Max Scheler’s influence on Kurt Schneider

Introduction

It is fascinating to imagine what great historical figures said to each other when meeting for the first time. What did Napoleon and Goethe talk about when they got together in the middle of the Napoleonic wars? When Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, and Harry Truman, the US President, met in Washington after World War II to discuss Britain’s role in America’s nuclear programme, the atmosphere was at first frosty. But the British ambassador, who had facilitated the meeting, had done his homework, and pointed out that both men had been junior officers on the Western Front in World War I. This broke the ice and the two leaders ended up singing songs from that war.

In this article we try to recreate the relationship between the philosopher Max Scheler (1874–1928) and the psychiatrist Kurt Schneider (1887–1967). Each was one of the foremost twentieth-century representatives of their respective fields. They first encountered one another in 1919 in Cologne, where Scheler, newly appointed as Professor of Philosophy there, was giving his first seminars. Schneider, just released from three years as a military doctor and returning to his chosen career as a psychiatrist, enrolled as one of Scheler’s first students. They maintained a professional and personal relationship until Scheler’s sudden death nine years later. This article charts the great philosopher teaching the trainee psychiatrist whose greatness was yet to come. Was the latter’s greatness a consequence of this? This is our theme.

Max Scheler

Max Scheler was born in Munich in 1874. His father was a Protestant, a steward for the Hungarian royal family’s estates. His mother was Jewish. He himself became a Catholic, although he radically tempered his religious beliefs in later years with his notion of ‘panentheism’, the idea that God is being developed by the moral (and delayed by the immoral) actions of human beings rather than being completely formed at the outset of Creation.

He was a charismatic man, entrancing everyone who came within his orbit, whether in official lectures or in impromptu seminars in unofficial venues after he was dismissed from his university position in 1910 for an alleged affair with the wife of an official. He had to maintain himself in a freelance capacity until Konrad Adenauer, the future Chancellor of West Germany but who in 1919 was Mayor of Cologne, pressed for his appointment as professor in Cologne on the back of his reputation as a Catholic philosopher. Adenauer was establishing a Catholic university there, and wanted Scheler as his star turn.

All the great philosophers of that era who knew Scheler – Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, José Ortega y Gasset – have attested to his philosophical brilliance. Heidegger, for example, penned a eulogy on his death (Heidegger 1928/1984: 50), calling him ‘the strongest philosophical force in contemporary philosophy’. Manfred Frings, the editor of Scheler’s Gesammelte Werke until his own death recently, recounts a meeting that he had with Heidegger, where Heidegger recalled a get-together of philosophers in the 1920s to celebrate Husserl’s birthday. Scheler swept in late and stunned everyone with a masterly exposition of how God must be spatially extended. From all accounts he was an amazing man.

His philosophical writings run to 15 volumes in his Gesammelte Werke (Scheler, 1954–97), a remarkable achievement considering that he died relatively young at the age of 54. They cover the entire gamut of philosophical concerns – logic, history of philosophy, metaphysics – but he was also up to date with and extremely knowledgeable about the complete range of scientific and humanistic disciplines – from physics to physiology, from sociology to psychology. He was a polymath, the like of which we shall never see again, and this is relevant to the theme of this article. He knew everything of significance going on in the nascent discipline of psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century – a halcyon era, what with psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, behaviourism, Pavlov’s physiological psychology. He was also shrewd enough to see what was wrong with it – essentially its false assumptions as to the nature of the mind. He was, furthermore, well acquainted with the burgeoning psychiatric literature of the time, and actually wrote an article on compensation neurosis (Scheler, 1915/1984), which is spot on to this day, emphasizing the subconscious element of financial gain that drives all such claimants. So, when Schneider first attended Scheler’s seminar in 1919 he was encountering not only a great philosopher, but someone who was exquisitely clued up about the very matters which would preoccupy the former throughout his career.

Most pertinent of all is the fact that Scheler’s first major publications dealt with such topics as love, emotion and empathy, issues which had barely been addressed in the work of other philosophers. But these, and their aberrations, are the bread-and-butter of a psychiatrist’s working day.

The first of these was published in 1913 with the title Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass, which ran to five editions, the fourth being retitled Wesen und Formen der Sympathie; the fifth edition (1948) was translated as The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler, 1954). Its central argument is that empathy for someone else’s emotional state is a direct intuitive perception, and not, as virtually everyone else writing on the topic presumed, a rational projection of our own experiences on the same matter.

The second was a book-length treatise entitled Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. It has 600 pages and was first published in two parts, in 1913 and 1916, in Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. It was translated into English in 1973, and is usually called Formalism (Scheler, 1913,1916/1973). It is a mine of philosophical insight into matters hardly suggested by the cumbersome title. Its bare bones, however, are a masterly exposition of how the values which guide a human being’s life (1) are objective (not subjective as so many philosophers have assumed), (2) are circumscribed (into four hierarchically arranged groups), (3) elicit discrete emotions (also arranged into four groups corresponding to the value which inspire them) and (4) are intuitively perceived (by a faculty which he calls ‘value-ception’ and which is independent of the apparatus which is responsible for object perception; note the link here with the first book mentioned above).

It is clear from Schneider’s writings (see below) that he had read both works, but it is not clear whether this was before or after he met Scheler. Either way, he must have read them pretty quickly, because he published an article as early as 1920 incorporating the thrust of both works.

Scheler’s philosophical publications subsequent to these two were quite prolific, even in his short remaining life-time, but Schneider does not refer to them in his writings. We might take this as our first clue to the possible influence of Scheler on Schneider that we are seeking: that it was Scheler’s merit to have brought values, emotion and empathy centre-stage in philosophy and it was this that appealed to Schneider; his acquaintance with psychiatry, albeit short at that time, must have alerted him to the facts that these issues pervaded the discipline of psychiatry, were pronouncedly awry in the sort of patients he was seeing, and were desperately in need of the sort of theoretical framework that Scheler was offering.

Kurt Schneider

Kurt Schneider was born in Crailsheim in the State of Württemberg in 1887. He studied medicine in Berlin and Tübingen and qualified as a doctor in 1912. He began his psychiatric training straightaway in Cologne, but this was interrupted by the First World War in which he served on the Western Front for three years. He returned to Cologne in 1919, enrolled in Scheler’s seminars, and was supervised in his postgraduate thesis by Scheler himself. (We shall devote a separate section to these years.)

In 1931 he moved to Munich as Director of the German Psychiatric Research Institute there, a prestigious position because of its link with Kraepelin. He resigned in the late 1930s, disgusted with the eugenic turn in German psychiatry. He served again as an army doctor in the next war, and was appointed Dean of the Heidelberg Medical School at its end. He retired in 1955 and died in 1967.

His key publications are remarkable for the wide range of topics covered, compared with the specialism of ‘eminent’ psychiatrists of our own era. He wrote a book on psychopathic personalities in 1923 which ran to nine editions, and the last one was translated (Schneider, 1950/1958). In his 1920 article, already mentioned (Schneider, 1920/2012), he proposed that there was a fundamental psychopathological difference (not just a clinical one) between two sorts of depressive conditions – the melancholic or endogenous variety and the reactive variety (see later). He wrote his thesis on the psychopathology of love and empathy (Schneider, 1921). He then published several chapters and books on general psychopathology during the 1930s, for example Pathopsychologie im Grundriss (Schneider, 1931), Psychiatrische Vorlesungen für Ärzte (Schneider, 1936) and Psychischer Befund und psychiatrische Diagnose (Schneider, 1939). The last of these is the most significant historically, because it was here that he first set out his notion of first rank symptoms of schizophrenia (Symptome 1. Ranges). In 1946 he published a book entitled Beiträge zur Psychiatrie (Schneider, 1946) which then ran through nine editions. From the third edition, the title became Klinische Psychopathologie, and the fifth edition was translated into English as Clinical Psychopathology (Schneider, 1946/1959).

What is notable about Schneider’s contributions to psychiatry is that whatever topic he focused on, his views moulded the subsequent development of the subject. Take his slim book on psychopathic personalities: his subdivision of the field resembles the subtypes in the early versions of the International Classification of Diseases manual; and his theoretical model of what constitutes a personality disorder – essentially someone who deviates from the norm in some respect with no moral or morbid implications – became the mainstream view, which was not the case when he first wrote the book. He had even done some experimental work on the subject, interviewing prostitutes. Curiously, there is now a trend away from a non-morbid formulation of personality disorders, exemplified in DSM-5, but not present in DSM-IV, with the inclusion of frontal lobe dysfunction as a determinant of moral decline. There is a possibility that he was influenced by Scheler’s hierarchical scheme of values in constituting the human being in his, Schneider’s, introduction of a hierarchical diagnostic system – with schizophrenia at the apex, depression of various sorts in the middle, and personality disorders at the base. This is hypothetical, but his hierarchical system has also influenced several prominent Anglo-American psychopathologists (e.g. Foulds, 1965), although not the committee that designed the DSM. His realization that some delusions and hallucinations were almost pathognomonic of schizophrenia was also innovatory in the 1930s, when the Bleulerian notion prevailed that delusions and hallucinations were unreliable diagnostic indicators and that thought disorder of some sort was the gold standard. Schneider’s refusal to give such first rank symptoms, as he called them, a common psychopathological denominator appealed to the pragmatic orientation of Anglo-American psychiatrists from the 1970s onwards. We believe that this was misguided and that there is a contemporary trend to return to the search for the essence of schizophrenia, but Schneider’s views in the 1930s were certainly an insightful premonition as to the Zeitgeist in this matter of the last half of the twentieth century. His philosophically-inspired article on the nature of melancholia was ignored by British and American psychiatrists for nearly a century until it was translated (Schneider, 1920/2012) in a book of the best of twentieth-century phenomenological psychiatry. In retrospect, it stands out as the very first example of philosophical psychopathology – applying some circumscribed philosophical thesis to psychiatric disorders – predating Minkowski, Binswanger, and a host of others in this respect.

Did Kurt Schneider derive any benefit from his encounters with Max Scheler in addition to appreciating the relevance of the latter’s philosophy of value, emotion and empathy? The second clue to Scheler’s possible influence on Schneider, in this case his formulation of personality disorder, comes in the form of a chance request by Scheler to help him with a wayward son, which we shall now consider. Krahl and Schifferdecker (1998), who preceded us in our quest to trace the influence of Scheler on Schneider, made much of this, even to the extent of claiming that one of Schneider’s subtypes of psychopathic personality was based on Scheler’s son. We shall see later if this is plausible.

Personal relationship between Scheler and Schneider

There were three phases to this. In the first, Schneider was merely a participant in Scheler’s first philosophy seminars in Cologne in 1919. In the second phase he chose Scheler as his supervisor for his postgraduate thesis between 1920 and 1921. In the third, Scheler came to Schneider in 1923 asking for help with his son, whose official care his ex-wife had had transferred to him and who was demonstrating problematic behaviour. We will deal with each phase in turn.

The atmosphere among the students in Scheler’s 1919 seminar on ‘Life and Soul’ was electric. Most of them were survivors of the trenches, demoralized by their own and their country’s experience, and could scarcely believe their ears when they encountered someone who was crediting the entire event to a positive stage in the progress of the human spirit. Schneider must have been infected with the enthusiasm of his colleagues.

In any case he chose Scheler to be his supervisor for his postgraduate thesis entitled ‘Pathopsychologische Beiträge zur psychologischen Phänomenologie von Liebe und Mitfühlen’ (Pathopsychological contributions to the psychological phenomenology of love and empathy). It was published in its entirety in 1921, in the same year that it was awarded (Schneider, 1921). (At that time and well into the 1930s Schneider preferred the term pathopsychology to psychopathology for what he was doing, because it emphasized that psychiatric disorders were the result of morbid psychological functioning. He dropped the term in the 1940s.) Scheler’s comments on the dissertation are kept in the archives of Cologne University and were unearthed by Krahl and Schifferdecker (1998: 96):

In the present dissertation the writer presents a number of unusual cases, culled from medical experience, of the various ways in which love and sympathy can be manifest in abnormal ways. As a referee I can warmly recommend this work to the Faculty as an essential contribution to philosophy [it was a philosophy degree that he enrolled for] and I consider the writer to be a worthy candidate for the degree applied for.

In 1923 Scheler wrote to Schneider asking for his advice on the matter of his son, who, for several years, had been causing problems for him and his ex-wife. The final straw seemed to be the son’s insistence that his father pay for a prostitute for him. Schneider interviewed the son, Wolf, and concluded that he was a psychopath: ‘The young man is obviously a severe psychopath, not mentally ill however, and fully responsible for his behaviour. There is no law that would exonerate his actions’ (Krahl and Schifferdecker, 1998: 98). Correspondence between the two of them went on for several years. Wolf Scheler was murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1940, partly, it is assumed, because of his Jewish ancestry and partly because of his psychopathic status.

The episode is made much of by Krahl and Schifferdecker (1998). They suggest that the second edition of Schneider’s Die Pathopsychologische Persönlichkeiten published in 1928 contained an altered account of one of the subtypes – gemütlosen Psychopathen (affectionless psychopaths) – which is almost identical to the description he had given of Scheler’s son.

Here is his account of the same entity in the first edition of 1923:

We understand by this term something similar to what Kraepelin made casual reference to. He wrote about people with abnormal personalities with emotional blunting towards other people in particular. This trait formed the core of what he referred to as those who are hostile to society or ‘antisocial’. (Schneider, 1923; cited by Krahl and Schifferdecker, 1998: 98)

In the account in the second edition of 1928 we find considerable elaboration:

Their character is a pitiless one and they lack capacity for shame, decency, remorse and conscience. They are ungracious, cold, surly and brutal at times. They provide the nucleus of Kraepelin’s antisocial group – called by him enemies of society. (Schneider, 1928; cited by Krahl and Schifferdecker, 1998: 98–9)

Now here are Schneider’s actual notes of his interview with Wolf:

He recounted his recent swindles [stealing from his father] in a jovial and boastful manner as if he were some hero or other. He himself admitted that he had no remorse and was only annoyed that he had been caught. Moreover, the thought that he might go to prison for his actions hadn’t the slightest effect on him. As for his career plans he no longer wanted to be a farmer or a businessman as he had once considered but now contemplated a role as a film star, playing an adventurer or criminal. (Krahl and Schifferdecker, 1998: 98)

Krahl and Schifferdecker (1998) have a good case here, and this is our second clue as to Scheler’s influence on Schneider, albeit vicariously on Schneider’s formulation of personality disorder through his son’s psychiatric state, is supported.

Academic influence of Scheler on Schneider

The core question in this article is whether Scheler substantially influenced Schneider in any of the latter’s major psychiatric projects, of which we have identified four. We will deal with each in turn.

Conclusions

A historian’s job is not easy, as we can see from the difficulty in tracking down what was seemingly a simple task of whether one man influenced another. Kurt Schneider, a psychiatrist at the outset of his career at the time of our deliberations, but who eventually became a twentieth-century icon of psychiatry, met one of the greatest philosophers at that time, Max Scheler. You might think that this meeting, along with the documented ongoing personal and professional exchanges over the next nine years, might have constituted some sort of epiphanous event for Schneider, which would colour the rest of his life and work.

Not a bit of it. Schneider’s overall intellectual debt to Scheler is not obviously substantial, apart from one article on depression published in 1920 invoking Scheler’s notion of hierarchical layers of emotion, which, logistically, to be able to publish this in 1920, Schneider must have imbued before they met. What Schneider is now most celebrated for – his scheme of first rank symptoms in schizophrenia – bears no trace of Scheler’s influence, either in itself or in any reference to Scheler in the text. Schneider’s book on psychopathic personalities, which in our view is still a masterpiece and which we believe underpinned the current diagnostic manuals on the matter, is also a non-philosophical exercise; it is certainly not a Schelerian project except for the chance fact that Scheler’s son turned out to be psychopathic and Schneider saw in him the core features of one of his psychopathic subtypes.

The thesis that Scheler did influence Schneider is therefore supported in some minor respects, but it cannot be substantiated that Schneider owed his undoubted current prestige as one of the greatest psychiatrists of the twentieth century to Scheler.