Plan de Emergencia contra el riesgo de siniestros

In this chapter I give an overview of the main ideas of Scheler’s ethics and begin to explain their application to current questions in ethics. I examine these ideas further in terms of their epistemology, ontology, and normative implications in chapters four, five and six. At the end of this chapter I also briefly consider the relation of Scheler to Kant’s theory. Scheler took Kant’s theory as his starting point and inspiration and throughout this chapter I contrast Scheler’s theory and Kant’s at key points.

This thesis is primarily based in the phenomenological school of philosophy of which Max Scheler was an early prominent member, and the phenomenological method is absolutely central to understanding his ethical theory. I also argue that the phenomenological method is particularly suitable for ethical investigation in general, as mentioned in the previous chapter. Therefore, before I begin the explanation of the core features of Scheler's theory, I will now briefly explain why I believe this to be the case, and what phenomenological doctrines are particularly important to Scheler's philosophy, and hence any theory developed from it.

The phenomenological method originated with Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations of 1900 and 190191. Husserl sought to produce a genuinely fundamental philosophical analysis. He aimed to concentrate on the immediately given phenomenal content of human experience by abstracting all content from experience that represents any scientific, philosophical or naïve theory or inference. This is because while all such content of an experience may be doubted, the existence of the phenomenal content of the experience itself is beyond doubt.92 For Husserl all mediate content must then be phenomenologically understood from this initial immediate content of consciousness. His phenomenology attempts an analysis of the mind and experienced world from the first person perspective in an attempt to understand the basic constitution of that world from that individual human subjective position. Furthermore, Husserl argued that since each person views the world solely through the perspective of individual subjectivity, to abstract from that subjectivity is to erase the fundamental source of human knowledge.93

91_{Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations Volume 1. Translated by J.N.Findlay. Abingdon: Routledge,}

2012 [1900-1901].

92_{Edo Pivcevic, Husserl and Phenomenology. London: Hustchinson & Co, 1970, p13.} 93

A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophical Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London: Routledge, 2003, p17.

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Husserl’s methodological starting point for this process was two core concepts. Firstly, the concept of intentionality: the recognition that human consciousness is the consciousness of an object: one sees something, one hears something, one remembers something. An object is always intended. This demonstrates an intimate connection between mental action and the objects of the external world and the mind, and demonstrates that mental content and phenomenal experience are fundamentally and inseparably linked. Thus a fundamental analysis of human mental action and phenomenal experience requires an analysis of those mental intentional acts that link the two.94 The second core concept is the phenomenological reduction that occurs through epoché. Epoché is the subtraction of all theoretical and inferential content from experience. All theoretical inference must be bracketed, whether scientific, philosophical or naïve, everything that we cognitively layer onto the immediately given content of external and internal experience, in order to leave the core phenomenal content. He was not advocating scepticism of scientific or philosophical knowledge, but rather attempting to lay these to one side to analyse the most basic question of how we build our everyday world from phenomenal consciousness, which all such knowledge presupposes. The epoché in turn makes possible the phenomenological reduction to and exclusive focus on only that content left un-bracketed.95 Scheler himself credited Husserl with the invention of the phenomenological method that he used, but apart from that he almost never referred to Husserl in his work and certainly saw himself as an independent thinker, rather than as a student of Husserl in the manner Martin Heidegger or Edith Stein were.96 Practically, he followed the outline of phenomenology described above. But he was not concerned with the details of the phenomenological method in the way Husserl was and almost never mentioned or defined either the phenomenological reduction, intentionality, essential intuition, horizonality or other key methodological concepts. The focus of his phenomenology was also totally different. Whereas Husserl focussed on the phenomenological basis of theoretical cognition, Scheler primarily focussed on human practical (moral and emotional) life.97 He was a realist phenomenologist who had no interest in Husserl's later theories of transcendental phenomenological idealism and criticised Husserl for continuing the phenomenological reduction until only the transcendental ego remained as real98.

The key phenomenological concept for Scheler's own phenomenology is essential intuition. Like Husserl he argued that the phenomenological method revealed that we experience reality not as a confusion of sense-data that is stitched together by consciousness, as empiricists and Kant believed in different ways, but as a plethora of material objects and essences that we directly access, and can clarify through the phenomenological method.99 In both theoretical and

94

Ibid, p68

95_{Zahavi, Dan. Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2001, p11.} 96_{Scheler, M. Formalismus, pxix.}

97 _{Ibid, pxiv.} 98

Ibid, p78.

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practical cognition we have direct intuitive access to these essences and the prime phenomenological task is then to closely, qualitatively analyse and describe them and their interrelations and how these constitute our world. Scheler argued that we have both intuitive access to the every-day world through ordinary experience, and intuitive access to essences through phenomenological experience, and this doctrine is absolutely key to his ethical epistemology.100 The core concept of Scheler's ethics is that of material values: they are how good and evil manifest and they are how Scheler's material ethics transcends the limits placed by Kant's arguments of the Critique of Practical Reason (which Scheler considered the peak of philosophical ethics before his own work).101 And, they are textbook examples of phenomenologically intuited essences. Scheler argues that the un-reflexive experience of these values (and other essences) is common even to children and animals but they and their interrelations only become clear through phenomenological analysis.102

I argue that phenomenology as pioneered by Husserl and practised by Scheler is uniquely suited to analysing the nature of ethical experience and obligation. The phenomenological method is superior to both purely empiricist and rationalist approaches to ethics because of the elements of both that it combines. Empiricist approaches to ethics will always struggle with the fact that ethical statements are widely taken to be universal, necessary, a priori statements based on 'empirical' evidence that is nowhere near sufficiently universal or conclusive to justify such statements about the nature of value e.g. utilitarianism. Rationalist approaches, such as Kantianism, will also struggle with the nature of ethical experience as I described in my naïve sketch in chapter one: an experience that is not based originally on deduction from any logical principles, but rather has the nature and force of immediate experience, which only later works back to theory. Ethics is as fundamentally practical (in both the ordinary and philosophical sense) as any philosophical subject can be, and I argue it only enters consciousness in the experience of other persons and objects as valuable. Regardless of the questions about the metaphysical status of values or human free will, practically we are inescapably agents, and so ethical analysis has no choice but to precede on that basis. If ethics is to be both a priori and universal but also grounded in the realisations of personal experience then neither of these methodological approaches will be suitable. Phenomenology, on the other hand, has a doctrine of the substantive a priori that neither ends up denying its existence, as much empiricism often does, nor bases it in the independent action of rational minds. Rather, it bases it in the intrinsic rational ordering revealed in the detailed structure of phenomenal experience of reality by phenomenological analysis.

I argue that ethical experience of value provides an even more natural ground for applying the phenomenological method than the constitution of physical experience. Without the ability to

100 _{Ibid, p67.} 101

Ibid, Ch 1.

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quantify our experience in terms of measurement in space and time (as we do with our physical experience) we can only analyse our ethical intuition and experience through considering its structural properties. This is both in relation to our own immediate experience of these essences i.e. values and their interconnections, and the manner we constitute and schematise that experience into the partially rationalistic concepts of our ordinary life, e.g. evil, courage, beauty. Phenomenological qualitative analysis is particularly designed for bringing essences to clarity and contrasting their structure. Consequently it offers the most thorough source of data from which to build a fruitful analysis of moral experience in all its individual richness. Furthermore, to argue negatively, phenomenology of theoretical experience and judgements will always struggle to abstract to the phenomenologically relevant detail of experience from the overwhelming torrent of ordinary perceptual information. Practical phenomenology, although it has to deal with a weight of existing moral commitments that are often held with great emotional strength, does not have to abstract from the same quantity of contingent perceptual information. This should make the phenomenological task relatively easier and clearer in ethics.