STEPHEN SCHNECK

The legitimacy question facing contemporary political theory is quite different than the question of political legitimacy in past times.* All previous eras were faced with the puzzle of fashioning a polity which was attuned to the character, or the essence, or the end, or the nature of man. The unknown element to be discovered, the missing answer, was the formula for the good, correct and workable po lity. To make the chains of political life legitimate, the polity needed only to reflect the soul of the philosopher, or draw together the wills of its citizens, or unite the worker with his artifice.

Today, posing the legitimacy question solely or primarily in terms of the legitimate polity is insufficient. Although the resolution of this question has never been more imperative, it has become obvious in our times that the quandary of the polity rests on a deeper quandary. Who is the person that is the philosopher, the citizen and the worker? What is he? How is he? Where is his place? It might be objected that such questions have been asked of ourselves since antiquity, that such questioning is inherent to human character. Yet the questions have never been asked with the urgency that marks them in our era. The crucial question of today is the question of being human. The dilemma of the legitimate polity, bound up with this crucial question, cannot be answered in abstraction from the deeper query. Rather, every inquiry into the polity must begin with and continually return to the endeavor to clarify our understanding of man.

In agreement with the foregoing, Max Sc heler, philosopher, sociologist and cultural and political critic, considered the problematic of the liberal politics in our century. His thought is a rich, but little tilled ground for the social scientist whose concerns turn upon questions of the human situation. Indeed, the question of man--his character, existence and destiny--is the very nucleus about which the whole of Scheler's thinking revolves. Of interest to the social theorist, he rejects outright the individual ego as an acceptable starting point for understanding man, and from the first presents the web of acts which is the person as always and essentially an expression of the intersubjectivity which is the community. It is a sad irony, therefore, that it is only recently--more than fifty years since his death in Weimar Germany--that social and political theorists have begun to consider Max Scheler's works seriously in their own endeavors to comprehend the social and political world. In this vein, the present essay aims at reviewing Scheler's assessment of bourgeois liberalism (the dominant political paradigm of our day) in light of his broader treatment of the more basic question of being legitimately human. On this basis bourgeois liberalism is ultimately revealed to be: 1) untenable as a theory for understanding politics, and 2) normatively unacceptable as a guide for political action.

Scheler's treatment of liberalism is an on-going, peripheral theme throughout the corpus of his works. It is linked tightly with the core theme of his philosophy--i.e., the deeper quandary of contemporary man. While liberalism itself is seldom directly addressed, it nonetheless remains consistently in the background of his thought and writings. Scheler sees libe ralism (with cap italism, posi tivism, scie ntism, and a host of other "isms") as an epiphenomenon of the emergence of a new type of man during the late Middle Ages, a type he terms the bourgeois. This new man, he argues, is the product of a self-inflicted evolution.^l Christianity is stripped of both its sense of communal solidarity and its teleological linkage and hierarchical structure of world > man > God. Bourgeois man is thus left with irresolvable breaches between himself and others, and between himself and the world. Recognizing this alienation and fueled by the passion of ressentiment, man's attitude becomes one of domination toward both the world and others. He seeks frantically by way of force in this regard to re-establish a semblance, however artificial, of the earlier world-man-God linkage.² The frantic scurrying leads to a boundless acquisitiveness and, with the loss of hierarchy, to a blind and indiscriminate greed for quantities of objects.

Concomitant with this self-inflicted evolution is the emergence of a conceptual, normative framework by which the world view of the bourgeois is rationalized and all questions of self, world and others are resolvable. It is within this framework that Sc heler unearths some of the key structural conditions of liberalism. Four of these conditions are of special value for present concerns: 1) for malism, 2) indi vidualism, 3) needs/utility motivation and 4) rat ionalism.

Theoretically, liberalism posits the conception of civil society as a network of contracts, covenants, rules and procedures. Its conception of government is one of laws, not of women and men. That the liberal paradigm of politics in large measure depends upon formal structures is apparent. Early liberal thinkers erected their politics on the idea of the social contract, wherein members of society are bound together in association on the basis of formal quid pro quo agreements among themselves. In the theories of later liberal thinkers, where the operation of the polity is in some sense more concrete owing to the consideration of actual utility or pleasure, the process remains in large part formal when the motor of political action is reduced to a formal, mathematical aggregate of individual human desires. Clearly writers arguing for a categorical imperative, to the extent it can be interpreted as a maxim for the political order, can also only be seen as furthering the notion of form alism.³

Practically, liberalism counsels political actions according to a table or formula of methodological principles. Political actions are legitimate, regardless of outcome, if the proper method has been followed. Political practice is considered "good" if it is in accord with such formal principles--a point applicable for society as whole and for individual political actions within the liberal schema. There is no acknowledgement of the legitimacy of social goo ds or val ues apart from adherence to formal procedures. Hence, political practice can never be more than ad hoc actions and the polity itself is in the last analysis no more than an ad hoc, formal tool devised by its citizens as a means toward their separate ends.

Max Sche ler's most thorough investigation of "formalism" appears in his masterwork on ethics, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values.⁴ Taking Ka nt's formalism, "a colossus of steel and bronze," as his starting point, Scheler demonstrates the possibility and necessity of a flesh-and-blood, substantively human approach to questions of normative significance. Despite the impressiveness of Kant's colossus, and while acknowledging much of its conclusion, Scheler finds the colossus to be inadequate precisely because formalism offers no "down-to-earth" value for real men faced with real normative dilemmas.⁵ This inadequacy of Kant's and all formal approaches to norm ative issues lies in the chasm which is drawn between formal procedures and material facts. Scheler remarks that the character of such procedures (general, abs tract, inflexible) is itself illustrative of its inapplicability to the uniqueness of each person and each human situation. More particularly, by way of convincing phenomenological presentation, Scheler reveals that special material "facts" are directly perceived in every normative experience. These facts are values which are immediately given and which offer concrete guidance for action. The proper course of action is that on which lies the "higher" value. When possible, for example, and all else being considered equal, one ought to pursue the relatively higher value of social welfare over the lower value of individual utility.⁶ Hence, Scheler contrasts the formalism of liberalism with his nonformal, direct perception of values. In place of liberalism's process o

Liber alism is formal, however, in more than merely the manner in which it structures civil society . Beyond the concerns which Scheler voices over the formal methods and procedures of liberal political theories lies a more disquieting implication. In Scheler's estimation, liberalism inevitably reduces actual, human persons to less-than-human abstra ctions of themselves. The formal character of liberalism requires that unique personal needs and talents be ignored in order that individual women and men might be more efficiently handled by the political process. In a democratic liberalism, people would be treated as radically equal units of political demands and inputs, as identical faceless digits in the counting of numbers which constitutes policy-making, or as interchangeable cogs in the vast machine of civil society. Even a formalism which claims that persons must always be treated as ends and never as means, is in the final regard a depersonalizing construction. Scheler agrees with Immanuel K ant that the person "must never be considered a thing or a substance," and asserts along similar lines that the person must be the "immediately co-experienced unity of experiencing." Nonetheless, he contends that efforts by Kant to overcome the objectification of the other by dutifully considering all others as identical to oneself in regard to possessing the same structures of reason ironically leads to a conception of the other as less than the full person he or she is. Kant's form alism, like all formalisms, ineluctably can conceive of women and men only as "the X of certain powers" or "the X of some kind of rational activity." The depersonalization occurs, therefore, because the X, "that `something' which is the subject of rational activity, must be attributed to concrete persons--indeed, to all men--in the same way and as something identical in all men."⁷ Regardless of its intentions, it seems that formalism unavoidably reduces the human being to a ghostly caricature of his or her full per sonhood and distorts the possibility of polit ics by relegating normative decisions to cold-blooded procedures removed from the reality of the world and, especially, from the reality of values.

As with formalism, individu alism is not so much a causal factor in the development of liberalism as it is an aspect of the conceptual and normative framework of bourgeois man. In that liberalism emerges as the predominant paradigm of politics within this framework, liberalism is by and large erected on the idea of individuals being the elementary particles of so ciety and gov ernment. Thus, liberal political theories divide the political community into standardized chunks of rights, liberties, duties and so forth--chunks that are individual men and women. Because liberalism looks at the polity in this fashion, because it seeks to explain politics and guide political practice in accordance with this model, there can be little doubt that liberalism is "individualist."

Sc heler himself illustrates the modern notion of individua lism and its relationship with liberalism by contrasting the ideal of the liberal society with the dominant ideal of society existing prior to the emergence of the bourgeois type of man.⁸ The previous conception was one of a natural community wherein members partake of social rights and responsibilities proper for each member's determined place in the social order. Much different from this, Scheler's portrayal of the liberal society finds rights and responsibilities relative not to one's proper place in the political order, but to a real or heuristic understanding of one's rights and responsibilities without the political order--indeed, outside all association with others. In this picture, resp onsibility for others can only be a secondary consideration that follows and is built on a primary concern for unilateral self-responsibility. In the same way, rights are no longer to be understood as "social rights" (the only manner of understanding them prior to bourgeois man). Rather, rights in the liberal paradigm are understood as wholly lodged in the individual. As a result, the polity is "not a special reality outside or above the individual." It is, in fact, "only the similarity or dissimilarity of individuals' interests . . . [a] fabric of relations that represent `conventions,' `usage,' or `contracts,' depending on whether they are more explicit or more tacit."⁹

In what is plainly a parallel analogy, Scheler proposes a typology of sociality in a similar phylogenetic sequence of stages. Going beyond Ferdinand Toen nies dichotomous division of sociality into Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Scheler's is a four-tiered typology. As presented in his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, the bottommost level of sociality is the "herd," at which level the individual is totally submerged in a beastlike social organism.¹⁴ Above this, at the next level, is the "life community," where the barest shadow of the individual can be discerned. What small measure of individuality is afforded in the life community, however, would be an individuality determined as necessary by the community. Scheler describes such individuality as an appendage of the community, much as one's hand has an individual character but is meaningless without the whole body.¹⁵ At the next level of the typology, the "society," which Scheler likens to the individualism of democratic liberalism, more completely differentiated individuals appear. Individuals at this level succeed in transcending the understanding of themselves as only objects or means for the various ends of the community. However, in so doing, the community ceases to exist in its own right and becomes merely a means to the many ends of the individuals. These individuals, similarly, by asserting the primacy of the self, isolate themselves from their fellows who at best become objectified means for the ego's ends. In denying the community to assert the self, Scheler contends that the individuals of the so ciety surrender a fundamental aspect of true individ ualism--i.e., the personal dignity and respect for the se lf which is only freely given in the eyes of one's fellows. By viewing others as objects, the society individual is himself objectified in the perspective of each of his fellows.¹⁶

"Person community," the highest level of sociality, envisions a transcendence not only of the self as an object of the community, but of the community and others as objects of the self. In this instance, the community which disappeared as a separate existence at the level of the society, is reformed and transformed. While accepting the personhood and inherent dignity of others, in one sense, eliminates the subject/object relationship between the self and others, in another sense personal individuality is most deeply affirmed in the acceptance of one's own personhood as it is reflected in the eyes of others and in the embrace of the community. In familiar terminology, Scheler here is presenting an inte rsubjectivity involving the self, other selves, and the communal self. It is inherently political in that each self freely partakes in constituting the communal self and freely accepts being constituted by the communal self. The person community is a circle of free and individual persons in community engaged in on-going mutual acceptance and respect for the unique personhood of each other as individual and part of the social whole.¹⁷

The parallel characters of the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of sociality are reaffirmed in a further, very important respect: a fully developed person is one aware of his everpresent roots in the enveloping community. Despite these same roots, the relationship between person and community is not one of simple dependence. Acknowledging that the community delimits the boundaries of the person, Scheler yet wishes to retain avenues for the expression of some measure of individual freedom. The fully developed person, thus, is one who freely affirms and acknowledges the roots of his freedom in the community, and who as a free individual chooses the community. In the same way, phylogenetically, the individuality of the person community has its roots in the lower types of sociality, but the communality of the person community is not so rooted. This highest communality is reflective of the free choice of the individual person. Man's individualism occurs only in community, in other words, but the highest community is constituted by free individuals. Man's individual freedom is an achievement of his sociality; man's highest soc iality is an achievement of his individual fre edom.

Second, individualism fails to do full justice to the individual. True individuality requires the mutual acceptance of the unique personhoods of the self, the other selves, and the communal self. Because the liberal scheme sees the commu nity as dependent upon the parallel but separate actions of distinct individuals, the dignity of the unique personhood of the others and the community is precluded. Denying the subjectivity of the community and others undermines the possibility of the individual's own subjectivity.

Third, indiv idualism in the liberal scheme is substantively unachievable.¹⁸ Because each individual discovers himself only against the backdrop of the community, any conception of the individual as isolated from the community would be but an illusory abstraction. Although Scheler does not claim that there is a causal dependency between the individual and the community, or even a circular interdependency, he does assert that both the community and the individual are necessary for a full understanding of the person. As illustrated by these counterpoints, Scheler rejects the simplistic individualism of the liberal paradigm.

In the liberal paradigm, two differing explanations for the motivation behind the polity and behind all political action have figured prominently among theorists. Typically, however, the difference between these two explanations of motiv ation is often blurred by these liberal thinkers. Even at best, distinctions between these motivations are only vaguely noted. Yet, from the perspective of Scheler's phenomenological studies on values, a sharp line must be drawn between liberalism which is motivated by the negative value of "need" and liberalism which is motivated by the relatively low, but positive, value of enhanced utility or pleasure.¹⁹

Need motivated liberalism would conceive women and men as motivated in their political actions by an effort merely to escape from a present great evil toward a future condition with potentially less evil. In this pessimistic portrait of human existence, the status quo is perceived to be forever a situation of woeful circumstances which is tolerated only out of fear of degeneration into a worse situation. There is no tranquil, resigned acceptance reflected in whatever toleration might be granted to the present. Indeed, the circumstances of the present are an eternal goading for individuals to seek progress to predicaments of lesser evil.²⁰ All political actions must therefore be understood as directed at minimizing or blindly avoiding the discomforts of existence. Hob bes, in this vein, sees individuals acting politically due to fear of violent death, Spi noza out of fear of aimless anarchy.

It might be objected that Scheler 's identification of a pure needs motivated liberalism is itself an abstraction, that no liberal thinker completely ignores motivation from positive values. Hobbes, for example, might also be cited for his stress on the desire for a commodious life. But, while it will be acknowledged by Scheler that a number of needs motivated political theories also consider some minor positive values in motivation, such positive values are very much secondary motivations for these theories. Moreover, when present in these schemes, such positive values--pleasure, physical satisfaction, etc.--remain values of the lower levels in Scheler's own hierarchy of values. Thus, a needs motivated liberalism might discuss a motivation such as pleasure in the context of values, yet it plays a role of lesser importance in the explanation of motivation than a negative motivation such as fear or anxiety. Indeed, more typically, such thinkers despair of truly positive values and come to name that which fulfills a need as a "positive" value. Whatever the particulars, all needs motivated liberalisms operate according to the principle of ameliorating the deficiencies of existence which can never be wholly overcome.

Scheler, surveying all other theories of liberalism, concludes that what is not definable in terms of needs motivation can be roughly categorized under the general heading of "utility motivation."²¹ Under this heading, political practice is motivated by a recognition of only a narrow range of what for Scheler are the lower, materialistic values. Due to the materialistic nature of such values, motivation in such liberalisms aims toward the amassing of greater and greater quantities of those things which carry these values--i.e., prop erty.²² Unlike needs motivated liberalism, which pictures women and men engaged continually in seeking (though never completely finding) easement of the evils of life, utility liberalism finds the basic motivating factor in human action to be an attraction to perceived values such as "pleasure." They operate not on negative values, therefore, but on positive ones. As with the needs version, however, there are seldom pure examples of this utility based explanation of human motivation. Most liberal thinkers in this category also admit the negative value of "pain" and assign it a secondary role in the motivation process. Some more complex examples of utility liberalism contend that negative values predominate in the operation of civil society until a certain level of civilization is attained at which point utility values come to dominate.²³ Despite its various guises, utility liberalisms remain based upon the notion of "utility-seeking" as the primary motivation of individuals and the purpose for politics.

Scheler's evaluation of these two different explanations for motivation in liberalism, as noted previously, varies with each. In regard to needs motivated liberalism, Scheler begins by investigating the feeling of need itself. He contrasts the feeling of need with instinctual impulses such as hunger, terming it an experience of displeasure which accompanies the perception of a lacking.²⁴ Although such an experience occurs just as well in hunger and thirst, Scheler notes a profound difference in that "needs" are not a physical, natural experience of lacking, but rather are in some sense an artificial product of our minds and cultures. He supports this point by way of very convincing examples, noting that a starving tribe of primitives does not "need" the fish in nearby lakes if their culture has not come to consider fish as food. Similarly, pre-Columbian American aborigines did not "need" the horse, despite the fact that their children's children of the American plains truly, in fact, did have this need. Ne eds, thus, are not innate, but are developed in psychology and history by human actions.

Scheler's thinking in these regards cuts to the heart of the needs motivated concept of liberalism. If needs are a product of psychology and history--if there are no common "innate" needs--then needs can hardly be taken as the foundation of culture or the motor of historical progress. Needs cannot be the basis for explanation of civil ization or political practice when they themselves arise in history and in reference to human acts.²⁵ Furthermore, needs are certainly incapable of explaining true progress. Progress is measured in the attainment of new heights, in the coming to know that which was previously unknown. Yet, as Scheler makes evident, one can only need what one has known or experienced before. As negative, reaction-like feelings focused on what are perceived as the deficiencies of the present, needs are unable to truly look forward; they are unable to guide action in anticipation of the new "heights" of progress. Because the needs-driven model of liberalism is characterized by a state of constant agitation due to an individual's continual reaction to the inadequacies of the status quo, such a scenario would result not in genuine forward-looking progress but rather only in aimless, incremental flux. To suppose that the polity arises haphazardly from such a process is to deny it positive purpose and to reduce its existence to the status of "happy accident."²⁶

In opposition to this understanding, Scheler contends that all actions by men have their basis in the perception and subsequent pursuit of positive values. More than this, he argues that the subsequent pursuit of positive valu es itself has its "source in a surplus of positive feelings at the deepest stratum."²⁷ Human action springs, accordingly, not from need, but from surplus. True progress occurs when the present situation is not only "tolerable," but when there exists in the present a great enough overabundance of positive value so as to begin reaching for that which is greater than the present. Civilizations do not begin where humankind is in greatest need, but instead where there exists a great surplus of resources. Polities do not arise out of needs, but out of vision--vision freed from the ball and chain of necessity. Politics is properly a pattern of human actions, not reactions.

At first glance, utility liberalism would appear to be in concurrence with Scheler's response to the needs variety. The needs model, after all, fails in Scheler's estimation precisely because of its blindness to positive values. In contrast, utility liberalism finds the pursuance of positive values, in this case utility values, to be both the mainspring and the proper end of human action and progress. Oddly, however, it is exactly because utility liberalism finds utility to be both the motive behind individual action and the ultimate ends of human sociality that Scheler utterly rejects such liberalism as an explanation and normative guide for social life and politics. Utility liberalism, he claims, rests upon an "inversion" of man's hierarchy of values. Thereby, Scheler sees it as only a "perversion" of the proper means and end of the social order.

The significance of this becomes clear in considering the hierarchy of values which Scheler divides into four modal levels: the agreeable (from which utility values are derived), the vital, the spiritual (geistliche), and the holy.³¹ From the agreeable as lowest to the holy as highest, each level corresponds to its own distinct sphere of acts and values. At the same time, Scheler implies that there is a covert teleology in this order where the values of the lower levels are to be considered as directional signs pointing toward the highest levels. Utility liberalism, therefore, greatly errs in its consideration of the value of utility (pleasure, agreeableness) as the proper end of the polity or as the ultimate goal of political action. The implicit teleology of Scheler's hierarchy of values requires that every positive action be done in consideration of the highest values, or, as he states elsewhere, in consideration of the "destiny of man."³² Although Scheler certainly does not object to the intrinsic importance and independence of each modal level, in a situation of conflicting values the lower must give way to the higher; the utility values must be subordinated to the vital, the vital to the spiri tual and the spiritual to the h oly.

Utility liberalism's selection of utility as the means and immediate motivation of political and social action is also rejected by Scheler. Indeed, this is the point of "the most profound perversion" mentioned previously, for it is here most clearly that vital values are subordinated to utility values. The nature of utility, explored in phenomenological fashion, is determined by Scheler to be particularistic and individual. Utility is such, he finds, that it can only be privately pursued by men and women as individuals. Even thinkers who subscribe to utility liberalism are able to refer to the "utility of the social order" only as a mathematical majority of individual pleasures. Because the vital values, however, are concerned with the whole of a given life and not the particular pleasure of a specific part, they are seen to encompass the whole of the community's life.³³ On this basis, therefore, the proper motivation for political action is not the pursuit of utility, but rather the pursuit of the vital values of the whole community--e.g., its commonweal and growth--always, of course, in light of the highest values for mankind.³⁴

According to Scheler, the interpretation and understanding of reason also undergoes profound change with the emergence of the bourgeois man. Where previously reason was somehow understood as very much intertwined with fai th, lo ve, man's ultimate values, goods, ends and so forth, with this new type of man reason is stripped and isolated from such heady concepts. Reason being conceived in a much more narrow and restricted sense, Scheler contends that with the bourgeois man it "emancipates itself from both emotional and organic-schematic guidances."³⁵ Reason, thus, becomes estranged from the world and others: theory is distanced from nature and practice; facts are thoroughly severed from values.

Two somewhat different but essentially interrelated versions of this new interpretation of reason are evident within the general paradigm of liberalism. According to the first, reason is rendered a mundane, instrumental and calculative tool serving the interests of individual needs and utility. This "reasoning" is, therefore, only an instrument of the underlying motivations which were earlier considered and rejected by Scheler. Indeed, Sch eler only sketchily treats this particular version of the new understanding of reason.³⁶ The second version, however, attracts his closest and most engaging scrutiny. Perhaps in awareness of the inadequacies and dangers of establishing ethics and politics on a foundation of utility or need, this second version of the new reason takes the "purified" reason of the bourgeois man itself as a guide and starting point for practical action. Liberal thinkers in this "rationalist" vein would stand approvingly with Scheler in opposition to the claims of other liberals regarding a universal need or utility motivation. Such rationalists contend that needs or utility motivation belong in general to the world of sensible experience. For that reason such motivations and all that is derived from them are subject to individual psychology and experience and thus are dangerous grounds for political principles and untrustworthy bases for the legitimate polity. The rat ionalist skirts the problems of such empirically-based social and political theories by claiming that "the ground of obligation must not be sought in the nature of man or in the circumstances in which he is placed, but sought a priori solely in the concepts of pure reason" [Ka nt].³⁷ In other words, Scheler's rejection of those liberalisms which operate on the assumptions of need or utility motivation is inapplicable to liberalisms based on the a priori imperatives of universally-shared reason. Rationalism here, a derivation of rules for action from reason itself, becomes the explanation of, and justification for, society and politics.

Operationally, this understanding conceives women and men as molding the sensible world, through the innate processes of reason, into general categories with which reason itself can subsequently work. Rationalism contends that the raw world is unsuitable as a location from which to make social and normative judgments because it is particularized and individuated. Indeed, so much is each bit of experience in the everyday world understood as an individual and unique occurrence, that the world of these experiences is taken to be only a meaningless chaos of disparate phenomena. To make normative decisions in the midst of such an unsettled state of affairs and on the basis of such incoherent data, the rat ionalists reason, would be folly. To establish a political community on a foundation of this sort--the chaotic, raw facts of the sensible world before reason has digested them--would be absurd.³⁸

Beginning with the first of Scheler's points, he notes that the rationalist pictures mankind to be something firm and stable in its possession of certain faculties. Though most rationalist writers contend that they are concerned not with human reasoning, but with reason itself, their works offer little evidence to support the possibility of reason existing outside of human beings. (Even were artificial intelligence achievable, one would hope the rationalists would not allocate human choice to a computer; here the heart would murmur within them it seems.) With scant exceptions, to be a man is seen to be a rational man regardless of personal development, culture and so forth. As Sc heler writes, in the rationalist view "the concept of man was, in a way, involuntarily idealized, and a real species was subsumed under this ideal concept as a correlate, which today seems possible only on the basis of insufficient knowledge of the fact. This resulted in the `universally human,' `humanity,' and the `all too human.'"³⁹

The second objection which Sc heler raises against the use of such reason as the primary guide to practical affairs radicalizes the first. For not only, he argues, does the faculty of reason change, but reason itself changes. The key to Scheler's claim is what he terms the "functionalization of essential insight" [Funktionalisierung der Wesenseinsicht].⁴³ As Scheler explains the concept, reason exists much more intimately with man than the rationalists would admit. Reasoning affects reason, on one hand, and the objects of reason affect reason, on the other. Reason itself is pulled and stretched to accommodate both forces. Subjectivity/experience constitutes the conditions of reason; reason becomes what it is required to be by both man and world. It develops and grows. "The functionalization of essential insight enables us to understand that there can be an evolution and growth of reason itself--growth, that is to say, of its property in a priori rules of selection and function."⁴⁴ Contrary to the hopes of the rationalist, reason is not immune from the flux of experience. Nor is it immune from the actions of men and women. As Scheler puts it, reason "grows and diminishes, `evolves,' and `regresses,' because certain of the essential insights by whose functionalization its progress is controlled are attached to this or that particular locus in the concrete world-process and are possible only at those points."⁴⁵ Ironically, adding insult to injury, Scheler concludes that the particular reason upon which the rationalist liberal seizes, is but the peculiar reason of the European Enlightenment and only a cul-de-sac in the development of reason in Western civilization.⁴⁶

Even the perception of value, however, cannot be seen as sufficient grounds for reason, for there must be a tendency in the knower to rise beyond itself to participate in the known. There must be an "evaluating" or "taking interest in" that which is becoming known. In the most mundane sense, Sche ler refers to this tendency as "interest"; in the highest sense, he calls it "love." It is only by way of this fundamental tendency that man is able to overcome the self, in order to reason. He claims that man "before he is an ens cogitans or an ens volens, is an ens amans."⁴⁸ Reason is, therefore, not as the rationalists see it. The bedrock of our relation with another is always the perception of the inestimable value of the other and the tendency to deny the self to partake in the other's essential character. The root of our relation to the world is always interest. Reason cannot be the primary ground of normative choice and action; reason follows the "knowing" of the heart. The rationalist liberal errs, therefore, by establishing the legitimacy of politics on the priority of purified reason.

Considering the thorough rejection of the conditions of bourgeois liberalism in the foregoing, it may seem puzzling that the historical Max S cheler was something of a liberal in the last years of his life. More oddly, his support for liberal politics waxed while the liberal Weimar republic found its public support being eroded by non-liberal political movements of the right and the left. In his youth and early intellectual life, Scheler clearly opposed liberal political theories. Indeed, while generally supportive of the Reich and Kaiser, he had little liking even for the "mechanizing" of the state which he saw with the Prussians. For the initial engagements of the First World War, Scheler was a vigorous apologist for the German cause, often portraying the struggle in terms of preserving Germany from the forces of liberalism and cosmopolitanism. By 1916, however, Scheler reversed his support for the war. Deploring its brutality and horror, he hoped that its experience--the common, soul-jarring experience of the war shared by all of Europe--would serve as the basis for a unified European community. As with most German academics, the establishment of the Weimar regime saw Scheler lending the republic only lukewarm support. He doubted whether the seeds of England and America--liberal democracy , capit alism and Edisonism--were suitable for German soil.⁴⁹ By the mid-Twenties, however, Scheler's support for the Weimar government was firm. He remained adamantly opposed to any politics based upon materialism, the lower values, formalism, individualism and so forth; yet it is clear that he was and considered himself a liberal.

It does not seem that Scheler's "liberalism" represents a turning or reconsideration of his theoretical position. In the mid-Twenties, he does attempt to sharply delineate his own philosophy from Lebensphilosophie and all blind emotivisms.⁵⁰ Moreover, he does attack the German youth movements (the Wandervogel, etc., whose spirit he had previously admired) for their growing mysticism, irrationalism and unquestioning obedience to their leaders. Yet, he continues to applaud the youth's rejection of the bourgeois value system of their parents.⁵¹ Bitterly rebuking the growing influence of radical politics of the left and the right, and critical of the burgeoning mass society which he saw as promotive of such politics, Scheler nonetheless sustains his rejections of the bourgeois conditions of liberalism. Indeed, he contends that the mass society, the breeding ground of fasc ism and bols hevism, is itself only a consequence of the emergence of bourgeois man.⁵² The more interesting puzzle, therefore, is not why Sch eler increasingly accepts liberal politics, but rather how, on what grounds, a liberalism which rejects the formalism, individualism, motivation and rationalism of the bourgeois is itself possible? If bourgeois liberalism is not legitimate politics, then what liberalism could be legitimate?

For Scheler, as indicated earlier, such questions are perhaps wrongly put. The question of political legitimacy is not merely a question of the political order. His considered rejection of bourgeois liberalism is not simply reflective of it being incorrect or bad government. The failure of the predominant political paradigm of our era does not stem from liberalism itself, but rather from the inadequacy of the bourgeois conception of man and the accompanying conceptual and normative framework within which liberalism finds its source. As Scheler sees it, the bedrock of political legitimacy lies in a more basic legitimacy. To inquire about legitimate politics presupposes an inquiry into legitimately being human. The politics of bourgeois liberalism, in other words, fails to attain genuine legitimacy because the bourgeois man is not himself fully legitimate as a person. In accord with his own counsel, the puzzle of Scheler's own liberalism must find its resolution in Scheler's efforts to clarify the image of man. His image of man, moreover, both begins and finds its end with the concept of the person. Hence, Scheler's own personalist liberalism is inextricably linked with the criterion by which the liberalism of the bourgeois is rejected--namely, with the elusive dynamic, the per son, which is truly man.

l. A common theme, see "Zur Idee des Menschen" in Scheler's Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 3: Vom Umsturz der Werte, ed. Maria Sch eler (Bern: Francke, 1955). See also "Man in the Age of Adjustment" in Philosophical Perspectives, trans. Oscar Haac (Boston: Beacon, 1958). Note accordingly that the idea of self-inflicted evolution pictures man as possessing at least a moment of freedom in history. Even, however, in the radical sense of self-inflicted evolution, fre edom is constrained and conditioned by history for Scheler; cf. "Man and History" in ibid.

4. Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred Fri ngs and Roger Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). See especially his section "Formalism and Apriorism," pp. 45-110, and his section "Formalism and Person," pp. 370-595.

5. Ibid., pp. 5-6. N.B. Scheler agrees with Kant that "goods" are relative to the experiences of men. Scheler claims, however, that Ka nt errs by assuming that goods and va lues are identical. Values and their order, for Sc heler, are the objective and universal basis for ethics because they, unlike goods, are not relative to men's experiences.

6. This is not the place for a review of Scheler's ethics. Suffice it to say that Scheler finds values such as usefulness, nobility, holiness and so forth to be directly perceived by men. In recognizing a value, we also are immediately aware of the relative rank of that value vis-a-vis all possible values. Using "a priori" in an odd manner, it can be said that we recognize man in an a priori manner a rank-order of all possible values. Scheler's ethics, thus, demands simply that when possible one ought to choose the higher relative value. The noble must be chosen over the useful, the h oly over the noble, and so on.

8. Scheler, however, goes beyond Toen nies to chart a four-tiered typology of sociality, including: the herd, the life-community, society and person community. See ibid., pp. 526-35.

11. Cf. Scheler's Gedanken zu Moral und Politik, edited by Manfred F rings (Bern: Francke, 1973), pp. 5-6; his Formalism, op. cit., p. 525; and his essay "Man in the Era of Adjustment" in Philosophical Perspectives, op. cit., passim.

19. It is tempting to refer to this distinction as one between early and late liberalism, or between classical liberalism and utilitarianism. In his work, Ressentiment, trans. William Hol dheim (New York: Free Press, 1961), Scheler comes close to making such a conclusion. However, since Scheler does refrain from making such a division, utilitarianism and classical liberalism are treated under the generic term "bourgeois liberalism" in this essay.

22. Scheler in passages such as this seems clearly to be referring to the likes of Bentham who plainly treats all pleasures as equal and additive. One wonders, however, how well Scheler was acquainted with the works of J. S. Mi ll who proposed that there were qualitative differences between pleasure and that pleasures were not additive at the highest levels where they could only be truly appreciated by superior people. Also, consider that progress here would be conceived only as a quantitative, continued aggregation of more and more things.

37. Cf. Ka nt's preface to Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. L W. B eck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), p. 5ff.

38. In this vein, see John Ra wls' Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 1976), especially the separation from world by way of his veil of ignorance.

42. See Scheler's Man's Place in Nature, trans. Hans May erhoff (New York: Noonday, 1961), pp. 69-70, where he discusses the nature of man as becoming human--i.e., actively participating in the unfolding of being's self-awareness.

43. See Erkenntnis und Arbeit, op. cit., pp. 201-202, 231-33 and Sche ler's On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (London: SCM Press, 1960), pp. 198-213.

48. Scheler, "Ordo Amoris" in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David Lachter mann (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 110-11.

49. In regard to Scheler's changing position on the war, see his Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 4: Politische-Pedagogische Schriften, ed. Manfred Fring s (Bern: Francke, 1982), especially the essay "Der Krieg als Gesamterlebnis." Regarding his doubts concerning German liberalism, see his essays "Christliche Sozialismus als Antikapitalismus" and "Von kommenden Dingen" in ibid.

51. Sch eler, "Jugendbewegung" in ibid.