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Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann PHAENOMENOLOGICA SERIES FOUNDED by H.L Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann PHAENOMENOLOGICA SERIES FOUNDED BY H.L. VAN BREDA AND PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE HUSSERL-ARCHIVES 203 EUGENE KELLY MATERIAL ETHICS OF VALUE: MAX SCHELER AND NICOLAI HARTMANN Editorial Board: Director: U. Melle (Husserl-Archief, Leuven) Members: R. Bernet (Husserl-Archief, Leuven), R. Breeur (Husserl-Archief, Leuven), S. IJsseling (Husserl-Archief, Leuven), H. Leonardy (Centre d’études phénoménologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve), D. Lories (CEP/ISP/Collège Désiré Mercier, Louvain-la-Neuve), J. Taminiaux (Centre d’études phénoménologiques, Louvain- la-Neuve), R. Visker (Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven) Advisory Board: R. Bernasconi (The Pennsylvania State University), D. Carr (Emory University, Atlanta), E.S. Casey (State University of New York at Stony Brook), R. Cobb-Stevens (Boston College), J.F. Courtine (Archives-Husserl, Paris), F. Dastur (Université de Paris XX), K. Düsing (Husserl- Archiv, Köln), J. Hart (Indiana University, Bloomington), K. Held (Bergische Universität Wuppertal), K.E. Kaehler (Husserl-Archiv, Köln), D. Lohmar (Husserl-Archiv, Köln), W.R. McKenna (Miami University, Oxford, USA), J.N. Mohanty (Temple University, Philadelphia), E.W. Orth (Universität Trier), C. Sini (Università degli Studi di Milano), R. Sokolowski (Catholic University of America, Washington D.C.), B. Waldenfels (Ruhr-Universität, Bochum) For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6409 Eugene Kelly Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann Eugene Kelly Department of Social Sciences New York Institute of Technology Old Westbury, New York USA [email protected] ISSN 0079-1350 ISBN 978-94-007-1844-9 e-ISBN 978-94-007-1845-6 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-1845-6 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011934685 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) To Libusha Kelly and Mark Breidenbach. Introduction: The Legacy and Promise of Scheler and Hartmann By Philip Blosser Sacred Heart Major Seminary Detroit, Michigan Alasdair MacIntyre opens the first chapter of his landmark book,After Virtue (1982), with an allegorical dooms-day scenario in which all scientists have been killed, all laboratories, books and instruments destroyed, and all scientific knowledge blotted out from the earth. A later generation, wishing to revive scientific learning but having largely forgotten what it was, has at its disposal only fragments – records of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context that gave them significance, bits and pieces of theories unrelated to each other or to experiment, and instruments whose uses are forgotten. Nonetheless all these fragments are even- tually re-embodied in a set of practices which goes under the revived name of “science.” Children learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid. Nobody, however, realizes that what they are doing is not science at all, since the theoretical context needed to make sense of what they are doing has been lost. MacIntyre suggests that moral discourse today suffers from exactly this sort of irrational disembodiment. Contemporary moral beliefs are no longer commensurable with the language about rules and duties and obligations used to describe them. This incommensurability represents, in his view, a rupture of historic proportions between rival traditions of moral inquiry, between utterly disparate frameworks of moral experience and judgment. As a consequence, the conceptual dissonance underlying moral discourse and experience today is symptomatic of both a failure of rationality and a failure to even admit to being irrational. In the notable Foreword to his magisterial Ethik (1926) Nicolai Hartmann sketches, from a slightly different perspective, a similar disembodiment in contem- porary moral discourse. It is a disembodiment stemming from a disconnection from a material (content-oriented) framework of moral reasoning of the kind exhibited in Aristotle’s analysis of human virtues, the kind of framework needed to make sense of it and establish it and give it credibility. The crisis is not portrayed so dramatically as in MacIntyre’s scenario, and the crisis is concerned not so much with retrieving a lost tradition as with developing and embodying the new axiological insights first suggested by Scheler; yet the problem of overcoming a certain irrationality and incom- mensurability between moral convictions and the language and conceptualization vii viii Introduction: The Legacy and Promise of Scheler and Hartmann used to describe them is not dissimilar. In the opening chapter of Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, Kelly summarizes Hartmann’s account by saying that it has taken years for thinkers to respond to Nietzsche’s observation that we have not yet grasped the meaning of good and evil: “Lost for years in unpro- fitable studies of human consciousness, ethics had forgotten the orientation that it once received from Aristotle: a limited but nonetheless ‘material,’ or content-driven, study of the value-phenomena we call virtues” – even if, in Aristotle’s account, “we are left with a noble torso without a phenomenology of its members.” The pieces of the puzzle required to reconstruct a viable framework for moral reasoning and discourse have come together, suggests Kelly, only gradually and incrementally. Kant achieved one of the indispensable requirements through his insight into the a priori nature of moral judgment embodied in his Categorical Imperative, which liberated ethics from an empirical and descriptive dependence upon of the contingent ends and outcomes of human action. His ethics remained purely formal, however, lacking the further insight needed into the objective nature of material values and their ranks as capable of being apprehended a priori in inten- tional intuition. Nietzsche, for his part, opened us to an array of values beyond merely the moral by means of his “transvaluation of all values,” but his ethics even- tually ended in relativism, making any serious investigation into the nature and interrelations of values appear to be pointless. It was only the publication of Scheler’s Formalismus in der Ethik (1916), according to Hartmann, which finally opened the way for a genuine material (content-based) axiological ethics. Whatever further insights Hartmann and others may have contributed, Scheler’s ethics was the first to be built upon a foundation of material values objectively given a priori, to encompass both values and morals, and to apprehend the content of goods and virtues in their manifold gradations by the light it cast on Aristotle’s virtue-ethics from a phenom- enological perspective. It is doubtful whether any contemporary scholar may be found who is more emi- nently qualified than Eugene Kelly to guide us in an inquiry into Scheler’s and Hartmann’s legacy of a material value-ethics and to help us in assessing its importance for moral reasoning today. Kelly has spent most of his professional career writing and lecturing on Max Scheler’s philosophy. In 1977, he published his first monograph, Max Scheler, a concise and closely-reasoned survey of Scheler’s philosophy as a whole, which carries a Foreword by the eminent student of existentialism, William C. Barrett.1 Twenty years and many articles and presentations later, Kelly published his second book on Scheler, Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler (1997), the work of a seasoned scholar, enriched by two decades of further reflection and broader reading both inside and outside of the phe- nomenological tradition, in which he rethinks the conclusions of his earlier work and explores hitherto unexamined implications of Scheler’s philosophy.2 1 Eugene Kelly, Max Scheler (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977). 2 Eugene Kelly, Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler, Phaenomenologica series, 141 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997). Introduction: The Legacy and Promise of Scheler and Hartmann ix While Kelly’s research and writing over the past few decades have been focused principally on Scheler, his writings have also exhibited a more programmatic focus. His interest in clarifying issues left undeveloped or unresolved in Scheler’s work is nearly always subordinated to the larger end of envisioning how a comprehensive ethical theory would look when based on a sustainable phenomenological theory of values. Can normative ethical principles be clearly and coherently grounded in a phenomenological theory of values and material value-ethics? What about moral obligation, or a theory of virtue? What about ethical personalism? This program- matic focus is already evident in Structure and Diversity, along with a much broa- dened scope of research and reference. Kelly displays a willingness to test a Schelerian perspective against other contemporary views, which he does by developing his inquiry against the backdrop of more
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