Anthropology and axiology by M. Scheler

The aim of this article is to learn the initial motives, which impelled M.Scheler to create material ethics of values and a new type of anthropology. The author of this paper challenges the assertion made by M. Scheler that his own axiology and anthropology were new and scientifically productive. This article has the following structure:1..The author expounds the content of Scheler's criticism of Kant's interpretation of a priori. The conclusion is that the new understanding of I - not as the subject - shows a new anthropological model created by Scheler and a new interpretation of values related to this model.2..The author describes Scheler's anthropological model, reveals its novelty concerning the preceding anthropological models - the Jewish-Christian model, the classical Greek model, the model homo faber, the model Dionysus man.2153..The author analyses Scheler's anthropology, reveals the difference between Kant's and Scheler's interpretation of the reason and the will. M. Sheler states the principal difference and the rupture between will-acts and the a priori cognition-contemplation. The independence of moral cognition from moral will is, according to Scheler, the condition of human's freedom.4.The author analyses Scheler's interpretation of freedom. For the sake of assertion of human's freedom, Scheler denies the concept of the essence. Anti-substantionalism and anti-essentialism are the main characteristics of M. Scheler's type of anthropology and axiology. A human in Scheler's theory appears to be a meeting place of the spirit and the life impulse, which are considered to be two components of the world's basis.5.The author analyses the examples of understanding of will, reason and freedom in patristic anthropology, which does not only keep freedom at the theoretical level but also specifies its conditions.6.The author reveals the difference between patristic anthropology and M. Scheler's anthropology. The former does not postulate the independence of cognition (intellect and reason) from will. According to it, human's cognition and vital abilities are interrelated. Will is the reasonable striving (aspiration) of soul powers. Freedom is interpreted as self-determination and self-acting, as the ability to choose the direction of one's own movement, resulting from human's soul powers, granted to him/her.7.The author reveals the logic of Scheler's thinking from the position of patristic anthropology. M. Scheler's theory demonstrates the new extremity in comparison with Kant's essentialism - arbitrariness instead of freedom, medium instead of personality (selfhood), antiessentialism instead of proving the difference between acts and essence.

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