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The preceding chapter demonstrated that Scheler's moral philosophy is founded in a concept of the person, rather than in a system moral law, in a theory of obligation or rights, or even in a concept of virtue. Although it appears to be a virtue-based theory, defined as the capacity for action that realizes higher value-goods, or suppresses lower value-goods, we see instead that, for Scheler, virtue has a deeper foundation: both virtue and moral action presuppose the givenness of persons to each other and both are motivated by the love for the irreducible personhood of others, and for what is possible for a person to be and to do. Vice is precisely a turning away from the person as the highest value. It is an immersion in other values for their own sake: especially, of course, in the values given to our sensual feelings, but those of the spiritual and the holy can also impel persons to wickedness and idolatry, once they are severed from the value of the person. Hence all moral action, all human virtue, finds its final basis in the givenness to each other of other persons; without the non-mediate givenness of the personhood of others to an agent, moral action would lose its meaning and its function. We have not yet, however, spoken of the sources of our understanding of the personal existence of others. This understanding is founded in the primordial givenness of persons to each other, within their shared community, in intentional acts of sympathy. The phenomenology of the sphere of the other will occupy us in the current chapter.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3099-0_11

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