© 2010 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

A MATERIAL A PRIORI? ON MAX SCHELER’S CRITIQUE

OF KANT’S FORMAL ETHICS phil_352 113..126

RODOLPHE GASCHÉ

Since Jacobi and Hegel accused Kant of having reduced the ethical law to an
empty formula whose very aloofness therefore has no binding force, responses to
Kant’s alleged formalism in ethics have taken the form of non-formal, or material,
ethics. Indeed, if within the framework of traditional philosophical thought one
proceeds, as does Kant, to free ethics from all material principles for the deter-
mination of the will, then what remains is inevitably mere form. Conversely, as the
case of Max Scheler demonstrates, the rejection of a formal ethics because of its
seeming indeterminateness and abstraction leaves one with recourse solely to
material values in founding an ethics. But the form/matter opposition has the
further consequence that it even prevents one from assessing the actual scope of
Kant’s moral philosophy. As Eric Weil reminds us, Kant’s specifically moral
philosophy is to be found neither in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
nor in the Critique of Practical Reason, but in the Metaphysics of Morals. The
form that the categorical imperative takes in the actual moral theory of Kant is
anything but simply formal.1 By contrast, what has been called Kant’s formalism
in the Second Critique does not regard his theory of morality, but rather only the
conditions for such a theory to begin with. The sole concern of the Critique of
Practical Reason is the exploration of the ground of determination of the subjec-
tive maxims of the will by reason, and not whether the thus determined will is
capable of successfully executing such maxims or actually bringing about objects
in conformity with them. But even though in the “The analytic of pure practical
reason” Kant forcefully holds that, if they are to be ethical, all material practical
principles which make the will dependent on what is willed must be separated
from it, in “The dialectic of practical reason,” Kant reintroduces the issue of the
sovereign Good into the ethical law, a principle that is nothing less than a supreme

1
Eric Weil, Problèmes kantiens (Paris: Vrin, 1963) 9.

113
 RODOLPHE GASCHÉ

material ground for the will’s determination. In the Critique of Practical Reason,
Kant could thus be said to transgress his own formalism, and if such transgression
is not to be a self-contradiction, then would one not have to consider first whether
the dimension from which he is establishing the groundwork for the realm of the
ethical is not, from the start, on this side of the form/matter divide? Furthermore,
to accuse Kant of formalism in ethics on the basis of the rigid metaphysical
opposition of form and matter is also to ignore a variety of observations by the
philosopher which, although they occur within the exploration of the grounding
conditions for an ethics, nonetheless have to be taken into account in any attempt
at evaluating what, in his so-called formal understanding of the moral Law, he is
actually seeking to accomplish. Such an observation occurs, for example, in
chapter 29 of the Critique of Judgment, where Kant argues that “it is utterly
mistaken to worry that if we were deprived of everything that the senses can
recommend [morality] would then bring with it nothing but cold, lifeless approval
and no moving force or emotion.”2 In other words, in relinquishing all grounding
of ethics in material principles such as those established on sensible, but also ideal,
objects, including the idea of the Good as an idea which is not to be confounded
with a doctrine for the pursuit of perfection, the pure ethical Law does not,
therefore, necessarily become abstract, formal, or, in other words, ineffectual.
In the chapter “Of the Interest Attaching to the Ideas of Morality” from Ground-
work of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant questions “on what grounds the moral
law is binding.”3 Indeed, if the Law is not a law of nature, one that applies to each
one of us as a member of a species, the way the moral Law can be at all of concern
to human beings becomes a crucial question. According to Kant, the moral Law
commands beings endowed with free will. The binding character (Verbindlichkeit)
of the Law is not conceivable without the assumption that its addressee is the
individual rational being, rather than a member of a species, and that, furthermore,
injunctions by the Law presuppose a singular addressee who in all his or her
singularity must be concerned by this injunction, and in the position to respond to
it. This question, I contend, is the guiding question for Kant’s investigation in the
Second Critique of the conditions for an ethics. In other words, it is precisely this
issue to which Kant seeks to respond by stripping practical reason from all
material determinations and proposing a so-called formal determination of ethics.
Such exclusion of all moral content from the moral Law, an exclusion which
demands, therefore, that the will autonomously give the Law to itself, not only
secures that the Law is binding for me as a singular rational being, but also as one

2
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000) 156.
3
Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” Practical Philosophy, trans. M. J. Gregor
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 97.

114
 A MATERIAL A PRIORI?

that stands in a relation to other rational beings. If Cassirer’s statement that “it was
exactly the formalistic nature of Kantian ethics that proved historically to be the
peculiarly fruitful and effective moment,” is correct, then it is of course more
urgent than ever to clearly understand what “formal” means here.4
Kant’s ethics has been charged with having stripped the law of everything that
makes a moral judgment possible, but it has also been argued, and this is the case
with Heidegger, that Kant has not gone far enough in his formalism. Here, it is
contended that, by burying the essential indeterminacy of the call of the Law under
metaphysical determinations, all authentic and responsible response to it is
thwarted.5 At first sight, such an approach to the moral Law, in holding that it is not
sufficiently undetermined, would seem to involve an equally formalist conception
of the Law as that one of which Kant is accused of establishing by the proponents
of a non-formalist, or material, ethics. However, I think that a careful investiga-
tion of what Kant calls the “ground of determination” (Bestimmungsgrund) of the
will in the “Analytic of pure practical reason,” that is, of that part of the Second
Critique which is generally seen to contain Kant’s rigoristic and austere concep-
tion of ethics, can show, perhaps, that the moral Law, though a form, also has a
material content of sorts, one that, rather than being lifeless itself, causes the
determination of the will by the moral Law, and in this way is binding for every
particular subject. If the nature of the moral Law is one of obligation, its subject
must necessarily be one that is in the position of an addressee and a respondent to
the Law’s address. The question of how the Law regards the individual subject, or
person, has been a question that has drawn particular attention, and not acciden-
tally, in phenomenological thought. This is especially the case of Max Scheler,
who, in the aftermath of Hegel, has, in Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal
Ethics of Values, proposed one of the most severe critiques of Kantian ethics, and,
in doing such, has opposed to it, as the title of his book suggests, a non-formal—in
the original German, a material—ethics. But, it should also be clear from the start
that the whole debate regarding formal versus a non-formal, or material, ethics
takes place within, and with respect to the fundamental question of how the moral
Law must engage the singular human being in order to become binding in the first
place. Therefore, the question that arises for me, is whether the elemental char-
acteristics of Scheler’s material ethics, rather than correcting the alleged short-
comings of Kant’s ethics, are not, paradoxically, part and parcel of Kant’s
so-called formal ethics to begin with, and whether Scheler’s criticism of Kant, has
not, the ironic result of opening our eyes to what, precisely, the whole formalism

4
Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. J. Haden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1981) 270.
5
See Jabob Rogozinski, Le don de la loi. Kant et l’énigme de l’éthique (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1999) 125.

115
 RODOLPHE GASCHÉ

debate about Kant’s ethics has failed to see, namely that the so-called formal
nature of the moral law is in a peculiar way a content that makes it binding for any
of its individual addressees. In what follows, however, I will have to limit myself
to making a compelling case only for the necessity of this question.
Scheler starts his inquiry with the recognition that Kant has, once and for all,
refuted all non-formal ethics hitherto. Up to that point, with some minor excep-
tions, all forms of ethics have been such that the determining ground of the will,
to quote Kant, has been “the representation of an object and that relation of the
representation to the subject by which the faculty of desire is determined to realize
the object.”6 Where the will is thus determined by an object, it is determined by
matter, for, according to Kant, “ ‘the matter of the faculty of desire’ [is] an object
whose reality is desired.”7 Matter, for Kant, is thus primarily of the order objects,
even if such objects are not limited to empirical things but include the supreme
Good as well. All these objects which Scheler terms goods and purposes are the
reason why all previous ethics have, in his parlance, been merely “ethics of goods
and purposes” (p. 5).8 But, although Scheler agrees with Kant that in grounding
an ethics, one must set aside all of these “actual goods,” this does not warrant
establishing ethics on merely formal grounds (p. 11). Indeed, matter, for Scheler,
is not exhausted by goods and purposes. Matter, as he understands it in the context
of his reflections on ethics, is primarily constituted by values which, rather than
being abstractions from goods, are understood as real and independent phenomena
that are “clearly feelable phenomena,” distinct from the “states of feeling” in
which they are apprehended, which are thus given to us in feeling as “true objects”
that “represent themselves in goods” (pp. 16,19,11). As material qualities, values,
according to Scheler, allow for a foundation of a non-formal ethics that overcomes
ethics based on the rationalist concept of reason which can secure “obligation”
(Verbindlichkeit) of the moral law only by reducing it to mere formal lawfulness.
Notwithstanding its foundation in the matter of values, which, rather than
originating in inductive experiences, are the result of a “comprehension of the
essence [Wesenserkenntnis] of what is good and evil” (p. 45)—of essences expe-
rienced in intuitive evidence, and which Scheler also calls “facts” of a different
order than empirical facts—the resulting material, or non-formal ethics which he
proposes, is as a priori as any rationalist ethics. Indeed, the material a priori, a
notion coined by Scheler, on which he grounds his ethics is, indeed, supposed to

6
Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” Practical Philosophy, trans. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1999) 155.
7
Ibid: 155.
8
Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. A New Attempt Toward the
Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. M. S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1973). (All page references in the text are to this edition.)

116
 A MATERIAL A PRIORI?

be more genuinely a priori than Kant’s allegedly only formal moral law. Kant’s
formalism, Scheler claims, is the main reason why he cannot access the correct
facts on which an a priori ethics can be grounded. At this point it must be recalled,
first, that Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values is deeply
indebted to Husserl’s Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Philosophy which had appeared in 1913, that is, to the Husserlian conception of
a descriptive phenomenology (prior thus to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenol-
ogy), and second, that the Kant from which Scheler seeks to distinguish himself
is the Kant of the neo-Kantians, a Kant, that is, who has been bent into an
epistemologist and a theoretician of the sciences, in short, who above all is a
pioneer of logism. This recall is necessary both to understand Scheler’s concept of
matter as to make sense of his emphasis on the problematic of knowledge,
cognition, and especially, insight (Einsicht) for the domain of ethics.
Can only formal a prioriness secure a universally binding ethics, or “are there
non-formal ethical intuitions” that “are evident and can neither be tested by
something that has been found, prior to such testing, by observation and induction
nor be refuted by observation and induction,” and on which a “non-formal ethics
which is nevertheless ‘a priori’ ” can be established (47–48)? This is Scheler’s
question. When he proceeds to respond to the question “what alone may, and
should be called ‘a priori,’ ” it is clear that, for him, a prioriness, rather than linked
to forms, is the characteristic of units of essences (Wesenheiten) that are the givens
in direct intuitions of the intentional correlates of feelings. He writes: “We des-
ignate as ‘a priori’ all those ideal units of meaning and those propositions that are
self-given by way of an immediate intuitive content in the absence of any kind of
positing [Setzung] of subjects that think them and of the real nature of those
subjects, and in the absence of any kind of positing of objects to which such units
of meaning are applicable” (p. 48). This is not the place to acknowledge Scheler’s
contribution to phenomenology and his expansion of the analysis of intentional
acts to the emotive states; our goal is only to understand what Angelika Sander has
termed Scheler’s “material expansion of the apriori.”9 Or, rather, the question is
whether there is in Scheler an expansion of the a priori at all, whether it is not in
fact the project of replacing the formal by a material a priori altogether. For

9
Angelika Sander, Max Scheler zur Einführung (Hamburg, Germany: Junius Verlag, 2001) 43. Given
the essential formal nature of what an a priori is, it is, strictly speaking, impossible to expand the
notion of the a priori to include materiality without recasting the meaning of the term entirely. As
we will see what Scheler terms a material a priori is no longer a formal, necessary, and universal
enabling structure, but an essence, hence something radically different than a Kantian a priori. See
also Mikel Dufrenne, The Notions of the A Priori, trans. E. S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1966) who, following Husserl, and especially Scheler, has also sought to extent the
limits of the a priori by conceiving of it in terms of an immediate presence of meaning given in acts
of intuition.

117
 RODOLPHE GASCHÉ

indeed, the Kantian a priori forms, whether the pure forms of intuition, of
thinking, or of the moral Law, are not contents or objects of a beholding. Rather,
they are presupposed by, and formative of, the acts of theoretical and practical
judgment.
As I said a moment ago, Scheler claims that “essences and their interconnec-
tions are a priori ‘given’ ‘prior’ to all [empirical] experience [. . .] However, the
propositions that find their fulfilment in them are a priori ‘true’. Hence the a priori
is not dependent on propositions (or even on acts of judgment corresponding to
them). It is not dependent, for example, on the form of such propositions and acts
(i.e., on ‘forms of judgments,’ from which Kant developed his ‘categories’ as
‘functional laws’ of ‘thinking’). On the contrary, the a priori belongs wholly to the
‘given’ and the sphere of facts” (p. 49). Even though propositions find their
fulfilment in a prioris, the latter rather than being elementary forms of judgments,
are essences that are given to a mode of perception—intuiting—that presupposes
a bracketing of all positings—and whose focus is the intentional content, or the
noema, in Husserlian terms, of experiences, or, more precisely, of intentional acts.
Scheler rejects as a groundless assumption the Kantian doctrine of the “sponta-
neity” of thinking, the doctrine, that is, that the intellect alone is responsible for
synthesis, for interconnecting sensible appearances, and that thinking accom-
plishes such synthesis by way of forms. To reduce the a priori to form, to
understand it as the result of a “forming activity,” is of the order of a mythology,
and has nothing to do with a priorism. Form, formalism, formation defy intuition
and is “a purely constructivistic explanation” that rests on a fundamental error
which Kant inherited from Hume’s sensualism (p. 66). To this understanding of
the a priori as a formative law for the synthesis of impressions, Scheler opposes
an a priori conceived as “the objective structure [sachlich gegenständliche Struk-
tur] of the large areas of experience itself,” in other words, as a structure that is
objectively intuitable and that concerns the matter of (or that which is “meant” in)
experiences (pp. 66–67).
With this dismissal of Kant’s formal understanding of the a priori on the basis
that all forming activity of the mind, in particular through the synthetic activity of
thought, is a mythology, Scheler in fact takes issue with Kant’s innovative philo-
sophical contribution itself. This becomes explicit in his critique of what he terms
“Kant’s subjectivistic interpretation of the a priori” not to be confused with Kant’s
“profound, but false, transcendental one” (p. 74). To interpret the a priori as
transcendental is to conceive of it as a law according to which, in Scheler’s
rendering of Kant’s famous dictum, “the laws of the objects of experience and
cognition (and also of willing) conform to the laws of the experience and the
cognition (and the willing) of the objects” (p. 71). Scheler rejects this Kantian
thesis on the basis of a phenomenological description of what actually occurs in
theoretical and practical experience (pp. 71–74). But let me return to the critique

118
 A MATERIAL A PRIORI?

directed at Kant’s subjectivistic interpretation of the a priori. It is false, Scheler

holds, to “place the necessity of oughtness [. . .] before the insight into what is
good.” It is subjectivistic to link “the a priori evidential to so-called necessity and
universality of judgment (or of ‘assessments [Beurteilung]’ in the area of values,
or of willing in ethics)” (p. 74). In other words, it is subjectivistic to bestow
necessity and universality on the moral judgment and the ought itself by having it
formed by a prioris rather than on the basis of evidential insight into a priori
values or the interconnections thereof. But “subjectivistic” has still another impli-
cation, for Scheler writes: “Subjectivism becomes erroneously intertwined with
the a priori not only when one (exclusively) interprets the a priori as a primary
‘law’ of acts but also when one considers it a law of the acts of an ‘ego’ or a
‘subject,’ e.g., as the form of the activity of a ‘transcendental ego,’ a so-called
consciousness as such, or even a ‘consciousness of a species’ ” (p. 76). An ego, or
a subject, according to Scheler, is merely an object for acts, in particular acts of
consciousness, and, in reality, is not different from a tree perceived in outer
perception. It is in no way “the point of departure for the apprehension nor the
producer of essences,” which, in the realm of ethics, is what Scheler terms
“value-essences.” By contrast, the starting point for the apprehension of a priori
essences is the “I,” the individual person. Anyway, by now it should be clear that
by both opposing Kant’s “transcendental” and “subjectivistic” interpretation of
the a priori, Scheler rejects nothing less than what he calls “Kant’s erroneous
‘Copernican turn.’ ” Following up on his critique of the “fundamental error of
Kant’s doctrine,” according to which the a priori is formal, Scheler contends that
“this error is closely connected with another one, namely, Kant’s identification of
the ‘non-formal’ (in both the theory of cognition and ethics) with ‘sensible
content,’ and the ‘a priori’ with what is ‘thought’ or what has been an addition to
such ‘sensible content’ by way of ‘reason’ ” (p. 54). Scheler tries here to take issue
with the tenet of Kant’s thought which holds that what is given is necessarily
sensible and that the a priori forms are brought to the thus given from the outside
by reason. The true stakes of this critique become manifest when Scheler ascer-
tains: “As I see it, the proton pseudos of this identification [of the non-formal with
the sensible] is that one asks what can be given instead of simply asking what is
given. One assumes in this fashion that nothing ‘can’ be given at all when sensory
functions [. . .] for it are lacking” (p. 55). In the name of Husserlian descriptive
phenomenology, Scheler argues here for the intentional givenness of ideal con-
tents. But as his distinction between what can be given and what simply is given
demonstrates, the target of Scheler’s criticism is the concern with conditions of
possibility, in particular, Kants inquiry in his transcendental aesthetics and tran-
scendental logic into the a priori forms of sense intuition and understanding. The
aim is to free the a priori from its enabling functions which Kant understands in
formative terms and to conceive of it in terms of essences (Wesenheiten) that can

119
 RODOLPHE GASCHÉ

be directly apprehended in intuition instead of first requiring an extrapolation

(or deduction) from the judgmental functions, that is, in Scheler’s terms, a
construction.
Material a prioris are of the order of contents that can be directly apprehended
and that are being erschaut in evidential fashion. They are thus self-evident,
einsichtig, the result of an insight into their immediate intelligibility, into the sense
that they make. In the realm of ethics, these material a priori contents are
value-essences which are apprehended in the “value-cognition or value-intuition
[Werterschauung] [. . .] that comes to the fore in feeling, basically in love and
hate, as well as the ‘moral cognition’ [. . .] of the interconnections of values, i.e.,
their ‘being-higher’ and ‘being-lower’ ” (p. 68). In these intentional emotive acts
that are entirely different from acts of perceptions and thought, “values and their
order flash before us! The a priori content lies in what is given in these manners”
(p. 68). Moral cognition is thus entirely distinct from judgments and propositions
(p. 69). Moral willing, moral comportment, “is morally evidential” only where it
is the “directed realization of a value given in these [emotive] acts,” rather than, as
is the case with Kant, where willing and comportment are moral only if they yield
to a formative moral law (p. 68). “All moral comportment [Scheler concludes] is
built on the basis of moral insight,” or “moral cognition,” and all explicit “ethics
must go back to the facts lying in moral cognition and their a priori interconnec-
tions” (p. 69). The terms Einsicht, and einsichtig, are crucial here, and will require
progressive clarification as I now turn to a discussion of the material a prioris in
the domain of ethics.
I wish to do this by way of a close reading of a couple of remarkable pages
which, let us not forget, date from 1913 to 1916, that is, from well before
Heidegger’s elaborations on Gewissen in Being and Time, not to mention from
before the developments of the relation to the other in later French phenomenol-
ogy and post-phenomenological thought.10 These pages are from Part IV of the
book entitled “Formalism and Person” and are the beginning of a Chapter entitled
“Person and Individual.” In this chapter, Scheler proceeds to explain what pre-
cisely he understands by “individual-personal value essence,” in other words, that
is, by the essence of the person “as a bearer of ethical values” distinct as such from
an ego, subject, or consciousness in general, wherein the person is, obviously, the
ethical agency (pp. 476, 489). Essences, Scheler contends, in Formalism in Ethics,
have “nothing to do with universality”; in fact, they are neither universal nor
particular and only become differentiated in this manner when related back to an

10
In his account of the reception of phenomenological thought in France, Waldenfels remarks that
“aus dem Kreis der phänomenologischen Prominenz bleibt Husserl zunächst in Hintergrund vor
allem gemessen an Scheler.” Bernhard Waldenfels, Phänomenonologie in Frankreich, Frankfurt/
Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1983) 36.

120
 A MATERIAL A PRIORI?

object of observation as the essence of this object. Because “therefore there are
essences that are given in one particular individual,” it makes good sense “to speak
of an individual essence and also the individual essence of a person.” And, he
adds: “it is this value-essence of a personal and individual nature that I also
designate ‘personal salvation’ [mit dem Namen ‘persönlichen Heiles’ bezeichne]”
(p. 489). The essence of an individual person is thus, from the start, an “individual
value-essence” tied to the wholeness [the Ganzheit of Dasein, as Heidegger will
say], spiritual well-being, and salvation of the person. But Scheler points out that
“it would be a complete mistake to identify this “salvation” with a personal-
individual ought, or to say that it is given in the experience of such an “ought.”
There is, of course, an individual ought—an experiencing of the ought-to-be of a
content, an action, a deed, or a project through me, and, in certain cases, only
through me as this individual. But this experience of my obligation—no matter if
I share this obligation with others or not, no matter if it is recognized by others or
not, no matter if they ‘can’ recognize it or not—is based on the experience of my
individual value-essence” (p. 489). Differently worded, all individual obligations,
responsibilities, and duties—everything that is of the order of an ought, or
Sollen—are dependent on the experience of my individual value-essence. This
singular and unique individual value essence of a person—by which the person is
constituted as a person—is that in which the person’s responsibility is grounded
and toward which he or she has a responsibility. Consequently, if such value-
essence which is specific to a singular person is not a specific “ought,” a specific
way in which this singular person should be willing, acting, etc., it says something
about who this individual person potentially is, and something about his or her
ideal being (whether or not he or she lives up to it). Such an “individual value-
essence of a person” is a given that is experienceable and intuitable in emotive acts
by the person himself as well as by others. At this point, it would be necessary to
make a long detour through Scheler’s elaborations on love and “the ‘creative’
role,” or “the disclosing role,” that the act of love plays “in our value-
comprehensions, and that it is only this act which does so” (p. 261). I limit myself
here to a definition of love from Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy (1913): “love
is that movement wherein every concrete individual object that possesses value
achieves the highest value compatible with its nature and ideal vocation; or
wherein it attains the ideal state of value intrinsic to its nature.”11 In short, if love
is “the act through which the ideal-value essence of a person is revealed,” such
revelation and understanding of the person occurs equally through oneself and
through others. Scheler writes: “The highest form of self-love is [. . .] the act
through which the person reaches full understanding of himself and thus the
intuition and feeling of his salvation. But it is also possible for another person to

11
Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. P. Heath (London: Routledge, 1954) 161.

121
 RODOLPHE GASCHÉ

show me the path to my salvation through his completely understanding love for
me. Through a love which is deeper and more true than the love that I have toward
myself, the other person reveals to me an idea of my salvation that is clearer than
the one which I have by myself ” (p. 491). In the highest form of self-love, that is,
a form of relation to oneself that in more traditional philosophical parlance, would
have to be called “self-affection,” and which is thus entirely different from how
Kant understands this term, namely as pertaining merely to one’s own happiness,
I intuit, and reveal to myself, my value-essence. Yet, in the understanding love that
another person has for me, this value-essence of mine, which is the ground of all
my moral obligations, is given to me in an even clearer and more comprehensive
way.
According to Scheler, by starting out from the ought, as does Kant, without
grounding it in an insight into what is good, one can at best only distinguish
between an ought that is universal and necessary and an ought that is merely
subjective and pathological. But any obligation that is universal and necessary
does not respond to the question of why I, this singular person, should heed any
obligation to begin with. By contrast, if in thinking about obligation one takes
one’s point of departure from an insight into a good that concerns me expressly
and personally, then it is possible to distinguish between genuine oughtness as
opposed to mere capricious impulse. Having said that any “ought,” any obligation,
or any responsibility is moral only on the condition that it be “based on insight
into objective values—i.e., in this context, into the morally good,” Scheler argues
that, if this is necessarily so, then it follows that “there is also the possibility of an
evidential insight into a good whose objective essence and value content contains
a reference [Hinweis] to an individual person, and whose ought therefore comes to
this person and to him alone as a ‘call,’ no matter if this ‘call’ is addressed to others
or not” (p. 490). Indeed, qua insight, any insight into an objective value-essence
means that the content of the value-essence in question can concern me directly,
and I can be moved personally (rather than anonymously, as one among many
others) by this very value-essence. But this is even more so the case if the
evidential insight is one into a Good that itself contains a reference to me as this
singular person. No judgment or assessment whatsoever is implied in such insight,
for, as an apprehension of a good that contains a direct reference to me, such a
good is from the start evidential. Now, as Scheler contends, in order to catch sight
of such a good-in-itself that is for me, I must “catch sight of the value-essence of
my person—in religious terms, of the value-picture, so to speak, which God’s love
has of me and which God’s love draws and bears before me insofar as this love is
directed at me” (p. 490). In other words, in the “highest form of self-love” in
which I discover my personal-individual value-essence (which is the foundation of
all my particular obligations that I encounter with respect to myself and others), I
intuit the Good-in-itself that a loving Other—God as the loving Other—has in

122
 A MATERIAL A PRIORI?

mind for me, one that He holds out in view of me, for me alone. In self-love, in
relating to myself, in self-affection, that is, I am confronted with the value-picture
that “God’s love draws and bears before me,” the picture of the highest ideal state
that is compatible with me as this singular individual. It is the picture meant for me
alone of what I am potentially capable as this one, unique, and singular person.
Scheler continues: “This peculiar individual value-content is the basis on which
a consciousness of an individual ought is built, that is, the evidential knowledge of
a ‘good-in-itself’ but precisely in the sense of a ‘good-in-itself-for-me’ [. . .] Its
being good ‘for’ me (in the sense of me experiencing it) does not make it a
good-in-itself.’ In that case there would be an evident contradiction. It is a good
precisely in the sense of being ‘independent of my knowledge.’ For this includes
the ‘good-in-itself.’ Yet it is the ‘good-in-itself’ for ‘me’ in the sense that there is
an experienced reference to me [ein erlebter Hinweis . . . auf mich, ein erlebter
Fingerzeig] which is contained (descriptively put) in the special non-formal
content of this good-in-itself, something that comes from this content [der von
diesem Gehalte ausgeht] and points to ‘me,’ something that whispers, ‘For you’ ”
(was gleichsam sagt und flüstert: ‘für dich’) (p. 490). The value-essence of my
person is a good-in-itself that, rather than being universal, general, and abstract, is
singular. Content wise, this good-in-itself contains a pointer, an indexical mark
directed at me alone. It is a good-in-itself for me, not because I would experience
it as such, but because it is given to me by an Other, and is that which the loving
Other—God—holds out for me. This good-in-itself-for-me is thus independent of
my knowledge and is objective. If insight into this good-in-itself determines all my
moral obligations in relation to myself and others (including God), it is an insight
into a value-essence that is the gift of an Other to me and hence is heteronomously
constituted. However, as it is given to me by a loving Other who draws and holds
up to me the picture of what I can potentially be, which, as the picture of a
good-in-itself, contains a sign that says “For you,” is this good-in-itself-for-me not
also at the same time a picture of my value-essence that I cannot but also give to
myself in relating to myself in the highest form of self-love? As a consequence, the
constitution of this value-essence is also autonomous.12 The voice that, in a
whisper, confronts me with a good-in-itself that is a good-in-itself-for-me, the
voice whose knowledge (Wissen) founds all particular obligations on my part (all
ought), is, needless to say, the voice of conscience (Gewissen), one which has
traditionally been understood either as the voice of God or the voice of an other
within myself who, however, is no other than myself. If the good-in-itself given to

12
In this context, Scheler’s argument that the a prioriness of insights does not necessarily have to
imply that it has to be “self-obtained,” or “self-found” (79–81) is of interest. For Scheler, the ethical
autonomy of the person does not include that all ethical insight be exclusively self-generated (see
404–501).

123
 RODOLPHE GASCHÉ

me as the ground of all my obligations came only from God, would it not also
remain abstract? God must be loving enough (absolutely loving) to inscribe the
mark “For me” into this picture and thus let me give this picture autonomously to
myself as well if his gift is to be at the same time one that I can give to myself, thus
making it truly binding for me.
Precisely this content which, within the good-in-itself, directly points at me
“places me in a unique position in the moral cosmos and obliges me with respect
to actions, deeds, and works, etc., which, when I represent them, all call: ‘I am for
you and you are for me’ ” (p. 490). Insight into the good-in-itself that God’s
intentional loving glance holds out and “objectifies” for me not only represents the
foundation for all my moral obligations, it assigns me as well a unique and
singular place within the moral cosmos, that is, within the world. The value-
essence of myself that I apprehend in relating to myself, one which Scheler
characterizes as “a special non-formal content,” “something that comes from this
content,” namely, that it is directed at me, causes me to have a singular place in the
world. That which causes the non-formal, or material, content to point at me and
thus makes this content truly binding for me is something that comes from this
content, namely, I experience it as containing a reference to me, as signifying
“me,” as pointing at me (ein erlebter Hinweis [. . .] auf mich, ein erlebter Fin-
gerzeig, der [. . .] auf “mich” deutet). Yet, what is the status of this experienced
sign on which the very binding nature of the good-in-itself in question depends?
As a Hinweis, as a Fingerzeig by which the intuited non-formal content of the
good-in-itself concerns me, and which must be able to be repeatedly experienced
as pointing to me, is this sign not in some way, and, perhaps, essentially a formal
structure? It is something that comes from the non-formal content, but is not
identical with it. Rather, it is what marks this content as a content that is addressed
to me. Undoubtedly, such a sign is experienced by me as directed at me, hence as
a form that is singular. At the same time as it must be recognizable by me and be
repeatable, it must also come with certain ideality. The ideality of its form,
however, without which I could not recognize its directedness at me, is also at the
same time what, inevitably, causes any one such pointer to be also a pointer at
others than me. It is its being a content that is so singular that it only pertain to me,
that, at the same time, and paradoxically so, allows this content to be, in principle,
universally addressable to every one. Furthermore, if such reference to me, and me
alone, inevitably points to all others as well, then this very reference is also what
makes me as this singular and irreplaceable person replaceable. Do we not
encounter here an unacknowledged formal aspect of Scheler’s non-formal ethics?
Undoubtedly, Scheler recognizes that the call upon me as this one singular person
can be addressed to others as well without making it therefore less singular. But
the problematic of the indexical pointer in a value-essence meant for me alone also
suggests that its content must be addressed to all others for its ought to come to me

124
 A MATERIAL A PRIORI?

as this singular person. From what we have seen, Scheler’s non-formal ethics
which seeks to purge ethics from all formalism, cannot but also admit some formal
and universal structures without which the material content of a value-essence
could never be experienced as directed at me alone.
Thus, when Scheler concludes: “It is—to refer once again to this state of
affairs—precisely this theory which claims that there is a true good-in-itself which
not only allows but also demands that there be a good-in-itself for each person in
particular. On the other hand, one who does not recognize a ‘good-in-itself,’ but
would join with Kant in basing the idea of a good only on the universality (and
necessity) of a willing, must find it impossible to recognize a good for me as an
individual person,” we should ask in turn whether Kant’s alleged formalist a priori
is universal and necessary to the degree of prohibiting all possibility of the
individual person of being addressed by the moral Law in person (pp. 490–91).
The question thus is whether the formal principles according to which alone
something like an ethics is possible that would be universally binding, does not
also come with some sort of material content—a content indistinguishable from
the form itself. Certainly, such a material content of the formal law could not be
material in a sensible way. Would it not rather have to be thought in terms
approaching those that Scheler used to conceptualize the material a priori of
ethics?
Let me only briefly sketch out, to conclude, how I would like to explore, to
quote Kant again, “on what grounds the moral law is binding,” and what it is in the
Law that secures that the Law addresses me, and not a subject in general. Needless
to say, the answer of this question would require establishing, first and foremost,
what a Law amounts to whose “mere form” alone, rather than “the universal law”
itself, must determine the will independently of all empirical conditions—thus,
the pure will itself, that is—a will that is free, autonomous, and whose determi-
nation by the mere form of the Law is then a self-determination.13 Rather than a
natural law, this Law is merely that of the minimal formal conditions of freedom
that an autonomous subject alone can give to itself. Furthermore, if such a Law
“commands,” it is precisely because it is me, this one singular rational individual,
who is its addressee. If the law expresses necessity, this is, therefore, never
“natural necessity,” but “consists only in the formal conditions of the possibility of
a law in general,” one that in all its concreteness is still outstanding, as it were, as
something that is only constituted progressively as actions occur whose subjective
maxims yield to the formal conditions in question.14
Secondly, in order to answer whether there is a call of the Law and if it is me
who is the addressee of the mere form of the moral Law, it is imperative to center

13
Kant (1999): 164.
14
Ibid: 167.

125
 RODOLPHE GASCHÉ

on what Kant calls “the determining ground [der Bestimmungsgrund] of the will,”
that is, not only what determines, but what motivates the will, what gives it its
direction and vocation. A careful, and patient technical analysis of this problem-
atic would be able to reveal what it is in the pure will itself (which immediately
yields to the Law) that seeks freedom from all empirical determination and invites
its determination by a mere form of the Law. In other words, the task would be to
figure out what, precisely, the freie Einstimmung in das Gesetz presupposes,
involves, and amounts to. The aim of such an inquiry into the ground of determi-
nation of the will would also seek to demonstrate that the classical form/matter
divide is no longer suitable to account for what takes place when the pure will
gives to itself the mere form of a law. To freely consent to the moral Law as one
that constitutes one as an individual and autonomous being implies letting oneself
be determined by what one recognizes as the Law of such autonomy. Such
recognition of the mere form of the Law is not an intuition in the phenomeno-
logical sense, and yet this form of the Law is discernible through insight as a
content as it were, and compels me as precisely this singular being.
Finally, it would be necessary to show that all knowledge in advance of, and
insight into a determined content of the Law would restrict the will’s autonomy
and hence its ability to decide. The merely formal nature of the Law, its undeter-
mined character, is also the very condition for the subject’s responsibility.15 Con-
versely, the call of the Law must remain undecidable, it must remain impossible
to definitely know that what the Law demands is demanded of me rather than of
an abstract and universal subject if I am to be able to freely decide that it is me who
is addressed in person by the Law. Only on this condition am I this singular
subject, and only the mere form of the Law, rather than a determined Law, makes
it possible for me to be a responsible I, that is, in Kantian terms, a person, in other
words, a being who is an end in itself.

15
See Weil (1963): 44.

126