Abstract:
Usually philosophers worry about the existence of mind, or consciousness, or persons, or other difficult-to-explain phenomena. Having posited matter or nature, or fields, they wonder where can person or consciousness originate? This kind of thinking is backward. Only persons ask such questions. Persons exist. I turn the tables on the traditional problem of person by asking whether anything impersonal really exists. I argue that the impersonal almost exists, using the theory of feeling of Max Scheler and supplementing it with insights from Alfred North Whitehead and Josiah Royce. Even though feeling almost succeeds in divesting itself of the pre-supposed act of the person, but its concrete actuality blocks such complete self-abstraction.
Keywords:
Scheler, person, Whitehead, Royce, existence, feeling
How to cite:
Auxier, Randall E. “Scheler and the Very Existence of the Impersonal.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 2, no. 1(3) (2018): 74–86. https://doi.org/10.26319/3918.
Author:
Randall E. Auxier
Department of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Faner Hall, Mail Code 4505, 980 Faner Drive, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA
personalist61@gmail.com
References:
Auxier, Randall E. “Bowne on Time, Evolution and History.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 12, no. 3 (1998): 181–203.
Auxier, Randall E. “God, Process and Persons: Charles Hartshorne and Personalism,” and “Immediacy and Purpose in Brightman’s Philosophy.” In Hartshorne and Brightman on God, Process and Persons: The Correspondence, 1922–1945, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Mark Y.A. Davies. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001.
Auxier, Randall E. “The Sherpa and the Sage.” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 36, no. 1 (2015): 37–50.
Auxier, Randall E. Time, Will and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce. Chicago: Open Court, 2013.
Auxier, Randall E., and Gary L. Herstein. The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s radical Empiricism. London: Routledge, 2017.
Bowne, Borden Parker. “The Failure of Impersonalism.” In Personalism, 217-267. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908.
Cesarz, Gary L. “A World of Difference: The Royce-Howison Debate on the Conception of God.” The Personalist Forum 15, no. 1 (spring 1999): 84–128.
Nobo, Jorge Luis. Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986.
Royce, Josiah. “The Conception of God.” In The Conception of God, edited by G.H. Howison, 7-50. New York: Macmillan, 1897.
Royce, Josiah. The World and the Individual: First Series, The Four Historical Conceptions of Being. New York: Macmillan, 1899.
Scheler, Max. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Translated by Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), 328–344.
Scheler, Max. “The Meaning of Suffering.” Trans. Harold J. Bershady. In Max Scheler on Feeling Knowing, and Valuing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 82–115
Spader, Peter H. Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.
Tyman, Stephen. “Royce and the Destiny of Idealism,” in The Personalist Forum, 15:1 (spring 1999), pp. 45–58.
Wilshire, Bruce. Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Open Access Statement:
This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, as long as the author and original source are properly cited. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Submitting a text to Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture means that the author agrees with the general conditions of this license. The author does and will maintain copyrights and publishing rights for his/her article without any restrictions.