The Human Place in the Cosmos

Outside The Cosmos

Titled "The Human Place in the Cosmos", Max Scheler's book finds that the human place is largely outside the Cosmos. Scheler (1874 -- 1928), was a German philosopher who studied with Dilthey and Simmel. His own pupils included Edith Stein, and he deeply influenced other thinkers including Merleau-Ponty and Pope John Paul II. Scheler was deeply influenced by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology even though he became a sharp critic of Husserl. Before Scheler's death, Martin Heidegger called him the most important force in the philosophy of his day.

"The Human Place in the Cosmos" was Scheler's final work and appeared just before his death in 1928. It is short, difficult, and dense -- more of a essay than a fully developed book. This edition was published in 2009 in the "Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy" series of Northwestern University. The translation is by the late Manfred Frings (1925 -- 2008), the editor of Scheler's collected works, with an introduction, notes, and glossary of Scheler's philosophical terminology by Professor Eugene Kelly, who has written extensively about Scheler. Kelly aptly describes Scheler's text as "an adventure in high philosophy".

This is a book for readers who think that philosophy is important in discussing the large questions of life. It is also a book which will appeal to readers with a modernist, post-religious outlook. In other words, Scheler seeks to find meaning and spirituality in life but not within traditional theism or religion. Some of the thinkers that receive attention in this book are the Buddha, Spinoza, and William James. A good background in thinking about philosophical questions and a willingness to study a text closely are helpful in approaching this book.

Scheler describes his book as a "philosophical anthropology" and says its aim is to address two questions: "what is the human being and what is his place in being?" Scheler finds three broad answers to the questions, each of which includes insights but are individually unsatisfactory: 1. The Jewish-Christian view of creationism; 2. the Greek view of reason and participation in logos; 3. the view of the natural sciences, evolutionary biology, and genetics. Scheler's develops his own answers to these questions which begin with inorganic matter and work up through plants and animals to determine what human beings share with other forms of things and how they differ. He then approaches his questions from the other direction, so to speak, to try to understand the role of human beings in what he terms the cosmos.

The crux of the book is in the development of what Scheler calls spirit. Spirit is what makes people human and which separates them from other living things. The development of spirit is what human beings ultimately share with the cosmos and with large reality. Scheler's understanding of "spirit" is difficult and should not be confused with "soul" or with "mind" in idealism or Cartesian dualism. For Scheler, spirit is not a thing or a substance. Animals show a greater or lesser degree of instinctual, associative or possibly reasoning ability to protect themselves and to find food and sex. Human beings show a much greater problem-solving ability. But only humans have an ability to step outside their surroundings, objectify them, and ask themselves what they mean. This ability to step back and reflect, Scheler calls Spirit, and it is a process and an ongoing subject rather than a thing. For all his criticism, this strikes me as a Husserelian approach.

Scheler develops a Spinozistic answer to the relationship between physical process and mental processes, finding that both are two sides of the same thing unified together by spirit. Spirit stands aside from pragmatic issues and searches for meaning through art, law, literature, music, philosophy. It enables people to say "no" to their impulses, upon occasion, in a way animals cannot do. Scheler's understanding of spirit differs from that of traditional religions and earlier philosophies. Most importantly, Scheler's spirit is a weak, difficult reed. It has now power of its own, unlike, say, a transcendental God, and only fully comes through rarely, at the upper reaches of human effort. "Short and rare is what is beautiful in its tenderness and vulnerability", Scheler writes (p.47).While animals are enclosed in their lives and in the environment, human beings live outside of it, in rare moments, through spirit, reflectiveness, and the objectification of their environment. Hence the human place "in the cosmos" is "outside the cosmos."

With its existence "outside the cosmos" spirit tries to find meaning in God or other forms of transcendence. But it is not to be found there for Scheler, but rather from within. Meaning and transcendence are developing concepts that come from below, rather than from above. Thus it is the role of human beings through the generations to develop their varying understandings of spirit. At the conclusion of the book, Scheler writes:

"One might tell me at this point, and, indeed, I was once told, that it is impossible to bear the idea of an unfinished and God-in-becoming. My answer is that metaphysics is not an insurance company for weak people in need of protection. Metaphysics requires and presupposes human beings with strong and courageous minds." (p. 66)

Readers with a strong interest in philosophical and religious questions will benefit from studying Scheler's book.

Robin Friedman