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    Gooch - The Epistemic Status of Value-Cognition - JCRT 3.1

    The Epistemic Status of Value-Cognition in Max Scheler’s Philosophy of Religion

    Todd A. Gooch
    Eastern Kentucky University

    The following paper was written in response to a call for papers addressing “The Role of the Emotions in Religious Reasoning,” and was presented to the Philosophy of Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion in Nashville, Tennessee on November 21, 2000. Whatever else might be said about it, Scheler’s treatment of this theme is among the most original to have been articulated by any major twentieth-century philosopher. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part examines Scheler’s views on religion in relation to his broader philosophical project. The second part seeks to determine the epistemological significance of Scheler’s phenomenological analysis of “the religious act.” When the dust from that frequently exhilarating analysis has settled, what reasons, if any, has Scheler given us for supposing that any religious beliefs are true, or that someone might reasonably give her assent to them?

    Part I

    Scheler’s main work in the philosophy of religion is On the Eternal in Man, and in this paper I will be primarily concerned with the theory of religious acts of consciousness developed in that work.[1][1:1] However, this theory is best understood in relation to arguments found in Scheler’s earlier writings, especially Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value, where Scheler criticizes a number of presuppositions underlying Kant’s moral philosophy, and lays the foundation for his own ethics of value (Wertethik).[2][2:1] It may be recalled that Kant had rejected teleological ethics on the grounds that all attempts to define moral obligation in terms of a particular good or end are contingent upon the inclinations of some individual or group. Because inclinations are subjective mental states, contingent upon the empirical constitution of the people who have them, they are incapable of yielding a universal moral principle, binding for all rational beings. Kant is thus led to propose a definition of the good only after he has defined duty, which he takes to be the conformity of the will of a rational being to a formal law determined by reason, without reference to any specific of good or end. “An absolutely good will, whose principle must be a categorical imperative, will therefore be indeterminate as regards all objects and will contain merely the form of willing; and indeed that form is autonomy.”[3][3:1]

    > [^5][4] By means of a novel appropriation of Pascal’s notion of the ordre or logique du coeur (logic of the heart), Scheler argues that these acts exhibit a lawfulness just as valid in its own right as the lawfulness of logical relations. This lawfulness is not based on generalizations drawn from the observation of psychological facts. It is an a priori lawfulness; and it is this a priori structure that makes feeling-acts suitable candidates for phenomenological investigation.

    > In all of the areas that it undertakes to investigate, phenomenology has to distinguish three kinds of essential interrelations: 1) the essences (and their interrelations) of the qualities and other contents of things given in acts (thing-phenomenology); 2) the essences of acts themselves and their interrelations and orders of foundation (phenomenology of acts or foundational orders); and 3) the essential interrelations between essences of acts and things (e.g., values are given in feeling, colors in seeing, sounds in hearing, etc.) [^6][5]

    Scheler’s attempt to develop a phenomenology of emotional life reflects his dissatisfaction with the treatment of alogical or non-rational levels of experience in the modern philosophical tradition. Scheler distinguishes two basic tendencies in the treatment of the emotions within that tradition. Rationalists like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz recognize a sort of intentionality in acts of feeling, but they do not acknowledge a distinct class of objects to which these acts are related. Instead, they hold that the same content apprehended by feeling in a confused or obscure manner may be clearly grasped by the understanding. For example, Scheler observes, according to Leibniz, “maternal love is a confused conception of the fact that it is good to love one’s child” (FE 262). While the empiricists resist this kind of intellectualization of the emotions, they simultaneously abandon the recognition that feelings are intentional acts directed toward a content of some kind. Instead, the British moral psychologists regard feelings as mental states that are suitable objects of psychological description and causal explanation, but do not perform any cognitive function.[6][6:1] Since today our primary concern is the role of the emotions in religious reasoning, it is worth noting here that Scheler regards the psychological assumptions common to empiricism and Kantianism alike as “the greatest obstacles in the way of a philosophy of religion” (EM 256), by which he appears to mean that one does justice to the phenomenological facts of religious experience and the intentional structure of religious consciousness.

    > I think that if I heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to happen to me during the next twenty-four hours, including events that would have seemed highly improbable, and if all these events then proceeded to happen, I might perhaps be convinced at least of the existence of some superhuman intelligence."[7][7:1]

    Let us suppose that the evidence indicated by Russell were forthcoming, and that, as a result, Russell became convinced of the existence of some superhuman intelligence. Would it be correct to say in this case that Russell had become a religious believer? In other words, would it be correct to call Russell’s belief in the existence of some superhuman intelligence a religious belief? In light of the preceding discussion of Scheler’s theory of religious acts, it is clear that his response to this question would be negative.

    > . . . if the objection is made to us that what is self-evident to us is not so to ‘other men,’ it is of course quite possible that we are the prey to an illusion of self-evidence, for we do not contest the possibility of such illusions. . . . But it is no less deplorable if similar factors have blinded others to intrinsically manifest truths which at the same time we must suppose to be universally apprehensible [^16][8] That we wish or hope for something to be true, Scheler insists, has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not it is in fact true. Rather, Scheler takes Pascal’s dictum to mean that “the heart,” or feeling-acts, are themselves sources of evidence. The person who regards feelings merely as psychological facts, and fails to recognize the intentional structure of feeling-acts, “can never see what is revealed to us of the world, and of the value-content of the world in feeling, in preferring, in loving and hating, but instead sees only what we encounter in inner perception, i.e., in ‘ideational’ behavior, when we feel, when we prefer, when we love and hate, when we enjoy a work of art, when we pray to God” (FE 260/274). Acts of feeling, preferring, loving and hating, in Scheler’s view, are a source of information about the world that is just as legitimate in its own right as the information we receive from sense perception.

    > A philosophy which fails to recognize and a priori denies the claim to transcendence which all non-logical acts make, or which allows this claim only in the case of acts of thought and those acts of intuitive cognition which furnish the material for thought in the domain of theory and science, condemns itself to blindness to whole realms of facts and their connections, for access to these realms is not essentially tied to acts of mind proper to the understanding. A philosophy of this sort is like a man who has healthy eyes and closes them and wants to perceive colors only with his ear or his nose![9][9:1]

    There are two issues here that need to be clearly distinguished. The first issue is whether or not one is willing to concede that there is a phenomenologically distinct “realm of facts and their connections” that are only given in religious acts. The second issue concerns the epistemic significance of these facts, if they exist.

    Notes

    Todd A. Gooch (Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University) is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2000).

    ’ 2001 Todd A. Gooch. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
    http://jcrt.org/archives/03.1/gooch/

    1. Tr. Bernard Noble (New York: Harpers, 1960). Hereafter cited as “EM.” Throughout this paper, I will refer to Scheler’s works by the titles of the available English translations. In some cases, however, I have amended these translations. Frequently cited works are indicated in the text in parentheses. Where only one page number is indicated, that number always refers to the standard English translation. Where two pages are indicated, the first refers to the English translation, and the second to the corresponding German original as found in Scheler’s Gesammelte Werke, 15 vols., ed. Maria Scheler and Manfred Frings (Bern: Francke, 1954-1985; Bonn: Bouvier, 1987-1997), in this case, Vom Ewigen im Menschen (GW 5). ↩︎ ↩︎

    2. Tr. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Hereafter cited as “FE.” This is a translation of Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (GW 2). Also important in this connection is Scheler’s analysis of love in The Nature of Sympathy, tr. W. Stark (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1970) = Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (GW 7). ↩︎ ↩︎

    3. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 3rd ed., tr. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett, 1993), p. 48. ↩︎ ↩︎

    4. One might well ask whether the analogy employed by Scheler is legitimate. The point of Husserl’s critique of psychologism is that no empirical law based on the observation of psychological facts is able to determine whether a particular inference is logically valid. As a normative discipline, logic is categorically distinct from the empirical sciences, including psychology. Thus, the distinction between logic and psychology turns on the issue of validity. But is a similar distinction applicable where feelings are concerned? In other words, are acts of feeling either valid or invalid in the same way that acts of thinking are? As we shall see, Scheler admits the possibility of acts of feeling involving deception in a manner similar to the manner in which acts of perception may involve deception. It is not entirely clear, however, how illusory contents of feeling-acts are to be distinguished from “real” ones. ↩︎

    5. “Nun hat die Phänomenologie auf allen Gebieten, die sie ihrer Untersuchung unterzieht, drei Arten von Wesenszusammenhängen zu scheiden: 1) die Wesenheiten (und ihre Zusammenhänge) der in den Akten gegebenen Qualitäten und sonstigen Sachgehalte (Sachphänomenologie); 2) die Wesenheiten der Akte selbst und die zwischen ihnen bestehenden Zusammenhänge und Fundierungen (Akt- oder Ursprungs-phänomenologie); 3) die Wesenszusammenhänge zwischen Akt- und Sachwesenheiten (z.B. daß Werte nur im Fühlen gegeben sind; Farben nur im Sehen, Töne im Hören usw.)” (GW 2:92). ↩︎

    6. Cf. the preface to the second edition of The Nature of Sympathy, where Scheler refers to the “deep-seated errors . . . [of] Shaftsebury, Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, Alexander Bain and others” (SN xlvi). ↩︎ ↩︎

    7. Bertrand Russell, “What is an Agnostic?,” quoted here from The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959, ed. by Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), p. 584 ↩︎ ↩︎

    8. Such an interpretation seems to underlie James’ argument in “The Will to Believe.” ↩︎

    9. Max Scheler, “Ordo Amoris,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, p. 122. ↩︎ ↩︎

    10. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 161. Lewis White Beck translates the phrase, “ein Faktum der reinen Vernunft, dessen wir uns a priori bewußt sind und welches apodiktisch gewiß ist” as “an apodictically certain fact, as it were, or pure reason, a fact of which we are a priori conscious.” I have chosen to retain the construction, “fact of pure reason,” which is present in the original, and to which Scheler’s remarks refer. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 3rd ed, tr. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 48. ↩︎ ↩︎

    11. William James, “The Will to Believe,” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897), p. 25. ↩︎

    12. Cf. Also sprach Zarathustra, Part IV, “Vom höheren Menschen.” ↩︎ ↩︎

    13. Specifically, the tradition to which Scheler refers is the one that in the nineteenth century came to be called “ontologism.” The most famous representative of this tradition in modern philosophy is Malebranche, whose De la recherche de la vérité (1674-75) develops an original synthesis of Augustinian and Cartesian lines of thought. Malebranche’s theory of “vision in God” proposes a solution to the ontological status of ideas of sensible qualities, which he locates in the divine substance, so that “the ideas we immediately perceive are the ideas, or archetypes, of objects in the mind of God.” Willis Doney, “Malebranche, Nicolas,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. V, ed. by Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 141. Although Scheler explicitly rejects several views associated with ontologism, he is clearly interested in reclaiming its recognition of “the fact that there is an ultimate element of an immediate and intuitable nature in all religious object-ideas” (FE 294). ↩︎

    14. Eugene Kelly, Max Scheler (Boston: Twayne 1977), p. 165. Kelly’s book is in my view the most helpful concise introduction to Scheler’s thought available in English. ↩︎

    15. W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” Lectures and Essays, vol. 2, ed. Leslie Stephens and Frederick Pollack (New York: Macmillan, 1901), p. 186. ↩︎

    16. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 816. ↩︎ ↩︎

    17. Leo Rosten, “Bertrand Russell and God: A Memoir,” Saturday Review, 1:12 (Feb. 23, 1974), p. 26. ↩︎ ↩︎

    18. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), p. 13. The translation is mine. The first half of the citation is emphasized in the original. ↩︎ ↩︎

    19. Max Scheler, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, tr. David Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 142. ↩︎ ↩︎

    20. Incidentally, since Clifford does appear to reject the minimal phenomenological claim, one wonders what meaning can possibly be attributed to his reference to belief as a “sacred faculty,” since, if the minimal claim is false, then the adage is literally true that “nothing is sacred.” ↩︎ ↩︎

    21. Augustine, Confessions, X xxvii, 38. Quoted here from An Augustine Synthesis, ed. Erich Przywara (New York: Harper, 1958), p. 75. ↩︎ ↩︎

    22. Louis Dupré, Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 137-38. The quote appears in the context of a discussion of the simultaneous sense of the presence and absence of the divine, and continues, “‘I am quite sure that there is not a God, in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word.’” ↩︎ ↩︎

    23. Augustine, Epistolae CXX, I, 3, 4. Quoted here from An Augustine Synthesis, p. 62. ↩︎ ↩︎