The Relationship Between Scheler's Panentheism, Pantheism,
and Theism
by Dr. Peter Spader, Marywood University ________________________________________________________________________
(Below is an edited version of the paper I read.
I am planning to revise this paper for publication so please do not
quote it without my permission.)
This paper will explore the relationship between Scheler’s
early theism, his later panentheism, and pantheism. This is important to do
because as Scheler explored and developed a new ethical personalism he had to
face a number of difficulties presented by the new insights he was forging. As
a result his thought underwent not only development, but basic changes as
well. One of the most dramatic changes in position was Scheler’s shift from
the theism he had championed to a panentheism which seemed to be a version of
the pantheisms he had vigorously criticized. What I intend to do in this paper
is look at the relationship between Scheler’s later panentheism and his
earlier theism, as well as its relationship to pantheism, to help develop both
the differences between his earlier and later position, and the possible
points of contact. Before I do that, I must sketch what I believe was the
philosophical/theological crisis in his earlier position which caused the
shift.
The first thing to note is that Scheler’s primary concern throughout
his life was always the development of his ethical personalism, and a
cornerstone of Scheler’s ethics is his belief that one realizes the moral
value good through the realization of positive, high, non-moral values. As he
puts it in the Formalism in
Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values:
A New Attempt toward the Foundation
of an Ethical Personalism1:
The value ‘good’--in an absolute sense--is the value that appears,
by way of essential necessity, on the act of realizing the value
which (with respect to the measure of cognition of that being which realizes
it) is the highest. The value ‘evil’--in an absolute sense--is the value
that appears on the act of realizing the lowest value (GW2 47/F 25).
This belief presents a metaphysical challenge to Scheler- -
-what exactly is “realization?” Although he gives some hints to an answer
in the Formalism, it is not until he turns to wrestling with the idea
of God in On the Eternal in Man2
that he finally gives an answer as he develops the idea of creation. As he
puts it:
Now, within the whole range of our world-experience we
know only one case, one empirical datum, in which a contingent existence is
not merely altered, modified or transformed but actually created by the action
of another. That is the form, shape, idea which the originally “creative”
human act of will imposes on a given material. And it is only in this one set
of circumstances that we may see an ideal thing (the content of the volitional
project) “become” real . . . in so far as there is any question of its general
realness (as distinct from its mere realness here-and-now, in this or
that situation, with these or those properties), the reality of any contingent
real existent must have been effected by the agency of some kind
of volition. In other words, a volition must have created any real
contingent existent (GPR 187-188/EPR 191).
Now Scheler is here speaking of our experience of creation as finite
human persons, but as he develops in this essay, as a theist Scheler believes
that creation is ultimately traced back to the creator God. I will not detail
Scheler’s development of the idea of God as mind (Geist) or that God is all
good and all powerful, as his ideas are relatively traditional, if insightful.
What is of concern to us here is the fact that Scheler’s connecting of moral
good with the realization of values and his understanding of creation and the
nature of God creates for him the purest form of the classic problem of evil,
the problem of how an all good, all-wise and all-powerful God could create a
world that contains evil. Since Scheler defines
the moral values good and evil in terms of the realization of non-moral
values, he faces a particularly pointed version of the problem.
What makes the problem of evil particularly difficult for Scheler is
the fact that when he turns to dealing with this problem, he rejects several
classic ways of dealing with it. First of all he rejects a dualistic answer,
the idea of two principles, one good and one evil, as the grounds of the
world. Although he admits that if we look just at the “factual world and its
ordering . . . another underlying principle, one just as fundamental as the
first--a blind energy or a substance co-original with God. In other words
dualism, as in the religions of the Manichees and the ancient Persians, would
not be precluded; on the contrary it would be probable (GPR 193/EPR 197),”
he rejects this possibility because he believes with Augustine that we do not
know God from knowing the world, but vice-versa.
He also rejects the idea that evil could be rooted in the will of human
persons. He does so because of the profound depth at which evil appears in
this world. At this point in the development of Scheler’s thought he
believed that evil is antecedent to the appearance of the human person, and is
so deep in the world that it requires a being greater than human persons to
account for it. As he says: “ . . .the free action of some mind superior to
human strength, an action whereby the world has fallen into its present
condition, becomes an assured truth of reason. The ‘fall’ is thus a truth
of reason inseparable from theism: it
is no mere proposition from revelation (GPR 225/EPR 231).” He goes on to
assert: “The origin of the wickedness
which is the ultimate basis of this
world’s evil and also the cause of direct temptations to human wickedness,
can lie neither in the world-basis itself nor, solely, in man. It must reside
in a metaphysical zone lying intermediate between the two, in a free
insurrection against God instigated by a person having power over the world (GPR
229/EPR 235).”
The idea that a being greater than human persons rebelled against God
is not new or unique to Scheler. The Christian story of the angel Lucifer’s
rebellion against God is well known. Unfortunately, while exploring why the
human person could not rebel against God, Scheler says:
That man should “fall” exclusively from his own
free-will--without temptation by any higher and mightier element of evil above
him--is unthinkable for the god-created image of God, even if we
attribute to him a genuine personal freedom, a genuine freedom of choice.
Freedom, being intrinsically a positive good, is ceteris paribus
freedom for good rather than freedom for evil. The activation of freedom in
the sense of a real choice of evil therefore requires a stimulus outside and
above man (GPR 228/EPR 234).
The difficulty is that unless Scheler wishes to adopt a
dualism this more powerful person must also be created by God. Thus his
argument why we cannot blame evil on human persons applies equally to this
more powerful tempter, despite the fact that he is more powerful than a human
person. Unless the tempter were equal in power to God, a possibility ruled out
by Scheler when he rejected a dualistic answer, Scheler’s answer to the
problem of evil fails.
Since realization is central to Scheler’s ethics he faces two
choices. He can either abandon or modify his ethics (at least his
understanding of the connection between the realization of non-moral values
and the realization of the moral values good and evil), or he must abandon or
modify his theism. Since he was, throughout his life, primarily focused on
developing his ethical personalism, I do not find it surprising that he
modified his religious beliefs.
Yet what modification could be made? Why not some form of pantheism?
Scheler defines pantheism as those systems of thought and feeling that rest on
the equation “God = World.” Unfortunately, as Scheler develops in “The
Problems of Religion,” pantheism is not a solution to the problem of evil.
He starts this essay by pointing out that the “Great War” (World War 1)
had destroyed the possibility of Comte’s religious faith in “humanity,”
and that the depth of evil revealed by this world war has dealt a blow to the
“idealistic” version of pantheism, the idea that the world is somehow
identified with an existing God. As Scheler puts it:
Pierre Bayle was perhaps the first to ask the ironic
question (in his Dictionary’s
article, “Spinoza”) whether God is at war with himself
in time of war. But how more profoundly shattered is pantheism now than was
indicated in that question! The seeds of its destruction were already sown in
the development of pantheistic thought and feeling over the course of the
nineteenth century and during the two decades of the twentieth (GPR 107/EPR
111).
Scheler then points out that as non-idealistic elements in
reality began to press in, even before the first world war, pantheism had to
include more and more “irrational, non-divine and . . . even counter-divine
factors” (GPR 111/EPR 115). Indeed, by the time we get to Schopenhauer we no
longer have a pantheism but rather a pandemonism (albeit one that is still
“attached to” Christian values) (GPR 112/EPR116).
The reason for the inadequacy of pantheisms to solve the problem of
evil is not hard to see. Theism fails unless you can find a way to show that
an all-good, all-powerful, all-wise, God can create a world and still not be
responsible for the evil contained in that world. This is not easy to do, and
Scheler rejects the answers that many theists find cogent. But pantheism,
which accepted the identification of God = World faces a much more difficult
task. If we begin with an idea of God and then accept that the world is God
you have a version of the problem that parallels that of theism, but is even
more basic. How can the existing world be God when it contains evil. Probably
the best way to answer the problem is to claim that we are, in some way or
other, ignorant of the true reality of the world such that what we see as evil
is not ultimately evil. Although this may well be true in some cases, given
the depth and pervasiveness of evil that Scheler sees, he will not accept this
answer. And if you were to accept the idea that the ultimate basis for the
world is demonic, you must account for the presence of “good” in the
world.
The main problem with pantheisms are that they are monisms. Since good
and evil are so radically different, all monisms, whether theistic or
pantheistic, face the problem of evil. Yet Scheler had rejected dualisms which
posit two equally powerful elements, the most promising theistic answers, and
he must reject pantheism as well. How then, can he come up with a new answer
to the problem of evil while still satisfying the human “cry of longing”
for something transcendent, something that is truly “holy”? He does so
with a most creative form of Panentheism which does solve the problem of evil.
To understand Scheler’s new position and how it solves the problem of
evil we must remember that in Scheler’s ethics the moral values are
co-realized along with the realization of high, positive non-moral values, and
the nature of realization is most clearly revealed in the act of creation.
Thus any new position he adopts must show that the act of creation of the
universe, if it involves a Deity, does not entail the creation of evil by that
Deity. Scheler’s Panentheism does so because although it is a dualism, it is
not a dualism of good vs. evil. Let me begin to show this by first sketching
Scheler’s new position in simple terms.
In Scheler’s new dualism we have the Deitas on one side, the side of
Geist (mind, spirit), but the power to create is on the other side, the side
of Drang (force, drive, impulse). In this dualism Deitas is not an
all-powerful creator God but rather initially powerless. Thus Drang is not
evil but initially is pure, undifferentiated or defined force (impulsion). It
is, initially, a morally neutral force that can become either the embodiment
of higher values (Deitas) or lower values. It is only when the raw Drang
becomes something that good or evil appears and since good or evil occurs
along with the realization of either high, positive values (good) or low,
negative, values, we must have some being who realizes these values for there
to be good or evil. That being in Scheler’s Panentheism is the human person,
the point of interaction between Geist and Drang. Thus it is the human person
who becomes either good or evil, not Drang and not Deitas. Thus the Deitas,
though it is the ideal model of the universe, is not the agent of good or evil
until the human person undertakes acts of realization.
Neat and simple. Unfortunately, as so often happens when you solve one
problem, your solution creates new problems. Scheler’s new Panentheism is no
exception. Critics quickly pointed out two serious problems. First, if Geist
is powerless, and Drang is blind force, how can Geist become active, and
secondly, given how radically different Geist and Drang are, how does the
interaction between them occur?
These problems are made no easier by the fact that in most of the
writings that appeared before his untimely death Scheler was trying to sketch
his new position in a way that highlighted just how radically different it was
from his earlier theism of pantheism, and so much of what he says is
misleadingly one-sided. Let me now try to correct some of this one-sidedness
to show how the apparent flaws in Scheler’s Panentheism can be dissipated.
As I developed in Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic,
Development and Promise,3 the
first problem (the apparent powerlessness of Geist) arises because Scheler was
so concerned to deny creative power to Geist to avoid the problem of evil,
that he often does seem to be denying it all forms of power. Yet he does give
Geist a form of power. Geist has the power to “inhibit and release” (Hemmen
und Enthemmen) Drang. In Man’s Place in Nature
(Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos)4 Scheler
shows that he understands Geist must have independent power when he rejects
the idea that Geist only arises from Drang with the repression of instinctual
forces (a position he ascribes to Buddha, Schopenhauer and Freud) because such
an approach cannot answer the question of:
“What is it that negates in man? What is it that denies the will to
live? What is it that represses instincts?” (SMK 48/MP 60-61). It is mind,
Scheler asserts, which initiates all of these things (SMK 49/MP 62).
The power that Scheler gives to Geist is evident also when he speaks of
willing. A particularly dramatic example occurs in “The Forms of Knowledge
and Culture” (“Die Formen des Wissens und die Bildung”)5
essay. In a footnote concerning the fact that mental willing is basically a
negative, restraining activity, Scheler states that:
We do not derive the origin of the world from a
“creation out of nothing,” as does theism, but from the “non non
fiat” (it shall not be non-existent), through which the divine spirit
released the demonic drive in order to realize the idea of the divine which
had been only a “potential.” In order to realize “himself,” God had
to accept in exchange the substance of the world
and world history (FWB 148 Fn. 15/FKC 130-131 Fn. 15).
Furthermore, Scheler accepts that there is a positive
element to this “negative” power. As Scheler put it in Man’s Place
in Nature:
There is one thing the spirit cannot do: it cannot
generate or cancel the instinctual energy; it cannot enlarge or diminish it.
It can only call upon energy complexes which will then act through the
organism in order to accomplish what the spirit “wills.” But there is
something positive, not just in regulating the drives, but also in the goal
achieved thereby. It is a process of gaining power and activity for the
spirit, inner freedom and autonomy (SMK 49/MP 62).
The second problem arises due to the fact that for Scheler the human
person plays a very unique role in the development of interaction between
Geist and Drang. As I argue in Scheler’s Ethical Personalism, “Geist,”
as one of the two elements of the dualistic ens a se, must be present from the
first, and although Scheler does not explicitly admit this, his talk of the
early interaction between “Geist” and Drang shows this is true. In the
“Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge” (“Probleme einer Sociologie
des Wesens”)6
essay Scheler states that Geist is always a “determining factor” and never
a “realizing factor” (PSW 21/PS 37). Thus any presence standing out
against pure chaos shows the working of Geist on Drang. As I put it in Scheler’s
Ethical Personalism:
. . .even these lowest “centers of powers” are
experienced as “centers and fields.” There is at least a minimal form of
determination to them, even if it is only detectable as a “statistical
regularity.” When we go up from these lowest levels of the inorganic world
to even the lowest form of psychic life, the impulse-feelings (Gefühlsdrang),
we see a definite increase in determination. These Gefühlsdrang
may well be “blind to ideas” and we may well still be at a level
where “urge” and “feeling” are not yet differentiated and all we have
is a movement “toward” or “away,” but this is a decided improvement in
directedness and coherence over the inorganic centers of energy, which are not
even governed by causality. Yet both are manifestations of
Drang. Furthermore, as noted above, even these lowest levels of
inorganic centers of force cannot be totally undetermined. You cannot speak of
a force, even one noted only through statistical regularity, without
differentiating it from the background of total randomness. Determination
occurs at every level of being, from the lowest to the highest. Indeed, as
Scheler goes up the scale of being he distinguishes the increasingly
“higher” levels of being in terms of the type of, and degree of,
determination present. This extends right up to human being. (SEP, p. 208)
I believe Scheler did not acknowledge Geist at lower
levels to emphasize what appears with the emergence of the human person. Up to
this point in the interaction between Geist and Drang, they are tightly
intertwined. (We can see how tightly as we observe lower life forms and even
the higher vertebrates so close to being human persons but not quite there
yet.) But with the emergence of the human person Geist can and does win free
through the act of ideation. Again, as I put it in Scheler’s Ethical
Personalism:
We are, as human beings, able to act according to ideal
objects. In the animal, Geist was able to manifest itself only through
“creative dissociation,” that is, by the ever more accelerated
differentiation of forces and force-complexes into more and more discrete
elements. With the human person, Geist achieved a quantum leap upward.
Human mind, instead of merely blocking the oncoming forces into a new
direction or differentiating them into more discrete elements, introduces
something truly new, namely ideal objects. Geist now has “essences”
which can be models for the future development of the cosmos. Scheler comments
at one point in “The Forms of Knowledge and Culture” essay that the world
had, up to man evolved “really” (realiter), and now man ought to
evolve “ideally” (idealiter) (FWB 92/FKC 20).
This is why Scheler is almost justified in saying that
Geist does not appear until it becomes freed from Drang in the human person,
though strictly speaking Geist and Drang were present and interacting from the
first. Yet if pure Geist becomes fully manifest only in the human, I would
suggest that good and evil, and Deitas only appear with the human person as
well. I say this because for Scheler Deitas is an “ideal possibility,” and
the moral values good and evil occur only with the realization of high or low
non-moral values. It is only when Geist has won its freedom from Drang that we
can talk of such realization (and the fact that reality is given to Drang and
not Geist, though it modifies and complicates the details of willing and
realization, does not change this).7
We see this sense of emergence in various passages by Scheler. In the
essay “The Forms of Knowledge and Culture,” while discussing the
constitution of the human person, Scheler says that the human person is a
being lofty and noble who has freed himself from the subservience to life and
purified himself into mind, a mind whose service “life” enters. Of this
process Scheler says:
We have here an ever new and growing process of
“becoming man” in this specific sense, a humanization which is both
self-deification and a collaboration in realizing the idea of divinity. It is
not waiting for a saviour from the exterior . . . It is, rather, self-deification,
and that means also collaboration in realizing the idea of the spiritual
divinity which is “essentially” present in the substrata of the life-force
( . . .der ewig nur “wesende” Idee der
geistigen Gottheit im Substrate der Drangs)
(FWB102/FKC 30)
Throughout “world” history, Scheler goes on to say,
the human person continually develops “. . .what is incipient in its essence.
. . (. . .was es seinen Wesen nach keimhaft
ist. . .), in the sense of Pindar who said: ‘Become the one you
are’” (FWB 103/FKC 30).
Now saying this does not deny that Geist and Drang are early analogues
of good and evil. As Scheler states:
The original order of relations holding between the higher
and lower forms of being and categories of value, on the one hand, and the
forces and energies in which these forms are realized, on the other, may be
expressed as follows: ‘To begin with, the lowest forms are the most
powerful, and the highest the most impotent’ (SMK 52/MP 66).
He goes on to say that Geist and life are related in the
same way. Thus the early world as realized lower values starts out as
initially the analogue of an “evil” world. It is important to see,
however, that the analogy is weak since realization does require an act of a
person, and this is why I say that good and evil, Deitas, and even pure Geist
and Drang, only appear with the emergence of the human person.
This is why the human person now becomes so important. Deitas is only
an ideal possibility, and only if the human person can inspirit Drang will the
Deitas become realized. The human Geist finally wins free from Drang with its
ability to “ideate” and this freedom gives us the first clear vision of
Deitas. Yet it is the very freedom from Drang which human Geist finally
achieves that creates the possibility human persons will become so cut off
from Drang they fail to realize Deitas. Thus the realization of Deitas is up
to human beings alone.
There is one more issue to explore. Is Scheler’s Panentheism totally
incompatible with classic theism? His version clearly is, since it denies to
Deitas both existence and creation “ex nihilo.” In Scheler’s Panentheism
Drang does have significant impact on what can be realized by Geist in the
interaction between them. But can his Panentheism be modified in some way to
make it compatible with theism? After all Scheler sketched key elements of his
later position during his theistic period, in, for example, The Eternal in
Man, when he was discussing realization by finite human beings.
Let me suggest a way of making key elements of Scheler’s Panentheism
compatible with the idea of a creator God. Let us suppose that the creator God
of theism exists. Let us further suppose that this God wished to create a
world where finite human persons have free will and the responsibility for
good and evil that is necessary for their moral development. (Furthermore, let
us suppose this God realizes that in creating such a world he cannot interfere
with either their evolution or the evolution of nature, except in rare
circumstances human beings will call “miracles,” lest he rob them of their
freedom and responsibility. Such a God would also know the pain of seeing his
children hurt both by natural “evil” and the evil they created.) Last of
all, let us suppose that this creator God creates this world with both the raw
material out of which Deitas can be realized (Drang), and the possibility the
human persons can both see that ideal Deitas and be able to use that raw
material to realize it. One might even see in such a creator God the hope that
if his plan worked he would see emerge a new encompassing person, a new
finite, real, God. I suggest that the emerging world that Scheler’s
Panentheism sketches for us might be just such a world. Such a position is
clearly not classic theism with its rather simple idea of an “all-powerful
God,” but it does rescue the idea of a real, personal, creator God.
Key elements of Scheler’s beliefs made this vision impossible for
him. Yet even in his last years I hear echoes of such a creator God when he
speaks of Geist “releasing” Drang, and the human person “co-creating”
with Deitas. One can, of course, read such passages as simply metaphors. But
as a theist I prefer to think they are echoes of God in the mind of Max
Scheler even at the end.
ENDNOTES:
1.
Max Scheler, Der
Formalismus in der Ethik und die
Materiale Wertethik: Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung
eines Ethischen Personalismus was first published
in the Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phänomenologische
Forschuung in two parts, the first part in 1913 and the second in
1916. It is reprinted as Volume 2 of the Collected Works (Gesammelte
Werke), Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der
Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik: Neuer
Versuch der Grundlegung eines Ethischen
Personalismus (1913/16; rpt. Bern: Franke Verlag,
1980 [now published by Bouvier Verlag: Bonn]), pp. 659. The English
translation is Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and
Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New
Attempt toward the Foundation of an
Ethical Personalism, Translated by Manfred S. Frings and
Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. xxxiv +
620. This work will be referred to below using the Gesammelte Werke
edition and this translation by means of the abbreviation (GW2/F).
2.
Max
Scheler, “Probleme der Religion,” in Vom Ewigen
im Menschen, which first appeared in 1921. It was reprinted in
Volume 5 of the Collected Works (Gesammelte Werke),
Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1921; rpt. Bern:
Franke Verlag, 1954 [now published by Bouvier Verlag:
Bonn]), pp. 101-354. The English translation is “Problems of
Religion,” in On the Eternal in Man,
Translated by Bernard Noble (1960; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: The Shoe String
Press, 1972), pp. 105-356. This work will be referred to using the
abbreviation (GPR/EPR).
3.
Scheler’s
Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development and Promise (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. xviii + 327. This work is
referred to below using the abbreviation (SEP, p. ).
4.
Max
Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos
(Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Verlag, 1928). This
work is reprinted in Volume 9 of the Collected Works (Gesammelte Werke),
Max Scheler, Späte
Schriften (1928; rpt. Bern: Franke
Verlag, 1976 [now published by Bouvier Verlag: Bonn]), pp.
7-71. The English translation is Max Scheler, Man’s Place in
Nature, translated, with an Introduction, by Hans Meyerhoff (New
York: The Noonday Press, 1971), pp. xxxv + 105. This work is referred to
below using the abbreviation (SMK/MP).
5.
“Die Formen des Wissens und die Bildung” first appeared in
1925. It is reprinted in Philosophische Weltanschuuang (1929; rpt. Bern:
Franke Verlag, 1976, pp. 85-120 [now published by Bouvier
Verlag: Bonn]). The translation
is “The
Forms of Knowledge and Culture” in
Philosophical Perspectives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 13-49.
This work is referred to below using the abbreviation (FWB/FKC).
6. “Probleme einer Sociologie des Wesens”
first appeared
as Scheler’s contribution to “Versuche zur einer Soziologie
des Wissens,” Schriften des Forschuungsinstitutes
in Köln,
II, ed. Max Scheler (München:
Verlag Duncker u. Humblot, 1924). The essay is
reprinted in Volume 8 of the Collected Works (Gesammelte
Werke), Max Scheler, Die Wissenformen und die
Gesellschaft (1926; rpt. Bern: Franke Verlag,
1960 [now published by Bouvier Verlag: Bonn]), pp. 15-190. The
English translation is Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology
of Knowledge, Translated by Manfred S. Frings. Edited, with
an Introduction, by Kenneth W. Stikkers (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1980), pp. vii + 239. This essay will be referred to using the
abbreviation (PSW/PS).
7.
I believe the importance of
ideation explains why Scheler spent so much time in his last years trying
to work out the intricate dance of Geist and Drang as ideas
come into being and are realized. To get a sense of the creativity of
Scheler I recommend Chapter IX (“The Last Vision:
The Becoming of God, of World, and the Cosmic Place of Human
Existence”) of Manfred Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler
(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997), pp. 249-298.