Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

Author(s): Edward V. Vacek

Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Apr., 1982), pp. 156-177
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Scheler's Phenomenology of Love*
Edward V. Vacek,S.J. / WestonSchool of Theology

Although love has been a staple of literature, religion, and life, it has
seldom been examined with thoroughness or rigor. Perhaps the
phenomenon of love is too fragile, precious, or intimate to be sub-
jected to careful scrutiny. Perhaps, as Jules Toner suggests, the topic
of love is so familiar that most people think they have read exten-
sively on the subject, much as they feel they have read the works of
Marx because his ideas are so widespread. Most philosophical and
theological writing, when it speaks of love, assumes that love has an
evident meaning. Toner exaggerates only slightly when he says that
the West has seen no more than half a dozen serious studies of the
nature of love.'
One penetrating student of the human heart is Max Scheler.2
While most thinkers of his time concentrated on intellectual activity,
Scheler focused on the emotional life. While others worked out the
canons of empiricism and logical analysis, Scheler developed a
methodology whose lifeblood is love of the world. And while the West
turned to science to solve its problems, Scheler pleaded for a renewal
of Christian love to rebuild Western culture.3

*I am grateful to my students, to Sr. Martha Curry, RSCJ, and Fr. Richard Ahler, S.J.,
who have offered many helpful comments on the style and content of this paper.
IJules Toner, The Experience of Love(Washington, D.C.: Corpus Instrumentorum, 1968), p.
8.
2Scheler has had, until recently, minimal influence in the United States in part because of a
lack of accurate translations. In this own time, many considered him to be more important
than Husserl. He has had considerable impact on European Catholic and Protestant thought,
especially in ethics and religion. Few commentators have addressed themselves to Scheler's
philosophy of love. Among the reasons, I suggest, are the obscurity and contradictions in his
reflections on this issue and the multiplicity of claims he makes about love. This essay attempts
to provide a framework that will bring clarity and harmony to his philosophy of love. Scheler's
writings are commonly grouped into three parts (1898-1912, 1913-22, 1922-28). His under-
standing of love, however, does not seem to have been modified directly by the dramatic
changes in, e.g., his methodology or his understanding of God.
3A fascinating, if partial, comparison of Scheler and Husserl's approaches can be made by
reading Husserl's two essays in Phenomenology and the Crisisof Philosophy,trans. Quentin Lauer
?1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/82/6202-0004$01.00

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 Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

The guiding thread of Scheler's understanding of love can be found

in his extraordinary essay "Ordo Amoris":
. . . love is the tendency or, as it may be, the act that seeks to lead
everything in the direction of the perfection of value proper to it-and
succeeds, when no obstacles are present. Thus we determined the essence of
love as an uplifting and constructive action in and over the world. "Who in
stillness looks about him, learns how love uplifts," as Goethe says. Man's
love is only a particular type, a partial function, of this universal power
active in and on everything. Love, in this account, was always a dynamic
becoming, a growing, a welling up of things in the direction of their
archetype, which resides in God.4
In this "metaphysical" conception, love is the creative power active
whenever beings grow toward their perfection. Among living beings
love is a persistent, deep urge to develop and evolve rather than
merely to reproduce. In higher beings, love sets persons in motion
toward individual and interpersonal perfection.5 Love is the power of
the Kingdom of God. Before examining Scheler's theory of love in
more detail, however, let us begin with his view of' what love is not.

I. COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF LOVE

Scheler's writings commonly exercise a hypnotic power over readers,

in part because of his ability to pare excrescences from the
phenomenon he examines. According to Scheler, love is frequently
confused with beneficence or striving, with desire or yearning, with a
feeling state, feeling function, or value judgment. It is further
confused with identification, sympathy, preference or a bond of
interests. We will look at each of these.
Beneficenceand striving.-Love should not be equated with benefi-

(New York: Harper & Row, Torchbooks, 1965), with Scheler's"The Nature of Philosophy and
the Moral Preconditions of Philosophical Knowledge" and "Christian Love and the Twentieth
Century" in On the Eternalin Man (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, for Archon, 1972)
(hereafter cited as Eternal).Scheler should not be contrasted with Husserl alone. In the style
common to German professors, he constantly compares his thought with those of scores of
predecessors and contemporaries. Most important among these are Aristotle, Plato, Kant,
Hegel, Bergson, Nietzsche, and von Hartmann.
4In SelectedPhilosophicalEssays, trans. David R. Lachterman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1973) (hereafter cited as Essays), p. 109. Unless otherwise indicated, all
citations are to works by Max Scheler.
sur Soziologieund Weltanschauungslehre,
5Schriften 2d ed. (Bern: Francke, 1963) (hereafter cited
as Soziologie),p. 92; Essays,pp. 109-10; "The Meaning of Suffering,"in Max Scheler(1874-1928)
CentennialEssays, ed. Manfred Frings (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974) (hereafter cited as
"Suffering"),p. 132; The Natureof Sympathy,trans. Peter Heath (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String
Press, 1973) (hereafter Sympathy),pp. 123-24, 161; Schriftenaus dem Nachlass, vol. 2, ed.
Manfred Frings (Bern: Francke, 1979), (hereafter Nachlass,2), pp. 190, 193.

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The Journal of Religion

cence, understood as a will to do good deeds for another. The essence

of love lies not in promoting the welfare of the beloved. We can love
a sunset, a deceased parent, a statue, or God without trying to do
something for them. Tired feet and an aching back are not synonyms
for love. We can be angry with others, refrain from doing good for
them, even deprive or hurt them, out of love.6 On the other hand,
helpful deeds can be done for a salary or out of vanity. Helpful deeds
may give pleasure, but love should never be reduced to giving
pleasure. Beneficence, moreover, typically lacks the intimacy that
belongs to love.7
Love, of course, promotes the well-being of the beloved, but only
where this well-being contributes to the person's overall perfection.
The deepest perfections cannot be directly willed into existence; to try
to do so would be to usurp the other's freedom.8 Beneficence usually
implies a striving for some goal. Unlike striving, however, love does
not have goals until it discovers a value that needs to be realized. As
Scheler remarks, What goal does a mother strive for when she
lovingly looks at her sleeping child?9
Desire and yearning.-Scheler distinguishes the phenomenon of love
from neediness in the lover. Love may give rise to desire or romantic
yearning for the beloved, but these are consequences of love and not
love itself. Naturalists often reduce love to a desire for the satisfaction
of some need such as sexual release. Love's movement is entirely
different. Desire and yearning fade when their goal or object is
attained, but love does not die.10 "Love either remains the same, or
it grows in its action in the sense of an increased penetration into its
object and an increased illumination of the object's initially hidden
value."'1 Desiring and longing can be satisfied, but love can never be
satisfied. The romance of the engagement may end, but, contrary to
Freud, love need not end with the marriage ceremony.12
States of feeling. -Perhaps the most common mistake is to confuse
love with the good feeling the lover has while loving. When people

6Sympathy,pp. 140-41; Genius des Kriegesund der deutscheKrieg (Leipzig: Weisen, 1917)
(hereafter Genius), pp. 86-87; Ressentiment,trans. William Holdheim (New York: Schocken
Books, 1972), pp. 92-93.
7Sympathy, pp. 140, 149, 195; Genius,p. 84; Ressentiment, pp. 118-19; Eternal,p. 367.
8Sympathy, pp. 14-41, 150; Soziologie,p. 84; Ressentiment, p. 87.
9Formalism in Ethicsand a Non-FormalEthicsof Value,trans. Manfred Frings and Robert Funk
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973) (hereafter Formalism),pp. 225-26, 337,
343-44, 507-8; Eternal,pp. 367-68; Sympathy,pp. 141, 163-64; "Suffering,"pp. 161-62.
"?Essays,pp. 112-14; Soziologie,p. 84; Sympathy,pp. 114, 180-209; Ressentiment, pp. 117-18,
181.
" Sympathy,p. 141.
'2Ibid., pp. 116, 141, 150, 187; Soziologie,pp. 84, 86, 94; Ressentiment,
pp. 87, 181; Essays, p.
113.

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 Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

argue against an "emotionalism" and in favor of an emotionally

neutral beneficence, what they distrust is usually the transience of
feeling good. To be sure, acts of love are always accompanied by
positive states of feeling, even if love is in some way frustrated or
rebuffed. But these accompanying feeling states are not the
phenomenon of love itself. "Being in love with love" should not be
confused with the act of love. The statement "I love strawberries"
normally means only that I feel good when I eat strawberries. These
pleasurable states are resonances in the lover's bodily, psychic, or
spiritual self; love itself, however, is focused on a beloved.'3
Love perdures, however great the variations in our states of
feeling. One who loves will necessarily suffer. If love were simply an
abundance of good feelings it would dwindle when it encountered
suffering. The Christian tradition has always recognized that there
can be suffering or exultation in love, but love is founded on the
beloved and not on these states. Analogously, according to Scheler,
God's creative love should not be understood as directed to his own
self-glorification. 14
Similar illusions occur when we "love" another because patterns,
habits, or states of feeling stimulate us to act. "There is, for example,
also a 'supposed love' that is only clinging, because we 'have done so
much' for someone or 'have invested so much energy and care into
him.' This is a form of valuation based on resentment: 'The good is
that which costs much.' Or there is the supposed love based on fleeing
oneself (an 'inability to be alone'). ... Or there is the pathological
captivity due to an attraction in the beloved object that is similar to
an earlier loved object. . . . The essence of love may not be judged
according to any of these possible illusions."15 Each of these is a form
of partial egoism. Each represents a failure to transcend oneself and
to move toward loving the other for himself or herself.
Directed feelings and value judgments.-Love, then, should not be
mistaken for beneficence or striving, nor for desiring or yearning, nor
for any state of feeling. Love is also essentially different from any
specific feelings for the beloved. Such feelings are directed only to
values or states that are already perceived in the object. "Love,
however, is a movement."'6 That is, directed feelings acknowledge
what is known, whereas love moves beyond the given. Anger,

'3Sympathy, pp. 14-41, 147-48, 153; Essays, pp. 120-21, 128-30; "Suffering," pp. 134-35,
154-55; Ressentiment, p. 189.
'4"Suffering," pp. 132-34, 154-55; Sympathy, pp. 141, 147; Soziologie, p. 92; Ressentiment, p.
181, Nachlass, 2:205.
'5Sympathy, pp. 160-61.
'6Ibid., p. 142.

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The Journal of Religion

delight, or admiration are examples of feelings responding to values

already present in an object. While love may begin with a present
value, it always moves beyond what is explicitly present.17
Sometimes love is called a value judgment, such as respect. Scheler
disagrees. We do not first approve this and that characteristic of the
object, and then conclude that the object is lovable. We first love the
whole being and then come to see its admirable qualities. We do not
say, "She's intelligent, gentle and beautiful, and therefore I love her,"
but, rather, "I love her, and she's so intelligent, gentle, and
beautiful." Love precedes rather than follows such value judgments. 18
Scheler rebuffs those who try to rationalize their love. He points
out that normally we cannot give reasons for our love and that the
reasons we adduce are never really sufficient to justify love's intensity
or particularity. The beloved is reason enough. Scheler notes that
love dispenses with "good standards" and that, in any case, these
standards themselves are post factum, taken from objects already
loved. Love seizes on the individual kernel of value of the beloved,
and this kernel can never be completely captured in any set of
universal judgments. 19"Love and hate have their own evidence that is
not to be measured according to the evidence of reason."20
Identzfication.-Another frequent mistake is to think of love as a
form of identification or fusion with the beloved. A mother who
identifies feels the suffering of her child as, not as if, her own. Some
sort of identification is a necessary prelude to love, but in the love act
the distinctness of lover and beloved is preserved and accentuated.2'
"The giving and receiving of freedom, independence and individ-
uality is essential to love."22 A wife absorbed in her husband is not
loving, however consumed her life may be in self-sacrificial service.
Those who identify romantically with the other often end by hating in
a desperate attempt to restore their autonomy.23
This difference between love and identification has metaphysical
implications. Every monistic metaphysic abolishes love by collapsing
the distinction between the lover and the beloved. Monistic theories
such as pantheism identify the lover and the beloved, making affir-
mation of the other nothing more than self-affirmation. True love, by

'7Ibid., pp. 141-42, 148-49, 153; Formalism,pp. 256-58, 261.

'sSchriftenaus demNachlass,vol. 1, 2d ed. (Bern: Francke, 1957) (hereafter Nachlass, 1), pp.
234, 273; Sympathy,pp. 148-150, 166-67.
'9Formalism,p. 488; Nachlass, 1:273; Sympathy,pp.149-50, 166-67.
20Sympathy, p. 150.
21Ibid., pp. 22, 26-27, 68-71, 78, 120.
22Ibid., pp. 70-71.
23Ibid., pp. 26-27, 44-44, 70; Essays, p. 94.

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 Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

contrast, enhances the distinctive character of both the lover and the
beloved.24

Feeling with and preference.-Love is sometimes wrongly thought to

be a form of shared feeling, such as sympathy or empathy. Shared
feelings, however, are reactive responses to the emotionally perceived
feelings of another; love is preeminently a spontaneous. act directed
toward valuable objects. We can share feelings of spite or envy; but
we cannot love with these feelings. Moreover, the range of love's
objects is dif'ferent. We can sympathize only with beings that feel;
love is not limited to feeling beings. We can also love ourselves; but
there is no genuine sympathizing with oneself'. Further, shared
feeling functions only within the bounds of some established social
relationship (e.g., a social club), but love can deepen or change the
relation itself from, say, that of fellow club members to that of close
friends. One who feels great sympathy for the poor or sick does not
love such persons until the relation is no longer simply for suffering
beings but for unique individuals.25
Love should not be confused with preference. We can love an
object, if' there is nothing present we prefer it to, or if there is
something else we prefer to it. Divorces often spring f'rom confusion
on this point. Love is not a choice between two objects. No one
should have to answer the question, "Do you love him or me?"26
Bond of interests.- Finally, love should not be mistaken for a bond of'
interests. We can have a bond of interests in evil actions just as much
as in good. There is unity among thieves. Love, however, generates a
unity only in higher values, ultimately in God. A partnership or bond
of' interests depends on an agreement, however tacit, and may be
terminated any time there is no longer a shared goal. Marital love,
for example, has been erroneously understood as a contract to secure
mutual interests. When one loves, one loves "for eternity." Love
endures even beyond the death of' the beloved. Scheler does not mean
to say that we cannot cease loving, only that we put no temporal
limits on our love. We cannot say, "I love you for a week."27
In Section I, we have seen how Scheler isolates a wide variety of
human activities that are intimately related to love but are not love
itself'. These actions and emotions will usually be present in our

24Sympathy, pp. 62-76, 78, 122-23; Eternal, pp. 195-96, 228-29; Soziologie, p. 86.
25FriiheSchriften (Bern: Francke, 1971), p. 400; Formalism, p. 261; Ressentiment, pp. 116-17;
Sympathy, pp. 66, 67-68, 99, 140-43, 150.
26Formalism, pp. 87-88, 261; Sympathy, pp. 148, 152-54; Nachlass, 1:273; Nachlass, 2:192.
Scheler's understanding of preference changed while writing Formalism and Sympathy.
27Formalism, pp. 91-92; Sympathy, p. 161; Essays, pp. 43, 80; Nachlass, 1:40-41, 159; Die
Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Wolff, 1917) (hereafter Ursachen), p. 21.

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The Journal of Religion

loving; some will always be present. But Scheler understands love to

be something more.

II. POSITIVE DESCRIPTIONS OF LOVE

In order to say what love is not we must have at least an implicit

understanding of what love is. Scheler offers not just one but several
descriptions of the experience of' love-a fact never acknowledged by
Scheler and seldom by his commentators. The goal of this essay is to
unify these descriptions.
Before beginning, we must look at the notion of "intentionality." In
the language of phenomenology, consciousness is always
"intentional," that is, consciousness of' something. Subject and object,
or, in personal relations, subject and subject, are essentially related;
they mutually require one another.
Intentionality is the interpretive framework in which we shall
consider Scheler's various descriptions of' love. We shall begin with
his description of' love as an intentional movement. Next we shall
consider the object' place in love, then the subjects role, and last, love
as the source of union.28

A. IntentionalMovement
Put most simply, Scheler describes love as "the intentionalmovementin
which from a given value A of an object the appearance of its higher
value realizes itself. And it is just this appearanceof the higher value
that stands in an essential connection with love."29
This description centers on the new appearance of values. Without
love, the object would be inertly what it is; any higher values in an
object would not be seen. One might infer that a stranger is precious,
but this preciousness would not come to appearance. In this sense,
love is the intentional act related to all those values that are greater
than the ones already present to emotional and cognitive conscious-
ness. Love is the key that gives entry into the "more" or the mystery
of each being.30

28Philosophical Perspectives, trans. Oscar Haac (Boston: Beacon Press, 19a8), pp. 10-11;
Eternal, pp. 184-88, 282-83; Formalism, pp. 265, 374; Nachlass, 1:39, 190-91. Nachlass, 2:243.
The choice of "intentionality" limits this paper to a phenomenology of love itself. We are unable
to explore here the relation of his idea of love to his idea of ethics, the other emotions,
anthropology, theory of history, sociology of knowledge, or religious metaphysics. I will treat in
another essay Scheler's interesting divisions of love into sexual, humanitarian, psychic,
spiritual, and amare Deum et mundum in Deo. I am concerned here only with the most formal
essence of love.
29Sympathy, p. 153.
30Ibid., pp. 92, 152-54, 192; Kreig und Aufbau (Leipzig: Weisen, 1916) (hereafter Krieg), p.
11; Formalism, p. 261; Nachlass, 1:82, 234.

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 Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

We saw before that love is not preference. We can now see why,
for Scheler, all preference is based on love. That is, in love a higher
value flashes out and is added to the values that have already been
seen; only then can preference take place. Since for Scheler ethical
knowledge is knowledge of what is higher and lower in value it
follows that "all of ethics would reach its completion in the discovery
of the laws of love and hate."'3
Love is not merely the subjective act of being more attentive.
Defining love as openness or attention puts the emphasis on the sub-
ject's activity, not on the object where it belongs, so that the inten-
tional relation is weakened or severed. Love is a presentiment of the
object's higher value being. It continues as a movement toward this
higher value. Greater alertness and interest are only consequences of
love.32 Love moves us to share in the mystery of the beloved. It
enters this mystery, uncertain whether the higher value of the beloved
is simply not yet apparent to us or whether it is there only as a poten-
tial still to be realized. Romeo loves Juliet not for the values he
knows she possesses or only for some values he is sure she may
someday realize, but for herself, without determining in advance the
actuality or potentiality of any such values.33
Scheler notes that love is not directed to "a"higher value but to the
object's "higher being of value." By this somewhat awkward distinc-
tion, he tries to forestall the objection that any directedness to a
higher value presupposes already knowing the higher value. The
father who forces his child to develop in a direction foreign to the
child does not love. Love implies a directedness only toward whatever
is of higher value. It is a journey into the unknown, into those
unknown values that will become clear only at the end of its
movement. The full value of the object is always more than what is
currently felt. The lover senses a horizon of value-we might call it
an aura of mystery-lying behind every value which he or she
already feelingfully knows. This horizon or higher being of value may
include new values or it may be a new depth of the values already
felt. Thus love always includes a sense of expectation and hope, and

3Formalism,p. 261. See also Essays, p. 99; Sympathy,pp. 153-54. Scheler's ethics has rightly
been seen as a synthesis of Kant and Nietzsche. Scheler has been called a Catholic Nietzsche
because he affirmed the rich variety of values that Nietzsche proclaimed part of every full life
and opposed the barrenness of Kantian formalism. He was trained as a Kantian and sought to
overcome Nietzsche's relativism through a revision of Kant's Gesinnungsethik and a priori
intuitions. To both of these authors, Scheler added an Augustinian-Pascalian emphasis on love
as the central act of human existence.
32Sympathy, pp. 71, 157-58; Soziologie,pp. 96-97.
33Sympathy, pp. 141, 154, 156-67, 192; Nachlass, 1:234; Ressentiment,
p. 181; Eternal,p. 311;
Nachlass, 2:191.

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TheJournal of Religion

love grounds a trust that exceeds legitimate inferences from past

experience. At the ontological level-the unified realm of all beings
including God-love intimates that reality is a fullness that we can
never exhaust.34
Objectivity.-The claim that love illuminates the unknown stands in
stark contrast to the aphorism that love is blind. Far from being
blind, love, according to Scheler, is essential to philosophical and
theological objectivity. Objectivity is made possible only by a loving
devotion to the object. Blindness is domination by a drive for power
or sex or some interest that merely uses the object for its own
purposes. The one who love overcomes such "distractions."35 Thus,
instead of being blind, love is the "root of all authentic objectivity, in
morality as well as in knowledge."36
Scheler accuses the rationalist of a programmatic blindness. The
seasoned lover sees the same deficiencies in the object that the ration-
alist sees. The lover, however, also sees what the cold, gray eyes of
the detached observer can never see. Only one who loves can pene-
trate to the value of the unique center of the beloved, a value core
that permeates all other values. The loving disciple, not the historian,
is the one who knows Jesus. The disciple has an evidence that is not
available to those who confine themselves within the strict canons of
reason or history.37
By the same token, Scheler rejected the common insistence on
disinterestedness. Such thinkers fail to distinguish between the
interest motivated, say, by pride or sensuality and the interest spring-
ing from love for an object. We need not divest ourselves of all
interests in order to be objective. The heightened interest of a genius
stems from a strong passionate love and leads to far greater
objectivity than is possible by a general proscription of interests.38 To
paraphrase Wordsworth, works of genius are love reflected upon in
tranquillity.

34Sympathy,pp. 141, 148, 154-59, 192; Nachlass, 1:133, 234; Essays, pp. 112-14, 116;
Formalism,p. 261. Scheler devoted considerable effort to show how there must be both process
and permanence in ethics.
35Eternal,pp. 74, 95-7, 298, 390; Nachlass, 1:192, 324-27; Perspectives, pp. 20-21, 40, 116;
"Metaphysics and Art," in Max Scheler(1874-1928) CentennialEssays, p. 109; Nachlass,2:244.
36Genius,p. 85. Scheler insisted on the objectivity of ethics. At the same time, he founded
ethical knowledge and activity in subjectivity; this has led a number of philosophers to compare
his thought with that of Kierkegaard, although Scheler seems to have been unaware of the
Danish thinker.
37Sympathy, pp. 149-50, 160, 166-68; Formalism,pp. 488, 491; Perspectives, pp. 20-21.
3Nachlass, 1:321-23, 329; Essays, pp. 125, 127, 130; Soziologie,pp. 94-95; Eternal,p. 311.

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 Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

B. Changes in the Object

The intentional relation, we saw, essentially involves a subject and an
object. Love, according to Scheler's phenomenology, affects both the
subject and the object. These changes cannot be readily observed by
a person with either a scientific or a practical attitude. The scientific
attitude accepts only what is recurring and measurable and is foreign
to the love relation; the practical attitude looks for the replicable and
the manipulable, which love abhors.
Let us begin with changes in the object. At first glance, it seems
that love does not change the object: the object stays the same
whether or not we love it; rather, in love we change, because we
take a new attitude toward the object. The question is this: Does love
bring about any changes in the beloved? When we say "These
mountains have been special since the Indians began to pray here,"
or "This velveteen rabbit has been made precious by my love," are we
simply speaking about ourselves?
Creativity.-Scheler frequently says that love creates new values.
We saw above that love brings about the existence of values relative
to the lover. That is, values first become available to explicit feeling,
preference, and choice insofar as love brings about their appearance.
Their existence relative to these acts, not their real existence, is
"created" by love.39
The values created by love are not projected on the object, or they
would be mere illusions. Rather, they are already in the ideal value
image of the object but have not yet appeared to feeling until love
reveals them. Love, therefore, should not be confused with any
idealization of the object. Such idealization usually reflects an
inability to free ourselves from our own ideas and preoccupations. By
contrast, love enables us to see the depth of value in the object. With
each new discovery of value, new possibilities are present to be
realized. On the social plane love acts as the fountainhead of all
culture and the foundation of every ethos.40 The world is endlessly
surprising and rich to those who love.
Ideal value essence.-We saw above that love is a movement toward
the higher being of value of an object and that love precedes or is

39Sympathy, pp. 113, 154; Formalism,p. 261; Nachlass, 1:127-28, 234, 307, 321-22. Scheler
developed a theory of a qualitative heirarchy of values as the foundation of his ethics. These
values are objective correlates of our emotional acts. That is, without emotions, especially love,
values could not be discovered and apprehended. This awareness of values can subsequently be
conceptualized, formed into judgments, and willed into reality. Scheler resisted all attempts to
make values merely objects of the intellect or will.
4?Sympathy, pp. 154, 156-54, 159-60; Formalism,p. 261; Soziologie,p. 96; Genius, p. 85;
Nachlass, 1:306-7, 321-22; Perspectives, pp. 20-21; SpateSchriften(Bern: Francke), p. 294.

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indifferent to any question of whether this higher value being is

actual or still needs to be realized. Accordingly, love does not work in
the realm of hypothetical imperatives, demanding that the object first
achieve some value before we love it. Speaking in the language of
grace, we do not have to make ourselves lovable before we can be
loved. Jesus did not say to Magdalene, "Change your life, and then I
will love you." Rather, he looked to her with love, and change
became possible. Still, to love an object as it is does not mean to
leave it as it is, for such acquiescence would deprive love of its
movement. Rather, the "as it is," the value being of the object loved,
is its ideal being. This ideal being is always both partially realized
and partially to be achieved. To use a Nietzschean expression, love
simply invites, "Become that which you are."41
It is wrong, therefore, to identify love with working to improve the
object. Teachers, social workers, even parents sometimes make this
mistake. The will to improve the object can flow as a consequence of
love. It can, on the other hand, pervert love if it turns into a
superficial attitude wherein only behavior is "improved." The
newlywed can turn into a nag. We feel demeaned and let down if we
discover that the encouraging remarks of a "friend" are really moti-
vated by a moralistic desire to change us. This manipulative attitude
violates the love consciousness. Rather, the lover's consciousness
continuously renews a standing invitation that the beloved reveal
itself as ever more valuable.42
Our love illumines the ideal essence of the beloved person.
Beginning perhaps with only a few actions or expressive gestures, we
grasp intuitively the direction of development required by the
person's value essence. This unique essence is, of course, not fully
given in a few actions, but from them a perceptive heart can sketch
the first lines of the beloved's identity.43
The more deeply we penetrate into a man through an understanding cogni-
tion guided by personal love, the more unsubstitutable, irreplaceable,
nonexchangeable, individual, and unique does he become for us. So much
the more do the various "wrappings"that are there fall from his individual
personal center. These "wrappings"refer to the more or less social "self' of
the man, the general bondage to similar drives, needs of life, and passions,
as well as to the idols of language that hide from us the individual nuances

4'Sympathy,pp. 128, 141, 154, 157-59; Soziologie,p. 84; Ressentiment,

p. 93; Nachlass, 1:234.
42Soziologie, p. 84; Sympathy, pp. 113, 152-53, 157-59; Essays, pp. 109-10; "Suffering," pp.
131-34.
43Essays,pp. 104, 107-8; Sympathy,pp. 122-23, 154, 160, 166-67; Formalism,pp. 477, 485,
488, 491; Nachlass, 1:234.

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 Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

of experience insofar as they allow us to apply the same words and signs to
them.44
Personal love uncovers the essence of another's life and affirms every
action that moves in the direction of that essence or destiny. The
beloved is invited to grow in the direction of the ideal image which
love unveils, an image taken from the beloved in the first place. A
sense of repose in what the person has already attained is accom-
panied by new hope for what is yet to be realized.45
The popular claim that people know what is best for themselves is
groundless. Persons who hate themselves often come to discover and
love their ideal essence through responsive co-loving with the one
who loves them. Zacchaeus came to love what Jesus loved in him.
When we love, we make it possible for the beloved to be transformed
and ultimately to achieve that salvation which is the destiny toward
which God's creative love is beckoning. The Christian God is not
merely a Grecian all-knowing God who contemplates eternal essences
in himself; he is an all-loving God who redeems his creation. When
we co-love with God's love, we effectively co-create with God the
beloved's salvation.46
Affirmation.-Although Scheler does not often describe love as an
act of emotional affirmation, the idea perhaps best explains love's
power to change its object. Of course, love is not merely a warm
approval of what is already present. The movement of love joins the
object in its dynamism towards fullness.47 "All authentic love affirms
its object in the goal-direction of growing towards its own ideal value
essence."48 Love's affirmation means "intentionally" sharing and
promoting the beloved's tendency to grow. We can even oppose
particular qualities, deeds, and expressions when these are not
consonant with the beloved's ideal essence.49
In a religious context, we can say that, originally, God's affirma-
tion moves an essence from ideal to reality. Human love participates
in and continues this divine affirmation. By cooperating with the
direction of the object's growth toward perfection, human love assists
the beloved in achieving higher value being. In so doing, human love

44Sympathy, p. 121.
45Essays,pp. 113-14; Formalism,pp. 488, 491; Sympathy,pp. 128, 168.
46Sympathy, pp. 70-71, 127-28, 160, 164; Essays,pp. 99, 106-7, 111-13; Formalism,pp. 488,
490-91; Soziologie,pp. 89, 92-93; Genius,p. 84; "Suffering,"p. 162.
47Essays,pp. 109-10; Sympathy,p. 153; Soziologie,p. 81; Spate Schriften,p. 277; Nachlass,
2:190.
48Eternal,p. 229.
49Ibid., pp. 196, 367; Sympathy,pp. 70, 122, 149-50, 152-53, 166-67; Nachlass,1:273; Essays,
pp. 107-8; Ressentiment, p. 109; "Suffering,"pp. 129-30, 160, 162.

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The Journal of Religion

cooperates with God's creative love.50

Redemptionof creation.-Thus far in this section we have seen that
love is not a calculating will to improve but rather an act that
progressively illumines the ideal value essence of a being and then
affirms that being in realizing its full value. This affirmation may
take place through helpful deeds, through offering to the beloved a
vision of his ideal possibilities, through evoking a return love, and so
forth.
Change brought about by love's affirmation is possible only if the
object is open to growth. The invitation to development marks love's
most profound effect in the object. In the movement of love, the
higher value streams forth of itself from the loved object and not as if
it is manufactured by the activity of the lover.5' But what can we say
about objects of nature which are not obviously open to the invitation
of the lover's affirmation? For an answer, Scheler turns to Francis of
Assisi and to Augustine.
According to Scheler, Francis so loved nature that natural objects
became brother and sister to him. His love also revealed that God,
because of his love of the world, had incorporated the material world
into himself as his body. The world shares his dynamism. Scheler
takes from Augustine an explanation of this change in the object.
The appearance of the image or of meaning in the intellectual act . .. , and
similarly the increasing fullness in the givenness of the object with increasing
love and interest, is for Augustine not merely an activity of the knowing
subjectwho penetrates into the already present object, but is at the same time
a responsive answer of the objectitself:a "self-giving,"a "self-revelation"and
"opening"of the object, i.e., a genuine self-revelationof the object. It is "love's
question," as it were, to which the world "answers"insofar as it opens itself
and thereinfirst comesto itsfull beingand value.52
This process is likened by Scheler to a redemptive process wherein a
loved object is freed from its closed existence. The world opens itself
when one loves it and thereby moves toward its fullest destiny.
Human labor spiritualizes matter; love redeems it.53
Scheler contrasts this Augustinian understanding with the Platonic
theory of eros, in which objects strive toward an idea that eternally
precedes them; deficient, changing beings strive for the stability of
being; ignorant philosophers desire to remember the eternal truth.
Nothing truly new or creative occurs, merely gradual participation in

50Essays,pp. 109-12; Soziologie,p. 92; Eternal,pp. 226-27, 304, 312, 448; Genius,p. 84;
Krieg, p. 8; Nachlass, 1:192-93, 273; Nachlass,2:193, 203.
51Nachlass,1:322; Soziologie,pp. 93, 96-97; Sympathy,pp. 87-91, 157; "Suffering,"p. 154.
52Soziologie, pp. 96-97.
53Nachlass,1:192-93, 322; Eternal,pp. 302, 304; SpateSchriften,p. 272; Soziologie,pp. 280-83.

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 Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

a preexistent sphere. This eros is noncreative since it does not strive

to bring forth something new but only to reproduce according to a
pregiven type. As sexual love, for instance, Platonic eros merely
maintains the species rather than improves it.54 Scheler suggests that
in genuine love there is no pregiven type, but that the very essence of
the object is co-formed into as yet unimagined possibilities.55 Some-
thing new comes to be in the very movement of love. Sexual love is
not directed to producing merely more children but, rather, to
allowing life to bring forth better creation.56 Through divine love,
objects are not merely what they are but also come to participate in
God, and God in them.
We are now in a position to understand one of Scheler's formula-
tions that underlines the creativity of love in the object. "Loveis the
movementin which everyconcrete,individual objectthat bears values attains to
the highest value possiblefor it and in accordwith its ideal determination,or
love is the movementin which it reachesthe ideal value-essencethat is properto
it" (emphasis in original).57
Range of objects.-Love has no restrictions as to its object. It is a
movement able to intend any object that bears values. Thus, personal
love is not limited to either self or others.58 Two errors are possible
here. The first is to reduce love of others to a subtle form of self-love.
For example, some argue that all love is merely a way to increase
one's own happiness or self-esteem; some say they love others so as to
achieve their own salvation. This reduction, of course, makes a sham
of real love for the other. The second error is to deny love for oneself
and to attempt to love only others. Christians, for example;
frequently speak as if the only worthwhile love is a love for others.
They admit to loving themselves only as a way of keeping the beast
alive so it can love others for yet another day. This turn to others,
Scheler remarks, is all too often a flight from being chez soi. Social
reformers are often moved more by uncomfortableness with

pp. 80, 82-87, 92, 95-96; Eternal,pp. 73-74; Essays, pp. 132-33; Sympathy,pp.
54Soziologie,
82-83, 110-13; Ressentiment, pp. 84-86. In Scheler'slast writings, erosis a creative principle and
is dynamically united with spiritual love (Nachlass,2:193).
55SpateSchriften,p. 289; Sympathy,p. 157. Through 1922, Scheler held the Augustinian
position that God "loves and contemplates the goals and essential ideas of all things before they
are created"(Essays, p. 110). At the same time, he held that love brought about not merely a
change in appearance of a thing, but a growth in its essence (Nachlass, 1:322). In his last
writings he resolved this tension by rejecting the thesis that God has a prevision of essences of
real beings. Rather, God knows them only as they are formed in history (SpateSchriften,p. 289;
Nachlass,2:121, 206, 246, 257, 260).
56Ressentiment,pp. 86-87; Soziologie,p. 95; Sympathy,pp. 110-13, 124-25, 192-93.
57Sympathy, p. 161; see also Nachlass, 1:234.
58Sympathy,pp. 70, 148, 150, 162-63, 196-270; Ressentiment,pp. 94-95, 124-25; Frihe
Schriften,p. 400.

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TheJournal of Religion

themselves than by love for others. Our love has a good and
necessary object close at hand, namely, ourselves. A lack of self-love,
Scheler urges, is ultimately deadly. It is a refusal to cooperate with
God's action.59
Love should not be restricted to interpersonal relations. We can
love a community of persons, and in two senses: we can love the
whole group and we can love the individuals as members of that
group. We can, for example, love a family, and love persons because
we love their family. Contrary to Comte and others, we can, on the
other hand, love individuals apart from, even in spite of, their rela-
tionship to a group; for example, an anti-Semite can have close
Jewish friends.60
Love, moreover, is not limited to inferior or to superior beings.
Scheler viewed the Greek tradition of eros as a claim that one can
love only what is more valuable than oneself. This theory implies that
God cannot love at all since there is no being superior to him in
value.61 According to Scheler, early Christian tradition reversed
ancient tradition and said that love is directed to that which is
inferior. In this view, the very essence of God is to move toward
sinners and the disenfranchised; human beings become like God by
similarly loving.62 For Scheler, love is open equally to the weak and
to the strong. Love is directed to the positive values in the beloved,
whether the beloved is poor and suffering or rich and exalted. Thus
Scheler accounts for the fact that God can love us and we can love
God.63
Finally, it is a mistake to limit love to human beings. We can love
all sorts of nonhuman objects, from mountains, pet cats, and
paintings by Picasso, to God himself. The value of a symphony or of
God is not merely a projection of human rationality or needs onto the
universe. Either we love objects for themselves, or we have merely an
instrumental relation with them.64
What can be said here in response to the earlier question: Does
love bring about any changes in the beloved? Is it true that to every
59Ressentiment,pp. 94-97, 124-26, 131; Sympathy,pp. 69-71, 151-52; Essays, pp. 120-22;
Soziologie,p. 86.
60Sympathy, pp. 101, 142-43, 151-52, 194.
6'Ressentiment,pp. 84-85; Soziologie,pp. 83-88.
62Ressentiment,pp. 84-88; Soziologie,pp. 88, 93.
63Sympathy, pp. 144, 154-56, 162, 164; Soziologie,p. 90; Ressentiment,p. 91. As Scheler
rethought his ideas of God, he developed what I think is a bipolar evolutionary panentheism.
See my dissertation, "AnthropologicalFoundations of Scheler's Ethics of Love" (Northwestern
University, 1978), chap. 8. Love became the source of growth even in God. Scheler may have
changed his conception of God in order to protect the creativity of love. Our love for God and
his world implies growth in him (Nachlass,2:193, 203, 265).
64Sympathy, pp. 154-56, 165.

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love there is an effect in the object? Obviously, love makes us willing

to foster and promote by word, deed, or any other means, the
development of the beloved. More fundamentally, love is an affirma-
tion that opens the beloved to a new possibility for itself. The beloved
is invited to rise to its own fullness. In this sense, love effects a
change in the possibility for change. Finally, just as human labor
spiritualizes or enculturates matter, so also human love brings the
material world into that redemptive order for which God destined it.

C. Changesin the Subject

We began this section by saying that love is an intentional relation
between subject and object. We then discussed love's effects in the
object. We now turn to the changes in the subject. Developments in
the lover, though more obvious than those in the beloved, are
nonetheless difficult to articulate. Scheler describes some salient
features of these changes in the subject.
asfreedom
Self-transcendence from determinism. -We have seen that love
is, in its most formal essence, an uplifting action moving toward the
growth of a being. In the lover, love brings about a growth in
freedom and slowly overcomes self-centeredness. With spiritual love
we go beyond the level of bodily drives and demands. We are
essentially different from other animals in the autonomy of our spirits
from our vital functions and from the spatiotemporal particularity to
which these functions otherwise limit us.65 Through spiritual love we
gradually free ourselves from the social conditioning of class,
tradition, and culture and from prejudices that belong to the
everyday consciousness. Love enables us to transcend our social and
historical limitations.66 Scheler does not, of course, argue that
spiritual love eliminates, or acts completely apart from, bodiliness or
social environment. Rather, each level of love is authentically itself
only when it is not controlled by the lower levels of human existence.
Love overcomes mere infatuation with the senses or with some
cultural ideology.67
Human beings have drives for sex, power, or nourishment which
interact to form a system of needs and satisfactions. This drive
system, responding to environment, selects the kinds of objects we

65Nachlass,1:237, 306-7, 324-25; Nachlass, 2:243; Ressentiment, pp. 84, 134-35; Essays, pp.
106-7, 109-10; Soziologie,p. 90; SpateSchriften,pp. 272-74; Perspectives,pp. 7, 25, 29, 40. For
Scheler's view of how the spiritual and biological sides of being human have been related in six
different Western typologies, see my article "Max Scheler's Anthropology" in PhilosophyToday
23, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 238-48.
66Eternal,p. 375; Sympathy,pp. 152, 160; Soziologie,p. 90; Essays, p. 106.
67Nachlass,1:114, 306-7, 324; SpateSchriften,p. 277.

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The Journal of Religion

initially love but does not determine the nature of love or the
particular objects. Scheler's image for a drive is a torch that
illuminates portions of a wall without determining the nature either
of the objects on the wall or of the act of seeing. Drives push out in
all directions, seeking satisfaction.68
Scheler explains by this analysis of drives why we tend to love
those closest to us, while neglecting other, perhaps more valuable,
persons. An American is more likely to love his family than to love
the Queen of England or a thousand people starving in Pakistan.
Our drive system tends to limit us to those who satisfy our basic
needs. Scheler's analysis also attempts to explain why we are more
attracted to the comely, powerful, or rich than to the ugly, infirm or
impoverished.69
The selectivity of the drives is overcome by the unrestricted move-
ment of spiritual love. Love has the power to outlast the drives, to go
beyond their initiating stimulus. The lover thereby attains both self-
possession and, as we shall shortly see, participation in an objective
world.70
If we have only onceexperienced how one feature which is worthy of love
emerges next to another-whether in the same object or another-or how
another feature of still higher value emerges over and above one we had
taken till now as the "highest"in a particular value-region, then we have
learned the essence of progress or penetration into this realm. Then we can
see that this realm cannot have precise boundaries. . . . Love loves and in
loving always looks beyond what it has in hand and possesses. The drive-
impulse which arouses it may tire out; love itself does not tire out. This
sursumcordawhich is the essence of love may take on fundamentally different
forms at different heights of the value regions. ... A love that is essentially
infinite-however much it is broken, bound, and particularized by the
specific organization of its bearer-demands for its fulfillment an infinite
good.71
Once we have seen the unrestricted character of love, then we
understand how anything that stops this expansive movement is
destructive of self-transcendence.72 By nature love moves beyond
such limitations and becomes ever more spontaneous.73 Without self-
transcending love, human beings would become merely animals. The

pp. 187-88; Nachlass, 1:97, 118, 159; Essays, pp. 112-14; Formalism,p. 538.
68Sympathy,
pp. 187-92; Essays, p. 112.
69Sympathy,
7?SpateSchriften, p. 277; Sympathy, p. 192.
7"Essays,pp. 112-14.
72Ibid., pp. 110, 114-16; Sympathy,pp. 157-58, 160, 167.
91, 93, 97-103; Sympathy,p. 144.
73Ressentiment,

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 Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

whole human being is a bridge or transition between the animal

sphere and God.74 It is love that keeps this transition in process.
Self-transcendenceas participation.-The movement of love frees us
from isolation. Love opens us to union with the dynamism of the
other. Love gives birth to the spirit by enabling it to participate in the
world and thus become spirit.75
In our account love was thus always the primal act by which a being,
without ceasing to be this one delimited being, abandons itself, in order to
share and participate in another being as an ens intentionale.This partici-
pation is such that the two in no way become real parts of one another.
What we call "knowing,"which is an ontological relation, always presup-
poses this primal act of abandoning the self and its conditions, its own
"contents of consciousness," a transcending of them, in order to come into
experiential contact with the world as far as possible. And what we call "real"
or actual presupposes that some subject wills the realization of something,
while this act of willing presupposes an anticipatory loving that gives it
direction and content. Thus, love is always what awakens both knowledge
and volition; indeed, it is the mother of spirit and reason itself.76
Love enables us to transcend ourselves and to participate in all
essential aspects of nature and history. We go beyond ourselves and
we gain the world. "Homo est quadammodo omnia." All essences of
the world become progressively ours through this participatory love.77
The restlessness of our heart means that personal and world history
advance, not through anxiety before death or through a dialectic of
negations, but rather through a creative and participative love.78
Primacy of love.-Love is the principle of self-transcendence, the
mother of spirit, and thus it precedes any conceptual knowledge or
volition. Scheler explicitly rejects the tradition of Western philosophy
and theology that says we cannot love what we do not know. Love is

74VomUmsturzder Werte,5th ed. (Bern: Francke, 1972) (hereafter Umsturz),pp. 186, 189-95;
Spate Schriften,pp. 274, 294, 297; Nachlass, 1:65-69; Genius, pp. 273, 275; Formalism,pp.
288-92.
75Sympathy,pp. 152, 160, 167, 192, 255-56; Genius,pp. 65, 85, 120; Perspectives, p. 40; Essays,
p. 110; SpateSchriften,pp. 266, 277.
76Essays,p. 110.
7Perspectives,
pp. 20-21, 40; Sympathy,p. 156; Nachlass,1:192, 320-21, 325, 327; Eternal,pp.
73, 196; Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft,2d ed. (Bern: Francke, 1960) (hereafter
Wissensformen), pp. 204-5.
78Umsturz,pp. 186-87; Eternal, pp. 96, 227, 375-76; Man's Place in Nature, trans. Hans
Meyerhoff (New York: Noonday Press, 1973), p. 55; Essays, pp. 109, 114; Nachlass,1:192-96;
SpateSchriften,pp. 271-74, 294. Scheler understood the spiritual person as the dynamic center
of a rich variety of emotional, intellectual, and volitional acts. The human person is a
composite of spirit and Drang,roughly, "biologicalthrust."Drangis the seat of physiological and
psychological drives, sensations, and feelings. Spiritual love and biological eros interpenetrate
as a person matures (Nachlass,2:193, 211).

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knowledge's "pioneer and guide."79 We could never know another or

will any project without this prior act of participatory self-
transcendence. More positively, we grow in knowledge and try to
achieve some project only if there is some valuable object we love.80
Scheler calls love the very "root of the spirit," since it precedes or
grounds our theoretical and practical acts.81
Man, before he is an ens cogitansor an ens volens,is an ENS AMANS. The
fullness, the gradations, the differentiations, and the power of his love
circumscribes the fullness, the functional specificity, and the power of his
possible spirit and of his own possible range of contact with the universe...
The things and properties of that which he can have knowledge do not
define and delimit his value-world; his world of essential values circum-
scribes and defines the being he can know, raising it up out of the sea of
being like an island. Where his heart is attached, there for him is the "core"
of the so-called essence of things.82
Thus one cannot, according to Scheler, simply choose to love, since
choice is subsequent to the originating activity of love. One can and
one ought freely to consent to or resist the movement of love toward
this or that object, but one cannot simply decide to love.83 Love's
movement is primary.
Ordo amoris. -The primacy of love in no way implies that love is
blind or that it randomly flits about, like a butterfly, from object to
object. When we affirm persons, we align ourselves with the rightly
ordered love that forms their true identity. To say that persons are
radically individual, according to Scheler, is to say that each has a
different ordo amoris. In a word, persons love differently. This is not
merely to say that they love different objects or persons but, rather,
that their structure of love is distinctive. The descriptive ordo amoris
constitutes a person's most basic direction or orientation in life.84
The ordoamorisis the means whereby we can discover, behind the initially
confusing facts of man's morally relevant actions, behind his expressions, his
wishes, customs, needs, and spiritual works, the simplest structure
of the most
elementary goals of the goal-directed core of the person, the basic ethical
formula, so to speak, by which he exists and lives morally. . . . Whoever has

79Formalism,
p. 261; Nachlass,1:324; Eternal,pp. 88-89, 228-29; Essays,pp. 127-28; Nachlass,
2:61-64, 193, 243-44.
p. 132; SpateSchriften,p. 257; Eternal,p. 88-89; Nachlass, 1:264.
80Ressentiment,
8'SpateSchr2ften,
pp. 257, 277, 297; Soziologie,pp. 92, 94-97; Wissensformen,
p. 204; Perspectives,
p. 40; Eternal,pp. 88-89; Nachlass, 2:61-64, 76.
82Essays,pp. 110-11.
83Nachlass,1:126, 234; Formalism,pp. 260-61; Essays, p. 106; Soziologie,p. 96; Sympathy,pp.
p. 32.
71, 154; Perspectives,
84Essays,pp. 99-110, 116-18; Formalism,pp. 385-86, 515; Nachlass, 1:132, 264; Perspectives,
pp. 32-33.

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the ordo amoris of a man has the man himself.He has for the man as moral
subject what the crystallization formula is for the crystal. . . . He sees before
him the constantly simple and basic lines of his heartrunning beneath all his
empirical many-sideness and complexity. . . . He has a spiritual schema of
the primary source which secretly nourishes everything emanating from this
man. 85
The descriptive ordo amoris, on the one hand, selects the range or
type of object we tend toward and, on the other hand, is itself a
pattern set by our previous loves.86 Ultimately, our perfection as a
person is measured strictly according to the degree of development of
our love.87 Our ordo amoris expands to include ever more nuanced,
higher, and more spiritual values, or it contracts to focus ever more
on the lower values. In this expansion or contraction, we create a
morally perfect or empty self.88
In this section, we have seen that love is the source of change in
the subject. It is a twofold source of self-transcendence. First, the
subject becomes increasingly free of physical, biological, and psycho-
logical determinisms; second, the subject is able to participate in
beings other than itself for the other's sake and thereby is expanded.
We have seen, in addition, that love is prior to all other acts and is,
in this sense, their source. Finally, we have seen that love's ordered
direction is the source of the continually developing uniqueness of the
lover. In all these changes, love shows itself to be creative of the
identity of the lover.

D. Love as Union
We have concentrated so far on Scheler's central descriptions of love.
In remarks that are less than thoroughly developed but, I believe,
fundamental for understanding his last writings, Scheler attributes to
love the power to unite lover and beloved.89 Possibly the most
deficient aspect of Scheler's treatment of love is his lack of attention to
the bond between lovers. He seldom considers the union and the
shared world that such thinkers as Tillich, Teilhard, and Fromm
consider to be the very essence of love. Most people think first of the
unitive power of love; Scheler prefers the words "participation" and

85Essays, pp. 99-100.

86Ibid., pp. 101-2; Soziologie,pp. 95-96; Nachlass,1:223-25, 262, 264, 272-74; Formalism,pp.
574-76; Perspectives,pp. 32, 38; Sympathy,pp. 167-68.
87Perspectives,pp. 19, 33-34, 38, 47; Nachlass, 1:224, 238-39; Sympathy, pp. 163, 165, 167-68;
Formalism, pp. 385, 515, 537; Ressentiment, p. 109.
88SpateSchriften,pp. 274, 297; Formalism,pp. 515, 537; Nachlass,1:238-39; Sympathy,pp. 163,
165.
89Sympathy,pp. 70-71, 159; Nachlass, 1:41, 161.

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The Journal of Religion

"co-performance"to "union"because it is possible to love objects and

persons without communion taking place. Friendship requires
mutuality, but love does not. Nevertheless Scheler does not deny that
love moves toward union. Love works to achieve union among living
things within the life sphere.90Among human beings love is a "power
that creates unity and forms the human community ever more
extensively and intensively."91 Love finds its culmination and
ultimate goal in a community of solidarity and love with and in
God.92
An important characteristic of love between human beings is that
by its very essence it evokes a response of love from the one loved. By
the "reciprocityof love," Scheler means that there is a prevoluntary
tendency toward a return love. One can refuse this return of love,
but this refusal is then experienced as a nonfulfillment of the very
essence of being loved.93 When Magdalene feels loved by Jesus, she
"can"no longer sin because she is united to him. Love is the lifeblood
of a moral solidarity of all persons with one another. With every act
of love performed or omitted, a community of love grows or
dwindles. Persons who have been loved become more able to love in
return; persons who have been denied love are malnourished in their
ability to love. Thus love builds, and a lack of love destroys, union
among persons.94
Love not only transforms individuals; it also weaves together all of
reality into the Kingdom of God. The effects of love are, on the one
hand, the increased independence of the subject, and, on the other,
"the solidary membership and true co-responsibility of all souls to
God in one body which truly embraces them."95 The unity of
humanity is not the starting point of history, but its destiny. And so
Scheler envisions the end of history: "the great invisible solidarityof all
living beingswith one another in All-Life, of all spirits in the eternal
Spirit, and, at the same time, the solidarityof the worldprocesswith the
fate of the becomingof its highestground and the solidarity of this ground
with the world process."96

p. 116.
90"Suffering,"p. 132; Perspectives,
9tKrieg, p. 8.
92Formalism, pp. 533-41; Eternal,pp. 374-77, 390; Sympathy,pp. 128-29, 164-65, 194-95;
pp. 106-7.
Soziologie,pp. 90, 230-31; SpateSchriften,p. 294; Ressentiment,
93Formalism, pp. 535-38; Sympathy,pp. 102, 159, 164-65; Ursachen,p. 144; Nachlass, 1:201;
Soziologie, p. 90.
94Sympathy,pp. 144, 164-65; Formalism, pp. 536-38; Eternal, p. 448; Ressentiment, pp. 106-8.
95Eternal, p. 382; Sympathy, pp. 70-71; Ressentiment, pp. 106-7; Nachlass, 2:193, 201, 262-63.
96Perspectives,pp. 105, 115.

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 Scheler's Phenomenology of Love

III. CONCLUSION

Scheler returned time and again to the theme of love. This human
act fascinated him, as it has fascinated poetic spirits of all ages. He
wanted to demonstrate that love is not one human act among others,
not even the highest and most important of acts. Love is the heart of
a person, the font of spirit, the power leading to growth, the bond
tying human beings, the world, and God into cosmic unity. In sum,
love is a movement of the heart that creates and enhances the value
of both the lover and the beloved through a union that affirms their
respective dynamisms.
The world was, for Scheler, endlessly overflowing, constantly
surprising. He once remarked he wished he could begin every day as
if he had just been born. The energy and exuberance of his own life
translated itself into his philosophy of love. Love is a movement, or,
in more contemporary terms, love is the dynamism of life and of the
spirit. Where there is love, there is greater vitality, richer beauty,
deeper ideas, stronger fidelity, more profound religion. Love's eyes
see the unique and the special in the beloved. Love's heart beats with
the dynamism of the beloved and affirms the beloved for what it is
and for what it can become. Love's arms reach out and embrace the
beloved, bringing it into the family of all creation. Love's prayer joins
God's own love and redeems the world through his own participation
and enfleshment in his world.
Our identity is constituted by a movement toward the Beyond who
is God in our midst. We love ourselves in union with the creative
love that God has for us. We love others and the world with that
same love that is perfecting all creation and drawing all beings into
union with one another and him. For Scheler, the perfection of the
universe will be reached when God is in all and all is in God. Love is
the dynamism for fulfilling this ultimate goal.

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