Summary of Max Scheler’s ‘The Nature of Sympathy’

Part 1 – Fellow-Feeling

1. The Ethics of Sympathy

P5. An Ethic of sympathy is impossible because it presupposes that which it is meant to explain. Sympathy
in of itself may be ethically valuable but it cannot be the source of value.
P6. Ethical judgements do not only arise through fellow-feeling. A person can ethically judge himself
directly, without this being an act of self-sympathy. And ‘spontaneous’ positive acts are ethically more
valuable than merely ‘reactive’ ones.

2. Classification of the Phenomena of ‘Fellow-Feeling’

P8. Fellow-feeling must be distinguished from “apprehending, understanding and […] reproducing
(emotionally the experiences of others).
Pity or Rejoicing cannot be used to derive knowledge of the ‘Other’ because these already presuppose an
awareness of the other as a ‘person’. P9. One can visualise or recreate another’s pain without having any pity
for it (as an Actor must). Nor can it derive from any “argument from analogy’ nor by any projective
empathy, or mimetic impulse”.
P10. Knowledge of the other is given intuitively and derived from this also that the other has “a sphere of
absolute personal privacy, which can never be given to us”. The emotional experiences are given directly.
To abstract the Body from the person is to take an artificial posture of the doctor or scientist. It is not by the
imitation of gesture because this can only be done AFTER the gesture is recognised as emotionally
significant.
P11. Further evidence is our ability to understand the emotion of animals despite their entirely different
‘gesture’. And our ability to understand occurrences despite having no equivalent experience of them. P12.
What imitation does lead to is ‘infection of emotion’ but this is without any conscious understanding of the
emotion or the process.
Fellow feeling has 4 distinguishable possible relations:
(1) Immediate Community of Feeling, e.g. of one and the same sorrow ‘with someone’.
(2) Fellow-feeling ‘about something’; rejoicing in his joy and commiserating with his sorrow.
(3) Mere emotional infection
(4) True emotional identification

1. Community of Feeling.
P13. When the feeling is ‘one feeling’ in valuation and emotional keenness held by bother, a “feeling in
common”. Rather than A and B both feel and knows the other feels a certain pain.
2. Fellow-Feeling
P14. Here also, the one’s sorrow is not simply the motivating cause of the other’s. It involves intentional
reference to the first person’s suffering as the thing that motivates the feeling. Fellow feeling is a
participation based on a reaction to the other’s emotion as reconstructed in vicarious feeling.
3. Emotional Infection.
P15. Emotional infection such as when a joyful atmosphere at a pub can spread to us, or a mournful aspect
among people in a room. This is distinguished by its lack of intentional direction towards the recognised
feeling of the other. Merely the ‘state’ of feeling is transferred. Its origin can only be derived causally, not in
the insight of the feeling itself.
It is involuntary and perpetuated by imitation and expression. It is distinguished by the fact that once infected
we take the emotion to by our own, rather than relating it to another. P17. Nietzsche fundamentally confused
pity with fellow-feeling. Through pity we are not infected by suffering.
4. Emotional Identification.
P18. A limit case of Infection where not only one emotion but the whole sense of emotional identity is
passed over. Involuntary and Unconscious. P19. Examples are the identification among primitive peoples of
a person with a totem or a person with his ancestors, the mass self-identification of a population with a
charismatic leader and the belief in reincarnation and in the religious mysteries of antiquity.
P24. Stronger among children who achieve identification when adults usually only engage in empathy. P25.
A unique form of this occurs in ‘truly loving sexual intercourse’ where the partners “relapse into a single
life-stream” of ecstatic union, a state itself probably the motivation for the Dionysian mysteries in classical
times.
P26, p27. Earlier writers such as Bergson promote the “identification theory of love”. This theory is false.
Particularly the bond between mother and child is not one of identity, as shown by abortion or abandonment
but rather one of Love as an outreaching force. Love in fact opposes motherly attachment, especially in later
stages, challenging the mother to give the child the chance to grow as its own individual and to be valued as
that separate individual.
P29. “Throughout all modes of sensory apprehension the act of perception occurs as a simple and unitary act.
Again, the content so given does not primarily consist in an aggregate, divisible into sense-datam, but in a
whole in which the reality, value and form of the object are already given before-hand as one and the same.”
P30. Any more-than-reflexive action of an organism is not understandable as a mere response to discrete
stimulus but only through an awareness of the object as an integral whole. Identification extends beyond
perception just as sight is a relative clairvoyance in comparison to touch.
P31. Any element of fellow-feeling or understanding between minds is built on the “primitive givenness of
the other”. This capacity for specialised identification is weakest in civilised, adult men and stronger in
children, women, primitives, dreamers, animals etc. It is not just that we have gained through the progress of
civilisation we have also definitively lost certain valuable capacities.
P32. The aim must be a complementation of intellectual and ‘primitive’ faculties, a “Only […] co-operation
on a worldwide scale between the individual yet complementary portions of humanity can bring into play the
total capacity for knowledge inherent in humanity at large”. “The stages of evolution are never merely
stepping stones but each has a unique character and value of its own”
P33. Identification occurs between the layers of human bodily sensibility and higher spiritual intentional
activity. Spiritual mysticism may be thought to offer a counter-example. But in true mysticism always
retains “at least a consciousness of the ontological gulf intervening between man and God”. Identification
lies in the vital consciousness, above the materiality of body and below the spiritual personality. It contains
the vital energies and impulses. This impulse is:
(1) Automatic, vectorial and goal-seeking.
(2) Occurs when physical and rational sphere are peculiarly empty.
Therefore can occur when man “heroically” elevates himself above his body, but reduce his spiritual
independence that is his higher inheritance. War experience does this: Transforming organic communities
into single entities.
This means that monistic, metaphysical theories of sympathy such as Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer,
Bergson, Hartmann “can only have meaning in the organic sphere”.

3. Genetic Theories of Fellow-Feeling

P37-39. Tradition is an example of the role of emotional infection. Tradition is genetically related to another,
but we are unconscious of that fact. We think we hold the view for its own worth, whereas in fellow feeling
we are phenomenologically directed at the other, as well as genetically. Pietas (filial Piety) is a rationalistic
doctrine and not one of traditionalism.
Fellow feeling is not comparative: ‘How would it be if this happened to me?’ because it easily contains the
statement “Had it happened to me […] it would not have been so bad; but being the sort of person he is, it is
a very serious manner for him”. This is an attempt to make fellow-feeling fundamentally egoist in origin
P40. It fails both on the phenomenological and ethical facts. Because ethically it would have to command us
to remove ourselves from those who are in pain to relieve ourselves, not direct us to heal their pain. The truth
is based on the sharp distinction between feeling-functions and emotions themselves. Fellow-feeling is
“wholly functional”. We are given the other’s pain (as the other’s) and our emotional response is entirely
independent. The other’s pain does not induce pain in us, which would make it an egoistical event.
It is possible to become identified with another person such that we value ourselves purely in relation to their
value of us. P42. This has low moral value because it is purely reactive. Such a reactive attitude towards
society is that of the abnormally vain man. Such a person or society may damage or destroy its own interests
for the benefit of the other, but this is not sacrifice. P44. “For a man who neither leads his own life nor finds
it worth living cannot sacrifice himself for another”. This generally ends in hatred though. And, of course, an
attitude may be a mix of this and genuine fellow-feeling, such as the attitude towards the Tsar in Russia.
P47. Neither is it necessary for us to have experienced the precise feelings in question ourselves at any point.
It is not reproduction. In the more physical feelings we must do this to experience the same, but less so in the
vital, and not at all in the spiritual: (p49) “Jesus’ despair in Gethsemene can be understood and shared
regardless of our historical, racial and even human limitations.” Indeed such a theory would make history or
true sympathetic understanding of people of difference from ourselves impossible. P50. Further, a single
example of suffering may be sufficient to make us sympathetically comprehend the whole depth and fullness
of human suffering, such as Buddha, or our own personal examples.

4. Metaphysical Theories
P51. Schopenhauer progressed in recognising pity as an immediate and intentional and moral phenomenon,
but erred in considering its essence as that of shared suffering, and giving it a metaphysical interpretation. In
fact pity does not increase suffering but “halves it”. Recognition of our unity in shared suffering is an
intellectual judgement, and while possibly a source of solace is nothing to do with fellow-feeling. It even
betrays a certain apparent ‘glee’ in suffering. P53. Indeed this would seem to ethically command us to cause
suffering so others may achieve enlightenment.
P55.It also dissolves genuine pity altogether in any ethical function, because if I am ontological identical to
the other I can only feel ‘my’ pain and feel self-pitying sorrow for that, not moral pity for another’s
suffering.
Metaphysical theories of pity are superior to the genetic because they do not seek to reduce fellow-feeling
but treat it respectfully as a basic phenomena. But they fail in ascribing fundamental ontological significance
to this in the manner described above. They also have the following distinctions:
 Does the monistic idea merely serve to explain fellow feeling, or is the claim that fellow-feeling
itself reveals metaphysical monism as ‘knowledge’?
P57. Feelings can be intentional. They do not reveal ideas in terms of representational, conceptual or
propositional knowledge but do have cognitive content in the pre-logical manner in which original
perception is undoubtedly cognitive. This follows the law demonstrated in other basic presentative cognitive
areas that value properties may be given in advance of a level where conceptual are clearly revealed.
P58. It does free us from the illusion of ‘egocenticity’. That other persons are relatively metaphysically un-
real compared to oneself. As valuation underlies higher personal phenomena this underlies solipsism,
egoism, and other negative phenomena. Fellow-feeling can free us of this relative solipsism and thus allow
us to see that our view of the other man does not possess ultimate reality, but it itself is what is only a
phantom, whereas the other man has true real basis.
P60. This change comes from grasping the other as equal in worth, and hence can only come if fellow-
feeling is directed at the essence of the other person’s ego. And hence, as in the Buddha’s case “the essence
of suffering […] is thereupon grasped as an idea”. “Egoism is the outcome of a closed heart and mind, not
the cause of this disposition”.
P62. Neither can it be accepted that fellow-feeling or other phenomena proceed by purely causal inference,
as transcendental realism must presume, such as Hartmann. P63. Monistic philosophers that posit ontological
unity from fellow-feeling are themselves differentiated from those who merely posit a joint entelechy and
purpose, or driving principle, uniting all living things such as Bergson.
P65. The opposite is true. Fellow-feeling is such that even if we abstract from all physical difference and
psychic content persons still differ in their “intrinsic character as act centres”.
P66. Fellow feeling leads us to conclude that independent persons are in an “intrinsically teleological
relationship of mutual adapt[ion]” , inexplicable in genetic or associative terms and, Scheler argues,
requiring an intelligence to bring about this arrangement, and thus the facts of Fellow-feeling point to
Panentheistic or Theistic NOT pantheistic metaphysics of reality. P66. This anti-monistic conclusion is
strengthened by the experience of absolute privacy of some part of the other, a fact given in fellow-feeling,
and essentially so, not merely due to a lack of information.
P67. Fellow-feeling conceived on its own is largely reactive. And as such is limited to the social bond that
has already been established. It is spontaneous love that actively perceives into the heart of the other and
breaks and recasts these social boundaries.
P68-p69. Hartmann and Hegel both represent love as revealing the identity of all beings, particularly the
love that sees each as part of oneself. Even our love of God and God’s love of us is merely God’s eternal
love of himself. P70-72. This is nonsense though. Fellow-feeling, and more so Love, because it is most
intentional and spontaneous essentially recognise the other person as individually unique and ontologically
separate. That is what makes the movement of love possible. Monistic philosophies derive Love & fellow-
feeling wholly from emotional identification.
P72. The moral phenomena cannot be traced to the necessity of a social community, or derived from that
community. It would exist if a man was solitary. P73-74. The phenomenon of emotional identification can
support a theory of unity among life-forms at the vital level but not a metaphysical monistic conclusion. This
is an advance in the work of Bergson and others, over that of Hegel and earlier philosophers.
P75. Personal individuality is not defined by bodily separation, but by the essence of character. A body can
only be identified as mine after the person has been separated from the background. P76. The vital level of
the body as life-centre is different in substance to the person as spirit, shown by their different processes: the
freedom of the spirit and the “psycho-somatic quasi-intelligent process of life”.

5. The Sense of Unity with the Cosmos in some Representative Temperaments of the Past
P77-78. The Eastern Ethos of Brahmanism, Buddhism and Taoism is one of pity and fellow-feeling but not
of Love. For the purpose of this ethos is not to reach out to the other and recognise that other as valuable,
but to abandon all attachment and love and extinguish the desire of the self. The aim is quietude.
P79-82. This philosophy obtains through emotional identification an idea of the negative unity of all Being in
suffering. It sees the realm of nature as equal in a manner that neither Greek or Jewish, and above all
Christian philosophy has not. This led to the attempt to internally extinguish suffering from pain, rather than
to externally extinguish the sources of pain.
P83-87. Christianity, by exalting the Spirit, replaces this with an intentional, loving superiority of Spirit. It is
the essence of God, of Jesus Christ and purely Holy communion that retains this emotional identification. St
Paul speaks of dwelling “in Christ”, an ecstatic identification driven by intentional love. Certainly not pity or
fellow-feeling.
P88-p93. St Francis of Assisi established a unique joining of religious identification with Nature and the
Christian exaltation of spirit. He took the pure parabolic references to nature from the Gospels and imbued
them with literal significance as co-sharers in God’s love and redemption. P94. After his time this spirit has
fractured ever further, particularly in Protestant which removes all love, fellow-feeling or identification from
the core of religious teaching.

6. Sympathy and its Law of Dependence.

P96-98. Emotional states given in vicarious feeling must have been received directly or indirectly through
emotional identification. This suggests identification: unconscious, automatic and vital, functionally
underlyies vicarious feeling, as it underlies higher levels of feeling.
1.Identification underlies Vicarious Feeling.
2.Vicarious feeling underlies Fellow-Feeling (which itself gives the reality of persons)
3.Fellow-Feeling underlies Benevolence (love of man in general)
4.Benvolence underlies (Non-cosmic) Love of Persons (recognised and valued as individual ‘persons’)
P101. Persons may conceal as well as reveal themselves. This possibility of disclosure requires Love. For
only that penetrates into the ‘person’-hood of the person and reveals the ultimate privacy of his psychic
content. P102. Christian religion requires not just the Love of God, but the Love of persons in God. It is this
chosen identity of the divine with individual humankind that separates Christianity from pagan worship.

7. The Interaction of the Sympathetic Functions

P103. Once again one must insist on the importance of all man’s emotional faculties. Emotional
identification provides an organic view of nature as ‘friend’ that both underlies, fuels, and cannot be replaced
by, the mechanistic viewpoint of science. P104. The animistic view is not opposed to science, it is merely
another level of human cognition, and one that is indispensable nonetheless.
P107. Divorced from this emotional appreciation of the love of man human society begins to prioritise mere
utilitarian accumulation of commodities, and all things as far as they support this end. But Man, woman and
childhood each have their own irreplaceable value.
P110. The sexual act is not only for procreation or pleasure. Procreation is its end but not its essence, and
pleasure merely a possible subjective conjunction. P112. Each man is a new individual, children are a gift,
parenthood merely partakes in this process and love creates it does not merely preserve or reproduce. P113.
“The movement of Love is always and everywhere towards the creation of values”.
P116. Both naturalistic and priestly moralities are to be criticised for degrading sexual love to a merely
physical response rather than, properly approached, a crowning point of vital values towards new creation
and improvement of the universe. P118. These vital values are not the highest, they may justly be sacrificed
for the personal, moral or religious values that lie above them but only if the true value of what is being
sacrificed is realised.
P121. Human beings are not definable in terms of parental heritage. The lower and more physical layers are
more traceable to genetics, the higher more intellectual aspects are almost not at all traceable in this way.
P127. Furthermore we are joined with God in the fact our individual and unique personal essence exists in
eternity among the infinity of the Ideas that reside in the mind of God.

8. The Phylogenetic Origin & Extension of Fellow-Feeling

P131. Abolition of cruelty has been put down to an increase in sympathy. Scheler instead wants to attribute it
to an increase in the capacity for suffering, and thus an increase in the feeling of the suffering of others.
P132. Darwin confuses infection and fellow-feeling, and forgets that fellow-feeling is as much a requirement
for much evil as for good and it is possible to use fellow-feeling to pursue evil actively, not just merely as the
ignorance of good. P134. Neither can the sympathetic and moral functions be considered as one. Some
degree of fellow-feeling is required to even identify the other as an organism, and on this the moral feeling
must then be constructed.

9. Pity & Rejoicing and their Typical Modes

P135. Pity may be considered in many modes from the deepest, compassion to mere regret that is largely
empty and reactive. Rejoicing however comes in fewer form and is a derivative rather than original
linguistic form. P136. Possible reasons for this are (1) metaphysical pessimism or that (2) pain is more easily
fallen into than rejoicing or that (3) pity is practically useful whereas rejoicing is not generally.
In terms of vital values all of these are misplaced. Joy is at least as valuable as pity, higher even, for joy is
preferable to sorrow, and because being so easily frustrated by envy, its presence betrays a nobler
personality.
P137. This is also not to be confused with perversity, where one enjoys pain generally. This is not immoral,
merely pathological, and is not to be confused with cruelty, where one evaluates normally, but merely
chooses evil.

10. The Moral Value of Fellow-Feeling

P138. “Genuine acts of fellow-feeling have positive moral value”. This varies:
(1) According to the spiritual, mental, vital or sensory type.
(2) Whether it is Pity with someone or mere pity for someone. (The value of emotional infection is negative)
(3) Whether fellow-feeling is directed to the self-awareness & respect in the other or merely towards his
circumstances.
(4) And with the value of the situation which is being sympathised with.
Acts of beneficence are a mark of genuineness in pity.
P139. Contrarily in Ethics of Sympathy “sympathy has literally no positive value, though all moral values
are said to acquire their value only by virtue of their connection with sympathy.”

11. The Relationship of Love & Fellow-Feeling

P140. British empiricist moralists erred in deriving love from fellow-feeling. They generally equated
benevolence with love. This is wrong as benevolence implies a practical effort, whereas love is directed
purely at the “positive values of personality”. P141. “Love has an intrinsic relation to value” unlike fellow-
feeling. Even self-love “cannot be sympathy for oneself”. “Love is not a feeling (i.e. a function) but an act
and a movement”.
P142. “All feeling is passive or receptive” and hence a function. “But love is an emotional gesture and a
spiritual act”. All fellow-feeling is based on love to some extent, and vanishes when it is entirely absent. But
the love need not be aimed at the intentional object of fellow-feeling, but only of a whole or general category
to which he belongs. P143. “The really impossible thing is for sympathy to be lacking where love is already
present”. In cases where pity is not accompanied by direct Love it is taken as shaming. Pity is welcomed
where it reveals love.

Part 2 – Love & Hatred

1. Towards a Phenomenology of Love and Hatred

P147. Love had Hate cannot be derived from any more basic idea of feeling. Both Love and Hate can be
sources of great joy or sadness. Through grief and joy love and hatred remain fixed upon their objects. P148.
Love is not the apprehension of value as suggested by Brentano, and not just any cognitive function. “They
refer to objects inasmuch as these possess value”. P149. The value in question is not given beforehand: “Our
value-attributes are guided by love” not vice versa. P150. They are not conations. They are not intrinsically
social, self-love is a real thing in a way self-fellow-feeling or sympathy is not, but can only be achieved by
imagining the self as another sees it. Nor is it the same as egoism.
P151. Love is not necessarily social or self-directed, nor is it necessarily group or individual-directed. One
can love members of a group as individuals while hating that group. P152. Egoism is not equal to self-love
for egoism means being “so taken up with [one’s] social self that he leaves sight of his individual, private
self”.
Hatred itself is a positive act of disvalue. P153. Love is a movement of intention from a lower to a higher
value in an object. “Love only occurs when, upon the values already acknowledged as ‘real’ there
supervenes a movement, towards potential values still higher than those already given and presented.” P154.
These values are given as ideally present but not empirically so. They are implicit in the values already
empirically disclosed and disclosed as his ‘real’ value and ‘true’ nature. Love reveals new values within each
sphere it applies. Love as such relates not only to humans but to anything that has value. P155. We
sentimentally love non-human objects when we value our feelings towards them. We truly love them when
we love them for themselves as different objects.
P156. Love involves the movement towards a potential higher value. This value can either exist but
unperceived until that moment or be given as ‘ought’ to exist. P157. Nor is it an effort to improve the
person. That betrays a pedagogic attitude that is not that of love. This emergence of new values does not
require effort, it emerges as of its own accord. This process cannot be tied down to any one rational
formulation of how this occurs. P158. In love “we do indeed see the faults of these objects as they stand, but
love them all the same”. Love is given as the object is, but in doing so reveals enhanced values within it.
P159. We love the ideal being, neither the empirical, existential one nor that one that ought to be but a third
thing: “Become what thou art”. P160. Love is not the creation of values in the beloved, for that could only
come from the one who loves. It is the revealing of the truly individual person in the one loved rather than
their social person.
P161. “Love is that movement wherein each concrete individual object that possesses value achieves the
highest value compatible with its nature and ideal vocation; or wherein it attains the ideal state of value
intrinsic to its nature.”

2. Basic Values of Love and the ‘Love of Goodness’

P162. There is no such as the love of goodness. There is a love of knowledge and beauty, which themselves
have moral value. But there is no love of goodness, except as a pharisaic precept. Christianity commands us
to love all men as bearers of value, and especially the wicked. P163. “Love [possesses] moral goodness in
the most ultimate sense”. It is in its very movement that goodness first appears.
One cannot aim to do good, or will it for its own sake, for that is itself the pharisaic mistake. They must
engage in spontaneous acts that are good. P164. The love of God is not love for God, but joining in God’s
love for the world and Love for himself. “Hence there is but one basic moral relationship between men of
good will: as fellow-servants, partisans of a common Ideal and co-partners in a common love.” Love itself
produces a loving response and hence an increase in moral value.
As such we can postulate a principle that “all stand proxy for one and one for all; so that each must share the
blame for another’s guilt, and each is party from the outset to the positive moral values of everyone
else.P165. “Love has a moral value insofar as it represents a relationship between persons”. The occurance of
wickedness implies a co-comitant absence of answering love. We are all responsible for each other, and for
each other’s wickedness as well.

3. Love and Personality

P166. There are values of the person like virtues and the intrinsic value of the person. The love that has
moral value is the love that incorporates the person’s attributes into the object of the person itself and does
not value them as separable, general attributes. This is only possible through the act of loving. Neither love
nor hate can be rationalistically explained or justified by a mere list of the positive or negative features of the
person.
P167. Love is objective because it frees us from the subjectivity of our own interests. But the private nature
of the person cannot be given as an object. This is neither object nor thing. The physical body and the self are
revealed as objects but the person can only be disclosed by “joining in the performance of his acts”. The
only one who understands the person Jesus is his disciple. However many facts someone knows about the
‘historical’ Jesus one who does not enter into his acts cannot know him as a person, or any other person. But
yet through Love this person is clearly revealed despite difference of culture or time.
P168. Other levels of value can be revealed ‘objectively’ but not that of the person. This can only be revealed
through Love: Love of the person and loving the things he loves.

4. The Forms, Modes and Kinds of Love & Hatred

P169-170. Love can be divided by forms, modes and kinds.
The forms are “spiritual love of persons, mental love of the individual self, and vital or passionate love”.
Vital acts noematically correspond to vital values of the noble, mental acts to the intellectual values of
knowledge and beauty, and spiritual acts to the values of the holy. Values below these levels do not involve
love. Sensual ‘love’ is a distortion of Love because it involves seeing the person as an object. Love and hate
can vary at all these levels. Hatred of the person is ‘daibolical’, of the mental is ‘evil’, and of the vital is
‘wicked’. These different levels explain the use of different terms for love in some languages.
P171. Kinds of love are differences in the emotion itself. Different loves: maternal & filial, love of home
and country, sexual love, are already different even before we consider the fact they are applied to different
objects. P172. These do not need objects, thus a man without a home or country may feel this love as an
unfulfilled longing. Mother-love takes a different, more instinctive form than love from a father.
P173. Lastly we distinguish kinds of love from modes. These are conjunctions of acts of love with social
dispositions and feelings of sympathy: Kindness, goodwill, fondness, affection, amiability, etc, are examples.

5. The limitations of the Naturalistic theory of Love

P176-179. Love cannot be explained by an expansion of natural sexual instincts themselves sublimated into
maternal instinct, and from that generalised from family to society and all beings. This is particularly as
given in Freud’s theory where sublimated or repressed Libido is the drive-force for all Love and fellow-
feeling.

6. A Critique of the Naturalistic Theory and Outline of a Theory based on the Phenomena
P182. Naturalistic philosophy cannot understand the emergence, as a new thing, of the spiritual and sacred
love that is independent and not essentially derived from the lower forms of Love. This Love is directed at
persons (i.e. at essences). P183. St Francis is an example of this sacred love. The facts of the case cannot be
explained by reference to sublimated libido or any other concept at the purely vital level, only to the
awareness of a higher cause. P185. Love of an individual soul is equally inexplicable from this viewpoint.
It is this that defines monogamy as a superior institution.
P186. All effort is based upon an evaluation. Effortful impulses of a purely involuntary kind possess an
underlying tendency towards value. P187. Instinct does not bring love into being. Rather instinct is the light
of the torch that reveals those values that the love-act may occur in relation to. “It determines the actual way
in which love is evoked [but not] upon the superiority of the value and its position in the scale of values”.
P188. The naturalistic theory cannot explain love by mere appeal to instincts and the slow and
‘geographically’ limited scale of our love and fellow feeling. P189. As love broadens and moves away from
real organic unities we become less able to know and apprehend persons as persons and such the values
given in love become steadily less valuable. P190. The mass of man cannot be an object of love, only of
utilitarian counting. Mankind as a valuable unit can only be truly cognised by God.
P192. Transference of love is not necessary because love by its nature is already the movement from the
current values of the thing to the higher values possible for it. P194. Love itself travels outwards and is based
on a community of love, first in the family and then greater. But at each stage it reaches beyond itself to
higher values. Even beyond humanity to the divine as some form of background whatever shape that may
take.
P195. Nor can there be any perfection of society such that love would become unnecessary because love
constantly reaches for higher values. And because any community that is conjoined in this manner could as
easily be a kingdom of hatred as much as love.
P197. Empiricism assumes that psychic effects do not matter when they come in development (given the
effect of previous effects) but this is incorrect. At each stage in human development there is the possibility of
a qualitatively different effect. P200. Freud’s libido is incorrect because it cannot recognise the role of values
in directing striving, in hunger or elsewhere, and as such makes the errors of traditional mechanical
association psychology. P202. Freud’s attempt to base all sorts of love in sexual sublimation is false. These
loves are qualitatively different. P204. Sexual love is a particular vital form of love, the archetype and basis
of them all.
As such no rational planning or eugenics can explain or replace the essential choice that sexual love,
unencumbered by rationalist prejudices can make. P206. Libido is meant to be checked by ‘moral ideas’ but
all such moral ideas are meant to come from checked libido. This is circular and it confuses proper control
of libido with unhealthy repression, nor has any means to distinguish between the two.

Part 3 – Other Minds

1. Nature and Scope of the Problems

P214. This problem is very important for metaphysics and epistemology of biology, expression, psychology
and men’s emotional knowledge of one another. P216. This can be broken down into a number of specific
problems:
1. What is the relation between individual and community, both ontologically and essentially? Is there
an essential connection?
2. On what basis can we justifiably postulate the existence of another specific person or community?
3. What is the origin and psychological provenance of our knowledge of other selves?
4. How do we come to know the inner content of another’s mind, separate to its mere existence as some
form?
P217. Does awareness of others previously necessitate awareness of ourselves? Yes. Does it require self
consciousness in the first place. No. Does it presuppose purely formal awareness of God. Yes. Does this
knowledge precede the knowledge of nature in general? No, because this knowledge is itself a knowledge of
nature as expressive. P218. Does it precede knowledge of the inanimate world? Yes. “The primitive, like the
child, has no general acquaintance with deadness in things. This knowledge goes along with awareness of
organic man. Only from the total unity of the animate body can we differentiate man into a physical body
and an inner life on the other.
P221. Empirical psychology cannot answer these questions because it must fundamentally assume the
existence and knowledge of other minds. Certainly as well the same mental event may be constructed in
many minds. Otherwise all knowledge of inner life would be impossible. P223. Neither can experiment
capture entire knowledge of our cognitive or spiritual centres for these are essentially increasingly private
and hidden.
P226. Particularly there is a connection between the metaphysical and epistemological answers to these
questions. Certain such views on the one question more or less condition sensible views on the other. P231.
This is true of both religious theories and forms of social organisation as well, even epistemological and
ethical theories. Furthermore these ties reveal the purely relative truth of these theories.
P227-p228. Lastly this problem is also one of value as well. Fichte, Riehl and Cohen (to whom can we add
Levinas?!) attempted to derive our knowledge of the other from our ethical responsibility to the other. This
theory is false. Existence must be given before value, but not (for a person) before character. P229. What
these can provide is independent (if indirect and secondary) emotional evidence for the value and hence the
existence of another.

2. The General Evidence of the ‘Thou’

P234. An epistemological Robinson Crusoe would still have evidence of himself as a member of community,
even if he had never encountered another person. This comes from the intuitive content of the emotional and
conative acts that are essentially other directed, particularly types of Love. The sense of absence in these acts
would inevitably lead to the conclusion of community. P236. This givenness is in terms of the ‘sphere’ of
community, not the evidence of the existence of other minds in general, or knowledge of particular other
minds. This evidence also comes in the vital instincts that presume other beings.

3. The Perception of Other Minds

P238. “The difficulties of this problem are mostly self-engendered”. Previous theories are the theory of
inferential association and that of empathic projection of the self into the other. P239.
The analogy theory is untenable because both animals and infants are capable of recognising expression.
More plausibly we are born into an expressive world that we slowly disenchant, not the other way round.
P240. We could not recognise the expressive movements of others because we do not observe ourselves 3 rd
person. We can sense the lie or insincerity beneath the expression, or in animals with totally different
expression. P241. Lastly this inference could only ever imply my mind being in the other person, not some
autonomous self.
As for empathy, it cannot provide any explanation of how we decide which stimuli to recognise, or that
expression presupposes a mind, nor how we can recognise expression in mere works or signs of a person.
P243. “Both self and body acquire their ultimate individual character from their evident connection with the
unitary person”. An individual mind is never a mere collection of experience. Experience is only
understandable in as far as it can be attached to a unitary person.
P244. These theories have a twofold phenomenological starting point:
1. That it is our self only that is primarily given to us.
2. That we are only primarily given the body of the other.
These are both wrong. Phenomenologically we can think the thoughts and feel the feelings of others. P245.
We constantly distinguish our thoughts from those told to us, our feelings from those that have infected us.
Our own thoughts or feelings may even be given as belonging to someone else e.g. Scholastics reading
Christianity into Aristotle.
P246. What we actually have is “a flow of experiences undifferentiated between mine and thine”. We are
given the fact that all experiences must belong to some individual self, and from this differentiate the stream
into vortices of individual selves. P247. We are more likely to impute others’ experiences as our own, that
impute our own experience to others. P248. Scheler argues that children particularly live in this manner and
what elements stand out for them is shaped by possible social relevance. Primitives, hysterics and crowds
bear similar psychological characteristics that can be traced to this position.
P249. Inner intuition is not intuition of oneself. It is the intuition of the mental. One can sense oneself or
other in external or internal sense. The physical stimulus does not determine the content it only restricts the
choice of this character and no other. P250. We do not infer the content of another’s mind but see it and our
own content in one immediate process. P251. The same process of differentiation is required to know
ourselves as to know others. And these theories of ten over-estimate the difficulty of knowing the other and
under-estimate the difficulty of knowing oneself.
P252. The condition of mental activity on the body holds for oneself as well. All mental acts require physical
expression and can only be truly known in this context, like language. Our expression and attention, itself
conditioned by our “environmental field of attention” dictates what elements come clearly to awareness. Our
language is a common one and can only be accessed with the other. ‘Poets’ actually increase our realm of
emotional understanding by wrenching new comprehensions from the inarticulacy of our inner life. (P253.
like Collingwood).
P254. What we perceive of other’s minds is not the physical stimulus determines how they are perceived not
the existence or content of the objects. P255. The mental content that cannot be shared in this way is the
sensory content itself, whether or pain or taste or some other. It is only as far as man can lift his attention
from these sensory contents that he can become aware of himself and of others.
This has lead to a theory whereby mental phenomena must be referred to their physical stimulus. P257. In
the external world we often make the mistake “of taking a thing for a mental experience when it is only
given as a physical object”. These theories lead to epiphenomenalism and generally lapse back into
sensualism as well. P259. This error would be comparable with defining nature as that part given to human
sense-perception whereas in reality this part can be given only in reference to the whole.
P260. Turning to our 2nd assumption (from above). This is basically false as well. Phenomenologically we
do perceive the other’s emotion in his expressions and thoughts in his actions. It is only when we are given
extraneous evidence to doubt these perceptions that we turn to inference to a better conclusion. But this
whole process presumes the initial perception. P261. Scheler rejects the possibility this merely means an
‘unconscious, primitive’ inference” (but not perception).
P262. In perceiving another we do not perceive bodies or souls we perceive unitary persons, wholes, from
which we then abstract details, but always as belonging to the whole and only understandable in that context.
Nor can they be constructed from below.
P263. Our 2nd assumption can only come from a series of false premises and a fallacy. 1. That we treat
colours, sounds, shapes etc as sensations when they are qualities. 2. That we treat the perception as a
complex of sensation, when sensation plays no part in it. 3. If we forget that on this view it is no more
possible to see the body than the self then we reach the conclusion that we can perceive the bodies of people
but not their selves.
P263. “The fact that my body must be affected by physical […] stimuli emanating from another body, does
not mean that I have to be aware of that body, or that I must first be aware of sensory appearances […]
corresponding to these stimuli before I can recognise an expression of friendliness” “The Primary awareness
in ourselves [or animals] consists of patterns of wholeness; sensory appearances are only given in so far as
they function as the basis of these patterns, or can […] signify or represent such whole”.