Scheler’s appropriation
of the phenomenological reduction

Mariana Chu García^[2]

Abstract

With the aim of clarifying the ontological appropriation of phenomenological reduction undertaken by Max Scheler, this paper is divided into three parts. First, I will briefly reconstruct the path which leads Husserl to the idea of a transcendental reduction; second, I will show that Scheler reactivates the meaning of the phenomenological reduction as a “desymbolization” of the world; third, I will show that he transforms this desymbolization into a “derealization.” Finally, I will link these two concepts.

    

Keywords: phenomenological reduction; Husserl; Scheler; desymbolization; derealization.

Resumen

Con el objetivo de aclarar la apropiación ontológica que hace Max Scheler de la reducción fenomenológica, este texto se divide en tres partes: en la primera, se reconstruye de modo breve el camino que conduce a Husserl a la idea de una reducción trascendental; en la segunda, se muestra que Scheler reactiva el sentido de la reducción fenomenológica como una “desimbolización” del mundo; y en la tercera, que luego transforma ese sentido en el de una “desrealización”. El texto concluye proponiendo un enlace entre ambos sentidos.

    

Palabras clave: reducción fenomenológica; Husserl, Scheler; desimbolización; derealización.

   

“With this we attain the methodological insight that, along with phenomenological reduction, eidetic intuition is the fundamental form of all particular transcendental methods (that both of them determine, through and through, the legitimate sense of a transcendental phenomenology)” (Hua I: 106 [72]).^[3] So concludes § 34 of the Cartesian Meditations pointing out that phenomenological reduction and the intuition of essences are sources of the legitimacy of the meaning of transcendental phenomenology. Scheler would agree with this claim, since also he considers that phenomenological philosophy cannot do without them. However, he would be hesitant to qualify phenomenology as transcendental, for he interprets ontologically the concepts that give meaning to Husserlian reduction—immanence and transcendence, absolute and relative, and even essence. Therefore, beyond the agreement concerning the need to break free from natural life to undertake the task of a phenomenological foundation, it is possible to identify important differences between the Husserlian and the Schelerian notions of reduction and how it should be carried out.

With the aim of clarifying the ontological appropriation of phenomenological reduction undertaken by Max Scheler, this paper is divided into three parts. First, I will briefly reconstruct the path which leads Husserl to the idea of a transcendental reduction; second, I will show that Scheler reactivates the meaning of the phenomenological reduction as a “desymbolization” of the world; third, I will show that he transforms this desymbolization into a “derealization.” Finally, I will connect these two concepts.

§ 1. Transcendental-phenomenological reduction

Quite aware of the fact that the meaning of reduction may compromise the idea of phenomenology itself, Husserl reflected repeatedly upon reduction and, as we all know, developed several paths to carry it out. Here I will only recall the milestones in Husserl’s intellectual itinerary that led him to defend the transcendental nature of reduction, milestones which are necessary to understand Scheler’s appropriation of reduction.

In 1913 Husserl pointed out the limitations of his Logical Investigations. In this work Husserl, with the aim of offering “a new foundation of pure logic and epistemology” (Hua XVIII: 7 [2]), presents the ideal being of logical legality, and analyzes the pure lived experiences of knowledge in order to show their essential structures, especially the lived experience of truth. However, this immanent analysis of lived experiences is restricted to their real components (Hua III/1: 296, note [308]). Objectivity is excluded from this phenomenological analysis.^[4] Thus, in the Investigations, phenomenology deals only with real immanence.^[5] Correspondingly, consciousness is understood according to an empirical apperception. Thus, in spite of the refutation of psychologism, the reflection of the Investigations—born out of “the historical and natural course from psychology to phenomenology” (Hua III/1: 296 [308])—understands the adequation of internal perception as the model of evidence; therefore, phenomenology turns out to be descriptive psychology. It was necessary, writes Husserl in 1906, for the phenomenologist to suspend the existence of the empirical ego; it was necessary to learn how to demarcate and to preserve the purity of the given through “phenomenological reduction” (Hua XXIV: 441–442 [452]).

Let us not forget that Husserl published the method of reduction in his 1907 lectures on The Idea of Phenomenology. Understood as “the specifically philosophical attitude of mind, the specifically philosophical method” (Hua II: 23 [19]), phenomenology is above all critique of knowledge,^[6] as well as “critique of reason in general.”^[7] Phenomenology’s first task is to clarify the enigma of transcendence, i.e., the question of the possibility of objective knowledge. Thus, reduction is presented as a principle of the theory of knowledge that:

[…] has to be accomplished in the case of every epistemological inquiry of whatever sort of cognition. That is to say, everything transcendent that is involved must be bracketed, or be assigned the index of indifference, of epistemological nullity, an index that indicates: the existence of all these transcendencies, whether I believe in them or not, is not here my concern; this is not the place to make judgments about them; they are entirely irrelevant (Hua II: 39 [31]).

In order to avoid the skeptical consequences of the psychologistic, biologistic, and anthropologistic theories, the required attitude of passing no judgment regarding the existence of transcendent objectivity implies that we understand the concepts of immanence and transcendence in a different way. By distinguishing real (reell) immanence from immanence in general, Husserl shows that the modern theory of knowledge restricts the latter to the former and identifies them. Hence, for the modern theory of knowledge, only the psychical and singular can be absolutely given, while everything else remains problematic. However, the object of knowledge is presupposed without having a concordant, evident, and adequate intuitive experience. Against Descartes, but also against the descriptive psychology of his own Investigations, Husserl claims the need to acknowledge several types of objectivity and modes of givenness.^[8] Hence, he claims that the experience of universal objects that are neither psychic nor real, and which are given in an idealizing abstraction, is possible. But if critique of knowledge ought to clarify the essence of knowledge, its pure possibility, every idealizing abstraction should be performed within the framework of immanence in the sense of the absolutely given, given in itself as it is meant, that is, in “the sphere of pure evidence” (Hua II: 61 [49]). The sense of reduction is precisely to assure this pure sphere of intuitive givenness for the investigation of essences, including those that do not pertain to the psychic sphere (Hua II: 62 [50]):^[9]

Consequently, the idea of phenomenological reduction acquires a more immediate and more profound determination and a clearer meaning. It means not the exclusion of the genuinely transcendent (perhaps even in some psychological-empirical sense), but the exclusion of the transcendent as such as something to be accepted as existent, i.e., everything that is not evident givenness in its true sense, that is not absolutely given to pure “seeing” (Hua II: 9 [7]).

In this new consideration, the gaze focuses on the intentional relation between knowledge, meaning, and object “but in the reduced sense, according to which we are dealing not with human cognition, but with cognition in general, apart from any existential assumptions either from the empirical ego or of a real world” (Hua II: 75 [60]). Thus, pure immanence, the field of phenomenological reflection, is reduced to the “a priori within absolute self-givenness” (Hua II: 9 [7]). However, in his 1910/11 lectures on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Husserl considers this second meaning of the concepts of immanence and transcendence to be still too narrow, since it constrains phenomenological experience to what is actually given, leaving “all that is not present, nevertheless conscious as an object” (Hua XIII: 170–171) on the side of transcendence. The evidence of the implicative nature of intentionality, synthetic and temporal, gives place to a precision concerning what reduction ought to “disconnect”: “Thus phenomenology does not want to bracket transcendence in any sense. From the start, she was actually defined by the bracketing of nature, of transcendence in a particular sense, transcendence in the sense of what appears” (Hua XIII: 171). In other words, what is excluded from the investigation is what can never be object of evidence, that is, what is not susceptible of absolute givenness, insofar as it is always given through appearings; in one word, “nature,” “the objective world,” “a title that comprehends the totality of objectivities that appear through phenomena” (Hua XIII: 171). Disconnecting transcendence in this sense, the immanence we are left with is the actual and potential stream of the lived experiences of consciousness. The phenomena of retention and the presentifications (Vergegenwärtigungen) lead Husserl to broaden his field of reflection, particularly presentifications: subjected to a “double reduction,”^[10] they justify the expression of a transcendence (in the second sense) in immanence (in the third sense), as in the case of the phenomenon of the alter ego in the analysis of Einfühlung (Hua XIII: 188–191). Highlighting the unitary and temporal structure of consciousness, Husserl observes the following:

[…] that phenomenological experience is not tied to individual cogitationes, that are now presently observed, but rather that stretches itself along the entire stream of consciousness as a unique temporal connection, that indeed does not fall at the same time under the light of intuition in all of its breath and length (Hua XIII: 176–177).

Afterwards, Husserl corrects this passage by adding that phenomenological experience only reaches the entire stream of lived experiences “[…] through the continuous development of horizons under the continuous execution of the phenomenological reduction of every positing” (Hua XIII: 176–177, note 1]).^[11] But already here we find the basis of the transcendental sense of reduction as a radical change of the general thesis of the natural attitude or, as stated in First Philosophy, as “a very ‘unnatural’ attitude and a very unnatural observation of self and world” (Hua VIII: 121 [324]).

In order to understand Scheler’s position, we must consider two aspects of reduction expounded in Ideas I. First, the use of the word “transcendental” responds to the explicit embrace of the epistemological point of view (Hua III/1: 68–69 [79–80]). Reduction is transcendental because—together with the epochē that suspends every position-taking concerning the real (wirklich) world—it aims to demarcate and preserve the sphere of intuitive givenness whereby the conditions of possibility of the being and validity of such a positing may be apprehended with eidetic evidence. The bracketing of the transcendent being of the world by abstaining from every position-taking, provides simultaneous access to consciousness’ pure immanence: its being shows itself as absolute while every meaning and validity of the world’s being appears as relative to transcendental subjectivity.

The result of the phenomenological self-clarification of the mode of being of the real world, and of any conceivable real world at all, is that only the being of transcendental subjectivity has the sense of absolute being, that only it is “irrelative” (i.e., relative only to itself), whereas the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity, due, namely, to the fact that it can have its sense as being only as intentional sense-formation of transcendental subjectivity (Hua V: 153 [420]).

Second, we must highlight the universal nature of transcendental reduction. It is not simply a matter of suspending the judgment of existence in the sense of spatio-temporal reality. Certainly, in Ideas I, this is how the phenomenological epochē is characterized (Hua III/1: 65), and this is why Scheler criticizes Husserl for making reduction a mere “logical abstention” (logisches Absehen) (GW 9: 207). However, the natural attitude and its general thesis embrace all forms of positings and validity, including those of values and practical formations:

But above all, to life all belongs necessarily, and in each stretch, positionality. At all times entities are there for the Ego, existing as valid. We can here include in this concept of ontic validity also other validities, such as those stemming from the heart and the will; namely insofar as, for instance, to feel a value is not itself an act of active believing, active grasping, which brings the being of the value ǃ as value to position; but the value-grasping a feeling does bear the value in itself consciously, such that it is at any moment ready to be experienced, ready as existing to be seized in an immediate grasp. Accordingly, values and practical formations belong themselves to the general sphere of being, belong to the respective world, which is instituted as its surrounding world from the Ego’s own achievement of consciousness and positing and for itself (Hua VIII: 156–157 [357–358]).

If values and practical objects are available to experience, it is not enough to suspend the judgment of existence, but it is rather necessary to abstain from all positing and interest, whether axiological or practical. This underlines the fact that intentionality is a horizon, so that reduction must be universal. Since validities refer to one another—so that intending an object implies co-intending other aspects of the same object and, at the same time, the entire world as the universal horizon of experience—, namely, since all types of positing are intertwined, reduction has to be carried out, as Husserl says in the Crisis, “[…] with one blow” (mit einem Schlage) (Hua VI: 153 [150]).

§ 2. Schelerian reactivation of the sense of reduction as desymbolization

Which motifs of this intellectual itinerary does Scheler pick up and which does he reject? Although he always differentiates between phenomenology and theory of knowledge, it is precisely concerning reduction that Scheler concedes that there is a profound relation between phenomenology and what he calls the “‘transcendental’ theory of knowledge:” performing reduction enables the independence of the phenomenological intellections from human beings (GW 10: 394 [156]). This is how Scheler presents reduction in 1913/14:

In a genuine phenomenological investigation, we abstract from two things when we execute the so-called “phenomenological reduction” (Husserl): First, the actual performance of the act [realen Aktvollzug] and of all the accompanying phenomena which do not come within the sense and the intentional direction of the act itself, along with all the characteristics of its bearer [Träger] (animal, human being, God). Second, we disregard any positing (belief or unbelief) of the particular coefficient of reality with which the content of the act is “given” in natural intuition and in science (e.g., actuality, appearance, imagination, illusion) (GW 10: 394 [156]).^[12]

This passage is quite rich. Above all, it is worth noting that Scheler picks up the idea of reduction from the perspective of the structure of intentionality or “consciousness of.” From a Husserlian point of view, one could claim that Scheler picks up the idea of a “double reduction,” but in the context of his own interpretation of the Husserlian concepts of immanence and transcendence of 1907. Let me explain. In the quoted passage, reduction is conceived of as a suspension of everything that is singular and pertains to the order of the real. This includes the reality of the one who fulfills the act, but also of the act itself as a real positing; this leads to the disconnection of the positing of singularity with which the object appears. It is, thus, an exclusion of transcendence. According to Scheler, the natural view of the world and sciences are always transcendent, for in them acts mean more that can actually be given in them. To the extent that the object is meant as a totality—though not all of its aspects may be given—, in this type of experience, every intention has a plus.^[13] This transcendence is linked to another characteristic of the natural intuition and the scientific view of science: because they are symbolic, these experiences are necessarily mediated. The whole of the object is only given through its appearances (Erscheinungen), which work as symbols referring to the meant totality. In the case of natural perception, for example, the appearance of color plays the role of symbol of the appearance of a solid thing (GW 10: 416 [183]).

It is necessary to point out that what appears in the natural experience is always a relative object in the sense that it is only given to beings capable of carrying out certain acts. A stone can only exist for someone who perceives, a mathematical object can only exist for someone who thinks, and a value only exists for beings capable of feeling (Fühlen). To speak of knowledge or value implies, therefore, to speak of a being capable of carrying out acts whose essence stands in correlation with the essence of the concerned object:

[…] all objects which essentially can only be given in acts with a certain “form,” quality, or orientation, etc., are called relative, namely existentially relative. They are existentially relative to the bearers of those cognitive acts, while these bearers in turn are essentially associated with these forms, etc. The concept of cognition, in contrast to the concept of an object, presupposes the existence of a bearer having some essential organization, whatever that may be (GW 10: 398–399 [161]).

According to Scheler, the different classes of objects form a stratification of existential relativity, whose layers are ordered according to the essence of the organization of the real bearer of the essences of the corresponding acts and functions: the animal, the human, or God. There are no limits to the determination of the objects of increasingly relative existence, although, in general, the existence of objects pertaining to the natural worldview is relative to human beings, and the existence of objects pertaining to science is relative to all possible living beings.^[14] In the natural experience of the world related to “normal” human beings, the existence, the being-there of bodily things—objects of external perception, as well as normal objects of illusion, as in the case of the state of affairs formed by a pencil inside a glass of water—stands out. However, it is also possible to determine objects relative to certain cultural ages;^[15] even objects whose existence is relative only to man or to woman, and we can also determine objects of hallucination that only exist for “[…] a single individual during a definite interval of time” (GW 10: 400–401 [164]).

Thus, reduction has the function of suppressing the existential relativity of natural and scientific objects, so that we may experience something independent and invariable in regards to the psychophysical organization of those who carry out the reduction. In other words, phenomenological reduction enables, according to Scheler, the experience of objects of “absolute existence,” the pure and adequate intuition of objects “absolutely given:”

Something given in this way is at the same time absolute being; and an object whose being is of this sort exclusively, an object with this kind of pure essence, is given with ideal adequation. […] An object which is given only in a pure act of this sort, where nothing in the way of form, function, selective factor (not to mention the organization of the bearer of the act), stands between the pure idea of the act and its object, is and is called “absolute existence” (GW 10: 398 [161]).

This passage shows, in the first place, that Schelerian reduction must lead to an immanent experience. Because, instead of a “plus” we find a coincidence between the meaning and the given as it is meant—in other words, because we find the unity between the lived Adequation and the Selbstgegebenheit of the object—, there is no place in this immanent experience for transcendences; on the contrary, the overlap (Deckung) between meaning and what is given is total. In the second place, reduction must free the appearance of the natural and scientific experience of the world from every function as a symbol or sign, so that the phenomenon is given to us. In this immediate experience, symbols and signs have no function at all; on the contrary, their sense is fulfilled in the absolutely given “[…] in an act of pure, formless intuition” (GW 10: 398 [161]). “In this sense—Scheler claims—phenomenological philosophy is a continual desymbolization of the world” (GW 10: 384 [143]).^[16]

In this understanding it is possible to identify the Husserlian motif of a reduction to pure immanence in the sense of 1907, that is, to the essences absolutely given. But, following Scheler, reduction ought not to be understood as a principle of the theory of knowledge nor can it become transcendental. Rather, it is an ontological principle in the sense of an essentialization. It is in this context that the following commentary must be understood:

This coefficient of reality itself and its essence remain the object of investigation. We do not bracket them, but rather the explicit or implicit judgements in which they are posited. Thus we do not bracket the possibility of positing them, but only the positing of them in some one mode. Only what we encounter directly, that is, in an experience with such and such an essence of a content having such and such an essence, is a topic for phenomenological investigation (GW 10: 394 [156]).

As we have seen, the singular mode of the positing of the “coefficients of reality” that ought to be disconnected, together with the real effectuation of the act and the properties of the bearer of its essence, is the relative existence of the objects of the natural worldview and of science. This should allow for the apprehension of phenomena, the immediate intuition of objects of absolute existence, that is, of essences and essential relationships. Since their being is not dependent on our knowledge, Scheler claims firmly that phenomenology precedes any theory of knowledge (GW 10: 396 [158]). Because of this precedence, reduction is, in a sense, “double” or multiple. Once it is carried out on the objective side of the a priori of intentional correlation—or, as Scheler puts it, of “the consciousness of”—it is possible to undertake a “thing-phenomenology,” whose phenomena are the essences of the “contents” (“qualities” and things given in acts)^[17] belonging to the essential structure of the world.^[18] Once it is carried out on the other side of the “consciousness of,” reduction allows the intuition of a multiplicity of essences of acts embedded in founding (Fundierung) relationships. This results in the task of a “phenomenology of acts or origins [Akt- oder Ursprungsphänomenologie]” (GW 2: 90 [72]), which leads to the issue of the unity of being of acts, or of the structure of spirit.^[19] The idea of a multiple effectuation of reduction stems from Scheler highlighting a third field of research: “the essential interconnections between the essences of acts and those of things” (GW 2: 90 [72]). Every theory of knowledge, including that of axiological knowledge, must be developed on the basis of the analysis of these correlations.^[20] As we have seen, theory of knowledge in a wider sense implies the degrees of the existential relativity of given objects—for instance, of mathematical objects or values—as well as a bearer of the essences of the act of knowing and feeling. Thus, the phenomenologist collaborates with the epistemologist by uncovering the stratification of the existential relativity of the different classes of objects, for which he may turn to the idea of God as a limit concept corresponding to the bearer of the adequate knowledge of all absolute objects (GW 10: 399 [162]).

Clearly, reduction for Scheler is neither unique nor universal. On the contrary, he carries it out exactly the way Husserl warns not to: as a step-by-step abstention, leaving us within the natural attitude (Hua VI: 152–153 [148–149]). Indeed, in section VI of Formalismus, trying to show when and how the problem of the essence of the person, and correlatively of the world, emerges, Scheler recalls that he has undertaken a reduction on the side of acts and another parallel one on the side of objects (GW 2: 380–381 [380–381]). Regarding the first one, Husserl annotates on his issue of Scheler’s work: “‘Reduction’ of the natural, organic structure” (Husserl 1991: 37);^[21] regarding the second one, he writes: “This is an ontological-eidetic reduction” (Husserl 1991: 37). These annotations match the established idea according to which Scheler got phenomenological reduction and eidetic reduction mixed up.^[22] Even though this idea refers primarily to the late understanding of reduction, one might assume that it is also valid for the early understanding of reduction—that is, an essentialization as a result of desymbolization, especially if we consider that, in the quoted context of Formalismus, Scheler refers to reduction as an “eidetic abstraction” (GW 2: 378 [378]). However, more than a mix up, it is an appropriation of reduction aimed at an ontology of essences.

§ 3. Reduction as derealization and “The Moral Condition of Philosophical Knowledge”

Let us now consider Scheler’s late interpretation of reduction. According to it, it is Husserl who remains within the natural attitude. Indeed, for Scheler, Husserlian reduction fails because, instead of developing a theory of reality, Husserl limits himself to presupposing that being real means nothing more than having a spatio-temporal place (GW 9: 207 [315]). Thus, Husserlian reduction takes, according to Scheler, an erroneous notion of reality as its starting point. Also, for Scheler being-real (Realsein), being-there (Dasein) means having a place in space and time, and to this one must add the possession of a contingent being-thus (zufälliges Sosein), that is, the manifestation “here and now” of the real being in a determinate mode which could be different. But the singularization of an essence in a multiplicity of objects which in their contingent being-thus represent such an essence does not depend, according to Scheler, on space and time but on the being-real (GW 9: 245). For this reason, if we abstain from everything that is given in the natural worldview, an “impression of reality in general” still remains:

Imagine yourself deconstructing step by step the whole content of the natural world-view, allowing all colors to fade, all tones to die away, all bodily conscious spheres to disappear, spatial and temporal forms and all being-forms (categories) of things leveling themselves to an undetermined being-so—then there remains as non-degradable a simple impression of reality in general that is not further dissolvable […] (GW 8: 363).^[23]

This passage, dating from 1926, matches the idea of a multiple phenomenological reduction. Indeed, in this context, Scheler presents reduction as a temporal Aufhebung (sublation) of the modes of existence (GW 8: 363). But he limits its use to the world with the aim of claiming that a still indeterminate impression of the reality of the world is “pre-given” with regards to all that which we can experience in the natural worldview and can be deconstructed. If we are looking for absolute-being, what gives beings their singularity cannot remain after reduction. First, it is necessary to understand what it is that properly belongs to real being or to the experience that we have of it, in order to then abstain and distinguish the Dasein from the authentic Sosein, the reality from the genuine essence. For Scheler, this process consists in “‘the ‘derealizing’ of the world or the ‘ideating’ of the world” (GW 9: 43–44) and understands it not only as the condition of philosophical knowledge, but also as the fundamental faculty of the human spirit (GW 9: 42).

According to Scheler, both idealism-realism make the mistake of taking the inseparability of the being-there and the being-thus from the knowledge (Wissen) we might have of them as the starting point of their reflections. Scheler rejects this presupposition because he understands knowledge in an ontological sense, that is, as the participation of an entity in the being-thus or in the essence of another entity.^[24] Be it contingent or authentic, the Sosein can always be immanent to knowledge and consciousness, but the Dasein cannot, it always remains transcendent (GW 9: 185–186), since they are two different modes of being to which we do not have the same access. While the contingent Sosein of something is accessible in perception and thought, its being-there can never be-object (Gegensteinsein), least of all of this type of acts. Rather, it is lived as resistance in an ek-static suffering of the reality of the world in all spheres of being.^[25] Referring to Dilthey, Scheler insists that it is not merely a matter of resistance in the face of conscious willing (GW 8: 365). It is, above all, a resistance to our impulsive, involuntary, and spontaneous life, the life of striving (Streben). Furthermore, in The Human Place in the Cosmos, impulsive life becomes the only access to the Dasein of the spheres of being: “[…] the factor of reality is the resistance of our continually active, spontaneous, but at the same time completely involuntary, impulsive life. It is not, accordingly, resistance to our conscious willing. The latter is forever coming upon a completed reality” (GW 9: 214 [325]). The spontaneity of our central vital instincts not only precedes the acts of the will, but it is also a condition of sensation, perception (Wahrnehmung), and representation, a set Scheler calls by the name Perzeption (GW 8: 365). If we have a sensation, it is only because we are already oriented by a tendency; if we perceive an image, it is only because we have already experienced the being-real of that which resists our impulsions. This does not mean that from the beginning we are aware of the tendency, and of what hinders it; on the contrary, to the extent that the being-real of something is lived as resistance, we become aware of the impulsions, and of our own ego (GW 9: 214 [325]). The first relation with the world is, thus, that of “our endurance of the world’s resistance” (GW 8: 370)^[26] and the reality remains inaccessible to the sphere of Perzeption.^[27]

Even though the indeterminate reality of the world is given before that which is apprehended in Perzeption and in the natural worldview in general, the same cannot be said about sentiment, for the life-drive is affective: “The lowest level of our psyche […] configures the unconscious, sensible, representation-lacking ‘affective instinct.’ In it ‘feeling’ and ‘drive’ (that as such already have a specific direction and purposiveness ‘towards’ something, i.e., nourishment, sexual gratification) are not yet sundered” (GW 9: 13).^[28]

Lived as resistance to our affective drives, the moment of reality has also an affective correlative: “‘pure’ anguish.”^[29] Thus, in order to suspend both the moment of reality which gives an entity its singularity and the vital feeling of anguish that follows resistance, a voluntary human act is needed; the act of a human being who, as a spiritual being, can become the “ascetic of life” [Asket des Lebens]:

But precisely this act of derealization can only be carried out by that being that we call “spirit.” Only spirit in its form as pure “will,” by means of a willful act—and that means: an act of inhibition—can accomplish the deactivation [Inaktualisierung] of that center of affective drive that we have acknowledged as the access to the real being of what is real (GW 9: 44).

As an inhibition of our affective-vital impulsion, reduction is understood as a “derealization” whose consequence is the suppression of the contingent Sosein with which things appear in the natural worldview. Thus conceived, reduction continues being an essentialization, since it places us in a situation in which, according to Scheler, we can apprehend the world without experiencing already singularized things and images. However, while in the previous period, essentialization was a desymbolization carried out through multiple abstentions and that, in a strict sense, Scheler followed Husserl in excluding all positing regarding reality, in his later understanding of reduction, these abstentions are not enough. Now, the suspension of the general thesis corresponding to the lived experience of the unqualified reality of the world—expressed in the judgment of existence “There is realiter a world” (GW 8: 363)— does not affect the affective impulsion, condition both of the Perzeption and of the will. Reduction is not, therefore, effective if it is conceived as a procedure of thought, as a method, for, according to Scheler, we could then only suspend those acts which Husserl calls “doxic” and, thus, we would only reach the contingent Sosein:

One no longer sees what ought to be altered in the “blossoming apple tree” (to use E. Husserl’s example) through the mere suppression of the existential judgment. One does not see at all how, by this means alone, a new world of objects is to reveal itself, a world not contained in the natural world-view should open. The only result of bracketing the positing of existence [Daseinssetzung] is that the contingent characteristics of the object which all along preserved its space and time emerge world clearly. We are still a long way from the essence and are forced to ask, in astonishment, “What was the good of all?” (GW 9: 207 [315–316]).^[30]

This criticism of transcendental reduction shows that Scheler expects an essence from the effectuation of reduction. This manifests the decisive difference between Husserl’s and Scheler’s phenomenologies in one of their forms: they do not share the same understanding of the concept of phenomenon. For Husserl, reduction is transcendental and finds a new world of objects only to the extent that the same world, the same apple tree is given but not as something that appears and exists independently from the experience we have of it; on the contrary, it is given as relative, correlative, to her who carries out the reduction, that is, as phenomenon of meaning. This is why Husserl uses quotation marks when he claims that, in the transcendental attitude, what shows itself becomes “another” (Hua III/1: 226 [237]). Additionally, we are indeed a long way from the essence since the phenomenological-transcendental reduction leads to life itself which constitutes meaning, to the transcendental experience of the self. This means that, with reduction, we access the stream of lived experiences that continuously flow leaving us nothing evident but the “living present” surrounded by indeterminate horizons. As we know, in order to access essences, an eidetic reduction is needed. This reduction has nothing in common with the first one besides the sense of redirecting the gaze towards pure possibilities. With the infinite freedom of fantasy, the phenomenologist modifies her own actual and potential transcendental experience to the point that she apprehends the unchangeable traits or essential predicates of its a priori structure. By remaining within the domain of the “as if,” the task she must undertake is the constitutive analysis of the eidos ego, which entails all possibilities of the ego in its facticity, an ego that is taken as a mere example.

This conception supposes that an essence and, therefore, a whole series of a priori predicates belong to the meaning of what is contingent. Although Scheler agrees with this, it is not possible to state he would agree with the role Husserl assigns to fantasy in the phenomenological experience. Certainly, fantasy is a means to conduct the other to her own intuition of essences, but it should not be at the center of the determination of the essential laws, since, so to speak, it violates things themselves. This is also the point of the 1911/12 criticism according to which Husserl interrupts the effectuation of reduction by founding categorial intuition on sensible intuition. Thus, he shares with Stumpf the πρῶτον φεῦδος of sensualist theories (GW 10: 448–449 [221]).^[31] For Scheler, “the content of categorial intuition” is the foundation of the content of sensible intuition; and reduction is the condition that allows its complement, essence, to become a phenomenon. This understanding of reduction as an ontological principle explains why in The Idols of Self-Knowledge, from 1912, Scheler disapproves of the change which he finds in “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” when comparing it to the Investigations. Notwithstanding everything he agrees on regarding the concept of phenomenon, Scheler claims that Husserl confuses the pure immanence of phenomenology, the domain of absolute being, with the domain of psychic being:

In fact, however, Husserl seems to me to confuse here the essence of “phenomenon” with that of the “mental,” to confuse phenomenology and psychology, although in another place (p. 302 of the Logos essay), the “phenomenology of consciousness,” which has to do with “pure consciousness,” is sharply distinguished from that of “psychology,” which has to do with “empirical consciousness” or with consciousness as “nature” (GW 3: 246, note [42, note]).^[32]

And, as if Husserl still had the prejudice he had already rejected in 1907,^[33] Scheler adds the following:

On the other hand, everything Husserl says about “phenomenon” holds to, including what he says about the mental phenomenon. “Phenomenon” means only what is immediately given in living acts; what stands before me “in person;” that which is in the same way it is meant. I can seek out this givenness, however, in any object I please, in the non-mental as well as in the mental, and, once again, in “thingness” and in “reality” (GW 3: 247, note [42, note]).

As one can appreciate, the later critique to the transcendental method picks up the initial aim of reduction as desymbolization consisting in turning the essence into a phenomenon. However, within the framework of a metaphysical conception, reduction can only fulfill its task by inhibiting the center of vital functions through which we suffer the resistance of the world. Therefore, Scheler describes reduction as a “techne,” as a “process of inner action,” and, against Husserl, he claims: “Merely to suppress existential judgment is child’s play. It is quite another thing to set aside the factor of reality itself by putting out of operation those (involuntary) functions which furnish it” (GW 9: 207 [316]).

We find a previous version of this criticism in a text whose title, Vom Wesen der Philosophie und der moralischen Bedingung des philosophischen Erkennens, indicates, according to Henckmann, that reduction becomes there a moral behavior (Henckmann 1998: 45). I would like to end this paper by briefly referring to this text, since, from my point of view, we find in it the bond between the two Schelerian senses of reduction: that of “desymbolization” and that of an “ascetic act of desymbolization” of the world (GW 9: 44). There, Scheler does not deal directly with reduction, but presupposes it when referring to Husserl (GW 5: 77).

With regards to the previous texts, it is not enough to abstain from all positing of the modes of the being-real, rather it is necessary that those who want to philosophize, that is, participate in the absolute being through knowledge, be completely committed. To the extent that it is not a merely theoretical issue nor an issue concerning the primacy of practical reason, the attitude the philosopher needs in order to give themselves to absolute knowledge—here characterized above all as the union of essentia and existentia—is an articulation of three emotional acts. Scheler sees in the unitary effectuation of these acts a moral condition of philosophical knowledge. They constitute the Aufschwung that can liberate human beings from the relativity of “being for life,” removing them from egocentrism, anthropologism and vitalism, all pertaining to the natural worldview (GW 5: 89–90).^[34]

The most fundamental of these acts and, as Scheler says, the only one with a positive character is a type of love: “the whole spiritual person must love absolute value and being” (GW 5: 89). If it is true that the object of philosophy belongs to the realm of absolute being, then it is this love which puts us in its direction, beyond the objects of the surrounding world, whose existence is relative to our own being (GW 5: 90). The second one is the act of the humbling of the natural ego and self (des natürlichen Ich und Selbst):

Self-humbling overcomes natural pride and is the moral presupposition for the necessary simultaneous discarding of (1) the modes of contingent existence of a pure something (a condition of intuiting pure ‘essences’), and (2) of the actual intertwinement of the cognitive act in the economy of a psycho-physical organism (GW 5: 90).

According to Scheler, humbleness overcomes the pride that accompanies the primary having of things guiding us to the pure intuition of essential being. In order for essences to show themselves, humbleness (Demut) is needed, this is a necessary moral condition to detach ourselves both of the contingent modes of existence and, correlatively, of the functions of the psychophysical organism presupposed by the real effectuation of the act of knowledge. Finally, this detachment of the primary having of the objects of the natural worldview is followed by self-control (Selbstbeherrschung). In the same sense of derealisation of the later conception of reduction, this latter act has the function of inhibiting vital impulsions that condition sensible perception and objectifying them “[…] which are ‘given’ and experienced as ‘in the flesh’ and which must necessarily exert a constant influence on natural sensory perception” (GW 5: 89). This way, and at the same time, it neutralizes the symbolic experience of the surrounding world and guides us towards an adequate essential knowledge (GW 5: 90).

Therefore, we can understand the claim that, in this text, Scheler presents a “personalistic concept of philosophy” (Henckmann 1998: 29). The presentation of the essence of philosophy from the perspective of the personal attitude of the philosopher, or from the perspective of the philosopher’s moral condition, reminds us of the idea of transcendental epochē as a personal transformation that can only be compared to the religious conversion mentioned by Husserl in the Crisis; or, better yet, it may evoke this aspect of the Husserlian idea of philosophy: “Philosophy—Wisdom (sagesse)—is the philosophizer’s quite personal affair” (Hua I: 44 [2]).

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