The Transcendental and the Psychological Method (Die transszendentale und die psychologische methode) – Max Scheler

Scheler’s early habilitation thesis on how philosophy should ground its inquiry into mind and knowledge

What the Work Is

Die transzendentale und die psychologische Methode (The Transcendental and the Psychological Method) is the habilitation thesis Max Scheler submitted in 1899, written under the direction of Rudolf Eucken at the University of Jena. A habilitation thesis is the qualifying dissertation by which a scholar in the German academic system earned the right to teach as a university lecturer, and Scheler’s was accepted on this basis, leading to his appointment as a Privatdozent at Jena in 1901. The work is written in German and belongs to the tradition of late nineteenth-century German philosophical inquiry into the foundations of knowledge and the methods proper to philosophy.

What the Book Is About

The thesis addresses a foundational question in philosophy: what method should philosophical inquiry into the mind and knowledge actually follow? Specifically, it examines the relationship and tension between two approaches — the transcendental method, associated with the Kantian tradition, which asks about the necessary conditions that make experience and knowledge possible, and the psychological method, which proceeds by investigating mental processes empirically. Scheler’s habilitation takes up this methodological problem as its central concern, seeking to clarify how these two approaches relate to one another and what each can and cannot achieve.

Key Ideas and Themes

The work is organised around the distinction named in its title. The transcendental method, in the Kantian sense, does not ask how particular mental events occur but rather what must be presupposed for experience, judgment, or knowledge to be possible at all. It operates at the level of conditions rather than causes. The psychological method, by contrast, treats mental life as a subject matter to be investigated through observation and empirical description, asking how thoughts, feelings, and perceptions actually arise and function.

Scheler’s thesis examines whether these two methods are compatible, whether one reduces to the other, or whether they occupy genuinely distinct domains. The question was a live one in German philosophy of the period, when the rise of experimental psychology under figures such as Wilhelm Wundt raised the prospect that philosophical questions about knowledge might be absorbed into a scientific psychology of mental processes. Scheler’s habilitation engages this problem directly, working to establish what is proper to each method and to resist the conflation of philosophical inquiry with psychological explanation.

The thesis reflects Scheler’s early formation under Eucken, whose own work sought to defend the autonomy of spiritual and philosophical life against reduction to naturalistic terms. It also belongs to the broader methodological debates of the 1890s, in which philosophers across Germany were re-examining the relationship between philosophy and the newly institutionalised human sciences.

Significance and Influence

The habilitation is significant primarily as the formal beginning of Scheler’s academic career and as an early statement of his lifelong concern with method — with how philosophical inquiry should proceed and what distinguishes it from other forms of investigation. The methodological questions it raises about the relationship between transcendental philosophy and empirical psychology would continue to occupy Scheler as he moved toward phenomenology in the following decade, developing the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl and applying it to ethics, value theory, and philosophical anthropology. The thesis thus marks the point at which Scheler entered the German philosophical profession, from which he would go on to become, in his lifetime, one of its most prominent figures.

Scheler was born in Munich on 22 August 1874, into a well-respected Orthodox Jewish family; his Catholic father had converted to Judaism in order to marry his mother. He had what has been described as a rather typical late nineteenth-century upbringing in a Jewish household bent on assimilation and agnosticism. He converted to Catholic Christianity in 1901.

He began his university studies as a medical student at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, then transferred to the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he abandoned medicine in favor of philosophy and sociology. At Berlin he studied under Wilhelm Dilthey, Theodor Lipps, Carl Stumpf, and Georg Simmel. He moved to the University of Jena in 1896, where he studied under Rudolf Eucken, at that time a very popular philosopher who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1908. Eucken corresponded with William James, a noted proponent of philosophical pragmatism, and throughout his life Scheler entertained a strong interest in pragmatism. It was at Jena that Scheler completed his doctorate and his habilitation and began his professional life as a teacher.

His doctoral thesis, completed in 1897, was entitled Beiträge zur Feststellung der Beziehungen zwischen den logischen und ethischen Prinzipien (Contribution to establishing the relationships between logical and ethical principles). In 1898 he made a trip to Heidelberg and met Max Weber, who also had a significant impact on his thought.

Later Philosophical Development

When the editors of Geisteswissenschaften invited Scheler, about 1913/14, to write on the then developing philosophical method of phenomenology, he indicated that the phenomenological movement was not defined by universally accepted theses but by a “common bearing and attitude toward philosophical problems.” Scheler disagreed with Husserl that phenomenology is a method of strict phenomenological reduction, holding it instead to be “an attitude of spiritual seeing … something which otherwise remains hidden ….” Calling phenomenology a method, on his view, fails to take seriously the phenomenological domain of original experience: the givenness of phenomenological facts (essences or values as a priori) “before they have been fixed by logic,” and prior to assuming a set of criteria or symbols, as is the case in the natural and human sciences as well as other (modern) philosophies which tailor their methods to those of the sciences. Rather, that which is given in phenomenology “is given only in the seeing and experiencing act itself.” The essences are never given to an ‘outside’ observer without direct contact with a specific domain of experience. Phenomenology is an engagement of phenomena, while simultaneously a waiting for its self-givenness; it is not a methodical procedure of observation as if its object is stationary. Thus the particular attitude (Geisteshaltung, lit. “disposition of the spirit” or “spiritual posture”) of the philosopher is crucial for the disclosure, or seeing, of phenomenological facts. This attitude is fundamentally a moral one, where the strength of philosophical inquiry rests upon the basis of love. Scheler describes the essence of philosophical thinking as “a love-determined movement of the inmost personal self of a finite being toward participation in the essential reality of all possibles.”

The movement and act of love is important for philosophy for two reasons. First, if philosophy, as Scheler describes it, hearkening back to the Platonic tradition, is a participation in a “primal essence of all essences” (Urwesen), it follows that for this participation to be achieved one must incorporate within oneself the content or essential characteristic of the primal essence. For Scheler, such a primal essence is most characterized according to love, thus the way to achieve the most direct and intimate participation is precisely to share in the movement of love. This primal essence, however, is not an objectifiable entity whose possible correlate is knowledge; thus, even if philosophy is always concerned with knowing, as Scheler would concur, nevertheless reason itself is not the proper participative faculty by which the greatest level of knowing is achieved. Only when reason and logic have behind them the movement of love and the proper moral preconditions can one achieve philosophical knowledge. Second, love is likewise important insofar as its essence is the condition for the possibility of the givenness of value-objects and especially the givenness of an object in terms of its highest possible value. Love is the movement which “brings about the continuous emergence of ever-higher value in the object–just as if it was streaming out from the object of its own accord, without any sort of exertion…on the part of the lover. …true love opens our spiritual eyes to ever-higher values in the object loved.” Hatred, on the other hand, is the closing off of oneself or closing one’s eyes to the world of values. It is in the latter context that value-inversions or devaluations become prevalent, and are sometimes solidified as proper in societies. Furthermore, by calling love a movement, Scheler hopes to dispel the interpretation that love and hate are only reactions to felt values rather than the very ground for the possibility of value-givenness (or value-concealment). Scheler writes, “Love and hate are acts in which the value-realm accessible to the feelings of a being…is either extended or narrowed.”

Material Value-Ethics

Values and their corresponding disvalues are ranked according to their essential interconnections as follows: religiously relevant values (holy/unholy); spiritual values (beauty/ugliness, knowledge/ignorance, right/wrong); vital values (health/unhealthiness, strength/weakness); and sensible values (agreeable/disagreeable, comfort/discomfort).

Further essential interconnections apply with respect to a value’s (disvalue’s) existence or non-existence: the existence of a positive value is itself a positive value; the existence of a negative value (disvalue) is itself a negative value; the non-existence of a positive value is itself a negative value; and the non-existence of a negative value is itself a positive value.

With respect to values of good and evil: good is the value that is attached to the realization of a positive value in the sphere of willing; evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a negative value in the sphere of willing; good is the value that is attached to the realization of a higher value in the sphere of willing; and evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a lower value [at the expense of a higher one] in the sphere of willing. Goodness, however, is not simply “attached” to an act of willing, but originates ultimately within the disposition (Gesinnung) or “basic moral tenor” of the acting person. Accordingly, the criterion of ‘good’ consists in the agreement of a value intended, in the realization, with the value preferred, or in its disagreement with the value rejected; the criterion of ‘evil’ consists in the disagreement of a value intended, in the realization, with the value preferred, or in its agreement with the value rejected.

Man and History (1924)

In 1924, in Man and History (Mensch und Geschichte), Scheler gave some preliminary statements on the range and goal of philosophical anthropology. In this book, Scheler argues for a tabula rasa of all the inherited prejudices from the three main traditions that have formulated an idea of man: religion, philosophy, and science. Scheler argues that it is not enough just to reject such traditions, as did Nietzsche with the Judeo-Christian religion by saying that “God is dead”; these traditions have impregnated all parts of our culture, and therefore still determine a great deal of the way of thinking even of those that don’t believe in the Christian God.

Death and Legacy

Scheler planned to publish his major work in anthropology in 1929, but on May 19, 1928, he died in a Frankfurt hospital due to complications from a severe heart attack. Some fragments of the incomplete work have been published in Nachlass. After Scheler’s death in 1928, Martin Heidegger affirmed, with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler and praised him as “the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and in contemporary philosophy as such.”

Personal Life

Scheler’s first marriage, to Amalie von Dewitz, ended in divorce. Scheler married Märit Furtwängler in 1912, who was the sister of the noted conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Scheler’s son by his first wife, Wolf Scheler, became troublesome after the divorce, often stealing from his father, and in 1923, after Wolf had tried to force him to pay for a prostitute, Scheler sent him to his former student Kurt Schneider, a psychiatrist, for diagnosis. Schneider diagnosed Wolf as not being mentally ill, but a psychopath, using two diagnostic categories (Gemütlos and Haltlos) essentially equivalent to today’s “antisocial personality disorder.”

Religion and Health

An adult convert to Catholicism, after 1921 Scheler disassociated from Catholic teaching and even from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, committing himself to pantheism and philosophical anthropology. Scheler had developed the habit of smoking between sixty and eighty cigarettes a day, which contributed to a series of heart attacks throughout 1928, forcing him to cancel any travel plans.

Works and English Translations

Scheler’s works include Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (1913); Der Genius des Kriegs und der Deutsche Krieg (1915); Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (1913–1916); Krieg und Aufbau (1916); Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses (1917); Vom Umsturz der Werte (1919); Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus (1921); Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1921); Probleme der Religion. Zur religiösen Erneuerung (1921); Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (1923, newly edited as Zur Phänomenologie … 1913); Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre, 3 Bände (1923/1924); Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (1926); Der Mensch im Zeitalter des Ausgleichs (1927); Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928); Philosophische Weltanschauung (1929); and Logik I. (Fragment, Korrekturbögen, Amsterdam 1975).

English translations include The Nature of Sympathy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); Philosophical Perspectives, translated by Oscar Haac (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 144 pages (German title: Philosophische Weltanschauung); On the Eternal in Man, translated by Bernard Noble (London: SCM Press, 1960), 480 pages; Ressentiment, edited by Lewis A. Coser, translated by William W. Holdheim (New York: Schocken, 1972), 201 pages, ISBN 0-8052-0370-2; Selected Philosophical Essays, translated by David R. Lachterman (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 359 pages, ISBN 9780810103795, ISBN 0-8101-0379-6; 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, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 620 pages, ISBN 0-8101-0415-6 (original German edition: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 1913–16); Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, translated by Manfred S. Frings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 239 pages, ISBN 0-7100-0302-1; Person and Self-value: Three Essays, edited and partially translated by Manfred S. Frings (Boston: Nijhoff, 1987), 201 pages, ISBN 90-247-3380-4; On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing. Selected Writings, edited and partially translated by Harold J. Bershady (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 267 pages, ISBN 0-226-73671-7; and The Human Place in the Cosmos, translated by Manfred Frings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 79 pages, ISBN 978-0-8101-2529-2.