Alfred Schütz, Max Scheler’s Philosophy

Alfred Schütz’s essay, first published in 1956 and republished in this English version in 1970, reconstructs the coherence of Scheler’s philosophy across anthropology, ethics, intersubjectivity, and the sociology of knowledge. Beginning with contemporary portraits of Scheler’s intellectual vitality, Schütz treats the apparent disorder of his writings as compatible with an underlying philosophical architecture.

Life was not the theme of his philosophizing, but his philosophy arose from the fullness of his life.

This relation between experience and thought frames Schütz’s thematic reconstruction. Rather than reducing Scheler’s work to its successive commitments, he follows correspondences among human existence, values, love, knowledge, and social forces. Intellectual development remains important, however, especially the movement from Christian personalism toward a conception of divine becoming.

Converted to Catholicism Scheler became, as a convinced Christian, both a personalist and a theist.

Scheler’s later position changes the relation between world and divinity:

This process now meant to him the manifestation of the divine force, the becoming of God within the world.

Schütz situates this transformation within the broader tension between historically conditioned existence and absolute values. The essay seeks connections that survive these changes without denying their significance.

The anthropological starting point is humanity’s double position within organic life and beyond its environmental limits. Schütz presents Scheler’s ascending levels of vegetative impulse, instinct, associative memory, and practical intelligence, then distinguishes spirit from these biological capacities. Spirit makes possible an open world of objects rather than confinement within an organism’s environment. Humans can objectify their own experiences, but the Person, as the active center of intentional acts, cannot itself be grasped as an object. Personhood exists through the performance of acts rather than as a substance behind them.

This distinction supports Scheler’s ethics. Feeling, preference, love, and hate disclose objective values; they do not merely express subjective states. Scheler extends phenomenological analysis into emotional life through an autonomous order of the heart. His concrete apriorism opposes both ethical formalism and relativism: historical changes concern access to values, not their validity. Different societies disclose different sectors of a common value cosmos. Its hierarchy extends from pleasure and utility through vital and spiritual values to holiness, supplying a recurring pattern for the essay’s account of love and knowledge.

Love moves toward the highest value possible for the beloved being. Drives condition its selection without producing love itself. Personal love requires participation in another’s intentional life rather than detached observation, and grounds a solidarity through which each person becomes responsible for all. Schütz connects this account with Scheler’s rejection of inference by analogy and empathy as explanations of access to other minds. Joy or shame is perceived directly in expressive wholes, such as smiles and blushes, rather than inferred from neutral bodily movements. Understanding personal acts nevertheless requires participating in or reenacting them; inaccessible bodily sensations mark a limit to interpersonal knowledge.

Schütz next distinguishes knowledge for practical domination, cultural knowledge of essences, and knowledge for salvation. Positive science discovers laws useful for technical control. Essential knowledge reaches beyond contingent circumstances and practical interests toward invariant structures. Salvific knowledge relates humanity as microcosm to the supreme ground of being. These forms concern different modes of participation in existence, represented by the scientist, sage, and saint.

The sociology of knowledge extends this architecture into historical life without making truth a product of social circumstances. Social interests help select the objects of knowledge but determine neither its content nor its validity. Groups possess historically variable stocks of unquestioned insight that constitute their relative natural conceptions of the world. Scheler also resists explanations that grant exclusive causal power to kinship, politics, or economics. Material factors condition which ideas become effective, while ideal factors guide tendencies that would otherwise remain blind.

Schütz closes through Dempf’s interpretation of Scheler’s unfinished philosophy as an integral humanism. Its unity lies in a recurrent problem: how spiritual freedom, objective values, and solidarity can become effective through bodily drives and historically situated social forces. The reconstruction thus identifies an architecture of related tensions rather than imposing a finished system.