Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann

Transcription

1 Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann

2 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-Ar chief, 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, Louvainla-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:

3 Eugene Kelly Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann

4 Eugene Kelly Department of Social Sciences New York Institute of Technology Old Westbury, New York USA ISSN ISBN e-isbn DOI / Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: Springer Science+Business Media B.V 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 (

5 To Libusha Kelly and Mark Breidenbach.

6

7 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 eventually 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 contemporary 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 incommensurability between moral convictions and the language and conceptualization vii

8 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 unprofitable 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 intentional 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 eventually 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 phenomenological perspective. It is doubtful whether any contemporary scholar may be found who is more eminently 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 phenomenological 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).

9 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 programmatic focus is already evident in Structure and Diversity, along with a much broadened 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 recent developments in virtue ethics, postmodernism, anti-foundationalism, anti-realism, and the discussions of Anglo-American and Analytic philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Willard Quine, Donald Davidson, Charles Taylor, and J. L. Mackie. With the publication of Kelly s third work, Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann (2011), we see his programmatic interests emerge with particular clarity, now further enriched by his more recent investigations in Nicolai Hartmann s massive Ethik (1926). 3 Kelly s systemic focus in this work is on creating a descriptive synthesis of material value-ethics as a platform for moral theory. The word synthesis here is deliberate, since his effort incorporates not only the work of the two principal philosophers and their seminal works Scheler s Formalismus and Hartmann s Ethik but also some of Edmund Husserl s lectures on ethics, as well as the ethical writings of Dietrich von Hildebrand, not to mention the secondary and tertiary contributions of a number of contemporary scholars with parallel interests, such as John Crosby, and others whose names remain mostly in the background of this essay. Kelly s stated objective is to demonstrate that the contributions of Scheler and Hartmann to a material ethics of value are complementary, despite their differences, and provide a foundation for a comprehensive and defensible axiological and moral theory. Further, in the course of his analysis, he seeks to demonstrate that a material value-ethics functions also as an ethical personalism not solely, he says, by virtue of being descriptive of the moral agent, but by deriving from its descriptions normative principles of living and acting. In this respect, he writes in his final chapter, material value-ethics is certainly anomalous; it is a unique search for lucidity in morals. There is nothing like it in the prior history of philosophy. Those unfamiliar with the phenomenological tradition and with Scheler or Hartmann, and even some of those who are, might be excused for responding initially to such a bold categorical declaration with some skepticism. Whether material value-ethics is an utter anomaly, or an altogether unique and historically unprecedented search for lucidity in morals, may be debatable. Yet skeptics willing to follow Kelly s argument patiently throughout this investigation to its end may find themselves surprised. Not only is the case Kelly makes here comprehensive, 3 Three volumes in the English translation.

10 x Introduction: The Legacy and Promise of Scheler and Hartmann cogent and compelling, but the kind of ethics he seeks to establish should have considerable appeal to those with a continuing interest in credible, well-grounded moral reasoning in the postmodern era. Any ethics which demands that moral reasoning be grounded in demonstrably objective values, ranked in a testable order of preference independent of contingent objects of desire, and yield normative ethical principles, as well as an ethical personalism for which the value of the human person emerges ineluctably as an absolute, should command the attention of the most confirmed skeptic as well as the most traditional humanist secular or religious. Among the latter, the intellectual stepchildren of philosophers in tradition of Catholic phenomenological realism and personalism, such as Dietrich von Hildebrand, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, and Karol Wojtyła, 4 as well as their disciples, like John Crosby, Josef Seifert, Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, Kenneth Schmitz, Rocco Buttiglione and their associates, should find themselves in considerable sympathy with Kelly s project. Of interest in this regard is Kelly s argument (in Chap. 9) that Hartmann s hostility toward Scheler s alleged theistic foundationalism is unwarranted, since Scheler never claimed to base his ethics on his Christian theistic metaphysics. On the contrary, argues Kelly, Scheler s ethics led him into metaphysics, and the idea that love opens persons to the realm of values deepened Scheler s concept of God rather than originating from it. There is a great deal in Kelly s synoptic view of material value-ethics in this book that could deepen and enrich the conceptual architecture of moral theorists who stand in this phenomenological tradition. Another example from farther afield is the Grisez-Finnes school of Catholic natural law theorists, which has not yet ventured into the territory of phenomenological value-theory, but has been arguing for some time that the first principles of morality are grasped, not in Aristotelian fashion through a metaphysics of human nature and analysis of natural inclinations, but on the level of intentionality, through acquaintance with human potentialities, their actualizations in acts, and through the intended objects of these acts. 5 While it identifies the natural telos of human action with primary goods rather than with their values, as in material value-ethics, it does distinguish different categories of goods such as the rational, emotional, physical, etc., and regards reflexive goods (involving choice), such as goods of morality, 4 Karol Wojtyła s brand of phenomenological personalism is sometimes identified with Lublin Thomism. See, for example, introductory essay by Stefan Swiezawski entitled Karol Wojtyła at the Catholic University of Lublin in Person and Community: Selected Essays, by Karol Wojtyła, trans. Theresa Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. ix xvi. 5 In his oft-referenced essay, Recent Criticism of Natural Law Theory, The University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 55 (1988), pp , Robert George of Princeton University offers a thoroughgoing introduction and survey of the debate between partisans of the old natural law school (represented by Ralph McInerny, Vernon Bourke, Henry Veatch, Lloyd Weinreb, Russell Hittinger, et al.), for whom the first principles of morality are apprehended, in Aristotelian fashion, through an analysis of human nature and its natural inclinations, and partisans of the newer Grisez-Finnis school (respresented by Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, Christopher Tollefsen, Robert George, J. Budziszewski, et al.), who insist that the first principles are apprehended on the level of intentionality.

11 Introduction: The Legacy and Promise of Scheler and Hartmann xi friendship, and religion as having a certain priority over substantive goods, such as bodily life and health. All of which would seem to lend itself readily and profitably to a phenomenological axiological analysis. Despite the basic secularism of Kelly s project, which follows Hartmann in this respect more than Scheler, Catholic legal and moral theorists interested in establishing common cause with non-religious thinkers by appeal to natural law arguments independent of religious faith, particularly in the fashion of the Grisez-Finnes school, could find material value-ethics eminently congenial and instructive in refining their own analyses. One of Kelly s achievements in this book, particularly significant from the point of view of the present writer, is one that may pass unnoticed by some readers. This has to do with an insight from Hartmann that he brings to bear on resolving a persistent problem in Scheler s ethics. The problem lies in Scheler s inveterate lack of clarity in defining moral value a criticism that may strike the reader initially as a trifle unfair given G.E. Moore s allegation that good is indefinable. The problem, however, is that Scheler is a self-described phenomenologist, seeking to draw distinctions between values phenomenologically. It is therefore highly incongruous, not to mention unhelpful, when he insists that moral value has no content that can be directly intended or realized and can never be the content of willing. 6 Instead, says Scheler, the value of moral goodness must be understood always and everywhere as a by-product of bringing about some other intended good, which serves as the bearer of a positive material non-moral value of one kind or other. Hence moral value appears on the back of willing the realization of other, non-moral values. The problem here is not only that Hartmann does not agree altogether with Scheler on this, 7 but that one can easily think of acts exemplifying positive non-moral values (such as those attached to technical skill, self-discipline and boldness) that are not accompanied by the co-realization of moral goodness as a by-product (such as the acts of the terrorist pilots on 9/11). What is missing is the recognition that moral value must have some sort of definable material content of its own. 8 6 Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, II: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, ed. Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1980), p. 48; Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p See Hans Reiner, Duty and Inclination: The Fundamentals of Morality Discussed and Redefined with Especial Regard to Kant and Schiller, trans. Mark Santos (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983), pp. 172 f. 8 See Philip Blosser, Scheler and Values that Belong to the Ethical Sphere, in Phenomenology 2005: Selected Essays from North America, Part 1, Series Post Scriptum Organization of Phenomenological Organizations, vol. 5, ed. Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2007), ; and The Cape Horn of Scheler s Ethics, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (Winter 2005), ; Scheler s Ordo Amoris: Insights and Oversights, in Denken des Ursprungs/Ursprung des Denkens: Schelers Philosophie und ihre Anfänge in Jena, ed. Christian Bermes, et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), ; and Moral and Non-moral Values: A Problem in Scheler s Ethics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47, no. 1 (September, 1987),

12 xii Introduction: The Legacy and Promise of Scheler and Hartmann Drawing on a set of distinctions Hartmann makes in his Ethik, Kelly points out (in Chap. 5) that the value of the intention in any act is not the value of the intended outcome. Rather, he writes, the moral quality of the intention depends upon its own content, that is, upon the desire to do good or evil. Thus, as Hartmann suggests in his own illustration, the happiness of a person is not the highest good, yet it is morally good to foster another s happiness, just as it is wicked to attempt to destroy it. Only the intentional fostering of another s happiness, then, and not the other s happiness as such, bears the value of moral goodness in this example. Kelly concedes that the material content of [moral] goodness is very slender here, since it cannot derive any of its goodness from the goodness of what it achieves. The value of these insights, however, is that they show, first, that the value of moral goodness has a material content of its own, distinct from the value of an intended action, or even from the value that the action itself may have (such as being executed brilliantly, hesitantly, etc.); and, second, that this moral value, as the value of the moral quality of the intention to do good or evil, is transactional in nature that it involves, in Robert Sokolowski s words, taking the good of another as my good and the bad of another as my bad. 9 These insights drawn from Hartmann should help to clarify the nature of hitherto unresolved issues in Scheler s ethics, as well as indicating the path towards their eventual resolution. Kelly draws on many other significant and fascinating insights from the legacy of Scheler and Hartmann in his discussion that many should find helpful. To mention just a single example, one such feature is his analysis (in Chap. 8) of Aristotle s schema of moral virtue as a mean between vices of excess and defect, in which he shows how Hartmann takes Maria Louise von Kohoutek s diagram of Aristotle s schema and develops it to make remarkable extensions to the theory and phenomenological technique of material value-ethics. Hartmann does this by taking Kohoutek s diagram, which she developed in an ontological and axiological space, and placing it within the evaluative space of his own diagrammatic rectangle of oppositions, in order to show that virtue is not simply an Aristotelian mean, but a tension-in-balance among at least four value-oppositions. 10 Courage, for example, is not merely a virtue opposed (axiologically) to vice, or a mean (ontologically) placed between the defect of cowardice and excess of recklessness, but is also situated between two fraternal virtues: boldness (absent in cowardice) and prudence (absent in recklessness). All of which illustrates just what a deft analytical tool material value-ethics can provide, in the right hands, for intricate phenomenological analysis of the values and disvalues involved in virtue ethics. 9 Robert Sokolowski, Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 156. I develop the transactional aspect of moral value especially in my essay, The Cape Horn of Scheler s Ethics, loc. cit. 10 The original diagrams may be found in Nicolai Hartmann s Ethics, trans. Stanton Coit (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975), Vol. II: Moral Values, p. 256 (Maria von Kohoutek s diagram), p. 410 (Hartmann s rectangle of oppositions), and p. 417 (Hartmann s diagram of their mutual juxtaposition).

13 Introduction: The Legacy and Promise of Scheler and Hartmann xiii Of course, questions persist. While material value-ethics and its foundational phenomenology of values offer excellent tools for ethical analysis, it is an open question as to what extent they provide the equipment necessary to offer concrete moral guidance. Indeed, it was a matter of some contention between Scheler and Hartmann whether it is even the task of ethics to offer prescriptions. 11 Related to this are persistent questions about the relationships between insight and obligation, spontaneity and striving, lucidity and virtue, moral conflict and self-deception, happiness and being worthy of happiness. Is it true that as insight increases, moral conflict necessarily diminishes, and with them regret and guilt? Is the distinction between subjective and objective guilt a distinction without a difference? What role does the habituation of virtue or vice play in fostering or hindering moral insight? A perfectly virtuous person, certainly, would live without moral conflict, but is it reasonable to suppose that virtue always spontaneously follows upon insight? Is not the problem of morality precisely the fact that people fall short of moral perfection? In fact, is it not a well-attested and empirically demonstrable premise of Western philosophical anthropology that human beings are capable frequently of acting maliciously with full knowledge and consent and thus with insight? Furthermore, is there any basis in material value-ethics for identifying acts and dispositions that are objectively and inherently, always and everywhere right or wrong, and not so merely on the basis of how they appear from the vantage point of a person s subjective Ordo amoris, and even less from the vantage point of their effects? 12 Additional questions pertain to fundamental methodological assumptions of material value-ethics, at least as developed in the legacy of Scheler and Hartmann, which have been brought to light in ongoing debates about the relationship between feelings and the intellect in material value-ethics. 13 Of special interest here is not merely the Pascalian claim regarding the priority of the heart over the head, so to speak, but the claim that values are apprehended by feelings independently of the intellect. This basic dualism is reflected in the way Kelly (in his Preface) initially poses two different forms of subliminal or non-thetic awareness, which, he says, function in our judgments about the world: one is logical and one sentient; the first intends meanings, the second values. There is nothing exceptional about Kelly s remarks here. They simply reflect the legacy of Scheler s and Hartmann s axiologies. The question is bound to be asked, however, whether this kind of dualism, 11 Ultimately ethics is a damned bloody affair, and if it can give me no directives concerning how I should live now in this social and historical context, then what is it? wrote Scheler, in response to Hartmann s denial that ethics is in the business of offering prescriptions (Scheler, Formalism, p. 23, n. and Frings translation, Formalismus, p. xxxi, n. 14). 12 One thinks of Michel Foucault, for example, who is described as so fearful that society constitutes a conspiracy to stifle one s own longings for self-expression that he agonizes profoundly over the question of whether rape should be regulated by penal justice (Ronald Beiner, Foucault s Hyper-liberalism, Critical Review, Summer 1995, pp ). 13 See, for example, Peter H. Spader, Scheler s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp , for a discussion of the criticisms of Scheler by Stephen Strasser, Karol Wojtyła and Dietrich von Hildebrand.

14 xiv Introduction: The Legacy and Promise of Scheler and Hartmann however persistent it may be, can be indefinitely sustained. 14 Are values not also meanings? Are meanings not also values? Is not the logical mode of awareness also sentient? Does the world of values not include logical and mathematical values, and, if so, are not values apprehended by intellect as well as by feeling? Such questions are not new, but the resolution of these and other such questions will be essential to the ultimate the success of the envisioned project. Kelly s book represents a milestone in the history of phenomenological moral reasoning and material-value ethics. It is a remarkable achievement from many points of view, with manifold implications not only for Scheler studies and Hartmann scholarship, but for the future of phenomenological value-theory, material valueethics and virtue ethics. We owe Professor Kelly a debt of gratitude for this work. 14 See Philip Blosser, Can a Schelerian Ethic Be Grounded in the Heart Without Losing Its Head? in Advancing Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Lester Embree, Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 62, ed. Thomas Nenon and Philip Blosser (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp

15 Contents 1 The Idea of a Material Value-Ethics Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann The Difficulties Facing Efforts at a Synthesis of Scheler and Hartmann s Moral Theories The Theological Question The Question of the Moral Subject The Character of Material Value-Ethics Ethics Material Value The Aims of Material Value-Ethics Passing Beyond Kant The Concepts of Obligation and Virtue Post-Kantian Concept of the Person Prospects of Material Value-Ethics The Phenomenology of Value Nature and Aims of Phenomenology Scheler s Distinctive Phenomenological Procedure Scheler s Phenomenology of Values The Stratification of the Emotional Life The Order of Values Competing Values and Norms and the Unity of the Sphere of Values The Orientation of Human Beings Toward Value The Aspiration to Systematic Philosophy Anthropological Foundations of the Human Openness to Values The Ordo Amoris The Basic Moral Tenor Sympathy xv

16 xvi Contents Milieu The Value-Milieu Human Freedom Conclusions Values and Moral Values The Realm of Values The Antinomic of Values Relational Oppositions Among Values Qualitative and Quantitative Oppositions Non-moral Values That Condition Moral Content Goods as Values Laws That Condition Content Action Theory and the Problem of Motivation The Problem of Action Hartmann s Action Theory Scheler s Critique of Kant s Concept of Action The Structure of Action The Essential Phenomenology of Action Consequences for Moral Judgment Moral Motivation Goodness and Moral Obligation Values and Norms The Negativity of Obligation The Phenomenology of Obligation Moral Education and Authority The Authority of Obligation The Contribution of Dietrich von Hildebrand to the Problem of Obligation Obligation in Husserl Love and Obligation The Relativity and Universality of Values and Norms The Limits of Moral Autonomy in Scheler The Concept of Virtue and Its Foundations The Conflict of Reason and Emotion in Scheler The Phenomenology of Virtue Von Hildebrand and Husserl on Virtue Hartmann: The Moral Context of Virtue Goodness Nobility Richness of Experience Purity

17 Contents xvii 8 Virtue Ethics The Platonic Virtues Justice Wisdom Courage and Self-control The Aristotelian Virtues Aristotle s Procedure A Problem: Ontological and Axiological Dimensions of Virtue The Minor Virtues The Christian Virtues Brotherly Love Truth and Truthfulness; Reliability and Fidelity Humility Social Virtues Modernity: The Third Order of Values The Love of the Remote Radiant Virtue The Structure of the Realm of Value Unity of the Virtues in Plato s Protagoras Oppositional Relations in Hartmann Recurrence in the Realm of Values An Illustration The Phenomenology of the Person Scheler s Phenomenology of Personhood Hartmann s Critique of Scheler s Concept of the Person God and World Subjectivity Subject and Person Ethical Personalism The Empirical and the Ideal Person The Self-execution of Moral Personhood in Scheler Moral Autonomy and Social Milieu The Goal of History Is the Realization of Persons The Realization of a Person Cannot Be Achieved Directly The Need for Equalitarian Communities Solidarity and the Collective Person The Social and the Intimate Person Models and Leaders: Education in Material Value-Ethics The Intimate Person and Personal Love Hartmann s Ethical Personalism Virtue as a Balance-in-Tension

18 xviii Contents 10.8 Material Value-Ethics and the Good Life Political Principles Spontaneity Social Diversity The Collectivity Love The Problem of the Unity of the Table of Values Revisited Bibliography References in the Text Primary Sources: Scheler Books on Scheler in English Selected Articles on Sheler in English Primary Sources: Hartmann Secondary Literature: Hartmann Index