Ep. 365: Scheler on Love (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, episode 365, part 2. Continuing to discuss Max Scheller's The Nature of Sympathy. We're now well into part two, talking about love. Yeah. Did we want to crank back as we look more closely into the text itself to part one in there?

0:30 Wes: I don't know. Was there anything in chapter 11? Because we read chapter 11, the relationship, love and fellow feeling. Some of it is kind of foreshadows what we get in more detail here. But I think we've said enough now about love to make sense of what he's saying here. I mean, one of the primary points, right, is that you can't derive love and hate from fellow feeling or in General, from the concept of benevolence. And I think one of the points he wants to make, kind of contra utilitarianism, is that where in benevolence we might be seeking a kind of benefit for an object, especially a material benefit, we want to redistribute the resources.

For instance, love isn't seeking any kind of material benefit. It's concerned strictly with the personality in this technical sense. And he makes other points. This is where he makes the point. You know, you can love things like knowledge and God, but, you know, obviously you can't have benevolence towards knowledge or God. That doesn't make sense. Benevolence involves superiority, and it can even be insulting under certain conditions.

1:43 Mark: I'm just looking for quotes that I picked out. Page 142. We often have fellow feeling for someone we do not love. In conveying our regrets to someone, for instance, there's no trace of love, nor is there in our ordinary pity for him. But even here, the stirrings of sympathy are based on love. A love which in these instances relates either to a whole of which he is a part or member, a family, a nation or mankind, or else to a general category which he exemplifies for us as a compatriot, relatives or a human being, or even as a living creature. In other words, the phenomenological object to which love is directed does not have to coincide in intention with the object of sympathy.

2:22 Wes: Right. You know, ultimately he's going to say, fellow feeling is based on love. So love is not. This is, again, how things always get complicated with him. Love is not reducible to fellow feeling. But fellow feeling is always based on love. Which is not to say that we have to love the person. It might just be that we love some category that the person is in. And the ultimate category would be humanity. So I could say, you know, I sympathize with you, Mark, insofar as you're a human being. But I don't really like you. I don't love you, may not even like you. But I can still have fellow feelings based on my love for your category or your American ness. Maybe he's always on about nation as well. I think it's a legitimate type of love. Love of nation.

3:12 Mark: Right. Dylan, you were saying in our last installment here that this love of mankind was a positive evil as opposed to the individual right or wickedness. Anyway.

3:24 Dylan: Yeah, this is where I can go get the quote. Yeah, it's one of the places he talks about.

3:28 Wes: Well, it can be Phariseeism he says, and it's positive evil because it makes it condition. Right, well, let's wait on that. Maybe we should look at the text there to kind of parse that out.

3:38 Mark: Yeah, well, so, yeah, page 143 is the other quote. So it's sort of a follow up to the other one I just read. In a case where we do have love indeed, but not for the object of our sympathy, the effect on the pitied one is to create a sense of injured pride, shame and humiliation. It is not, as Nietzsche says, pity as such that is wounding to our shame, but pity without love. For the pitied one, the only thing that makes pity bearable is the love it betrays. The case referred to, the pitied one feels that the love which underlies pity is not directed on him in a concrete sense at all, but on a generalized object, mankind, his family, his country, his membership of a class.

It is this general or collective concept which continues to be loved, and it is the indirect occasion of pity regarding the pitied one as merely a case or instance. Its effect, when viewed in relation to the individual suffering to which that pity refers, is to awaken shame.

4:29 Dylan: I mean, that sounds right, actually. That really becomes condescension in that respect.

4:35 Wes: So he's reinforcing a Nietzsche point, but he is also qualifying it, right, because he doesn't think. He, unlike Nietzsche, thinks fellow feeling could follow from concrete love for that particular individual, in which case it's a good thing. And I think even at this point, at least, feeling derived from love of humanity is well and good as well, you know, whether or not it injures the pride of the person. Right. There's a place for us to be able to sympathize with strangers, and we can't expect to love everyone or especially people we don't know.

5:11 Dylan: In fact, he has an analysis of the phenomena of distance. He wants to. Well, I'd have to go back and look at it. But he acknowledges that we love with respect to effectively distance to ourselves, where we will love our families more than we will love someone far away. And my recollection is that analysis is just. That's just the way it is. It's. That's just a characteristic of the.

5:38 Wes: He's defending that.

5:39 Seth: Well, he's still in his phenomenological mode, so. Yes, it is just the way it is.

5:43 Dylan: He's.

5:44 Seth: His pretense is that he's just describing, you know, the lived experience of it, so to speak.

5:50 Wes: Well, he defends this idea as well, and he defends it right at the point where he talks about the evils of love, of humanity. You know, he's defending patriotism, let's say, not necessarily nationalism, but he's defending the concept of the love of nation, which is not uncontroversial. Right. And internationalists like Marx might say, well, that's just. That is straight up the source of a lot of evil, love of nation. But he's going to make the argument that because it's nearer to us, it's more concrete, there's more content to it in that sense, it's a more legitimate form of love. So this is on page 189, if we want to do that. So it's better to love what is nearest and better to love our nation before we would love humanity, and better to love our family before we would love nation and so on until we get. Until we drill down to individual.

6:42 Seth: On individual love, there's a section earlier where he uses a word. I thought I was going back through my notes and I thought he used the term disinterest. And so I was going to ask. I was thinking of Kant and sublimity and things like that, but it's actually detachment. So he's describing. Let me just read it real quick. This is page 149. There may be emotional acts which presuppose the passing of a judgment, or rather an evaluation. Respect, for instance, seems to me to be one of these. It presupposes that initial detachment from the object, which alone makes it possible for a value judgment to precede the onset of the emotional act.

And it also requires a specific awareness of the presence of the value. But this detachment is just what is lacking in love and hatred. They're entirely primitive and immediate modes of emotional response. So the reason I mention that is in this context is if you think in terms of attachment and detachment, then his anti Singerian scale of immediate self, individual, family, you know, I don't know, village, whatever, nation, humanity actually makes sense because there's a very real sense, at least phenomenologically, in which you can think about our own attachment to ourselves, to our spouses, to our families.

And you can, very reasonably, I think, conceive of that level of attachment decreasing as you get to more and more abstract and larger groups of people.

8:22 Mark: And if you're wondering a Singerian of or relating to Peter Singer, it's in the wiktionary. That is a real adjective.

8:29 Seth: Yeah. Don't send any emails.

8:31 Mark: It took me a second to even figure out what you were talking about.

8:34 Wes: Although he's not doing a precognition here. In this particular section of Singer, he's thinking of Kant, right?

8:40 Seth: Yeah.

8:40 Wes: So he's explicitly talking about respect. So deontology as opposed to utilitarianism. But yeah, I think the later section sounds more like it's about utilitarianism. But in this case, yeah, respect is a form of detachment. And I think again he wants to replace this concept of respect for the other with the concept of spiritual love.

9:04 Mark: You know, in your quote there, Seth, you of course mentioned love and hatred and the whole thing. Part two, Love and Hatred, Chapter one, Towards the Phenomenology of Love and Hatred. But we have not said the word hatred even once. Because even though it sounds like he's going to talk about and it's not, hatred ends up being also a positive thing. It's not just the absence of love. It's an active walk down the ladder that I'm trying to see the worst in you. And even if you're nice to me, even if you bring pleasure to me, I'm still going to hate you. It's also not based on reason, but he doesn't have much more to say about it.

9:40 Wes: It's not a desire for the non existence of the hated thing.

9:43 Mark: Right.

9:44 Wes: It's not simply aversion. Right. He says, yeah, it's a movement towards. From a higher value to a lower value. So everything he says about love, you just. He's basically said just reverse it for hate. And he doesn't talk about hate at all, which is. Yes, there's no phenomenology, there's no like, like the hate would be the more exciting. Just give something, it's just not there. Yeah.

10:05 Mark: Like even if you say you have a love of art, can you have a hatred of certain kind of art? Really? Ah, it just rubs me the wrong way. It's not. You can even explain it. You can explain the quality. I don't know, I think something about how to get over hatred. Because people do get over it. It is not the same. Right. If, oh, I love you, but then you have an accident and now your face is mutilated and I don't love you anymore because I was actually shallowly fixing on your personal appearance. We say, well, that's just shallow. You didn't really love.

Love has to stay there even if the qualities change. But hatred, we hope that as you get to know the person more. But it seems like no, the real hatred would reach right into their inner soul and I will just hate you no matter what. You do. And no matter how much we go through together or anything like that, I will still hate. Just it doesn't seem like a very.

11:00 Wes: Well, also, we're not loving or hating for any particular reason, which sounds weird, right? He basically reasons out to be. Well, you're just rationalizing this gut level response to the individual love or hate. And those things aren't discursive, they aren't judgments, they're not fixated on qualities per se. We just will make up reasons. Okay, I hate this person and now let me find the reasons why I hate them after the fact.

11:30 Mark: I don't buy this.

11:31 Dylan: Yeah, and this is where it's confusing. I mean again, the. Whether it be love or hate, it's exercising a power that we have. But then it seems to be something that is like the tail wagging the dog. We experience love and hate, but it's not something that we are tuning. But then again, later on in other parts, we are effectively cultivating love. He doesn't say much about the notion of cultivating hate or to Mark's point, getting over hating.

12:04 Wes: Yeah, this part about maybe just to follow up a little bit on this idea that all reasons for love are just rationalizations. This is on page 167. Where is it?

12:15 Dylan: This is the last paragraph.

12:18 Wes: That's why I'm not reading my own notes. Carson.

12:20 Dylan: Well, at the end of the incomplete paragraph at the top.

12:24 Wes: All right, so hence this is at the top of 167. Hence the utterly misguided rationalism of seeking to account for one's love for an individual person in any such terms as those relating to his qualities, acts, achievements or disputes, dispositions. Indeed, the very attempt to do so has the effect of bringing the phenomenon of individual personal love sharply home to us. For we always find out in the process that we can imagine every single one of these details to be altered or absent without being a whit more able on that account to leave off loving the person's concern.

So this gets at the unconditionality. We also realize that if we consider these qualities and activities separately and add up our liking for each of them, their total value for us is nothing like enough to justify our love of the person. There is always a surplus we cannot account for. Moreover, the same thing also applies to hatred, of course. Moreover, the curious inconstancy of the reasons we are accustomed to offer ourselves in justification of our love for somebody is a further indication that all such reasons are merely trumped up after the event.

This is what I'm calling rationalizations and that none of them provides the real explanation. So what does provide the real explanation? Right. I mean, for spiritual love, it sounds like that should be universal. So I'm just having a visceral response to their personhood. Okay. If that's available to me, that's well and good. But what if I have a more particular right? There's also sexual love or vital love. There's also mental love and hate. Yeah, how do you explain those? How do you explain the fact that I love one person and hate another if it doesn't depend on any particular quality and all the qualities just come after the fact?

14:05 Mark: Well, maybe hatred is only skin deep and love can penetrate to the center of the person. And I was wrong in saying that, and we were wrong in saying you could just flip whatever he says about love to say about hate. That hate is always have to do with, you know, like I can in a superficial way love based on qualities, based on circumstances, based on being members of the same community. You know, these other fellow feeling there can at least be love involved in that. And it seems like hatred would be comparable to that kind of situation. Like, well, you know, that we Hatfields always hate the McCoys or whatever. We. That hatred is something that is inherently shallow, I would hope.

14:46 Wes: I mean, I think just focusing on love though, there are really two problems. One is that maybe I ought to have spiritual love for everybody, but I don't. Or maybe I sometimes can do it and sometimes I can't. And then the other forms of love are selective. I don't have them for everybody. And so how do I explain them when I do have them if it's not because of these qualities which he seems to treat as rationalization. So even leaving aside the hate problem, that's a little unclear to me.

15:18 Seth: Have we talked about creativity and destruction?

15:22 Dylan: Nope.

15:23 Seth: Actually, this is another thing that I found really interesting. It may come up in the last section about the naturalistic theories, but anyway.

15:31 Wes: Well, he talks about, I think on 154.

15:34 Seth: 154, yeah, that's what I got here. So love, in short, is creative of existence relative to these spheres. Hatred, on the other hand, is in the strictest sense destructive, since it does in fact destroy the higher value and has the additional effect of blunting and blinding our feeling for such values and the power of discriminating them. So, you know, this goes back to how we started off the last episode. You know, it's somewhat poetic that Scheler's description of the movement, you know, the act of love as a movement that is creative in the sense that it creates a higher value that emerges, as Mark said, out of the unity of this personality.

And so love is, you know, creativity is. It's empowering because it creates the possibility or empowers a personality to fulfill and become something more than they are. It's creative in the sense that it creates a value that didn't exist without the love and so forth. So, you know, and he makes a point of saying about hatred, it's not simply a lack. So hatred isn't the lack of values or it's literally the inverse of love in the sense. And he says at some point in the two that, you know, the opposite of love is not some kind of an emotional state, it's actually hatred.

And so hatred is a positive. Hatred is an actual act. It's just a movement in the opposite direction. So that instead of elevating or creating higher value, it's the destruction of value in order to subtract or take away value from something.

17:18 Wes: Well, it makes us insensitive to values. And so he says the additional effect of blunting and blinding our feeling for such values and power of discriminating them.

17:28 Dylan: So.

17:28 Wes: Right. So yeah, he always wants to be in this reversal. It's not that love flows to pre existing values, it's that we figure out values by way of love. So love brings new and superior values into existence and populates our. What he calls a field, right, with options. And then those options can become subject to our preferences and will and choice and action. But we don't have something to prefer over another thing until love does its work and brings those values into the phenomenological field. And then we can do our preference thing. So it's not just that they're there and then we prefer. And then that's love. Right? He's rejecting that notion.

18:19 Dylan: What you just articulated was like this power aspect of it, right? So it's like we have. Love is like seeing or touching in this respect to have things in our. The phrase you used, the field of awareness that we would have with our loving activity, characterizing love as a power rather than something that is not just activated, but something that we are exercising, seems to me is like the biggest difference that he has.

18:52 Wes: But you would think it's detecting objective value, right. Just thinking back to Brentano, it's doing at this procedural, non conscious, non discursive level. Then it tells us what our judgments should do, what the value options are. It's a little. Again, I find it quite unclear, but to say that right if we want to say that it's a generative of values, I think he would hopefully want to say, like Brentano, well, it's not that we're just inventing them out of nothing and we can invent any values we like. It's more like we're increasing our sensitivity to what really is more valuable by way of love. He doesn't explicitly address this, but I assume it must be the case. I don't know. Was that your impression?

19:43 Mark: I feel like one of the issues that we're dancing around is, right, we are. We're already saying that we don't love the qualities in a person, we love the person. But he just explicitly does discuss in chapter two, the love of the good, the counter. You know, the actual arguments that philosophers have made that like it seems even Aristotle on friendship, right, I'm appreciating your virtue. I'm having fellow feeling with you based on your virtue. Your virtue resounds to me, I resound to you. You know, we are all helping each other. But do I actually love you as an individual? You know, if you turned away from your virtue, would I continue to love you? And. Right, so Scheler is not saying that,

20:27 Wes: well, there is no love of goodness, right?

20:29 Mark: There is no love of goodness.

20:30 Wes: We can't love goodness. 161 to 162. Yeah.

20:33 Mark: Something that he said made me think of Plato in the apology in the Republic, Socrates is considering, like, is justice loving your friends and hating your enemies? Enemies? And he's like, no, we should love and try to benefit everybody. Even so, if they're your enemies, you should try to make them better. And that is one of the things, right. This Phariseeism that Schiller criticizes is, I love you insofar as you are virtuous. Insofar as you're not virtuous, I hate you. And Scheler, like Plato here, is saying, no, actually you should try to love everybody. And that will enable, right? This will unlock the goodness, or at least it'll maybe, you know, at least it's pointing in the direction of unlocking the goodness and helping the bad to be good. That's what we should be doing across the board.

21:19 Wes: He's saying here that. So it's another really kind of radical, I think, and interesting claim, right? There is no love of goodness because the act of love is the ontological ground of goodness. We figure out what is good from the act of love. This speaks directly to what I was talking about before, but presumably. Right, so what does that Mean, this seems like an ontological point here. I was trying to say, well, this is more epistemological. It has to be the case that love plugs us into what really is good or worthy of love. Now he seems to be saying, well, love determines what is good and it's not my particular love. Right. You could think of this in a very generic sense. Or maybe it's what God loves that determines what is good. Or maybe, well, it's the act of love. Right. So some. I find it mysterious. How does it work ontologically here?

22:17 Mark: Isn't it just that he's a phenomenologist and so you don't have to say, if I'm creating value, am I creating or am I discovering values? That's ultimately what we're.

22:25 Wes: I was worried you were going to say that what we're getting at for

22:27 Mark: phenomenologists, you don't care. It's just you find them. And is it you're finding the searching that is creating the values, or are you just actually uncovering them? I don't think he has to. It sort of seems like there's a bit of both.

22:41 Wes: Well, the bracketing should be temporary. I mean, it shouldn't imply. You don't think that there's any external reality. There's got to be some external reality.

22:52 Dylan: In doing the phenomenology, then you are bracketing some of the ontology or how it's all fitting together until you apply your rationality to it, try to figure it out.

23:05 Mark: Well, you're figuring out the essence of it, of good and evil, whatever, when you're bracketing. The only time he talks about unbracketing in this entire thing is when he is in those last chapters when he says, well, we can talk about the biological basis of this kind of thing, because that's unbracketing. Now we're actually going to try to talk about. Do some science stuff in the world. But I don't think that he thinks that you can account for the emergence of values or the emergence of love if you are in that. That naturalistic, unbracketed standpoint. So to get to the truth of the matters ontologically about love and about values, you stay bracketed. But again, he doesn't make this clear. We don't ultimately how his phenomenology works.

23:49 Wes: Let me try to fight my way out of the bracket for just one second because we can get out of it and be in a metaphysical standpoint. It doesn't have to be naturalistic. So if I were to Try to make this work. All I'm saying is how does the act of love ontologically ground goodness if it is God's love, which seems like the natural go to solution? It's not that God can just. We get into the euthyphro type of problem. It's not. This is God can love anything and okay, that's what's good. It's just. And he can love anything he wants and make it good that way. It's that love has this naturally improving quality. Right. It already, like in the way that Jesus improves Mary Magdalene with his love. It irradiates into things and makes them good, fills them up with goodness. Something like that. Not to have us go down that path, but that would be my speculation on how this type of thing might work.

24:43 Dylan: Well, the only thing that I would add to it was the notion of the transcendent, which. That you're able to be sensitive to and connecting to the transcendent through love.

24:55 Wes: Yeah. So which is the thing that, you know, trying to reduce things naturalistically can't get at? That it's all just about sex or libido.

25:04 Dylan: No.

25:04 Wes: There's some irreducibly spiritual element where we transcend anything empirical, I think.

25:12 Dylan: Yeah. This is on page 181. This is in the critique of the naturalistic theory. The act of love can be generally, in addition to the view that we've already rejected that the act of love can generally be explained as a complex or evolutionary outcome of more elementary mental factors. The roots of naturalism lie in its complete failure to recognize the ultimacy not only of spiritual and sacred love, but also of love of the individual soul. The error of naturalism does not consist in having actually recognized the facts so designated while offering a false and inadequate explanation of them.

The fact is that it simply does not see them at all. Being quite peculiarly blind to such things, it has no eyes for phenomena exhibiting a level of action and value which is transcendent not only of our actual vital organization, but of the nature of all life and in sacred love, of the nature of all that belongs to the mental plane as well.

26:09 Wes: He'll go on to say completely new acts and qualities can and do appear in the course of organic and human evolution.

26:15 Mark: And that's what I meant by emergence. Yes.

26:18 Wes: So I think it's an important point because if you're a naturalist who thinks that everything must be reducible to libido, it's like, okay, well, what's there? Right. It's there in animals. That's the matter. That's the thing we have to construct everything out of. But no, in biological evolution, right. We could have other irreducible psychical modules. He'll say we could be irreducibly interested in. In power, in status. Right. Recognition, the thymotic part of the soul. And that interest in recognition doesn't reduce to libido. It just is another irreducible thing that could have come about evolutionarily. And we could say that for we could get far more granular about that. And this I think he's right about. We don't need to do this reductionistic thing because evolution can do lots of different things to us.

27:12 Dylan: Yes. Or the things that are being activated in evolution are not always the sum total of everything. That's a character of us as individuals. Evolution itself is exercising and acting along certain qualities and characteristics of us that are levers for our reproduction. But there are characteristics and levers for our existence that aren't levers of reproduction.

27:39 Wes: Well, you could say, right. The main point is we can evolve to have spiritual capacities and values. Right? That's the idea. And you know, and it doesn't have to be constructed developmentally out of libido.

27:51 Mark: Well, so is this the same as Brentano's account that like. Yes, as a matter of, you know, a genetic explanation, we can evolve out of lower forms to emerge spirituality. But it's not that it is based on or reducible to those lower forms. It's that we are made so that we can discover the spirituality that is available to anybody that reaches that is just objectively there, you know, and be and beyond is non physical. So in other words, the. I was saying the only way to get out of the bracket is to, you know, go to naturalism. Well, the other way out of the bracket is over. Is that we can actually just experience transcendence. And that means it is transcending the bracket where it is revealing true metaphysical things. We really do have spirits, not necessarily in the Cartesian sense of soul or something like that, but, you know, something that is irreducible to mere biology.

28:49 Wes: And I do think it does sound dualist and I think he might even be a substance dualist. I don't know. We don't get that.

28:56 Mark: He's got whole books on religion. We could, yeah, we care. We could read more about it.

29:00 Wes: But even if we don't like that. Right. The more fundamental point, we can evolve to have these spiritual capacities. I feel positive about that. I mean, it certainly is the case for what is he. Let me find the part about power, since I'm so into that. Oh, I think the other. So this is on page 203. I think so page 203. This is where he wants to say there are these other irreducible things. So he'll say, what is the point, it has been urged, of giving priority to the sexual instinct and attempting to account for the various qualitative love relationships among human beings for the part played by the sexual instinct and establishing these relationships is not essentially different from that of hunger and thirst.

Right. So these are two other. Right. Hunger. Are we going to reduce that to sexual libido? That's always a big problem. No, it's just another basic module. So hunger or thirst, for instance, or any other instincts of a more or less inborn kind, such as the instinctive desire for the approval of others or the craving for respect, power, dominance, and so on. Again, thymotic part of the soul don't need to be derived from libido. Can evolve perfectly independently. And I think one other point to make here, Dylan, just pivoting off you, is in human evolution, you don't even have to think in terms of survival necessarily.

Right. Because there's sexual selection. My favorite thing, and you know, my argument has been, and I'm not the only one to make this, but the culture is more. Is really the result of sexual selection. So spiritual values, the capacity to grasp other people as spirit, is a. You know, can evolve out of sexual selection. So it doesn't need to be, again, be developmental. It can just happen, you know, developmentally sexual. It can be evolutionarily sexual.

30:56 Mark: So we've kind of unopened the door, especially because we're in the last couple of laps here toward more explicit consideration of chapters five and six. Just this. I thought this was going to sort of get at something fundamental. And then I realized, no, actually, he's already given his theory of love in this scale of this ascendance of the latter. And he doesn't get a lot clearer on that. But he just says, what's wrong with all these other thinkers who just want to explain, like Freud, these things using naturalistic assumptions, is that they can't accommodate the explanation that I've already given.

Right. And you've said that if we want to say that the spiritual is something that we have direct access to, well, a naturalist is not going to be able to explain that. So this is not a surprise. It's like saying naturalism is here's my theory of miracles, and naturalism is wrong because it can't accommodate my theory of Miracles. So I feel like he's not actually giving a very strong argument against, you know, if you're a committed naturalist, this is not going to convince you. It's what he has said before. Like, is there room for authentic emergence such that we could recognize an objective spirituality within naturalism?

I guess that's the question. And I feel like he does not directly say, here's what a naturalism that I would like is. He just points at the particular Freudian reductive naturalism, Spencer's reductive naturalism. None of these accommodate what he has been telling us.

32:28 Dylan: This is where his weakness in ontological discussions is becoming a problem. Right. He says that the love is categorically different. It's a power that we have and naturalism can't account for it. Because your analogy with miracles is fine. But he neither says why that is ontologically. Like what kind of thing is it then that materialism can't accommodate? Nor is it something that's missing out of naturalism in an emergent way that says that, well, now it's a categorically different thing, but it arose in a way that's distinct from the way in which naturalism would account for it. Well, then you might quibble with whether emergence is a version of naturalism.

33:09 Wes: But I think there are a lot of different arguments in here. Maybe one of the stronger ones is the worry about how if everything is at bottom libido, then sublimation is a result of an initial repression. And then we ask where that repression comes from. And it comes from cultural values and morality. But morality is itself supposed to be the result of sublimation. Then we can see one of the important problems here, which is that it's a chicken and egg problem. Right. We don't get sublimation until there's a pre existing sublimated structure to do the repressing in us and induce us to more sublimation.

I don't think it's necessarily insurmountable, but I think, you know, and this is kind of the way Freud thinks. Freud thinks that kind of everything is made of the clay of libido, including the ego and the super ego. So we kind of the ego forms by kind of bumping up against the world and producing this kind of psychical skin scar tissue. But yeah, ultimately we can explain everything in terms of pleasure principle and libido. And again, I think, yeah, he's right that it just seems implausible. Can we really reduce will to power to pleasure? Right.

It's the same sort of or to libido. It's the same sort of criticism that Nietzsche is making. I don't think we can. We need at least a tripartite soul. Right. Maybe we need. I mean, what would be the word for a hundred parts to the soul or a million parts or an infinite number of parts? I think. Think ultimately we have to get much more granular. We can't. Just like this quest for a grand unified theory of the psyche is bound to fail.

35:09 Mark: I did appreciate that he defends Freud, said, look, Freud is usually criticized for just emphasizing sex too much. And Schiller, you know, he's not Plato, he is not Ficino. That the latter just gets us beyond sex. Like it takes sex with us. Right. Sex without love. Well, okay, that's a bunch of. That's just biology. But love incorporates sexuality, this vitalism, as a kind of essential part such that it is its relationship to spiritual love. It's not just one of sublimation. It's not that the latter is just based on the former, but it is kind of essential. Right. So he talks about. Well, yeah, just the fact they thought

35:54 Wes: this is 196 to 197, by the

35:56 Mark: way, is getting a bad rap that Freud has got a bad rap about this. Actually, he should be defended that sexuality is much more central than these prudish philosophers would have you believe.

36:06 Wes: Yeah. He praises Freud for making us aware of childhood sexuality. And he praises him for this idea that early childhood attachments can have to really influence our subsequent love life. He praises him for seeing the connection between giving a genetic understanding of mental illness. He usually doesn't like genetic explanations, but in this case, this relationship between mental illness and early childhood, including early childhood sexuality. He likes this idea. And then he goes on into. Right. It furthers our conception of mental causation in general.

And he goes on this jag about destiny. Freud helps us understand destiny. It's not just a matter of external divine forces making us do things as we might think of ancient Greek destiny. Although perhaps erroneously, perhaps the ancient Greek version is actually close to Freud in a way. Because really it's about character. It's about what's characteristic of us. It's about character traits that have been laid down in early formative influences. And those influences at that early stage in life are very powerful in a way that they aren't. Once we become adults, every little input is like the butterfly that causes the hurricane later on.

Yeah. So he sets us up with a lot of praise before he goes on to the critique.

37:38 Mark: Yeah, I didn't think I'd be that interested in that section. But like his responses to Nietzsche, I think this is one of the things that makes sense. Scheler fun for me is that he actually gives these. He reads charitably even though, like, he is fundamentally opposed to things about Freud and things about Nietzsche, about their, you know, that he's a Christian spiritualist. And they are not. But the answers are not just blanket dismissals of these guys that, like, he actually engages in the arguments and, you know, shows you, oh, you know, here's why they were right about something, but their overall orientation is still wrong, so they can't express the theory that I've expressed.

38:17 Wes: If he were Schopenhauer or Marx, it would just be, you know, and these idiots. Pablo Freud, Saint Freud, what else have we.

38:30 Mark: Not any significant. I feel like I brought up the whole yearning issue, which he doesn't use that word, but I feel like we've not run across where actually in the text that whole thing comes.

38:44 Wes: I think he uses the word longing.

38:46 Mark: Longing.

38:49 Wes: But I don't have it here and maybe I'm making that up.

38:51 Seth: I mean, have we done justice to kind of the premise of this entire episode of like, love and ethics or love and morality? Like, I feel like we've talked a lot about the mechanics of what he's trying to describe, but have we really poked in on that connection or what

39:12 Mark: we think of it? Because I think we've laid out what he has to say and it's just confusing, you know, that we are.

39:18 Seth: This.

39:18 Mark: This whole argument that we're having over is he revealing the moral ontology or, you know, as a phenomenologist, can he be irreducibly ambiguous about it and say, well, maybe we're finding the values, but we're also creating the values through the act of love. So, yeah, I feel like we've given the relevant quotes, but I don't know myself walking away from this. Like, I found Brentano way more clear in terms of just like, oh, it is objectively there. But I also like the idea that I can't remember what past author we read that was talking about how love makes someone more beautiful.

That I sort of think. I feel like Scheler is giving a generalized version about ethics of that point, about beauty, that it's not that when you love someone you're just fooling yourself and you're seeing someone who's really ugly as beautiful, but it does sort of define the act of love. Is setting up a standard so that this person Uniquely sets a standard of beauty that then you could apply to some other things. And so it's just interestingly ambiguous in that same way. And so I thought. I felt like Scheler was saying that about goodness, that we're.

I'm detecting goodness, but I'm also projecting goodness. I'm also finding the goodness that, you know, that is the potential. Yeah. What else do you have to say about this?

40:39 Wes: Well, what he says about longing, and I think this is related on 141. It's a passage you've already mentioned, I think, Mark. But love may give rise to all kinds of effort, desire, or longing for the beloved object, but these are no part of it. This is just one of these paradoxical statements. It follows an opposite law to that of effort. Whereas the latter exhausts itself and comes to rest once it is satisfied. Love either remains the same or increases its activity, becoming ever more engrossed in its object. Yeah, so love is not. It's not longing, it's not effort, even though it can give rise to longing and effort.

41:18 Mark: Right. If it were longing, it could be fulfilled by just, you know, getting the object. But I thought he said some more positive things, whether he uses the word longing or yearning, but just that the attitude of love being not necessarily starting off with an object, that it is about an orientation, a dis. Toward, then. Yeah. Do you know what I'm talking about, Dylan?

41:40 Dylan: He does use this word orientation. It's in the end of the section that we've been working on.

41:46 Wes: Well, in 172, he does use yearning. The authenticity of the various kinds of love is warranted for their being recognizable as stirrings without a semblance of the object to which they are directed. Having been given in any way, they are genuine qualities of the acts themselves. Thus, a person having neither home nor country can still experience the characteristic stirrings of love for these things, even when they lack an object and persist, therefore, as yearnings without fulfillment. Yeah. So that's what you're thinking of.

42:16 Mark: Yep, exactly. Okay, so having a loving disposition is being primed. Is having this sort of yearning set up in you? But that is not just a yearning. It's not a long for a particular object that will then make the yearning go away. But it is an openness, let's say.

42:34 Dylan: I mean, again, the distinction between what he's clearly pointing to as a power and how that power gets manifest and refined or exemplified in its most sort of canonical form. He just seems to be muddy about that, you know, when he talks about the kinds of Varieties of love. He at the same time will say that, well, they're only one of them, or one form of it is really real love, even while describing there being different forms. And you will be able to have love that has gradations and love is an act of valuing and it's value oriented. And you can have. At higher levels of love are characterized by having higher value for things that deserve higher value. But he doesn't really unpack that.

43:32 Wes: So not a lot of examples.

43:34 Mark: Well, so one of the examples. I know we've read a number of things from page 167 earlier in our discussion here, but at the bottom there he's been talking, I think we quoted this part that the part that we actually see of other people are like their body, its unity, their vitalism. The person of another can only be disclosed to me by joining in the performance of his acts, either cognitively by understanding and vicarious reliving, or morally by following his footsteps. Here's the example. The moral core of the personality of Jesus, for example, is revealed to one man only, his disciple.

This is the only path which can lead to such a disclosure. It may be vouchsafed to a disciple who knows nothing of an historical kind about Jesus, nothing of his outward life, or even of his historical existence, or even to be aware of oneself as disciple, which naturally implies an awareness of one's master as having a historical existence is already a different thing from being a disciple, whereas a theologian is not a disciple. Right, so this is, I'm trying to emphasize the yearning, the longing part of love, because he really wants to leave room for love of God.

It's really important to him. In fact, love of God ends up being sort of the most fundamental. It enables the love of the. Of other human beings. It's very much like the whole Spinoza or Buber or whatever, like that I'm loving the eternity through the eternal, through loving you as an individual. I, you know, it's my route to the transcendent. So, yeah, what do we think of this? I mean, does he. Would he have a better theory if he would just look, okay, there are these proto versions of love where you're looking for the loved object or whatever, but real love is actually like this idea of really connecting to another person and acknowledging their otherness, not just with respect, but like an embracing of this thing that, because it has no properties in itself, transcends reason, qualification.

And I will continue to love you even if you are a bastard toward me or whatever. But just to throw away this idea that I could actually love something that does not have consciousness. Like, I think in the Schopenhauer we're reading Wes in close reads, he specifically said, you can only love something that can love back. It's like we can only be in a moral relationship with somebody that can also be in the moral community that has that rationality. And I don't mind that qualification. And just saying that, well, my love of art is just derivative of this.

It's like that I'm loving that somebody created it. So it's like I'm loving the artist through the art, or I'm loving something about mentality. Or my love of God is, as Feuerbach says, is because I love humanity, which is something, you know, Scheler does not want to admit.

46:16 Seth: I think to Mark there's, you know, an added characteristic, just to use the word participation. So if we go back to that, just that reference where he says it's being with, it's being in league with, participating with. And that's a way in which love differs from cognition or emotion, which is essentially non participatory. Like you can be empathetic or sympathetic and not actively be participating in somebody else's situation. And we all know, like the concept of cognition and intention is very much non participatory. Right. It's objectifying.

So if you think about, we've talked about this many times of different ways, alternatives to intentional, intellectual, epistemological engagement with others in the world. Like, what are ways that we can. That two subjectivities can get together? That is not a relationship of intentionality where one is objectified. I think that's what he's trying to drive at. And again, I agree with you. I like that poetically at least very much. But yeah, the question about, I mean, art is one thing, but what about cats?

47:31 Wes: I was going to ring up my cat. For those of us our primary love object is our cat.

47:41 Seth: Can Wes's cat participate in a moral community with him?

47:44 Mark: I mean, we could say that there's something a little pathological about our love of pets. That it is like loving a teddy bear or something. That it is a substitute. We are, you know, personifying, we're imposing things about humanity. Maybe it still has an individual. But do you really love the individuality of that cat or that dog in the same way that you love the individual? Because like when your pet dies, when you get another pet, like it does make it better in a way that like, I'll just get another wife.

48:13 Seth: There's a footnote on page 187. Animal affection, such as that of a dog for its master, has nothing to do with love. Wes. I'm sorry.

48:21 Wes: Yeah, this is something I strongly disagree with. I think in a way, dogs are more human than humans in this respect, and that's partly because they've co evolved. Dogs represent the loving core of humanity there. That's my philosophical thesis.

48:37 Dylan: The best of what we could possibly aspire to be is embodied in the canine.

48:43 Seth: Well, then we should replace all these mega churches down here in Texas with giant pet rescues.

48:48 Wes: Dogs are not just man's best friend, they're man's best self.

48:51 Mark: Well, maybe this is an argument against the idea that the best love gets at this spiritual core that only human beings have. Maybe that's just, I don't know, I don't want to just like get all pessimistic and Lacanian and say, well, actually I'm just loving the qualities. And even if I think I'm loving this black box, well, that's sort of a projection.

49:17 Wes: And the complicating factor here is, right, I might be able to say, well, yeah, I fundamentally empathize with you as a human being or respect you as a human being. But Scheler wants to say, no, it's gotta be love. And yeah, I do find that alien. Right. So I could love a person for all their great qualities and then say, well, is there anything above and beyond that? And then our natural, I think, impulse is to start appealing to empathy or respect, but that's the very thing that he rejects. And I think that does make this kind of hard to grasp.

49:49 Mark: Well, we will continue discussing empathy next time on Edith Stein's On the Problem of Empathy. I think, you know, so just as a little closing, my, my Scheler has a lot more to him than I thought, and I'm a lot more intrigued by him than I thought. And I kind of would like to read several more things by him, but I don't think we'll do it on this podcast anytime soon. Wes and I can mop up with a little close reads action maybe to cover, you know, what is the personality. Can we get a little more into that? But yeah, we need to keep moving here.

But hopefully, you know, a few years from now. I wouldn't mind circling back, but it's the same kind of thing, you know, is it intriguing because it's actually that fruitful, or is it intriguing just because I don't understand it? And that's aggravating me. Right. Whitehead is somebody that like, we stumbled on. And there's just so much about his style that's just like, oh, this is a whole thing. If I want to become a Whitehead scholar, I need to read 20 more things. But are we going to do that? Probably not. Probably. This is something that's attracting me right now.

50:49 Wes: The very short introduction to Whitehead. Isn't that enough?

50:54 Seth: Yeah. I'm also intrigued. I mean, I will say this. He's confusing in many points because he seems to be contradictory, but he's not a terrible writer. His writing is not bad, and it's not obscure or hard to understand. It's just he's, you know, making assertions. And maybe there's a lot of, like, Christian theology underlying all this. That. But again, this. The explicit talk and the explicit attempt to do, you know, phenomenology when we're talking about the era and his. The milieu in which he was working, I think is really interesting and not just from a historical perspective.

51:30 Mark: All right, Please come back next time. Reach out to us. Let us know what you want us to cover. You could do that. Peltiallyexaminedlife.com you could comment on the blog post associated with this episode@PartiallyExaminedLife.com where I always write nice summaries and things that you probably should be reading. And I hope you sign up for our newsletter at partiallyexaminelife. Com. There's a weekly email blast that will fill you in on everything we're doing. Follow us on social media, et cetera. Good night, everybody.

51:59 Seth: Good night.