Scheler’s Critique of Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology

Scheler’s Critique of Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology Judging from the superlatives they use to characterize each other’s work, Scheler and Heidegger seem to have formed something of a mutual admiration society. At the conclusion to his notes on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Scheler describes the work as “the most original work that we possess in contemporary German philosophy, the freeest and most independent of philosophical traditions: a radical and yet rigorously scientific assault on philosophy’s highest problems.”2 For his part, Heidegger is moved, upon hearing of Scheler’s sudden death in the spring of 1928, to eulogize him as “the strongest philosophical force in Germany, nay, in all of Europe - and even in all contemporary philosophy.”3 Heidegger goes on to cite Scheler’s early grasp and advancement of phenomenology’s novel potential (most notably in Der Formalismusbegriff in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik), “the totality of his questioning,” and his “uncommon nose” for ever-emerging novel possibilities on the horizon. After noting the considerable changes, some filled with torment and despair, that Scheler’s thinking underwent over the years, Heidegger, in obvious admiration, attributes that tumultuousness to the fact that Scheler was “possessed” and what possessed him was philosophy.4 On Pentecost Sunday, 1929 Heidegger pens the final lines to the foreword to his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik by dedicating the work “to the memory of Max Scheler.”5 Yet far more important than such praise as a sign of genuine regard between thinkers is the time each takes to understand the other’s work, subjecting it to searching critique. In this respect, too, a high measure of mutual esteem between Scheler and Heidegger is demonstrable, though it is less balanced than the cited encomia might suggest. For, while peppering his lectures and writings during the 1920s with several approving and disapproving asides to Scheler’s thought, Heidegger does not appear to have left behind any record of a sustained, critical examination of Der Formalismusbegriff or Das Wesen der Sympathie. Scheler’s Nachlaß, on the other hand, contains such an examination of Being and Time, composed eight months before his death but also at least a month before Heidegger comes to spend three days at Scheler’s Cologne home in December, 1927.6 There is more than one reason for the difference in the levels of attention that Scheler and Heidegger bring to each other’s work. Scheler’s major works before the 1920s are not directly or at least pre-eminently concerned with the ontological and epistemological issues, paradigmatically treated by Aristotle and Husserl, that form such an important part of the breeding ground for Heidegger’s philosophical revolution.7 Scheler’s insights clearly are significant for Heidegger’s interest in the phenomenology of religion, another crucial source for his effort in the early 1920s to think being anew.8 But here, too, Heidegger turns mainly to the classic sources for the investigation of religious experience, namely, the writings of Paul, Augustine, Luther, Schleiermacher, and Kierkegaard. Perhaps the little attention paid in this respect - at least in public - to Scheler can be traced to the Protestant turn in Heidegger’s thinking after the war, coupled with a fear of displaying affinities with “the Catholic phenomenologist.” In some ways, as Scheler himself notes, his work shares some basic themes with Dilthey’s writings, but it seems that Heidegger is more concerned with the hermeneutical and historical 2 dimensions of Dilthey’s philosophy of life than with the focus on nature demanded and exemplified by Scheler’s studies of the phenomenon of life. Yet these very differences in Heidegger’s interests and influences, while perhaps explaining the lack of any evidence of extensive scrutiny of Scheler’s major writings - at least in the way of seminars, publications, or notes prior to the publication of Being and Time in 1927, make his high praise for Scheler as a philosopher even more puzzling. Should we conclude from the facts reviewed that Heidegger’s encomium for Scheler is less than genuine or, at least, that it is motivated more by sentiment than reason? Such an inference would be precipitate for at least two reasons. In the first place, several thematic treatments in Being and Time and later works bear too fine a resemblance to similar treatments in Scheler’s work not to be pedigrees of the latter (as is, indeed, acknowledged by Heidegger in some instances). In the second place, the foregoing review of Heidegger’s concerns and the works that preoccupied him bears principally upon his thinking as he works his way to writing Being and Time. Yet Heidegger’s strong praise, it bears recalling, is expressed over a year after the publication of Being and Time and less than half a year after an extensive private and, as it turned out, last meeting with Scheler. During that last encounter, the two of them, as Heidegger himself puts it, “discussed in detail how the formulation of the question in Being and Time was related to metaphysics and to his [Scheler’s] conception of phenomenology.”9 It is highly unlikely that, at this meeting, Scheler did not make his extensive criticisms of fundamental ontology known to Heidegger; the philosophical question is: are they trenchant? and the historical question is: did they take? In other words, what remains to be seen, in order to determine the significance of Heidegger’s postmortem laudation for Scheler, is whether and, if so, in what sense Heidegger takes Scheler’s criticisms of Being and Time to heart, as his words to his students might suggest. These criticisms, paradoxically, are first published in the year Heidegger dies and it is probably quite unlikely that Heidegger had ever planned to publish a detailed response to them. Moreover, as far as I know, no manuscript containing such a reposte exists among Heidegger’s Nachlaß. Yet the lack of such a manuscript or even evidence of plans to respond does not establish that Heidegger is not affected by Scheler’s criticisms or that the course taken by his thinking after Being and Time - most notably, his first, so-called “systematic” or “metaphysical” turn - does not show the effects of those criticisms.10 To the contrary, his eulogy of Scheler in the spring of 1928 gives us ample reason to think that Scheler’s criticisms meant a great deal to him. The first order of business, however, and the primary aim of the following paper is to examine Scheler’s critique of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. This examination should not be confused with a full assessment of the validity of the criticisms, an undertaking as ambitious as it is necessary, that requires the development of a philosophical position capable of embracing the insights and differing perspectives of each philosopher. Such an undertaking demands, in any case, a venue far larger than that provided by an essay. Hence, while possible rejoinders (that might be made on Heidegger’s behalf) to Scheler’s criticisms are frequently mentioned in the body of the paper and a main line of divergence between the two thinkers is indicated in the conclusion, the paper endeavors primarily to identify Scheler’s criticisms themselves and their possible merits. There is, as noted, ample reason for this restricted enterprise: it constitutes the requisite first step that must be taken in order to answer both the philosophical question of the trenchancy of Scheler’s criticisms and the historical question of their impact on Heidegger’s thought. I. Scheler’s Rebuttal and Critique of Fundamental Ontology 3 Scheler was prompted by more than the general philosophical challenge presented by Being and Time to write a lengthy critical response to it. He was clearly piqued and provoked by Heidegger’s various, mostly critical asides to his work. The one point that seems to have annoyed him in particular is the objection that might be considered Heidegger’s overriding criticism, namely, that Scheler forgets the question of the being of human being and instead conceives it “as ‘self-evident’ in the sense of the present-at-handness of the remaining created things.”11 The inadequacy of this traditional ontological orientation in relation to Dasein, Heidegger charges, also undermines Scheler’s otherwise salutary attempt to construe knowing as a “relation of being.”12 For his part, Scheler faults Heidegger for, among other things, dogmatically relativizing all manners of being to a solipsistic, suspiciously narrow, and inadequately justified interpretation of human existence.13 The following section is principally devoted to elaborating the main sources of contention between the two thinkers, based upon Scheler’s rebuttal of Heidegger’s criticisms (“Scheler on the defensive”) and his objections to the existential analyses in Being and Time ( “Scheler on the offensive”). These differences should not, however, obscure the considerable area of their agreement (circa 1927). As a prelude to the main business of this section, it may be helpful to list several points on which they concur. Both agree (and know that they agree) that a human being’s primary access to reality is not a matter of sensation, intuition, perception, thought, inference, knowledge, or consciousness; nor can being-real be based upon being-an-object or explained as the effect of something real.14 They also both agree that reality is not confined to the external world and that knowing is not “the primary mode of access” to the real.15 Scheler praises Heidegger’s account of the priority of the ready-to-hand over the present-at-hand as well as his efforts to break with the traditional transferral of physical categories to investigations of the phenomena of life, the self, and so on; but such praise is hardly surprising since Heidegger is thereby largely recapitulating Schelerian themes.16 In their common repudiation of a Cartesian conception of subjectivity, both thinkers argue that consciousness and knowing are derivative phenomena.17 Heidegger’s claim that Dasein’s essence is precisely its existence, together with his sharp differentiation of it from the ready-to-hand and the objectifiable present-at-hand, echoes Scheler‘s insistence that “the being of a person is never an object” and “that it is the very essence of the person that it only exists and lives in the performance of intentional acts.”18 Scheler’s emphasis on the ultimate and essential correspondence of person and world reverberates in Heidegger’s account of the fundamental wordliness of human existence, its “being-in-the-world.”19 Not incidentally, it would seem, Scheler’s account of an ecstatic way of behaving, presupposed by knowing, is unmistakeably appropriated into the existential analysis of Being and Time (as characteristic of the temporalizing that is the underlying sense of human existence).20 There are also patent similarities between the two thinkers on the topic of temporality. For example, both reject the Kantian doctrine that time (or space) is a form of intuition. In addition, Heidegger follows Scheler in considering phenomenal time as well as physicalmathematical determinations of time, along with other such objectifications of time, to be derivative of a more basic sort of temporality. They also concur in singling out the primarily futural and kairological character of “original temporality.”21 For quite similar though not identical reasons, they distance their philosophical projects from those of the two contemporary thinkers to whom jointly they are most indebted, namely, Dilthey and Husserl. Thus, Scheler endorses Heidegger’s claim that Dilthey does not succeed in determining the manner of being of life because, like Bergson, he immediately combines (and 4 thus confuses) this issue with that of the ‘psychic.’22 They both reject what they regard as Husserl’s “one-sided idealistic orientation of all being on <>.”23 Much as Scheler does in Der Formalismus, Heidegger rejects the notion of an independent realm of “ideal being” and Scheler notes that “for years” he has been teaching a doctrine of the sort captured by Heidegger’s insistence on the truth of being, the emergence of the being of an entity from absence, as the presupposition for the truth of bi-valent assertions.24 Finally, Scheler acknowledges the correctness of Heidegger’s basic observation that an ontological determination of the validity of the various concepts employed in understanding human beings is needed but has yet to be made and that, in its absence, Greek ontology has held sway over the Western philosophical tradition.25 They also agree in their rejection of traditional approaches to the conception of human beings. Scheler is apparently ready to concede Heidegger’s criticism of him for continuing to work with a bifurcation of reason and life and for being “thoroughly oriented towards the ancient and Christian anthropology”; however, were Heidegger acquainted with the present stand of his research, Heidegger would, Scheler argues in 1927, see that those criticisms no longer apply.26 A. Scheler on the defensive The lines of agreement mentioned in the last few paragraphs are considerable and yet they are not sufficiently fundamental to prevent each thinker from challenging, as noted above, the legitimacy of the basic premises of the other’s thought. In his discussion of “reality as an ontological problem,” after noting Dilthey’s achievement of giving a “phenomenological characterization of the reality of the real” in terms of the phenomena of resistance, Heidegger charges that the analysis falls short because the problem of reality is construed epistemologically. While epistemological refutations of Dilthey’s analyses should not keep us, Heidegger emphasizes, from reaping what is “positive” in the latter, Heidegger criticizes the ontological indeterminateness of the very notions (notably, “life”) that underlie those analyses. Well aware of Scheler’s demand for a noncircular, ontological definition of cognition and thus his construal of knowing (a kind of cognition) as a “relation of being” (Seinsverhältnis), Heidegger knows that Scheler and, following him, Hartmann cannot be accused - at least not stratightforwardly - of construing epistemology as the final court of appeal for the problem of reality.27 Heidegger maintains, nevertheless, that both thinkers adopt the basic orientation of traditional ontology and fail to appreciate its fundamental inadequacy in regard to Dasein and the problem of reality. Accordingly, Heidegger charges, Scheler’s interpretation of reality is “fundamentally” beset by the same “ontological indeterminacy” that undermines the otherwise positive prospects of Dilthey’s interpretation of reality.28 As noted earlier, Scheler is particularly upset with this last charge. Not that he would fail to admit a substantial area of agreement with Dilthey. When Dilthey (in the much-discussed essay “Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage vom Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die Realität der Außenwelt und seinem Recht”) challenges the very presuppositions of the traditional quandry (Kant called it a “scandal”) of proving the reality of the external world, he does so by appealing to the basic, prenatal schema of “impulse and resistance,” a schema that, Heidegger rightly observes, Scheler continues. In Dilthey’s own words: “The schema of my experiences, in which my self distinguishes from itself the object, lies in the relation between the consciousness of arbitrary, willful movement and that of the resistance which it meets.”29 Dilthey, it bears noting, regards the assumption of the immediate givenness of the reality of the external world as a “psychological fiction” and on this score, in a qualified way, Scheler parts ways with him.30 Yet Dilthey also insists, as Scheler does later, that the reality of the external world is not something 5 disclosed by the data of consciousness or derived from mere thought processes. Both thinkers concur that the key to the belief in the reality of the external world lies in “impulsively voluntative behavior” (Scheler) or “an experience of willing” (Dilthey).31 Not surprisingly, Scheler’s refers - in the singular - to “Dilthey’s and our doctrine” and Heidegger’s “not very precise elaborations in opposition to” that doctrine.32 Scheler has reason, nevertheless, to be peeved by Heidegger’s charge and failure to differentiate Dilthey’s views from his. For years, he observes, he has devoted lectures to the question of life’s manner of being.33 Moreover, in “Idealism - Realism” Scheler makes four central criticisms of Dilthey’s account of reality. To be sure, it is questionable whether Heidegger had any access to these criticisms when he penned his charge34 and it is perhaps even likely that at least one of Scheler’s criticisms is made with Heidegger’s remarks in mind. Scheler criticizes Dilthey for failing to appreciate (a) the centrality and immediacy of the experience of resistance (Dilthey accepts Helmholtz’ findings - since discredited, according to Scheler - that invoke the intervention of “thought processes”), (b) the priority of the “ecstatically experienced resistance” to any immanent contents of consciousness (Dilthey speaks of a fundamental “consciousness of resistance”), (c) the spontaneous, involuntary character of the impulsive life that meets resistance (Dilthey continues a Schopenhauerian legacy of characterizing the life drives as willful), and (d) the fact that the experience of resistance is by no means confined to the so-called “outer world” (Dilthey overlooks the resistance experienced purely psychologically, for example, the resistance of things remembered to change, weakness of will).35 For the purposes of this paper, a full assessment of these criticisms would be out of place; nevertheless, they deserve mention because they demonstrate why Scheler would take such exception to having his interpretation summarily associated and dismissed with that of Dilthey. Indeed, Scheler’s discomfiture was undoubtedly compounded by the fact that he understood Heidegger’s position in many relevant respects, not least in its criticism of Dilthey, as a facsimile of his own. Already in Formen des Wissens, a text that Heidegger did in fact read and cite, Scheler asserts unequivocally that for seven years he has been insisting that “consciousness” is derivative of a “preconscious” (= “prereflexive”), “ecstatic” cognition or, better, “having” of things that does not rest on “intellectual” functions.36 More to the point of Heidegger’s basic criticism, what is ecstatic is not some present-at-hand state, but a process.37 The merits of this rebuttal of Heidegger’s criticism must be evaluated, but not before it is placed in the context of Scheler’s own criticisms of Heidegger. B. Scheler on the offensive Heidegger’s objections to Scheler’s doctrine, made in the wake of criticisms of Dilthey’s conception of reality, are “too incomplete” in Scheler’s view to warrant a more searching analysis. However, there are two general, interrelated points advanced by Heidegger in support of his critique that Scheler “has to dispute” (as he puts it): the ontological primacy of the disclosedness of the world over the constitution of reality through resistance and the existential primacy of anxiety and care over eros.38 In addition to and often in the context of these two basic objections, Scheler also makes several other substantial criticisms of Heidegger’s existential analysis: the solipsistic makeup of its point of departure and the resulting enfeeblement of the concept of the world, the empiricist and arbitrary nature of the undertaking, the self-refuting character of the conclusion about temporality, and - not least - its underlying worldview. The first two of these additional criticisms are elaborated in the course of presenting Scheler’s two basic objections in the next two sub-sections. However, a separate sub-section is devoted to the 6 last two criticisms because they offer an explanation as much as a criticism of the shortcomings of Heidegger’s analysis.39 i. Worldliness, reality, and resistance: Heidegger’s solipsism and “the world well lost” Heidegger claims that the experience of resistance is only possible ontologically on the basis of the disclosedness of the world.40 Scheler’s position is that “resistance to the one center of impulses and life yields the unity of a real sphere - prior to all individual realities.”41 What is given in advance is - not a world - but a certain subjective spatiality and temporality.42 Moreover, they are given with and relative to the possibility of alteration characteristic not merely of human existence but of vital entities in general. Scheler can agree fully with Heidegger that ‘world-being’ and ‘being-a-self’ are equiprimordial on a certain level, but Scheler adds an explanation for the equiprimordiality on that level, namely, that “both, as manners of being, grow out of resistance, overcoming of resistance, and subsequent inspection of what has, hence, come to be.”43 Inasmuch as reality is defined by this resistance, the world is something real and derivative in Scheler’s account. Moreover, the world, in addition to being “nothing primarily given,” first possesses a definite sense only in relation to “God.”44 ‘World,’ of course, does not mean for Scheler what it does for Heidegger and this difference considerably complicates any attempt to sort through their contrasting positions, especially since their different uses of the term ‘world’ are not quite as far apart as their different uses of ‘Dasein.’ Whereas it is unambiguous that ‘Dasein’ and ‘reality’ are synonymous for Scheler and their meanings quite different for Heidegger, he would certainly endorse in a certain sense Scheler’s realistic depiction of the world as “a being independent of the living subjectivity and everything experienced by it.”45 But in regard to this realistic endorsement it is necessary to make three qualifications, corresponding to three distinctions on which Heidegger insists. The first qualification is that Heidegger distinguishes several senses of the world: (1) ‘world’ as the totality of entities presentat-hand within the world, (2) the manner (or particular region) of being of such entities, (3) the world of human existence, and (4) the worldliness that is presupposed by the latter worlds and is “a manner of being of Dasein and never the sort of manner of being of an entity present-at-hand within the world.”46 Only as far as the first and second senses of world are concerned would Heidegger concur with Scheler that the world is independent of living subjectivity (supposing for argument’s sake, of course, that the latter is, if not equivalent, then at least profoundly akin to being-in-the-world). The second qualification is Heidegger’s distinction between the real and reality. Conceding a point of agreement, however superficial, with realism, Heidegger maintains that entities within-the-world are respectively “already” disclosed with Dasein (Dasein as beingin-the-world).47 Yet at the same time, acccording to Heidegger, idealism has the better of the debate inasmuch as it clings to the insight that no entity can explain what ‘to be’ means. Hence, in a move clearly reminiscent of Kant’s transcendental idealism securing common sense realism, Heidegger maintains that, while the external world is “really” present-at-hand, “reality is ontologically grounded in the being of Dasein.”48 There is accordingly a third way in whcih Heidegger’s endorsement of (realist) talk of the “independence of reality” must be qualified, namely, inasmuch as reality is an ontological category necessarily founded in Da-sein (fundamental ontology). This third qualification brings us back to what Scheler calls “the founding question” (Fundierungsfrage) and the immediate matter of dispute between the two thinkers.49 Worldliness is, for Heidegger, a supposition for reality; the real is “accessible essentially only as an entity within the world.”50 Reality can be uncovered - or remain hidden - only on the basis of a 7 foregoing disclosedness. But reality is neither in need of nor capable of a proof, Heidegger insists. Indeed, the very question of the reality of the external world is self-refuting since the question must at once presuppose an “isolated” or “worldless subject” and yet one that opines, is certain, or believes, etc. - behavior founded upon being-in-the-world. This same presupposition, Heidegger maintains, plagues Dilthey’s deflationary effort to establish the belief in the external world’s reality rather than provide a proof of it. The epistemological impasse is not removed as long as the basis for “a phenomenally assured problematic” is not procured and this basis, Heidegger adds in a criticism undoubtedly directed at Husserl and Scheler, is not secured by “subsequent phenomenological improvements of the concept of subject and consciousness.”51 Nor are matters helped by an insistence on the necessary interrelatedness of subject and object. This formal move remains ontologically indeterminate and naive. What needs explaining is why the question is posed and the explanation is the fallenness of human existence that displaces the primary understanding of being to present-at-handness.52 For Scheler, by contrast, as already noted, there is a sense of the world that is coextensive with a subject or, more precisely, a specific level of subjectivity (“being-a-self’) but this world is the result, not the presupposition of the experience of resistance.53 Moreover, only as such, does the concept of the “world” retain any significance. In this way Heidegger’s criticism of the “ontological indeterminacy” of Scheler’s interpretation of reality is turned on its head. Scheler is charging not only that Heidegger’s existential concept of the world is basically unclear but also that any meaning that it is capable of conveying presupposes what Heidegger denies, namely, the foregoing independence of reality.54 As far as Heidegger’s own claims for the alleged primacy of worldliness are concerned, Scheler observes further (1) that “unfortunately” he has absolutely no acquaintance with worldliness as a phenomenon (instead of simply an idea), (2) that he has seldom seen a more indefinite concept than the so-called “referential totality of significance” (with which Heidegger attempts to elaborate worldliness), (3) that not a single line of proof is presented by Heidegger that the drive-impulse is a modification of what he calls ‘care’ or that resistance presupposes “being as something about which one is concerned” (das Sein als Besorgtes), and (4) that Heidegger’s claim that resistance is only one character of reality is untenable if the problem of the ‘in itself’ is properly analyzed (so as to distinguish real-being and that which is real).55 In regard to this last point, Scheler adds that it is blatantly inconsistent for Heidegger to maintain, on the one hand, that “if Dasein does not exist, then ... ‘in itself’ (An sich) also ‘is’ not” and, on the other hand, that the ontological grounding of reality in Dasein “does not mean that something real could only be what it is in itself (an ihm selbst), if and so long as Dasein exists.”56 Heidegger construes worldliness, it bears iterating, as an existential, that is to say, as a way in which Dasein exists; so construed, worldliness is an essential part of the structure of “being-in-the-world.” Scheler continues his assault on Heidegger’s concept of worliness and its alleged ontological primacy by challenging what Scheler considers the solipsism implicit in the respective individuality of what Heidegger dubs the “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit ) of “being-in-theworld.” Though well aware of Heidegger’s stipulation that being-with-others is part of the constitution of being-in-the-world, Scheler questions the import of that stipulation since that being-with-others, like the reality of entities within-the-world, continues to be intepreted as relative to the solus ipse of Dasein.57 Descartes’ “basic mistake” is not averted, but merely inverted.58 Heidegger leaves himself open to this objection inasmuch as he talks about the necessity of “inverting” the cogito ergo sum, whereby “the first assertion is then: ‘sum’ and, to be sure, in the sense of ‘I-am-in-a-world.’”59 On the basis of passages such as this, Scheler finds 8 in Heidegger’s analysis no means of avoiding “an absolute pluralism of exemplars of the solus ipse” or, equivalently, no reason to assume that one authentic world is shared by them.60 Indeed, there is no sufficient reason given by Heidegger, Scheler insists, for not identifying Dasein with Heidegger himself!61 The net effect of the inherent solipsism of “being-in-the-world” and the counterpart notion that the world’s disclosure is a condition for the experience of reality is, Scheler infers, an indeterminate, empty conception of the world. Paradoxically, precisely by construing worldliness as an existential (a fundamental character of a respectively unique being-in-theworld) allegedly more basic than reality, Heidegger sacrifices the unity and thus the intelligibility of the world. In addition to leaving himself with no means of determining whether there is only one world, Heidegger so ties the notion of worldliness to the being-in-the-world that is respectively “mine” or “yours” that he robs the world itself of any intrinsic significance. “In this philosophy,” Scheler accordingly contends, “the world is without any sense itself, value itself, without any independent reality in relation to the human being.”62 After musing that, before Heidegger, perhaps only Fichte had so devalued the world (nature and history), Scheler observes that the world is even less than it was for Fichte because for Heidegger it is merely an illusory refuge, from which one returns to oneself, one’s angst, and one’s death. The world according to Heidegger is, Scheler submits, like a prep school for Calvinists, existing for no other reason than to instruct Dasein (through suffering and failure since these “expand” him) that he has no essential relevance and the world is actually nothing.63 (This last sentence introduces the sixth basic objection made by Scheler, an objection treated separately below.) ii. Care, anxiety, and love: Heidegger’s empiricism and ontological arbitrariness Heidegger does, of course, have more of an explanation of his answer to what Scheler calls “the founding question” (whether the experience of reality founds the disclosedness of the world or vice versa). Reality is disclosed in “care,” Heidegger’s term for the being of Dasein, the structure of which, Scheler is quick to point out, is allegedly provided in its entirety by the phenomenon of anxiety .64 Not to be confused with fear of a particular entity, the phenomenon in question is not an everyday experience; it is rather anxiety for and about being-in-the-world at all, an existential anxiety that robs the individual Dasein of any possibility of understanding itself in terms of the “world” or public opinion, in short, in terms of anything that is not its own utterly individual (>>solus ipse<<), authentic potential-to-be-in-the-world.65 More importantly, at least for Scheler’s purposes, is Heidegger’s claim in this context that “anxiety ... discloses the world as world.”66 Scheler has several difficulties with Heidegger’s notion that care and anxiety provide the basis for world-disclosure and, thereby, the discovery of realities. Some discussion of these difficulties is instructive, since each specifies a more general complaint that Scheler directs at Heidegger’s way of proceeding in Being and Time. Formulating the first difficulty as a question, Scheler asks: how, on Heidegger’s account, is one supposed to distinguish what is essential or ontological from what is purely cultural or historical in the interpretation of anxiety?67 This query reflects Scheler’s reservations with the “scientific” and “phenomenological” label given by Heidegger to his analyses. While phenomenology is, if nothing else, characterized by its pursuit of essences, Heidegger has, Scheler charges, no means of distinguishing what is essential from what is not.68 Inasmuch as Heidegger’s way of proceeding consistently urges the conflation of essence and existence, it shares fundamental traits with philosophical traditions otherwise derided by Heidegger, namely, empiricism as well as Lebensphilosophie.69 Heidegger recognizes, Scheler concedes, an a priori domain but it is restricted to the order of givenness and, 9 hence, relative to the organization of Dasein.70 While Heidegger’s break with the Husserlian doctrine of ideality is in Scheler’s eyes to be commended, Heidegger’s failure to distinguish between essence and contingent existence renders “perennial truths and mathematical principles” incomprehensible.71 Scheler’s second difficulty with Heidegger’s claims for the foundational role of care is directed at his determination of care in strictly ontological terms (“being-ahead-of-itself-inalready-being-in-a-world”). Care is characterized so formally that it might just as well express a state of hope and loving anticipation as care and its basic mood of anxiety.72 This difficulty epitomizes Scheler’s broad misgivings with the very endeavor of attempting to provide an ontology in advance of an ontic determination of various central concepts and their validity (e.g., ‘knowing,’ ‘life,’ ‘thing,’ ‘body,’ etc.). As noted earlier, Scheler is in full agreement with Heidegger that the ontological structure of human existence has yet to be adequately elaborated and that traditional philosophical approaches too readily borrowed categories from other domains. But the solution is, he submits, not to pretend to give an ontological interpretation of human existence without presupposing various concepts. It bears noting that, with this criticism, Scheler is once again attempting to turn the tables on Heidegger’s criticism that Scheler interprets reality with ontologically indeterminate notions. Heidegger’s analysis is ontologically arbitrary, Scheler is maintaining, because it employs (presupposes) some ontic notions that are supposedly derivative without explaining either the criterion for the employment of those notions (rather than others) or their derivation. There is, he suggests, perhaps no better example of this con-fusion than an unclarified, but obviously presupposed relation between Dasein and human being: “Every reader of this book [Being and Time] will not get over a certain lack of clarity regarding what is actually meant by the constantly recurring ‘the Dasein.’ ‘The’ Dasein is in any case supposed to the ‘human being’ in contrast to the not-human - or yet a structure of being that is supposed to be found on or in connection with the ‘human being.’”73 Scheler underscores his claim that Heidegger’s very point of departure is impossible by noting the further presuppositions of the existential analysis in Being and Time. In the first place, Heidegger plainly presupposes some sort of essence (if not of human beings, then of Dasein) in contrast to those of other entities. Furthermore, he presupposes not only that it is given along with the way a human being as <> is given to itself, but also that it can be distinguished from what is individually essential and what is empirical.74 However, as already noted, each presupposition regarding an essential feature is made without providing a means of distinguishing it.75 In sum, Scheler criticizes Heidegger’s existential analysis both for its empiricism, that is to say, its conflation of the essence/existence distinction, and for its ontological arbitrariness, that is to say, its pretension of providing an ontological account of human existence without presupposing (or acknowledging its precise presuppositions of) selective ontic concepts such as those of nature, body, life, spirit, thing, and so on. Yet these criticisms, while weighty, are largely methodological. Scheler’s chief difficulty with the fundamental role assigned to care and anxiety, especially with respect to the experience of reality, is directed at the phenomenal content of anxiety itself. Far from being fundamental, anxiety is (in Scheler’s view) itself derived from a surfeit of unsatisfied urges in relation to satisfied and satisfiable ones or, in other words, it is derived from the world’s resistance to its strivings. After noting the considerable difference in their conceptions of the “founding question,” Scheler attempts to specify further the difference between his conception of human nature and Heidegger’s existential analysis in terms of the three questions: What leads Dasein to the object? 10 What leads it to know and to progress in knowing? Can anything lead Dasein out of the anxiety that is so constitutive for it? Heidegger’s answer to the first two questions is, Scheler claims, Dasein’s “anxiety-ridden flight in the face of itself,” propelling it to lose itself in things ready-tohand and present-at-hand, becoming an anonymous unit in an anonymous society.76 Regrettably, this claim, while not without some justification, completely overlooks the fact that this progression represents only one part of Heidegger’s analysis, namely, the analysis of inauthentic existence alone (the same could be said in response to the criticism, stated above, that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology effectively devalues the world). Moreover, Scheler clearly exaggerates when he maintains that this progression represents the very opposite of the truth. Nevertheless, with his observation that the flight inward, closing off the outer world and escaping into dreams, illusions, and drugs, is no less powerful a phenomenon than that mindless immersion in external things and society, an important issue is raised. To be sure, in Heidegger’s defense, one can legitimately reply once again that his conception of fallenness by no means rules out such maladies or, equivalently, that authentic existence is no more a flight inward than it is a flight outward. But the lack of consideration of these alternatives raises the question of the sufficiency of, at the very least, this portion of Heidegger’s intepretation. In other words, Heidegger’s account of inauthentic existence is inadequate inasmuch as it does not take into account the formal possibility of the alternative outlined by Scheler. Moreover, since anxiety is tied to death and authentic existence is determined precisely in terms of Dasein’s anticipation of its death, there is reason to question whether the insufficiency of the account of inauthentic existence carries over into that of authentic existence as well. The elaboration of this last point brings us to the third question raised above and to the heart of Scheler’s second major objection to the analysis in Being and Time (the objection, it bears recalling, to the notion that the world is first disclosed and reality discovered in care and anxiety). Scheler argues that, contrary to the claims made for them in Heidegger’s existential analysis, anxiety and care are derivative, not fundamental phenomena. The argument is, of course, incomplete without an account or at least an indication of the underlying phenomena. Scheler accordingly contends that anxiety and care presuppose and, indeed, have more than their match in eros.77 Scheler can agree with Heidegger’s account of anxiety as a fundamental state of mind (Grundbefindlichkeit), if the claim is that anxiety is one of the basic (not historically contingent) states of mind of human beings in contrast to animals. Yet it is also a “vital feeling or, better, a vitally complete circumstantiality that expresses itself physiologically and psychologically in an equally primordial manner.”78 Heidegger’s insistence that anxiety is fundamental to human existence overlooks, in Scheler’s view, the fact that human beings are not merely living beings, but also spiritual ones.79 More needs be said (see below) about Scheler’s notion of spirituality. But, quite apart from any such notion, Scheler is once again raising the spectre of the inadequacy, even arbitrariness, of the phenomena singled out by Heidegger for their ontological significance in the interpretation of human existence. Scheler, it bears iterating, is not denying that anxiety is the human being’s “most central feeling of life” or that human beings have a distinctive form of anxiety that is, indeed, constitutive for them.80 But he is maintaining that such anxiety is constitutive for them precisely inasmuch as they are alive. By taking anxiety as the point of departure for the interpretation of human existence, Heidegger has in effect duplicated the moves of a Lebensphilosoph. It may be legitimately objected that such criticisms are off the mark inasmuch as they suppose a distinction between living and spiritual beings that is not countenanced by or, better, is 11 bracketed by the very enterprise of a fundamental ontology. That enterprise, it bears recalling, is to unpack the preontological understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) that is constitutive of human existence, as a foundation for any ontology.81 But there is another reason, in Scheler’s mind, for rejecting the foundational roles assigned by Heidegger to anxiety and care, and it is a reason that does not suppose the distinction between living and spiritual beings. The reason is the simple fact that care and anxiety, as normally understood, are patently derivative.82 Far from finding or discovering reality, anxiety presupposes reality; it emerges from the resistance of the world. Anxiety is not directed at the unknown as such but at the possible resistance that the unknown might offer us. In short, anxiety is not the “ultimate datum” from which the analysis must take its bearings: “Behind anxiety there is a surfeit of unsatisfied, spontaneous life-urges opposite the satisfied and satisfiable urges.”83 In the dynamic of these urges lies the foundation supposed by phenomena such as anxiety and care. Eros is what basically motivates and shapes human beings’ turn to things and others, whether inauthentically or authentically. Moreover, when anxiety intrudes (inauthentically or authentically) on their self-conception, their ways of relating to things and being with others, eros has the potential to dispel the anxiety.84 With explicit reference to Plato, Scheler describes eros, not merely as the antagonist of anxiety and the anxiety-based hunger for power and superiority, but as the very impetus to participation in the world.85 He even conceives the world order as an “ordo amoris” and human love as a particular species of a “universal power, active in and on everything.”86 In keeping with this conception of the ordo amoris, Scheler delineates three forms of love, corresponding to his basic division of all acts and their bearers (vital acts of the body, psychic acts of the ego, and spiritual acts of the person).87 These claims are obviously based upon a broad, analogical conception of love. “In the most formal sense of the word,” as Scheler puts it, love is the tendency or, depending upon the case, the act that seeks to guide each thing in the direction of the “perfection of value” peculiar to that thing.88 In this act, one entity “takes leave of itself,” without ceasing to be the specifically limited entity that it is, and participates in another entity as an “ens intentionale” and thus without either entity becoming a “real part” of the other.89 Values are the noematic correlates of such acts directed at objects, but this observation means more to Scheler than the fact that the acts are directed at objects of value or in terms of the value of the beloved. Instead, acts of love are movements toward the elevation of the value of the beloved, whereby, however, the higher value in question is neither simply present-at-hand in advance of the love nor simply created by the lover.90 When Scheler claims that the first turn to the world is a matter of eros, not anxiety, when he maintains that eros, not anxiety, first opens up the world to us, and when he argues that anxiety and care are reactive, presupposing self-love as well as an already disclosed sphere of the world, he is appealing to love in that formal and, at the same time, broadly analogous sense.91 Yet Scheler’s second major objection to the existential analysis in Being and Time, his criticism of Heidegger’s appeals to anxiety and care in accounting for the way the world is disclosed, does not depend upon a specific cosmological doctrine of an ordo amoris. If the objection is trenchant, it is because anxiety and care are reactive phenomena, a clear indication that each supposes something like an urge, its frustration in the past (resistance to it), and the present indeterminacy of its fulfillment in the future. iii. Time, eternity, and Heidegger’s “Calvinist prep school” As a means of explaining the radicalness of Heidegger’s departure from Husserl’s phenomenology, Scheler observes that the departure consists in “a very far-reaching, factual approximation of Lebensphilosophie and philosophical historicism.”92 One indication of such an 12 approximation has already been noted: the role assigned by Heidegger to anxiety (inasmuch as it is a phenomenon that is in some degree common to all animate entities and not just human beings) suggests to Scheler that Heidegger is slipping “more and more into a type of Lebensphilosophie.”93 Another typical characteristic of a Lebensphilosophie that Scheler finds in Heidegger’s philosophy, despite its protests to the contrary, is its articulation of a certain view of life or the world (Lebens- or Weltanschauung). While not the stated aim of fundamental ontology, the construction of a world-view is, Scheler is charging, its operative presupposition and, to that extent, an integral and hardly covert part of its purpose. Heidegger’s views of the relation between philosophy and world-view, much like his conception of the relation between philosophy and science, are rapidly changing during the end of the 1920s. Yet even in Being and Time he acknowledges - as, indeed, he must for the sake of consistency - that “a definite ontic conception of authentic existence, a factual ideal of Dasein, underlies the ontological interpretation.”94 In that work, however, he remains exasperatingly mum about the precise make-up of that factual ideal (as, indeed, he does - perhaps not coincidentally - about the nature of the metaphysics that presupposes fundamental ontology). It is no mystery, however, to Scheler what world-view informs Heidegger’s existential analysis. The world-view is theological, specificially Protestant, even more specifically, “the Barth-Gogartenian theology, a kind of Neo-Calvinism.”95 What Scheler understands by the latter is a Protestant conception of “the absolute symbolic transcendence of God” together with the utter thrownness of human beings into the world.96 This theological conception is, in Scheler’s view, the pendant to the devaluation of the >> world << that he finds in Heidegger’s accounts of both the unreality of the world and Dasein’s fallenness in the world. Given the existential character of the world, it is Dasein itself that is thereby at bottom devalued. In this “immoderate, hysterically excessive doctrine,” as Scheler characterizes it, lies also the source of Heidegger’s fatally one-sided consideration of anxiety as the “basic state of mind” and his assignment of the preeminence of a self-centered care over love.97 Earlier several points of agreement between Scheler and Heidegger on the topic of temporality were mentioned. However, they also differ markedly in their understanding of the ontological status or, better, range of temporality. In keeping with the Calvinistic notion of the utter thrownness of human existence into worldiness and, as its counterpart, the notion of a divinity that absolutely transcends the worldliness of human existence, Heidegger does not entertain any sense in which human existence moves beyond the temporality constituting it. Heidegger is, indeed, formally precluded from doing so by virtue of his thesis that finite temporality is the ultimate horizon for human existence, understood precisely as the thrown projection or transcending of a being-in-the-world.98 In other words, on Heidegger’s account, temporality constitutes the very sense of human existence. From Scheler’s vantage point, however, this construal of human existence overlooks once again the distinction between human beings as living beings and as personal or spiritual beings. A human being is a ‘person’ or ‘spirit’ according to Scheler insofar as he or she has some sort of active capacity for self-reflection, for example, a capacity to gather, recall, enrich, fortify, be true to, aim for, conceal itself from, have or not have itself and, indeed, in each case “over time.”99 This self-reflection is only possible if the flow of time is in some sense, if not interrupted or suspended, then at least superseded. The entire person varies itself, becoming different to some degree, in and by means of each act performed by it, but in this variation, Scheler insists, there is nothing of the sort of change or succession that time makes possible. A person, as he struggles to put it in this connection, lives “into” time without living either “within” 13 the phenomenal time immediately given in the flow of internally perceived mental processes or even “in” the objective time of physics.100 Thanks to this capacity for self-reflection, it is possible to make the distinction between essence and existence. With the ability to make this distinction comes the ability, too, to recognize mathematical principles, perennial truths, indeed, the idea of truth itself. After observing that all of the latter are in some sense supra-historical, Scheler observes that Heidegger, to the great discredit of his existential analysis, must deny any such supra-temporality and with it, the distinction between essence and existence or apriority and aposteriority.101 As noted earlier, Heidegger interprets an original sense of temporality as the ultimate horizon, the meaning, of human existence. Scheler, too, distinguishes original and derivative senses of temporality in a cognate way, recognizing that the original sense forms the basis of the very constitution of Dasein’s existential structure. But Scheler does not endorse Heidegger’s sweeping claim that “the sense of Dasein is temporality.”102 Given the very nature of Dasein, this temporality cannot be confined to the self. In a passage cited by Scheler for its clear statement of the radical relativism inherent in this account of Dasein, Heidegger states: “Newton’s laws, the principle of contradiction, any truth at all is true only so long as Dasein is.”103 What is not immediately obvious is the connection in Scheler’s mind between this view of temporality and the world-view allegedly animating it. In order to see this connection and, conversely, the connection between Scheler’s view that persons and truths in some sense supersede time and his world-view, it is necessary to say a few more words about Scheler’s “idealism” (a label that he would in a certain sense bristle at) and theology.104 Like Heidegger and unlike Hartmann, Scheler holds fast to the phenomenological premise that there is no beingtrue without a being to which it is disclosed. Unlike Heidegger, however, from this premise he infers the necessity of “co-positing,” along with individual Dasein, “one super-singular Dasein, with whose disclosure of truth we co-disclose being-true, when we do so.”105 (The only other alternative, namely, Hartmann’s “critical realist” option of positing the independence of being from intentionality of any sort is confused and unacceptable).106 While Scheler thus embraces a familiar religious and metaphysical move to an an absolute ground of things, it bears recalling that he rejects traditional theism in favor of a revised version of the Spinozistic-Hegelian notion that the absolute becomes aware of itself in human beings in the same act in which they see themselves grounded in it.107 Unsatisfied with the intellectualistic cast of the traditional notion, Scheler emphasizes that this “self-grounded knowing” is a consequence of actively committing ourselves, at the very core of our being, to the ideal furthering of the deity. Human self-realization is the only place of God’s becoming, that is accessible to us but it is, Scheler maintains, “a genuine part of this transcendent process itself.”108 He accordingly posits the existence of an entity-that-is-through-itself, out of which all things go forth in the sense of a continuous creation in the interplay of urge and spirit (corresponding to the ordo amoris mentioned earlier); but these attributes of the absolute are first vitally related to one another in the human being.109 This creatio continua, in which the human spirit participates, is characterized by Scheler both as eternity and absolute time, generating but not itself subject to temporal existence.110 It is now possible to give an answer to the question of the connection in Scheler’s mind between Heidegger’s supposedly Calvinist world-view and his interpretation of temporality as the ultimate horizon and meaning of human existence. Precisely by interpeting temporality and, indeed, finite temporality as the underlying sense of human existence, without access to or 14 participation in the eternal, Heidegger has, in Scheler’s eyes, painted a faithful picture of a Protestant humanity that believes in God’s utter transcendence. Scheler provides only a few clues as to the details of this mirroring, but it is likely that he has something like the following in mind. The way of being-in-the-world from which the existential analysis of Being and Time initially takes its bearings is work, not play; Heidegger’s point of departure is a drearily quotidian existence, the immediate locus of which is a seemingly unredemptive (“fallen”), anonymous and one-dimensional public world, in the face of which the sole recourse is the paradoxical authenticity of an individual’s resoluteness in embracing the world utterly negated by it, a resoluteness anchored in a kind of world-weary anxiety and the natural inevitableness of an oncoming demise.111 In the existential analysis of Being and Time, so construed, Scheler finds more than a faint echo of Calvinism’s insistence on the primacy of faith (“sola fide”), where faith is construed as an unmediated matter between the individual and his or her Creator alone (“sola gratia”), its emphasis on the word (“sola scriptura”) and its inner revelation to the individual at the expense of both a community’s historical traditions of interpretation and public celebration of the sacrament, its repudiation of any theoretical account of the divine immanence or human transcendence of the temporal order (and its sinfulness), and, finally, its circumscription of all human projects by the ultimate thrownness, divine predestination (“providentia dei, prae-destinatio”). Heideger’s woefully inadequate treatments (by his own account) of the status of the workworld, the polis, and, indeed, ethics in the context of an authentic human existence reflect what for Scheler, the lapsed Catholic, are the unresolved paradoxes in Protestantism’s emphasis on faith as an inward, private matter and yet on a salvation, the evidence for which is to be found in work and the work-world (hence, the work ethic).112 In an attempt to capture the core of this criticism and, indeed, explanation of Heidegger’s existential analysis, Scheler insists that “Catholicism, not Protestantism, must be thought through the end.” He expresses a cognate thought when he observes that it is necessary to oppose the philosophy of everyday with a philosophy of Sunday. Both observations are meant to indicate an alternative to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, an alternative that that takes as its point of departure the notion that what matters most to the human being is not his or her existence, but rather solidarity with things and others and their common ground. The structure of human existence might still be characterized as ‘care’ and, indeed, care for the world - but for God’s sake and with a view to this being that alone exists of itself. Towards a Conclusion As reviewed in the body of the foregoing paper, Scheler’s notes to Being and Time contain six major criticisms of Heidegger’s existential analysis in the latter work. Firstly, contrary to what Heidegger explicitly maintains in the text, being-a-world presupposes the reality (confirmed by the experience of resistance) and not vice versa. Secondly, the experience of resistance (motivated by love) is presupposed by care and anxiety and not vice versa. Thirdly, the individuality of human existence is at best the result, but cannot legitimately be construed as a given and, in that sense, a presupposition or point of departure for an analysis of human existence, as Heidegger purports it to be; his conception of human existence as a solus ipse accordingly amounts to an unwarranted solipsism. Fourthly, essence and existence (reality) are distinct and the failure to maintain and observe that distinction, even in an analysis of human existence such as that given in Being and Time, is tantamount to empiricism and effectively renders the undertaking arbitrary. Fifthly, time is inconceivable without eternity, notwithstanding Heidegger’s alleged interpretation of time without regard to eternity. Sixthly, far from bracketing any worldviews and religious conceptions of human existence, Heidegger’s 15 existential analysis is informed by a Calvinist worldview of a human existence with no possibility on its own of transcending, theoretically or otherwise, its finite existence. This last point is an explanation as much as a criticism. The young Heidegger looked upon traditional ontological categories, handed down from classical Greek thought through the great Medieval metaphysical syntheses, as fundamentally inadequate, indeed, incompatible with a phenomenology of life and, especially, religious life. This insight, with its obvious Lutheran overtones, is part of the motivation for his initial project of interpreting Aristotle anew, a project that eventually ensued in an analysis of human existence (Being and Time), meant to serve as a fundamental ontology, a foundation for any subsequent ontology. But this phenomenological project, as Heidegger conceived it, required the bracketing and ultimately the full dismantling of traditional metaphysical conceptions of human existence, including those that construed human beings in terms of natural theology or, in short, as grounded, created beings.113 The legitimacy of this construal of human existence by itself or left to itself, that is to say, apart from any sense of transcending its finite, constitutive temporality, together with the operative assumption that the meaning of being for human existence is thus discernible as a whole is precisely what Scheler is challenging. Scheler’s challenge, however, is not simply a dogmatic reaffirmation of the claims of (ontic or, better, onto-theological) causality over (fundamental ontological) interpretation. Instead, his challenge attempts to expose and call into question the alleged primacy accorded the interpretation of certain phenomena for the purposes of ontological interpretation in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Scheler calls this or that interpretation into question precisely by presenting an argument for its incompleteness or derivativeness. Accordingly, his criticism is internal to the extent that considerations of completeness and fundamentality (grounding) are purported to underlie the sequence of moves in Being and Time. Judging from the themes and turns of Heidegger’s work, especially in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Being and Time, he seems to have conceded that there is something to Scheler’s objections, even if he continues to refuse to endorse Scheler’s philosophical anthropology. As noted at the outset of this investigation, an adequate assessment of the validity of Scheler’s criticisms cannot be ventured in the space of this paper for obvious reasons. Such an assessment would require the elaboration of a position beholden neither to Scheler’s philosophical anthropology nor Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, yet capable of considering the trenchancy of the criticisms from both standpoints. Nevertheless, to that end, it is possible and perhaps useful to try to sketch a core difference between these otherwise so similar thinkers on an issue that was very likely the subject of their final meeting with one another as they discussed, in Heidegger’s words, “how the formulation of the question in Being and Time was related to metaphysics and to his [Scheler’s] conception of phenomenology.” In the final section of Die Stellung, Scheler recounts how the human discovery of the possibility of “absolute nothing” raises the question why the world is at all.114 Employing what Heidegger later dubs the metaphysical interpretation of the logos or, in its modern form, the principle of sufficient reason (Satz vom Grund), Scheler maintains that “the sphere of an absolute being in general, regardless of whether it is or is not accessible to experiencing or knowing, is no less constitutive of the essence of the human being than are his self-consciousness and his worldconsciousness.”115 The origin of this sphere, that of “religion” and “metaphysics,” coincides completely with the coming-to-be of the human being itself. Chiding Aquinas and Descartes for inferring God’s existence, Scheler maintains that, at the very instant in which human beings come into their own as masters of nature, they necessarily anchored their “center somehow 16 outside and beyond the world,” thereby accounting for a human being’s inability no longer to conceive him- or herself simply as a “part” or “member” of the world.116 For the next quarter century or more, following Scheler’s death, Heidegger repeatedly returns to this Schelerian account of the origin of metaphysics. The question: “why is there something rather than nothing?” is, in Heidegger’s own words, the leading question of metaphysics 117 But, unlike Scheler, he ultimately comes to identify being (Seyn) rather than any entity (das Seiendste) as the “ground” of existence - while at the same time rethinking “ground” in this case as the event that appropriates all entities, human and divine, a fully historical appropriation that, from the standpoint of traditional metaphysical, i.e., ontotheological thinking, is itself groundless or an abyss (Abgrund). Or, in other words, Heidegger maintains that that the so-called leading question (Leitfrage) of metaphysics is not the basic question (Grundfrage). The basic question is: what is being? and, in Heidegger’s eyes, Scheler, like so many before and after him, fails to raise this question with all the earnestness it deserves. Thus, while accepting Scheler’s account of the origin of metaphysics, Heidegger rejects what he must regard as the basic nihilism implicit in the ontotheological answer proposed by Scheler, that is to say, the way in which Scheler forgets to raise the question of what ‘to be’ means, foresaking such an inquiry all too precipitously in favor of the idea of a supreme entity.118 On the final pages of Scheler’s critical notes to Being and Time, Scheler makes the following observation: “What would the human being mean if he had only to care for himself and the world - and not also for its ground? He would be a footnote to being.”119 Indeed.