EDITORIAL:Varia: Clashes of Cultures, Religions and Models of Democracy; Max Scheler’s Selected Conceptions

• Autorzy: Czarnocka Małgorzata , Czerniak Stanisław
• Języki publikacji: EN

Abstrakty

EN

We have decided to publish this issue of Dialogue and Universalism as a Special Supplement in addition to its usual annual sequence of three issues. The readers can expect publication of issue 3, volume 31, 2021 in due course. The journal is pleased to publish this extra issue without extra cost to subscribers. Unlike most others in our journal’s 44–year history, this issue is not monothematic. This special supplement does not interrupt the continuity of three consecutive Dialogue and Universalism monothematic issues on the new Enlightenment under the guest-edition of Professor Robert Allinson (the first appeared as issue 2, volume 31, 2021, the remaining two will come out as 3, volume 31, 2021 and 1, volume 1, 2022). Also, in view of their commemorative character, we decided to publish Professors Kevin M. Brien’s and Michael H. Mitias’s contributions as quickly as possible—without the rather extended delays connected with Professor Allinson’s simultaneously realised project. These two mentioned papers focus on problems addressed in recent books by two long-standing and merited ISUD members: Kevin M. Brien’s Marx, Reason, and the Art of Reason, which will be soon published in Chinese by Contemporary China Publishing House, Beijing (an English-language edition came out in 2006), and a monograph Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) by Michael H. Mitias. Both studies exemplify participating philosophy: they approach two universal problems of burning urgency for the contemporary world—freedom and the cultural clash between East and West— from a typically philosophical, distant and abstract perspective, through the prism of Confucius and Karl Marx and interreligious dialogue. Professor Brien’s essay is an addendum to the Chinese translation of his book and has never appeared in English before. Another example of participating philosophy in this special issue of Dialogue and Universalism is a study by Professor Temisanren Ebijuwa devoted to democracy models, one of the fundamental issues in the present-day and future organisation of the human world. Four analyses of Max Scheler’s conceptions are important for a metaphilosophical reason—in view of the rather disturbing changes in contemporary epistemology, most notably its strong propagation of transferring all cognition study to the cognitive sciences, or at least introducing a Quinean-style naturalisation pro gramme; the second proposal is, in fact, a very similar proposal to the first. Despite their thematic diversity, the contributions to this issue have one thing in common, namely they are related to each other on the metaphilosophical plane: they distance themselves from minimalism (the rejection of all the fundamental questions addressed by philosophy, as well as its comprehensiveness and pursuit of essence, mainly on charges of speculativeness and metaphysical character) and the eliminative naturalisation (which reduces philosophy to a science, depriving it of its autonomous identity) that is increasingly visible in the contemporary philosophical debate. Whereby under debate here is not, as Jürgen Habermas called it, the all-encompassing, totalising knowledge which “relates to the whole of the world, of nature, of history, of society,”1 but the revealing of the common foundations that constitute these entireties. Another feature binding all the contributions to this issue is that their authors formulate new insights in dialogue with, or in the context of, the philosophical tradition and philosophy’s achievements over history. Thus, the material in this Dialogue and Universalism issue presents an alternative philosophy to the trends that today largely shape the philosophy of the mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science, as well as cognitive and social philosophy, and are attempting to colonise further philosophical fields. Four essays are devoted to the work of the unrightly forgotten Max Scheler, one of the more important 20th-century philosophers. By including the devoted to Scheler, we intend to point to the problem of Scheler’s current absence from the philosophical debate despite the evident actuality of his findings as an example of the meandering way in which philosophy is evolving today. We also intend to suggest some reasons for at least considering a return to his ideas, which are very remote from the most fashionable and propagated present-day thought trends. Our aim in revisiting Scheler was not only an historical insight of his writings, but mainly intend to investigate the prospects of transposing his most important ideas—perhaps not in their entirety but more as an inspiration— to today’s philosophy and show the currently unnoticed actuality and importance of his conceptions. The history of philosophy is full of ostentatious “restorations” of earlier paradigms: medieval Christian philosophy fed on Aristotle, the various late-19thcentury neo-Kantian schools on Kant’s epistemological conceptions, one of the main inspirations behind 20th-century postmodern thought was Nietzschean philosophy. One could, therefore, ask if the authors of this edition’s four Scheler features in any way herald a “return to Scheler.” or a “Neo-Schelerism.” In seeking a reply to this question, it is worth starting with a reflection that would naturally suggest itself to a historian of philosophy: Scheler’s legacy appears to be too theoretically diversified and multi-topical to serve as a reference point for a broad-scale “renaissance” of his thought. The late, vitalistic and pantheistic Scheler contradicted the “earlier” Scheler, who was closer to Husserlian phenomenology. Moreover, in both these phases his thought was full of aporias and theoretical inconsistencies. His philosophical narrative brimmed with new ideas or, as Richard Rorty would say, original “metaphors,” but was too frequently devoid of a methodological framework and suspended in a doctrinal void—as the authors of the contributions to this edition also point out. To put it differently, Scheler lacked what was characteristic for Aristotle, Kant or Nietzsche— a set of guiding philosophical ideas which could form a conceptual system to function as an inspiring holistic reference point for thinkers in later eras. This, however, does not mean that Scheler’s reflections with all their interdisciplinary nuances are uninspiring and unworthy of reference or reconstruction. What directions do such reconstructions take? Can we speak about a specific suggested reception model? The following trends appear to dominate in this respect in all approaches: a) reference not to “Scheler’s philosophy” as such, but the philosophical sub-disciplines he occupied himself with, like epistemology, sociology of knowledge or philosophical anthropology, in which his findings are often of a pioneering character and can therefore not be left out of any related debate; b) the accentuation of the “mediatory” character of his philosophy, which as if by definition transgresses all theoretical purism. For example as an epistemologist, Scheler uses categories beyond any “pure” epistemology with its exclusive focus on the grounding of its “foundations,” and seeks epistemological categories that could help him build bridges between epistemology and sociology, philosophy of culture or philosophical anthropology; c) reference to the heuristic, problem-generating values of his work, which opens interesting new horizons for philosophical inquiry even in areas where its inconsistencies and oversimplifications are easy to Stanisław Czerniak presents a critical approach to the German philosopher in two articles: “Max Scheler’s Pluralistic Conception of Knowledge” and “The Consistence of the Assumptions of the Sociology of Knowledge with those of Philosophical Anthropology (on the Example of Max Scheler).” In both, Czerniak seeks out the earlier-mentioned aporias and inconsistencies in Sche-ler’s argumentation, which in his typology of knowledge obfuscate the criteria of eidetic and metaphysical knowledge and lead to the removal of humanistic knowledge from knowledge analysis, and in the sphere of the sociology of knowledge cause some of his assumptions to collide with the principles of philosophical anthropology—which the same Scheler defends. However, Czerniak’s approach is also in line with the earlier-mentioned interpretational trends: he refers not so much to “Schelerism” as such, but the philosophical subdisciplines Scheler developed. Czerniak sees the relations between them which Scheler points out, and emphasises the “problem-generating” character of the philosophical questions he asks, a circumstance which additionally drives philosophy historians to seek a “different conceptual symbiosis” between the sociology of knowledge and philosophical anthropology than the one Scheler proposes (here Czerniak refers to Helmuth Plessner’s anthropological position). But it is evident that this comparative undertaking comes to mind and crystallises conceptually only in the context of Scheler’s mediating discourse on the border between both these sub-disciplines (which Czerniak mentions), and that his work is the initial inspiration for the debate Czerniak develops in his article. In her article The Duality of the Subject in the Conception of Max Scheler, Małgorzata Czarnocka analyses the relation between the individual and collec tive subject, which, with the help of the “group soul” and “group spirit” categories, Scheler made to one of the terminological assumptions of his sociology of knowledge. What we encounter here is epistemology mediated by sociology, which allows Scheler both to further develop the new philosophical-sociological sub-discipline he had co-founded—the sociology of knowledge—and gain deeper insight into epistemology’s theoretical identity. The new sociology of knowledge field and the idea of the collective subject generate a heuristic added value, which Czarnocka sees in the “de-transcendentalisation” of the Kantian transcendental cognitive subject, a process whose contemporary continuation she finds in the philosophy of Habermas and which she holds for a comprehensive alternative to contemporary epistemological conceptions like Andy Clark’s and David Chalmers’ “extended subject.” Czarnocka believes Scheler’s ideas contain valuable and inspiring threads which are worth bringing back to memory. Aivaras Stepukonis pursues a similar interpretational strategy in his article “The Functionalisation of Essential (A Priori) Knowledge: A Close Look at Max Scheler’s Epistemology,” in which he uses the aprioristic differences between the assumptions of Kant’s and Scheler’s epistemology to show how much Scheler’s approach transgresses the transcendendalist tradition. Because for Scheler the “subjective” a priori, the result of the titular “functionalisation of objective a priori knowledge” is carried not by the Kantian “transcendental subject as such,” but by historical subjects capable of creating their own subjective thought patterns. These patterns retain their a priori character (Scheler is not a relativist) because they are, in a sense, cognitive “matrices” or “projections” which all—albeit differently—relate to the objective a priori world. They can differ in cultural, social or civilizational aspects, which enables a conceptual bridge between Schelerian epistemology and the sociologies of knowledge and culture. Stepukonis also underlines the interdisciplinary character of Scheler’s philosophy to show that the German thinker also applied the subjective a priori concept to the philosophy of values and to ontology.

• Wydawca: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk; Fundacja Filozofia Na Rzecz Dialogu
• Czasopismo: Dialogue and Universalism
• Rocznik: 2021
• Numer: Special Supplement
• Strony: 5-8

Twórcy

autor

Czarnocka Małgorzata

• Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

autor

Czerniak Stanisław

• Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences