On Scheler and Psychiatry

In his article, “Scheler, Phenomenology, and Psychopathology,” John Cutting has, once again, performed an extremely valuable service by drawing our attention to some largely forgotten or ignored resources in the history of psychiatry and philosophy. In 1987, together with Michael Shepherd, Cutting edited a brilliant anthology of German and French contributions to the psychopathology of schizophrenia, including crucial texts by Gustav Störring, Joseph Berze, Ludwig Binswanger, Paul Matussek, and Eugene Minkowski, among others. In his own books, especially Principles of Psychopathology: Two Worlds—Two Minds—Two Hemispheres (1997), Psychopathology and Modern Philosophy (1999), and The Living, the Dead, and the Never-Alive: Schizophrenia and Depression as Fundamental Variants of These (2002), Cutting has offered fascinating applications of such psychopathologists as well as of figures from the history of philosophy. In the present target article as well as in a recent publication (Scheler’s The Constitution of the Human Being [2008]), he calls our attention to the most neglected of the major authors in the phenomenological tradition: Max Scheler, who died in 1928 at age 53 after having produced work that, at the time of Scheler’s death, made Heidegger consider him the greatest contemporary philosopher (Cutting 2009, 143).

Anyone who has been so admired, and has had such influence, is well worth examining for the conceptual resources his work may offer. In his article, Cutting shows that Scheler’s ideas closely parallel a number of ideas and approaches whose value is more widely recognized, including the Bergsonian approach that Eugene Minkowski took to schizophrenia. Cutting also draws a sharp contrast with both Husserl and Heidegger, claiming that Scheler offers a richer and more comprehensive phenomenology that avoids the different polarizations or oversimplifications of these more famous thinkers. He argues that Scheler offers a richer framework for psychopathology.

I am grateful for being introduced to a phenomenologist whose name is so famous but whose work I barely know. My own reaction to John Cutting’s discussion of and claims about Scheler is somewhat ambivalent, however. I see the appeal of Scheler’s approach to several important questions, including the duality of Geist and Drang and the notion of distinct forms of emotion corresponding with distinct levels in a rank-ordering of values ranging from “agreeableness” and “utility” through to the “spiritual.” Of particular interest to students of schizophrenia such as myself is the way Scheler’s perspective might help to conceptualize forms of psychopathology that involve a diminishment not (or not primarily) of intellectual level, abstraction, or self-consciousness but, rather, of the instinctual or motivational elements that are the sources of our vitality and practical orientation. Elsewhere I have referred to this as the notion of an Apollonian or even Socratic illness (Sass 1994, 116). (The Dionysian/Apollonian/Socratic distinction comes, of course, from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.) Such a view is not, however, unique to Scheler, nor was Scheler the first to introduce related ideas that could fruitfully be applied to schizophrenia or to psychopathology more generally. I would have appreciated a more specific account of just why one should, for instance, prefer Scheler on Geist-versus-Drang to, say, Bergson and Minkowski on intellect-versus-intuition or spatial-versus-temporal modalities.

On Cutting’s account, Scheler conceives of Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction” as an act that eliminates the Dionysian elements of experience and institutes a more abstract and disengaged orientation to existence. Some supposed effects of disengagement that Scheler describes do have a kind of immediate intuitive plausibility. A good example, mentioned in Cutting’s article, is the tendency for identity between particular objects or events to be perceived via the isolation of abstract essences rather than through more pragmatic means (e.g., how two objects may serve the same need in the experiencing organism). In a work called “My Theory of the Cognitive and Methodological Aspects of Metaphysics” (in Scheler, The Constitution of the Human Being, 2008), Scheler presents a long series of experiential transformations that supposedly occur as consequences of this disengagement—including, rather early, loss of “causal interconnections,” then loss of accidentalness, later loss...