Max Scheler - Ressentiment (Marquette Studies in Philosophy)

MARQUETTE STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

IV

ANDREW TALLON, EDITOR

COPYRIGHT 1994

MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS

COVER PHOTO HOMMIT ZONE

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ISBN 0-87462-602-1

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We are accustomed today to see our tiny planet earth on pictures taken from outer space. During the July 1969Apollo II mission astronaut Edgar Mitchell remarked:... "Suddenly from behind the rim of the moon...there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel" and what was then a breathtaking photograph showed the earth rising in all its glory -- and tragedy.

Many pictures of the kind show us the earth floating through the uncanny tranquillity of the universe; a negligible and quiet star, that is, by comparison to billions of others exploding, imploding, colliding, collapsing, forming. The earth has a distinctive feature. It stands out against its dark background by its shifting blue, white and sometimes reddish colors reflected from the sphere of its air and its water, covering three quarters of its surface.

All scientific and literary visions to the contrary, it might well be the case that it is the only planet in the universe that meets the most subtle and precious conditions for sustaining life. If this could be proven to be the case, say, by a complex mathematical formalism of statistics, no doubt, the human being -which has been the center of twentieth century philosophic inquiry -- would have to be assigned a hitherto neglected existential category: the eeriness of cosmic solitude.

So, it least, it looks. But one can take also another step into looking at human existence on the earth. If one removes the earth

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from such photos, say, by blocking it off from one's mind for a moment, and imagines there just human history alone floating through space, such a vision would solicit the question why, in all the world, humans can be and are so violent, self-destructive, and why they are so foolish to keep on destroying one of their most valuable possessions, their lives and the environment, by waging wars, technology, neglect, or for profit making? The tranquillity of the stars visible above our life-world may be sublime, as Immanuel Kant ( 1724- 1804) held, human history has no such sublime tranquillity.

The question why there are hate and hostilities among us earthlings, notwithstanding illimitable cultural and scientific achievements, and notwithstanding the counterpoint of human existence: a dormant, or more active, or at least disquieting faith in something Divine, leads one also to ask yet another question: Who are those earthlings when looked at from a bird's eye view, so to speak?

Modern philosophy, taking its historical departure in seventeenth century France with Ren Descartes ( 1596- 1650), has ever since recognized reason to be the essence of being human. This self-understanding of the human race took its root in the cradle of Western civilization: in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. They taught us that beings endowed with reason are essentially distinguished from the animal kingdom because the latter is devoid of such things as art, culture, history, language, law, religion, or science -- all supposedly embedded in human reason.

Up to this day we dwell in this ancient Greek conviction of the power of reason. We firmly believe that we must trust reason alone and everywhere. Without it, there is no progress. Reason allows us to work with explanations of whatever as long as they are logical. Indeed, especially in our own time one takes for granted that everything under the sun is, potentially or in the long run, explainable and controllable by technology as long as reason has accrued enough experience and savvy.

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However -- and this pertains to the gist of the book before us -- rational explanations also hopelessly fail even when they are logically true. Relying on reason alone, as the ancient Greek philosophers suggested, does not exclude its opposite, the nonrational, as is testified by the inexplicability of human tragedy. In contrast to Greek rational philosophy, their literature demonstrates this point over and over again; perhaps, most obviously in the figure of Antigone. She represents the unresolvable conflict between laws of reason and feelings. In everyday life pangs of conscience, unexpected deaths, catastrophe, wars, oppressors, massacres, are just some examples of tragedy on our planet.

Yet, Western humanity has a penchant to keep on running after logical, rational explanations. And it must. In contrast to Eastern cultures, it lives more versus than with nature. It prefers to foment passion for knowledge and controlling nature as an object starting with its atoms. It prefers to foment its passion to pry into the human gene. Strangely enough, it does not put the same efforts in exploring the depths of its non-rational sides, exceptions like Freud and others granted.

Max Scheler ( 1874- 1928), by testimony of almost all contemporary European philosophers, was one of the most brilliant thinkers in our century. As Heidegger once put it, there is no presentday philosopher who is not indebted to him. Others agreed with the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset who wrote that with the sudden death of Scheler, Europe had lost one of its greatest minds it ever had. Whereas his name was in circulation everywhere during the twenties, including in Asia and the Americas, his fame faded away like a comet after his demise at the age of fifty-four. He left behind many printed works and thousands of posthumous manuscripts, all of which material was suppressed by the German Nazi regime during 1933 and 1945. Publication of his works took only a slow start in 1954. So did translations of them. As is rather common in the humanities, quickly emerging interests in particular areas and authors who are "in," shifted

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Scheler's name until recently more into the background of philosophical discussion. To be sure, his studies into the depths of the non-rational, including the tragic of human existence, that is, his investigations into human feelings, emotions, love and hate, did not exactly corroborate with twentieth century philosophy characterized by areas like logic, analytic philosophy, the question of being, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, deconstruction, et alia.