Max Scheler - The Nature of Sympathy

The Nature of Sympathy

Max Scheler

with a new introduction by
Graham McAleer

First published 2008 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2007038905

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scheler, Max, 1874-1928.
[Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. English]
The nature of sympathy / Max Scheler; translated by Peter Heath, with an
introduction by Werner Stark, and a new introduction by Graham McAleer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-0687-9
1. Sympathy. I. Title.
BF575.S9S3213 2008
177'.7--dc22
2007038905

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0687-9 (pbk)

IN the last years, there has been a remarkable effort to make the writings of the leading sociologists and social philosophers of the Continent available to the English-speaking world. We now possess full translations of the main works by Toennies and Durkheim, and representative selections from the books of Simmel and Max Weber. Strangely enough, Scheler has so far been passed by. Yet he was as great as all the others, and, indeed, in some respects greater than any of them. The present publication needs therefore no apology. It was more than overdue, and it is hoped that it will be the first of many of its kind.

What has in the past decided English and American translators not to take up Max Scheler was possibly the fact that he is known as 'a German metaphysician'. Certainly, his books are not altogether easy reading, but their study is richly rewarding. The point need not be laboured here. Let anyone take up this volume and see for himself! Only one fact should perhaps be mentioned, namely that there is a deep kinship between Scheler's thought and some fundamental tendencies in American sociology, at any rate as far as substance is concerned. Personally, he has always reminded me of C. H. Cooley. When Cooley writes, in his essay on Spencer, that 'sympathetic qualities... are, after all, the only direct source of our knowledge of other people', he expresses a conviction which is also to be found in this and all the writings of Scheler's early and middle period.

W. STARK

Manchester
May 1953

THE life of many if not of most leading philosophers consists in the gradual elaboration of some great idea which has come to them in a sidereal hour of their youth. Such, for example, was Kant's flash of insight that space and time, commonly regarded as objective realities, are in point of fact subjective, i.e. merely the formal scheme which our mind imposes upon the world in order to be able to apprehend and understand its phenomena; such, too, was Bergson's sudden realization that the Greeks were wrong when they considered rest as the perfection of being and movement as an impoverished form of it; that, on the contrary, movement, becoming, is of the essence of life, while rest, immutability, can only be achieved in death. Scheler was a thinker of a different type. He, too, had his Damascus experience, but it was to him a point of departure rather than a point of arrival. Plagued by an extreme intellectual restlessness, he continued to change and re-change his point of view: he was one of those who, in Pascal's phrase, 'search groaning'. In order to understand his philosophical work, it is essential to distinguish three stages in his career, each of which is characterized by an outstanding intellectual achievement: the first by Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materials Wertethik; the second by Vom Ewigen irn Menschen ; and the third and last by the Philosophische Anthropologic, a book that was as yet unfinished when death struck him down, a man of barely fifty-four, in May 1928.

At the time when Scheler was born, the intellectual scene was dominated by two great hostile schools of thought. The one, an idealistic philosophy, traced its origin back to Immanuel Kant and had just been powerfully restated by Hermann Cohen: the other, an embodiment of the materialistic world-view, had come down from Jeremy Bentham and had gained considerable influence through the much-read and much-appreciated writings of John Stuart Mill. The choice before a young philosopher seemed simple enough: he could either turn to the right, or to the left. There was, apparently, no middle way.

In the narrower field of ethics, the Kantians started from the conviction that the cravings of the individual were, in the last analysis, at variance with the interests of the race. Man had to be tamed if he was to be transformed into a citizen: the moral law had to be imposed on his wayward will, and the moral law was the sum and substance of the claims of the community on its individual components. To the question: what is good?, Kant's disciples answered: good is what you ought to do! The concept of duty was thus at the root of their whole ethical system. But if man is a creature who can, in principle, act rightly, but will not, in practice, easily do so, if he is a creature whose spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak, a series of consequences is bound to follow: man cannot then be a unitary being; he must have two warring natures, one sensible, the other supersensible; there must be a phenomenal and a noumenal man. The moral law will reveal itself in conflict rather than in the day-to-day workings of the world: it will confront man as something alien, something independent of his human experience, something absolute and compelling, in a word, as a categorical imperative. He will not be able to say in concrete terms what is good and what not: he will only have a negative criterion for determining the goodness of an action the rational conviction that it curbs his sinful bent. In such a philosophy, nothing can be good but the good will. In other words, the ethical teaching of the Kantian school was an abstract and formal doctrine of duty, not a concrete and material catalogue of values. It was this latter alternative of moral thinking which had been worked out and propagated by the opposite school, the children and grandchildren of Jeremy Bentham.

The Benthamites started from the sub- or semi-conscious assumption that the desires of the individual were in harmony with the needs of the race, either because an inborn principle of sympathy holds them together from the very beginning, or else because the mechanism of social intercourse ensures an ultimate reconciliation. The most that can ever be wanted is an appropriate system of laws to support and perfect the working of that mechanism. Thus there is, for them, little need to discipline man: on the contrary, discipline, as a source of pain, will be an evil in itself, and the highest postulate of practical reason will be to let everybody act as he wishes to do. To the question: what is good?, the Utilitarians could joyfully answer: what we all desirewhat we feel will cause us pleasure. Their ethical system was frankly hedonistic. Man was in their view a simple and easily understandable being: a pleasure-seeking and pain-fleeing animal like any other, uncomplicated in every respect, and essentially one in nature. As objective goodness and subjective enjoyment coincide, it is not conflict that will reveal the norm of actionconflict can only arise where there is confusion of some kindbut the spontaneous everyday behaviour of men, and psychology will become the basis of ethics. Indeed, ethics will become a highly practical, one could almost say, economically useful, discipline. It will not concern itself with the metaphysical notion of a noumenally good will, but will elaborate instead a concrete list of values which sensible men do pursue, and which all men should pursue, and which will provide the basis for the practical maximization of both public and private felicity.