Stratification of emotional life (Scheler)

Max Scheler (1874–1928) was an early 20th-century German Continental philosopher in the phenomenological tradition. Scheler's style of phenomenology has been described by some scholars as “applied phenomenology”: an appeal to facts or “things in themselves” as always furnishing a descriptive basis for speculative philosophical concepts. One key source of just such a pattern of facts is expressed in Scheler’s descriptive mapping of human emotional life (the “Stratification of Emotional Life”) as articulated in his seminal 1913–1916 work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values.

The practical significance of Scheler's Stratification of Emotional Life is obvious in several respects and points of view.

First, Scheler seems to be making a case in favor of what we might refer to today as Emotional Intelligence, as a portal to more ethical behavior and optimum personal development, similar to the ancient Greek concern for promoting virtuous character. However quite unlike many of our modern attitudes and prejudices, emotional life ought not be viewed as simply a chaotic impediment to reason, but rather should be understood as a sort of “sixth sense” having an informative objective core: what Scheler termed our Ordo Amoris (or “Logic of the Heart”).

Second, for Scheler values have true primacy as real inherent qualities discovered in things, people, situations and the like. Values and immanent emotive experience are co-extensive: “the plain fact is that we act vis-à-vis values just as we do vis-à-vis colors and sounds.” Scheler's claim is that the correlates of feelings and emotions are values, just as the correlates of visual perception are colors and audio perceptions are sounds. If such qualities are present in a person's world, they tend to be apprehended. But the reverse is also true: the meanings ascribed to things, people, situations and the like are uniquely co-extensive with the subjective relativity of every person, as the "totality of acts of different kinds" having a unique qualitative direction and destiny. As a value being and bearer of values every person is as unique as a snowflake. This is why Scheler's ethics is commonly referred as a Material Value-Ethics as opposed to a formal ethics (Immanuel Kant).

Third, values are emotively intuited. The whole of "something" is intuited by consciousness before any of the parts can fully be rationally known or assimilated. Common expressions such as "ah ha", "love at first sight," déjà vu or "the cat's pajamas" sum up this basic idea. Values are realized though personal apprehensions (i.e. "attractions" and "repulsions") of positive (and negative) qualities discoverable through our own pre-thought, pre-willed acts of preference.

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