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[4] “Love and Power: Scheler’s Sublimation of Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology” 

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Forthcoming in The Legacy of Max Scheler. Ed. Eric Mohr and J. Edward Hackett. Marquette University Press. 

In this paper, I reconstruct Scheler’s neglected engagement with Nietzsche in his later philosophical anthropology. Here we find a critical encounter between what Scheler will see as Nietzsche’s “one-sided” drive psychology and Scheler’s own bipartite account of human nature as the “mutual interpenetration” of biological drives and a higher-order mode of intentionality that Scheler will term "mind" or "spirit" [Geist]. On this picture, Scheler attempts to reconcile a drive psychological account of embodied action within a drive-transcendent model of human agency, one in which the drive-generated actions of a living being come under the direction of a higher-order form of consciousness guided by the intentional act of love. I begin by examining the fundamental tenets of Nietzsche’s drive psychology and its attendant thesis of the “will to power,” according to which all human action is generated by certain impulsive psychological forces—namely, drives [Treib]. I then turn to examine an internal tension between certain commitments attending Nietzsche’s drive psychology and the possibility of explaining certain forms of love—in particular, love directed towards higher-order datives like persons, including the love of one’s own person central to Nietzsche’s ideal of autonomous self-affirmation. It is this conflict that Scheler’s account of human agency promises to overcome. Like Nietzsche, Scheler maintains that all human action is generated through the activity of drives, which alone provide the productive powers necessary to realize actions. Nevertheless, through a process Scheler terms the “spiritualization” of life, an initially “powerless” form of higher-order intentionality acquires the capacity to guide the productive powers of the drives towards the realization of its own intentional directives, including actions guided by love for high-order datives like self, world, and other persons.

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