Table Of ContentPERSON AND SELF-VAWE
MAX SCHELER
PERSON AND SELF-VALUE
Three Essays
With an introduction,
edited and partially translated by
M.S. FRINGS
(DePaul University, Chicago)
1987 MARTINUS NIJHOFF PUBLISHERS *
a member of the KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LANCASTER
Distributors
for the United States and Canada: Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 358,
Accord Station, Hingham, MA 02018-0358, USA
for the UK and Ireland: Kluwer Academic Publishers, MTP Press Limited,
Falcon House, Queen Square, Lancaster LA1 1RN, UK
for all other countries: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, Distribution Center,
P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Scheler', ~klx, l1l74-l921l.
Person and self-value.
Includes index.
Partial contents: Shame and feelings of modesty --
Repentance and r'ebir'th -- Exemplars of person and
leaders.
1. M,m. 2. Self. 1. Frings, Manfred S. n. Title.
B3329.S481 1986 128 86-14169
ISBN- 13: 978-94-010-8065-1 e-ISBN- 13: 978-94-009-3503-7
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-3503-7
Copyright
© 1987 by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1987
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publishers,
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, P.O. Box 163, 3300 AD Dordrecht,
The Netherlands.
Table of Contents
Translator's Note VII
Acknowledgements IX
INTRODUCTION TO THREE ESSAYS BY
MAX SCHELER XI
Manfred S. Frings
SHAME AND FEELINGS OF MODESTY
The "Location" of the Feeling of Shame and Man's
Way of Existing 3
I. The Preconditions for the Occurrence of Shame of
the Body 6
II. Shame and Related Feelings 14
III. Basic Forms of the Feeling of Shame and Theories of its
Ori~n n
IV. The Sexual Feeling of Shame and its Function 44
1. The Primary Accomplishment of the Feeling of
Sexual Shame 45
2. The Secondary Accomplishment of the Feeling of
Sexual Shame 59
3. The Tertiary Accomplishment of the Feeling of
Sexual Shame 71
V. Psychic and Bodily Feeling of Shame in Man and
Woman 82
V
REPENTANCE AND REBIRTH 87
EXEMPLARS OF PERSON AND LEADERS
Introduction 127
I. Some General Comments concerning Personal Exem-
plars and Leaders 130
II. The Mind of the Person in the Formation of Human
Groups. The Vehicles of the Effectiveness of Perso-
nal Exemplars (The Formation of Fate). Models of
Personal Exemplars 135
III. The Saint 148
1. Typology of Exemplars and Leaders in Religion 148
2. General Comments on Exemplars and Leaders in the
Area of Religion 151
3. The Original Saint 153
IV. The Genius 164
V. The Hero 190
VI. The Leading Mind of Civilization 194
VII. The Master in the Art of Living 196
Bibliography of English Translations of the Works of
Max Scheler 199
VI
Translator's Note
Unlike the English word "shame" which carries a negative connota-
tion, possibly due to the Anglo-American Puritan heritage, the
German word Scham does not necessarily carry such a connotation
and thus in many contexts comes much closer to the English "mod-
esty." Therefore, the title of the essay, "Uber Scham and Schamge-
fiihl," is translated in the way it is to catch the broader meaning of
the term, and throughout the essay Scham is translated as both
"shame" and "modesty" depending upon the context, much as such
a distinction appears to be sometimes impossible to be made. (Cf., in
the German translation of Havelock Ellis's work on The Evolution
of Modesty, to which Scheler refers in this essay, "modesty" is
rendered as Schamgefiihl.
In order to retain the German distinction in the usage of the
terms Kultur andZivilisation I have translated the German connota-
tion of Zivilisation with "technical civilization" to set it off from
"culture" (Kultur), which itself corresponds in English usage most
often to "civilization."
The translation of "Repentance and Rebirth" is that of Bernhard
Noble as contained in his translation of Max Scheler's Vom Ewigen
des Menschen, translated by Noble as On the Eternal in Man, Lon-
don: Student Christian Movement Press, 1960; Archon Books,
Hamden, CT, 1972. The German text of this book of Scheler's is
contained in the German Collected Edition, Francke Verlag, Berne
and Munich, as Vol. 5, ed. by Maria Scheler, 1954, and based on its
first publication in 1921. Apart from minor changes in the text, and
some changes in the footnotes concerning the present-day status of
the German Collected Edition of Scheler's Works, this text is a
VII
reprint of Noble's translation, courtesy of SCM Press and Harper &
Row, Publishers.
The manuscript "Shame" was written in 1913, those of "Repen-
tance" and of "Exemplars of Person" prior to 1917 and, respective-
ly, between 1912 and 1914. The German texts of "Shame" and
"Exemplars of Person" are contained in Vol. 10 of the German
Collected Edition, edited by Maria Scheler. Whenever Scheler uses
the phrase "as I pointed out elsewhere," or "as I showed else-
where," he refers to the major works he published during his first
period of productivity, and available in English translations also:
The Nature of Sympathy, translated by Peter Heath, London, Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1954 (274 pages), and Formalism in Ethics
and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Founda-
tion of an Ethical Personalism, translated by Manfred S. Frings and
Roger Funk, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 (620
pages). The German original of the former appeared first in 1913
and (enlarged) in 1923. The first German publication of the latter
appeared in 1913, and partly in 1916 because of circumstances
brought about in World War I (1914-1918). The originals are con-
tained in the German Collection Edition: the former as Vol. 7,
edited by Manfred S. Frings, the latter as Vol. 2, edited by Maria
Scheler.
In the German Collected Edition both "Shame" and" Exem-
plars of Person" are followed by a number of notes on those themes
made by the author. Valuable as they are for further research into
these areas, I did not include them into this translation because they
are aphoristic in nature and, in part, incoherent with the overall
themes as presented in the present book. The final pages of the
translation of "Exemplars of Person" at the end of this book give
some specimens of the aphoristic style of the notes.
All brackets [ ] contain notes and comments by the translator.
Likewise, the title of the essays - Person and Self- Value - is the
translator's, not the author's title given to them.
M.S.F.
VIn
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Professor Kenneth W. Stikkers for reading my
translation of "Shame and Feelings of Modesty" and for finalizing
its footnotes, to Rev. Edward Vacek, S.J. for suggestions and
comments.
I am indebted to Dr Nina Cunningham for reading the transla-
tion of "Exemplars of Person and Leaders" and for her valuable
observations and suggestions.
Last, but not least, I am indebted to Ms Suzanne Rubis for having
typed the manuscript of "Shame" and to Ms Patricia Waters for
having typed the one of "Exemplars of Person".
M.S.F.
IX
Introduction to Three Essays by Max Scheler
MANFRED S. FRINGS
At a time when human beings have become so accustomed to the
velocity of technological progress and, out of the thirty-five or so
classes among values, to mainly quantifiable and manageable val-
ues, a gradual loss of the a wareness of the self-value of the human
person, and of a recognition of the individuality of personal feel-
ings, has justifiably been predicted to be a factor looming over the
rise and accomplishments of technology.
At first glance a collection of essays dealing with the hiddenness
of the quality of the self-value of the human person may, therefore,
have an air of being somewhat out of touch with the technological
age we live in. The three essays contained in this book, "Shame and
Feelings of Modesty," "Repentance and Rebirth" and "Exemplars
of Person and Leaders" do not cover, of course, the whole range of
all human experiences of self-value; but they provide a solid access
to the problem concerned in a century when bodily and personal
shame, repentance and genuine recognition of exemplary persons-
be they heroes, geniuses or holy persons - have increasingly been
depreciated or slighted. Max Scheler (1874-1928) who wrote these
and other essays during his first period of philosophical production
regarded the value of the person to be the highest value among
values. Needless to stress that his own monumental work on ethics:
Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics a/Values. A New Attempt
toward an Ethical Personalism (1913/1916) rests entirely on the
notions of person and value. To the tenet of the primordiality of the
value of the person, established in his ethical, religious and
metaphysical writings, he held fast from the times and turmoils of
World War I, when the following essays were written, to the end of
his dramatic and tragic life.
XI
A brief look at the development of ethics in our century would
already indicate that ethics remained one of the most neglected
areas of research when compared to the vast amount of literature
which accumulated in areas like logic, ontology, social and political,
analytic and pragmatic philosophy, etc. Of course, on occasion
these and other disciplines, too, touch upon ethics. It is a common-
place, however, that works dealing with the very foundation of
ethics, i.e., philosophical ethics, as opposed to tackling moral prob-
lems in individual disciplines such as in medical or business ethics,
are small in number.
It is characteristic for the latter half of our century that ethics
proper has been largely replaced by attempts to clarify only specific
moral situations as they arise in particular disciplines such as the
ones just mentioned, or, above all, in atomic physics and the wider
spectra of society itself as in "situation-ethics." To be sure, the
reason for this, or for what I would like to call the "compartmenta-
lization" of ethics proper, lies within the well known fragmentation
of knowledge itself and the increasing number of fields of specializ-
ation and their specialists. The more we penetrate into the nature of
entitites, into the nature of society, ofthe atom and outer space, into
the nature of man and culture, etc., the more the accumulation of
knowledge attained needs to be put into organizing systems permit-
ting it to be found as quickly as possible (computer). We are also so
accustomed to the compartmentalization of knowledge as a whole
that we tend to lose sight of the very foundations on which it all rests
or may rest. Questions of "foundations" continue to be replaced by
those of expediency and specifics. Strangely enough, ethics shares
this situation with mathematics. The crisis in the foundation of
mathematics is still alive among researchers in pure mathematics,
but it is applied mathematics (for instance, in computer science,
technology) which is of foremost interest and subject to high pro-
motion. Similarly, the question of the foundation of good and evil in
ethics, be such a foundation a religious, metaphysical, or an onto-
logical one, is overshadowed by situational analyses of what is, or
may be, morally "right" or "wrong" on the one hand, and accept-
able, productive or unacceptable or counter-productive rules and
procedures, on the other. It has not infrequently been argued that
following rules or procedures in whichever field would lead to
morally acceptable conduct. In extreme cases it may even happen
XII
