Microsoft Word - Hackettproof.docx Corresponding Author: J. Edward Hackett Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Doctoral Candidate, Editorial Assistant Library of Living Philosophers Email: jhackett@siu.edu Journal of Applied Hermeneutics March 15, 2013 The Author(s) 2013 Scheler, Heidegger, and the Hermeneutics of Value J. Edward Hackett Abstract In this paper, the author examines two different phenomenological frameworks for values: Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology and Scheler’s phenomenology. Given the popularity of hermeneutic phenomenology inspired by Heidegger’s efforts, the author openly questions if val- ues can be accommodated in that framework. The author suggests that those paying attention to the lived-experience of values consider Scheler’s phenomenology of value as a more refined al- ternative to make sense of value-experience and cultural practices more generally. Keywords ethics, givenness, Heidegger, Scheler, value In this paper, I explore the possibility of how value can be given in both Heidegger and Scheler. The “how of givenness” is the man- ner in which some thing can be given, or ac- cessed phenomenologically. Thus, if we take a look at both Scheler and Heidegger, we can address their conceptions of phenomenology as limiting and enabling the givenness of val- ue. On a whole, phenomenology’s develop- ment issues more from Heidegger’s influence than Scheler. Heidegger interprets value as present-at-hand and I argue this follows from the limits imposed by his hermeneutic phe- nomenology. Values are ontic for Heidegger. In Scheler’s magnum opus the Formalismus, he is silent on what values are exactly, but describes them as given. Scholars familiar with Scheler’s work will note that many times in the Formalismus, Scheler will assert the ideality of value and refer to the rank of val- ues as an eternal order. However, he will nev- er spell out the ontological nature of value nor how it is that they are eternal. Thus, if we can establish the givenness of value itself and what that requires independently of either phenomenology, then we can recommend ei- ther Heidegger or Scheler’s phenomenologi- cal approach. Thus, this paper is not an analy- sis of the historical relation between Scheler and Heidegger. Rather, this paper works out value’s givenness itself in relation by consid- ering two phenomenological frameworks to- gether. Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 2 After working out value’s givenness and seeing which phenomenology can best ac- commodate value, I will show the applicable upshot of Scheler’s thought to an applied problem. I will show that disagreements over the management and accessibility to health care in the United States invert the absolute value and overwhelming fullness of persons. This example serves to show the theoretical benefit of adopting a hermeneutics of value rooted in Scheler’s thought more generally and further evinces the problematic silence plaguing Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenome- nology about the prominent role values play in our experience at a fundamental and onto- logical level. Introduction to the Problem Scheler offered tiny clues in the Formalismus as to what he thought phenomenology could do for him. These insights were given in the introduction between the central preoccupa- tions of method. For Heidegger, phenomenol- ogy was the way into working out the prob- lem of Being in his fundamental ontology in Being and Time, yet the problem presented itself when Heidegger construed phenome- nology as a hermeneutic turn. While Scheler was not necessarily preoccupied with method in the same way Heidegger responded to Hus- serl, Scheler can still be analyzed in terms of what he claimed about phenomenology in the Formalismus. Primarily, Scheler was interest- ed in developing his personalism against the background of Kant’s moral philosophy. We must look passed the Formalismus. Heidegger was preoccupied with method, but Heidegger’s “method” comes across indirect- ly as a consequence of interrogating Dasein about the question of the meaning of Being and the history of ontology. In what follows, I want to ask the ques- tions: What is the givenness of value? How is value experienced in its givenness? If I can answer these questions, then it is the phenom- enological criterion of value itself that can answer which phenomenological framework better suits value’s givenness. I will first dis- cuss Scheler and then move to Heidegger. I. Scheler’s Intuition of Essences Scheler’s conception of phenomenology is given in Chapter 2 of the Formalismus. In the Formalismus, he outlined his concepts of the a priori and phenomenological intuition, or what he called “essential intuiting” (We- sensschau). Scheler designated “as ‘a priori’ all those ideal units of meaning and those propositions that are self-given by way of an immediate intuitive content in the absence of any kind of positing” (Scheler, 1973a, p. 48). Like Husserl, phenomenology is opposed to the natural attitude and is therefore a special type of experience (Frings, 1996, p. 18). In the natural attitude, we regard phenomena as a natural fact described by the sciences, and in this standpoint, phenomena are described from a third-person perspective. The natural attitude seeks only to describe from an objec- tive or impartial perspective. It does not pay attention to how phenomena are disclosed to us in the first-person perspective, and the nat- ural attitude takes for granted the sense- constituting role of subjectivity in experience. The natural attitude reveals phenomena in their non-experienced features and has, there- fore, a skewed interpretation. Phenomenolog- ical description is the attempt to render expe- riential elements clear that undergird and con- stitute experience itself as we truly live through them by remaining true to both the subjectivity of the experiencer and the en- joined constituted object. If I told my wife that love is merely the evolutionary adaptive strategy to facilitate human pair-bonding and that we need not concern ourselves with the actual content of love (as it is lived), I would seriously disregard what it means to be in love in the first place. Moreover, the third- Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 3 person perspective does not and cannot ad- dress what it is like to be in love. 1 Thus, Scheler opposed the propensity of the natural attitude to posit and take for granted the ori- gins of how acts constitute the meaning of phenomena. Instead, meaning-constitution of an act can only be apprehended in absolute immanence and we must pay specific atten- tion to what is given in experience. What is given in experience is how a phenomenon is lived through within experience. For Scheler, attempting a description is more line with an attitudinal approach than a well-established method. This also marks a considerable dif- ference between him and Husserl. …phenomenology is neither the name of a new science nor a substitute for the word philosophy; it is the name of an attitude of spiritual seeing in which one can see or experience something which otherwise remains hidden, namely, a realm of facts of a particular kind. I say attitude, not method. A method is a goal-directed pro- cedure for thinking about facts…before they have been fixed by logic, and second, of a procedure of seeing… That which is seen and experienced is given only in the seeing and experiencing of the act itself, in its being acted out; it appears in that act and only in it. (Scheler, 1973b, pp. 137- 138) For Scheler, phenomenological description is about describing the sphere of acts in which we experience the world. As products of “spiritual seeing,” these descriptions aim at the primordial acts prior to all other cognition and experience. In such a way, the phenome- nologist attempts to retrieve the “most in- tensely vital and most immediate contact with the world itself, that is with those things in the world with which it is concerned and these things as they are immediately given to expe- rience” (Scheler, 1973b, p. 138). Experience, according to Scheler, means the immediately given nature of phenomena and these phe- nomena “are ‘in themselves there’ only in this act (Scheler, 1973b, p. 138). It is only within the sphere of acts in which we have a living contact with the world, and it is only as a uni- ty of these acts we experience each other as persons. For Scheler, the immediate apprehension of whatness/essence cannot be disclosed by scientific thinking at all. Instead, the content of that immediate apprehension is what ena- bles our efforts to understand science. Es- sences reveal the intelligibility and meaning of the world given in experience. Then, sci- ence is an abstraction of phenomenological experience. In Scheler’s terms, “we can also say that essences and their interconnections are a priori “given” “prior” to all experience” (Scheler, 1973a, p. 49). Scheler equated phe- nomenological intuition with phenomenologi- cal experience (Scheler, 1973a, p. 48). In phenomenology, this connection be- tween act-center and the world is collapsed in how experience is undergone, and this is called “intentionality.” The act-center is con- sciousness of something. Anytime I am fear- ful, I am fearful of the spider. When I per- ceive, I am perceiving the tree. There is no moment in which consciousness is not taking an object. Thus, we are constantly undergoing moments of intentional relation with the world, and it is phenomenology that attempts to retrieve how it is that experience is under- gone by careful attention to what we intuit as given within this intentional structure. Schel- er’s term for intentionality that emphasizes the constant unfolding linkage of acts and the world is interconnection. An essence is not mysterious for the phe- nomenologist. Instead, essence refers only to ‘what-ness’ of a thing (Was-sein). For Scheler, it does not refer to a universal or particular concept of a thing. For example, if I have a Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 4 blue thing in front of me, the essence “blue” is given in the universal concept of the thing as well as the particular experience of the thing in question. Therefore, the essence is the whatness that carries over into both the uni- versal and particular conception of a thing. In this way, the phenomenological essence is neither a particular thing, or a universal ab- straction or ideality. Instead, the phenomeno- logical essence is the mode of givenness ex- hibited within experience and these modes of givenness constitute experience of the phe- nomenon as such. Therefore, it is wrong to say that the phenomenological content can be reified to support any particular ontology, and this is the reason why Philip Blosser articulat- ed the weakness of Scheler’s thought and re- lationship it has acquired in relation to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. On this, Blosser wrote …the chief defect of Scheler’s phenome- nology, like all philosophies of value, was the weakness of his treatment of the on- tology of values. The insufficient devel- opment of this fundamental aspect of Val- ue Theory has left it especially vulnerable in a philosophical climate that has been distinguished, since the 1930s, by the ma- jor “growth industry” of Heideggerian on- tology, making this appear probably the most critical defect of Scheler’s Formal- ismus. (Blosser, 1995, p. 16) Blosser is not alone in his assessment. In ad- dition, Stephen Schneck claimed “(i)n accept- ing phenomenology, Scheler was already steeped in the life philosophies and was committed to an unrefined metaphysical posi- tion to an as yet undefined metaphysical posi- tion” (Schneck, 1987, p. 31). Scheler’s sense of ontology remained tenuous and was not fully developed in the Formalismus in a com- plete sense. Support for this interpretation can also be seen in what little Scheler wrote about essences. Essences fill out both sides of the inter- connection in terms of acts and propositions. Let me describe the latter. Scheler wrote Whenever we have such essences and such interconnections among them, the truth of propositions that find their ful- fillment in such essences is totally inde- pendent of the entire sphere of observa- tion and description, as well as of what is established in inductive experience. This truth is also independent, quite obviously of all that enters into causal explanation. It can neither be verified nor refuted by this kind of “experience.” (Scheler, 1973a, p. 49) In other words, essences locate the intercon- nections between what is given originally pri- or to experience to such an extent that this originally prior sense is independent of the empirical determinations about experience. However, he did not develop what it means for phenomenology to be independent. The term “independent” follows from Scheler’s description of “immanent experience.” By immanent, he meant “only what is intuitively in an act of experiencing” and by contrast, “non-phenomenological experience is in prin- ciple an experience through or by means of symbols and, hence mediated experience that never gives things “themselves” (Scheler, 1973a, p. 51). Thus, phenomenological de- scriptions are independent from mediation of any symbols, or representations. In other words, they are not conditioned in any way, and immanence can only be disclosed to acts of experience, the being-in-an-act of experi- ence. While Scheler may not have developed how phenomenological descriptions are inde- pendent from the empirical sciences, Scheler did develop what he meant by phenomenolog- ical independence in other works. In his Lehre Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 5 von den drei Tatsachen, Scheler described three levels of “pure facts.” First, the pure fact must identify a positive something (Etwas) as the sensory function through which this intui- tive identity is established will be varied. Se- cond, pure facts must serve as an ultimate foundation of the intuitive identified essence despite the changing nature of sensory content in which they are first experienced. Finally, the pure facts must be independent from the symbolic order in two ways. First, they must be independent from “the symbols with which it is possible for us to designate them” and second, they must be independent from “the symbols which are used in presenting the facts of which they are parts” (Scheler, 1973c, p. 299ff). If they are independent, then the connection between act and object must be independent as well, and this will allow the phenomenological descriptions to represent “what is not given in person” to others when sharing phenomenological results with others. Phenomenological facts are disclosed in acts but without any mediation. In this way, Scheler described the essential interconnec- tions that are possible to address phenomeno- logically. (1) the essences (and their interconnec- tions) of the qualities and other thing- contents (Sachgehalte) given in acts (things-phenomenology) (Sächphanome- nologie); (2) the essences of acts themselves and their relations of foundation (phenome- nology of acts or foundational orders); (3) their interconnections between the es- sence of acts and those of things [zwischen Akt- und Sachwesenheiten] (e.g. values are given in feeling, colors in see- ing, sounds in hearing etc.) (Scheler, 1973a, pp. 71-72) Scheler’s ontological commitments are inadequately developed, and this makes them unclear. Did Scheler want to secure an onto- logical underpinning for his personalism from the brief treatment he gave it in the Formal- ismus? A passage in the Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition provides support to such a reading linking his phenomenological efforts to future efforts of ontology. “Essential connections and essences have an ontological meeting from the start…the ontology of the spirit and world precedes any theory of cogni- tion” (Scheler, 1973b, p. 158). Here, Scheler emphasized the independence of phenomeno- logical description from the causal sciences, in particular various epistemic theories of cognition, must first presuppose the phenom- enological priority of how spirit and world are first encountered in conscious acts. Those very same acts are accessed through the es- sential intuiting of the phenomenological atti- tude to render it clear how being-in-an-act relates to the world. In concluding this section, I explained some of the problematic features that accom- pany Scheler’s thought about experience and how phenomena are given. I find Scheler’s Formalismus wanting because by itself the language of phenomenology cannot get us very far when it concerns the ontology of val- ue unless phenomenology becomes ontology. Clearly, Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenome- nology provides an example of how phenom- enology breaks into ontology, and it is where I turn to next. II. Heidegger’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology Heidegger operated with a more skeptical, but equally complex conception of phenomenolo- gy. For Scheler, phenomenology accesses the foundations of meaning in personal acts that later become concealed and taken for granted in the empirical sciences, or what he called “mediated” through signs and symbols. Heidegger denied that a conception of phe- nomenological experience can access imme- Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 6 diately pure phenomena. For him, the herme- neutic conception of phenomenology that arose in Being and Time conceives of the pos- sibility of givenness as that which is always mediated, but brought into the clear. This dif- ference will become apparent as I explain it from Section 31 and Section 32. Moreover, such focused attention on these two sections will illuminate methodological commitments Heidegger’s thought never abandoned. In what follows, I pay special attention to how this conception of phenomenology arises within the project of fundamental ontology and Being and Time as a whole. An entire work could trace out the consequences of hermeneutic phenomenology. Such an effort is certainly beyond the task of this work, but it is important also to keep in mind the meth- odological differences between Scheler and Heidegger before any exposition of Scheler’s concepts and subsequent remedy can be in- troduced to the problem of dearth of value in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. A central feature of Heidegger’s funda- mental ontology qua phenomenology in- volves the analysis of human beings not as epistemic agents, but as “Dasein.” Dasein is being-in-the-world (Sein-in-der-Welt) and his name for “us.” Heidegger sought a solution to the meaning of Being in the very being that can pose the question before itself. It is there- fore within Dasein (what Heidegger used as a phenomenological term to stand for any being that can pose the question of its own existence to itself) that this concern arises. Dasein is described as Being-in-the-world. By under- standing Dasein as being-in-the-world, Heidegger explicated the question of being in terms of the practical orientation we exhibit towards the world and others. At the same time, Being-in-the-world is a collapse between Dasein and world. We come to understand ourselves only in light of the everyday contexts we find ourselves already in. We do not know a hammer from the de- tached perspective as just another epistemic object. Rather, we know the hammer from the contextual significance it possesses in a nexus of instrumental relationships in which it is used. Thus, phenomenology attempts to bring to light that which is concealed over or taken for granted. Phenomenological description brings into explicit relief the hidden contexts and purposes that underscore practical inter- action with the world. This point can only fur- ther be clarified if we explain understanding. Under a hermeneutic conception, Dasein is centrally characterized as understanding, but as I have already emphasized this concep- tion of understanding does not mean under- standing only as knowledge. Understanding is not primarily a formal conception of knowledge that epistemologists analyze and consider primitively - basic to human experi- ence. Rather, understanding is the implicit intelligibility that characterizes human activi- ties as meaningful and already familiar in practice. When we understand objects, we understand them as neither objects with ex- ternal properties, nor an explanation that at- tempts to stand over a phenomenon in a transhistorical sense either (Heidegger, 1962, p. 182/143). Instead, understanding is a pri- mordial disclosure of possibilities of the world as a whole or the possibilities that per- tain to my self-understanding as a historically mediated being thrown into the world. Ontically, we often claim “to understand something” but for Heidegger we have to be clear. The ontic interpretations are those con- cealed over in the public cliché attitudes and natural attitude in Husserl and Scheler. Ontic explanations are unexamined and offer no primordial investigation of a fundamental on- tology that hermeneutic phenomenology can. Heidegger offered a fundamental ontology through a hermeneutic phenomenology. He Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 7 described the ontological facticity of Dasein as the structure of care (Sorge). In the struc- ture of care Heidegger described understand- ing as an existentiale - an ontologically con- stitutive characteristic of Dasein at pre- cognitive the layer of experience. Through the existentiales, one experiences the world. Ac- cordingly, understanding is not a competence, but Being as existing, or what we might call a Being-possible. It is a way of existing. A can- didate passage might help clarify: In understanding, as an existentiale, that which we have such competence over is not a “what”, but Being as existing. The kind of Being which Dasein has, as poten- tiality-for-being, lies existentially in un- derstanding. Dasein is not something pre- sent-at-hand which possesses its compe- tence for something by way of an extra; it is primarily Being-possible. (Heidegger, 1962, p. 183/143) As seen above, Dasein is its “possibilities,” and those possibilities pertain not only to it- self but how it understands Being as existing, as it already is thrown into the world. These possibilities are never independent of the world in the way we described in Scheler. In other words, Heidegger does not think that possibilities are “free-floating potentiality-for- being in the sense of the liberty of indiffer- ence” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 183/144). In this way, possibilities are not like the “proposi- tionalized” maxims of Kantian moral philoso- phy that have their source in something else other than being-in-the-world. Instead, Dasein is ontologically understood as its possibilities. However, possibilities come already fur- nished in a world not of our own making. Heidegger wrote As the potentiality-for-being which is is, it has let such possibilities pass by; it is con- stantly waiving the possibilities of its Be- ing, or else it seizes upon them and makes mistakes. But this means that Dasein is Being-possible which has been delivered over to itself - thrown possibility through and through. Dasein is the possibility of Being-free for its ownmost potentiality- for-being. Its Being-possible is transparent to itself in different possible ways and de- grees. (Heidegger, 1962, p. 183/144) In other words, Dasein is an undetermined potentiality full of possibilities it may choose for itself. Sometimes, it will make mistakes in that choosing, but it seizes upon those possi- bilities nonetheless. Accordingly, Dasein must be handed over to itself as a field of po- tential possibilities it may choose, and the formation of these possibilities is not com- pletely within human control. There is a world already underway we are born into. We are thrown into the world. There are legacies shaping the direction and field of history I must and cannot help but respond to in my vocation. When I teach philosophy, I have come to expect that students from poorer are- as have less developed writing skills on aver- age than those that come from more affluent areas. While this is not always the case, a part of this problem places undue burdens on me as a teacher of philosophy in a public Ameri- can university. I have to work harder at get- ting clear what a text says to my students due in large measure by their lack of preparation for university life. I have to develop cultural references that might be analogous to the life of students far removed from philosophical texts. These legacies of under-preparation, failing high schools, and open admissions subsist even if I had never chosen to be a phi- losopher teaching at a public university. In another sense, however, these possibilities are mine and mine alone. I am the one who was assigned such and such a course with enrol- ling first-year students. All of these factors shape my situation. As Heidegger insisted, it is a matter of “degree.” Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 8 Dasein is thrown, and thus understanding takes into account the whole of a situation, and has a basic idea of its capabilities already but possession of this self-knowledge is not guaranteed. Dasein can fail to recognize that it is essentially its ownmost possibility. Un- derstanding can go astray. Heidegger summa- rized his complete definition of understand- ing: “Understanding is the existential Being of Dasein’s own potentiality-for-being; and it is so in such a way that this Being discloses in itself what its Being is capable of” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 184/144). To unpack this conception, Dasein is that which has its own being as it issue for it. We are in possession of our own possibility. This possession is not mysterious, but it is a structure exhibited in our everyday daily experience. In this way, the possibilities are concrete. In an intimate way, we know what we are capable of since an intimate fa- miliarity with our own being is disclosed in a very practical orientation towards the world. Let me take stock of what has been estab- lished thus far. For Heidegger, possibilities were not a deliberated choice, or a detached belief that will inform action later on. These possibilities are concretized in a particular context of significance. These possibilities are already present in a world we are thrown into, and the possession of these possibilities occur in matters of degree. These possibilities are always relative to a worldly situation. Under- standing is always practically-oriented in a context - this is what Heidegger meant by calling the projected understanding a “for-the- sake-of-which” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 182/143). By being constantly affixed to the worldly concrete possibilities and situational character, Heidegger introduced a distinction between factuality and facticity. Let me explain the distinction. Many past thinkers have argued what is possible by connecting those inferences about possibility to what someone is “factually.” For example, Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery in the Politics largely depends on metaphysical assumptions. (Aristotle, 1254a, pp. 28-32) For Aristotle, a thing possesses its nature inherent within it, and as such, the dis- tinction between those that rule and those that are ruled inheres in the nature of individuals. In another way, the pseudoscience of phre- nology in the 19th century “secured” the truth of racist attitudes. In addition, understanding “agency” in moral philosophy has gravitated towards attempting to construct moral theo- ries by first examining how humans operate socially through social psychology.2 This is an attempt at establishing what we are factual- ly rather than looking at how it is we exist as being-in-the-world. The latter emphasizes the facticity of human life over what Aristotle, pseudoscience or the use of moral psychology can do for us in ethics. The point in raising these examples is to open up Dasein’s worldly structure but at the same time being aware of what Heidegger is not claiming. Dasein could never be discerned from what it is factually. Instead, “Dasein is ‘more’ than it factually is, supposing that one might want to make an inventory of it as something-at-hand and list the contents of its Being… ” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 185/145). Therefore, again, Dasein cannot be known by simply listing off the properties of its being as a scientific perspec- tive might insist. Instead, Heidegger’s analy- sis is an existential-ontological account of how the projection of self-understanding can become “what it is by becoming what is pos- sible for it to be” (Hoy, 1993, p. 181). In or- der to understand what one may become, in- terpretation is required since we must be able to interpret the already possessed conception of who we want to become. For my purposes here, the possibilities can thus be interpreted as “modes of givenness” and interpretation imposes the limit of how those modes of givenness can be understood. Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 9 By interpretation (Auslegung), Heidegger meant a practically-oriented capacity of un- derstanding to bring into view the parts and wholes of an entire possibility and context. Put another way, interpretation is the devel- opment of the understanding’s projection up- on what is inherently possible. In Heidegger’s words, an interpretation is “the working out of possibilities projected in understanding” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 189/148). Thus, we must already have a worked out understanding of possibilities prior to interpretation since inter- pretation is grounded in the understanding. Understanding is never generated out of in- terpretation. Instead, understanding is the pre- reflective, pre-linguistic, and pre-cognitive practical orientation that makes it possible to interpret the world at all. We understand as- pects of the world already; we understand something-as-something. When I engage in reading a book, I understand the book as something to be read. The book occurs in the in-order-to relationships that constitute the whole world and the possible interpretations of it: That which is disclosed in understanding - that which is understood - is already ac- cessible I such a way that its ‘as which’ can be made to stand out explicitly. The ‘as’ makes up the structure of explicitness of something that is understood. It consti- tutes the interpretation. (Heidegger, 1962, p. 189/149) In other words, there is an implicit back- ground to the world, a nexus of practical rela- tionships behind understanding and interpret- ing the world that Heidegger called the “total- ity of involvements.” I possess an intimate familiarity with many of these practical rela- tionships already. For Heidegger, we are born into a world already underway within its own historicity and, likewise, all interpretations are a working out of projective understanding in that historicity and totality of involvements. The totality of involvements is always un- derstood not as a grasping of facts inde- pendently of that historicity and already un- derstood contexts of significance. Instead, the totality of involvements is what Heidegger called “ready-to-hand” (Zuhanden). We do not apprehend properties about objects out- side of the interpretively-laden contexts we inhabit. Such an apprehension would exem- plify what Heidegger called “present-at-hand” (Vorhanden). Moreover, this holds for value too. As Heidegger put it, “in interpreting we do not throw a signification over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it…” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 190/150). In other words, interpretations can- not get outside of the contextual significance. Instead, this hermeneutic threshold holds for value. For instance, values are not disclosed as a mind-independent property through a type of moral intuition.3 In the totality of in- volvements, there are three pre-linguistic/pre- cognitive features that condition interpretation and further the hermeneutic threshold already described. As Heidegger put it, “an interpreta- tion is never a presuppositionless apprehend- ing” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 191/150). First, there is fore-having (Vorhabe). We have a prior understanding that does not stand out clearly from the background. We under- stand the bridge is something to cross prior the practical involvement of driving. Second- ly, there is fore-sight (Vorsicht). This is the act of appropriation in which the interpreter brings into relief an already understood but veiled aspect of a thing, and this is what is responsible for conceptualization of a thing for interpretation. Finally, Heidegger de- scribed fore-conception (Vorgriff). This is the already decided and definite way of conceiv- ing the thing to be interpreted “either with finality or with reservations; it is grounded in something we grasp in advance—in a fore- conception” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 191/150). Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 10 All three factors describe the fore-structure. These three features constitute the hermeneu- tic threshold that interpretation imposes upon what is possible for us. Hermeneutic phenomenology is not simp- ly a description about the limits of under- standing and interpretations. Those are cer- tainly part of it, yet it is more. For me, herme- neutic phenomenology is the fusion of the as- structure and fore-structure in Heidegger. The fore-structure is the particular way in which the whole “must already have understood what is to be interpreted” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 194/152). Hermeneutic phenomenology is the descriptive attempt to bring the as-structures and fore-structures together in which together they form an articulation.4 The as-structure is the thing “as its own” but such a thing is giv- en as part of a contextual whole. Their togeth- erness delimits how projective understanding actually works. In projective understanding, …entities are disclosed in their possibility. The character of the possibility corre- sponds, on each occasion, with the kind of the entity which is understood. Entities within-the-world generally are projected upon the world—that is, upon the whole of significance, to whose reference- relations concern, as Being-in-the-world, has been tied up in advance. (Heidegger, 1962, p. 192/151) In other words, projective understanding is limited by the part-whole relation disclosed in the as-structure and fore-structure. To say that understanding works out pos- sibilities for interpretation within the part- whole relationship is not to commit oneself to circular reasoning. It is not a “vicious circle” as Heidegger insisted. Instead, interpretation is an effort to see more than simply an ideal of knowledge operating as pure philosophiz- ing but rather “a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 195/153). Heidegger’s phenomeno- logical description of understanding limits the very possibility of phenomenological ontolo- gy itself. More generally, many philosophers have imposed the standards of deductive rigor upon discourses in philosophy. These rigor- ous discourses attempt to get at the truth of a discourse. Yet, such an imposition of an ideal of knowledge is still a species of projective understanding. In the Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl phenomenologically re- trieved how the sedimentation of historical meaning in Galileo had “mathematized” na- ture to the point that nature itself could only be understood scientifically as an event within space-time.5 Such events could not be given any other way. Quite similarly, Heidegger’s insistence on the priority of practical engage- ment with the world is a similar insight. Heidegger’s efforts return to what is given, and at the same time, the return establishes a limit that neither understanding nor interpreta- tion can surpass. This would include how val- ues could be given, if at all. III. Phenomenological Tensions The differences in these respective philoso- phies illustrate two ways values can be inter- preted. First, Scheler’s silence on the ontolo- gy of value follows from his phenomenologi- cal attitude. From the earlier passage, Scheler regarded the “given only in the seeing and experiencing of the act itself.” In the sphere of acts, we could discern the essences of things, but this essential insight cannot glean any on- tological insight. Scheler was a thoroughly committed pure phenomenologist at that point, and the ontological neutrality of the attitude of “spiritual seeing” does not seek to delimit that which can be given. Scheler’s insistence on the immediate givenness of value through emotional intuition expresses that spirit may discern the what-ness of a phenomenon, yet we are never told anything about what es- Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 11 sences are anymore than how it is that values are given as an eternal a priori order of ranks. On the other hand, Dasein cannot immediate intuitively apprehend a phenomenon. Accord- ing to Heidegger, all understanding is – to put it in Scheler’s words – “mediated” through “signs and symbols.” Therefore, it is clear that insofar as the analysis regards the Formal- ismus and Being and Time, there are clear contradictory commitments to either a phe- nomenology that can discern essences imme- diately through intuition or a hermeneutic phenomenology in which the understanding works out its interpretive possibilities mediat- ed through the as-and-fore-structures of expe- rience. If someone is given the choice be- tween these two approaches, the question can be asked: Which approach allows for a better understanding of value’s givenness? In the Nature of Sympathy, Scheler argued that existence is pervasively already mooded - that is to say, Scheler’s insistence that affec- tivity pervades human life is that such affec- tivity is being-in-the-world. I offer the follow- ing passage as evidence of this interpretation: …the value-qualities of objects are al- ready given in advance at a level where their imaged and conceptual features are not yet vouchsafed to us, and hence that the apprehension of values is the basis of our subsequent apprehension of objects. (Scheler, 2008, p. 57-58) We are actively borne into a world engrossed in an emotional tonality. Human life is thor- oughly “mooded” in Scheler. Consequently, there is agreement with the Heideggerian in- sistence on Dasein as Being-in-the-world, and how the care structure unfolds emphasizing “moodedness.” Scheler’s analysis takes affec- tivity farther than Being and Time. He gives full phenomenological independence to affec- tive intentionality whereas moods are just one existentiale in the care structure. For it is our whole spiritual life - and not simply objective thinking in the sense of cognition of being - that possesses “pure” acts and laws of acts which are, according to their nature and contents, independent of the human organization. The emotive elements of spirit, such as feeling, prefer- ring, loving, hating and willing, also pos- sess original a priori contents which are not borrowed from “thinking”, and which ethics must show to be independent of logic. There is an a priori ordre du Coeur, or logique du Coeur as Blaise Pascal aptly calls it. (Scheler, 1973a, p. 63) Scheler considered the experience of affec- tivity as the basis for all other experiences. In Heidegger, the moods are experienced in much the same way as Scheler. They are a co- penetrating part of the structure of care. Moods come from behind us, without our control, and we are constantly delivered over to them. Every situation is mooded, and there- fore given as already mooded as such. In this way, both Scheler and Heidegger emphasized the same primordial level of affectivity in which all situations and the world itself is dis- closed. Yet, there is a striking difference be- tween both phenomenological approaches. In Scheler, the emotions form an independent autonomous logic disclosed in the structure of intentional acts. In Heidegger, the moods work alongside the other existentiales. This autonomous logic is the reason why Scheleri- an phenomenology is capable of grasping the values intended in emotions more fully than Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, and explains why Heidegger could not ade- quately grasp values in the everydayness of Dasein. The givenness of value-qualities in expe- rience, when successfully bracketed phenom- enologically, perdure. That is, values are giv- en as a form of intransient permanence as ev- idenced in acts of love. These acts are of spirit, Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 12 and they disclose values as objectively valid in their own way. Consider the experience of love. Love is a personal intentional act that opens up the grasp of value’s givenness of an- other’s spiritual essence. These others could be other persons, an anonymous other – such as other Americans, or maybe an idea like jus- tice. Either way, the structure of love is the same intentional act and offers us phenome- nological insight into the experience of values itself. In love, I will adopt a permanent intran- sient orientation to sacrifice all my effort to bring the other to proper fruition. I will not attempt to control, manipulate, or dominate this other. Control, domination, or manipula- tion would only attempt to bring about an im- posed conception of what the other should be rather than allowing the unique other to be. Hence, love is the movement or ascendancy of Scheler’s value-rankings that allows the valued good to become more than what it is, and at the highest level is the absolute value of the person. Being capable of experiencing value’s givenness requires eliminating any mediation such that the experience can pick upon value’s overwhelming fullness. The overwhelming fullness of value’s givenness is a conceptual feature of value itself. It could be proposed that Heidegger picked up on the givenness of value as a form of permanence, but Heidegger held value to be an ontic phenomenon that naively regard values as present-at-hand. As Heidegger first mentioned ethics in Being and Time Dasein’s ways of behavior, its capacities, powers, possibilities, and vicissitudes, have been studied with varying extent in philosophical psychology, in anthropolo- gy, ethics, and ‘political science’, in poet- ry, biography and in the writing of history each in a different fashion…Only when the basic structures of Dasein have been adequately worked out with explicit orien- tation towards the problem of Being itself, will what we have hitherto gained in in- terpreting Dasein gets its existential justi- fication. (Heidegger, 1962, p. 37/16) For Heidegger, ethics is but one example of an ontic interpretation that does not go far enough in elucidating the Being of Dasein. Heidegger thought that various ontic interpre- tations of Dasein’s possibilities had been overlooked and concealed over. In a sense, Heidegger was correct, yet had Heidegger ex- plored the ground of values as “felt in experi- ence,” he would have gleaned Scheler’s in- sight. I hope the reader understands I am not simply “playing up” Scheler, but offering the givenness of value as a reason to regard Scheler’s phenomenology more sophisticated on this point. Phenomenologically speaking and independent of Scheler, values are given as enduring beyond contexts of significance. If I face a similar situation later on in life, then ceteris paribus the same value will apply to the same context of significance. Hence, we can understand it when Scheler claimed that the determinate order of values “is inde- pendent of the form of being into which val- ues enter - no matter, for instance, if they are present to us as purely objective qualities, as members of value-complexes (e.g., the being- agreeable or being-beautiful of something), or as values that ‘a thing has’” (Scheler, 1973a, p. 17). Heidegger had only picked up on the givenness of value partly. Indeed, values are given as a presence perduring throughout time because the act-center of persons realizes them into time as goods.6 The act-center of persons in realizing values exceeds represen- tation, and so too do the values realized by persons. An example might prove helpful. Scheler stated that values only matter in relation to the dignity of a person, and this is the highest value (which for Scheler is the value of the Holy). Therefore, if I enslave another person, I disregard how he is given to me in experi- Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 13 ence as a person. This insight is gleaned in the emotional apprehension I have in relation to a person. The dignity of a person does not come to us through the a priori form of the moral law as a Kantian would insist. Instead, the inviolable sense of the person is given in her inexhaustible richness as a wholly unique in- dividuated being. The person emanates out- ward phenomenologically as absolute and unique. It does not matter if we are talking about the slaves of Ancient Egypt, or slaves in the American South of the 19th century. In all instances, the value of the person is felt in ex- perience. There is no mediation of the value attached to the holy sense afforded to person. In much the same way, Levinas insisted on the transhistorical absolute value of the other. It is therefore no mistake that Levinas and Scheler insisted on the trans-historical and therefore trans-mediated sense that the other person possesses. No ethics can get off the ground if there was not a phenomenological givenness of the person and value itself. In short, ethicists assume the phenomenological existence of values and persons as a basis for their own inquiry. A Heideggerian might counter we have simply paid too much attention to the as- structure, the immediate immanence of a per- son without paying attention to what context or fore-structure that allows us to make such claims as when Scheler opens in the Second Preface to the Formalismus with “The spirit behind my ethics is one of rigid ethical abso- lutism and objectivism” (Scheler, 1973a, p. xxiii). Consequently, it is no accident that the next sentence follows as “My position may in another respect be called emotional intuition- ism” (Scheler 1973a, p. xxiii). By contrast, one could agree with Gadamer’s sentiments surrounding Scheler’s thought. Scheler’s ma- jor ethics merely “fused the tradition of Cath- olic moral philosophy for the first time with the most advanced positions in modern phi- losophy” (Gadamer, 2008, p. 135). By “mod- ern philosophy,” Gadamer referred to phe- nomenology and its supplementary role to a metaphysics informed by philosophical an- thropology. Scheler’s contribution is down- played if a hermeneutic phenomenology in either Gadamer or Heidegger’s formation succeeds. Yet, hermeneutic phenomenology is limited by its inability to capture the absolute immanence of value-experience. There is no mediation in Scheler’s thought of value expe- rience. This follows from Scheler’s commit- ment to a phenomenology of essences ex- pressed in the interconnections between emo- tional acts and value-correlates. Interconnections are, like essences, “giv- en”. They are not a “product” of “under- standing.” They are original thing- interconnections [Sachzusammenhänge], not laws of objects just because they are laws of acts apprehending objects.7 They are “a priori” because they are grounded in essences [Wesenheit], not in objects and goods. They are a priori, but not because of “understanding” or “reason” “produces” them. The logos permeating the universe can be grasped only through them. (Schel- er, 1973a, p. 68) The givenness of value shares in a completely different mode of givenness - more than Heidegger could anticipate in Being and Time - and this is why it is unfair to insist upon the hermeneutic threshold without fully paying attention to the how-of-givenness and what that how-of-givenness entails for value in par- ticular. The givenness of value could only be articulated in a phenomenology of emotional life where they are experienced directly. For instance, if I find myself likely to eat fish from Lake Erie, I will refrain. Lake Erie is very polluted, and the game wardens in Penn- sylvania near Presque Isle warn of the dangers. The fish are given as threatening my health. Moreover, I come to value my health over the pleasurable desire to eat fish. I choose the vi- Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 14 tal value of health over the lower pleasurable value. To experience value is to be thrust in situations in which values are given in rela- tion to each other, and the phenomenological evidence of preferring acts indicates the high- er values are chosen at the expense of those experienced as lower. Some might be dissatisfied with my inter- pretation that Heidegger missed out on the givenness of value. It is not enough to elicit the motivations for why a philosopher has de- fended a particular conclusion. Herein, I have offered the givenness of value as its own evi- dence and this is why if a moral phenomenol- ogy is to take shape, the phenomenology in question cannot adopt a Heideggerian frame. Instead, a moral phenomenology can only be founded on a phenomenology open to value in the first place, and unlike Heidegger, Scheler phenomenology accommodates value’s givenness. However, there are some limita- tions even to Scheler’s approach. Scheler provided an account of moral phenomenology that disclosed the how-of- givenness of values. However, in his ethics, he never provided a clear account as to what the content of values are, nor how that content is experienced. Instead, we know what value might be operative in a particular value- complex or situation and the phenomenologi- cal form of moral experience more generally. I feel a calling of the Holy and the values cor- related to spiritual feeling but there are no specific duties or prescriptions as to how I instantiate that calling in my actions. With its dearth of a prescriptive element, Scheler’s moral phenomenology cannot take the form of a particular moral theory that privileges ways to decide what I ought to do, and by “moral theory,” I mean a philosophical meth- od that provides agents with set procedures for moral deliberation, e.g., Kant’s categorical imperative or Mill’s greatest happiness prin- ciple. At best, Scheler might endorse some type of virtue ethics in which phronesis is in- volved in apprehending what values are sali- ent to a particular value-complex, duty or per- son, but this is a topic for another time.8 In this paper, I have urged two conclu- sions regarding the differences spelled out between Scheler’s intuition of essences and Heidegger’s hermeneutic turn. First, I have argued that the experience of value could not help but be given in terms of its presence-at- hand nature. Persons and values, when viewed within time, resemble presence in the Heideggerian sense because of the excess of givenness overtakes the phenomenal appear- ance and that overwhelming giveness of value is given immanently without mediation. Heidegger’s insistence that values are ontic follows from Heidegger’s incomplete grasp of how values are given in experience. The in- transience of value is simply the manner in which it is given in experience. Scheler’s silence about the ontology of value in the Formalismus is a product of seek- ing a phenomenological basis for ethics. Put simply, when we engage in phenomenological description, we are not to assume anything prior about the phenomenon, but let the phe- nomenon show itself from itself. From this phenomenological neutrality, Scheler cannot settle anything about the question of values ontologically, but unlike Heidegger, Scheler’s phenomenology can capture the givenness of value. Scheler can say how values are experi- enced in emotional intuition in preferring, loving, and hating, and that there may be les- sons to learn from Heidegger. Heidegger’s efforts to “ontologize” phenomenological in- quiry about factical life is a model for how Scheler’s efforts may be better developed - though my audience must wait for another time to address the Heideggerian suggestions for Scheler’s metaphysics yet to come. At present, Scheler’s approach is more amiable to the givenness of persons and values and for Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 15 this reason. Scheler’s approach should be re- garded as the better hermeneutic framework whenever such frameworks concern values in lived-experience. IV. Application In this last section, I hope some of my efforts have opened up eidetic seeing about values. The earlier sections provide reasons why we ought to favor Scheler’s phenomenology of value over and above Heidegger’s hermeneu- tic phenomenology. Scheler’s unique vision for a phenomenology of value has intellectual merit. His phenomenology of value accom- modates the very experience of values. This unique vision is superior to Heidegger’s her- meneutic phenomenology, and the overall ambition of this essay has appealed to the phenomenological evidence of value itself as a way to decide this issue. For non- phenomenologically-inclined thinkers, such a solution may seem rather obtuse. Put differ- ently, the interest in hermeneutic approaches to problems of human experience cannot ac- commodate the experience of values if her- meneutics is restricted to embody Heideggerian-inspired approaches. I choose to address Heideggerian hermeneutic phenome- nology since Heidegger’s thought has inspired so many. Beyond the concerns with “theory,” let me provide an example why this insight is crucial to those interested in hermeneutic method and application to cultural practices. Over the last four years, health care acces- sibility has been the subject of intense debate in the United States. Ever since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA hereafter), the politics of the United States have been divid- ed between those that think reform need not involve any alteration of how health care is made accessible in the United States via pri- vate companies and those that believe in pub- lic insurance. Until the ACA, a person’s abil- ity to access health care service depended very much on whether one’s job provided health care insurance. In the United States, private companies provide insurance benefits attached to one’s employment. For the under- employed, the jobless and those with preexist- ing conditions, these people cannot acquire insurance easily or not at all, and the only re- course these at risk populations is to access health care services provided by the Emer- gency Room in the hospital. Federal law pro- hibits hospitals from turning away anybody, but this option often puts the uninsured in ex- treme financial debt if the problem is severe, and hospitals will not go out of their way to serve the uninsured. In January 2014, howev- er, the ACA will require all Americans to purchase insurance and employers of all types will be required now to offer insurance. This requirement is called the “universal mandate.” Let us, now, assume that one wanted to interpret this political situation. In light of feelings of the uninsured prior to the Afforda- ble Care Act, a Heideggerian frame could pick up on the anxiety felt of those in the situ- ation. The anxious mood and suffering of one’s health might reveal aspects of our finitude, even possibly revealing aspects of our own being-towards-death depending on the severity of one’s health problem. Anxiety can individuate the experiencer and even ar- rest us from our immersed social self to the point where we achieve an authentic existence (Eigenlichkeit). Yet, anxiety is not love. Anx- iety only brings to light my possibilities for action as a finite being and, in its deepest rev- elation about my own possibilities in the call of conscience. I am not called to serve others as much as I am only aware of myself as anx- ious. My own freedom and the tenuous re- solve to face my situation constitute all I am capable of doing. Applied to one’s personal health, this deep revelation of anxiety can on- ly inform me as to how I relate to the environ- ing world. For Scheler, anxiety is felt in the vital sphere of values. Love allows us to as- Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 16 cend past this value sphere and acquire knowledge of values beyond the personal in- dividuated experience anxiety causes within us. Heidegger has no order of preferring with- in his limited conception of hermeneutic phe- nomenology to acquire knowledge of values beyond the personal individuated experience of anxiety. Love allows us to grasp higher values and realize them in the service of the other. Reli- ant upon Scheler’s act of preferring, or what we could call value-ception (Wertnehmung), persons can glean the values given in our ex- perience of the world whereas Heidegger can only pick up on the moodedness of a situation as it pertains to Dasein’s concern only, but not the value-correlates attached to those moods. In this way, Heideggerian hermeneutics could not do appropriate justice in understanding the moral imperative necessary to engage in a political dialogue about how best to solve the anxiety of having little or no reliable access to health care services. Love is the name of those intentional acts where we ascend in Scheler’s value rankings to the highest value of the person. In this way, love enables the growth beyond the vital sphere to solving the problem felt in the vital sphere. We can see this insight in Kenneth Stikkers’s work on Scheler. He wrote Contemporary Western culture, for exam- ple, is to be understood as an utilty-value ethos increasingly dominated by economy - what Scheler describes the “ethos of in- dustrialism” - and to grasp this fact is to gain the single most penetrating insight into that culture. (Stikkers, 1986, p. 250) In light of this passage, Stikkers continued and showed what the idea of economy looks like as we ascend in value. Starting from the lowest value at the top and ascending in love, economic concerns look very different at eve- ry level. Love is the grasping of higher values over lower ones, and the movement in the various value-spheres, as the example of eco- nomic concerns below, would be based on love that would eventually culminate in the Holy. Thus, economics understood through the various value-spheres in Scheler’s thought would resemble the following schema. - pleasure: hedonistic consumerism - utility: as measured, e.g., by money units - vital values: as found in the original life- communal meaning of “Oikonomia” viz., care of the home - spiritual values: e.g., when economies primary interest is justice - the Holy: e.g., when labor is experienced as participation in God’s ongoing creation and as an act of creation. (Stikkers, 1986, p. 251) The ACA’s universal mandate that every- one buy public insurance is based on love. If healthier people buy into a nation-wide insur- ance pool, the cost of uninsured people will no longer drive up costs for those that have insurance, and the universal mandate compels obedience so that more people can afford to purchase it. The ACA is motivated by provid- ing access to the economically disenfran- chised already tending both towards the spir- itual value of justice and the Holy. Contrary to ascension, Conservative ad- vocates mostly favor an entirely free market solution. Such solutions privilege the man- agement of one’s home and projection of one’s own self-interest against what would be in the interest of others. The fact that the uni- versal mandate compels people by law to pur- chase a service they might not want or need is interpreted as going against their own self- interest. In the vital sphere, we can feel the value of anxiousness, but anxiousness, as I criticize Heidegger is self-referential. The violation of liberty often spoken about by op- ponents of the ACA is based on a conception Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 17 of liberty-as-self-interested. Yet, the entire system prior to the ACA viewed the unin- sured as people incapable of paying and ex- cludes them economically. To this day, the health care system seeks to profit from treat- ing patients as consumers rather than the indi- vidual person. V. Conclusion When it comes to value-experience, there are few approaches in philosophy that can thema- tize experience. Phenomenology is one ap- proach to describing lived-experience.9 Yet, the lived-experience of value is unique. Val- ues have a special mode of givenness, and as such, the phenomenological commitments of Scheler and Heidegger prevent or enable that mode of givenness to be seen. In this essay, I argued that if we pay attention to the givenness of value itself as an enduring im- manent presence, I can determine which ap- proach can accommodate the givenness of value. As a phenomenologist, I want to allow for the phenomenon of value to shine forth on its own merits, and I devoted considerable attention to see how value could manifest in both approaches. In Heidegger’s thought, values are either not gleaned at all or only partially. The prin- cipal figure in the development of twentieth century hermeneutics is Heidegger. Heidegger also eclipses the importance of Scheler’s phe- nomenology, and yet only in Scheler’s phe- nomenology is the core of value-experience truly manifest. For those outside of philoso- phy but still interested in the application of hermeneutic insight into cultural practices are better served by adopting Scheler’s phenome- nology when addressing the reality of value- experience. I attempted to show this insight in the example Stikkers applied to economics itself. This application allowed for us to see that despite the prominent appeal of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, Scheler’s phenomenology of value allows for a deeper insight into cultural practices. References Blosser, P. (1995). Scheler’s critique of Kant’s ethics. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Frings, M.S. (1996). Max Scheler: A concise introduction into a great thinker. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Gadamer, H.G. (2008). Philosophical herme- neutics (D. Linge, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Hoy, D.C. (1993). Heidegger and the herme- neutic turn. In C.B. Guignon (Ed.), The Cam- bridge companion to Heidegger (pp. 170-194). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Scheler, M. (1973a). Formalism in ethics and the non-formal ethics of value: A new attempt toward the foundation of an ethical personal- ism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scheler, M. (1973b). Phenomenology and the theory of cognition In Selected philosophical essays (D. Lachtermann, Trans.) (pp. 136- 201). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scheler, M. (1973c). The theory of three facts. Selected philosophical essays (D. Lachterman, Trans.) (pp. 202-287)). Evanston, IL: North- western University Press. Scheler, M. (2008). The nature of sympathy (P. Heath, Trans.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 18 Schneck, S. (1987). Person and polis: Max Scheler’s personalism as political theory. Al- bany, NY: State University of New York Press. Stikkers, K.W. (1986). ‘Ethos,’ Its relation- ship to real and ideal sociological factors in Scheler’s philosophy of culture. Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture, 21(3), 243- 252. Notes 1 The priority of this type of act is central to the entire sphere of moral experience in Scheler. 2 The turning point of this in the most recent literature and attraction to social psychology would probably be Gilbert Harman’s “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Er- ror” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Soci- ety 99 (1998-1999): pp. 315-333. It is fair to say that this probably goes as far back Hume. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume’s attempt at describing the moral sciences at- tempts to discern limited to normative theo- ry by appeals to Hume’s psychology about sympathetic identification. 3 This holds really for any conception of phi- losophy that apprehends or discovers mind- independent truths. Such examples in some moral philosophy disobey this hermeneutic threshold that Heidegger sees as constrain- ing all inquiry. R. Schafer-Landau is the most recent defense of moral intuitionism in his Moral Realism: A Defense (Oxford: Ox- ford University Press, 2003). Similarly, this hermeneutic limit has consequences for any realism about science, art, ethics or wherev- er such efforts attempt at grasping the struc- ture itself without seeing such efforts as op- erative in a context already. These condi- tions also elicit Heidegger’s suspicion about metaphysics and why it is that we must call for the de-structuring of metaphysics. 4 It is no surprise that so much time is spent on logos as a gathering together (legein) and letting-be in Heidegger’s essay Early Greek Thinking. 5 It is fair to say that beyond a transcenden- tal idealistic phenomenology, Husserl’s draw to sedimentation is an influence of Heidegger’s hermeneutic turn. 6 This is a point of contention in Parvis Emad’s brilliantly argued Heidegger and the Phenomeology of Value (Torey Press: Glen Ellyn, IL, 1984). In that work, Emad thinks the difference between Heidegger and Scheler turns on Scheler’s acceptance of traditional concepts of the person that presuppose a temporality of presence. Heidegger, Emad insists, works out a completely different account of temporality that questions Scheler’s acceptance of a traditional metaphysics concealed in his commitment to intentional acts as products of spirit (and likewise the whole of Western metaphysics for that matter). “The a- temporal nature of spirit is clearly manifest in its sole representative, the act. The nature of act is such that it does not exist in time. To use Scheler’s terminology, acts exercise their influence into time without being extended in it…like the tradition criticized by Heidegger, Scheler is unaware of the subtle, hidden and elusive role of time” (p. 47) While I do not have the space here to revisit the entire presentation of Emad’s argument, Emad’s book only takes up the Heideggerian confidence in that line without asking first what the givenness of value is itself. The alternative explanation for Hackett Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 2 19 Scheler’s lack of awareness about time is simple. Values are given in such excess that, like persons, they exhibit a type of givenness that cannot be captured in time. The givenness is a vertical dimension, given in height and only partially understood in the horizon of time articulated in hermeneutic phenomenology. 7 On its own laws apprehending objects would be a form of naïve realism or version of either epistemic or moral intuitionism. 8 While I do not have time to review the literature on this point, I am especially attracted to Eugene Kelly’s recent efforts to marry virtue ethics, Scheler, and Hartmann. For more information on this view, see his “Between Scheler and Hartmann: Some Problems of a Material Value Ethics” in Ethics and Phenomenology. Ed. Mark Sanders and J. Jeremy Wisnewski (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2012): p. 39- 56. Those parties interested in Scheler may also read his “On the Rehabilitation of Virtue” trans. Eugene Kelly (2005) in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 79(1), 21-37. 9 American pragmatism is the other side of philosophy that regards experience as primary.