Abstract
This paper attempts to demonstrate Max Scheler’s anticipation of and continued relevance to a burgeoning trend of essence-based accounts of modality, chief among them being Kit Fine’s landmark 1994 “Essence and Modality.” I argue that Scheler’s account of the material a priori not only anticipates the picture of essence-based modality suggested by Fine, but moreover offers resources with the potential to resolve key challenges for the Finean program. In particular, Fine’s account runs into problems in explaining how formal logical necessities are to be grounded in essences, challenges that put pressure on the essentialist to adopt a non-propositional account of the nature of logical principles. I argue that one such account can be found in Scheler’s notion of the material a priori, according to which all necessary propositional truth is grounded in a realm of experientially given yet a priori "phenomenological facts." After showing the general rapprochement between Scheler’s and Fine’s accounts of regional modality, I then turn to address Scheler’s attempt to ground formal logical principles in essences. On Scheler’s picture, propositions expressing formal logical truths are true in virtue of the domain of essences in two senses: (i) In terms of what Scheler calls objective necessity, they are true insofar as they coincide with the essential facts and interconnections shared by all possible regions of being; (ii) In terms of what he calls subjective necessity, they are true in virtue of these same essential facts and interconnections insofar as they have become “functionalized” into law-like patterns of cognition.
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Notes
Scheler (1960, p. 213).
Fine (1994 p. 9).
Scheler (1960, p. 201).
Fine (1994, p. 4).
Ibid.
Now, in response to the foregoing challenges, one natural strategy that the proponent of the modal account might take is to impose some constraint on the modal criterion that would allow us to block the wrong kind of necessities from being essence-makers. Fine anticipates that the modalist might attempt to stipulate that a necessary property must be “relevant” to an object if it is to count as an essential property. Intuitively speaking, since the necessary fact that “Socrates is human if he exists” is irrelevant to nature of the color red, we might think that this stipulation allows the modal account to avoid the result that it belongs to the essence of red that “Socrates is human if he exists.” The problem is that the very notion of relevance appears to presuppose some tacit notion of an object’s essence that would allow us to adjudicate which necessities are relevant. Otherwise, there appears to be no reason to privilege certain necessities as being of the right kind to constitute an object’s essence. As Fine claims: “[W]e want to say that it is essential to the singleton to have Socrates as a member, but that it is not essential to Socrates to be a member of the singleton. But there is nothing in the “logic” of the situation to justify an asymmetric judgement of relevance; the difference lies entirely in the nature of the objects in question” (Fine 1994, 7).
Fine (1994, p. 6).
Ibid., p. 14.
Ibid., p. 9.
Fine (1995, p. 57).
Fine (1995, p. 58).
Ibid., p. 59.
Michels (2018, p. 1029).
Fine (1995, p. 57).
Ibid.
Fine (1995, p. 58).
As Fine claims: “This account of necessity has been anticipated by Husserl. In the third of the Logical Investigations, Sect. 7, he describes the necessity relevant to his discussion as an ‘a priori necessity rooted in the essences of things.’ I do not follow him in treating the necessity in question as a priori or in taking the essences of things to be universal; and he does not follow me in treating the account as a definition of one notion in terms of another. But still, the underlying idea is the same” (Fine 1994, p. 14n).
Fine (2011, p. 12).
Ibid., p. 24.
See Scheler (1973, p. 54).
Ibid., p. 48. Scheler makes clear that his notion of phenomenological experience is at once in keeping with and divergent from the account of Wesensschau inaugurated by Husserl. In Scheler’s estimation, one major point of divergence between himself and Husserl is that the latter is committed to the “prōton pseudos” of “sensualism,” namely the “presupposition that sensory contents furnish the foundation of every other content of intuition” (Scheler 1980c, p. 221). By contrast, for Scheler, essences are the foundation upon which an empirical observation can be posited in the first place: “[I]t is a criterion of the essentialness of a given content that it must already be intuited in the attempt to ‘observe’ it” (Scheler 1973, p. 50).
In his essay “The Theory of the Three Facts,” Scheler provides a nuanced tripartite distinction between scientific, natural, and phenomenological facts. Both scientific facts and natural facts are species of non-phenomenological facts: Natural facts are those “naïve” phenomena mediated by the subject’s practically conditioned associative dispositions, such as when looking at a lemon I see something that would taste sour to me were I to bite into it, or when looking at a wet floor I see something slippery and dangerous; or when I see a statue as something I can walk around and view from different angles; Scientific facts, by contrast, are those phenomena that involve abstracting away from such perspectival contents in order to reduce the phenomena to a theoretically determinable "state of affairs" (Scheler 1980c, p. 202–205).
Scheler (1973, p. 48).
Ibid. p. 51.
Ibid., p. 49.
Scheler (1980b, p. 142).
Scheler (1973, p. 49).
Scheler (1980b, p. 158).
Scheler (1973, p. 49).
Scheler (1980a, p. 123).
Scheler (1973, p. 76).
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 49.
Ibid., 74.
Ibid., 75.
Ibid., 74.
Ibid., 75.
Scheler (1980b, p. 142).
Scheler (1973, p. 74).
Ibid., 75.
Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 83.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 84.
As Scheler claims: “That all concepts, judgments, and arguments must satisfy logical principles and laws is a condition of the truth of the relevant propositions generally, independently of material truth. Consequently, these principles and laws themselves can no longer be called ‘true’ in the same sense in which their obtaining is the condition of true propositions […] And yet they are still ‘true,’ in the plain and simple [schlichten] sense of the word, a sense that is prior to the distinction between the material truth of a proposition […] and its [logical] correctness. They are ‘intuitively true,’ that is, their truth is given in these principles themselves” (Scheler 1980b, p. 175–176).
Scheler (1973, p. 76).
Scheler (1960, p. 201).
Ibid.
Ibid., 202.
Ibid., 98.
Ibid., 99.
Ibid., 202.
Ibid., 203.
Ibid., 211.
Ibid., 201.
Ibid., 205.
Ibid., 213.
For helpful comments and discussion, I owe special thanks to Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Karin Frings, Walter Hopp, Yena Purmasir, and Guy Schuh.
References
Fine, Kit. 1994. Essence and Modality. Philosophical Perspectives 8: 1–16.
Fine, Kit. 1995. Senses of Essence. In Modality, Morality, and Belief: Essays in Honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 53–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fine, Kit. 2011. What is Metaphysics? In Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, ed. Tuomas E. Tahko, 8–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Michels, Robert. 2018. On How (Not) to Define Modality in Terms of Essence. Philosophical Studies 176 (4): 1015–1033.
Scheler, Max. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Scheler, Max. 1960. On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble. New York: Harper.
Scheler, Max. 1980a. Ordo Amoris. Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman, 136–201. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Scheler, Max. 1980b. Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition. Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman, 98–135. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Scheler, Max. 1980c. The Theory of the Three Facts. Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman, 202–287. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussion, I owe special thanks to Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Karin Frings, Walter Hopp, Yena Purmasir, and Guy Schuh.
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Hammond, T. Essence, modality, and the material a Priori: Scheler and Contemporary Essentialism. Cont Philos Rev 55, 311–334 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-022-09580-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-022-09580-1