Scheler's Metaphysics Of

Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 79/2017, p. 801-817

SCHELER’S METAPHYSICS OF WAR

by Rainer Schäfer (Bonn)

1. Introduction

Max Scheler’s The Genius of War and the German War contains four parts and an appendix: a) “The Genius of war”, b) “The German war”, c) “The spiritual unity of Europe and its political demands”, d) “Renun- ciation of Britain”, and the appendix “On the psychology of the British ethos and hypocrisy”. “Genius”, in this context, refers to a paradigm, an original idea, or an essence of war.1 In the first part of the Genius text Scheler develops a concept of ‘just’ war in general, arguing that it must inevitably be rooted in human life, supportive of the meaning of life. Then he tries to show how war is an expression of the worldview (Weltanschauung) of a people, which adds a socio-psychological and ethical dimension to the war phenomenon (cf. 8-115). Thereafter he argues that the just war has a metaphysical

Rainer Fritz Schäfer (1971) is professor at the Department of Philosophy, University Bonn (Ger- many). His research areas are epistemology, ontology, theory of subjectivity, and classical German philosophy. Books: Hegel (München: Fink Verlag, 2011); Ich-Welten: Erkenntnis, Urteil und Identität aus der egologischen Differenz von Leibniz bis Davidson (Münster: Mentis Verlag, 2012); Was Freiheit zu Recht macht: Manuale des Politischen (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2015). 1 Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg (The Genius of War and the German War) (Leipzig: Verlag der Weissen Bücher, 1915; 2nd ed. 1916; 3rd ed. 1917). I quote according to the third edition. The German title is suggestive, because Scheler capitalizes ‘Deutsch’, which is grammatically unusual, for it means that World War I is a particularly German matter. That Scheler was not simply grammatically inaccurate is evident by the title of the second part of the Genius: “Der deutsche Krieg”. There exists no translation of this writing. Other writings of Scheler concerning WW I are: Europe and the War (1915), The War as Overall-Experience (1916), and The Causes of the Hatred against Germans (1917). In addition Scheler wrote numerous articles on WW I. Therefore one can say that he really was strongly committed to the subject.

doi: 10.2143/TVF.79.4.3284702 © 2017 by Tijdschrift voor Filosofie. All rights reserved. 802 Rainer SCHÄFER fundament (cf. 117-162), forming a particular reality in the moral and historical world, which culminates in the “idea” that a just and metaphysically grounded war is God’s judgment (cf. 91, 127-153). This implies criteria for distinguishing just from unjust wars (cf. 154-162). In the second part, Scheler applies those general determinations to the case of World War I (cf. 163-248). He argues that WW I is almost alone in world history in being a just war, since if war is an expression of the worldview of a people, expressing the volonté général, it is necessary that the whole nation be involved in the war. It is also necessary to fight with a chival- rous attitude, and it is imperative for the enemies to have people’s armies. Since Scheler wrote and published The Genius of War at the very begin- ning of WW I, it is clear that he could not have known the bestial slaughter, the gas attacks, the attacks on civilian populations, and the industrialized killing that were to come. This certainly does not excuse him, because he makes the fundamental mistake of judging WW I without fully understanding what was going on. Obviously, he was very naïve to think that a war in the 20th century could be carried out with the mediaeval and somewhat old-fashioned virtue of chivalry (Scheler also mentions: courage, willingness to take risks and danger, nobleness, heroism, loyalty, sacrifice, and fame, cf. 34). The third part of the Genius text (cf. 249-332) predicts what will happen after WW I. Scheler tries to forecast how a spiritual unity will be politically realised in post-war Europe. He argues that only Germany and the allied Austro-Hungarian Empire are cosmopolitan and thereby represent the true idea of Europe. The last part and the appendix of The Genius of War (cf. 333-413) argue that this unity of Europe could only be realised if Europe were completely to renounce modern British values (pragmatism, utilitarianism, capitalism, biologism, internationalism).2

2 In Scheler research, the Genius writing is mostly ignored, although Scheler claims that it is not only war propaganda, rather a philosophy and metaphysics of war as well as an advancement of his phenomenological material value ethics. For example, Ron Perrin, Max Scheler’s Concept of the Person: An Ethics of Humanism (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1991) and Eiichi Shimomissé, Die Phänomenologie und das Problem der Grundlegung der Ethik: An Hand des Versuchs von Max Scheler (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971) completely ignore Scheler’s war writings; likewise Ute Kruse-Ebeling, Liebe und Ethik: Eine Ver- hältnisbestimmung ausgehend von Max Scheler und Robert Spaemann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009). Heinz Leonardy, Liebe und Person: Max Schelers Versuch eines “phänomenologischen” SCHELER’S METAPHYSICS OF WAR 803

2. Forerunners, enemies and political aims of the ‘Genius’

In the Genius text Scheler tries to make German propaganda for World War I using the typical oppositions: culture vs. civilisation, community vs. society, cosmopolitism vs. internationalism, hierarchy-order vs. liberal-egalitarianism, aristocratic vs. republican, morality vs. economy, material values vs. utilitarianism, religious faith vs. capitalism, organic vitalism vs. contractualist mechanism, life vs. biologism. The chief enemies of Germany in Scheler’s view are Britain (cf. 73) and Rus- sia. France, regarded as the main enemy in Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, is not regarded as such by Scheler, who argues that France was merely seduced by Russia and Britain for their purposes and still wants revenge for the defeat of 1871 in the Franco-Prussian War and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.3 It is interesting that Scheler and Mann use nearly the same oppositions, but argue against different enemies. Scheler’s interpretation of WW I holds that it is a conflict of different material values, which characterise the different essences of the nations. That different nations adhere to different sets of values makes conflict and war necessary, for each nation tries to promote the values it adheres

Personalismus (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976), 1 simply states that the war writings of Scheler are external to philosophy. In the center of Scheler’s war metaphysics in the Genius stands love as a uniting power between God and a nation. Therefore, it is important to consider the war philosophy if one wants a complete picture of Scheler’s material value ethics, and what it means to apply it to a concrete historical phenomenon. At least this was Scheler’s own claim until the end of WW I. Manfred Frings, Lifetime: Max Scheler’s Philosophy of Time: A First Inquiry and Presentation (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 162 ff. at least mentions briefly a relation between Scheler’s material ethics and his war philosophy. Brilliant articles on the subject are Daniel Weidner, “Das Absolute des Krieges: Max Schelers Kriegsdenken und die Rhetorik des Äußersten,” in Texturen des Krieges: Körper, Schrift und der Erste Weltkrieg, ed. by Galili Shahar (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015), 85-114 and Sebastian Luft, “Germany’s Metaphysi- cal War: Reflections on War by Two Representatives of German Philosophy; Max Scheler and Paul Natorp,” Clio: Internet Portal on History, Themenportal Erster Weltkrieg, published in 2007, accessed in 2017, http://www.erster-weltkrieg.clio-online.de. 3 Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung: Die deutschen Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg; Ein Versuch (Berlin: Fest, 2000), 16 ff. is amazed that most German war philosophers (Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, Paul Natorp, Friedrich Meinecke, Enst Troeltsch, Rudolf Christoph Eucken etc.) repine with the British and not with France, which is usually seen as the German ‘archenemy’. But, after the British declaration of war, after it became known that Britain had secret navy contracts with Russia, and particularly after the sea blockade during the war time (at that time illegal in international law) with many civilian German hunger deaths, it was due to the concrete war situation common among the German intellectuals to direct their hatred and propaganda against Britain (cf. the review on Flasch’s book from Eberhard Demm, “Sinngebung des Sinnlosen,” in Die Welt, April 15, 2000, 27). 804 Rainer SCHÄFER to, and strives for political power in order to realise those values. War is a basic form of political competition, and this is a competition of ideas or ideal values. Scheler agrees with Heinrich von Treitschke’s famous statement that war is history and “politics κατ’ ἐξοχήν” (cf. 16, 41), for in war a state comes to its highest, truest, most basic, creative actuality. In its bellicism, this goes even further than Carl von Clause- witz, to whom war was ‘just’ an instrument of politics; according to Treitschke and Scheler, war is the very essence of politics. Germany holds the moral-religious values of true (Catholic) Christian- ity, a people as unity formed by loyalty, honesty, cosmopolitism and love, not economy. All of these values were already presented as core features of Germanness in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. Cosmopolitism is an especially interesting moral value, for Scheler adopts from Fichte the somewhat contradictory idea that one nation in particular is able to per- form true cosmopolitanism, because only German intellect is able truly to understand foreign cultures. Meanwhile, Russia pursues the ideal of Pan-Slavism and the goal of establishing an empire for the Eastern Ortho- dox Church (with the final goal of reconquering Istanbul/Constantino- ple). Britain’s values are liberal capitalism, utilitarianism, and racism motivated by Social Darwinism, and it seeks to be a world power by means of its naval power. Germany is the true defender of European values, and it is Germany’s goal in WW I to establish a United States of Europe. Besides this German propaganda, which could be criticised quite easily, for it includes several contradictions, trivial prejudices, and obscure con- fusions, Scheler also develops in the first part of The Genius of War a metaphysical and vitalistic foundation for a just war. He distinguishes justice/right and legal positive law, and is not interested in questions of law of war (neither jus ad bellum nor jus in bello interest him), since neither right nor justice are subject to a court or to judiciary categories. Right and justice are moral and non-contractual, essential and eternal ideas. Therefore, a people or nation could execute a right and just war without it being formally legal. Scheler’s propagandist intentions are complicated, since he finished writing The Genius of War in November 1914 as an affirmative reaction to the war fever and the ‘Spirit of 1914’ in Germany in August of that year — it SCHELER’S METAPHYSICS OF WAR 805 was already published in 1915. Hence one could see it as an emotional reaction. At this time, Scheler felt the outbreak of war as liberation. On the other hand, Scheler argues quite rationally and integrates earlier stud- ies of his material value ethics and his theory of social emotions (e.g. patriotism and sympathy) into this writing. Undoubtedly, he also aims to motivate young Germans to go to war and to teach Germans behind the front how to see the war correctly. These three tendencies compose a mix- ture in his writing style: a) a passionate arrogance, b) complicated phil osophical ideas and arguments (he combines insights of the late Nietzsche, Fichte, philosophy of action, vitalism, the phenomenology of social emotions, material value ethics, and the Christian ethics of love) — there is no denying that Scheler was a brilliant mind —, and c) popular simplifi- cations in order to compose a social education intelligible to the masses. A fourth tendency consists in a certain flavour of opportunism, because Scheler puts together opinions of the German government and leaders with ordinary popular opinions, trying to get everyone’s consent. Scheler was very impressed by the statement of Emperor Wilhelm II at the begin- ning of the war: “From now on I don’t know any parties, I know only Germans.” In this regard, it is no wonder that shortly after the German defeat in WW I Scheler changed his mind from a ‘convinced’ promoter of bellicism for the sake of eternal ideas and war as historical hygiene against the decadence of peace, to a republican who thinks about eternal peace and how to reach it. Like Mann, Scheler became ‘Vernunftrepub- likaner’. His religious opinions also changed from a kind of radical political Catholicism at the time of WW I to moderate Christian socialism (in order to avoid Western capitalism on the one side and Eastern commu- nism on the other) during the time of the Weimar Republic. When he became Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Cologne, through the support of Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, he changed to Neo-Spinozism in his later period. It is possible to interpret these changes either as an intellectual development or as opportunism.4

4 Looking at the portrait Otto Dix painted of Max Scheler in 1926, one cannot escape the impression that this painter — who took part in WW I as soldier — did not see Scheler — who did not actively serve in WW I — as a laudable fellow. 806 Rainer SCHÄFER

3. ‘Vivere est militare’ — Origin and rightness of war

Scheler argues in the first part of The Genius of War for a philosophy and metaphysics of war. He puts himself in the tradition of Fichte (Addresses to the German Nation), Nietzsche, Clausewitz (On War) and Treitschke (esp. Politics); Scheler also mentions Augustine and Plato as warrants.5 The root of war in general is the organic life of humans (cf. 9-14). Humans comprise organic life and spirit. But they are not a collection of two different parts, as an aggregate or a collage: in humans, organic life and spirit form a metaphysical unity. Therefore, Scheler is no natu- ralist when he mentions that humans consist of organic life. Life is no biological category, since the organic unity of a human is already a spiritual unity; the different organic parts of the human body compose a teleological, meaningful unity. Therefore, human life has to be described in terms of psychology, phenomenology and metaphysics. The eidetic abstraction of the phenomenological-psychological evident intuition is able to ‘see’ the quiddity of humans. That is the reason why Scheler’s war philosophy fits quite well into the phenomenological tradition in which he stands. Around 1900 Hus- serl’s Logical Investigations influenced him. Scheler was very impressed when he met Husserl in Halle in 1901. After moving to Munich in 1907, where he became Assistant Professor (Husserl recommended him

5 Luft, “Germany’s Metaphysical War,” ch. 2, § 5 and Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung, 115 mention Heraclitus as the origin of ancient Greek war philosophy. It is surprising that Scheler in the Genius text does not explicitly mention or quote the famous war fragment of Heraclitus. Scheler certainly knew it, and it is in the background of his text. There are similarities between Scheler and Heraclitus, since both claim that war is rooted in the very nature of life. But Heraclitus in his war- philosophical intentions went significantly further than Scheler, when he (cf. Diels/Kranz, ed., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmann, 1961), 22 B 53) states: “War (πόλεμος) is the father of all, the king of all, for some it made gods, others humans, some it made slaves, others free beings.” War is not subject to anything, it is the actual and constitutive principle of all entities and determinations. Therefore determinations and ontological differences do not first exist and come into -con flict afterwards; it is the other way round: war exists first, and only then can differences arise. Scheler makes war a subject of moral evaluation and thinks war is God’s judgment, but when Heraclitus states that war produces gods, he obviously ranks war higher and more fundamental than the gods; that is a profound difference between Scheler’s and Heraclitus’ philosophies of war; the latter is considerably more radical. SCHELER’S METAPHYSICS OF WAR 807 to Theodor Lipps), he had intellectual exchanges with the branch of the “Münchener Phänomenologie”, esp. his colleagues Alexander Pfänder, Moritz Geiger, Johannes Daubert, and Dietrich von Hildebrand. The original insight of Scheler was to apply the phenomenological method of eidetic reduction and self-giving intuitive evidence to social and moral phenomena and to describe these in terms of a material value ethics, which at that time remained a gap in the research in the line of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the Genius text Scheler writes: “History is teaching us exactly the same thing as is to be expected from phenomenological research and the deduction from the fundamental facts of the mind” (20). To subsume life under nature or biology would contradict Scheler’s views on ethics and his religious faith. God has no biological body but it/she/he is alive. The identification of life with the biological function of natural beings would also contradict Scheler’s theory of politics and his ethics, since a nation and its material values are also alive and real, though they do not consist of biological bodies. Scheler’s vitalism goes far beyond naturalism, physicalism or biologism, the meaningful part of reality is formed by life and spirit (cf. 40). The natural reality of organic bodies is just the manifestation of the vital reality. Life is therefore spiritually grounded, and the core of spirit is will. In humans the vital organic development has ended; our organic system is no longer able to develop or change in a decisive way. Humans are already the most highly developed “animals”, and therefore life in humans can only develop and increase in its spiritual and mental aspects (cf. 53). A people is a living entity too, a subjective or personal unity of a higher order;6 in its spiritual life a people — like each living single human — is striving to heighten and intensify its reality. This becomes manifest in its ‘will to power’. Power is a spiritual phenomenon. As a performative happening, power is an immediate expression of the will- ing spirit. Scheler’s vitalism — for sure strongly influenced here by Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ and Bergson’s vitalism — implies a will to

6 Cf. Scheler, Genius, 56: “The state is first of all a spiritual will-personality, composed on the ground of the vital total-organism of a population.” Cf. 119 ff. 808 Rainer SCHÄFER increase life; life and increase mean the same. A life which only wants preservation, adaptation to the environment and continuation is already on the decline. Intensification, increase and formation of the environment are criteria of the ascension of life (cf. 40-42). That is why the theory of evolution is wrong. But there is a contradiction in Scheler’s life-idea, for descending or degenerating life is still life; maybe it is not the highest kind of life, but obviously, it is still life. Therefore, one cannot identify life and increasing life. — That is why war is intrinsic to the relation between a nation and a people. War is the cardinal way for a people or a nation to form its psychological unity and to manifest the values of its will. Scheler quotes the Stoic idiom: “Vivere est militare” (cf. 53).7 War follows with necessity from the human life form; that is why there are no wars among animals. There are no biological reasons for war (cf. 23, 28); there are only spiritual ones. The true root of all war consists in the tendency to increase, towards growth and towards development of all forms of plurality (organ, function, etc.) which is to be found in all life, independently of its particularities, changing environment and its stimuli. (36) If a living being is not able to unfold and increase, it will start fighting against the hindrances of others. But this is not yet war; it is only a necessary condition of war. One way for living beings to increase their life is to transcend their individual personal unity into a higher more noble collective unity, namely into a people, state, or nation. Moreover, the nation then has the same drive for increase and ennoblement, as the individual being has. If this unity of a higher order also has life and spirit, it will go to war, for it wants to increase too. “Thus war is equi primordial (gleichursprünglich) with the existence of a state and the plurality of states, as Treitschke already correctly highlights. Yes, the warring state is the state in the highest actuality of its existence” (42). It is on the battlefield and in the trenches that a people becomes aware of the constitutive unity it forms by love (cf. 63). Therefore, war unifies a nation in love and is in the end an act of divine love (cf. 83, 115). What about a civil war? It for sure does not unite a people in love.

7 It comes from Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, XVI, XCVI, 5. SCHELER’S METAPHYSICS OF WAR 809

For Scheler there is no such thing as a metaphysical essence in a civil war, it hardly counts as a war (cf. 23, 26, 161). Obviously Scheler’s arguments only hold for war between nations, and only between nations that possess a will to intensify and increase their life. Violence is only a means to manifest power. Not all power has to use violence; Scheler claims that the more powerful a person or a people is, the less violence is necessary to realise the intentions of the will, even if it must still be the case that they are able to use violence. Scheler’s argument is that God, as the most powerful being, does not need violence to put his will into effect (cf. 9). Brutality and violence are therefore external to war, since its essence is the intensification of life through power and the unification of the fighting people. In this regard Scheler differs from Clausewitz, because the latter argued that in war a radi- calization of the means, weapons and violence is necessary, since one cannot predetermine which means and weapons the enemy will use and to what level the enemy will raise the violence. Therefore, each party of the war will radicalize in order to prevent the enemy’s predominance. Like Mann in his Reflections, Scheler downplays the violence, battle and mass killing in war (cf. 10, 77); they are just side effects of the essence of war. Due to the intensification and extension of the power of a nation, it can use the contingent instruments of violence, battle and mass killing. Scheler does not explain which other alternatives exist in a war to subjugate the enemy. Another strategy used by Scheler is to aestheticise and to sanctify the violence in war: Here iron and blood make the spirit fertile in a dark manner, and the mys- tery of ‘reincarnation’ contains not only the state, which arises in each true war anew, but also the forces, swelling beyond state and through culture, of their always new creation. (65)8 A genocide, a preventive war, a commerce raid, a race war as well as a war of obliteration (Vernichtungskrieg) are, according to Scheler, not just wars (cf. 157 ff.). A genocide is not a just war, since the justification of a war is the will to power of a nation or a people, which is not a racial

8 Or Scheler, Genius, 78: “This killing is a killing without any hatred; yes, it is a killing with respect.”, and 101: “War is the thunderstorm in the moral sphere.” 810 Rainer SCHÄFER entity. It is a political, cultural, moral and religious unity; so too a foreign race is not a political, but merely a biological, unity (cf. 158). In this regard, Scheler argues against Eduard von Hartmann, who holds that war is a principle of eugenics and natural selection.9 Scheler’s idea that a nation is a cultural unity means that the blending and combination of different populations is necessary for its cultural creativity. In addition, Scheler argues against Hartmann, that after winning a war, the winning nation usually mixes and merges with the occupied and defeated nation on its former territory. A ‘Vernichtungskrieg’ with the aim of complete annihilation of the enemy cannot be a just war either (cf. 50), because the annihilating nation in this case is only focused on the enemy’s non-existence and not on its own determination or vocation. A just war is not merely destructive, it is also constructive, and even more constructive than destructive. It constructs states and forms the source of law and moral habits. Only naturalists, biologists, positivists, utilitarians, and pacifists (frankly the British) focus on the contingent means of violence in war, and because they misunderstand its essence, they only calculate the victims (and the expenditure), for they have an economic and individualistic liberal worldview (Weltanschauung). In the correct moral interpretation of war, the death of individuals is only a medium in which the political will to power of a people addresses itself (cf. 11). War is no struggle for existence; it is a struggle for a higher existence in which individual existence does not count, because it is about the political freedom of the social unity. That striving for freedom and particular moral values in war is irrational (cf. 29 f., 151). Therefore, the concept of spirit in Scheler does not denote a reflective comprehen- sive reason; spiritual life has irrational aspects too, and war is where we become paradigmatically aware of this irrational but fundamental power of spiritual life. Even several moral values are not the fabrication of rational considerations, e.g. glory, honor and power; these are moral

9 Cf. Eduard von Hartmann, Die Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness) (Berlin: Duncker, 1879), 670. According to Hartmann humans need war only until artificial genetic selection can replace natural selection. SCHELER’S METAPHYSICS OF WAR 811 emotions grounded in the irrational side of life. It is our estimation of moral values, which leads to war (cf. 31). “The sense and existence of the nation and national states rest solely on the super-utilitarian values, namely on life and cultural values, on power, honor, spirit” (32). The extension of the power of a state by means of violence is morally justi- fied, for it is only an instrument to contend for freedom and political independence. In the process of world history, the just war increasingly manifests its very essence. In past epochs the outcome of war was dependent on contingent factors: 1. only particular classes of society had specific interests to make war, not the whole nation, 2. only those who had more financial resources, and 3. only those who had the better mercenary army, 4. ‘Kabinettskriege’ during absolute monarchy etc. But in modern times of mass war and people’s war, these contingent factors are reduced, and the just war can show its essence (cf. 152), for the whole nation is involved. Scheler sees this world-historical progress of war particularly since the Napoleonic Wars. The empirical war approximates more and more to the idea of war. The consequence of this ‘argument’ is that world wars are the most just wars and that world history consummates in WW I (cf. 153).

4. War and Peace

Pacifism is wrong when it claims that there is less violence in peacetime than in wartime; in civil society with its economic necessities egoism, stinginess, envy, competitive pursuit, need, profit, vengeance, hatred, and malevolence rule (cf. 100). The total amount of violence in peaceful societies is higher than in belligerent societies. Because of peace a people is internally separated and externally united, whereas by war it becomes internally united and externally separated (cf. 96); peace promotes the lower desires of humans, war the higher ones. Scheler concurs with Dostoyevsky’s opinion that one contributory reason for nations to go to war is the aggression accumulated during peacetime (cf. 102). Therefore, war is a kind of psychotherapy for a people 812 Rainer SCHÄFER

(cf. 99-100). “I believe that humans would eat themselves up peacefully if not for the dignity of war that sanctifies violence and focuses larger communities on their common goals” (45). War is ennoblement and purification of a society, since it gives a society the evidence of its true ends and makes clear to a people that it is noble to prefer death to the life of a slave under foreign domination — that is, without Scheler mentioning it, the argument in favour of slavery from Aristotle’s Politics. The ultimate consequence is that peace becomes only a negative cor- relate of war, whereas war is the positive entity, from which alone peace derives its meaning. Peace is only a shadowy existence of war (cf. 116).

5. The metaphysics, morality and religiosity of war

In The Genius Scheler considers a hierarchy of moral values, and this ranking of values is grounded in a moral phenomenological intuition (cf. 58 f., 76, 85): I. values of utility and civilisation (e.g. integrity, business-mindedness, solidarity of interests, internationalism), II. values of politics and war (e.g. patriotism, sincerity, honesty, chivalry, courage, sacrifice, power, nobility, political freedom), III. values of culture (e.g. truth, knowledge, beauty, sublimity, learnedness, cultural tradition, cosmopolitism), IV. values of morality (e.g. goodness, empathy, sympathy), and V. values of religion (e.g. holiness, one God, love). The respective lower level is supposed to serve the respective higher level. The war values are supposed to serve the cultural values. The problem with this ranking, as with all phenomenological arguments, is that it is only true for those who happen to share the same intuition; there is nearly no argument possible if others do not share the same intuition. For example: Couldn’t one ‘see’ that the values of civilisation stand above the political values? Or: Why shouldn’t a value like honesty belong to the values of civilisation? Maybe one intuits the values of culture as a branch of the values of civilisation. Or: All values of civilisation belong to culture. However, in Scheler’s intuition, the cultural values rank higher than the political and war values, but at the same time, the cultural values are only possible if the political values are realised. To put it SCHELER’S METAPHYSICS OF WAR 813 provocatively and briefly: no beauty without a free and powerful people! That is obviously wrong, for many oppressed peoples have created great cultural achievements. The moral justification for war is that political freedom is necessary for a people to develop cultural values (cf. 62). Because the moral values rank higher than the political and war values, it is impossible that war could corrupt moral values or our moral conscience. Even during wartime we are still able to distinguish right and wrong killing and just and unjust war (cf. 108). The moral distinc- tions remain unchanged no matter which kind of war we are waging; a genocide or a war of annihilation remain unjust; a just war (chival- rously fought with the aim of increasing the cultural-moral values of a people) remains just even for the fighting soldier who carries off a heavy war wound. It is interesting that according to Scheler’s phenomenological intuition, in the sphere of cultural values there is no progress possible (cf. 62). That is something one wouldn’t expect, since he always highlights that life is the striving for intensification and increase; yet in the cultural sphere only a regression to the primary origins is possible. The moral values are eternal; they do not increase either. Only our awareness of moral values can increase. The cultural values serve the moral values and the moral values serve the religious. Therefore, in the end, divine love is the motor driving humans to (just) war. Scheler’s idea is that divine love includes all other (lower) forms of love, such as the moral values of sympathy and empathy. Scheler appeals to the Sermon on the Mount and especially Augustine’s interpretation of it (cf. 83). It says that all love comes from God, and that this love is the reason for the persistence in each kind of love humans practise in their morality. (Just) war is the way in which humans are able to restore the love-unity between God and mankind after the fall of man. War unifies humans through an increase of love, because they come closer in their distress and affliction, bringing them thereby closer to God. War is worship. […] that war is necessary as an obstetrician for the force of love to constitute a true community; therein and only therein did the Christian doctrine correctly see a consequence of human sinfulness, which traces back to the fall of man and the weakening of reason through original sin. Nonetheless the 814 Rainer SCHÄFER

just war remains, by inducing the spreading of love, respectively to the sinful human nature an adequate and positive essence-component of the divine order of salvation. (97) Because a just and metaphysically grounded war is the spreading of divine love among humanity, there will be no increase of hatred even within the defeated nation, for after being defeated, it can reflect anew on its world-historical mission and on why it didn’t properly understand that mission prior to the war (cf. 106). In Scheler’s opinion, Britain has only the values of civilisation, politics, war and culture, and it lacks moral and religious values; whereas in Germany and Austro-Hungary the moral, cultural and religious values dominate. Therefore, if Scheler is right, the German-Austro-Hungarian values must be reconsidered after the defeat of WW I. And the idea of an increase of divine love among the nations after WW I has so obviously been proven wrong, that it does not even need to be seriously discussed. Only in war can nations and states as collective personalities gain consciousness of their existence and essence, namely that they are a substantial personality of a higher order (cf. 119-120). The substance of the personal nation becomes aware of itself when in war the fighting soldiers gain knowledge of their own death and of the fact that they suffer or sacrifice for this trans-individual nation. At that moment of mortal awareness, they ‘see’ that there is an immortal community that encompasses them. The conscious experience of the individual death of the soldier is at the same time the origin of the national substantial unity, in which the single soldier can transcend her/himself to immortality. The genius of war familiarises our spiritual eye (after overcoming the first shiver of fear of the whistling bullets) with death. […] Everybody becomes a metaphysician, because everybody can become a war hero. Thus the true speculation is — contrary to positive science — heroism of thoughts; likewise the hero could be named a practical metaphysician. (124 f.) That is obviously Scheler’s attempt to justify not only war, but his war philosophy too, since it is theoretical heroism. Scheler himself was dis- charged from military service for medical reasons, but he is a hero of cognition. It is hard to decide if Scheler means this seriously or if he is already engaging in self-irony; I hope the latter. SCHELER’S METAPHYSICS OF WAR 815

The glory of heroism is the concrete consciousness of immortality and of values that transcend the individual subject with its egoism. Therefore, glory is fundamental to Scheler’s idea that war has a metaphysical ground; the heroic glory soldiers gain in war is a concrete experience of immortality, eternal life (cf. 127). The metaphysics of war is in this regard anti-Platonic, because the idea and the moral values are concretely given in the historical experience. It is a grounded metaphysics. Those at home keep single soldiers as well as a whole self-sacrificing company in their common national memory. Immortality through glory is our path to the transcendent glory of God. War enables the concrete experience of eternal divine actuality and “God’s regiment” (128). One core determination of God is his omnipotence, and we become aware of it by anticipation of our own death, if we sacrifice it for a higher good. God wants us to make war for the sake of our experience of God’s power. God is testing the nations by war. War is God’s ‘examen rigorosum’ for mankind (cf. 133; Scheler quotes here again Tre- itschke), and God is using war as a kind of cultural criticism. It is “the strongest deduction” (130) of the metaphysical foundation of war in the will of God, that — like Madame Pompadour quoting Marshal Turenne — “God is always with the strongest battalion” (cf. 129). The decision of victory or defeat in a war is a judgement of God (cf. 141). Only with respect to the moral forces does the idea of war as God’s judgment become intelligible. If God is a God of love, he will give victory to the nation in which the love is the most fertile, most profound, most mature. And particularly here the genius of war becomes our leader (Führer) to God”. (151) According to Scheler we are not able to understand this communion of the will in the sacrifice of the fighting nation and the love of God, we are only able to feel and experience it in our empathy (cf. 151). The love of God is boundless, and the will to sacrifice in a true nation is boundless. “The immeasurable requires an immeasurable source” (151). No need to point out that this does not constitute a ‘deduction’; it is rather more an appeal to obscure feelings. That the transcendence of our selfishness is only possible through war is simply wrong. Therefore, 816 Rainer SCHÄFER there is no deduction of a metaphysical fundament of war, and Scheler does not prove the necessity of war. The main problem with Scheler’s idea of war is that on the one hand he argues that a nation going to war against another nation already is a unity of moral and cultural values (the reason why they fight against each other is that they differ in their values), and on the other hand he argues that war is nation building for it unites a community, because only in war the common goals of a people are fixed. But if the nation already exists before it goes to war there must exist other (more peaceful) ways of unifying a nation; therefore war is not necessary. If Scheler would argue now that something like the nation before war is merely an implicit nation, and that only war leads to such an intensification of the feeling of national unity that the community actually becomes a unity, he would again make a self-defeating claim, because then war is no essential entity, no “genius”, but only a means to intensify something which is already there. If war is only the “making explicit” of something that is already there, it is neither a metaphysical substance nor is it creative, because it depends on something which already exists. Scheler admits that in war it is often the case that neither power nor the “higher” national cultural values win, but sheer strength, cleverness or violence (cf. 131). If that is possible something must be wrong with God, for God is always with the “strongest battalion”, obviously then not with the most powerful in Scheler’s sense and not with the most loving nation. Sometimes God is with the smarter or more violent people. In that case God helps culturally inferior nations against the nations who hold the higher-ranking moral and religious values. It is self-defeating when Scheler writes: “Indeed the success in the outcome of a war gives no judgement about the value of given cultural achievements or culture forms or the value of creative forces in a people” (138). This is self-defeating, because in his hierarchy of material values Scheler argues that the higher-ranking values are more powerful and therefore closer to the omnipotence of God. When Scheler writes that the “genius of war” is the “Führer”, this remark is not only disgusting because of the experience with Nazi Ger- many, it also gives evidence of a fundamental confusion in Scheler’s SCHELER’S METAPHYSICS OF WAR 817 conception, for to which branch of values does this “genius of war” belong? Obviously the genius belongs to the political and war values, at the same time it is an entity with a kind of religious mission, which would put it among the religious values. In consequence the “genius” belongs to two branches of differently ranked values. Scheler’s metaphysics of war is an example that neither brilliant intel- ligence nor sympathy and empathy spare us from stupidity. Maybe only a measured combination of both can help.

Keywords: phenomenology, material, value and virtue ethics, just war, World War I, German propaganda.

Summary

Scheler’s The Genius of War and the German War (1915) is a) German World War I propaganda, b) a metaphysics of war, c) a philosophy of world-history, and d) an expansion of phenomenology to topics like patriotism, courage, inter-subjectivity, and the political. Although widely ignored in phenomenological research, Scheler’s text is a paradigm for the combination of propaganda and philosophy. The founder of phenomenological value and virtue ethics claims that WW I is the apex of the historical development towards a just war, which realizes the love of the Christian God. Fur- thermore, Scheler’s Genius is of some philosophical importance, since it applies the phenomenological theory of ethical values and social emotions (sympathy, empathy), to the sphere of politics and war. Scheler tries to work out philosophical criteria for a just war and a hierarchy of ethical values which justify war. Scheler’s program shows that social shared values and virtues like empathy, sympathy, patriotism, faith and feelings of justice are politically motivated and play with fire.