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Max Scheler was among Erich Przywara's most important interlocutors, especially in Przywara's early phase. Scheler pushes Przywara to make a number of judgments about early phenomenology, about the relationship between love and knowledge, value and being, person-as-spirit and person-as-body, intuitive knowledge and abstractive knowledge, immediate and mediated experience of God, scholastic thought and modern philosophy, the deification of the creature and the humble nothingness of the creature. This chapter traces some of these many judgments provoked by Scheler, and it does so by tracing Przywara's critique of Scheler's "primacy of love"—his notion of phenomenology as a reduction to a being-less horizon of the person, who is a kind of pre- or extra-ontological love-act. Przywara's main response is that Scheler's talk of the love-act "before" or "without" being is really only speaking of being by other means; rather than a metaphysics of being as being, Scheler holds a metaphysics of being as love-act. And this metaphysics has troubling consequences for Przywara. If the "love-act" comes to mean something like "(primordial or authentic or personal) being", then it stands in a dark, Manichaean suspicion over-against matter and knowledge as forms of thingly and servile "being". If the person is a "being-less' love-act which is an "immediate co-enactment of the divine love-act" (as Scheler says), then intentional consciousness seems to become a kind of self-deifying affective enclosure—or else, as in Scheler's late anthropology, the love- and feeling-acts of the person become the site of God's progressive self-deification in history. Against a Manichaeism of personal-being versus thing-being, Przywara holds to the unity of being and value, and of loving and knowing. Against the religious posture of human affectivity as God's self-realization, Przywara insists on loving and knowing as the creature's humble and endless becoming into God, in an attitude of service.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_13

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