Max Scheler on Human Exceptionalism in a Technocratic Society

In a recent reflection, I presented some challenges for those seeking to uphold that there is a “difference in kind” between humans (homo sapiens) and all other animals. What I want to reflect on here is something slightly different but directly related—namely, the nature of reason itself as a distinctively human faculty and what is at stake in attending to this issue.

In his 1947 Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer makes the following claim that is a helpful starting point for our purposes here:

When the ordinary man is asked to explain what is meant by the term reason, his reaction is almost always one of hesitation and embarrassment. It would be a mistake to interpret this as indicating wisdom too deep or thought too abstruse to be put into words. What it actually betrays is the feeling that there is nothing to inquire into, that the concept of reason is self-explanatory, that the question itself is superfluous.[1]

It is self-explanatory because it is taken for granted that “reason” (or intelligence) is “essentially concerned with means and ends, the adequacy of procedures more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory.”[2] In other words, what is taken for granted today is an instrumental view of reason.

But what else can reason be? Horkheimer offers numerous insights on this point, but I want to turn here instead to a prolific twentieth-century philosopher who, for better or worse, no longer receives much attention—namely, Max Scheler (1874-1928). To be clear, I am not arguing that Scheler is correct. Indeed, much that he argues for is utterly foreign to us now. Rather, I present him here only as an useful guide through this issue. There are three primary reasons for this.

First, his philosophical knowledge was immense, as was his knowledge of the sciences of the day. Second, he exerted a considerable amount of energy on philosophical anthropology, a discipline that in Scheler’s time aimed at clarifying what is distinctively human in relation to other animals. Third, Scheler helps us see how accounts of human distinctiveness are always intertwined with a much wider range of social-cultural issues. As I will highlight in the conclusion of this reflection, Scheler establishes interconnections between the instrumental view of reason, the prevailing of Darwinism as a scientific theory and the emergence of pragmatism as its philosophical counterpart, and the social-cultural transition into what we today tend to call a technocratic society.[3] Among other things, Scheler’s own philosophical anthropology is an attempt to resist this transition that we currently stand on the other side of.

Setting the Stage

This question concerning the nature of reason and human distinctiveness is, then, not some archaic one belonging to a bygone age. In fact, the relatively new but increasingly influential academic discipline of “Animal Studies” has renewed with urgency this question of human/animal differences and its social-cultural significance.[4] Within animal studies there is a broadly shared conviction that what we need in this time of rampant ecological destruction is a post-humanist anthropology that thoroughly rejects human exceptionalism—that is, the belief that humans are somehow radically other than (or different in kind from) all other animals in terms of both capacities and rights. Human exceptionalism is widely considered by scholars within animal studies as not only scientifically untenable (more on this below) but also as the deep ideological foundation of our current ecological crisis and technocratic way of relating to nature.

There are good reasons to question this narrative. Nonetheless, for Catholic theologians such as myself, animal studies poses a significant challenge and opportunity. This is especially the case in light of the publication of Pope Francis’ Laudato si’, which has argued for a more ecologically sensitive anthropology in order to resist what he calls our technocratic society. Laudato si’ does not, however, relinquish human exceptionalism. According to official Catholic teaching, only the human is in the image and likeness of God because humans alone have the capacities of reason and will. Correlatively, human beings alone among the animals have intrinsic dignity and worth.

As indicated above, one reason such a vision is widely criticized today is due to the conviction that it separates us from nature and inevitably leads to a thoroughly instrumentalized (or technocratic) relation to nature. But a second reason it is criticized, and that is just as important for our purposes here, stems from the assumption that ethology has now demonstrated that activities long considered distinctively human are found in other animals. For instance, we once thought of ourselves as the only tool-using animal, but this belief has been undermined by the discovery that certain other animals use tools (e.g., chimpanzees who use sticks in order to retrieve termites from within their mounds). Currently, we are also seeing a growing number of claims emerging within the scientific community that, with the aid of technology, something akin to syntax has been discovered within the communicative systems of certain whale species. What this indicates to many scientists is that even language is no longer distinctively human.[5]

All of this is often taken as definitive support of Darwin’s position that, between humans and (certain) other animals, there is only a difference in degree, not kind. It is, of course, possible to push back in each case and argue that, say, tool use or language in other animals is at most only analogous to human tool use or language and that there remains a qualitatively (or “essential”) difference between the two. As Scheler, for instance, suggests in a 1915 essay, the objects used by other animals cease to be tools (i.e., objects with a specific function) in their perceptual fields once they have been utilized.[6] This is not the case with a human tool. The latter has a unity of sense (meaning) that surpasses its momentary use or function. If, for instance, I stop reading a book or momentarily use it as a door stopper, this does not mean that the book ceases to be a book. Similarly, Scheler argues that what scientists mean by animal communication remains essentially different from human language. Animal expressions always refer back to an experience (e.g., fear, pain, hunger, and so forth), while the human word refers “outward” to some object or state of affairs in the world. In Scheler’s phrasing: “The word gives itself to us as the fulfilment of a desire for the object itself.”[7]

These are questionable claims. They might also give the impression that Scheler is just one more in a long line of philosophers to denigrate non-human animal capacities. But this would be a mistaken conclusion. Drawing from the research available to him, Scheler became increasingly more generous in what he grants to other animals. As he claims at one point:

All the usual distinctions between human being and animal—the animal has instinct but the human being intelligence, the animal has no concepts, no notion of relationships [e.g., identity, similarity, analogy, means-to-an-end, and so forth], no altruism, etc.—are invalid.[8]

He goes on to attribute to animals a preference for beauty; an ability to choose between actions and inhibit certain drives; the beginnings of tool construction; emotions such as sorrow, joy, curiosity, tenderness; the beginnings of humor; and acts such as gratitude, stubbornness, defiance, forgiveness, gift-giving, and vengeance.

This is strikingly generous for a philosopher in the early twentieth century. Indeed, taken alone it would suggest that Scheler in fact stands in agreement with Darwin. This is not the case, however. Despite his generosity concerning non-human animal capacities, Scheler is in fact one of the staunchest defenders of the position that, between humans and other animals, there is a difference in kind. Scheler realizes that this places him at odds with the trend of the age: “man [today] appears to have blended into his animalness and hence his lower nature.”[9] This blending represents a reversal of the broadly shared belief in human exceptionalism that prevailed among the major Western philosophers and theologians alike. Besides certain radical thinkers, the vast majority of Western philosophers and theologians have maintained that the human possession of reason (however defined) means that there is a difference in kind between humans and other animals.

Human Reason, “World-Openness,” and Metaphysics

But what do we have in mind when we say that “reason” renders us different in kind from other animals? This is where Scheler is particularly provocative and insightful. His clearest statement on this issue is found in his influential 1927 text The Human Place in the Cosmos.[10] Here Scheler outlines an ambitious hierarchical account of the structure of nature (or “life”). At the lowest level is impulsion (Drang). In the domain of plants, it consists of a mere “toward” or “away from” light, accompanied by a vague feeling. Plants lack the “inwardness” and “reporting back” to a center (i.e., nervous system) that animals possess. Only with this inwardness and reporting back can we have those capacities that characterize animals: perception, movement, affect, memory, and so forth. With animals, impulsion becomes more focused in the form of drives for specific goals pertaining to nourishment, survival, and reproduction. The second level is “instinct,” defined as behavior that is typical of a species as a whole; is useful in relation to drive-goals; unfolds according to a fixed rhythm without the need for learning (e.g., the migratory flight of a bird); and occurs in typical situations. The third level is associative memory. This is present in all living beings that are able to learn and hence modify their behavior. Here we find the phenomena of habit and animal behavioral “traditions.” Finally, the fourth level is “organically bound practical intelligence,” defined as the capacity to find solutions to practical problems in novel situations (more on this below).[11]

The lowest level (Drang) is present in all living beings, but not all living beings include all four levels. Plants, for instance, do not have instinct. The levels are also not present in the exact same way in all living beings. For instance, impulsion is present in both plants and animals, but, as noted above, it is more narrowly channeled in animals into specific drive-goals. With the so-called higher animals who exhibit genuine practical intelligence, the lower levels remain but are altered or lessened in dominance. Higher animals, for instance, have instincts, but these are less mechanical and dominant as they are in lower animals. This allows for more flexibility in behavior. Associative memory also comes in degrees. It is present in a greater degree in the higher animals who exhibit more behavioral flexibility and ability to learn.

Scheler’s account of practical intelligence is key for our purposes here, so let us sharpen our account of it a bit more. It consists of an immediate vision of practical possibilities pertaining to a novel state of affairs that is not based upon instinct or a history of trial and error and that requires insight into relations (e.g. “cause of,” “similar to,” and so forth). Impressed by the experiments on chimpanzees conducted by Wolfgang Köhler, Scheler has no doubt that certain animals are intelligent in this sense.[12] Köhler set up hindrances in the way of specific goals (e.g., fruit), while leaving various objects in the vicinity that could serve as possible tools to remove the hindrances. These experiments demonstrate that chimpanzees possess a remarkable ability to solve novel problems and to do so by transforming objects into tools. They are genuinely inventive.

Are humans unique then just in the sense that we exhibit practical intelligence to the highest degree, that we are simply the most inventive animals? Scheler rejects this position. It is the case that we have practical intelligence to a higher degree than other animals, but this is not where the difference in kind lies. Here is where matters become particularly obscure for a contemporary anglophone reader, since Scheler frames this difference in kind in a manner that is almost entirely unknown in the anglophone context. In brief, the human being is no longer bound-to-an-Umwelt (umweltgebunden) as other animals are. Rather, the human being alone is world-open (weltoffen) and hence that animal capable of metaphysical knowledge. As world-open, we transcend the domain of (mere animal) “life” and enter into the realm of spirit (Geist).

This way of framing the distinction emerges from—among other things—Scheler’s engagement with the biologist-philosopher Jakob von Uexküll’s influential Umweltlehre (“umwelt-theory”).[13] Uexküll sought to develop a new science of biology and animal behavior that would neither replicate chemistry and physics in its ideals nor base itself on anthropomorphic projections onto other animals’ inner lives. Uexküll’s new biology focused around the animal Umwelt (literally, “surrounding-world”), where the latter is defined as a purely subjective (phenomenal) realm whose structure and content are determined by an animal’s perceptual apparatus and capacities for action (i.e., many animals can perceive things, including possibilities for action in a given situation, that others cannot). All living beings including human beings are limited to such perceptual worlds that, as Uexküll famously puts it at one point, surround them like a “bubble.” The Umwelt is therefore not to be confused with the Umgebung—that is, the objective “place” that an organism is in or adapted to, what we today might call the animal’s natural habitat or niche. Rather, the Umwelt is a thoroughly relational and meaningful reality that the animal at its center, in a way, “constructs” out of what is present in its Umgebung.

Like many philosophers at the time, Scheler saw Uexküll as offering one of the most important alternatives to the mechanistic theory of life/biology that was then associated with Darwinism. More fundamental than “adaptation” to an already-made environment that emerges through natural selection (as emphasized in the Darwinism), is the active, constructive subjectivity of the organism and hence the animal/Umwelt relation. Animals do not “adapt” to an Umwelt. According to Uexküll, a non-mechanistic biology ought to be the scientific investigation of Umwelten, a science that would take seriously both the variety of species-specific Umwelten that often radically differ from each other (including in terms of space and time) and the central the role that meaning (or signs) play in the constitution of Umwelten.

Scheler is not, however, simply subservient to Uexküll. He provides his own account of the animal Umwelt and what it means for an animal to be “bound” to an Umwelt. “Umwelt-boundedness” is meant to capture the essence of animal life. It indicates Scheler’s conviction that all animals are cognitively limited to what is meaningful here-and-now in relation to the promotion of its drive-goals. An animal’s perceptual field (Umwelt) is, then, a dynamic reality of attractions and repulsions structured in terms of action possibilities: “animals’ perception, representation, instinct, rudimentary intelligence, and knowledge of various sorts, are all constrained by what is useful or harmful.”[14] Animals relate only to “Umwelt-things”—that is, things that have a practical function (e.g., thing-to-be-eaten, thing-to-flee-from). What is not relevant to its practical goals and vital values is, in a real sense, not part of its Umwelt.

We are now in a better position to understand Scheler’s characterization of human distinctiveness in terms of world-openness. If read in dialogue with Uexküll, then it indicates that humans alone break free from the bounds of an Umwelt. Weltoffen (world-open) is, then, interchangeable with umweltfrei (“umwelt-free”). Of course, we too are the temporal-spatial centers of a perceptual field whose structure and content is restricted by what our species-specific perceptual system is open to. There is much occurring around us at all times (e.g., sounds, smells, vibrations, colors, and so forth) that other animals perceive but that do not register for us (without the aid of technology). But it is simplistic to leave the matter there and conclude that we too are umwelt-bound (as Uexküll tends to suggest).

 Unlike other animals, we know that our perceptual reality is limited and hence that there is a world (Welt) in relation to which the various Umwelten are, so to speak, limited realities. We are also aware of what Scheler calls “world” space (and time). That is, although we are the spatial-temporal centers of a perceptual field that surrounds us like a bubble, we are aware that we are not the spatial-temporal centers of the larger universe. We each are simultaneously both the centers of an Umwelt and a de-centered part of a world.

In brief, only human beings are aware that there is something like a reality in itself as distinct from how things appears to us. As Scheler sometimes sums up this insight, only humans can relate to something other as a Gegenstand—that is, an object that I stand over and against in a contemplative relation, as something that I can genuinely wonder at and seek to understand irrespective of its use-value for me. It would, however, be a mistake to think of this “in-itself” simply as a physical reality. This is part of it no doubt, but it is not the central matter. More important for Scheler is our openness to what he calls essential structures, to “ideal laws of essences which are grounded in the essence of the ‘object’ as such, completely independently of the existence and organization of the genus Homo.”[15]

On this point, we can read Scheler’s account of world-openness as an attempt to defend a particular account of human reason and, correlatively, the possibility of metaphysical knowledge in the face of critiques from new philosophical and scientific developments—in particular Darwinism and pragmatism. Scheler’s argument is roughly the following: if there is only a difference in degree between humans and other animals (as Darwin and the pragmatists argue), then “the forms and laws of [human] thought” are all to be derived from “forms of working,” where “work” is understood broadly as any activity in which some given material is reconfigured.[16] Reason is, then, essentially a tool for survival (or “work”), a compensation for a lack of specialized organs and instinctual adaptation to a particular niche that other animals have. Some important consequences flow from this. All human cognition would, for instance, be a mere “lantern for our need for practical orientation in our environment.”[17] Knowledge would always be “the result of some inner action and a preparation for a reshaping of the world.”[18] No longer to be understood as a conformity of the mind to the real, truth would now be interchangeable with effectiveness.

From Scheler’s perspective, all of this indicates a thoroughly “animalized” view of human beings, a vision that renders us enclosed like other animals in an “animal milieu.”[19] Crucially, it spells the end of metaphysical knowledge. Scheler accepts that the human species evolved, but he maintains that we possess a faculty whose nature cannot be derived solely from “forms of working” or natural selection alone. As he puts the matter at one point, only if we possess a faculty capable of “spiritual acts that are principally independent of the collectivity of our drive-related needs . . . [and] of our particular practical manners of activity . . . will we be able to expect that it is, in principle, possible for us to take hold cognitively of the essence of the thing.”[20] Obviously, in order to make sense of such a faculty requires a far more expansive vision of reality, human nature, and evolution than what the natural sciences alone can offer us.

We can see more clearly now why Scheler argues that human distinctiveness has nothing to do with “intelligence.” We are not merely a very clever animal whose reason is simply an extension of instrumental (animal) intelligence that allows us to survive (or “work”) effectively within a particular animal Umwelt. Rather, reason in the truly distinctive human sense—or what Scheler calls “spirit” (Geist)—is characterized by the ability to suspend our practical comportment. It enables us to separate essence from existence that in turn makes possible a kind of cognitive act that Scheler calls ideation (Ideierung).[21] There is an essential difference, for instance, between being in pain and asking “what is causing this and how can I get rid of it?” and being in pain and asking “what is pain in itself? And what must the Ground of being be like in order for there to be a world permeated by pain?” The former is a matter of intelligence while the latter is a matter of ideation.

Ideation is a metaphysical mode of inquiry into essences that inevitably leads us to questions about the “Ground” of the world as a whole. This inevitability stems from the fact that world-openness is necessarily accompanied by the idea of an infinite and absolute being (i.e., “God”), even if this idea is not philosophically formulated at first.[22] In, so to speak, stepping out of an animal Umwelt into a “world” (Welt), the human species simultaneously found itself (cognitively speaking) beyond the world. As such, “the sphere of absolute Being . . . is as constitutive of the essence of humanity as is their self-consciousness and their consciousness of the world.”[23]

The human being is, then, a metaphysical animal. Reason in the distinctively human sense (as distinct from animal intelligence) is oriented toward metaphysical knowledge whose goal is nothing short of knowledge of the essential structure of realty in relation to the Ground of being. Indeed, Scheler defines “essences” at one point as “windows into the absolute.”[24] Entering into such knowing requires a contemplative-ascetic attitude, a relinquishing of the desire to control and manipulate the world. It emerges through what Scheler characterizes as a devotion to the object of knowledge and a participation in it, a relation he calls love. In knowing (loving), I transcend myself and partake in the known (beloved), indeed, become “one” with the beloved in a certain manner. Metaphysical knowledge is, then, an entrance into what he at one point calls the “kingdom of essences”[25] that is also a loving and contemplative participation in the world as it really is, not a knowledge that seeks to transform it.

Instrumental Reason, Homo Faber, and the Technocratic Society

I think it is fair to say that much of this is as foreign to us as are some of the descriptions we encounter in anthropological texts about the beliefs and practices of certain foreign cultures. Deeply influenced by pre-modern thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas, Scheler’s philosophical anthropology is by all means one of the great attempts to render up-to-date a definitively pre-modern understanding of reason and knowledge that, for better or worse, did not win out. One reason for this is no doubt Scheler’s anti-Darwinian tendencies. But this is perhaps a minor issue in the end. The foreignness of Scheler’s claims is much more the result of a wider social-cultural transformation into what we today call the technocratic society, a transformation that we live on the other end of.

As suggested earlier, Scheler’s philosophical anthropology can be read as an attempt to resist a technocratic society. We get the clearest insight into this dimension of Scheler’s thought in his Cognition and Work, a text in which he develops an extended critique of pragmatism and seeks to establish its connection to an increasingly technocratically oriented age. He does not provide a historian’s account of this transformation into the technocratic age (i.e., when and where it emerged, and so forth). Rather, his contribution is to characterize it, first, in terms of competing philosophical anthropologies and, second, in terms of how societies structured upon these philosophical anthropologies will rank values and understand knowledge.

At the level of philosophical anthropology, this transformation is one from an understanding of ourselves as homo sapiens to an understanding of ourselves as homo faber—"human, the maker” or, as Scheler prefers to phrase it, the “being of work.” Homo faber sums up what Scheler takes to be the philosophical anthropology instantiated most clearly in the Darwinian-inspired pragmatist movement. As characterized by Scheler, pragmatism adheres to a thoroughly instrumentalized understanding of reason. In a more up-to-date evolutionary phrasing, we could say that it promotes a view of human intelligence according to which the latter is solely the product of the highly social, tool-using, hunter-gatherer niche that our ancestors constructed.

It is Scheler’s conviction that a society governed by homo faber as its philosophical anthropology (i.e., Marxist and capitalist societies) will consider work as the fundamental value. Accordingly, it will promote “mastery knowledge” (Herrschaftswissen) as the highest form of knowledge. Rooted ultimately in fear, mastery knowledge is ordered toward the control of the world. It has, of course, always been necessary for our species, but it is not the only form of knowledge that human societies have pursued in their own ways. Scheler highlights two other such forms of knowledge: erudition (Bildungswissen) and redemptive knowledge (Erlösungswissen). The former is rooted in “wonder” and is ordered toward the cultivation of the individual person and knowledge of the world. Redemptive knowledge is rooted in the feeling of “awe” and is ordered toward participation in the Ground of all things (i.e., “God”).

Scheler goes on to argue that a society ordered around homo faber as its philosophical anthropology will either neglect other forms of knowledge or reduce them to mastery knowledge. That is, it will ultimately become technocratic in orientation. As he puts the matter at one point: if we are indeed homo faber, then we have no choice but to accept that “the practical demands of our civilization are in fact the ultimate goals and the alpha and omega of our existence.”[26] For better or worse, this situation represents the total inversion of the ideals that we find in pre-modern and/or in many non-Western cultures where mastery knowledge is always in the service of erudition and redemptive knowledge. Indeed, what we find in many pre-modern and non-Western cultures is often a contempt for work and a celebration of leisure. Here we find an ordering of society that is grounded in a different philosophical anthropology, one along the lines of what Scheler seeks to defend—namely, homo sapiens.

These are sweeping generalizations, all of which are no doubt historically, sociologically, and philosophically questionable. Nonetheless, there is something here worth taking seriously, especially for those of us who want to defend the value of something like a well-rounded humanist education. Do we not still find it hard to imagine knowledge coming through any other means than the modern natural sciences—that is, knowledge that gives us power? Are we not having to fight for a vision of education that is not ordered solely toward effectiveness in the job market? Is not the “technocratic entrepreneur” the ideal of our time rather than the philosopher, poet, or saint (and even less and less the scientist!)?

Such questions indicate what I take to be the surprising contemporary relevance of Scheler. Indeed, his relevance increases in light of the immense amount of scholarly attention currently being given to human/animal differences and to how particular accounts of these differences are intertwined with wider social-cultural, ethical, and economic systems. Transformations in such systems always entail a reimagining of our animality and our distinctiveness in relation to other animals. Any attempt to resist a technocratic society therefore requires attending to these questions.

Scheler’s philosophical anthropology is, however, utterly at odds with the trajectory of much contemporary work in animal studies and, indeed, in theological anthropology, where the aim of many scholars is to undermine human exceptionalism.[27] Especially in light of the much richer understanding of evolutionary theory that we have today, Scheler’s understanding of Darwinian evolution also reads as simplistic. With that said, a view of human reason (or “intelligence”) as instrumental in nature is still mostly taken for granted by many contemporary evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary inspired philosophers.[28]

This suggests that, while we may no longer share all of Scheler’s anxieties and by all means should challenge his philosophical anthropology as well as his characterization of animals, Darwinian evolution, and homo faber, he at minimum poses a provocative question to the spreading conviction that resisting our technocratic society requires thoroughly rejecting human exceptionalism: how are we, on the one hand, to reject human exceptionalism and take evolution seriously and, on the other hand, not end up with homo faber as our governing philosophical anthropology?