Schütz’s essay reads Scheler as Husserl’s most powerful successor and as the thinker who redirects phenomenology from logic and formal epistemology toward value, feeling, religion, and personhood. Its movement is double: first an account of Scheler’s theory of knowledge, then an account of the material ethics that follows from it.
Scheler wird allgemein als der originellste und einflussreichste Denker der phänomenologischen Bewegung nach Husserl betrachtet.
English translation: Scheler is generally regarded as the most original and influential thinker of the phenomenological movement after Husserl.
The epistemological half defines phenomenology not as a special science but as an attitude of eidetic seeing. It asks what is given before scientific construction, symbolic mediation, or inherited schemes have transformed the phenomenon. Scheler therefore rejects any view that makes philosophy merely dependent on established scientific propositions.
Die Gültigkeit der wissenschaftlichen Sätze vorauszusetzen, würde jede Einsicht in die Wesensstruktur ihres Gegenstandes blockieren und würde zusätzlich die Philosophie in die mindere Rolle einer Magd der Wissenschaften drängen.
English translation: To presuppose the validity of scientific propositions would block every insight into the essential structure of their object, and would additionally relegate philosophy to the lesser role of handmaid of the sciences.
Schütz’s key distinction is between natural, scientific, and phenomenological facts. Natural facts belong to the pretheoretical world of things, bodies, values, and social-cultural objects; scientific facts are method-governed idealizations produced by reduction and symbolization; phenomenological facts are essences and relations of founding disclosed in intuition. Scheler’s a priori is consequently material as well as formal: essence, value, and person can be given without being reduced to sensation, psychology, or convention.
In the later writings, this epistemology becomes philosophical anthropology. Human beings are marked by distance from impulse, by the power to negate, and by access to essence. Schütz presents the hierarchy of mastery or performance knowledge, essential or formative knowledge, and salvational knowledge as the mature form of Scheler’s concern with philosophy.
Die Rolle der Philosophie wurde mit dem zentralen Problem in Schelers Denken verbunden – die Lehre der drei Arten des menschlichen Wissens und ihrer hierarchischen Ordnung.
English translation: The role of philosophy was linked to the central problem in Scheler's thought—the doctrine of the three kinds of human knowledge and their hierarchical order.
Mastery knowledge orders phenomena for practical control; essential knowledge cultivates participation in Sosein; salvational knowledge concerns the person’s relation to the absolute. Knowing is not an inner copy of an outer thing, but intentional participation in what another being is. This anti-subjectivist account prepares the ethical argument, because values too can be genuinely given rather than manufactured by judgment or desire.
Kant is the hinge of the essay. Scheler accepts the demand for an a priori ethics but denies that a priori validity must be merely formal. On Schütz’s reconstruction, Kant mistakes all material content for empirical content and so excludes the emotional intentionality in which values are disclosed.
Das emotionale Leben hat auch seinen ursprünglich apriorischen Gehalt, der unserer eidetischen Anschauung zugänglich ist und der eine Phänomenologie des emotionalen Lebens und damit eine Phänomenologie der Werte ermöglicht.
English translation: Emotional life, too, has its own originally a priori content, which is accessible to our eidetic intuition and which makes possible a phenomenology of emotional life and thus a phenomenology of values.
Ethics therefore begins from values as objective ideal qualities borne by goods but not created by them. They are grasped in feeling as colors are grasped in sight. Their order is disclosed in preferring and postposing: sensory values stand below vital values, vital below spiritual values, and spiritual below the holy. Moral significance belongs to the willing person and act, not simply to causal success.
Es ist eine von Schelers Hauptthesen, daß das Sein-Sollen auf dem Wert gründet, und nicht umgekehrt.
English translation: It is one of Scheler's principal theses that the ought-to-be is grounded in value, and not the other way around.
This reverses Kant: obligation is grounded in value, not value in law. Historical variation does not refute value absolutism, because customs, norms, ethos, and institutions vary in their access to values, not in the being of values themselves. The essay closes with personalism. A person is neither body, ego-substance, nor bundle of psychic states, but the living unity of intentional acts; other persons are known through participation in acts. Thus Schütz presents Scheler’s ethics as phenomenological, material, solidaristic, and centered on how objective value becomes manifest in concrete personal life.
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