It's been almost a year since I followed a hint from Iaian McGilchrist to learn more about Max Scheler's ideas on love. I've never found a more potent way of defining love, and over the past nine months or so I've been falling in love more and more with his way of framing love.
Scheler wrote that love is the movement which "brings about the continuous emergence of ever-higher value in the object -- just as if it was streaming out from the object of its own accord, without any sort of exertion...on the part of the lover. ...true love opens our spiritual eyes to ever-higher values in the object loved." There is more to say about this, but this quote captures the essential point.
As I've been infusing this perspective into my worldview, I recently found myself searching for music which captured this idea of love. It's very fertile soil for any lyricist. I was stunned to realize I could not think of a single song which talks about this kind of love. One that comes close would be Steve Winwood's "Higher Love" or perhaps even better, Pete Townshend's "Let My Love Open the Door." I'm sure there are more, perhaps even many more, but this was all I could think of. I want more. I want lots more.
So I think we need a new genre of music oriented around this view of love. We are lovers who seek to make our loved ones more beautiful, and there is are joys and sorrows and the whole range of human emotion embedded in that angle.
A problem with pointing people toward Scheler
[Update, months later] Uh oh.
Um...
Well... How do I say this?
Okay, I just discovered there is a problem with pointing people toward Scheler. It's a problem which explains why someone with such deep insights into love has portraits which show a rather grumpy dude who looks unloved and unloving. The portraits show he had... issues... which contradict such deep insights into love.
However, this is a problem I've seen before, with another luminary in my pantheon of intellectual heros, Schrodinger. And there are others like this. The best way to confront this problem is with candid honesty, so here goes:
There's a story about Max Scheler, the famous early 20th century Catholic German ethicist. Scheler was known for his inspiring moral and religious reflections. He was also known for his horrible personal behavior, including multiple predatory sexual affairs with students, sufficiently serious that he was banned from teaching in Germany. When a distressed admirer asked about the apparent discrepancy, Scheler was reportedly untroubled, replying, "The sign that points to Boston doesn't have to go there."
The whole article from which this quote is extracted is thoughtful, with lots of comments, so check it out here.
In the world of quantum mechanics, Schrodinger was equally profound (the brightest star!) and yet had the same kind of issues in his personal life.
Scheler's response is a clever one, and presented this way, I agree. I have to say in agreement: there are many great thinkers whose insights transcend their generation, but whose personal life did not embody their own insights. Alfred Korzybski's great insight required one to change their language (how we use the word is...[1]) but he never did so. He pointed toward Boston but never got there. (It's okay, others have done so, even though they speak weirdly because of it.)
Perhaps the only person in history who wasn't this way would be the Son of God, whose words are able to be seen as true because he lived them so holistically. That's Rene Girard's great insight into the Christ. He was a myth who was also real. Apparently, we only need one of those to season the whole pot of porridge.
Don't get me wrong
I must be careful here. I'm not advocating that we ignore a person's character flaws if they present something stunningly beautiful to the world. Nothing of the sort. Rather, I'm saying, in the vein of Scheler's insight, we are morally obligated to do what we can to liberate such souls from their character flaws, to see them as they are and do what we can to bring them to a higher version of themselves, including at times holding them firmly accountable, such as banning them from teaching. There's a balance to be sustained here: rejecting their insight because the vessel which carried it to us is broken, is shooting the messenger and missing the point.
For my part, which I say not to boast but to be clear that I'm not forgiving Scheler simply because I have the same problem -- which I don't, I'll say this: I seek to hold myself accountable to a standard which unites my deepest philosophical insights into my own day-to-day lifestyle, partly because I believe you can only truly know a philosophical insight or teaching by living it. I have much to say on this point, but that's for another time and place. Being one who seeks this unification of thought and action deeply, I well know there is a gap between my ideals and my real, and thus have compassion in principle for others with the same dilemma. Thankfully I do not have the specific issues of Scheler and Schrodinger, but I do have my own flaws, like being too selfish, being too impulsive, not governing my anger well, being too lazy, and other such things, enough to understand gaps.
We still need a genre of music which celebrates Scheler's idea of love, but maybe it doesn't need to be named after him like I was thinking when I wrote the headline. Sigh.
Note(s)
- ^ While teaching at the University of Florida, Alfred Korzybski counseled his students to eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of "to be" from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use "I am," "You are," "They are" statements as usual. For example, instead of saying, "I am depressed," a student was asked to eliminate that emotionally primed verb and to say something else, such as, "I feel depressed when ..." or "I tend to make myself depressed about ..." Korzybski observed improvement "of one full letter grade" by "students who did not generalize by using that infinitive".