Eric J. Mohr

Scheler subjects Husserl’s categorial intuition to a critique, which calls into question the very methodological procedure of phenomenology. Scheler’s divergence from Husserl with respect to whether sensory or categorial contents furnish the foundation of the act of intuition leads into a more significant divergence with respect to whether phenomenology should, primarily, be considered a form of science to which a specific methodology applies. Philosophical methods, according to Scheler, must presuppose, and not distract from, important preconditions of knowledge that pertain more to the philosopher than to logical procedure. Accordingly, the phenomenological attitude serves as a foundation for, and is not the result of, the phenomenological method.

This chapter examines Max Scheler’s and Edith Stein’s shared commitment to two core tenets of phenomenological personalism: (1) the person’s irreducibility to nature, and (2) the person as the source of individuality. While individuality implies irreducibility, it does not simply follow from it; Scholastic metaphysics and Kantian formalism are both examples of adequate philosophical irreducibility with inadequate foundations for personal individuality. Stein’s later philosophy incorporates features of scholasticism so extensively that it warrants considering whether those features compromise a sense of individuality. I argue that Stein’s later work does indeed adequately ground personal individuality though primarily through Schelerian vestiges in her philosophy.

Edith Stein (1891-1942) and Max Scheler (1874-1928) have enough shared intellectual debts and interests that their respective oeuvres demand to be placed in conversation. Both were early practitioners of the phenomenological method, drew from and reflected on theological resources in their philosophical explorations, and maintained a lifelong interest in the human person. This volume, the first of its kind, brings together philosophers and theologians to explore the convergences and divergences in their thought. It examines key themes such as the human person, spirit (Geist), education (Bildung), and social ontology, demonstrating their historical importance and contemporary relevance. The authors argue that reading these philosophers together is essential for understanding their historical significance and for illuminating contemporary concerns both within and beyond academia. The volume also features the first English translation of Edith Stein's seminal essay, “The Meaning of Phenomenology as Worldview.”

This paper draws upon phenomenological value theory and conceptions of love and hatred (especially Max Scheler) for understanding dehumanization and forms of socio-political violence. Mohr argues that dehumanization cannot sufficiently be explained psychologically, i.e., as conceiving others as having a subhuman essence (in the view of David Livingstone Smith). The phenomenon is more deeply rooted within preconceptual devaluation, or regarding others as bearing negative value, whose destruction is regarded as value-positive. Such devaluation arises on account of attitudes of hatred. Mohr claims that love, as the movement toward the appreciation of value and the realization of higher possibilities of value, is the emotive counter to hatred and its dehumanizing effects.

Why does Scheler reject the possibility of reconciling phenomenological personalism and Scholastic metaphysics? Mohr claims that Scheler's rejection is in part related to the meaning of moral development. For Scheler, personal value is not grounded in metaphysical capacities of a shared nature, but in the value of individuality. This paper interprets and clarifies Scheler's positions on the content of personal individuality, how this content is value-bearing, and whether this value is original or derivative, absolute or conditional. Traditional ways of attempting to account for personal uniqueness, via either formal or empirical criteria, prove insufficient. If individuality is intrinsic to the person, and individuality is value-bearing, then there is a social responsible for assisting in disclosing personal individuality.

Various, albeit largely incongruent, attempts have been made at demonstrating the critical force of phenomenology. Mohr seeks to rekindle the project by accentuating the critical potential hidden within a core phenomenological presupposition: the discrepancy between conceptual and intuitive meaning (logos and phenomenon). Phenomenological attention on the discrepancy itself as an experienced phenomenon constitutes the starting point of critical phenomenology. While Adorno famously rejects intuition as a viable candidate for grounding critique, Mohr argues that reflection on lived experiences and the nonformal meanings they yield provide a robust source for critical self-reflection. As such, ideology may be most effectively unmasked by means of a proper attitudinal orientation to the intuitive meanings within one’s lived social experiences.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which began as The Children’s Corner in 1953 and terminated in 2001, left its mark on America. The show’s message of kindness, simplicity, and individual uniqueness made Rogers a beloved personality, while also provoking some criticism because, by arguing that everyone was special without having to do anything to earn it, the show supposedly created an entitled generation. In Mister Rogers and Philosophy, thirty philosophers give their very different takes on the Neighborhood phenomenon.

I explore the critical significance of the phenomenological notion of intuition. I argue that there is no meaning that is originally formal-conceptual. The meanings of concepts function as symbolic approximations to original nonconceptual, intuitive givens. However, the meaning content originally intuitively given in lived experience has a tendency to be lost in pursuit of universalizability and communicability of conceptual content. Over time, conceptual approximations lose their reference to the experience that had given them their meaning in the first place. The loss of an experiential reference makes for a vacuous set of concepts, giving way to ideologies, by which I mean the conscious prejudicial support for a set of ideas without the experiential, intuitive context that is necessary to see the value of those ideas. A critical phenomenology is a critique of ideological views by descriptively recovering the intuitive content whereby concepts can be adequately reevaluated. This main aim of this work is to establish the methodological features of critical phenomenology by responding to the objections made against phenomenology and intuition by Frankfurt School critical theorists. Scheler’s phenomenology is used as a way forward due to his far-reaching critique of reason and emphasis on the phenomenological intuition of value. Chapter 1 considers three Frankfurt School objections of Husserlian phenomenology, as (1) immanentist (Adorno), (2) idealist (Adorno), and (3) normatively empty (Habermas). Each fail to discern the subtle features of nonidentity with respect to Husserl’s notions of apperception and adumbrated phenomena. Chapter 2 shows how Scheler’s original view of the phenomenological attitude makes more explicit Husserl’s subtle dialectical elements. Adequate and inadequate givenness is interpreted with respect to one’s intentional orientation and the moral attitudes carried within the world, influencing the content of the given. Chapter 3 confronts the popular charge of idealism. Reality is a problem for phenomenology only to conscious modes of givenness. But through ecstatic modes of givenness (in resistances) Scheler’s phenomenology achieves an existential ground that is crucial for phenomenology to engage actually existing social structures and factors. Chapter 4 concerns the charge that phenomenology is normatively empty. That Scheler had developed a theory of value is not enough to rebut the charge but his view of value-givenness as an attitude informed by the act of loving, opens an awareness of the values disclosed by that attitude. Chapter 5 shows that Scheler’s sociology of knowledge, in contrast to Karl Mannheim’s interpretation, provides a unified picture of the interdependency of spirit and life needed for the realization of values in the world and society. Chapter 6 suggests a way of framing a phenomenological critique of ideology. Scheler points to the attitudinal factors of loving and hating to disclose systemic devaluation and overvaluation. This awareness arises (1) from noticing how individual valuation reflects social valuation, and (2) by being attuned to how one’s own intuitions contradict prevailing social valuation and thought, thereby opening a space for a critique of those patterns.

It is well known that Max Scheler framed his ethics in opposition to Kant’s “formalistic” ethical framework. However, it is a lesser-known fact that Scheler offered a critique of the ancient Greek moral vision. Although this critique was less developed than the one of Kant, the critique of the ancients was no less significant. First explicated in 1912 in Ressentiment, its central theme is reprised in nearly all of Scheler’s main texts even up until his death. Scheler’s contention is with what he calls the “love of goodness,” which he also happens to think Aristotle’s ethics represents. This paper will primarily examine the love of goodness, first, as one side of the “categorial form” of "Pharisaism"—that is, as it represents a “moral illusion”—then as the other side—namely, as it corresponds to “epistemological error." Finally, I consider the specific moral context in light of where it naturally leads Scheler: to the principle of solidarity.

Joseph Schear provides us with a much-needed compilation of this whole “battle of myths” that began when Hubert Dreyfus presented a challenge to John McDowell’s theory of perception with his 2005 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association. Although, back then, the terms of the debate were presented in the context of McDowell’s reading of Aristotle and phronēsis, they have since been taken up in their own right. Dreyfus claims that conceptual capacities cannot be pervasive in perceptual experience as McDowell maintains because, if so, conceptual content will crowd out those areas in which skillful embodied coping betrays a nonconceptual interaction with the world. Schear not only collects essays from highly distinguished scholars on this issue, but also manages to include never-before-published essays from both McDowell and Dreyfus.