Alfred Schütz, Max Scheler’s Epistemology and Ethics

Alfred Schütz’s exposition, presented in its 1970 version of the work originally published in 1957–1958, reconstructs the connections between Scheler’s phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, and ethical personalism. The discussion of Kant links the account of knowledge to an ethics grounded in objective values rather than formal law. Schütz’s central interpretive thread is that intuition discloses essential structures in both cognition and emotional life.

Scheler distinguishes everyday experience, scientific knowledge mediated by symbols, and phenomenological insight into pure facts. Everyday appearances retain their practical coherence even where scientific explanation departs from them. Phenomenology seeks a different kind of evidence, irreducible to sensory observation:

The pure fact, which can be grasped by eidetic intuition, must remain unchanged even if the sensory functions actually vary or are imagined to vary.

The distinction separates essential knowledge from empirical generalization. The a priori encompasses materially determinate relations, not merely logical forms. Knowledge discovers these relations rather than producing them through subjective synthesis. Scheler’s disagreement with Kant therefore concerns how objects become intelligible:

Spatiality, motion, change are not, as Kant believed, bestowed upon something pre-given by the so-called faculty of understanding, as forms of the synthesis of its activities.

Schütz connects this epistemology with Scheler’s later anthropology. Human beings can resist vital impulses, transcend an immediate environment into a world, and distinguish essence from existence. Knowing participates in another being’s essence without transforming it, whereas existence is encountered through resistance to striving. Scheler differentiates knowledge directed toward domination, personal cultivation, and salvation: these respectively transform things, enlarge the spiritual Person, and establish participation in the ultimate ground of being.

This anthropology also widens the meaning of spirit beyond intellectual cognition:

Spirit includes not only reason but also the power of intuiting essence; it includes in addition certain classes of volitive and emotional acts, such as kindness, love, repentance, etc.

Emotional acts can thus possess cognitive significance without becoming rational judgments. This supplies the basis for Scheler’s ethical opposition to Kantian formalism. Moral willing presupposes apprehension of values; rational law does not create goodness. Intentions already have determinate value-content before purposes are formulated, and acts must be distinguished from their subsequent causal effects. The alternative to formalism is therefore neither hedonism nor an ethics of practical success.

Schütz explains values as objective, enduring ideal objects disclosed through intentional feeling. They must be distinguished from subjective emotional states and from the goods that bear them: a betrayal does not invalidate friendship’s value. Preferring reveals relations of rank without being identical with choosing. Scheler’s hierarchy rises from sensory agreeableness through vital and spiritual values to the holy. Good and evil concern the willing realization of values, particularly the relation between higher and lower values, rather than constituting additional levels of this hierarchy.

Obligation is correspondingly derivative. An ideal ought presupposes value, while an imperative addresses a will capable of resisting its realization. Scheler’s account nevertheless has to explain historical and cultural differences in moral understanding. Schütz locates the proposed solution in changing access to values rather than changes in values themselves. Through the functionalization of eidetic knowledge, earlier insights become selective frameworks for subsequent experience. Traditions disclose partial perspectives, making cooperation among persons, cultures, and generations necessary for fuller understanding. Distinctions among ethos, ethical judgment, institutional morals, practical morality, and custom prevent their variations from being conflated with alteration of the objective value-order.

The exposition culminates in the Person as the primary bearer of moral value. Unlike the objectifiable ego or body, the Person exists through intentional acts and becomes accessible through participation in them, especially through love. Personal knowledge consequently involves disclosure rather than detached observation; the religious parallel is knowledge of God through revelation. Ethical personalism culminates in solidarity and co-responsibility for others. Schütz traces how essential knowledge, emotional disclosure, historical understanding, and personal community form a connected philosophical project, while also registering Scheler’s later revisions and movement toward a sociology of knowledge.