The conservative moral philosophy of Scheler and Kolnai.

EDMUND HUSSERL was the source of the principal philosophical movement of the twentieth century: phenomenology. The most important continental European philosophers of the century just past were all linked to the phenomenological movement to some degree or other. The greatest of these, Martin Heidegger, is infamous for cutting his ties with Husserl in order to curry favor with the Nazis. Heidegger in turn has been roundly criticized by such phenomenologists as Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas for his failure to develop any kind of ethical theory. This intellectual failure, they argue, explains Heidegger's own moral failure of sympathizing and actively collaborating with the Nazis.

Although phenomenology was still a very young philosophical school when Heidegger first flashed across the world of academic philosophy, ethics and phenomenology had nonetheless already come together in a remarkably fertile way. What is often referred to as the Munich School of phenomenology had concentrated from the start on moral and legal theory, and most famously so in the figure of Max Scheler, a man of brilliant intellect but febrile character. (1) It is widely acknowledged that Scheler (1874-1928) was the premier phenomenologist to have developed an ethical theory, a distinctive and highly original value theory. He presented his ideas in 1913 in his enormous and difficult work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. (2)

It is an interesting fact that those phenomenologists who developed original moral theories all created conservative ones. A superb phenomenologist like Merleau-Ponty, who is extremely popular in philosophy departments today, simply grafted his Marxist political and ethical commitments onto his phenomenology; the same can be said of thinkers more loosely related to phenomenology, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. But where truly original ethical thinking is found among phenomenologists, it always takes on a conservative hue. Today, Levinas is far more studied than is Scheler: of all the phenomenologists Levinas is certainly the most "popular" in the contemporary university. This is quite remarkable, for his biblically oriented ethics is undoubtedly conservative, centering as it does around issues of maternity and paternity. Despite all his sophistication, Levinas uses these ideas in a quite straightforward way to talk about the duties and responsibilities of parents. For a conservative philosopher, it is a delight to watch liberal and feminist commentators on Levinas--and they are legion--trying to hold on to his post-Heideggerian ethical reasoning while gutting his thinking of its essentials lest he unsettle their basic commitments.

Though eclipsed today by Levinas, Scheler remains a tremendous resource for conservative ethics. It is probably fair to say that until the mid-1960s Scheler's star was still rising, especially in Christian circles. He was foundational to the development of personalism as a philosophical anthropology, and personalism remains basic to Catholic social thought. Although Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II was often identified as part of the Munich School, already by the mid-1960s he was distancing himself from Scheler; late in his life, he spoke very favorably of Levinas. This, however, has nothing to do with Scheler's having become an apostate--as some maintain--and much more to do with the centrality of biblical norms in contemporary Christian ethics.

Scheler, though very much a Catholic when he wrote his ethics, always stood in the tradition of Catholic realism, his vigorously objective value ethics standing as an elaboration of an autonomous moral law. He did not aspire to be a moral theologian, but rather, a moral philosopher. If interest in Scheler is to be re-freshened, it might be sparked by putting him in contact with another member of his school, the Hungarian phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973).

Like Scheler, Kolnai was born a Jew and converted to Catholicism. He fled continental Europe in 1939, keeping just ahead of the advancing Nazis armies. In Kolnai's exile he came to view England as his home, so that English became the language in which his mature philosophical writings, exclusively in ethics and politics, would be written. This is something of a godsend, because Kolnai's value ethics is written in a very clear way whereas Scheler's classic Formalism is among the most difficult philosophical books that one will ever read. Kolnai, an astonishingly original thinker in his own right, makes Scheler accessible for English readers, and he does so all the while amidst an elaborately worked out conservative political framework.

Value ethics, in fact, is the twentieth century's original contribution to ethical theory. It is curious to note that while metaphysical theories abound in Western thought, ethical theories are really few and far between. Other than value theory, there have basically been only five approaches to ethics in the history of Western philosophy. Virtue theory dominated the ancient world and the Middle Ages, and Aristotle and Aquinas have seen a revival in the last twenty years in academic philosophy. Another strain of ethical thinking that emerged from the Middle Ages was natural law ethics, and it too has had a revival in recent years: among Christian thinkers, of course, but a secular variant, sociobiology, has also found favor in disciplines like business ethics and political philosophy. But by far the dominant modes of ethical thinking in universities today come from the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Kantianism and utilitarianism. Dominant in law schools, medical schools, and departments of philosophy, these styles of ethical reasoning will continue unabated as the hallmark of academic ethical teaching for at least another generation. A final stream of ethics is the Scottish school of moral sentiments that includes Adam Smith and David Hume. A minority interest amongst academic philosophers, perhaps, but because of Smith's role in the development of social philosophy and economics, it remains powerful.

If one tried to locate value theory amidst these five streams of thinking, it would be fundamentally hostile to Kantianism and utilitarianism and in continuity with the Scottish school of moral sentiments with a strong splash of natural law ethics. Perhaps in saying this much, one can readily see why value theory can be such a resource for contemporary conservative thought.

Value theory differs from each of these ethical traditions in some way or other, of course, and its strength as a theory is found in these differences. In adding to Aristotle's virtue theory, Thomas Aquinas wondered whether the virtues in a man were equal. Respecting the specific value of each virtue, the virtues are not equal, argued Thomas. Charity is a virtue ranking higher than faith. But Thomas also argued that the growth of virtue in man was similar to the growth of a hand. Just as the fingers might be of different lengths--an image of the ranking amongst the virtues--still, the fingers grow proportionally. Thomas claimed--and his analogy became a locus classicus of later reflection in the virtue tradition--that the virtues would likewise need to grow proportionally. A clear implication of this is that if one does not have courage, one cannot have justice either. The virtues are equal in that all are needed if any of them is to flourish (STI-II, q. 66, a. 2).

Sadly, when reflecting on one's own virtues, gaps are likely to appear. Oftentimes a person has a particular failing in virtue and Thomas has set the bar high. For to the degree that one fails in courage, say, then a proportional failing in all the other virtues follows. It would be comforting to think that Thomas was wrong about this, but it is all too easy to come up with examples to show that there is truth in what he says.

Value theory, on the other hand, while affirming a hierarchy and ranked order amongst values, does not see them as smoothly connected: very often there are tensions between values. This means that someone can be the bearer of a high value and a low value at the same time, and this is a pretty fair account of most people's moral lives. Value ethics is a theory that aims to work with what people have got, as it were, and to be affirma-tional. Not that it abandons the perfectionism of virtue theory--for value theory holds rigidly to the idea that some people are bearers of higher values than others. The theory affirms a conservative principle that shocks more Whiggish conservatives: implicit in its perfectionism is the idea that not all men are of equal worth since they bear different values. At the same time, even low values are still values. The value theorist looks out at the world with its highs and lows but still sees a spread of values and of individual persons struggling to attain value.

It is difficult to find a more congenial moral theory for conservatives than natural law, and value theory assumes much in its objectivism from natural law. However, value ethics adds to natural law a good deal of phenomenological sensitivity that helps natural law to become more persuasive. Value theory adds a descriptive content to natural law and holds firm to the idea that there is a core of value that simply cannot be done without. What Kolnai came to call the "primacy of moral evil" is in deep continuity with natural law: this is the idea that morality is much more about certain moral prohibitions than about positive moral prescriptions. This is not to say that value theory is a theory of moral laxity, but it does affirm liberty. Again, in this, it is similar to natural law ethics.

Contrary to silly criticism of the natural law as a sort of Trojan Horse for theocracy, Aquinas spoke eloquently about the role of the customary behavior of peoples in organizing their social order. Liberty is only to be restrained when fundamental moral values or precepts are threatened. In much contemporary constitutional thought, matters are reversed. Value rankings governing homicide (who may be killed, when and by whom) have fallen into chaos and key property rights have been suspended in significant ways while all the while talk goes on of constitutional "rights" to wages, to vacations, and to medical care. Similar confusions are found in economics. A job at McDonald's is not dignified work and so is not an ambition for most people. But contrary to those who denounce an economy which produces such jobs, a job at McDonald's is not an evil: it realizes a low value, true, but a value nonetheless. Put otherwise, a job at McDonald's does not transgress the natural law. A value ethics approach to such questions brings a certain clarity and places fashionable political causes in high relief.

Kantianism views the world as a "porridge," as Scheler put it, as an undifferentiated sameness along a single dimension. Value theory is a more expansive and liberal-minded approach than Kantianism, for it embraces all the values, high and low, that contribute to a moral life. Motivations might stem from hopes for low values, but again, because they stem from values they cannot be dismissed as positively immoral. To do so is simply to misdescribe the phenomena. In value theory, the unreality of Kant's ethics is thoroughly and convincingly dismissed.

A hallmark of Scheler's ethics is to show the way that emotion is pervasive in our moral life and how obligations are identified by emotions. Through close analysis of our emotional lives, Scheler showed that Kant was completely wrong to assume that emotions could not be the site of rigorous objectivity. Kant's rejection of the value texture of the world is so thoroughgoing that his ethics is hopeless in explaining moral issues related to our embodiment (Kant's moral rules, after all, applied to all "rational creatures," whether human beings or angels--in other words, having a body was irrelevant to ethical life for Kant). This is evident in the writings of post-Kantian liberals. Affirming Kant's theory of autonomy as they do, in sexual matters they have to rely on Mill's no-harm principle because desire cannot register as something ethical.

Rejection of "the beautiful structure of the world of values" (Scheler) in favor of the "generally valid law of human volition" (Kant) also constitutes a rejection of revelation as a source of ethics. For revelation is an insight into, and bearing of, values, and this insight is peculiar to some and not directly experienced by others. Those without insight and who do not bear the revelation must "believe" what others have held in direct experience. The whole idea of revelation, and the ethics derived from it, is anathema to the egalitarianism of Kant's "generally valid law." It is little wonder that political parties allied to humanitarian ethics, pervaded as they are by the spirit of Kant, are so hostile to faith and its insights into human values. It is surely Scheler who shows most clearly that there is an irreconcilable conflict when humanitarians attempt to speak the language of faith. It is also a singular service of Scheler's ethics to show that the liberal insistence on a publicly available reason for discussions of politics is premised on the extraordinarily particular ethical presumption that true ethical values are known to all or not at all.

Scheler thinks it readily demonstrable that the ranking of values--what is often called the "axiological hierarchy"--runs, from low to high, in this way: utility, vital, personal, and, lastly, spiritual values. This ordering helps make immediate sense of why utilitarianism seems so implausible. While we can all readily acknowledge that an appreciation of consequences is some significant part of moral understanding, it is equally evident that a concern for consequences is but a relatively small part of ethics. Civilization clearly rests upon a manifold of values which are not exhausted by reference to pleasure and pain, as Jeremy Bentham would have it. It is not only that utilitarianism offends against our sense that intrinsic evils exist, but the reduction of persons to what is useful rightly appalls our moral sense.

This affront to moral sense is so sharp that liberals readily denounce the excesses of industrialism or globalization. But if, in principle, utilitarianism evacuates the idea of intrinsic evil or tolerates the merely instrumental use of persons, these denunciations are remarkably inconsistent. It is also the case that not everyone's pleasure and pain are equal. A conceit of the contemporary utilitarianism of someone like Princeton's Peter Singer is a thoroughgoing egalitarianism in which my child's pain or pleasure ought to be of no greater moral concern to me than that of a child in India, and certainly a strict internationalism is to be assumed in government policy. This is a moral view that Adam Smith mocked as "artificial commiseration" and lampooned mercilessly. Just as this egalitarian outlook is hostile to the value of the family--rejecting the idea that nearness or what Smith called "habitual sympathy" is of moral relevance--so my nearness to a particular country is quite beside the point and the value of patriotism likewise dismissed.

Having just observed certain continuities between value theory and Smith's theory of moral sentiments, it must be noted that Scheler was quite critical of Smith. Indeed, he thought Smith's Whiggish commercialism nothing less than a species of ressentiment and his theory of sympathy a hindrance to the higher value of spiritual love. Scheler was especially concerned about the transformation wrought upon vital values by a commercial ethos. He observed that in the commercial republic, notions of exercising the body for its own sake or to realize martial values have been completely lost: for the comfort-seeking bourgeois, exercise is merely a kind of relaxation from work. It seems that Scheler failed to appreciate that commercial societies revolve around beauty--according to Smith. Beauty holds a high rank on the "axiological hierarchy." Nonetheless, Scheler's concern remains valid. Montesquieu observed, for example, that certain people procured abortions so as to avoid the disfigurement of breasts that accompanies nursing--i.e., out of a concern about beauty. The link between commercial life and practices such as abortion may indeed be a dark one.

Still, continuities do exist between value theory and the Scottish school, and Kolnai was more willing than Scheler to claim the mantle of Smith and Hume. In particular, Kolnai thought the idea of a moral spectator valuable. Smith argued that for an agent to be moral he had to have gained social approbation; Smith made this idea central to his own theory of "moral consensus." The importance that this idea places on the social order, and on a shared "value-ception" (Scheler), is bound to be a strong recommendation to conservatives.

It is in their respective attitudes toward Smith that a subtle but real difference between Scheler and Kolnai emerges. There was not a streak of the Whig in Scheler, and he strongly affirmed the reality of inequality between the sexes, races, and among men as such. He was convinced that modernity's abiding concern with equality was an aberration in human thought--and it is fair to note that most philosophers throughout history have been advocates of inequality. Kolnai brings a more practical approach to the question of equality with his idea of privilege. Without dismissing democracy nor the equality it implies, Kolnai nevertheless wanted to see democracy moderated and its destructive impulse to eradicate sites of privilege within society thoroughly routed. Kolnai, perhaps truer to the method of value theory, accepted the fact that modernity realized certain values--some of them low perhaps, but the point was to find a way to generate a social order that did full justice to the range of values in the value hierarchy.

Perhaps the appeal of value theory can be gleaned from this discussion of its differences from other ethical doctrines. But value theory's real strength for conservatives lies in its linking of a rigorously objective ethics with lived experience, putting an emphasis on subjectivity with its painstaking analysis of the emotions and the phenomenon of ressentiment. In Scheler, Nietzsche's insight is self-consciously appropriated in the service of conservative ends. Scheler would agree with a thinker like Roger Scruton that conservatism must embrace the turn to subjectivity without yet falling into the myriad errors that accompanied that turn at the beginning of the modern age. Thus, value ethics relies on analyses of discrete experiences--for example, disgust, dignity, condoning as distinct from forgiveness. Such an orientation can be remarkably productive for conservatives.

In Kolnai, Scheler's objectivism becomes the basis of a political constitutionalism with the absolutes of the moral law cast as anti-tyrannical. Kolnai argued that the rejection of moral absolutes--one of the excesses of the Enlightenment in which subjectivity transformed into subjectivism--is a rejection of limitation and a typically utopian gesture. It is really in the idea of limitation that the conservatism of Scheler's and Kolnai's value theory rests.

A fine example of how phenomenology arrives at moral objectivity is Kolnai's derivation of moral disgust from the experience of disgust itself. Kolnai's analysis is a remarkable development of some brief remarks by Scheler. Disgust has a very specific character. It is a response to organic nature, never to the non-organic, and it always has for its object the phenomenon of organic life out of place. Because Kolnai is a thorough-going realist--more consistently so than Scheler--he also thinks, beside the invariant character of the experience of disgust, that the disgusting is also an ontological object, since values inhere structurally in reality. Disgust is an aversion, but close attention to the lineaments of the phenomenon show that it is clearly unlike other aversions such as fear or hatred. Respecting the former, we respond to what we fear by turning away, whilst the disgusting can hold our attention; indeed, a quality of life out of place is the appearance of its reaching out and trying to touch us. In the case of the latter, the aversion is active as we seek to destroy or diminish that which we hate.

These discriminations amongst phenomena of the same genus, as it were, help to clarify that moral disgust is not derived from fear and hatred. Thus, those who have a moral objection to homosexual acts as acts regarding the generation of life occurring out of place can rightly reject the charge of being "homophobic." Moral disgust is neither a fear of the homosexual nor a form of hatred. The moral condemnation carried in the accusation of homophobia assumes a mixture of hatred and fear, but this is simply to obscure the highly specific character of moral disgust by confusing it with other species of aversion. This is the power that can be brought to ethical analysis by the phenomenological method of Kolnai and Scheler. Scheler, of course, has a more "attacking" style than Kolnai's careful discrimination of discrete experiences. He would certainly have charged that the transformation of a long-standing moral condemnation of homosexuality into the disease of homophobia is a classic case of ressentiment ethics. Nietzsche of course had observed that, rest assured, whenever a moral order is denounced as sickness the denunciation springs from impotence and hatred of the good.

The phenomenology of disgust reveals a moral imperative to cleanliness in which life is partitioned and regions of value are acknowledged to limit one another. Modesty, restraint, the rejection of dubious means in pursuit of worthy goals, purity of heart, and gentleness are all founded, says Kolnai, on the experience of exclusion. One can be rightly concerned about the sexualization of our culture, for the abandonment of sexual limitation is totalitarian in tenor. A conservative sexual ethics affirms limits in sexual life--for example, the age of consent--and liberal efforts to eliminate such limits should be seen as a utopian gesture with all its implications of anti-constitutionalism.

The ethics of progressive democracy also include a rejection of hierarchy and the gradations in value intrinsic to it. Because hierarchy is rejected in a politics of equality, gradation itself is rejected, and this helps explain a phenomenon that must have puzzled many. Liberals seem incapable of discerning the moral weights of various events, movements, and causes. The liberal's conflation of the foreign policy of the United States with the murderous intensity of radicalized Islam stems from a horror of making discriminations among values in tension. It is on display every day as we are passed in our cars by the liberal driver with all those bumper stickers: why never just one sticker? A plethora of causes are smeared across the back of the car, indicating an inability to prioritize amongst values, not all of which can ever be realized. Some, indeed, are mutually exclusive. This strange falling away from objectivity into a subjectivism in which adjudicating between values is entirely abandoned was dramatically seen in the clarion call of the French Revolution: it was a puzzle then, and remains so today, how liberty, equality and fraternity can all of them be realized at once in any regime.

Rejecting hierarchy, one necessarily rejects the vantage point needed if the priorities within the field of values and reality are to be appreciated. In a wonderful example, Kolnai describes what happens when one climbs up from a plain onto a mountain and therefore comes to a commanding vision of the landscape in which one previously travelled with little understanding. The phenomenon of "height" and its realization in the social order--the elevation to the peerage, the bench, high office, management, and general rank in the military--is really a phenomenon of discrimination in which order can be observed, but also the relationship between values.

It is no surprise then that progressive democracy increasingly rejects the distinction between private and public authority. In matters respecting abortion and euthanasia, liberals now have it as dogma that private individuals are free to exercise lethal authority that was once the provenance of government. In matters of war and capital punishment, there is a palpable disbelief that the state has the authority to kill. A slogan of leftist protesters against the Iraq War has been: "Not in my name." What exactly can be meant by this phrase? Is it that the public authority has no authority to kill beyond my own private authority to kill? A conservative has to be mystified by this. Any such theory denies the gradations, and thus the limits, within the phenomenon of power.

A strange reversal is afoot: increasingly, private lethal authority is insisted upon and that same authority is taken away from the state. It might be noted that this reversal is to some degree a return to ancient forms of homicide, since for millennia it was not the responsibility of the state to punish murder but it was for families to settle the matter between themselves. Remnants of this ethic are still found in the Mafia. And Montesquieu puts down the change--the rise of the public adjudication of murder--to the Gothic constitution. Certainly we also find the codification of the separation of authority into public and private in Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, Aquinas and the Church consistently claimed that husbands had no authority to kill their wives caught in the act of adultery, and the Church insisted on this for nearly three hundred years before this kind of homicide on private authority was finally prohibited by secular law.

Thus, it can readily be seen that the phenomenological observation of the significance of "height" is not simply an unreflective continuation of ancient practice. It was a Gothic sensibility and its valorization of hierarchy which was most keenly aware of the importance to good order provided by its social distinctions. Taking Scheler's insistence on the centrality of hierarchy to heart, contemporary conservatism can find an explanation not only for the continuation of the distinction between public and private authority but also for the basis of executive power and privilege.

Public authority is a site of privilege. Each site has a manner of action peculiar to itself and intensifies the manifold of values, argued Kolnai. The family, private schools and clubs, Church, state, etc.--each has a particular liberty of action, and so do the executive and other branches within public authority. It is the sensitivity to the role of privilege that helps clarify state action. For example, punishment, says Scheler, is to purge society. Forgiveness of crime is a personal value and cannot be expected from the constitutional state. The state has no personal value save perhaps in acts of the Royal or Presidential Pardon in which the personal is formally present and so too, therefore, can forgiveness be present. Otherwise, the expectation of the state to forgive is simply a confusion about the ranking and location of values.

One obvious question remains. If value theory is so agile an approach to understanding ethics, how is it that it is so marginal in contemporary moral debates? Why do American undergraduates so rarely encounter value theory in a survey course in moral philosophy? The answer, I believe, has much more to do with contingent facts of history than it does with the intrinsic merits of value ethics.

Both Scheler and Kolnai had very atypical academic careers and largely worked outside the established university system. This meant they never had a steady stream of doctoral students. This lack of academic affiliation is compounded by the fact that value theory seems to have found strong footholds in Eastern European countries--Poland and Hungary, for example--where non-Marxist intellectual traditions were subsequently stymied under Communism.

Moreover, while many Catholic thinkers quickly adopted the personalism of Scheler's broader thought, this interest has simply not continued in more recent decades. Catholic thought has found a new confidence in biblical ethics and rediscovered the analytical power of Aristotle and Aquinas. It might be said that, at present, the "experiment" within Catholic thought that value theory represented has been sidelined. Scheler has also been sidelined by the enormous presence of Heidegger in continental philosophy. Because of Heidegger's influence, skepticism about metaphysics is pretty much a new absolute. Scheler's reputation, and that of value theory more generally, therefore suffers because there is an undeniably Platonic dimension to the objective hierarchy of values.

The underlying attractiveness of value theory nonetheless remains. For all their academic popularity, there is something radically implausible about utilitarianism and Kantianism. It simply is not convincing that a single principle is adequate to the complexity of ethical life, yet both utilitarians and Kantians are committed to just such a claim. Value theory rejects their reductionism and forthrightly multiples the moral principles binding upon us. Loyalty, love, patriotism, maternity, courage, mercy, and disgust are but a few morally positive values that have a claim on us. There are also disvalues to be avoided, including being meretricious, unjust, undignified, and hard of heart. That all of us are responding each day to a manifold of values, oftentimes with legitimate tensions between them, seems to be exactly right.

1. See Manfred Frings's reconsideration, "Max Scheler: Early Pioneer of Twentieth-Century Philosophy," Modern Age, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Summer 1998), 271-280. 2. English translation, Northwestern University Press, 1973.

GRAHAM MCALEER is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola College in Maryland and author of Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics (Fordham University Press, 2005).