Max Scheler's Religious Philosophy in the Light of His Theory of an “Emerging Anthropology”

The article deals with the main directions of Max Scheler's philosophy, whose contribution to the development of the theory of knowledge and personality can hardly be overestimated. The author of the article aims to consider a most important part in the theory of knowledge - contemplation of the religious and moral knowledge in Scheler's philosophy. That would be impossible without a prior consideration of his basic principles in aforementioned fields because Scheler's philosophical theory is highly complicated: it links closely personality, knowledge, religion, and all these directions lead to Scheler's phenomenology, which basically differs from Husserl's phenomenological theory. A very special way of knowledge - religious cognition - has been investigated. Aiming at that, the author deals first of all with the principal categories of Scheler's philosophical thinking. These are: cognition of entities and their connections in the world, constitution of the human personality, formation of religion and faith, as well as the image of God. All these spheres of human being are inextricably linked in Scheler's new anthropological theory, which he called the “emerging anthropology” (German: werdende Anthropologie). A complex approach allowed the author to state an indissoluble unity of a big conglomerate of philosophical problems in anthropology, axiology, ethics, phenomenology. Nowadays, a rethinking of human destiny would be highly important in the face of the collapse of classical values, which Scheler was pointing at a century ago. Researchers may be interested in Scheler's idea of priority of a human' emotional sphere over the rational one. This could bring tangible results in the explanation of many radical processes happening now in the system of values and in the moral and ethical sphere of personality.

Keywords

Authors

References