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That, of course, is perfectly within Peperzak’s rights, and at times onewishes he had exerted such independence more often. But most of the timeone is simply grateful for such a graceful exposition of the Levinasian Said inwhich the Saying of that distinctive voice can be heard too distinctly.

Fordham University Merold Westphal

Philip Blosser, Scheler’s Critique of Kant’s Ethics. (Athens: Ohio Univer-sity Press, 1995).

Blosser opens Scheler’s Critique of Kant’s Ethics by describing Scheler’shistorical background in a manner that displays Blosser’s impressive acquaint-ance with the history of philosophy and both its contemporary continental andanalytic currents. Chapter two contrasts Scheler with Kant on the meaning ofthe a priori.

In chapter three, Blosser discusses how Scheler’s a priori ranking of ma-terial values constitutes a critique of Kantian formalism, although Blossersuggests, following Hans Reiner, that Kant may have espoused one “value”:the objective end of rational agency (61, 63, 70–71). Reiner’s point is ontarget since one can detect strong resemblances when Scheler insists uponthe independence of values irreducible to our feelings of them or conationstoward them and when Kant, in his treatment of the good will and the secondformulation of the categorical imperative, gives phenomenological descrip-tions of persons. Persons, according to Kant, impose limits on any arbitraryusage and possess a worth not conferred on them because we desire themwith our subjective inclinations, as would be the case with things.

In the same chapter, Blosser considers Heidegger’s objections about theunclarified ontological status of Scheler’s values and develops a series ofdefenses. One powerful defense Blosser never offers, though, is that Scheler’svalue-theory functions as a kind of first philosophy prior to ontology in muchthe way that ethics takes precedence over ontology for Emmanuel Levinas.Schelerian values, like Levinasian alterity, precede and elicit the activity oftheorizing, whether of fundamental ontology or value-theory.

In chapter four, Blosser contrasts Kant’s theory of moral feeling withScheler’s more diversified understanding that grants affectivity a more ex-pansive role as a source of moral insight and action. Thus, Kant, in Blosser’sview, “puts no moral stock in affective nature as the source of moral action”(118) and according to Scheler, “denies the affective faculties their properrole in the discernment of the moral good” (99). The historical reasons for

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Kant’s underestimation of affectivity can be traced both to his acquiescencein a metaphysical tradition based on “bifurcations of reason/sensibility, will/inclination, form/matter, and noumenon/phenonomenon” (171) and to his ef-fort to fence off a preserve protected against the prevailing mechanistic ex-planations of his day (including the empiricist account of will that Kant neverfully escaped). However, in sympathy with Kant, Blosser grants that thesepolarizations contradict some of Kant’s own phenomenological insights, thatis, that “Kant’s metaphysics subverts his phenomenology” (74, 113). Moreo-ver, Blosser admits that some of Scheler’s statements, for example, that “goodwilling occurs against all ‘inclination,’ ” are not based on the “ ‘objectivesense’ of Kant’s propositions, but on the ‘pathos’ of his description” (169).

But Blosser himself sometimes errs in this same direction when, for in-stance, he wonders “Do we have no means at all of distinguishing morallygood inclinations, for example, from morally bad ones?” – as if for Kant allinclinations were morally bad (173). Similarly, Blosser reads Kant’s quite du-alistically when he claims that for Kant morality “can be determined thus onlyby bracketing and setting aside, and in that sense disregarding, the questionof any specific material ends (or objects) of the faculty of desire” (72). Kantwould be better understood to be adopting as the crucial focus of his consid-eration the action aimed at fulfilling specific material ends and desires, whichthus are in no way to be excluded or disregarded. Rather, agents momentarilydistance themselves reflectively from the immediacy of pressing ends anddesires to inquire whether the actions directed to such ends and desires arejustifiable, or, in Kant’s terms, universalizable. In Kant’s practical examples,he usually does not assume from the start that the pursuit of such ends anddesires is not universalizable. Furthermore, Thomas McCarthy, in defendingJürgen Habermas’s Kantian-inspired discourse ethics, captures something ofKant’s own meaning when he observes that if an interest is found to beunsuitable for universalizability, this “unsuitability does not attach to it quainterest, from the outset, but only qua non-generalizable.”

On this interpretation of Kant, which entails no antipathetic relationshipbetween reason and affect, it is quite possible that, as Blosser contends, “ourprimordial comportment toward the world is affective” (28–29) and thataffectivity, far from being nothing more than an emotional chaos waiting forreason to impose an order, can serve as an alternative ordering principle inmoral experience (107). Moreover, affect can instruct reason, leading theway, reversing previously rationally based convictions, or inspiring actionsthat reason subsequently comes to recognize as morally praiseworthy.

However, Scheler’s rediscovery of the importance, force, and orderlinessof affectivity, often neglected by rationalist philosophies, appears so novel

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and impressive, and in that rediscovery affectivity emerges into suchpreeminence in relation to reason that whatever rational activity is present inmoral discernment is all but eclipsed. Thus, when affectivity takes the lead,one can overlook the subtle rational activity concurring in conjunction withthat leadership and recognizing its rightness, or when affectivity reversesreason’s convictions, one can be so struck by the discreditation of reason thatone does not see the reason which, assenting to affect’s guidance, correctsits own prior errors. In brief, when Scheler concludes that the heart has itsreasons of which the understanding knows nothing, the visibility of the heart’sleadership and the past ignorance of the understanding conspire to concealthe present reason endorsing the heart’s leadership and even denying its owncontribution by attributing “reasons” to the heart. In addition, such rationalactivity remains hidden because it may consist only in the anticipation thatone could provide reasons, if asked for them, and, as a result, one may neverfully articulate these reasons at all. The irony that reason is the final arbiterwhich recognizes that the heart has its reasons extends to the entire theoreti-cal project of Scheler and Blosser, who must resort to complex rational argu-mentation, including appeals to evidence of a phenomenological type (e.g. inthe Formalism), in order to establish that affectivity is a key source of moralinsight.

Insofar as one believes one has reasons to warrant the rightness ofaffectivity’s inducements, one has already entered upon a rational terrainwhere justification is at stake. It is under the rubrics of such a process ofjustification that one needs to understand the much derided notion of Kantianformalism. When one prescinds reflectively from the immediacy of one’sdesires to inquire into whether they are justifiable, one cannot seek justifica-tion by appeal to empirical evidence, as do the natural sciences, but one mustsearch out some ultimate first principle, as do ethical theorists such as Aristo-tle, Aquinas, or Mill. Of necessity, this first principle must be quite generalsince in its light one will evaluate and justify more concrete principles andproposals for action, and hence it will inevitably appear to be “formal” or“empty of content.” In order that this first principle be of such generality thatit could win universal acceptance, Kant locates his first principle not in anyparticular contents but in the structure of the rational agent who considersparticular contents and poses the question of what people ought to do in par-ticular concrete situations. Similarly, the proponents of “discourse ethics,”Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, in the tradition of Kant, uncover thefinal moral norm not in any contents, but in the structure of the discourse inwhich contents are considered. Hence for Apel and Habermas, proof of thefirst principle of ethics, namely that people ought to treat each other as ends

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in themselves, can be found in the structure of discourse in which that firstprinciple of ethics might come up for debate. For in the discursive give andtake of reasons one already expects to be treated as an end in oneself insofaras one is able to offer arguments, to assent or dissent freely, and to submit tono other force than that of the better argument that appeals to one’s au-tonomy.

Hence, thought begins in the everyday life-world, in which Levinasian Othersand Schelerian values impact one in accord with one’s affective attunement,and possibly invite a response of action. But one may also adopt a reflectivedistance from these immediate impingements, inquiring into their justifiability.Once embarked upon such a reflective inquiry, the exigencies of justificationitself impel one to formal levels and not any depreciation of sensibility,affectivity, or material contents, which, to the contrary and because of theirimportance, provide the impulse for this inquiry into their justifiability in thefirst place. Unfortunately, Blosser’s criticism of Kantian formalism repeat-edly concentrates on how well it can “offer moral guidance and impose obli-gation” (127, 172) and thus ignores the true origins of formalism in a projectof justification, one of whose benefits might be the resultant guidance it af-fords.

In a fifth chapter, Blosser presents Scheler’s critique of Kantian duty asblind and opposed to inclination, although Alpheus (131) and Blosser himself(170) dispute Scheler on both counts. Scheler further insists that the “ought”is grounded in positive values as opposed to a deontological ethics that de-rives “moral value from duty as the ultimate moral phenomenon and is there-fore essentially ‘negative, critical, and repressive (135).’ ” However, ifReiner is correct that Kant actually considered as objective value rationalagency – and it may be necessary to take the third and fourth formulations ofthe categorical imperative as the interpretive key to the others – then a Kantiandeontology, which upholds the worth of oneself and others as ends in them-selves under pain of self-contradiction, might not be as negative as Schelersuggests. In addition, neither Blosser nor Scheler explain why Kant enjoinedrational agents to act “from duty.” For Kant, if one acts merely “according toduty,” that is, for some other motive (e.g. money, power, prestige) than thatone ought to so act (“from duty”), then one effectively subordinates one’smoral activity to this other motive and so effectively undermines moralityitself.

Blosser shows his evenhandedness, however, when he ventures severalcriticisms of Max Scheler. For instance, he raises the question why for Schelerthe realization of a nonmoral value in its proper value-ranking necessarilyrealizes a moral value (84–86, 175). Blosser seems right in arguing that not

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every realization of a nonmoral value is moral, but Scheler’s Ressentimentprovides a concrete case of how the bourgeois value scheme that subordi-nates life values to utility seems to have its immoral aspect. Perhaps, though,this inversion of nonmoral values appears immoral because it is the life-valuesof persons who are subordinated to utility values. Hence, this lower-levelvalue inversion represents only one manifestation of a pervasive reduction ofpersons as means to the end of the bourgeois economic and political system,thereby subverting Kant’s first principle of ethics. A further point of conten-tion is that Scheler’s ethics, like the Kantian formalism he criticizes, articu-lates a kind of foundational ethic that fails to provide guidance for concreteaction (87, 142, 144, 145, 146, 150). One has the impression, though, thatBlosser, in spite of his disclaimers, expects ethical theory to function like amathematical theory that could deduce concrete obligations from first princi-ples without relying on intellectual virtue, such as Aristotelian phronesis orThomistic prudencia, to mediate in a nondeductive fashion between firstprinciples and concrete situations.

The great strength of Kantian ethics vis-a-vis Scheler’s, according toBlosser, lies in Kant’s development of a moral norm (118, 143, 145, 186). Onemight be able to rectify Scheler on this point, however, if one would takeseriously an aspect of Scheler’s thought that Blosser de-emphasizes – namelythe importance of interpersonal dialogue in the recognition and implementa-tion of the a priori value-ranking. When Blosser comments that moral obli-gation involves taking another’s good as our good and another’s bad as ourbad and then adds “that morality is about relationships – an idea that seems toget lost in Scheler,” it comes as something of a surprise. After all, Scheler inThe Nature of Sympathy, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, and theFormalism emphasizes interpersonal relationships, empathy, the solidarity thatwould see the failure of the convicted felon as our failure, and the idea of aintercultural and international dialogue in which any group’s insights belong toall, in spite of the relativist’s attempt to relativize each group’s truth to itself.The problem may not be so much with Blosser, though, since Scheler himself,having established via phenomenology his a priori ranking of values, neverattends sufficiently to how his theory of dialogue, supporting that value-ranking,is saturated with the kind of moral values that could deliver a moral norm.

Scheler’s account of dialogue shares central features with Apel’s andHabermas’s discourse ethics: the lack of coercion, the sense of solidarity in acooperative search for truth and rightness, and the need to be taught by oth-ers. One might not go too far if one were to suggest that Scheler’s account ofdialogue and discourse ethics rest upon a common Kantian first principle,namely that rational (dialoguing and discoursing) agents ought to be treated

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as ends in themselves. While Scheler’s theory of dialogue differs from themore rationalistic, argumentative orientation of a discourse model, both ap-proaches can also claim a kind of transcendental ultimacy – the kind thatBlosser finds lacking in Scheler (16). This is so since those who oppose thestructure or norms of dialogue or discourse would have to enter upon a dia-logue or discourse to make their case and thus would presuppose the verystructure and norms they argue against.

Scheler, however, not only converges with discourse ethics, he also com-plements it. Although the strong suit of the Kantian/discourse models is theirpotency to yield a moral norm and its justification, there is a vast pretheoreticalfield of experience that one encounters before questions of justification orvalidation ever arise. That field encompasses the affective, evaluative, andethical dimensions of experience that Kantian/discourse models with theirpenchant for argumentation and justification are often likely to de-emphasizeand overlook. Scheler’s contribution to the history of thought might be situ-ated within an architectonic, held together by a common thread ofintersubjectivity, that extends from the most basic affective engagement withothers to the transcendental presuppositions of dialogue/discourse. Such anarchitectonic, however, by no means responds to all the limitations that PhilipBlosser has discovered in the thought of Scheler or of Kant (e.g., particularlythe deficiencies of his psychology). It is to Blosser’s credit, however, that hehas brought to light the many problems with the ethical systems of Kant andScheler that make such an architectonic necessary.

Department of Philosophy Michael BarberSt. Louis University, USA