Max Scheler’s theory of the hierarchy of values and emotions and its relevance to current psychopathology

Introduction

Max Scheler (1874–1928) published his most famous work Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values) in two sections in Husserl’s journal of phenomenology, one in 1913 and the other in 1916. It was translated into English in 1973 and is usually referenced ‘Formalism’ (Scheler, 1913–1916/1973). The presentation of Scheler’s hierarchical scheme of values is in the first part (1973: 81–110), that on emotions in the second part (1973: 239–369). There is some discussion of the same matters as they apply to love and sympathy in his next most well known work, Zur Phänomenologie der Sympathiegefühl und von Liebe und Hass (On the Phenomenology of Feelings of Sympathy and on Love and Hate). This was also published in 1913, later editions being retitled Wesen und Formen der Sympathie and translated as The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler, 1913/1954). Formalism, however, sets out the matter comprehensively and succinctly, as nowhere else in Scheler’s writings.

There were four levels in the hierarchy. Frings (1997) – the joint translator of Formalism, the editor of Scheler’s Collected Works for decades, and his most knowledgeable commentator – saw ramifications of this hierarchy throughout Scheler’s philosophy. But all such ramifications, also hierarchically arranged, for example sort of emotion experienced, sets of iconic human figures embodying such values and who subconsciously influence a human being’s course of life, derive from the primacy, and the independence from any knower, of value. I shall discuss all this in the following. Sometimes Scheler mentions a fifth level of value – usefulness – whose position in the scheme is uncertain and which has no correlative feeling. I shall discuss this too, along with a further problem concerning the different labels given to the four sets of values in sections 1 and 2 of Formalism.

I do not intend to consider Scheler’s place in philosophy as a whole, nor to pigeonhole him as representing some form of ‘ism’. What I do want to stress, however, is that my encounter with his writings was quite revelatory, and I wish to convey this to the reader with the hope that he or she will be tempted to explore Scheler’s writings on this and other topics. Something in Scheler’s works – whether stemming from his profound acquaintance with psychology and psychiatry, or whether arising from his superb insights into the nature of the human being – seemed to open a door into the theoretical basis of psychopathology that I had not found hitherto in anything I had read.

The structure of the present article is as follows: first an account of Scheler’s hierarchical systems of value, emotion and the iconic human types who embody them is presented; then the writings of the few psychopathologists who have appreciated his construct; and finally, suggestions as to Scheler’s potential relevance to various sorts of psychopathology.

Scheler’s hierarchy of values (and ramifications of this throughout the human being)

There are, according to Scheler (1913–1916/1973), four fundamentally different sorts of values available to the human being, two of which are also open to the non-human animal. They are organized in a hierarchy, separate levels of which contain values restricted to agreeableness, vitality, mentality, or holiness, respectively, from bottom to top (of which non-human animals can only partake of the bottom two). There are positive and negative examples of the generic values at each level. What is evaluated at the lowest level is confined to whether something is agreeable or disagreeable. At the vital level there is a cluster of values, the common denominator of which is the beneficial quality of something to promote life. To this end, something can be noble or vulgar, vigorous or lethargic, excellent or tawdry, wholesome or rotten, or invite appetite or disgust. The mental level encompasses all those values which are known only to someone in possession of Geist (always tricky to translate into English, but meaning something like ‘spirit and higher mind’). Scheler actually calls these values ‘geistigen Werte’, and gives various examples: (1) the sense of beauty or ugliness and aesthetic values in general; (2) the appreciation that something can be right or wrong in a legal or moral sense (as opposed to correct or incorrect), which grounds the notions of society and statehood; (3) the ability to grasp that things can be true or false, which underpins the very possibility of philosophy and science; (4) awareness of culture in general; and (5) the facility to love or hate (as opposed to simply liking or not liking something – see below). The fourth level of values refers exclusively to those pertaining to the heilig (holy) and unheilig (unholy, sacrilegious(?) might be better in English).

The higher levels of values are distinguished from the lower in four respects: (1) the higher endure more – compare a work of art with the taste of wine; (2) the higher are less divisible – compare again a work of art (whose value is ruined if cut up) with a piece of cloth (whose value only halves if cut in two); (3) the higher found the lower – ‘the value of what is useful is founded on what is agreeable’, Scheler (1913–1916/1973: 94) says, indicating that this occasionally introduced fifth level in his scheme is the lowest of all); and (4) the higher evoke a greater ‘depth of contentment … nothing to do with pleasure’ (p. 96).

To each level of value there corresponds, in any knower capable of grasping the value, a specific set of feelings, also positive or negative. To agreeableness there are sensible feelings (sinnlichen Fühlens) such as pleasure or pain. To vitality (Lebenswerten) there are feelings (Lebensgefühle) of liveliness or languor, being glad or gloomy about something, a sense of courage or anxiety, and appetite or disgust. To mental values there correspond aesthetic feelings of a sense of beauty or ugliness, joy or sorrow (as opposed to being ‘gay’ or ‘not gay’) and respect or disrespect. Holiness or its absence are registered by feelings of bliss or despair.

These fundamental sorts of feelings, moreover, are also distinguished from one another by certain characteristics. The sensible feelings of pleasure or pain are localized in parts of the body, are impervious to any act of attention or control, are not directly related to the human being as a person but are rather simply there as ‘dead’ facts present in time now as opposed to auguring some future event, and are incapable of being reproduced in the same form either in ourselves at some later date or contagiously from others at the actual time. Vital feelings, such as vigour or fatigue, are not localized, but suffuse the ‘lived body’ (Leib); they manifest a unity unlike the patchy disposition of sensible feelings, and they have an intentional nature that can reveal advantages or dangers yet to come (think of anxiety). Mental feelings are directly connected to the self (‘Ich’; the translators used the word ‘Ego’) so that the feeler says ‘I feel sad’, whereas vital feelings pervade the body rather than the self. Feelings derived from the registering of values of holiness are independent even of the self and are not about anything at all (which mental feelings are), but bathe everything in inner and outer worlds with their effects. They are the ‘correlates of the moral value of our personal being, and for this reason they are the metaphysical and religious self-feelings par excellence’ (p. 343).

To complement all this, there are clusters of iconic people who personify these levels of values and feelings, who influence an individual human being in a profound and subtle way throughout life, and who essentially form their character through actual meetings with larger-than-life exemplars (think Uncle Bertie) or through fictional encounters (James Bond or Kafka’s K). This is set out in an article entitled Vorbilder und Führer (Exemplars of person and leaders; Scheler, 1933/1987). Personifying the value of agreeableness and the feeling of pleasure is the man-about-town (who knows where to buy the best oysters, for example). The vital level is represented by the hero (whose courage is tested to the limit). Then come the artist, jurist and scientist who embody aesthetic, legal and truth-seeking values at a mental level. Above all these, there is the founder of a religion – Christ or Mohammed, and their saints and sages – whose very lives personify the human being as a moralist.

All this is spell-binding and remarkably coherent, save for a few inconsistencies and questionable translations. One is the labelling of the third level of values in section 1 of Formalism as geistigen Werte, but in section 2 of the book the emotions corresponding to values of holiness are referred to as geistigen Gefühle. The translators render seelischen as ‘psychic’, but this does not properly denote what Scheler is talking about and I prefer the term ‘mental’. Scheler’s overall scheme (ambiguous in English because the untranslatable word geistig) seems best conveyed by values of agreeableness, vitality, mentality and holiness, with the corresponding emotions being sensible, vital, ‘mental’ and religious. As for ‘usefulness’, Frings (1997) confidently places this between values of agreeableness and vital values, but Scheler says quite specifically that values of agreeableness found usefulness. Furthermore, what Scheler appreciates, more than anyone else, is the fundamental difference in certain feelings yet the superficial similarity in the vocabulary used to refer to them. This becomes particularly important when we move on to discuss Schneider’s separation of two sorts of depressive illness. Positive feelings occur at all four levels – pleasure, being glad about something (Sichfreuen), joy (Freude) and blissfulness (Seligkeit) – as do negative feelings – displeasure, gloominess (Betrübtheit), sadness (Traurigkeit) and despair (Verzweiflung). Frings and Funk translate betrübt as sad, which is not what Scheler meant, as he said that vital feelings are directed to the future which sadness is not, whereas gloominess is. We shall see that one psychopathologist actually considered that the loss of the ability to experience Traurigkeit (sadness) was at the core of endogenous depression. This makes no sense unless sadness and gloominess are separate emotional states, and makes no sense either of Schneider’s pinpointing endogenous depression to the vital level of emotion unless gloominess is a vital emotion and sadness a mental emotion – see below. It is therefore crucial to be aware of phenomenological differences between emotions if we are to make any sense out of psychopathology.

Extant applications of Scheler’s hierarchy of values and emotions

The only two psychopathologists to have seen the potential psychopathological relevance of Scheler’s scheme are Kurt Schneider (1920/2012) and Stanghellini and Ballerini (2007).

Kurt Schneider knew Scheler personally and professionally. In his 1920 article he gives a good account of the section on emotion in Formalism which was summarized earlier. He then moves on to a discussion as to how two sorts of depressive illness – endogenous depression and reactive depression – might be characterized by a Störung (disturbance) in different layers of Scheler’s scheme. An endogenous depression, according to Schneider (1920/2012: 205–6), is one where there are:

disturbances of feelings of the lived body and vital feelings can come to dominate the clinical picture of endogenous depression … Matters are different in reactive depression. It is not as if disturbances of vital feelings … are totally absent in reactive depression; however, they are much rarer and most importantly they are exclusively secondary symptoms. The primary disturbance in reactive depression is the disturbance of mental feelings.

What Schneider further appreciates from Scheler’s formulation is that a person can simultaneously experience several emotions, if each is from a different layer. We have not covered this so far, but it is something that Scheler brings forward in support of his stratified system. Someone grieving, for example, whose sadness is a negative emotion at the mental level, can nevertheless experience a positive feeling of pleasure, at the sensible level, on tasting a glass of wine. If all feelings (we are using emotions and feelings interchangeably in this article) were on the same level, with merely different intensities and incidental qualities being invoked to explain their different nature, as virtually all previous theorists of emotion assumed, this simultaneous having of two contrasting emotions would be impossible. Scheler gives other examples – the martyred saint blissfully accepting pain. Schneider then realizes that this aspect of Scheler’s theory neatly explains the otherwise paradoxical situation of someone in the throes of an endogenous depression who complains bitterly that he or she has no feelings, a not uncommon psychopathological fact, and one which no-one else has been able to explain. But if the endogenous depressive is feeling something – whether appropriately or inappropriately (see below) – at the vital level, but is not feeling anything at the mental level, then Scheler’s scheme, which allows preservation of feelings at one level and dilapidation of feelings at another level, is tailor-made to account for this.

Schneider’s application of Scheler’s philosophical notions about emotions seems, therefore, quite revolutionary and revelatory. They have, furthermore, a bearing on the long-standing nosological debate about whether depressive illness is unitary or manifold (e.g. Kendell, 1976): there are at least two varieties according to this Schelerian-Schneiderian exegesis. The explication of a hitherto inexplicable aspect of depressive psychopathology – anhedonia with distress about this very anhedonia – seems to be a further bonus. No-one else ever took up these nuggets of wisdom, which seem now quite astounding.

It should be said, as critique, however, that it is not clear what Schneider meant by a disturbance (Störung) at the mental and vital levels. He says that:

It is possible that the disturbance of the vital feelings is so severe that psychic [mental, in our scheme] feelings cannot actually manifest themselves, in a similar way to how people can come to be dominated by strong feelings of pain. (Schneider, 1920/2012: 206)

In other words, he is saying that emotions at one level are so overwhelming that they swamp emotions at another level. If so, and it is not at all certain that this can explain the overall psychopathology of a depressive illness (see below), why does he keep referring to the primary problem in both endogenous and reactive depression as a Störung (disturbance) at some level? Or, perhaps more to the point, what does he mean by Störung? Is it a quantitative change – too much, too little? Or could it be, as I argue below, that in the case of endogenous depression the vital layer of feelings is unimpaired, whereas the mental feelings are defunct or dilapidated? As a result, the human being thus afflicted would be running on an intrinsically normal vital layer of feelings. This would only be apparently morbid because their companion layer of mental feeling, which complements this and contributes to the overall panoply of feelings any normal person has available, would be non-effective. Any Störung in endogenous depression would not then be at the level of vital feelings but one level above.

In favour of this formulation is the article by Schulte (1961) entitled ‘Nicht-traurig-sein-können im Kern melancholischer Erlebens’ (not-to-be-able-to-be-sad as the core of the melancholic’s experience), which, without invoking anything that Scheler wrote, proposes that Traurigkeit (sadness), a mental emotion in Scheler’s scheme, is not only lost in at least one sort of depressive illness but is the very core psychopathological phenomenon that needs explaining. Both Schulte and Schneider refer to the fact that someone in the middle of an endogenous depressive illness who hears of the death of someone they would hitherto have grieved for cannot do this, that is, cannot experience Traurigkeit, until they recover from the depressive illness. Schulte even says that in his experience the onset of grieving is the first sign that the depressive illness is on the mend, in other words, the return of the ability to experience sadness heralds the remission of the illness. The ‘depressive’ is not therefore sad at all, but is he or she who cannot be sad. Mourning and melancholia (Freud, 1917/1957) and the entire evidence base for cognitive psychology’s intervention in depression are utterly undermined by this simple psychopathological observation. Scheler’s thesis, Schneider’s application of it and Schulte’s independent insight all look to be critical stages in what should be a comprehensive psychopathological re-evaluation of depressive illness. Not a bit of it: a recent, mainstream American textbook on Melancholia (Taylor and Fink, 2006: 15) repeats the establishment view that melancholia is based on ‘pervasive sadness’.

Stanghellini and Ballerini’s (2007) study of ‘values in persons with schizophrenia’ is the only other psychopathological investigation in the entire 100 years since Scheler’s Formalism appeared which acknowledges his, Scheler’s, philosophical feat. It is not so closely linked to Scheler’s scheme of values as was Schneider’s, and the concept of value adopted by the authors deviates from Scheler’s. Nevertheless, it is an arresting counterpoint to Schneider’s take on Scheler. The authors are interested in what, at root, makes the schizophrenic who he or she is: what is the ‘anthropological and existential matrix they arise from’, as the authors put it. They find, during in-depth interviews, that the schizophrenic has feelings of radical uniqueness and exceptionality, and that this stems from a sense of being beholden to values which are ‘eccentric’ vis-a-vis the commonality of values which drive their contemporaries. The schizophrenic feels the weight of ‘metaphysical concerns’ and feels excluded from ‘socially shared values’. Stanghellini and Ballerini do not place all this precisely in Scheler’s hierarchy, but it is clear from their findings and remarks that, unlike their ‘normal’ contemporaries, the schizophrenic is over-reliant in their life on the highest values in Scheler’s system – geistig as opposed to vital.

Potential applications of Schelerian philosophy of values and emotions

Scheler’s scheme of values and emotions is only one aspect of a rich philosophical body of thought of potential relevance to psychopathology. Even restricting discussion to the topic of values and emotions, there are sufficient untapped veins to inform our subject much more than the meagre examples so far would suggest.

Conclusions

Further suggested applications of Scheler’s scheme would be speculative, but I hope I have given enough information to inspire future psychopathological formulations based on his ideas.

Psychopathology always seems to be at a crossroads. Many articles during the twentieth century, for example Janzarik (1976/1987), reported a ‘crisis in psychopathology’. The thrust of these is that either biological or psychological or pragmatic solutions – the last geared to benefit pharmaceutical or legal parties – threaten to sideline and obscure what should be a pure scientific endeavour. Much of this criticism is itself a biased plea for some specific viewpoint.

What the deliberations in the present article show, I hope, is that if one takes the highest possible analysis of the human being – the philosophical – and chooses a philosopher who is exquisitely au fait with the topic of our concern, then a lot of the peculiarities of our subject simply melt away with the insight that such philosophy provides.