(a) THE IDEA OF THE WORLD AND THE IDEA OF GOD
IF one starts from Scheler’s correlation between “person and world,” the “world” lacks the all-embracingness and absoluteness which everybody involuntarily understands in the concept of it. The limited personality therefore is confronted with the idea of the “macrocosm,” to which it is related as the part to the whole. But if correlativity continues in force as a law, there must be a corresponding personal counterpart for the macrocosm. The idea of God formulates such a correlate, the idea of “an infinite and perfect spiritual person.” The existence of such a person indeed does not follow from the idea; but his acts, in their essential outlines, are for us conceivable from actional phenomenology, in so far as this considers acts not of specific, empirical persons, but of all “possible” persons. “Thus with the unity and identity and individuality of the world the idea of God is given on the ground of an essential coherence.” These words give expression to metaphysical personalism.
Scheler regards it as irrational to posit a single concrete world as actual, without positing at the same time the idea of a concrete spirit; one could not believe in the former without at the same time believing in God.
What justifies such a statement? In the first place, there are found here once more the disguised metaphysical outgrowths of idealism which occasion the statement—such assumptions as “universal reason,” the “moral governor of the world,” the “logical subject.” These are indeed only surrogates for a macrocosmic correlate of the world; and in the polemic against them Scheler’s proposition has a certain justification. But the fundamental presupposition is still that “the” universe as such requires a correlate, that to be a world for someone inheres in the very mode of the world’s existence. The statement shares this presupposition with the idealistic theses.
But this presupposition has been shown to be erroneous. There is no such essential law. It contradicts the plain and evident meaning of all objectivity, theoretical as well as practical. Just as little does the concreteness of the world depend upon the concreteness of a personal counterpart. Conversely, a personal being which was not a member of a concrete, real world would itself be an abstraction. For in the fulfilment of its act—transcendent throughout and directed upon self-existent objects—it is necessarily set in the real cosmic context as a real part of it; but it is never “over against” the world as a whole.
The basic error here has nevertheless a deeper root. It lies in the universalization of personality beyond its natural sphere of validity and objectivity, in the detaching of it from its presupposition, from subjectivity, and from its whole ontological sphere, the real world itself.
The phenomenology of the person intensifies this universalization. It gives only the essential features of personality, considered in themselves and at the same time isolated. However objectively these may be regarded, they are only half discerned so long as they are not viewed in the context of persons and, ultimately, of reality. The entire ineptness of the extension given to their range of validity has its ground here. This kind of transcendence of boundaries takes place wherever essential features, correctly seen in a particular phenomenon, are carried over, without noticing it, to the totality of all phenomena, even of those which are fundamentally different. Materialism, logicism, psychologism, are such one-sided views of the world, justified in the narrow limits of their native problem, totally wrong as interpretations of the whole. Personalism belongs to this series. What holds good for an aspect of the world, which exists only relatively to a real individual person, for instance, its relativity to a person, is evidently not trans ferable to the world itself, of which it is a section and a partial aspect. Aspects of the world are relative to persons, and even this is true only in so far as the persons are members of a real world; but the one real world itself is not on that account related to any person. But, conversely, all persons are ontologically relative to the world. If out of this relation of dependence one makes a correlation by a forced passage beyond bounds, one stands immediately in the conceptual construction of metaphysical personalism.
(b) THE INDIVIDUAL PERSON AND THE COMMUNAL PERSON
Metaphysical personalism has a deeper ethical root in the thought of a “collective person.” That the individual, isolated and for himself, is an abstraction, that he does not emerge except in larger contexts of persons and is conditioned not only in his existence but also in his ethos by his context, is an ancient view. But Scheler conceives of these contexts—in so far as they are not merely biological communities, not mere societies of individuals but spiritual unities of a peculiar kind—as persons of a higher order, as “collective persons.” They also are fulfillers of action and carriers of actional values, and indeed in such a way that the acts of individual persons are always conditioned by those of the collective person. This relationship finds expression in the solidarity of individual persons and of their joint responsibility for one another as well as for the collective person. What binds man and man, whether it be reciprocal understanding, striving or love, communal knowledge, work or the aim of life, is not a derived organization of individuals originally independent, but the fact that they are rooted in a personal unit of a higher order. If to this we add that such higher orders always take on further potentialities—up to an absolute and all-embracing corporate person—the personalistic picture of the world culminates in the idea of God.
The magnificence of this metaphysical perspective must be fully acknowledged. But it is precisely such views that, on account of their vastness, are more likely to mislead than to convince.
It is true that the acts of individual persons, and the persons themselves, are always variously conditioned by the greater collective structure in which they are rooted; it is also true that understanding and love have a transcendent character which, from the point of view of the individual, is irrational. Ever since the profound thought of the Stoic συμπáθєια there have been many worthy metaphysical attempts to explain spiritual co-operation. Equally indisputable is it that the phenomena of joint responsibility and solidarity are something which transcends the limits of the individual. It would be a blunder to decide authoritatively how these eternal riddles of the human ethos are to be solved. In the metaphysic of morality there are more problems than these that are not solved. At the present-day stage of investigation we have still a long way to go. If all previous solutions were premature, we have a double reason for leaving them on one side for a time and attending to more immediate questions. The personalistic solution, despite its peculiar charm, is no better than the older errors of speculation. For the ascription of personality to the higher social units—to nation, State, cultural circle, humanity—is a theory which but feebly withstands criticism.
The conditioning of the individual person and his acts by a narrower or wider community does not by any means imply the personal character of the latter—just as little as the conditioning of individual knowledge by the prevalent level of public opinion implies that the latter is a conscious communal subject. It is true that those social units in a certain sense are also fulfillers of acts, and that to a certain extent the carriership of ethical fulfilment inheres in them. But the very question is whether this fact alone is sufficient ground for attributing to them personality in the full and intensified sense.
It would be much more conceivable that they possessed only a borrowed, pale and lowered degree of personality. There is no doubt, for example, that a nation as such can act, execute tasks, quarrel and have debts; but it remains questionable whether all this holds good of it in the same sense as of a single individual, whether with the community the real initiative does not always issue from single persons, whether communal ends are not seen by individuals and whether wrongdoing and guilt do not fall conspicuously upon them. So long as the question is considered only in general outlines, it can of course only be said that it may be so. But all this is changed as soon as one enters into a consideration of the principles, the categories, involved in the problem. Here we find that very definite limits are set to the possible extension of personality.
(c) “PERSONS OF A HIGHER ORDER” AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SUCH AN ORDER
For Scheler the question was simpler than it is in itself, because he removed the essential condition of the relation which subsists between person and subject. If one takes free-floating personality, without any categorial basis, there is nothing to prevent one from allowing gradations of personality to mount as high as one pleases. But if we see that personality is based upon a subject which carries it and cannot exist without such a basis—for since acts achieved by persons are directed to objects, they must proceed from subjects—if we see this, then with one stroke such a gradation finds its limits. Personality can only inhere in such structures as already have the categorial form of subjects. The reversal or dissolution of this connection means an inversion of the fundamental law of categories.
This law declares that a higher form always has the lower as its presupposition, rests upon it, is therefore dependent upon it as upon a conditio sine quâ non. Now, as a person, in comparison with a subject, is indisputably the higher form—by virtue of his axiological nature he belongs to a sphere of existence in which a subject as such cannot participate—it follows that personality cannot exist without subjectivity, therefore that it can never exist as a detached personality. A person can be only a subject, an “I,” a consciousness, an entity which has its inner world in contrast to the outer world, and to which the former is presented in an inward aspect—an entity which can know, feel, love, hate, tend towards a goal, will and do. One may say in the words of Leibniz: apperception is the condition of personality.
There is no use in citing the nature of God as an argument against this position. Categorical laws, in so far as they are discerned at all, are evident. But we know nothing about the nature of God. Only in accordance with the categorial relations, which rule our thought and intuition, can we hold anything before our minds, but never without them or in opposition to them. Categorial elements, torn from their context, may indeed be easily built up without this basis into something logically harmonious with itself—but in the way in which a fabulous world may be self-consistent. For such a construction no ontologically real mode of possibility exists.
Now if personality is bound to a consciousness, “persons of a higher order” can evidently be attached only to a consciousness of a higher order. But it is very questionable whether and in how far there exists a consciousness of a higher order above the individual consciousness. In this direction the fantasy of idealism has been inexhaustible; the “transcendental subject,” the “consciousness in general,” the intellectus infinitus are apparently brought against personalism. But they are little suited as characterizations of such corporate entities as nation, cultural group, humanity. Scheler expressly sets them aside. Taken literally, such assumptions stand on a very insecure footing; they are free forms without categorial support, quite incapable of supporting themselves, still less of sustaining the far heavier burden of collective persons.
But if one starts rather from the given phenomenon, if one finds one’s bearings where solidarity and joint responsibility are found, it becomes clear that these do not at all establish a consciousness of a higher order. Rather are they functions which can evidently exist without a binding collective consciousness. Both lie in an internal and unique connection which subsists between acts and actional values of individual persons. How such a connection is metaphysically possible is indeed very puzzling. But an over-arching consciousness is in any case not the binding force; therefore, also, a collective person is not. For actional consciousness, valuational consciousness, and the sense of responsibility are always features of an individual person only, whether they exist in oneself or another or in a community of persons. In any case we know every consciousness of that kind only as the consciousness of an individual, however much it may reappear in other individuals in the same form or variously modified. But that it is a shared consciousness of the acts and actional values of others, that acts of many directed to the same end coalesce and work like a collective act of a communal person and can possess value or disvalue, all this signifies anything but their centralization in a corporate personality; it indicates only common participation in the ethos and the ontological and axiological connection among the individual personal subjects. A consciousness of common possession, on the other hand, subsists exclusively in the individuals, and not in the community.
There are, of course, collective spiritual structures; there is an “objective mind”—even if not in the Hegelian sense—which never is absorbed in the individual consciousness, but in which all participate. Art, science, the morality of an age, the national, political or religious life, is a collective spirit in this sense. The mode of existence of such structures is a thoroughly real one, as they have their beginning and end, their history and their laws of development. They are a macrocosmic spiritual power, which stands in closest reciprocity with the individual mind. They subsist above the individuals, out they rest entirely upon them, and every development in diem is the work of individuals; the individual, on his side, is again determined by their structure, and indeed so much so that he finds scope for his individuality only in it, or, at least, very little beyond it. But the real structures of the group-mind possess the character neither of a subject nor of a person. Just as little as they amount to a collective consciousness or can be represented as a mere sum, so little may we describe them as a consciousness, in the proper sense of the word, superimposed upon the individual consciousness. Only the individual has a consciousness of them—and that only an imperfect consciousness. Complete consciousness is absent.
The unity of this really super-individual structure has its root not at all in a subjective unity, but in a unity of content, a unity of object. It is therefore in any case not a personal unity.
(d) ASCENDING ORDERS OF CORPORATE BODIES AND DESCENDING ORDERS OF PERSONALITY
Above the individual person there are corporate bodies which in fact show a certain analogy to personality proper: family, race, nation, State. Such corporations can collectively entertain convictions, can strive, act, be disposed, like persons; and the objects of their behaviour are, as a rule, corporations of the same order, just as the objects of the acts of individual persons are always in turn persons.
These structures, however, are not persons of a higher order, but only analogues of a person. Individuals are bound together in them and carry in common a responsibility for the communal behaviour. But as for personality proper, they lack a fundamentally essential element—not all the categorial factors of a person reappear in them. They lack the binding consciousness of the whole—the subject of a higher order. The real carriers of communal responsibility are ultimately the single persons, however widely the entire burden may be shared among them.
But that these communities show at least an analogy to a person, that they conduct themselves “as if” they were in fact persons of a higher order, this rests upon the fact that their members are personal beings. The real persons, the individuals, must lend their personality to the higher structures in order to make personal conduct possible for them. For in such quasi-personal forms there are always representative persons who act in the name of the whole: leaders and thinkers, who foresee and determine the goals. That their representative Will is not unconditionally “the will of all,” that the community can set itself in opposition to it, can deny it, and can find a substitute in the will of another individual person, this simply proves how entirely there is here not a person but a surrogate. Only a person can represent the whole, but the whole is never itself a person. The principle of representation and delegation—even when the representative is legitimately elected—is not a complete substitute for personality.
Still a representative lends to the community at least a certain mediate personality. But the higher the grade of collectivity, so much the more does the principle of representation and delegation miss fire and so much the more impersonal becomes the communal form. We might therefore with some justification make the statement: the higher orders of communal life are not higher orders of personality, but lower.
It is here as it is in mathematics with infinity and rationality. Rationalism is always prone to believe that the higher orders of the infinite and therefore of the “irrational” may at the same time be higher orders of the rational. In this it is presupposed that the ratio itself is capable of rising with the orders. This is an assumption entirely without foundation. We know only the human ratio; and this does not mount beyond itself. It remains fixed within its own boundaries and what transcends these is hopelessly irrational. It is just so with personality. We know only the personality of man and can speak intelligently only of it. It also does not advance beyond itself, however far the ethical problems may grow into the macrocosmic with the expanding orders of corporate life. Just as the mounting orders of the infinite are necessarily at the same time descending orders of the rational—for even accessibility to knowledge diminishes progressively—so the rising orders of collective life are always and necessarily descending orders of personality—for exactly the specific unity of the fulfiller of acts, as it can inhere only in a subject, diminishes progressively with every upward step.1
It is an almost ineradicable heritage of rationalism that we are disposed, wherever there is a gradation of advancement of form towards cosmic extent, not only to transfer subconsciously the attributes of the lower of the only given grades to the higher and more comprehensive, but also to magnify them to a proportionately higher degree. Metaphysical personal ism is entirely built upon this bias. It finds repeated in the ascending orders of collectivity certain fundamental features which it knows in man’s personality, the only one presented to us; and this analogy is enough for it to hazard the assertion that those higher collective units must also be persons of a higher potency.
Personalism takes no account of the quite evident fact that here the categorial foundation of personality, the subject, the unit of knowing, willing and doing—in short of the act-fulfilling entity—is lacking or reappears only in a few of the next higher grades and only vicariously and devitalized. The ethical problem is hereby wrongly wrenched from its ontological basis. If we draw this into the network of problems, and if in reflection we go back to the whole series of categorial presuppositions without which the ethical problems do not at all exist, the more general categorial laws of gradation and dependence are seen in their power, and we become aware that the increments of the power in the collective unit are at the same time diminutions in the power of personality.
In the total perspective which is hereby disclosed, it becomes immediately clear that the two extremes are the limits of personality. In the full, primary sense of the word, a person is and remains only the lower extreme, the individual subject, the man. The opposite extreme, the universal, absolute and all-embracing entity, if such exist, is so far removed from being the highest order or person that it must be much rather the lowest order of person, the absolute minimum as regards personality, at the same time the status evanescens (= o) of personality in general. But this means that the well-understood categorial coherence of this whole perspective proves exactly the opposite of that which personalism tries to prove by it: God—if one succeeds in drawing Him into this perspective—is not the highest and absolute person, but the absolutely impersonal being. The concept of Him, seen from this point of view, would be the negative limiting concept of personality in general.
Whether one should presume to draw God into this relation appears more than doubtful. One has also no ground for expecting from ethical problems that they should produce any theological corollaries. Even Kant’s procedure, in basing theological concepts upon morality, has brought upon itself the disapproval of thoroughgoing theological thought. Scheler’s personalism, although it sets aside Kant in general and especi-ally the doctrine of postulates, perpetrates a quite analogous leap beyond limits. But the concept of a person does not tolerate such action, at least not in so far as it is an ethical concept. Whether it has some other meaning, and whether this applies to a divinity, does not admit of being either affirmed or denied by ethics. By a metaphysical intensification of the ethically personal, one only renders its possibility ambiguous.
The whole doctrine of personalism, together with its theo logically questionable consequence, would be ultimately a matter of indifference to ethics if it did not indirectly foster an axiological prejudice. If there be persons of a higher order, it is a temptation to assume—since persons are carriers of moral values—that the higher values attach to the persons of the higher order; the highest value therefore attaches only to an infinite person, but to man only the lowest moral values are attached. Scheler actually sees in the “saint” such a highest value, the superiority of which over all other values—and not only over those that are ethical—is said to be rooted in an objective dependence. Here, behind the moral theology, peeps forth theological morality, a tendency which leads straight to the abrogation of all independence on the part of the ethical in general, because it touches the autonomy of moral values.
But irrespective of the personalistic idea of God and its all-depressing preponderance, the higher classes of value are thus so distributed among the average grades that collective persons must necessarily be the carriers of higher values than individual persons. This is a point of view which degrades man in comparison with the collective entities that are built upon him, and which elevates them at his expense. Nation, State, humanity thus appear as valuational carriers in a higher sense than man himself, whose personality they in truth reflect but feebly. Thus a distorted picture is given. Nation and State, it goes without saying, are not good or bad, not honourable or mean, not lovable or hateful, in the same primal sense as is the individual man. Always and everywhere they are so only in a secondary sense. And indeed only through the individual man, of whom they are a function.
The moral being is not the Absolute nor the State nor anything else in the world but, singly and alone, man, the primal carrier of moral values and disvalues.