EXECUTIVE KNOWLEDGE OR SOCRATIC FALLACY?

Whatever else might be said about the relationship between science and morality one thing is fairly clear: the two are aimed at different ends. Science is undertaken with a view to gaining awareness, knowledge, information about the world, while the aim of morality is to develop dispositions for right action, right behavior in the agent. To be sure, science too involves action, but only as a means of attaining its end. All the methodical probing, measuring, testing merely serve as preparatory steps toward what is really intended by the scientific enterprise. That end is knowledge. By contrast, morality makes use of knowledge and turns it into a means for its own end. As a preparatory step toward deliberate and righteous action, knowledge is undoubtedly a guide to morality, but not the whole of it; nor is knowledge the goal or final end of morality. That end is action which transmutes knowledge into concrete performance and thereby actualizes what knowledge merely represents. Through this actualization, a certain power or perfection, a surplus-being or reality accrues to the moral agent. Traditional wisdom calls this increase virtue.

One would expect from this that moral philosophies, especially theories of moral education, would have a great deal to say about how to foster virtue in people. At the very least, one would expect that, along with analyzing the sources, principles, objects and methods of moral knowledge, ethics would also explain to us the dynamics which turns our moral representations into performative skills. Besides enumerating the reasons for which people act or should act, ethics must call attention also to the energies through which people are enabled to act for those reasons. After all, the reality which moral philosophy studies can be said to exist only after people acquired the ability and disposition, not only to think according to a certain set of principles, but also to act on them. To understand morality, therefore, requires that we investigate not only the processes of moral discourse, but also the root of the dynamism of moral life.

Alas, most moral theories traditional and current alike, are rather thin on the latter score. Preoccupied with the problems of moral reasoning and moral discourse, many of them quickly gloss over the dynamics of moral action as virtually unproblematic. But there are problems, many of them, that cannot be resolved in terms of knowledge alone: How is it that certain moral judgments are implemented while others are not? Is it the truth or falsity of these judgments that decides their implementation or the lack of it? What initiates the action of implementation? Is the initiative causal or merely directional? What exactly is the connection between knowledge and behavior, between judgment and action, between theory and practice?

Finding few or scant answers to problems such as these slowly gives rise to the nagging impression that most moral theories, in spite of their verbal protestation to the contrary, are content with being theories about moral thinking rather than theories about moral life and moral action. Regardless of what they intend to be, they can be correctly labelled as "spectator ethics" to one degree or another.

It would be difficult to account adequately for this persistent neglect of the dynamic dimensions of morality, but one reason for it may be found in the particular kind of intellectualism which is never very far from the center of Western philosophy.¹ The kind in question is the ethical intellectualism of Socratic origin, which has the tendency of absorbing the dynamic components of moral life into knowledge by simply assuming that agents, when they are involved in a concrete situation,² will necessarily and automatically perform according to the principles which they uphold as uninvolved spectators of similar situations. All commentators seem to agree that Socrates credited knowledge with a kind of executive efficacy with regard to moral action: "knowing what is good is not only a necessary but also the sufficient condition of possessing goodness and hence of doing what is good."³ This means, of course, that knowledge is not only an informing factor but also the enabling factor of moral behavior. Moreover, it also follows that, if knowledge is ability, a man with the ability of doing the good could not knowingly do what is wrong; his wrong-doing could only be inadvertent, a matter of ignorance. Based on the belief that knowledge is virtue, intellectualists of all ages could always appeal to a ready-made solution to the central problem of moral education, which is the problem of how to teach virtue. Right action, in the learners of virtue, says this silent creed is best elicited by improving their knack of making the right moral judgments. Pointing out to them what is good and what is evil, or demonstrating with logical stringency the advantages of the "real" good over mere "apparent" good is the best way of turning them away from the latter and making them pursue the former.

The hope of this essay is to point out that belief, even when better stated and accompanied by cautious qualifications, is illusory and inconsistent with the structures of human behavior. The intellectualist conception not only does not give an adequate account of the dynamic determinants of moral action, it also puts the cart before the horse when it attributes primacy to cognition among those determinants. That primacy belongs to a striving or conative force which shall be designated here by the term "affectivity". As an all-pervasive propensity of living nature, affectivity will be seen as the general power supply of all behavior, the igniting spark of all activity, the integrating force of all knowledge and valuation, the parent rapport between life and reality. The principal thrust of this essay will be to show that moral behavior is only half understood as a consequence of moral judgments. Without the executive propensity of the affective or striving impulse, such judgments would not be made in the first place, or if made, would remain forever in the domain of mere knowledge or pure representation.

Identifying affectivity rather than the intellect as the dynamic source of moral life is based on the firm conviction that the essential perfection and final end of human development is not to be an epistemic or knowing subject, but to become an autonomous person, a self-regulating agent, who not only has life but also freely and resolutely leads it. While the beginnings of this self-regulating existence may coincide with the primitive strivings of life's self-movement, its peak is reached only in that affective exchange among sovereign individuals which we call love. It is love rather than contemplation that constitutes man's ultimate relation to reality and even provides the obediential disposition into which an invitation to supernatural destiny can be projected.

This conviction is in marked contrast with some aspects of the hallowed Greek tradition, according to which the highest, most divine element in man is his participation in the imperishable Intelligence (Nous), whose final perfection consists in a beatifying contemplation of the Supreme Idea or Form. Totally separated from matter, simple and incorruptible, the Intelligence was held to be the standard of excellence in being and its contemplative mirroring of spiritual reality an end in itself. The rank or worth of all other kinds of reality was measured against this ideal degree of being, and all other activities were judged by how closely they resembled the restful awareness of contemplation or how closely they contributed to it.

The irresistible pull of this intellectualistic bias is detectable even in the otherwise balanced philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It is not that he was an intellectual determinist,⁴ according to whom knowledge exercised not only a guiding influence over the freedom of the will but also a causal determination. He was, nevertheless, an intellectualist when it came to evaluating the position of the will in relation to the intellect. According to Thomas, even in those cases where will and intellect cooperate, they can be distinguished by their respective objects: the object of the intellect is the abstract meaning of the good (ratio boni), while the object of the will is the concrete good itself (bonum ipsum). Ordinary readers would imply from this that, as an appetite for the concrete good, the will excels the intellect. But then came the surprising conclusion which illustrated how deeply Aquinas was committed to intellectualism. Precisely because its object is "simpler and more abstract," the intellect is, absolutely speaking, "higher and nobler" than the will.⁵

Although Thomas admitted that accidentally the will and its chief activity of love could be considered higher than the intellect, he attributed this superior ranking to the provisional imperfection under which the intellect is forced to operate in the present pilgrim state of man. That imperfection, however, was expected to be lifted in man's definitive state, heaven, where the intellectual vision of the supreme good would secure the possession of that good all by itself:

. . . Human values, identically intellectual ones in the definitive state of our final destiny, [undergo] a certain reversal in man's present state where values belong essentially to the order of the will. In heaven the perfection of the blessed is measured by the clarity of each one's Beatific Vision; but on earth the only criterion of moral rectitude we possess is to be found in each one's capacity for love.⁶

I simply do not hold with such reversals of priorities. I hold instead that on any level, experiential as well as metaphysical, natural as well as supernatural, man's primary relation to the real is always of the affective order, an order of love, ordo amoris, as Max Scheler called it. I coined the term protention to characterize this relation. The elements of this coined word for man's primary relation to the real suggest that the original thrust of affectivity includes both the energetic aspect of launching oneself toward something (a project) and the knowing aspect of directing one's attention toward it (an intention). Of the two aspects, I consider the first more basic. In other words, I hold that the real is primarily that with which living beings are affectively involved, and only secondarily that which is offered to human inspection. Knowledge, inspection, representation are merely cognitive expressions of peoples' spontaneous attachment to, and appetite for the real.⁷ True, sometimes this attachment must be suspended, delayed and critically examined by reflective thought so that our allegiance may be bestowed not necessarily on the nearest good but on the greatest good available at the moment; nevertheless, the whole process of inspection is carried out for the sake of subsequent involvement. (See Chapter VIII on the objective human good). This is eminently true in the moral domain where the perennial problem is how to carry our best judgments into action. Any theory of morality or moral development that neglects this problem or deals with it but sparingly, is not very helpful.

AFFECTIVITY AS PRETENTION:

ATTENTIVE DYNAMISM OR DYNAMIC AWARENESS

The problem of how to carry our moral thoughts into action seems to be no problem at all for thinkers of the intellectualist persuasion because, as suggested above, the very tendency of intellectualism is to invest thought with a sort of causal efficacy with regard to action. This is not to say that all intellectualist theories always attribute this efficacy directly to thought itself, although some expressions of Spinoza's Ethics, for instance, could be interpreted in that sense. Instead, most theories hold that causal influence is exercised through a separate intellectual faculty, the will. The will is seen by them as an intermediary between pure thought and physical action. Inhabiting a sort of spiritual command post and prompted by representations of the intelligible good, the will is portrayed as dispatching summons to the other faculties to spring into action and execute the movements necessary for the attainment of that good. Sometimes thought and volition are fused, and the will is regarded merely as the energetic aspect of reason itself. Kant, for instance, defined will as the efficacy of the intellect,⁸ and as such, "nothing else than practical reason."⁹

Whether operating directly or mediated through other faculties, thought is seen by most intellectualists as the ultimate force behind moral action, moving us to actualize the objects of our moral representations. For reasons already hinted at and reasons that will become clear later on, I wish to attribute that kind of motive force to affectivity instead. But in order to do so without creating a whole series of misunderstandings, it is necessary first to cut away some of the habitual connotations attached to the concept of affectivity and redefine it in a more comprehensive and radical way. It is hoped that, as a result of this severe pruning, a fresh understanding of moral development can be grafted on to the stock of affectivity by the other contributors.

To begin with, affectivity, as intended by this essay, must be rigorously distinguished in many respects from the psychological constructs called "emotions," "affects" or "passions". A few maverick views apart, emotions are considered by the behavioral sciences as temporary disturbances in a person's normal state of mind and body, induced by the representation of particular situations as desirable or undesirable, and accompanied by a certain tendency either to seek or to avoid those situations through appropriate action.¹⁰ Theories of emotion based on this general understanding differ, and differ considerably, depending on which of these component aspects are thought to constitute the defining feature of emotion. "Bodily upset" theories emphasize the agitation of the organism and consider emotions to consist in the very awareness of that agitated state, its "psychic shadow"; "motivational" theories view emotions as prompters of action based on some kind of value estimation or calculation of utility; "feeling" theories emphasize the immediacy and spontaneity of emotions; and so on. The great diversity and sometimes sharp contrast between these theories do not, however, exclude a certain convergence on several points.

Influenced by a certain organic interpretation of system balance or equilibrium (homeostasis), most psychological theories consider emotions to be impermanent, transient affairs, as opposed to attitudinal or dispositional states which are more stable and permanent. As a feature of living systems, equilibrium requires the maintenance of a steady state of balance between organism and environment. When this steady state is upset, some mechanism within the system itself springs into action in order to reestablish the equilibrium. According to most theories, emotions are typically human ways of responding to temporary disequilibrium and of triggering the process of return to a steady state.

Secondly, most theories consider emotions to be particular and specific reactions to imbalance, even when overt behavior or physiological research can disclose no pattern that would be characteristic of, say, "embarrassment" as distinct from "shame". In other words, both ordinary language and psychology operate with many more terms designating emotional mental states than there are behavioral or bodily symptoms manifesting these (supposedly) distinct states.

Thirdly, all of them agree that emotions are conditioned, or at least triggered, by some form of perception, idea or intuition, in short, by some type of representation. Perception is seen as the cause of emotion--"cause" being understood here in the sense that most positive sciences use the term, namely, as an "antecedent state" which strictly determines the subsequent event in question. In fact, it has been suggested by some experimenters that "the same state of physiological arousal could be labeled `joy' or `fury' or `jealousy' or any of a great diversity of emotional labels depending on the cognitive aspect of the situation."¹¹ This, of course, would mean that knowledge or cognition not only occasions the occurrence of an emotion, but also determines its identity and meaning.

Finally, in spite of this strongly mentalistic and cognitive interpretation, the most consistent connotation attached to emotions is "irrationality", "turbulence", "frenzy".¹² This is especially true when emotion is equated with the singularly ambiguous term "passion". Emotion in this sense is a sheer liability to be avoided, or at least kept in strict control, for the sake of rational action. There are very few theories that consider emotions to be of service in revealing the real nature or real value of things. (See Chapter VII on moral sensibility.)

Without contesting the right of the positive sciences to define and elaborate their theoretical constructs in a way most suitable to their particular purposes and most in harmony with the explanatory models they have chosen, I claim that "affectivity" has very little in common with the psychological acceptation of "emotion" and other cognate terms. In fact, as referred to here, affectivity is characterizable by features that are very nearly the opposite of those applied to emotion.

First of all, the term affectivity designates that enduring orientation and universal propensity, adherence or tendency by virtue of which living individuals are bonded to their environment and interact with it, both by fitting themselves to it and rearranging it to their own advantage or to the advantage of their kind. In this sense, affectivity is immeasurably wider, older, more basic than particular human emotions. As a fundamental orientation (an ontological intentionality), affectivity is found in various forms in all sentient beings and perhaps even in some higher forms of plant life. It would be an unwarranted extrapolation, however, to conclude from this that people, beasts and vegetation are ontologically the same, just because they share in the propensity of all life for spontaneity and self-actualization. Affective intentionality is called ontological not in order to designate sameness of nature in all its bearers, but in order to indicate that affectivity is not deployed through a special faculty, but involves the individual in its totality and imparts directedness to its life as a whole. By contrast, noetic intentionality is an act mediated through conscious representation or appetite, an act of the mind by which it tends toward the object. Moreover, the global aim of affective propensity is not the mere maintenance of being, but the promotion of increase in being. In other words, affectivity is the basic dynamism of life that can reach beyond the factual towards the possible and, at a certain level of development, can even represent the possible as a "purpose to be actualized". As such, affectivity is the energy source of all growth, progress, striving, desiring, planning and willing. Simply stated, affectivity is rooted in the fact that, for life, being is not merely an object already given but also a cradle of further reality that makes the creative evolution of life possible.

Secondly, as a basic and permanent orientation of life, affectivity has no object, aim or intention other than the general one of life's self-enhancement. However, this generality implies neither invariance nor fixity on the part of affectivity. On the contrary, affectivity is the conative or dynamic matrix of the whole unsurveyable range of drives, instincts and appetites that constantly appear along the process whereby life intrudes into the domain of inertia. It is unspecific and undifferentiated only in the sense that, in itself, it represents the global impact of cumulative living on the individual's general orientation. As such, it is not the work of any particular faculty.¹³ It is not tied to any particular function or organic pattern, even though it can operate through all of them and, in so doing, acquire the specificity proper to the occasion.

Thirdly, the relationship between affectivity and knowledge is in reality the inverse of the one usually posited by philosophers between the emotional and cognitive factors of experience: it is the growth, the refinement, the evolution of affectivity that makes possible and gives rise to the different kinds and degrees of cognitive representation, and not the other way around. (This point finds a more extensive development in Chapter VII.) This means that the kind of knowledge available to a subject is directly related to the kind of attitudinal posture he or she is capable of assuming; that the process of objectification required for cognitive development depends on a process of affective dissociation or diffusion.

Some aspects of this process will be indicated presently, but first a remark or two about the inversion itself. The heterodoxy of this position should not be hidden from view, on the contrary, it should be emphasized from the start in order to signal that this essay is slightly off the beaten path in the sense that it does not endorse the long-standing Greek bias of unquestioned primacy of speculative knowledge over conation in every respect, though it goes to the heart of many recent developments in the understanding of the person and of personal life. One need not be a wholesale pragmatist, in fact one need not be a pragmatist at all, to agree with Dewey's analysis that pure thought has a certain colonizing bent which tends to absorb the whole of experience into reflection. Like a typical colonial settler, reflection soon claims the whole territory of experience, so that after a while even the native occupants are believed to exist at its sufferance alone:

What is known, what is true for cognition, is what is real in being. The objects of knowledge form the standards of measures of the reality of all other objects of experience. Are the objects of affections, of desire, effort, choice, that is to say everything to which we attach value, real? Yes, if they can be warranted by knowledge; if we can know objects having these value properties, we are justified in thinking them real. But as objects of desire and purpose they have no sure place in being until they are approached and validated through knowledge.¹⁴

It is against just this sort of familiar but usually unexpressed encroachment that these few pages wish to defend the rights not of action, as Dewey tried to do, but of affectivity and life in general. This wish is motivated by the firm conviction that the human world is originally and throughout a lived world of involvement rather than a spectacle provided for the dispassionate gaze of speculative thought.

Finally, if affectivity cannot be justly regarded as a ward of knowledge, neither can it be considered its rival. Knowledge is merely a later and more developed form of that affective discernment through which all living things endeavor to sort out the value and meaning of their environment. Long before the appearance or even the possibility of explicit representation of goals by individual organisms, life already has an intrinsic directedness through genotypically shaped processes, such as the instinctual acts of animals. Thanks to their value-orientation and affective interchange with the environment, living beings can feel "at home" in the world, even though they can only enact, but not yet represent, that feeling. This ability of life as it forms in order to be selective of value without the benefit of separate and antecedent representation of ends and means suggests that life as a whole cannot be regarded either as an entirely mechanical process or as a properly purposive one. On some levels at least, life seems to "know" reality by its mere attitudinal involvement with the real, and is able to accomplish its "purposes" almost automatically and unconsciously.

Even on the properly human level, it is affectivity that provides the field of force from which the initial meaning of the "lived world" (Lebenswelt) is progressively precipitated, drawn out. That original world is not so much a network of objects as a forge of actual goods and ideal values, and the rapport through which these values are disclosed is not so much an intellectual grasp as an affective grasp or protention. In other words, it is significant and decisive that the process through which the world is gradually invested with meaning takes its origin in valuation rather than in contemplation. Likewise, at the end of this process of meaning-production we discover love, the noblest expression of affectivity as well as a principle of knowledge par excellence, which alone permits us to understand others in their uniqueness, a dimension forever inaccessible to the attitude of detached spectatorship.

Therefore, the fear that granting affectivity its rightful place in human experience might somehow lead to emotionalism, irrationality or blind voluntarism is a needless fear. Affectivity does not detract from knowledge because it is the parent source of knowledge, man's dynamic attachment to being. Ideas that not only inform us but also move us derive their energy to do so from the fact that, by virtue of their affective residue, they are able to address themselves to the center of dynamic striving in our being, where goals, resolutions and actions are forged. Fact and value, knowledge and action can indeed be reconciled through the mediating role of affectivity which forms an actual bridge between the true and the good.

LIFE AND KNOWLEDGE

The altered meaning of "affectivity", its contrast to the customary psychological acceptations, necessitates a few adjustments in the understanding of the terms "knowledge" and, by extension, of "reason" as well. In order to introduce these modifications, one must first outline some salient points of the dominant view concerning knowledge in general.

By and large, most current theories recognize that knowledge is an emergent process, rooted in such precognitive and even preconscious phenomena as adaptive action, habit formation or patterned response. The recognition of this link does not mean, however, that continuity between preconscious and conscious life is admitted as a matter of course by most theories. On the contrary, conscious life is usually posited in direct opposition to mere organic reaction to stimuli. Consciousness is regarded as the sole, or at least the principal, producer and purveyor of meanings, and as such, the first of a series of qualitative breaks in the order of life forms. Similar breaks are said to exist also between the various forms of consciousness and the various degrees of knowledge. These degrees are believed to constitute a structural hierarchy of distinct forms of meaning-giving, culminating in the construction or discovery of purely abstract intelligibilities represented by conceptual symbols and expressed in assertive judgments. This is the familiar Greek ideal of speculative knowledge (theoria). The tendency to regard only this final degree as "real" knowledge is so addictive that even so-called genetic epistemologists, who admit a linear continuity between the various stages of knowing, end up considering this stage as normative for all the rest. In other words, all other forms and degrees of knowing are allotted intelligibility only to the extent that they approximate or somehow imitate this ideal degree.

It seldom occurs to knowledge-theorists or to genetic epistemologists to surmise that the development of consciousness ("the meaning-giver") may not be single-valued or linear at all; that, starting with some primitive datum that is both value and knowledge laden (axiological and noetic), development may fan out in several directions and tend towards not one but several ideal goals. Many theorists and philosophers simply disregard the fact that there is more than one mode of judging, more than one way of expressing and communicating the various meanings constructed or discovered by consciousness, and that there are in fact distinct forms of consciousness, many of which are not primarily cognitive. As Sartre once said, "all consciousness is not knowledge" (toute conscience n'est pas connaissance).¹⁵

What is needed, therefore, is a new theory of knowledge, one that is not boxed into a single-model explanation and can resist the pull of reductionism. What is needed is a perspective which can reveal not only the external complementarity of life and knowledge but also their internal, genetic connection which founds that complementarity. What is needed is an explanation of the life of knowledge. The limits of this essay, and even more the limitations of its author, make the appearance of such a theory at best a faraway possibility. The most that can be done for the time being is to propose a few theses which, when properly validated, could coalesce into a theory capable of presenting knowledge as a polyvalent and cumulative process that enables an organism to learn from its continued living, not only by storing and repeating crucial aspects of past experience, but also by inventing new and unprecedented ways of experiencing.

A. The first thesis about knowledge as a basic phenomenon of life in general has been suggested earlier. Here it could be recapitulated in the following manner: Originally, knowledge is a purely symbiotic function of life's spontaneous self-differentiation and self-actualization, totally indistinguishable in scope from that spontaneous urge itself. It is crucial that this first thesis be understood in the exact sense it was intended.

First of all, the statement refers to what knowledge is thought to be in its roots or "originally" in the double sense of the German term urspruenglich. In one sense, origin signifies a "primordial leap," an act of emergence and novelty, a process of departure from what was there before; in another sense, it signifies the ancestral resemblance, the permanent stamp left on the process by its parentage. Therefore, in its originality, knowledge both transcends the processes of life and is branded by them. In one sense, knowledge is an original departure from mere life, in another, it is continuous with it. This means that, no matter how far knowledge evolves "beyond" its origins, it never ceases to be recognizable as a vital function, serving some higher interest of life; inversely, no matter how primitive a life form may be, it can never lack that minimal degree of interiority (Innesein) through which living things are for themselves (Fuersichsein) and which also constitutes the embryonic meaning of consciousness.

Nevertheless, on this original level, knowledge is not yet undergirded by consciousness in the explicit sense of that word because, on that level, knowledge itself is only an operational aspect of an undifferentiated vital impulse towards self-differentiation. This is the lowest form of psychic life which Max Scheler used to call a Gefuehlsdrang. As an original form, this "feeling-impulse" cannot be defined by reference to something more original; it can only be circumscribed:

As the term implies, "feeling" and "impulse" are not yet separated. Impulse always has a specific direction, a goal-orientation "towards something", for example nourishment or sexual satisfaction. A bare movement "toward", as toward light, or "away from", as a state of pleasure or suffering devoid of object, are the only two modes of this primitive feeling. Yet this impulse is quite different from the centers and fields of energy that we associate with the images of inorganic bodies without consciousness. They do not have an inner life in any sense.¹⁶

Primitive as it may be, this impulse is not chaotic. In the first place, it already has a proto-tendency "towards" or "away from". But more importantly, as it pushes against the resistance of the environment, the vital impulse communicates to the living organism that first sense of "reality" or "objectivity" which, in the later reaches of development, becomes the guiding motivation of all search for knowledge.¹⁷ The very same push also sets into motion the processes by means of which the primitive Gefuehlsdrang develops into conscious representation, knowledge, appetite, will and all the other higher functions of life. As Scheler pointed out, one of those processes is, at least in its over-all design, dissociative.¹⁸ As we shall have occasion to show, it is through the dissociation of the representational and striving or conative elements of experience that intentional consciousness, the locus of cognition proper, begins to emerge. The other process, complementary to dissociation, is what more recently came to be called equilibration. This theoretical construct of Piaget is a sort of integrating principle, defined as "a general biological tendency to organize isolated elements into structured wholes."¹⁹ This tendency comes into play in the interest of associative learning and practical intelligence, both of which represent further degrees of vital development through which behavior is gradually set free from the relative fixity of instinctual response and turned into a self-regulating process that is increasingly open to modification by individual invention and control.

However, the point to note in all this is that both dissociations and reintegrations are possible only because the dissociated elements are first delivered in an original unity of experience prior to knowledge proper. Cognitive development takes place as a series of polarizations in that experience. In itself, however, before the onset of polarizations, that basic experience is more of an affective adherence than a cognitive confrontation between organism and nature; it is more a matter of eros than of logos. In fact, even after the emergence of consciousness, certain initial stages of cognition derive their cognitive value from the affective side of reactive behavior to which they are linked and which they serve. To a certain extent, most animal knowledge falls into this category. Animal knowledge is economical: each animal has only as much knowledge as it needs to live by. As J.J. von Uexkull so ably pointed out, most animals are allowed to be aware only of those segments and qualities of their environment to which they can respond by adaptive behavior.²⁰ The rest is not merely dismissed or ignored, it simply does not exist for the animal. Only need-related qualities compose the "objects" of animal awareness; life-neutral qualities are absent. Whether the ideal of complete neutrality is ever reached at all even by man is a further question; it certainly is not an original datum of cognition.

B. The second thesis refers directly to knowledge as it appears on the properly human level. Without defining first what makes certain types of knowledge properly human, a summary statement could be framed in the following words: Any effort at understanding human understanding must include a framework which is not that of a self-reflective, entirely translucent consciousness but rather that of a consciousness engaged in a multiple dialogue with the world. Such a consciousness is only partially understood as a polar relationship between a knowing subject and objects known (noesis-noema structure), and its dialogue with the world is poorly grasped as a production of speculative meanings expressible in universally valid, propositional judgments. A great deal of explanation would be needed to elucidate adequately the precise meaning of this thesis, but the following remarks should at least help to clarify its general import.

The first remark is merely a reminder that theories about knowledge are particularly vulnerable to what Whitehead termed the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness", and that this fallacy can be committed in more ways than one. The usual way of committing it consists in first reifying the theoretical constructs of an explanatory schema and then treating them as concrete things or entities. Many of the theoretical objects of modern science, such as models of the atom and atomic particles, are accorded reality at the expense of the objects of ordinary experience on such mistaken grounds.²¹ Placing concreteness where it does not belong can also be done in the paradoxical way of judging and validating the reality of existing, concrete phenomena by their approximation to an unrealizable ideal case. Here "an entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought."²² This gives rise to the curious view that the real is really the ideal but does not exist, while concrete existence is only an imperfect illustration of reality. Finally, concreteness can be misplaced when it is sought among the constructs of explicit consciousness rather than in the operations of lived experience. Knowledge as a concrete phenomenon of human life is thus diluted every time it is measured against the imaginary standards of absolute knowledge, born of a pure and transcendental mind.

Warning against the danger of such dilution, Professor Calvin Schrag of Purdue University recently attempted to establish a sort of "archeology of knowledge" that could serve as a protophilosophical anchor point for the human sciences. In a book-length critique of traditional theories of consciousness, he is calling for a "radical reflection" that would avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by refusing to identify knowledge with the work of pure consciousness.²³ Drawing on the Marxian critiques of theoretical knowledge as well as on some general lessons of phenomenology, Schrag attempted to get to the roots of knowledge by tracing it back in the direction of pre-reflective comprehension of experience, where "reflection is no longer separable from the order of things into which man is inserted and in which he moves about as perceiver, speaker, and actor."²⁴

The original world of experience is not a construct of pure consciousness, but a matrix of things, facts and values offered to the use, knowledge and appreciation of people. Instead of being an object of contemplation by an all-seeing eye, the world of experience is an arena for human action of praxis, as Marx used to point out. Perhaps the profound philosophical meaning of the Marxian notion of praxis is that it "reorients the classical concept of consciousness in such a manner that it no longer simply serves the function of a theoretic-epistemological grounding of human thought."²⁵ The consciousness underlying human action is only secondarily a cognitive subject: in its immediacy it is an affective openness. Likewise, the world of action is only secondarily a collection of objects to be known: in its immediacy it is an object of exchange, utility and delight. Even Husserl recognized this at the beginning of his phenomenology:

Therefore this world is not there for me as a mere world of facts and affairs, but, with the same immediacy, as a world of goods, a practical world. Without further effort on my part I find the things before me furnished not only with the qualities that befit their positive nature, but with value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant, and so forth.²⁶

The fact that his later philosophy, in particular, his transcendental reduction was able to recover only a diluted version of this lived world does not detract from Husserl's initial recognition of it.

The injunction against equating consciousness with the ideal of epistemic consciousness does not mean, of course, that the very idea of transcendental consciousness is without merit. As the capacity for knowledge with general, impersonal validity, the notion of transcendental consciousness correctly identifies one of the ideal goals of human knowledge. Humans and humans alone are capable of positing and approximating such an ideal. While an animal recognizes and reacts to whatever corresponds to its subjective interests, man can know more or less disinterestedly. Man's advantage over the animal resides in his ability to judge and evaluate the world objectively, that is, in relative independence from his immediate needs. An animal does not, properly speaking, confront its environment: its organism is an integrated circuitry, where the input of environmental stimuli are immediately turned into reactive output. Here organism and environment are continuous. In man, the circuitry can be interrupted. What man knows and perceives need not spill over into immediate action: between external stimulation and internal leaning to action there is a possible break. The possibility of that interruption is what we ordinarily call thinking or reflection, and the relative distance from immediate interests we call the objectivity of human knowledge. The world for man ceases to be a mere vital correlative and becomes an object, a Gegenstand in German. Rather than always fading and melting into the environment, man sometimes "stands opposite" to it, and it stands opposite to him. By virtue of this confrontation, man can emerge as a "self" against the resistant "non-self" of the world. All this is quite true as long as we keep in mind that impersonal validity is only one possible direction in which human awareness can develop; that objectivity in the sense of complete detachment from subjective interest is more a matter of ideal task than actual fact;²⁷ and that the concrete human knower is and remains a body-consciousness and not a disembodied speculative reason.

Beside its speculative orientation, human consciousness is constantly scanning the world through a whole series of distinct intentionalities in search of a range of distinctive meanings. Not only in thought and speech, but by every act of looking, listening, molding, arranging, moving, contriving, in bustle as well as in repose man is continuously taking up positions towards the world, he is making pronouncements about himself and the environment around him. To say this is not to imply that all these ways are incipient or abortive thoughts, which, had they been given a sufficient period for gestation, would have emerged as mental propositions or would have converted into verbal assertions. Rather, the point is simply that these are nonspeculative ways of getting meaning out of our relations and exchange with the world, non-verbal appraisals and pronouncements about reality and its value, for which speculative meanings and verbal judgments are no substitutes.

It is evident that in the experience of every individual certain actions and certain works of art are best left untranslated into statements, not because of hidden antipathy to the promotion of knowledge, but because, on the contrary, verbal translation is inadequate, irrelevant, or anticlimactic to knowledge already felt to be gained.²⁸

A full-blown theory of meaning would have to inventory all the possible intentionalities by means of which meaning is generated. For our limited purposes, however, it is sufficient to refer to Buchler's theory, which distinguishes three generic classes of producing meaning out of our relations with the world: doing, making and saying. To each of these corresponds a type of judgment that is designated respectively as active judgment, exhibitive judgment and assertive judgment. The merit of Buchler's theory lies precisely in its ability to argue convincingly that active and exhibitive judgments are cognitive, but not in the sense of being inchoative assertions; they are cognitive in different respects, not in differing degrees.²⁹

C. A final and brief statement, linking cognition and affectivity in the very idea of reason, could be framed in the following words: Human consciousness is possessed of a dynamism that demands an unqualified receptivity for the presence and meaning of being, no matter how that meaning reveals itself and regardless of the road that leads to it. That passion of consciousness for openness, that global effort to confer sense on everything it encounters and to let nothing stand unrelated and meaningless, that universal appetite of the human mind is the essence of reason itself.

This means, in the first place, that any definition of reason that does not take into account this multidimensionality and dynamic character of human consciousness is going to be defective and misleading. For example, reason defined as a timeless structure of universally valid meanings is an impoverished idea, because it limits the meaning of meaning to one of its manifestations, the one accessible to the impersonal intellect of scientific understanding. Such a constriction of reason is contrary to the most fundamental attitude of reason itself, which, as Karl Jaspers pointed out, is one of sympathy, unlimited attentiveness and accommodating receptivity.³⁰

Thanks to that accommodating attitude, reason can give meaning to all human endeavors. "If it is insufficiently decisive to regard man as an animal that judges, it may be sufficient to regard him as an animal that cannot help judging in more than one mode."³¹ Not only man's science, but also his industry, art, philosophy, moral life and religion are taken up in the unity and unifying recollection of reason. In other words, the unity of reason includes more than a system of ideas: it shepherds all the efforts of human life towards a harmony of meaning and action. The grotesque option that man must be engaged either in unfeeling science or drowning in the swamp of mindless feelings is unmasked as a pseudo-option (see Chapter IX on the objectivity of moral judgments) by the original living unity or symbiosis (Mitleben) of knowledge and affectivity in reason.

Moreover, the development of reason, the universal giver and interpreter of meaning, receives its impetus from the direction of its affective component. Degrees, stages and modes of evolving understanding result from the progressive maturation and refinement of the affective side of reason. Stimulation for the growth of knowledge comes from man's love of truth, not only because truth has "cash value" for him, but primarily because he senses that it is truth that will make him free. Knowledge for him is a means of emerging as a sovereign subject in the world, and even more as a free partner in a dialogue of love.

TOWARD A THEORY OF DYNAMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

To represent the original symbiosis of action, love and knowledge in the ancient layers of reason calls for a theory of dynamic consciousness, a theory that would enable us to understand how consciousness can be a kind of interiority as well as a project at the same time. Such a theory would avoid the twin danger of either reducing consciousness to the "nothingness" of pure intentionality (e.g., Sartre), or of inflating it into a spontaneous activity of an ideal or "transcendental ego" producing ideal or pure objects (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Husserl). Finally, as an alternative also to behaviorism, which banishes consciousness altogether by insisting that behavior is merely a set of glandular and muscular reactions to stimuli, this theory would also show that behavior as an aggregate of unit reflexes is no more intelligible than behavior as a pantomime for pure thought. Behavior is the manifestation of a conscience engagée, exhibiting the primarily affective character of consciousness. Presenting affectivity as the anchor point of consciousness in real life could provide the mediating link between the energetic and directional aspects of all behavior, including moral life. The building of such a theory with all the attendant laws and models belongs to psychological research.

In the meantime, however, philosophy can be of some help to psychological research by suggesting either the possible shape of such theories or the areas of research in which they are most likely to be found. The present essay wishes merely to highlight a few broad concepts from which an affectivity-based theory of consciousness in general and of moral behavior in particular could be constructed by empirical researchers.

Without prejudice to Freud and his pioneering work on the role of instinctual energy in the psychological development of the individual, the insights of three other authors, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Kurt Goldstein and Max Scheler, seem particularly promising for laying the foundations of a science of affective consciousness. From different starting points and for different reasons the thoughts of all three appear to converge on the central thesis of this paper, namely, that the energetic component of any form of human behavior, including moral life, is an affective impetus which drives the mind to recognize the "worth of things" and drives the somatic and other processes to pursue that worth. A brief sketch of the relevant points of each of these thinkers is in order here.

The Pivotal Role of Body-Consciousness:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In the beginning of Chapter Five of his Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out why analyzing our experience in terms of a preponderantly cognitive consciousness can never recapture the organic relationship between the living subject and its world. It cannot do so because such an analysis "is transformed by its own activity into an intercourse between the epistemological subject and the object."³³ While perfectly illuminating in other respects, this cognitive approach cannot reveal the world as value-charged, because the ideal goal of cognition is precisely value-free objectivity. If we want to see then how values are brought to birth in the exchange between subject and the world, "we must look at the area of our experience which clearly has significance and reality for us, and that is our affective life."³⁴

Even more significantly, Merleau-Ponty recognized affective life not merely as "a mosaic of emotional states of pleasures and pains," but as a distinct form of consciousness through which the world is invested with values.³⁵ Using sexuality as a particular example, he shows that it is consciousness as affection rather than consciousness as knowledge that projects a human world around the body-subject. Although his rich analyses cannot even be outlined here, a few points must be noted in passing.

It is in the context of affectivity that Merleau-Ponty argues for the existence of an erotic mode of perception supporting objective perception but "distinct from objective perception and intellectual significance."³⁶ This perception is not a form of knowledge (cogitatio), but the protention of a body-subject towards the world. Disturbances in that affective substratum always result in disturbed behavior, even when no impairment of knowledge can be detected to accompany the affective trauma.

Certain forms of these disturbances, like the famous Schneider case,³⁷ are particularly instructive by their broad implications. The very structure of Schneider's mode of perceiving the world has undergone a change because that secret connivance with the world that constitutes normal affectivity is impaired: because he no longer addresses the world about certain subjective values, the objective stimuli coming from the environment no longer speak to his body and, consequently, confuse rather than inform him. For instance, he has difficulty pointing to his nose or the middle knuckle of his left hand on command. Similarly, he cannot carry out the movements of his trade (sewing of leather goods) in the abstract. His movements appear hesitant as though he were trying to "locate" his limbs in objective space.³⁸ No such hesitation occurs however, when his body is involved in a network of familiar needs, such as blowing his nose or scratching his knuckle where a mosquito is stinging him.³⁹ It is as if his consciousness functioned intermittently.

But how is this possible, Merleau-Ponty asks? "If I know where my nose is when it is a question of holding it, how can I not know where it is when it is a matter of pointing to it?"⁴⁰ His answer is very simple and very much to the point of this essay: for the disturbed patient the "nose-to-be-pointed-to" and the "nose-to-be-blown" are not the same value objects; they do not belong to the same phenomenal world. The former belongs to the world of knowledge as an object of abstract inquiry; the latter is not an object at all because it belongs to the integrated dynamism of a living, acting body-consciousness. As his nose, the latter is a functioning aspect of his subjectivity. Something can be given to this consciousness, to this subjectivity, without being given as an object of representation and vice-versa. Schneider's trouble consists precisely in his inability of making the transition from one to the other. Therefore his impairment could be described from either side. On the one hand, it could be said that he is "lost" and cannot "find" himself in the objective world precisely because that world is only objective, without subjectively meaningful qualities. "Faces for him are neither attractive nor repulsive. . . . Sun and rain are neither gay nor sad . . . and the world is emotionally neutral."⁴¹ On the other hand, it could be said that it is his abstract attitude that is disturbed and that his "knowledge" is restricted to the comprehension of those situations which represent familiar problems to be solved by the mobilization of his body. In either case, the uncoupling of the normal link between representational and dynamic consciousness is attributed to an affective disturbance, and not the other way around. It is not the weakening of representations that causes reduction in desire or importance in action, because "absent-mindedness and inappropriate representations are not causes but effects."⁴² Both action and representation are diminished in the patient because of his loss of affective attachment to the world.

That is why, according to Merleau-Ponty, the role of body is so pivotal in all this. Ideas and representations do not come first in life. They come later as "expressions" of our gathering existential momentum, as mental symbols of our concrete striving for greater life and greater values. Because ours is an incarnate existence, we do not start with "inner phenomena", which we subsequently translate into bodily pantomime, but with real situations or value-orientations that have to be changed into actual values. It is the "body's role to ensure this metamorphosis."⁴³ The body is precisely that two-way gate which can either open or bar the way of the forward project of existence. Insofar as I have a body, I have the power to withdraw from existence and "shut myself up in an anonymous life which subtends my personal one. But precisely because my body can shut itself off from the world, it is also what opens me out upon the world and places me in a situation there."⁴⁴ It is bodily existence as projective that "continually sets the prospect of living before me . . . and establishes my first consonance with the world."⁴⁵

This consonance is the concrete "expression" of that bonding between organism and environment mentioned above as a defining element of affectivity. However, the term "expression" is not to be understood here in the ordinary sense of an arbitrary sign to which a signification is attached by conventional predication.

Anterior to conventional means of expression, . . . we must recognize a primary process of signification in which the thing expressed does not exist apart from the expression, and in which the signs themselves induce their significance. In this way body expresses total existence, not because it is an external accompaniment to that existence, but because existence comes into its own in the body. This incarnate significance is the central phenomenon of which body and mind, sign and significance are abstract moments.⁴⁶

In the same way, one might say that the affective propensity which breathes life into our original world is the central phenomenon in which one can discern the germs of development both in a cognitive as well as in an axiological direction.

The Drive Toward Self-Actualization: Kurt Goldstein

An interesting side-light with regard to the nature of this development can be gained from the writings of Kurt Goldstein. In cooperation with Adhemar Gelb, a psychologist, Goldstein's initial researches were about the after-effects of brain injuries on German soldiers in the First World War. His work yielded many practical results for medicine and psychology, but it also led him to interesting theoretical concepts. Among others, Goldstein soon adopted a holistic approach to human nature. He believed that every human phenomenon, normal as well as pathological, was the activity of the whole organism.⁴⁷ This was already evident to him from the facts gathered through studies of the nervous system. "The nervous system," he wrote, "is an apparatus which always functions as a whole. It is always in a state of excitation, never at rest."⁴⁸ All behavior is an expression of this condition of perpetual protention of the nervous system in particular and, through it, of the organism in general. Although not all points of the organism are affected the same way by this energetic state, all excitation concerns the entire system.

This is so because the organism as a whole is motivated by one drive only: self-actualization. Goldstein insisted that this drive was not to be confused with what is frequently regarded as "a tendency to maintain the existent state, to preserve oneself."⁴⁹ Self-preservation is characteristic of life at the stage of incipient decay: the only form of actualization that remains for a person in an impaired condition is to hang on to his existent state. "This is not the tendency of a normal person. . . . Under adequate conditions the tendency of normal life is toward activity and progress."⁵⁰

The drive to actualize one's capacities as fully as possible obviously has to have a built-in cognitive component. To be successful in discovering one's possibilities one has to go beyond tried ways of reacting; one must develop what Goldstein calls an abstract attitude. This involves the capacity of "approaching things that are only imagined, `possible' things, things which are not given in the concrete situation."⁵¹ Thus abstraction is not so much an action, for all action is concrete, but an attitude and an evaluation of action before it takes place.

The ability to approach things abstractly forms an integrated part of the behavioral circuitry of healthy and developed individuals. It helps them to relate to their environment creatively by leading them beyond the beckonings of the immediate situation outlined by a present perception and preparing them for new and unprecedented ways of dealing with the familiar. The break-down of this circuitry results in the most fascinating and, from certain perspectives, the most puzzling behavioral disorders. Goldstein's works⁵² are replete with the study and explanation of just such disorders. The case histories of these disorders make for fascinating psychological reading. Philosophically, there are two general conclusions worth noting here.

First, Goldstein's descriptions show that abstraction is a relative late-comer on the scene of human development. Long before the appearance of this behavioral skill, and often long after its disappearance in patients suffering from amnesic aphasia, meanings are organized by the more ancient and durable scheme of affective exchange between the subject and the world. Secondly, even though Goldstein insists on the decisive advantage that comes with the ability to grasp things abstractly, he nevertheless agrees with those who claim that "the formation of abstract concepts is usually not an end deliberately sought for itself. It has always been a means to an end."⁵³ For Goldstein that end is self-actualization, though not in the obviously utilitarian or hedonistic sense: abstraction is an instrument of self-actualization and, as such, affectively based.

Before leaving the writings of Goldstein, there is one final point that must be made. Goldstein's persistent claim that "there is only one motive by which human activity is set going, the tendency to actualize oneself,"⁵⁴ may easily lead to the impression that his studies were merely justifications for individualism and egotism based on biology. Nothing could be further from the truth. He rarely missed an opportunity to emphasize that "self-realization, i.e., human existence, is possible only in relation to the self-realization of the `other'."<sup>55</sup> Moreover, the discovery of the presence of other persons takes place not in an impersonal act of object-consciousness, but in a more intimate act of bonding called "encounter". Encounter is an original mode of consciousness, signaling the affective significance of another ego. "The experience in encounter," wrote Goldstein, "brings to the fore something that is profoundly characteristic of human nature, namely, that my existence is bound to the self-realization of the `other one'."⁵⁶

The experience of the presence of others is in fact composed of several elements:

l. First of all, it contains an immediate recognition that others are necessary for my self-actualization. Here others are revealed in their relative value for me: my self-actualization requires a corresponding self-restriction on their part.

2. On the other hand, the presence of others is also recognized as a limiting factor on my self-actualization. Inasmuch as their presence encroaches on my freedom, the others represent a relative disvalue for me. Their claim to self-realization relativizes mine, and calls for self-restriction on my part.

3. This means that, while the recognition of the relative value or relative disvalue of others is an immediate datum of my experience, the reconciliation between them is not. In the words of Goldstein, "there is not a pre-established harmony between human beings . . . they must seek it in an active way."⁵⁷ Harmony can be achieved only through a deliberate adjustment of attitudes. It comes about when individuals can accept self-restriction for the sake of others without resentment, and when they can lay claim to the affection of others without self-accusation.

4. Finally, the experience of encountering the presence of others leads to the derivative awareness that self-actualization demands an active balancing of compliant and encroaching behavior.

Only then can the individual realize himself, and assist others in their self-realization. Furthermore, the highest forms of human relationship, such as love and friendship, are dependent on the individual's ability and opportunity to realize both of these aspects of human behavior. . . . Love is not merely a mutual gratification and compliance; it is a higher form of self-actualization; a challenge to develop both oneself and another in this respect. . . . Self-restriction is experienced as inherent in human nature; it corresponds to what we call the ethical, to the norms.⁵⁸

The Primacy of Value-Orientation: Max Scheler

An even richer source of insight into the affective substructures of consciousness can be found in the philosophy of our third author, Max Scheler. Consciousness as an axiological protention towards reality comes especially to the fore in his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, ⁵⁹ which argues that value-qualities grasped by affective acts have the same objective status in nature as sensory qualities grasped by perception. Man's Place in Nature,⁶⁰ Scheler's last published work, goes even further to identify the deepest stratum of life with a consciousless "forward-urge" (Drang), which provides the "steam" (Dampf) for life's perpetual self-transcendence, including the ultimate sublimation of life by the "spirit".

In the introductory remarks to Formalism, Scheler notes that he wanted to present later a work on philosophical ethics based on phenomenological experience, but saw as an obstacle Kant's moral philosophy, "that colossus of steel and bronze"⁶¹ still generally accepted as valid. This meant that first he had to get around the formalism of Kant without, at the same time, lapsing into the errors of all non-formal⁶² ethics of goods and purposes, the ultimate rejection of which Scheler considered "the sole merit of Kant's practical philosophy."⁶³ Ethics of goods and purposes (Gueter und Zweckethik) are all those inquiries which start with the question, What is the highest good or what is the highest purpose of all volitional conations? Scheler's acceptance of Kant's general critique of all such ethics while rejecting some presuppositions of that critique⁶⁴ resulted in a highly original value-ethics, which tries to steer a middle-course between material ethics and Kantian formalism.

From Scheler's complex theory of values, two major points are of special interest here: first, his insistence that conation plays a decisive role in the apprehension of values (Cf. Chapter VII below on the revelatory aspect of passion); and secondly, his belief that in all goal-directed action the value-component or affective aspect precedes and founds the picture-component or representational aspect. Considering these two points briefly will illustrate for us how he regarded value-feelings as "an original relation towards objects," and how he attributed categorical priority to affectivity, and ultimately to love, "as pure attraction and pure interest in the world."⁶⁵

Scheler speaks of striving or conation (Streben) in the context of goals and purposes, yet his point is precisely to show that striving and purpose are not logically connected.⁶⁶ While conation "possesses its own intrinsic phenomenal differences of directedness"⁶⁷ by itself and on all levels, "it is only and exclusively at a definite level of our conation that purpose makes its appearance."⁶⁸ Conation, which begins as an impersonal and unconscious inner stirring (Regung), reaches the level of purposiveness when it becomes the act of a central ego. It is in purposive conation that the value-component and picture-component of striving really become distinguishable and the latter achieves prominence, because purpose, for Scheler, signifies precisely "represented contents of goals of conation."⁶⁹ What takes place at this level is the emergence of the consciousness of conation from conative consciousness. The confluence of the two is called the will in traditional terms; that is why purposes are often mentioned by Scheler as "purposes of the will".

How the value-component and picture-component of an act of will are related to each other is pivotal not only for understanding Scheler, but also for the general drift of this essay. It is a matter of quite ordinary experience that the value-control of our conations are often independent of our ability to represent those values. For instance, we may at times experience a great readiness to make sacrifices or to be kind to people without having any clear idea of the objects we are going to give up or of the benevolent deeds we are going to perform. Here, the resoluteness with regard to the value of sacrifice or kindness contrasts sharply with the irresoluteness of the idea or picture-content of their representation. However, the significance of such experiences for Scheler is not simply the fact that value-contents are distinct and even separable from representations, but the more radical claim that values are in fact the foundations and first messengers of representational meaning. To quote him: "The ontic relation between them is such that the value-component founds the picture-component; that is, the picture-component is differentiated according to its possible suitability to the realization of the value-component."⁷⁰

The last part of the statement just quoted directs our attention to another work of Scheler, Man's Place in Nature, where he outlined the stages of differentiation, through which the picture-component or representational aspect of behavior emerges from life's basic value-orientation. From plant to person, the primary orientation of life is toward value, according to Scheler, not the same value, to be sure, but a whole hierarchy of values.⁷¹ In fact, personhood itself is a value, in deference to which life yields up its innate direction (see Chapter XII on personhood). As a result of this yielding, personal life gains a new guiding principle: spiritual knowledge.⁷²

As we shall see, this does not mean that Scheler considered the spirit an outgrowth of life's natural evolution or that he tried to reduce human knowledge to a need-related function of vital drives. Quite the contrary: if anything, he is guilty of a sort of metaphysical dualism that pitches spirit against life, presenting it as "a principle opposed to life as such, even to life in man."⁷³ In its origin and according to its essence, Scheler saw spirit as independent from, and even antagonistic to, life, a perpetual naysayer to life's libidinal impulses. Nevertheless, he was careful in pointing out that the autonomy of the spirit is in reality a borrowed one, for in actual operation, the spirit is completely dependent on the energies withdrawn from life, having none on its own. Scheler thought it was a "fallacy to assume that the world in which we live is so ordered that, with the superior meaning and values revealed in higher forms of being, there goes a corresponding increase in power and energy."⁷⁴ In other words, spirit is superior to life and supersedes it only as a navigational device, not as a power source: "Spirit and will never mean anything else but guidance and direction."⁷⁵

Our point, however, is not to present Scheler's metaphysics, the acceptance or rejection of which leaves our concern relatively untouched. Our concern is to show how, through successive polarizations of its value-orientation, life can refine and redefine the goals toward which it strains, until it gives way to that non-objectifiable (but objectifying) process of self-ordered acts which we call personal life. Scheler has a great deal to teach us about the life of persons and their interpersonal exchange, independently of his ultimate metaphysical doctrines. The following outline provides a few hints about life's development towards the stage and value of emerging personhood.

1. Vital Urge. The first modality of life, already noted as the point of departure also for a theory of cognition, consists in a non-specific vital push (Gefuehlsdrang) of the organism against its environment. This primitive push is non-specific precisely because, in it, innerliness and protention are as yet undifferentiated, knowing and tending coincide. Found in all life, including plant life, this original urge lacks all means of reporting back the events that take place inside or outside the organism. Life at this level is completely consciousless, without any sensomotor equipment and, consequently, without active purposiveness of any kind. It fulfills itself in a blind protention of nourishment, growth and reproduction.

Vital feeling or urge is characteristic of plant life, but it is present in animal and human life also. Mixed in with more complex functions and largely subsumed by them, the vital urge nevertheless retains a certain archaic independence from them. Even when energy is withdrawn from more specific drives and functions, as in states of sleep, hibernation, fainting or coma, the vital urge burns on. On the other hand, "there is no sensation, no perception, no representation behind which is not the dark impulse burning continuously through periods of sleeping and waking. Even the simplest sensation is not merely the response to a stimulus, but always the function of a drive-motivated attention.⁷⁶

2. Instinct. Life's value-orientation begins to give rise to representational content in instinctual behavior, because it is on this level that the drive-motivated attention just mentioned brings about sensation. Sensation, in turn, as a reporting back of an organ to a nerve-center, modifies the subsequent deployment of the drive. Thus begins a dialectic process within the vital urge between action and representation, leading to repeated "disintegrations" (in the non-pejorative sense) and reintegrations of the initially undifferentiated protention of life. It is in instinct that the "undifferentiated energy of growth, reaching out ecstatically into a neutral, unspecified environment, is modified by sensation and spontaneous locomotion . . . which begin to untie the living being from its vegetative level."⁷⁷

Scheler calls behavior instinctive when it exhibits the following five characteristics: it must be meaningful for the whole of the organism or for the whole of another organism; it must have a set rhythm; it must be typical for the species; it must be innate; it must be complete rather than tentative. The first feature refers to the quasi-purposive or end-directed nature of instinct. Scheler coined the word "teleoclitic" for this kind of purposiveness which does not depend on individual representation. The second feature emphasizes the fact that instinct is not constructed by imitation or learning from others. Thirdly, instinct is typical behavior, typical of the species rather than of the individual. Fourthly, instinct is not acquired but hereditary. This does not mean, however, that "instinctive behavior must be present at the time of birth. It means only that it is coordinated with fixed stages of growth and maturation, and possibly even (in the case of polymorphism) with different developmental stages in animals."⁷⁸ Finally, instinct does not come about through the stringing together of partial movements that proved successful before. Its essential pattern is mounted ready-made, so to speak, before the processes of trial and error.

The really intriguing thing for us, however, is what Scheler has to say about the function of knowledge in relation to instinctual behavior. There is in instinct, as noted above, a beginning of the separation between sensation and drive, but there is also a very close functional connection. In a biologically shaped behavior, such as instinct, knowledge can serve only an instrumental function to action: "What an animal can imagine or perceive is controlled by the a priori relation of its instincts to the structure of the environment. . . . An animal sees and hears what is significant for its instinctive behavior."⁷⁹

Moreover, the knowledge operative in instinct is not the property of individuals; it is the atavistic wit of the whole species, so to speak. That is why instinctual knowledge is as much a filter as it is a mirror with regard to the environment. It admits only as much of it as the wisdom of the species allows the individual to perceive.

Finally, Scheler indicates that instinctual knowledge is predominantly and by nature affective. "Knowledge inherent in the instinct is not a knowledge by means of representations, images or even ideas. It is rather a feeling of value-charged resistances which are differentiated as attractive or repulsive according to these value-impressions."⁸⁰

3. Associative Memory. The next stage in the "disintegration" of the vital urge is the vast domain of learning, that is, the domain of behavior modification on the basis of previous experience. The possibility of learning from previous experience implies that the past has not entirely passed, but left some traces of itself behind which can be recalled and combined with a new experience. The ability of retaining the past and linking parts of it with the present is called associative memory.

The appearance of the associative principle is significant for our essay from two points of view. First, the affectivity underlying associative learning is quite manifest here. Progress in learning, fixation of habit, strength of conditioning are directly proportionate to the number of trial movements on the one hand, and to the affective meaning ("satisfying," "frustrating") or value-quality of those trials, on the other. In other words, the twin engines of behavior modification, i.e., reinforcement and inhibition, are obviously value-driven. Associative learning is significant, secondly, because it initiates the emergence of the individual qua individual. Insofar as an animal begins to manifest behavior learned through association, it also begins a process of emancipation from its bondage to the species. It begins to be more and more a center of its own behavior rather than a mere arena for it. "For only with the operation of this principle can the individual adapt himself to new situations, to situations not typical of the species. Thus the individual ceases to be no more than a point of transition in the reproductive process of the species."⁸¹

4. Practical Intelligence or Cunning. The liberation and centralization of individual behavior resulting from associative learning is counterbalanced by the attendant perils of mechanization of learned behavior. No sooner freed from the rigidity of species-bound instinct, behavior is in danger of lapsing into routine and stereotypy. As a corrective for such dangers, further differentiation brings forth cleverness or practical intelligence.

This type of intelligence is called "practical" because it deals with action and the choice of action by means of which the animal seeks to attain some goal set by its drives. This does not mean, however, that animal intelligence is a mere motor skill, for in fact it contains a great deal of independent imagination and even some hints of proto-abstraction. Indeed, intelligence is the faculty of "a sudden insight into a connected context of facts and values within the environment that is not perceived now nor was ever perceived previously."⁸²

The newness of the situation acts as an obstacle to the attainment of the need-determined goal. To overcome this obstacle, to master the unprecedented situation, the experiential field of the animal has to be actively restructured for possible clues. Hitherto neutral elements or elements corresponding to other needs must assume an instrumental relationship to the goal in question. This means, however, that those elements must be drawn into a relatively "abstract" and "objective" perspective by the animal. Commenting on Kohler's experiments with chimpanzees, Scheler called special attention to the degree of abstraction involved here. To reach the fruit lying outside the cage, these clever beasts used not only sticks which, after all, resemble branches on which the fruit normally hangs, but also pieces of wire, the brim of a straw hat, a blanket, anything that satisfied the abstract representation of "movable and elongated".

Nevertheless, Scheler also noted that this kind of ad hoc abstraction is not yet the reflective and universal abstraction usually associated with human inventiveness. Rather, "it is the dynamic energy of the drive itself that is here objectified and projected into constituents of the environment."⁸³ The objectivity discovered here is still only the instrumental aptness of some environmental feature to satisfy a particular end.

5. Spirit. Fully abstract knowledge, which can represent the qualities and values of things objectively, i.e., not just in particular circumstances but universally and independently of subjective need, is reached only by the properly human capacity called spirit. While the concept of spirit for Scheler includes the capacity for such acts as volition, love, remorse, reverence, despair and so on,⁸⁴ we shall concentrate on it exclusively as a special function of knowledge.

Whatever the ontological status of the spirit may be, the importance of its cognitive function is fairly clear. It is in spiritual knowledge that the drive toward objectification, which was merely begun and foreshadowed by instinct, memory and intelligence, finally succeeds. The consequences of this breakthrough are far-reaching and decisive for the understanding of the proper relationship between the cognitive and affective components of moral behavior.

Scheler correctly presents objectification as an act of emancipation of spiritual knowledge from narrow environmental pressures and interests, but he is mistaken when he perceives this emancipation as a form of detachment pure and simple. He is more correct when he emphasizes that detachment from the environment in human knowledge actually means the unlimited expansion of man's interests to the point of his being open to the world (weltoffen). "To become human is to acquire this openness to the world by virtue of the spirit."⁸⁵ Instead of being tied to a limited field of interaction, as is animal life, human interest extends to the most remote aspects of the world at large. Spirit is the ability of placing one's living space with its select centers of attraction and resistance into an extended context that objectifies that space and transforms one's "environment" into a "world."

This transformation is in reality a transvaluation. Objectification and objectivity is sought, first and foremost, as a value for man. It is sought as a condition for inventiveness, as a means of creative diversification of behavior. Instead of seeing things and relating to them only in the light of determined needs, man can see them and interact with them multifacetedly. Objective knowledge is so far from being a form of detachment from reality that it could be properly described as a universalization of attachment, for it expresses man's unbounded appetite for being that reaches beyond the points of interest given in animal knowledge.

But above all, objectification is sought as an access to self-consciousness, that is, "consciousness that the spiritual center of action has of itself."⁸⁶ Simultaneously with the objectification of the world, but logically consequent upon it, man's consciousness can objectify even his own inner states and vital drives and thus emerge as a substantial "self" against the "non-self" of the world.

All this is in marked contrast to animal knowledge which has no object, has no center, has no world. The animal inhabits a limited environment, "which it carries along as a snail carries its shell."⁸⁷ Its knowledge is a more or less dependent function of that environment in which things are given only as centers of resistance to attraction or repulsion. Anything that falls outside those centers is not given at all. "Animals only notice and grasp those things which fall into the secure borders of their environmental structure."⁸⁸ This environmental structure itself, forming a functional circle with the animal organism that is fitted into it,⁸⁹ guides both animal knowledge and animal behavior.

Man, on the other hand, has a new and largely independent method for guiding his behavior. Inasmuch as he is able to objectify even his vital impulses, he can evaluate them, coordinate their several goals under an overarching representation, and rechannel their energies toward a freely chosen project. In psychological terminology, the ability to call upon natural energy complexes to accomplish goals not necessarily native to those complexes is usually referred to as sublimation, and the agent behind sublimation as the will. Both of these terms are useful, but both are liable to be misinterpreted.

Sublimation is a useful concept if it throws light on the change that takes place in the transition from sensory striving or drive-directed behavior to voluntary striving or mind-directed behavior. The essential difference is usually and mistakenly seen by philosophers as a difference in the kind of goal or object pursued by each: the object of sensory striving is said to be some "particular" good, while the object of the will is supposed to be the "universal" good. The same difference is sometimes expressed in terms of the contrast between the "concrete" and the "abstract". However, these distinctions confuse the object of striving with the manner of representing that object. While it is true that the object of a voluntary act is represented generally and abstractly, that does not mean that its object is a "good in general", and much less that it is an "abstract good". There might be abstract intelligibilities and general meanings, objects for pure thought, but as the object of appetition, the good can only be concrete and particular. All affective propensities--love, volition, desire, even instinctual drive--seek the concrete reality rather than the abstract representation of their object. To be sure, some of them, like love and volition, seek their goal by the light of abstract representation, but what they seek is not abstract. The theory of sublimation is a refined way of saying all this. It is a way of suggesting that some of man's goal-directed actions are indeed objective and spiritual in the sense that, in them, the basic value-orientation of life finally gives rise to a separate picture-component that can function as an independent guidance system for those actions. By virtue of this guidance, the initially stereotyped operations of libidinal energies are freed and redirected towards the accomplishment of cultural projects. Needless to say, the production of culture itself is only a means for producing the very maker of culture: man himself.

EPILOGUE: THE FORMATION OF TRENDS AND ATTITUDES

This essay began by hinting at the inadequacy of studying morality and moral education under the heading of cognition. Treating morality as one more instance of applied knowledge, it was noted, tends to overlook the problems connected precisely with the application of such knowledge in action. The tendency is to assume that the very cogency of the reasons offered by the various moral theories for acting in a certain way is sufficient to trigger the process of appropriate application. At the very least, all cognitive moral theories are haunted by the ghosts of ideomotorism, that is, the belief that the picturing of appropriate ends and means can somehow overflow into purposive action all by itself.

The thrust of this essay has been to exorcise that ghost once and for all and to argue that ideation cannot be both the informing and the enabling factor of moral action, that knowledge, while indispensable to morality as a directional device, cannot at the same time be its energetic component. That component, it was argued, derives from life's fundamental value-orientation, called affectivity. This power to act morally is furnished by a goal-directed disposition which all living beings possess, but which in man is elevated to the rank of a conscious striving toward self-realization.

But introducing affectivity as a second major component of moral behavior is liable to give rise to some unintended and potentially misleading implications. For instance, to the extent that philosophers and psychologists make use of the concept of affectivity at all, they usually take it to mean the same thing as emotion, some kind of strong visceral agitation which signals the upset of the normal balance between organism and environment, but which also initiates the process of return to that normal state. Other, more untoward acceptations equate affectivity with unruly passions and chaotic arousals, with the moods and urges of a turbulent id. In either case, affectivity is usually seen as an interloper in human affairs. Under the first perspective, it appears as a momentary departure from a preset norm which, however, soon rights itself; under the second, it is seen as a violent counterforce to reason that has to be kept in constant check by commensurate rational resistance. But even without such sinister connotations, to say that moral behavior has an affective as well as a cognitive component is liable to make morality appear a dual phenomenon, the work of two separate faculties existing side by side and working either in tandem or against one another. It could be interpreted to mean that in moral questions the "heart" too has its say, after reason has spoken. In order to preclude such a dualistic interpretation, on one hand, and to make sure that it is not taken for a cybernetic theory of behavior, on the other, this essay tried to describe affectivity as life's fundamental value-orientation from which both knowledge and the particular acts of emotion, desire, will and striving take their origin. In other words, the essay does not merely complement other, cognitive considerations, it ascribes primacy to the affective processes, because it considers these to be the actual movers of moral life.

This last point may strike one either as momentous or as trifling, depending on what one considers the goal of moral education to be. If the goal is simply to teach students how to discover higher and broader moral purposes, their affectivity need not be stimulated beyond the point of awakening in them a curiosity to learn about such topics. But if the task is to form in them a steady skill and disposition to strive toward these purposes, then something more primordial than their intellectual curiosity must be touched (see Chapter V below on character formation). Their dynamic value-orientation must be stirred up, their love of probity must be set in motion, for that alone transforms them into moral agents.

In order to intimate that purposiveness and value-orientation are indeed non-derivative dimensions of human consciousness, the essay next presented a sampling of the pertinent ideas of three authors, two philosophers and one psychologist, which point to the possibility of reconstructing the theory of consciousness on an affective basis. The actual reconstruction, should it ever be attempted, will require a great deal of programmatic research and model building on the part of educational psychologists. That is obviously no longer a philosophic task.

Before leaving the scene, however, philosophy can perform one last service for the researcher by warning him about one more fruitless attempt of representing affectivity through concepts which are unsuitable to the task. The recurrent emphasis of these pages on the importance of affectivity in moral behavior might have led to the idea that the matter must, therefore, be restated in terms of "motivation"; that the dynamic component so often mentioned is to be read as the "motivational" component of behavior; especially, that the question of moral education may now appear as a question of how to "motivate" people to act righteously. But the point of the warning is that theories of motivation, while enormously relevant in explaining other things, tell us very little about how to think and what to do about the properly affective structure of purposive behavior.

A relative late-comer on the intellectual scene, the concept of "motive" or "motivation" betrays its philosophical ancestry by the manner in which it was made to function in the behavioral sciences. The psychological and sociological usage of "motive" designates what in the older context used to be called either the "final cause" or the "efficient cause" of conduct. One set of theories identifies motives with the "reasons" for which an action is performed.⁹⁰ By "reasons" here is meant the anticipatory representation of an end-state to be brought about by means of a certain course of action. In ordinary language usage we call that the "purpose" or "point" of an action. The representation of the end itself is thought to be the full explanation of why the action was undertaken. Here motive functions as a final cause.

However, since it is at least arguable that the "real" reason for an action was not what the agent himself "thought" it was, another set of theories dispenses with the representation of purposes altogether, and rebuts the belief that reasons are necessary at all for the understanding of regulated acts. A motive, according to this view, is not the intent for the sake of which or in view of which something is done, but a certain tropism, an unconscious drive or a tissue condition, which is already programmed to bring on self-regulatory behavior.⁹¹ Theories which regard the underlying mechanism of motivation to reside in brain stimulation or endocrine processes, theories of drive reduction, libidinal theories, social learning theories, all belong to this second group. Their explanations are modelled on efficient causality.

Thus alternating between ideas and drives, between final and efficient causality, motivational theories lack the integrated view necessary to understand the value-orientation of moral behavior. On one hand, they can give no adequate description of the dynamics of moral pursuit, on the other, they can explain what happens to man, but not what he does (see the concept of agent causality in Chapter IV). While each of them can bring to light some valid aspect of purposive behavior, theories of motivation fall short of providing a theory of affectivity or a conceptual model for moral education. That theory and that model must be looked for along different lines of approach.

To find them, empirical research must turn from focusing on the reasons or compulsions of human behavior to exploring the deep-dynamic structures of consciousness. For it is the activation of these structures, rather than thought or duress, that underline the formation of such positive trends of character disposition as courage, persistence, trust, confidence, interest, respect, rectitude, kindness and love. It should be fairly clear that these dispositions are not motives either in the sense of reasons for which one acts or as causes that make one act. Nor are they agitations and emotions in any meaningful sense of the word. They are, instead, relatively stable modifications in the general value-orientation of affectivity. As such, their influence on action and the quality of action is undeniable. Even though their influence is not causal, their presence imparts a particular cast to the acts whereby values are actualized.

One might say that the remaining task consists essentially in answering two fundamental questions: "How is human affectivity organized"? and "What pedagogic measures are likely to promote the positive development of affectivity"? The accent here is on the word "positive," for it seems that there can also be a negative development of value-orientation. This happens whenever the natural impulse of affectivity towards self-actualization is either arrested, repressed or misdirected. It is then that the foundations of immoral or criminal behavior are laid in such negative character dispositions as fear, mistrust, isolation, diffidence, apathy, cynicism, deviousness, meanness and hatred. In other words, the goodness or badness of affectivity appears to depend on the direction of its development. Four of Scheler's value-axioms are quite pertinent here:

1. Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a positive value in the sphere of willing.

2. Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a negative value in the sphere of willing.

3. Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a higher (or the highest) value in the sphere of willing.

4. Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a lower (or the lowest) value in the sphere of willing.⁹²

Thus, education in goodness must mean education in value-realization and not merely value-recognition. At the very least, moral education must involve the removal of all inertial obstacles which tend to block or deflect the positive direction of the affective impulse. But more than that, it also requires the strengthening of the will and the imparting of such positive attitudes to affectivity as were mentioned above. Only a person with positive moral inclinations is really a mature moral subject. How can such positive attitudes be imparted? Must they be "caught" from the teacher by way of role-modelling or merely elicited from the native powers of the student himself? What are the concrete lines of communication between the directional and energetic components of behavior? How is a commitment to recognized values made and maintained? All these problems are so many aspects of one and the same essential problem, "What is moral education"? This is the issue! Hic labor, hic opus est!

St. Vincent College,

Latrobe, PA

1. For the various meanings and implications of intellectualism see Andre Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), pp. 522-25. See also the introduction of Pierre Rousselot's book, The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas (London: Sheed & Ward, 1935), an apology for intellectualism.

2. Note that it is only by virtue of that involvement, and not apart from it, that a person is constituted an agent.

3. Norman Gulley, The Philosophy of Socrates (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968), p. 83.

4. Even though some careless expressions of his could be so interpreted. For instance: "quia enim intellectus movet voluntatem, velle est effectus eius (italics mine)." In Rom., 7, 3.

5. Si ergo intellectus et voluntas considerentur secundum se, sic intellectus eminentior invenitur. Et hoc apparet ex comparatione obiectorum ad invicem. . . . Nam obiectum intellectus est ipsa ratio boni appetibilis; bonum autem ipsum appetible, cuius ratio est in intellectu, est obiectum voluntatis. Quanto autem aliquid est simplicius et abstractius, tanto secundum se est nobilius et altius (italics mine). S.T. I, q. 82, a. 3.

6. Rousselot, The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas, p. l99.

7. In the classic words of M. Blondel, "au fond de mon etre, il y a un vouloir et un amour de l'être, ou il n'y a rien." L'Action (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), p. xxiii.

8. "Wirksamkeit des Verstandes," see Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten in Kant's Werke, herausgegeben von der Koeniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band IV (Berlin: Georg Reimer Verlag, 1911), p. 412.

9. Ibid., p. 446. It must be noted, however, that Kant is not always consistent in fusing will with practical reason: there are times when he talks of practical reason only as a representational faculty and the will as the real source of motive force.

10. Cf. Benjamin Wolman (ed.), Dictionary of Behavioral Sciences (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973), p. 118; also William P. Alston, "Emotion and Feeling" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 479-486.

11. Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer, "Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State", Psychological Review, 69, (1962), pp. 381-82.

12. Philip L. Harriman in the Handbook of Psychological Terms (Totawa: Littlefields, Adams & Co., 1975, p. 57, defines "emotional" as "prone to strong reactions rather than cognitive responses". The same is repeated by the Dictionary of Behavioral Sciences, p. 118. In an essay "In Praise of Cognitive Emotions". Teachers College Record, 79, (1977), pp. 171-186, Israel Scheffler of Harvard finds it necessary to apologize for coupling these two terms, "for cognition and emotion, as everyone knows, are hostile worlds apart. Cognition is sober inspection; it is the scientist's calm apprehension of fact after fact in his relentless pursuit of truth. Emotion, on the other hand, is commotion and unruly inner turbulence fatal to such pursuit but finding its own constructive outlets in aesthetic experience and moral or religious commitment." The rest of the essay, however, challenges this entrenched opinion by arguing that there are some emotions "in service of cognition" and some that are positively "cognitive emotions".

13. That is why the term "will" was not chosen. Will is regarded by most traditions as a separate faculty of rational appetite. It is called rational not because it is considered as a form of discernment in itself, but because--lacking any discernment--it must follow the judgments of the intellect. Whenever the will is not considered this kind of dependent function of intellectual representation, it is usually inflated into an altogether blind force of cosmic dimensions. Schopenhauer's "will-to-live" is a case in point (cf. The World as Will and Representation, transl. by E. F. J. Payne [Indian Hills: The Falcon's Wing Press, 1958], pp. 275ff). Neither will as an appendage of the intellect, nor will as an irrational thing-in-itself can do justice to the concept of affectivity as a cumulative directedness or protention of life.

14. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Minton, Black & Company, 1929), p. 21.

15. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 18.

16. Max Scheler, Man's Place in Nature (New York: Noonday Press, 1962), p. 9; italics added.

17. ". . . this vital feeling is also the subject of that primary experience of resistance which is the root of experiencing what is called `reality', especially the unity and the impression of 'reality' which precedes any specific representation." Ibid., p. 14.

18. "This creative dissociation, not association or the synthesis of single pieces, is the basic process of psychic evolution. The same is true in physiological terms." Ibid., p. 20. This may give the impression that Scheler considered the nature of intelligence purely analytical. His treatment of instinctual behavior, the second stage of psychic life, may indeed reinforce this impression. According to him, instinct can operate without previous learning because instinctual behavior does not have to construct a meaningful whole out of disjointed bits of experience (the blosse Mannigfaltigkeit of Kant); instinct and environment form a single organic configuration, a value-laden whole or Gestalt to start with. Intelligence is needed only for the "disintegration" of such wholes into their component parts. Nevertheless, even Scheler admits that every disjunction of experience is done in order to permit new associations and creative recombinations of the dissociated elements. The twin ability to do both is at the basis of further evolution that results in associative memory (= learning), imagination, problem solving (= practical intelligence) and abstract thought.

19. Peter H. Wolff, "The Biology of Morals from a Psychological Perspective", in Morality as a Biological Phenomenon, ed. G. S. Stent (Berlin: Dahlem Konferenzen, 1978), p. 96.

20. Baron Jacob J. von Uexkull, Streifzuege durch die Umwelten der Tieren und Menschen (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1934), p. 6ff. See also p. 61: "Wir werden sagen duerfen, soviel Leistungen ein Tier ausfuhren kann, soviel Gegenstaende vermag es in seiner Umwelt zu unterscheiden. Besitzt es bei wenigen Leistungen wenig Wirkbilder, so besteht auch seine Umwelt aus wenigen Gegenstaenden."

21. See Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Macmillan Company, 2954), p. 82.

22. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), pp. 7-8.

23. Radical Reflection and the Origin of the Human Sciences (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1980), p. 35.

24. Ibid., p. 72.

25. Ibid., p. 36.

26. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), p. 103.

27. That "the distinction between subjective and objective is relative" has been brilliantly argued by Thomas Nagel of Princeton in one of the essays of his recent book Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). In the same essay, he has the following to say: "We flee the subjective under the pressure of an assumption that everything must be something not to any point of view, but in itself. To grasp this by detaching more and more from our own point of view is the unreachable ideal at which the pursuit of objectivity aims" (p. 208, italics added). The reason objectivity is said to be unattainable is that the very attainment of it requires a subjective acceptance and incorporation of it into one's personal world-view: "Since an agent lives his life from where he is, even if he manages to achieve an impersonal view of his situation, whatever insights result from this detachment need not be made part of a personal view before they can influence decision and action. The pursuit of what seems impersonally best may be an important aspect of individual life, but its place in that life must be determined from a personal standpoint, because life is always the life of a particular person, and cannot be lived sub specie aeternitatis. . . . The impersonal standpoint takes in a world that includes the individual and his personal views. The personal standpoint, on the other hand, regards the deliverance of impersonal reflection as only a part of any individual's total view of the world" (pp. 205-206).

28. Justus Buchler, Nature and Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 35.

29. ". . . the fact that history is more particularistic than physics does not make it less truly knowledge. And if poetry is, as Aristotle says, more universal than history, . . . that does not make it more truly knowledge. Physics, history, and poetry are cognitive in different respects, not in different degrees. The cognitive values of the three modes of judgment are not easily comparable, and perhaps not comparable at all; and this may be a part of what has to be meant by the view that there are three modes of judgment." Ibid., p. 39.

30. There is an absolutely resonant passage in Jaspers' Von der Wahrheit (Muenchen: Piper Verlag, 1947), p. 115, which is here quoted in the original to show the compenetration of active and passive aspects of sympathy and assistance: "Grundhaltung der Vernunft ist universelles Mitleben. Vernunft als das staendige Vordringen zum Anderen ist die Moeglichkeit des universellen Mitlebens, Dabeiseins, des allgegenwaertigen Hoerens dessen, was spricht, und dessen, was sie selbst erst sprechen macht. Vernunft ist Vernehmen, aber das uneingeschraenkte von allem, was ist und sein kann."

31. Buchler, Nature and Judgment, p. 194.

32. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; hereafter cited as Phenomenology.

33. Ibid., p. 154. Proving the inadequacy of analyzing experience and behavior either in causal or in cognitive terms was the burden of Merleau-Ponty's earlier work, The Structure of Behavior (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), cf. "Behavior is not a thing, but neither is it an idea" (p. 127).

34. Phenomenology, p. 154.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 156.

37. First analyzed in the works of Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein.

38. J. Steinfeld, "Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der Sexualfunktion" in Zeitschrift fuer die ges. Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 1927, p. 174: "Da er [= Schneider] keine Vorstellungen von der raumlichen Lage seiner Glieder hat, muss er . . . zunaechst das betreffende Glied `finden'."

39. Phenomenology, p. 103.

40. Ibid., p. 104.

41. Ibid., p. 157.

42. Ibid., p. 156.

43. Ibid., p. 164.

44. Ibid., p. 165.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., p. 166.

47. Kurt Goldstein, The Organism; A Holistic Approach Derived from Pathological Data in Man (New York: American Book Co., 1939).

48. Kurt Goldstein, Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 11.

49. Ibid., p. 141.

50. Ibid., pp. 141-42.

51. Ibid., p. 54. The same ability is sometimes referred to as "categorical attitude."

52. A complete bibliography of Goldstein's works was put together by Joseph Meiers in The Reach of Mind; Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein (New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 271-295.

53. Kurt Goldstein, "Abstract and Concrete Behavior", in Selected Papers/Ausgewaehlte Schriften (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 391.

54. Human Nature, p. 201.

55. "The Smiling of the Infant", Selected Papers, p. 481. Italics are in the original).

56. Ibid., p. 483.

57. Human Nature, pp. 203-4.

58. Ibid., pp. 207-8. Italics added.

59. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, hereafter cited as Formalism.

60. See note 16, hereafter cited as Man's Place.

61. Formalism, p. 6.

62. This term is used here as an equivalent of "contentual" or "material".

63. Formalism, p. 5.

64. For a pertinent reference, consult Farrelly's distinction between teleological and deontological ethics in this volume.

65. Manfred Frings, Max Scheler (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1965), p. 111.

66. E.g., the color and fragrance of flowers serve the "purpose" of attracting pollinating insects, but this does not mean that flowers are "striving" to achieve pollination by these means.

67. Formalism, p. 33.

68. Ibid., p. 32.

69. Ibid., p. 39.

70. Ibid., p. 34.

71. Scheler noted four distinct ranks in that hierarchy: l. sensible values; 2. vital values; 3. spiritual values; 4. values of holiness. Cf. Formalism, pp. 104-110.

72. Scheler understands by spirit "a term which includes the intuition of essences and a class of voluntary and emotional acts such as kindness, love, remorse, reverence, wonder, bliss, despair and free decision." Man's Place, p. 36.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid., p. 64.

75. Ibid., p. 68.

76. Man's Place, p. 13. Italics added.

77. Frings, Max Scheler, p. 34.

78. Man's Place, p. 17.

79. Ibid., p. 18. The last sentence suggests that even developmentally the receptor system, what the Germans call Merknetz, is tailored to the capacities of the effector system, the Wirknetz.

80. Ibid., p. 21.

81. Ibid., p. 27.

82. Ibid., p. 30.

83. Ibid., p. 32.

84. See note 72.

85. Man's Place, p. 39.

86. Ibid., p. 40.

87. Ibid., p. 39.

88. Ibid., p. 38.

89. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 24.

90. Cf. William McDougall, The Energies of Men (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933); Richard S. Peters, The Concept of Motivation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).

91. Cf. John Atkinson, An Introduction to Motivation (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1964); Leonard Berkowitz, Aggression (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962); Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (London: Ernest Benn, 1914); Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1969).

92. Formalism, p. 26.