MAX SCHELER’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LOVE

1. MAX SCHELER’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LOVE

2. CONTENTS • WHAT LOVE IS NOT • THE ESSENCE OF LOVE • MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF LOVE • LOVE AND MORAL GOODNESS • HIERARCHY OF VALUES • SENSORY VALUES • VITAL VASPIRITUAL VALUES • LUES • HOLY AND UNHOLY

3. I. WHAT LOVE IS NOT • Love exerts no effort • Love differs from fellow-feeling • Love is not directed to values • Love is not blind • Love is not relative

4. Love exerts no effort • Scripted? • Your time is imposed and dictated by someone else? • Love is a spontaneous act and movement • Possibility of error? • Rules?

5. Love differs from fellow feeling • fellow-feeling for someone we do not love • we can rejoice over A’s pleasure over B’s misfortune • Love: not a feeling? • feeling is passive or receptive and reactive • Feeling states change but love endures • Despite the pain and grief that the beloved brings, love: • does not alter • There is no such thing as “falling out of love”

6. Love is not directed to values? • Preference and rejection as value-apprehension are founded on our love for the object exhibiting these values

7. Love is not blind • affords an evidence of its own, which is: • not to be judged in terms of reason • Love sees something other in values • The beloved is reason enough or the lover • Blaise Pascal: • “the heart has its own reasons which reason itself does not know.”

8. If Cristy would want to improve Annie’s situation by acquiring a higher value while she was in hell, would this be real love for Scheler? Why? Does changing the beloved to be better means real love for Scheler? Why? • There are 4 hierarchy of values (Sensory, Vital, Spiritual, & Holy/ Unholy ) says Scheler. How would you categorize the action made by Cristy and Annie when they decided to go back and experience human life again?

9. Love is not relative to the polar co-ordinates of 'myself' and 'the other' • Love = altruism & egoism? • Altruism: • Inability to endure one’s company • Egoism: • Myself in competition with others • The primary orientation of love is towards : • values and the objects to which these values inhere • regardless of whether these values belong to the self or to others or to a group.

10. II. ESSENCE OF LOVE • The opposite of love is not hatred but indifference • Love is a movement of intention • love relates to what has value rather than to value itself • Indifference to the existence or non-existence of a higher value • MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF LOVE

11. Love is not hatred • hatred like love is: • also an act and a movement albeit in the opposite direction • hatred moves from the higher to lower one.

12. Love is a movement of intention • Do we impose? • We DO NOT impose or import our own values when we love another. • lover brings into higher appearance the higher possibilities of value: • inherent in the beloved. • Karl Jaspers: • “in love we do not discover values, we discover that everything is more valuable.”

13. Love relates to what has value rather than to value itself • Love is not limited to human beings: • but to anything that bears value, like love of nature, love of art and love of God • When we love nature, we do not love the human projections: • we bestow on her but for what she is

14. Indifference to the existence or non-existence of a higher value • Without this indifference, love can be mistakenly construed as: • wishing or attempting to raise the value of the object loved, to improve the beloved or help him to acquire a higher value. • A desire for: • improvement would imply that there is a distinction between what the person already is • and what he is not yet but ought to become.

15. MISUNDERSTANDING OF LOVE • Do we seek for “new” values in the object loved? • Love does not desire to change the beloved, otherwise love becomes conditional. • DELUSIVE FORMS OF LOVE: • Loving a person because I have done so much for him • Loving out of habit; because I have become so attached to the object or person • Loving because I cannot endure solitude • Loving because we have common interests • Loving someone because I am reminded of a past love • Loving because we think alike

16. III. LOVE AND MORAL GOODNESS • Would there be such a thing as love of goodness? • Love of goodness is itself evil. • We only love people insofar as they are good • Love has a specifically moral value insofar as: • it represents a relationship between persons

17. IV. HERARCHY OF VALUES • What are values? • 2 groups of values: • HIERARCHY OF VALUES • SENSORY VALUES (values pertaining to life) • VITAL VALUES (values pertaining to life) • SPIRITUAL VALUES (values of the person) • HOLY AND UNHOLY (values of the person) • 5 CHARACTERISTICS BY WHICH A VALUE IS HIGHER THAN ANOTHER

18. VALUES • Values precede: • the experience of feeling-states and are the foundation of these states and their completion • 2 groups of values: • Positive values • Existence of positive values • Non-existence of negative values • Negative values • Non-existence of positive values • Existence of negative values

19. HIERARCHY OF VALUES • SENSORY VALUES • Objects of sensory feelings, and their corresponding subjective states are pleasure and pain • VITAL VALUES • Values connected with the general well-being. • SPIRITUAL VALUES • HOLY AND UNHOLY

20. HIERARCHY OF VALUES • SPIRITUAL VALUES • Spiritual values correspond to spiritual feelings • Kinds of Spiritual Values: • The values of beautiful and ugly, the whole realm of aesthetic values • The values of the just and the unjust • The values of pure knowledge for its own sake • HOLY AND UNHOLY • Values that appear only objects given intentionally as “absolute objects”

21. 5 CHARACTERISTICS BY WHICH A VALUE IS HIGHER THAN ANOTHER • ability to endure through time • Higher values are less divisible • A value is higher if it generates other values and founds them • Depth of contentment or fulfillment accompanies higher values • A value is higher the less it is relative to the organism experiencing it

22. GOOD = VALUES? • Good and evil are not included in the 4 value modalities? • Only persons can be morally good or evil; • everything else can be good or evil by reference to persons • This is so because only person can truly act, prefer, will.