The views of Max Scheler for religion
Scheler denies the possibility of a spiritual and omnipotent God in whom the world is undermined. Scheler believes that the essence of man's relationship to the world is based on the fact that this person is contained and carried on by the person himself, who is both a spiritual and a living being. This is also the reason why it is only a partial center of the spirit and the gust of "existing through oneself". In his view, this is a self-realization to which the existence that exists through itself, and that is why it accepts the world as a story.
Scheler puts three ways to the problem of human spirituality. Jewish-Christian, antique and evolutionist.
Each of them has its own anthropological equivalent - theological, philosophical and natural-scientific. The theological anthropology views man as the creation of God, which is created in his own image. Philosophical anthropology views man as a rational being and the natural science as the product of evolution.
As a distinguishing feature of his anthropology, Scheler defines the distinction between man and animal, and more specifically, the metaphysical place of man. He believes that man has a cosmic purpose and seeks the grounds for his "courage to be in a mystical unity with the higher reality." According to Scheler, a person besides the creation of God has a creative potential to realize this "higher reality," because man is the divine.
He enlivens life, and in contrast to the dead nature, it has a being for himself. Man has a dualistic self, it shows that he is self-conscious as part of some development, thinking in a hierarchy. At the very top of the very top of this hierarchy is God. In the hierarchy of "essential forms," the higher ones stifle within themselves the principles of the lower ones. The first essential form depicts a unity between instinct and feeling, some "unobtrusive pleasure" and "gratuitous suffering." It has no sensations, no memory, but it has primitive means of expression. The second essential form is the instinct, which has a hereditary character and a certain type of behavior. The successive overcoming of the instincts releases the individual from the bonds of the conditions of the environment and translates it towards the third essential form - the associative memory and the latter is the "practical intelligence". Both are the plane on which the individually determined behavior takes place.
The highest in the hierarchy is the Spirit, it has its own objects, essences without limits from the senses. According to M. Scheler , the spirit is "object and determination through the essential being of the objects themselves." Man is completely independent of the surrounding world and open to it. He transforms his vital aspirations into the spirit and values the spirit places within us. At the very top is God. Scheler thinks we are the cause of God that God is the end of the process of deploying the self and life. Our spirit can not be without God.
For Scheler what distinguishes man essentially from everything else is the fact that he has a spirit. It is not related to the environment, like animals, nor is it dependent on it, or on the instincts that determine its existence. He has a spirit that frees him from all this and opens it to the world. Spirit is the supreme principle that determines the essence of man. But with the contemplation of ideas, it also contains the manifold manifestations of man. One of his significant abilities is objectivity, achievement of the objects in their own being.