Presentation on Scheler & Embodiment

Adam Blair Dr. Anne O’Byrne Critical Phenomenology 12 February 2018 Short Presentation on Person/World in Scheler Phenomenology TO THE MAX In trying to think through the various readings for tonight, I considered what aspect of Scheler might be useful to the project of critical phenomenology. I think that his concept of “person” is something which we might be able to make use of, as this central concept is concerned with the tensions between essence and particularity found in an individual life, and also gets at the central insights of the phenomenological method in some crucial ways. Scheler’s focus is on attending to acts as they are lived and experienced. An act is performed by a person in a world. Scheler contrasts this person/world system with other philosophical systems to help make sense of it. The biggest foe here is the ego/environment view, which on Scheler’s account reduces both sides of the equation to objects. If the actor of an action is the ego, reducible to a piece of a psychophysical puzzle, then we will never be able to get at the heart of the intentional action itself, doomed to remain outside of it. It is for this reason that Scheler turns to his own notion of “person.” Scheler explicitly defines “person” as “the concrete and essential unity of being of acts of different essences.” (203) It is important for Scheler that the person isn’t “below” acts as their implicit common denominator, nor is a person the outcome of acts. He writes that the “person is not over and above or below acts, nor is it the sum total. But a person is contained in every full concrete act. A person executes acts - [and] is not some being at rest underneath them.” If a person were found in some sort of metaphorically spatial relation to the acts that they perform, then we would be looking at the system from a removed, third-person perspective. This would allow us to separate the person from their acts and from the milieu in which they are acting. But Scheler’s point is that a person is inseparable from their acts and from their world, precisely because we are attending to the person phenomenologically. The Husserlian insight of intentionality is that an intentional act will always be of something. Descartes’ cogito goes too far when I am only certain of myself as thinking—for there is always a world in which I must be thinking, no matter what sort of world this might be. The ego as separable from the act and from their environment is an objectification on Scheler’s view, as this ego must be the piece of a psychophysical unity which still reduces it to a sort of materiality. Rather, as we have seen, the person is the concrete and essential unity of the being of acts. The person is that which acts, and is fully contained in all acts which she performs. A person is absolute, and is the correlate to their absolute world. A person, an act, and a world are, importantly, “psychophysically indifferent,” meaning that they are unobjectifiable—they are primary to an individual existence, and therefore prefigure any scientific attempts at dividing and explaining. Psychology can never get at the act itself, as it is an inductive science, “not concerned with acts themselves, but the inner perceptions and bodily results of the occasion of acts.” (208) Whereas an “ego” is always defined in opposition to its environment, its past, other egos, etc., the “person” is a “self-sufficient totality,” experienced firsthand as a qualitative singularity all its own. Scheler writes on 208 that “it belongs to the essences of the person to exist and to exist and live solely in the execution of intentional acts.” To get at the essence of an act, which is where Scheler thinks we are present to existence, we must look to the act itself—not its object or at the egoistic “I” performing the act. This is the interesting tension. If I am reading these words, to think through the act-essence here, we must recognize that this act of reading is essentially that of my person, but not of my ego. “Reading” is not a generalizable essence, but is particular to each person, since they are each a self-sufficient totality. As Scheler writes on 205: “No knowledge of the nature of love or of judgment can bring us one step nearer to the knowledge of how person A loves or judges person B; nor can a reference to the contents (values, states of affairs) given in each of these acts furnish this knowledge. But, on the other hand, a glance at the person himself and his essence immediately yields a peculiarity for every act that we know him to execute, and the knowledge of his ‘world’ yields a peculiarity for the contents of his acts.” The essence of reading these words right now is not found in “Adam” or in the invested environment as I see it, but it is found within the act itself which is performed by my person within my world. This person/world system is lived through, and is the phenomenal precondition for me to have an ego or an environment at all. This is a powerful notion, insofar as it allows us to hold on to Husserl’s notion of “essence,” without succumbing to empty universality. However, I am still unclear just how we are to conceive of this “person,” and “world” in phenomenological practice. Indeed, as critical phenomenologists we want to be able to discuss essences in a uniquely particular way—but, that leaves us wondering, what does such an act-essence actually look like? What is my “person” once my ego is left behind? What is my “world” without my environment? Is such an epoche even possible? Since Husserl wanted us to bracket out historical contingencies too, another question remains: how is this different from the Husserlian reduction? Scheler seems to be a potent source for thinking through the importance of values and persons within a phenomenological framework. But I now have more questions than when I began... Finally, a potentially relevant passage from Mohr’s dissertation: As a lived (i.e., personal) experience, longing is neither formal (because it is personal), nor conceptual (because one need not conceptualize longing in order to long [for conceptual expression]). It appears conceptual, however, when the sphere of the person is excluded from consideration. I worry that Adorno tends toward the depersonalization of knowing (by means of the full exclusion of the realm of intentionality) for the sake of the success of the immanent dimension of critique. That is to say, he is adopting what Husserl calls the “natural attitude,” which considers matters from a third-personal standpoint, removed from personal involvement. The natural attitude alienates the intentional sphere of the person from the person’s own experience. Far from being intrinsic to concepts or in some way dependent upon them, longing is not only external to the concept—grounded in the intentional acts of persons—but is also not conceptual. I argue it is part of an entire constellation of nonconceptual, intuitive experiences relevant to the sphere of intentionality. (xxx) Blair