Scheler Reading Weber's "Protestant Ethic": Phenomenological Psychology and History

Abstract

In this article, we develop an analysis of the relationship between intentionality and the history of capitalism based on Scheler's commentary on Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic. We first show that psychology is a means of overcoming the ruinous alternative between materialism and idealism, due to its central position in the genesis of social phenomena: capitalist individuals are driven to work by psychological incentives that are determined as much by the content of dogma as by the social conditions of its practice. We then show that Scheler's phenomenology describes a historical intentionality at variance with the intentionality that aims at axiological essences: capitalism substitutes love with a pseudo a priori contingent that determines intentionality on the basis of ressentiment and anxiety, the very anxiety that Weber, through the figure of the Puritan abandoned by a hyper-transcendent god and appalled by his soteriological status, was making into a history. In this way, we try to indicate, in the company of Scheler, the phenomenological tools for thinking intentionality not as the aim that would always have already disposed of an intuitive given, but as an instance of essentialization constantly thwarted by the historical process, which deviates from the phenomenological aim of essences – as if Scheler were making use of what could be called a negative phenomenology.