Magda Arnold and Max Scheler: From Kant to Emotion and the Other Way of Rationality

Abstract

This article will address the recovery of emotion as a constitutive factor of human flourishing and of ethical meaning and lived experience. The paper will provide a sustained reflection on their critiques of the Kantian understanding of person. It will analyze their respective departures from the Kantian project and how their positions converge and diverge within the broader view of the phenomenological framework. Scheler’s critique of Kantian formalism as depersonalizing the moral agent and reducing the irreducible and robust phenomenon of the human person, will be compared with Arnold’s richly layered understanding of emotion in relation to its preceding, and primal grounding appraisal of any situation. This raised priority of emotion from its prevailing and insufficient view as secondary and reactionary, will be drawn out as a recovery of a more robust understanding of the human person in view of the meaning of community.