The following is the beginning of an essay I am writing. I thought I would share it here.
Phenomenology is
a name for a variety of approaches that take experience seriously. In these
approaches, the common desideratum is
to describe concretely the constituting subject acts in relation to the
constituted object. The core of phenomenology is the systematic description of
this co-relational act-object structure in which neither act nor object is
privileged more than the other. If descriptions are not concrete enough, then
the phenomenologist has either privileged one-side of the relation or neglected
a dimension of lived-experience that should remain explored in her descriptions
of that co-relational structure. I argue that Scheler’s description of
intentional feeling loses sight of the concrete lived-body and this encounter
with Scheler through pragmatism opens up the deeply felt dimension of reality
that underlies both James and Scheler’s philosophy. In trading the relevance of
the lived-body for enduring psychic and spiritual feeling, Scheler reveals how
feeling intends the values of the Holy and culture. In these feelings, the
values acquire a sense, but no mention is made of how those values manifest in
the experiencer involve the lived-body.
With the dearth of the lived-body,
one could insist that Scheler is neglecting a crucial aspect of overall
phenomenological experience. Thus, there is a crisis to be faced. On the one
hand, Scheler gives a description of intentional feeling and the value
correlates that constitute experience. In saying that, Scheler’s values involve
our world. They appear on the back of deeds, persons and things. They
illuminate aspects of our lived-experience in this world, and yet by denying
the relevance of the lived-body in the experience of values in feeling, the
disembodied nature of the higher feelings calls into question exactly how
concrete Scheler’s phenomenology is beyond its articulation in vital feeling. By
revealing the embodied relevance of the lived-body in psychic and spiritual
feeling, we no longer must face a crisis of concretion in Scheler’s thought.
The crisis is dissipated once we start to read Scheler’s thought pragmatically,
even when we move beyond the lived-body.
However, I do not stop with the
crisis of making Scheler’s notion of the lived-body more concrete. This is only
an opening. Instead, meditating on Scheler’s lived-body opens up a common
pragmatic ground revealed by James. Both Scheler and James regard feeling as
constitutive of experience before we can articulate anything about experience.
Experience is shot through with feeling.
Moving from the relevance of the lived-body and feeling, I start to open up the
basic insight that James not only saves Scheler from his own irrelevance, but
the commonalities on the very relation to reality can open up a powerful
pragmatic interpretation of Scheler’s later metaphysics. Let me describe how I
see this paper unfolding.
First, I outline the problem of
disembodied feeling in the four value-rankings that appear in the Formalismus. In the second section, I
introduce William James’s pragmatic thought as a way to conceive of feeling
situated in a body. Working from James’s Principles
of Psychology, I argue that the James-Lange hypothesis can remedy the
observed defect of Scheler’s intentional feeling. In the third section, I defend
three points of agreement between Scheler and James and what I take to be a
Jamesian reading of how the divine is
felt in James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. In
the fourth section, an analogy is made from James’s Varieties as a way to regard Scheler’s later metaphysics. Since
Scheler’s later metaphysics articulates life’s energy as an impulsion (Drang), and Scheler works from the
bottom-up tracing impulsion in the lived-body, I interpret this transition as
Scheler coming to grips with flaw I observed in his disembodied
intentional-feeling in its higher forms. Regarded pragmatically, the activity
of intentional feeling described on the side of impulsion and its relation to
spirit (Geist) is shown to have the
pragmatic consequence of putting embodied-ness
back into feeling. While I confess that one could read Scheler’s metaphysics as
an internal solution to the problem I point out, a pragmatic reading avoids the
charge of metaphysical dualism, and illuminates Scheler’s pragmatic appeal to a
larger world that may benefit from it.
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