MAX SCHELER AND THE CLASSIFICATION

OF FEELINGS

Quentin Smith

One of Max Scheler's most important contributions to

phenomenological philosophy has been his classification of the
different types of feeling. In Section Two of Chapter Five of his
work, Formali,sm in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, I
Scheler distinguished six different types of feeling. Scheler did not
mean this to be an "absolute" classification of the different types
of feeling, but a classification based on one specific criterion.
This was the criterion of the manner in which feelings are related
to their objects. Elsewhere Scheler had classified the types of feel-
ing on the basis of a different criterion-that of their manner of
relatedness to the ego. We maintained in our paper, "Scheler's
Stratification of Emotional Life and Strawson's Person"2 that this
was the decisive criterion in his classification of the depth-strata
of feelings. Other classifications based on different criteria are
also possible, such as the classifications based on the criterion of
the qualities or levels of intensity of feeling.
In the present paper, then, what we are concerned with is
Scheler's classification of the "types of feeling" in the sense of
their "types of connection with objects." The criterion he used to
distinguish one feeling from another was that of the way in which
the feeling is connected to its object. On the basis of this criterion,
Scheler was able to distinguish six types of feeling, ranging from

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the "feeling-states" to the feelings of "love and hate." These six
types of feeling will be described in the first part of our paper. In
the second part of the paper we will engage in a critical discussion
with Scheler with regard to his classification- and Brentano's,
Husserl's, Meinong's, Hartmann's and von Hildebrand's
classification-of value-intuitions as a type of feeling. We will
argue that value-intuitions should rather be classified as a type of
presentation.

Part One: Scheler's Theory of the Six Types of Feeling

At the outset we must mention the very same thing with which
we began our discussion of Scheler's classification of the types of
depth-strata in "Scheler's Stratification of Emotional Life and
Strawson's Person." This is the fact that Scheler never explicitly
states what his criterion for classifying the feelings is. All he
presents us with is the finished classification, and the reader has
to determine from the results what criterion Scheler had been us-
ing. In the above mentioned article, we found that Scheler
had employed eight different criteria, with only one of them
being truly essential. In the classification we are dealing
with in this paper, only one criterion can be found - that
of the feeling's way of being connected to its object. The
evidence that this is the criterion he used will appear in the
way in which the six types of feeling he distinguishes differ
from one another. As we will see, the only way in which each type
of feeling differs from each of the other five types of feeling is the
way in which it is connected to its object. The six different ways of
being connected with an object exist in a hierarchal order, which,
from the lowest to the highest level, range from the least con-
nection with an object to the greatest connection with an object.
This order is as follows: 1) feeling-states, 2) affects, 3) non-
cognitive intentional feelings, 4) feeling functions, 5) preferring
and placing after, and 6) love and hate. We will begin with the
feeling-states.

1. Feeling-States

Feeling-states are the type of feeling that have the least con-
nection with their objects. Under their heading are included both

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