Brief Notices

BRIEF NOTICES The Nature of Sympathy. By MAX ScHELER. Translated by Peter Heath. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. Pp. 328 with index. $5.00. Philosophical Essays. By A. J. AYER. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1934. Pp. 298 with index. $4.50. Max Scheler (1874-1928), who along with Brentano and Husserl must be counted among the founders of Phenomenology, completed the first edition of this book in 1912 and it was published the following year in Halle. A second and greatly revised edition appeared in Bonn in 1922. The present translation is based on the fifth edition, substantially identical with the second, edited by Maria Scheler and, published at Frankfurt-am-Main in 11>48. This book is of moment not only because the two significant editionsthe first and the second-span the most productive decade of Scheler's career, but also because it contains most of the themes characteristic of Scheler's philosophy. This translation is of moment not only because it is the first of Scheler's works in English, but also because of the lucid and balanced " Introduction " by Prof. Stark. This really is an introduction to Scheler's general philosophical and religious positions. The root problem raised here by Scheler is how we know other human persons. Much of the book is a criticism of two theories which hold that our knowledge of other men is indirect. The first of these theories is to the effect that we know others by reasoning from analogy based on our experience of the self. The second theory is that we know others by feeling ourselves into them, by empathy. Both theories, apart from their individual falsities, agree. on a common principle which Scheler holds is especially false, namely, that self-knowledge precedes and is more fundamental than knowledge of others. Scheler's own view is that our knowledge of the psychic life of others is direct, because originally experience of self and of others is undifferentiated ; consciousness is originally common and contains in principle the experience of others as well as the experience of the self. Both the ego and the· non-ego are originally given in a common life-experience. Later' sel/consciousness supervenes and gives rise to egocentrism which in metaphysics is named "relative solipsism" and in ethics is nambed "selfishness." This egocentrism is destroyed only through love and sympathy, which enable us to perceive that each human person is as real and as valuable as we are. Of these two, love is the more fundamental. For sympathy is a response 559 560 BRIEF NOTICES to the experience of others based on and limited by an underlying love. Love, not knowledge, enables us to penetrate into the innermost recesses of the person. In love, the perceived value realized in the person is but a starting point. For the lover has a double vision of the beloved: he is seen and loved just exactly as he is, for himself; yet he is seen also in all that he might be. Love, then, is itself the force which strengthens the beloved to move from the lower to the higher state, from potency to act. It is a motion, as well as an emotion. It is impossible to read anything of Scheler's without being saddened by the tragedy of the personal life of this gifted, restless, wilful man. The personal problems which darkened the last seven years of his brief life darkened too the light of his intellect. It is to Prof. Stark's honor that his "Introduction," which so vigorously calls attention to Scheler's genius, does not flinch from acknowledging the gradual decay of that genius. The Nature of Sympathy is not without shadows anticipating the later darkness , for the second edition was published at a crucial time in Scheler's personal life. But it is not without brilliant truth, either. It is, like its author, mixed; but as yet the brilliance, the insight, the simple truth, predominate. Professor Ayer's Philosophical Essays is, in spirit, as far removed from Scheler's Sympathy as two books in philosophy can be. Professor Ayer, of course, is no phenomenologist; he is an analyst. He is probably...