PERSON AND SELF-VAWE

MAX SCHELER

PERSON AND SELF-VALUE

Three Essays

With an introduction,
edited and partially translated by

M.S. FRINGS
(DePaul University, Chicago)

1987 MARTINUS NIJHOFF PUBLISHERS

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Scheler', ~klx, l1l74-l921l.

Person and self-value.

Includes index.
Partial contents: Shame and feelings of modesty --
Repentance and r'ebir'th -- Exemplars of person and
leaders.
1. M,m. 2. Self. 1. Frings, Manfred S. n. Title.
B3329.S481 1986 128 86-14169
ISBN -13: 978-94-010-8065-1 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-3503-7
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-3503-7

Copyright

© 1987 by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht.

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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the publishers,
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The Netherlands.
 Table of Contents

Translator's Note VII

Acknowledgements IX

INTRODUCTION TO THREE ESSAYS BY

MAX SCHELER XI
Manfred S. Frings

SHAME AND FEELINGS OF MODESTY

The "Location" of the Feeling of Shame and Man's

Way of Existing 3
I. The Preconditions for the Occurrence of Shame of
the Body 6
II. Shame and Related Feelings 14
III. Basic Forms of the Feeling of Shame and Theories of its
Ori~n n
IV. The Sexual Feeling of Shame and its Function 44
1. The Primary Accomplishment of the Feeling of
Sexual Shame 45
2. The Secondary Accomplishment of the Feeling of
Sexual Shame 59
3. The Tertiary Accomplishment of the Feeling of
Sexual Shame 71
V. Psychic and Bodily Feeling of Shame in Man and
Woman 82

V
REPENTANCE AND REBIRTH 87

EXEMPLARS OF PERSON AND LEADERS

Introduction 127
I. Some General Comments concerning Personal Exem-
plars and Leaders 130
II. The Mind of the Person in the Formation of Human
Groups. The Vehicles of the Effectiveness of Perso-
nal Exemplars (The Formation of Fate). Models of
Personal Exemplars 135
III. The Saint 148
1. Typology of Exemplars and Leaders in Religion 148
2. General Comments on Exemplars and Leaders in the
Area of Religion 151
3. The Original Saint 153
IV. The Genius 164
V. The Hero 190
VI. The Leading Mind of Civilization 194
VII. The Master in the Art of Living 196

Bibliography of English Translations of the Works of

Max Scheler 199

VI
 Translator's Note

Unlike the English word "shame" which carries a negative connota-

tion, possibly due to the Anglo-American Puritan heritage, the
German word Scham does not necessarily carry such a connotation
and thus in many contexts comes much closer to the English "mod-
esty." Therefore, the title of the essay, "Uber Scham and Schamge-
fiihl," is translated in the way it is to catch the broader meaning of
the term, and throughout the essay Scham is translated as both
"shame" and "modesty" depending upon the context, much as such
a distinction appears to be sometimes impossible to be made. (Cf., in
the German translation of Havelock Ellis's work on The Evolution
of Modesty, to which Scheler refers in this essay, "modesty" is
rendered as Schamgefiihl.
In order to retain the German distinction in the usage of the
terms Kultur andZivilisation I have translated the German connota-
tion of Zivilisation with "technical civilization" to set it off from
"culture" (Kultur), which itself corresponds in English usage most
often to "civilization."
The translation of "Repentance and Rebirth" is that of Bernhard
Noble as contained in his translation of Max Scheler's Vom Ewigen
des Menschen, translated by Noble as On the Eternal in Man, Lon-
don: Student Christian Movement Press, 1960; Archon Books,
Hamden, CT, 1972. The German text of this book of Scheler's is
contained in the German Collected Edition, Francke Verlag, Berne
and Munich, as Vol. 5, ed. by Maria Scheler, 1954, and based on its
first publication in 1921. Apart from minor changes in the text, and
some changes in the footnotes concerning the present-day status of
the German Collected Edition of Scheler's Works, this text is a

VII
reprint of Noble's translation, courtesy of SCM Press and Harper &
Row, Publishers.
The manuscript "Shame" was written in 1913, those of "Repen-
tance" and of "Exemplars of Person" prior to 1917 and, respective-
ly, between 1912 and 1914. The German texts of "Shame" and
"Exemplars of Person" are contained in Vol. 10 of the German
Collected Edition, edited by Maria Scheler. Whenever Scheler uses
the phrase "as I pointed out elsewhere," or "as I showed else-
where," he refers to the major works he published during his first
period of productivity, and available in English translations also:
The Nature of Sympathy, translated by Peter Heath, London, Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1954 (274 pages), and Formalism in Ethics
and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Founda-
tion of an Ethical Personalism, translated by Manfred S. Frings and
Roger Funk, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 (620
pages). The German original of the former appeared first in 1913
and (enlarged) in 1923. The first German publication of the latter
appeared in 1913, and partly in 1916 because of circumstances
brought about in World War I (1914-1918). The originals are con-
tained in the German Collection Edition: the former as Vol. 7,
edited by Manfred S. Frings, the latter as Vol. 2, edited by Maria
Scheler.
In the German Collected Edition both "Shame" and" Exem-
plars of Person" are followed by a number of notes on those themes
made by the author. Valuable as they are for further research into
these areas, I did not include them into this translation because they
are aphoristic in nature and, in part, incoherent with the overall
themes as presented in the present book. The final pages of the
translation of "Exemplars of Person" at the end of this book give
some specimens of the aphoristic style of the notes.
All brackets [ ] contain notes and comments by the translator.
Likewise, the title of the essays - Person and Self- Value - is the
translator's, not the author's title given to them.

M.S.F.

VIn
 Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Kenneth W. Stikkers for reading my

translation of "Shame and Feelings of Modesty" and for finalizing
its footnotes, to Rev. Edward Vacek, S.J. for suggestions and
comments.
I am indebted to Dr Nina Cunningham for reading the transla-
tion of "Exemplars of Person and Leaders" and for her valuable
observations and suggestions.
Last, but not least, I am indebted to Ms Suzanne Rubis for having
typed the manuscript of "Shame" and to Ms Patricia Waters for
having typed the one of "Exemplars of Person".

M.S.F.

IX
 Introduction to Three Essays by Max Scheler

MANFRED S. FRINGS

At a time when human beings have become so accustomed to the

velocity of technological progress and, out of the thirty-five or so
classes among values, to mainly quantifiable and manageable val-
ues, a gradual loss of the a wareness of the self-value of the human
person, and of a recognition of the individuality of personal feel-
ings, has justifiably been predicted to be a factor looming over the
rise and accomplishments of technology.
At first glance a collection of essays dealing with the hiddenness
of the quality of the self-value of the human person may, therefore,
have an air of being somewhat out of touch with the technological
age we live in. The three essays contained in this book, "Shame and
Feelings of Modesty," "Repentance and Rebirth" and "Exemplars
of Person and Leaders" do not cover, of course, the whole range of
all human experiences of self-value; but they provide a solid access
to the problem concerned in a century when bodily and personal
shame, repentance and genuine recognition of exemplary persons-
be they heroes, geniuses or holy persons - have increasingly been
depreciated or slighted. Max Scheler (1874-1928) who wrote these
and other essays during his first period of philosophical production
regarded the value of the person to be the highest value among
values. Needless to stress that his own monumental work on ethics:
Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics a/Values. A New Attempt
toward an Ethical Personalism (1913/1916) rests entirely on the
notions of person and value. To the tenet of the primordiality of the
value of the person, established in his ethical, religious and
metaphysical writings, he held fast from the times and turmoils of
World War I, when the following essays were written, to the end of
his dramatic and tragic life.

XI
 A brief look at the development of ethics in our century would
already indicate that ethics remained one of the most neglected
areas of research when compared to the vast amount of literature
which accumulated in areas like logic, ontology, social and political,
analytic and pragmatic philosophy, etc. Of course, on occasion
these and other disciplines, too, touch upon ethics. It is a common-
place, however, that works dealing with the very foundation of
ethics, i.e., philosophical ethics, as opposed to tackling moral prob-
lems in individual disciplines such as in medical or business ethics,
are small in number.
It is characteristic for the latter half of our century that ethics
proper has been largely replaced by attempts to clarify only specific
moral situations as they arise in particular disciplines such as the
ones just mentioned, or, above all, in atomic physics and the wider
spectra of society itself as in "situation-ethics." To be sure, the
reason for this, or for what I would like to call the "compartmenta-
lization" of ethics proper, lies within the well known fragmentation
of knowledge itself and the increasing number of fields of specializ-
ation and their specialists. The more we penetrate into the nature of
entitites, into the nature of society, ofthe atom and outer space, into
the nature of man and culture, etc., the more the accumulation of
knowledge attained needs to be put into organizing systems permit-
ting it to be found as quickly as possible (computer). We are also so
accustomed to the compartmentalization of knowledge as a whole
that we tend to lose sight of the very foundations on which it all rests
or may rest. Questions of "foundations" continue to be replaced by
those of expediency and specifics. Strangely enough, ethics shares
this situation with mathematics. The crisis in the foundation of
mathematics is still alive among researchers in pure mathematics,
but it is applied mathematics (for instance, in computer science,
technology) which is of foremost interest and subject to high pro-
motion. Similarly, the question of the foundation of good and evil in
ethics, be such a foundation a religious, metaphysical, or an onto-
logical one, is overshadowed by situational analyses of what is, or
may be, morally "right" or "wrong" on the one hand, and accept-
able, productive or unacceptable or counter-productive rules and
procedures, on the other. It has not infrequently been argued that
following rules or procedures in whichever field would lead to
morally acceptable conduct. In extreme cases it may even happen

XII
that challenging procedures themselves, say, those of a corporation
or even a religion - are regarded as tantamount to run against a
sacrosanct state of affairs. In all of this there occurs a clear loss of
self-responsibility over against a so-called "responsibility" of rule-
following.
But one must also recall the fact that the history of ethics itself
shows discrepancies. Works dealing with its foundation are them-
selves in disagreement with each other. Spinoza and Kant are a case
in point. But we can at least say that all philosophers who, since
Socrates and Aristotle, have taken on the task of delineating foun-
dation in ethics have agreed that the goal of any such investigation
must be a universally acceptable one, and that such foundation
must be of transcendental character, i.e., it must also go beyond all
specific areas and disciplines as already Plato demonstrated in his
Republic.
The essays contained in this book have their base in Max Sche-
ler's own lengthy and difficult work on ethics mentioned above. It
was followed by yet another attempt made by Scheler's colleague at
the University of Cologne, Nicolai Hartmann, who also took up the
question of values and, stimulated by Scheler's work, developed it
on his own terms. Inasmuch as both Scheler and N. Hartmann con-
centrated on new explications of the meaning of value-experiences,
and inasmuch as Scheler, in addition, concentrated on the being of
the person, they are at variance with Kant and Spinoza, medieval,
and ancient ethics, and thus helped to expand the search for
universal foundations in ethics in Europe in this century.
Since it is my task here to briefly introduce the following essays,
and not to deal explicitly with the question of the foundation of
ethics itself, I nevertheless wish to first refer to two aspects infrin-
gent upon the foundations of ethics. This I do because the essays
themselves are embedded, as it were, in these foundational aspects.
They are also points revealing typical Continental lines of ethical
thought which might not be regarded as so important in ethical
writings in English speaking countries. It is within the context of the
following foundational regards that the three texts must largely be
understood.
Among all studies seeking foundations of ethics as they emerged
since Socrates and Chinese philosophy two conceptions had
emerged: either the foundation of ethics is heteronomous or it is

XIII
autonomous. This is to say that there is either a recognition of the
object of ethics, the moral good, to be outside man (for instance, in
God, in an ideology of a state, or in an abstract conception such as a
"greatest number," etc.) or that there is a recognition that the
human individual alone is, at least potentially, the autonomous
bearer himself of the moral good (and evil). Despite all their
differences in ethics both Kant and Scheler sided with the latter
view, viz., that the foundation of any ethics must be autonomous in
character.
While heteronomous ethics can place the moral good into var-
ious spheres or ideals outside man, there are in autonomous ethics
only three possibilities for the location ofthe moral good (and evil):

1. the moral good may be evidential through the light of man's

reason,
2. the moral good may be evidential in the intentions of man's will,
3. the moral good may be evidential in the directions of our loves
and hates and feelings, i.e., in man's heart.

Depending on which of the three faculties - the rational, volitional,

or the emotive faculty - ethics is based, its very foundation is
necessarily linked up with a respective view of human beingness. 1
Socrates and Spinoza, for example, conceived the possibility of a

1. In His many writings on Max Scheler and prior to His becoming Pope John
Paul II, Karol Wojtyla has, like others, argued that the human will in Scheler's
ethical writings is somewhat underestimated, and also that Scheler's ethics is not
altogether compatible with the traditional Christian teachings on ethics. Any
emphasis on one of the three locations of the moral good in man will necessarily
"underestimate" the other two. Nietzsche, for sure, underestimates reason in his
emphasis on the will, Kant underestimates the power offeelings in his emphasis on
reason, etc. Inasmuch as Scheler emphasizes the human heart but recognizes a deep
interpenetration between reason, will and heart (although the heart remains the
starting point of all moral volition and judgements) there remained for Scheler a
carefully worked out balance between the three locations despite his understanding
of human beingness solely in terms of love of heart (ens amans idea of
man).
Concerning the compatibility of Max Scheler's ethics with Christianity see my
Introduction to the Holy Father's Collected Philosophical Writings in: Pope John
Paul II, Primal des Geistes, (German Collected Edition, Vol. 3) Seewald Verlag,
Stuttgart, 1980.

XIV
universally acceptable ethics in the concept of the homo rationalis;
Kant saw it in both the homo rationalis and the idea of homo volens;
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer recognized only the homo volens idea
as bearer of morality. It was at the beginning of this century that the
faculty of love and feeling (as distinguished sharply from rational
insight and willing) had been conceived as bearers of the moral
good. But some attempts had been made in this direction also
earlier, for instance, those ofSt. Augustine, and it is well known that
even the mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) strictly separated
the logic of reason from the "logic of the heart."
In order for us to fully understand the extent of the emotive base
of good and evil the following texts require some clarification
concerning this Schelerian position, which, let it be added, has
sometimes been misunderstood. To do this I wish to pick out two
basic concepts of Scheler's ethics referred to before, the concepts of
person and value. These concepts take on different meanings de-
pending on the context and on the field of knowledge they are
applied. As is commonly known, phenomenology "brackets," or
sets aside, such and many more connotations in order to focus on
the quintessence of the meaning of such and other concepts as they
are engendered in pure consciousness. If one does not adhere to
phenomenological analyses one may remain well within this or that
discipline and its respective uses of person, value, or the like, and
even apply them into areas where they do not belong. In business
ethics, for instance, the term "value" is essentially a tag-value
belonging to a thing or a commodity and, hence most values are
understood to be quantifiable or manageable values (stock market).
This view of values has certainly penetrated areas such as education
and even religion. But in religion per se, i.e., in the genuine expe-
rience ofthe Divine, "value" may refer to quite different meanings,
such as to humility, virtue, or to sacrifice, to love or self-commu-
nion, etc., which are neither quantifiable nor manageable values.
The term "value" has different uses respectively in politics, educa-
tion, or in the arts. It was largely because of Scheler's analyses that
the concepts of value and person won wide interest in the philosoph-
ical and scientific communities in Europe after World War I, and
through Scheler's admirer, Ortega y Gasset, they also became major
objects of investigation in Latin America at that time.
Since we mentioned phenomenology, let a few words be added

xv
concerning Scheler's main contemporaries in the field: Husserl and
Heidegger. Since Husserl did not regard the sphere of the person as
foundational to the human ego, and inasmuch as he considered
values under the aspect of only an axiological arithmetic borrowed
from Brentano, Scheler's own phenomenology and ethics reveal
radical differences from Husserl right from the start. The same
holds with regard to Heidegger for whom both value and person
seem to have mattered little at the time he published his first major
work, Being and Time in 1927, one year prior to Scheler's death.
Although Heidegger does make references to Scheler's notion of the
person in this work, even though on a page or two, the problem of
the relationship between what Heidegger called "Dasein" and what
Scheler called "Person" remained an open domain of research ever
since. For no matter who, ontologically, "Dasein" may be, in fact,
there is no Dasein unless it has the form of person. Scheler's own
reading of Being and Time has been made accessible. 2 In contrast to
Husserl, Heidegger did, however, keep interest in the Schelerian
conception of the person. To this he attested in my first meeting with
him at his Freiburg residence on August 21, 1967. When I presented
him with a lengthy manuscript of mine on the subject he emphasized,
"I entertain much interest in this" ("Daran bin ich sehr interes-
siert"). Later on, I could not find out whether he read the published
book in detail. Needless to say that his major concern, the question
of the meaning of being, took up most of his own time until his death
in 1975. But from 1970 on, the year I became general editor of
Scheler's works and had available to me many hitherto unknown
manuscripts on value and person, I came to realize how inadequate
Heidegger's understanding of Scheler's concepts of the person and
of value in Being and Time had been. For Heidegger thought the
entire realm of values to be "present-at-hand," i.e., to be thing-val-
ues, something contradicted already by the self-value of a human
being. His conception of values also implied that human "Dasein"
has no value of its own, let alone any dimension of moral oughtness.
Concerning the concepts of person and value, there exist many
differences between Husser!, Heidegger and Scheler, an area of

2. Max Scheler, Spate Schriften, Ges. Werke, Vol. 9, ed. by Manfred S. Frings,
Francke Verlag, Berne and Munich, 1976, "Das emotionale RealiHitsproblem,"
pp. 254-293; and pp. 294-340.

XVI
investigation much more in need offurther exploration than can be
suggested here. 3
Let us now turn to our major concern: the explication of the
concepts of the person and of values as they are implied and presup-
posed in large sections of the essays here translated from their
German originals.

I. PERSON

As a philosophical conception "person" appears to be of only

recent origin. The ancient Greeks, let it be stressed, had no concept
of "person." The word "person," of course, comes from the latin
persona, meaning in its verbal use (personare) "to sound through."
Persona is a mask used by actors. Hence, persona conceals some-
thing while letting sounds through from what is concealed behind
the mask. On the one hand, "person" has something to do with the
concealing of what could be visible, while, on the other, it has
something to do with what is audible, sounding.
We are fortunate that the Latin termpersona, a mask, happens to
fit in well with some essential state of affairs in a phenomenological
understanding of personhood. What we call "person" is neither a
visible thing, nor an object (for which Heidegger appears to take the
person). Person is, first of all, a dynamic being, a constant flow of
acts, such as acts of thinking, remembering, expecting, planning,
hating, acts of feeling or of emotions, of loving, of dreaming,
communicating, etc. Because of the person's "act-being" the exis-
tential status of the person is temporal. It is neither a thing nor an
object in objective space.
Nevertheless, all human persons are embodied persons and ap-
pear to be in space when we see them. But insofar as the person's
body is a "lived body" rather than an objective body or a body-thing,
the person does have spatial characteristics. These belong, however,
to lived-body-space and not to objective, measurable space. The
distinction between lived-body-space and objective space was first
worked ou t by Max Scheler in his Formalism in Ethics (1913/1916).

3. See my own work on the subject, Person und Dasein. Zur Ontologie des
Wertseins, Phaenomenologica, Vol. 32, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1969.

XVII
Only much later did it become an area of special investigation,
particularly in Amercian phenomenology, which drew heavily on
Merleau-Ponty on the subject and who, in turn, was stimulated by
Max Scheler's writings in his earlier years of study.
The distinction between object-body and lived-body can not be
taken up in this introduction. It was a very important distinction
because it shed new light on the thoughts of past philosophers. It
was, for instance, Descartes' mistake to assume that the cogito sum
forms the ultimate foundation of existence, and that the object-
body of a human being had to be subsequentially explained as a
separate substance. Scheler challenged Descartes by saying that the
cogito sum can in no way be an absolute principle because it presup-
posed the first principle of general metaphysics according to which
"there is something rather than nothing." Without this principle the
cogito sum can not stand on its own ground. Why do we make a
reference to Descartes and the first principle of metaphysics? We do
so because for Scheler this first principle of metaphysics is tanta-
mount to an existential "cancellation" of the possibility of its oppo-
site, viz., absolute nothingness, which Parmenides suggested could
not even be thought. For absolute nothingness being thought of
makes it already something: a thought in the mind. What is impor-
tant for us is that Scheler distinguished absolute nothingness from
what he called "relative nothingness," which, as we shall see, is of
highest importance to an understanding of the nature of value and
the person.
It was stated that what we call "person" is a constant flow of acts
such as the ones mentioned and many more. When we are in a
wakeful state we find ourselves always" acting out such acts. There
are two basic states of affairs implicit in this view. On the one hand,
human persons share the same types of acts (for instance, we all
think, will, perceive, feel, etc.) but, on the other, the ways we act out
these acts are individually different. The way person. X thinks is
different from those of person Y. While this is a simple matteroffact
hardly worth mentioning, it has great bearings on the individuality
of the person. Each person possesses his own peculiar ways of acting
out acts, making every individual person unique and irreplaceable.
The irreplaceability of the uniqueness of anyone particular person
makes the value of the person a non-negotiable self-value. The
self-value of the person is the highest moral value insofar as every

XVIII
person is "bearer" of all other possible values. Person is indigenous
value-being. This value-being must, of course, 'not be confused with
other types of values such as thing-values or tag-values, consecutive
values, symbolic values, or value symbols, etc. There exist many
types of values depending which measure one applies to classify
them. But all of these must not be confused with the self-value of the
person, which especially in Christianity has functioned as a vehicle
of personal exemplarity and holiness. It is, therefore, the "qualita-
tive direction" of the acts of a person that determine his individu-
ality. We all may pray, love, hate, expect, remember, etc., but we all
do so in individually different ways and styles, just as, by analogy,
we all may write the same sentence into our note books, our hand-
writing, however, remaining individually different, at times very
different.
All acts can, among other classifications, be divided into two
main groups: individual acts and social acts. Individual acts pertain
to the individual person, such as acts of shame or repentance, pangs
of conscience, or of self-communion. Social acts are acts commu-
nicating with others, such as speaking, observing, hating, loving.
Both of these types of acts do have something in common. They may
either express a person's individuality or they may conceal it. Being
silent, for instance, may say much more in certain situations than
speaking out. How much does Christ's silence speak in Dostoevsky's
"Legend of the Grand Inquisitor"? How much does Buddha's
silence bespeak the suffering in this world? How much can an
individual, unknown person's silence tell of tragedy or loss? Such
silence which is at the same time concealing and expressive, i.e.,
unconcealing, does not however, indicate only tragedy or suffering
and the like. As the essay on shame would show us, the person's
modesty and shame may reveal human beauty. In Greek sculpture,
for example, Aphrodite is shown in the nude, yet, the veil of mod-
esty covers her more than any garment could do. Her beauty and
concealment in modesty are intercontained and one. Scheler once
said that the essence of modesty is a revelation of beauty in the
manner of concealing itself. ("Der Kern der Scham ist eine Offenba-
rung der Schonheit in der Geste ihres Sichverbergens.")
One could add to such autonomous phenomena of personhood a

XIX
great number of other instances. 4 They may range from mutual
oneness between two persons (mother and child, love at first sight,
etc.), or from the mutual oneness and dissolution of persons in a
mass through psychic contagion, up to maximal individual in-
gatheredness of the person being all alone or abandoned. To techno-
logical society experiences of personal ingatheredness are not of
great interest. Instead, the present-day person tends to live most of
his life-time extravertedly and along human-made laws, regulations,
norms, constitutions, procedures, conventions, etc., which make up
the "artifact" called society. Society tends to belittle, and even
sometimes to repress, authentic human phenomena of personhood
such as shame, modesty, repentance, or personal exemplarity,
humility, love of God or of country, human phenomena of ascer-
taining one's self-value threatened by societal odds, of selflessness,
sacrifice, patience, spiritual joy, of an artists' being "lost" in his
work, of unconditional veracity and honesty, courage - many of
which being anchored in both the Old and New Testaments, or
having been described in world literature from Homer on to
Shakespeare, Dostoevski, Melville, and others.
Thus far we have made two points: 1. The existence of the
individual person is a dynamic existence of individually varying
qualitative directions of acts. 2. The person's value is a self-value to
be sharply distinguished from all other values. These two points
invite us at once to recognize the consequences in a phenomenolo-
gical theory of personhood bearing out the existential nature of the
person in the pregnant sense of the term. From the many characte-
ristics of the dynamic existence of the person I wish to refer, albeit
only briefly, to the two most important ones:

1. The incompleteness of the moral essence of the person.

2. The pure temporality of the person.

Ad 1. In all autonomous moral experience in which the individual

relates to himself the following maxim holds: The person experien-
ces himself on different levels. This is clearly exemplified in these

4. Some others are contained in my essay: "Toward the Constitution of the Unity
of the Person," in: Linguistic Analysis and Phenomenology, ed. by W. Mays and
S. C. Brown, Macmillan, London, 1972, pp. 68-81, 110-117.

xx
essays. And it may well be the case that such different moral levels of
ourselves are nowhere else more manifest than in a free act of
repentance; repentance, that is, which has not been induced in the
person by a religious or any other ordinance but which wells up by
itself. How does this happen? Firstly, in repentance there is a clear
feeling of the level of the person's own disvalue: When the person,
alone and left up to himself, begins to feel the low level of how he
was, hiding his face with his hands, exclaiming to himself: "How
could I ever have been so evil as to have done this or that."
Rare as such experiences of repentance of the immoral level of
one's own being may be, they show that the feeling of our own moral
levels originates in a domain of autonomous measures pinpointing
unmistakably either through the pangs of conscience, or through
feelings of self-redemption and rebirth from evil, the location of
negative and positive moral levels. The mystery of the regenerative
power of repentance lies in the fact that the location of our own
moral levels is pinpointed from a domain of a relative non-being
and absence of what the person ought to have done and to have
been. The domain out of which repentance occurs is a domain of the
relative non-being or nothingness of the moral ought.
Relative nothingness or relative non-being is, in contrast to abso-
lute nothingness, a concept and experience which permeates almost
every moment of our lives. Briefly stated, relative nothingness is at
hand when we expect there to be something but which is not found,
when we hope for something, but which does not exist, when we
seek something or someone -like in cases of looking for a leader, or
in cases of looking for the ideal love - but is never found. Even in
trivial cases when we say: "There is nothing on the table," it is
implied that there is nothing on the table with respect to what could
be there. What "could" be there is not there. We also say: "There is
nothing about this person," implying what could be with this person
is the non-being relative to this particular person.
In the moral reality given in our relating ourselves to ourselves,
such as in pangs of conscience, repentance, etc., there is a conflict
between what we are, and have done, over against what we ought to
have been, and against what we did not do that should have been
done. It is what we ought to have been, but were not, and what we
should have done, but did not do, that constitutes the inner resis-
tance of moral reality. For what we morally "ought to be" resists

XXI
 "what we presently may be," just as what we are is in conflict with
what we ought to have been but failed to be.
The moral goodness of the person, therefore, always amounts to
the exclusion and overcoming of a lower level resisting what the
person "ought" to be. Indeed, the person experiences himself rela-
tive to such levels and in this the person is never "perfect." It
belongs to the essence of the person to be always short of his own
image, exemplarity and perfection. The person "exists" always in
terms of owing to himself something morally. The person's exis-
tence is "in-between" the possibilities and poles of good and evil, of
spirit and flesh, of God and animal life. "Man's place in nature,"
this peculiar bridge and transition between two poles, engenders the
metaphysical location of shame, repentance and exemplary person-
hood in the world. In his essay on shame Scheler says that no
creature "on either side of this bridge can have a feeling of shame:
no god and no animal." The same pertains to repentance and
exemplary personhood. Man's existential transitional location in
the world is, therefore, one of the main denominators of the three
essays. There is, undoubtedly, a tragic element here insofar as the
person must ontologically always bear a peculiar guilt in this
discrepancy with himself. But this guilt is "guiltless guilt," i.e., the
person himself did not cause this guilt (we cannot touch upon man's
"fall" in Scheler's thinking here).
In extreme cases the pangs of the disvalue of the level repentable
may be so strong that the relative non-being of the domain of the
measure of the moral ought is itselflost. Rare as these cases may also
be, they amount to the death of the sphere of the human person.
]uda's case could be a case in point, and so could be the suicide of a
father, or mother, having killed their child in an irate state and
realizing too late how they had "been" in killing the innocent child.
Ad 2. The above characterization of the person's moral incom-
pleteness must remain insufficient without a reference to the tempo-
rality of the person and the phenomenological essence of the object
of all ethics: the moral good.
As the act of repentance shows us, the person is able to recognize
past repentable levels of his moral life in light of the relative non-
being of what the person ought to be and ought to do, and he is able
to extinguish them in repenting while simultaneously becoming
good (for the details see the essay concerned). With this in mind the

XXII
moral good is neither a definable ideal nor is it an heteronomous
object: It is a process of a peculiar type of becoming. This remains to
be clarified.
In our context "to become" has two meanings. Firstly, it has the
customary meaning of what will be (or won't be) in a projected
future. In this sense "to become" pertains only to objective, calcu-
lable calender time as it is used in the sciences, in business, law,
weather and economic predictions, fortune telling, technical plan-
ning and, overall, in most of our usual daily activities. This objec-
tive, measurable time with which we "work" is clock-time. We do
not only set our clocks; we set large parts of our lives by clocks. A
businessman may use a monthly minder and fill in the boxes with
projected luncheons, appointments, or conferences. Of course, these
can be shifted from one day to the next, be exchanged or cancelled.
It is characteristic of all objective time that the contents, whatever
they are, are not conjoined with the measurable flow of clock-time.
The independence of clock-time and contents is one of the major
reasons why predictions made in areas like the above, including
atomic physics, stockmarket, medical predictions, etc., can never be
absolutely reliable. We all know the ever so boring predictions made
throughout the economic world: "Things get worse before they
become better," saying in fact very little or nothing. According to
Scheler, economics and all other areas that grow out of basic human
drives do not obey clock-time but are based in pre-clock-time, i.e.,
absolute becoming itself and, for this reason, have their own inde-
pendent logic of development which allows at best non-reliable,
short term predictions.
Secondly, "to become" has the meaning of "absolute becoming"
just mentioned. Absolute becoming is the becoming itself of some-
thing independently of outer, especially human influences. It may
also be called "pure" becoming. In contrast to the usual objective
time, pure becoming shows that both contents and phases are inse-
parable. This type of becoming is, however, not only at the roots of
all drive-related areas but also at the root of personal becoming and
moral goodness.
Let us look first at some general characteristics of absolute time
or becoming. While reading this text up to this moment, for exam-
ple, absolute becoming was at hand insofar as the contents of the
text (whatever they may have been) were inherently tied up with a

XXIII
 peculiar flow of time-phases in the inner experience of the reader. It
,is only when we take a critical or second look at the text's contents-
as we now do - that the latter split a way from the original flux of
time-phases they were conjoined with. This time-flux must sharply
be distinguished from the clock-time it "takes" to read the text.
Indeed, it can be argued that absolute time is most manifest when we
are not thinking of time at all, something St. Augustine may have
had in mind when he said that not thinking about time took him
nearer the nature of it than deliberating what time is. Absolute time,
i.e., absolute becoming, is temporality "filled" with contents while
such contents run off in their own phases that cannot be clocked.
True, we may say that the absolute time passed while reading this
text "took" forty minutes. But this does not at all touch upon the
very experience while we were reading. It is this "whiling," in which
contents and phases are one, that is not clockable.
Strictly speaking, contents flow not "in" time but by timing
themselves in phases. By contrast objective time is empty like the
boxes on the monthly minder. Contents can be put into objective
time at random, or not. We can also say: Absolute becoming and
time is contented temporality or self-temporalization of contents.
Absolute time and becoming is also at hand in all experiences of
"welling up" or "stirrings" of feelings, thoughts and insights, or
drives, etc., before we are aware and conscious of them. Before we
are a ware of our hunger there had been wellings in the drive of
nutrition in which phases and drive-object (not to be confused with
rational objects) were inseparably one. It is only when such wellings
flowing out from drives knock at the thresholds of our conscious-
ness that we can take an active attitude toward them and satisfy,
say, our hunger feelings "in" clock-time. We then separate the
contents of the drive from their inherent phases, for instance, in
fasting, dieting, or in all asceticism, etc.). It is, therefore, through the
light of reason and of awareness, "ratio," that time and contents
may be broken up, but only insofar as they are originally conjoined
with each other.
Absolute becoming is also at hand in all phenomena of transition,
i.e., during any transition taking place from a given A to a given B.
In this sense, according to Scheler, absolute time is also present in all
forms of atomic, biological, emotive, psychic and rational transi-
tions of motion or growth. The growth of the person, too, happens

XXIV
in absolute time. (For the later Scheler even Man-World-God are
"one" process of absolute becoming, the "becoming Deity" in
history and world.)
Every moment of our lives bears the mark of the absolute beco-
ming in transitional phases. "In between" one feeling and the next,
one thought and the next, etc., there is pre-conscious, self-tempora-
lization of absolute becoming in such transitions. Needless to stress
that the transition from bad to good, and vice versa, too, is absolute
becoming in the person much as we may separate the contents in
objective time. Moral goodness, therefore, is neither an attribute of
an object nor is it a definable object. It is personal, absolute beco-
ming and, in the case of God, personal being in absolute time.
Although absolute time was not thematized in Scheler's ethics it
belongs to the heart of the essence of moral goodness. Hence,
Scheler's well-known expression that whenever a person, not by
mere willing or intentionally, but within his very moral tenor and
heart, prefers a higher value to a lower one (while the height of the
value is felt "in" such preferring and not rationally chosen to be so)
the most pure moral goodness, in whatever intensity, "rides on the
back" of such preferring, coming, as it does, from the moral tenor of
the person himself. The moral good, then, is like an echo of acts of
preferring (and not of choosing); an echo, that is, which sets in
"automatically" in the form of absolute becoming, and which is to
be distinguished from all goodness that may be the result of will or
of reason. Although we are much limited in this introduction and
can not go into further details of this state of affairs it will be
recognized that Scheler is the first philosopher who concretely
connected the moral good with the peculiar essence of time, i.e.,
absolute becoming much as he never articulated this.
The pure temporality of the person phenomenologically manifest
as act-being, as a continued flow of acts and their contents and
meanings, manifest in all wellings and stirrings in drives, in feelings,
volitions and rational insights, on the one hand, and manifest
metaphysically in the transitional "place of man in nature," will
reach full clarity in the following explanation of the meaning of the
term "value" to be found in Max Scheler's ethical writings.

xxv
 II. VALUE

In the above we have repeatedly made reference to one of the major

classifications existing among values which can be found implicitly
or explicitly in all value-theory: The distinction between self-values
and thing-values. The human person served us as an example of the
manifestation of a self-value insofar as the human person is neither
an object nor a thing. We can now turn to a characterization of
thing-values and the being, and non-being, of values in general.
It is proper to all thing-values that they are attached to things and
that things serve as their substrates or bearers. Let the value of a
vase be $ 100.00 and the dollar-value be indicated on a tag tied to the
substrate vase. What is shown on the tag can, however, be changed
at any time while the vase remains the same vase. This implies:
thing-values resemble colors spread out on surfaces of things. While
the shades of colors may undergo infinite variations on a particular
surface, say, that of the vase, the surface will stay the same surface of
the vase. But the opposite also holds: A shade of the color red
coming from the setting sun may show on the vase. If the vase is
removed and a cup is placed in the same area the same shade of red
will be on the cup also. Colors are independent of the things they
color, and things are independent of the colors they may have. This
mutual independence holds also for values and things. The value of
$ 100.00 can be assigned to an infinite number of things; and one
and the same thing, say a vase, may have an infinite number of
values. If the vase is three thousand years old its values range from
times of barter to its present day antique value. It has even found a
slot in the transient values of the stock market. Barter, business,
stockmarket, etc., are made possible through the independence
values have of things and things of values.
This independence, however, does not only hold for thing-values.
It holds for all values. The value of beauty may realize itself in art or
in a landscape, in the skies, or in a woman. The value of holiness may
realize itself in God, gods, or a fetich. Provided that the Schelerian
analogy between colors and values holds we can draw a conclusion
with respect to what has been called the "being" of values. If light
making colors possible, and colors themselves, do not find a sur-
face on which they realize themselves neither light nor colors exist.
Light without an object on which light waves hit remains dark.

XXVI
Without objects there is no existence of visible light. The same holds
for values: Values by themselves, and without factors on which they
may realize themselves, do not exist. Unfortunately, a number of
researchers claimed that Scheler assumed there to be an "ideal"
realm of values reminiscent of Platonism, or they misunderstood,
like Heidegger, the nature of values. As early as 1897 Scheler
expressed the view that a value by itself does not have existence,
"Der Wert ist uberhaupt nicht."5 A value exists only when it realizes
itself with a thing, with a state of affairs, or with a person, i.e., the
value enters into junctional relationships with these or other factors
in order for it to exist. The existence of a value is functional exis-
tence.
If it is the case that human beings experience an infinite number
of shades of values during their life-time the question to be answered
is whether or not all values can, nevertheless, be reduced to a basic
"order" of values. Scheler answered and explained this question at
length in his ethics. Basically, the point is this: Just as thoughts are
given in acts of thinking, colors in acts of perception, projects in acts
of willing, sounds in acts of hearing, so also values are first given
only in acts of feeling. All feelings divide in feelings relative to the
lived-body and life in general, on the one hand, and, on the other, in
feelings of the person. In the former feelings there are given values of
what is felt to be "pleasant" or "unpleasant," what is "useful" or
not "useful." In feelings of the person, however, there are given
mental values such as aesthetic beauty ,justice, and the cognition of
truth as well as the value of the "holy," or what is "noble" or
"ignoble". Hence there are five value-ranks: sensible values, utility
values, values of life, mental or spiritual values, and the value of
holiness. This division is based in types offeeling. It is clear that an
unpleasant body feeling like pain is radically different from a feeling
of injustice in a person. It is also clear that the feeling of holiness is
radically different from a feeling of what may be useful. These value
ranks, as Scheler described them in his ethics and elsewhere, are
spectral value ranks comparable to spectral colors. Their seat is in
the heart, i.e., that human capacity which, prior to thinking and
willing, sets the stage of how we feel in the world, of how we feel

5. Max Scheler. Friihe Schriften, Ges. Werke, Vol. 1, ed. by Maria Scheler and
Manfred S. Frings, Berne and Munich, 1971, p. 98.

XXVII
ourselves, of how we feel others to be, and how we feel about
anything before we may make discursive judgements. The "logic of
the heart" and of feelings is quite different from rational logic
(Pascal). I do not wish to go into any details of this position but wish
to return to the theme of absolute becoming in conjunction with the
moral good implied in the above.
First of all the moral good is, as we stated, no object. As Scheler
puts it, the moral good realizes itself whenever a person inadver-
tantly prefers a value-rank higher than the one he finds himself in.
This is not to say that "willing" a higher rank of value is of no value.
What it does say is that this willing a higher value may have good
but also bad and questionable motives whereas a person whose
moral tenor is such that his very being is directed to, say, love of
God, he is definitely a person better than and different from one
obsessed with material goods. Thus, the moral goodness of the
person is a temporal process happening in conjunction with prefer-
ring a higher value rank. The moral good "rides on the back," as he
stated, of this inadvertant preferring which characterizes the basic
moral tenor and that human capacity which, prior to thinking and
willing, sets the emotive stage for our willing and thinking. Such
feelings can not, of course, be satisfactorily rationally explained.
Feelings can at best be experienced in their genuine roles and
functions. The "logic of the heart" consisting of the feeling of
value-ranks, and not of values, is as hidden as spectral colors are in
visible light. While all values undergo changes in their being felt,
and being thought of, the ranks of values are immutable. Thus,
Scheler claims, the rank of the values of holiness can not, in feeling
it, be felt lower than, say, the rank of values of utility. This order is
referred to as the ordo amoris of man. Man's love is directed toward
ever higher value-ranks, no matter how much during his life-time,
or during a particular historical epoch, he may be infatuated with
lower ranks. Needless to add, that values can be placed into any
rank and thus be distorted in feeling them (for instance, in resent-
ment), but the spectral order of ranks among them remains the
same. This order, theordo amoris, resounds through the being of the
person and it is up to us, says Scheler, to listen to the correct order of
the ranks of our loves. For the order of love (ordo amoris) ranges,
like value ranks themselves, from one of the four types of sexual love
Scheler had described earlier in his book On the Nature of Sympathy,

XXVIII
up to love of God. While all values of the lower ranks, i.e., those
pertaining to what is pleasant or comfortable, on the one hand,
useful to individuals and groups, on the other, possess maximum
degrees of technical production and manageability (consumer
goods, epicurean goods, drugs, health and fitness merchandise, sex
merchandise, luxury items, etc.), values pertaining to the sphere of
the person, like the moral good, aesthetic beauty, or the experience
of the Divine, can hardly, if at all, be produced, nor ought they be
artificially produced in any way whatsoever by technical means.
One of the many practical messages Scheler enunciated in his
ethics was that the more a society increases the production of goods
designed to produce sensible pleasures and only temporary bodily
or psychic contentment in the individual, the more such mentality
reveals a basic, inner unhappiness in such society. Neither happiness,
let alone religious bliss, can in whatever which way be technically
produced. Scheler's alternative to such tendencies, then, is contai-
ned in the third essay ofthis collection dealing with the latent moral
powers a personal exemplar has in groups, in nations, religions, and
globally, in human history and education.

M.S.F.

XXIX
Shame and Feelings of Modesty
 THE "LOCATION" OF THE FEELING OF SHAME AND MAN'S WAY OF EXISTING

The curious difficulties a phenomenology of shame, and of the

feeling of shame, faces lie in the subject matter itself. The feeling of
shame belongs, as it were, to the clair-obscure of human nature. For
man's unique place within the structure of the world and its entities
is between the divine and animality. It expresses itself nowhere both
so clearly and so immediately as in the feeling of shame. At first
glance its "location" appears to be the living contact which man's
spirit (as the quintessence of all supra-animal or mental acts such as
thinking, intuiting, willing, loving, and their form of existence, the
"person,") has with drive life and the feelings of life which differ
only by degrees from those of animals. According to up-to-date
information and observations, the animal, which shares so many
feelings with us such as dread, anxiety, disgust and even jealously,
seems to lack the feeling of shame and its expressions. I It would also

1. The examples of expressions of shame among animals given by Havelock Ellis

in Geschlechtstrieb und Schamgefiihl [trans. Med. M. Kotscher, 3rd ed.], Wiirzburg,
1907 [pp. 60 ff; The Evolution of Modesty, The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity,
Auto-Eroticism (1899), in Vol. I of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 2nd ed. (New
York: Random House, 1936), pp. 37 ff] (e.g., the female dog pressing herself
against the ground when the male dog approaches her) belong to coquetry,
especially widespread among animals. This must not be confused - as the following
shows - with shame and expressions of shame. The behavior of many birds, claimed
by Stendhal, De l'amour [On love], chapter XXVI, to be the "base naturalle it la
pudeur," whereby they hide their heads and beaks under the water when drinking,
because at that moment they are defenseless, clearly has not the least to do with
shame.

3
be nonsensical to think of a "Godhead who feels shame." The basic
condition for the feeling of shame to occur is only given when in man
the light of consciousness is existentially bound up with the living
organism and shines down on the wellings of the inner life - the light
of consciousness is a phenomenon of surplus 2 vis-a-vis all drives and
vital needs and is in principle free to illumine or not to illumine vital
reactions to the environment.
Before we deal with all the following considerations concerning
the many manifestations of shame and its feeling, we should indicate
the ultimate law of its origin. Let us disregard all specific contents
"about" which we may feel shame, and the things which may "stir it
up," and let us also disregard all relations belonging to the expe-
rience of shame, such as being ashamed "of someone." We find that
the aura or "province" of the impression of shame is conjoined to
that peculiar experience present whenever anyone of the above-
mentioned mental acts is lost in pure and supra-biological contents
and goals, and becomes, by way of a sudden turning back of obser-
vation, glued to a spatially and temporally limited, animal-like
existence, with all its needs. Let us imagine for a moment an artist
lost in creative acts. In creating the work neither the "ego" nor the
"lived body" is given as a starting point from which creative acts
flow. It is in the living in the acts which grasp and realize impres-
sions, one after another, in terms of representation and pictorial
values, that the whole person and world is contained. The contents,
the "sense" and lawfulness of the acts and their continuously
changing and feelable "demands" ("shadow here, red there" etc.)
have nothing to do with the objective fact that there is here a specific
person sitting before a painting or a piece of marble and subjected to
the la ws of nature, and that this person is dependent on the totality
of natural causes in which the individual is but a link. But what if the
acts which were still lost a moment ago in a world with a peculiar
"sense" of its own begin to be experienced as "starting from" or as
"tied to" the limited and dependent embodied individuality? Or, let
us take the lover who was "lost" in the value of the beloved, or
someone lost in the cognition of a nexus of insight as, for instance, a

2. C. Lloyd Morgan's very clear discription in his book Instinkt und Gewohnheit
(German translation by Maria Semon), Berling, 1909, pp. 294 ff. [Habit and Instinct
(London and New York: E. Arnold, 1886), pp. 262 ff.].

4
mathematician is: what if they begin to turn back on themselves in
the above sense?
This does not imply that experiences of this kind necessarily
entail the feeling of shame. But with the above the very sphere and
ideal location has been delimited in which alone the feeling of shame
can come up and is, as it were, "at home". No matter how qualitati-
vely manifold are our experiences of the kind pondered about: there
is always in them by necessity an experience of opposites which can
best be described as one of an essential claim and actual sense that
those acts and their personal starting point have, according to their
nature, with their concrete and real manner of existence.
It is a specific form of this experience of opposites - there may be
more of them - that appears to me to be the root of the darksome
and peculiar feeling of shame. It is always conjoined with an element
of "astonishment," "confusion," and an experience between what
ideally "ought to be" and what, in fact, is. Perhaps in such a kind of
experience is to be found the foundation of the thousands of forms
of the idea of the "fall" of man in religious myth - a fall from the
loftiest heights of the human being where he sa w himself and dared
to feel "he was" or "like" an "image of God," as the Old Testament
expresses it. And when the darksome and pictorial myth of the Old
Testament describes the "eating ofthe fruit" as the concrete form of
the fall and of the origin of the feeling of shame in the words: "and
the eyes of them both were opened: and when they perceived them-
selves to be naked, they sewed together fig leaves, and made themsel-
ves aprons" (First Book of Genesis 3:7), this precisely corresponds
to what I mean to say. To the origin of the feeling of shame there be-
longs something like an imbalance and disharmony in man between
the sense and the claim of spiritual personhood and embodied needs.
It is only because the human essence is tied up with a "lived body"
that we can get in the position where we must feel shame; and only
because spiritual personhood is experienced as essentially indepen-
dent of the "lived body" and of everything that comes from it, is it
possible to get into the position where we can feel shame.
For this reason, in shame "spirit" and "flesh," eternity and time,
essence and existence touch one another in a peculiar and obscure
manner. All the various types of the feeling of shame which we will
distinguish in the following, and all special contents "with" which
this feeling wells up in us - which vary considerably historically, 10-

5
cally in man and woman, and in different age groups - and all perso-
nal relations which are enclosed in this feeling in terms of being
ashamed "before" someone - all of this possesses one large and gene-
ral background: one feels in one's depths and knows oneself to be, a
"bridge," a "transition" between two orders of being and essence in
which one has such equally strong roots that one can not sever them
without losing one's very "humanity." No creature, therefore,
which is beyond this bridge and transition on either of its sides can
have a feeling of shame: no god and no animal. But man must feel
shame - not because of this or that "reason" and not because we can
be ashamed "of' this or that - , we must feel shame because of our
being a continuous movement and a transition itself. Ultimately,
man feels ashamed of himself and feels shame "before" God in him.

I THE PRECONDITIONS FOR THE OCCURRENCE OF SHAME OF THE BODY

Before entering into my essential analysis of shame I would like to

shed some light on the preconditions of the occurrence of bodily
shame (in contrast to psychic shame with its subdivisions, such as
a we) in the development and structure of the life-world in general.
There is no doubt that this feeling is deeply connected with the
degrees of the individualization ofliving entities. It is impossible for
the feeling of shame to occur whenever a living individual appears to
be a more or less indifferent means for the process of propagation
such that the immanent goal of its urge is not the living individual
but the process of propagation itself, as we see it in a culture of
bacteria. For it is, first of all, the very function of bodily shame to
cover and veil, as it were, a living individual. Apart from this very
general function of this feeling it is the function of sexual shame to
exclude the very possibility of mixing with life that does not corre-
spond to the respective individual and its value. Obviously the
organic conditions for the occurrence of "body-shame" are missing
whenever organic growth and propagation are not yet, or are indis-
tinguishably, separated from one another, and also when either the
growth of living entities appears in our own immediate perception
like the propagation process itself, or when propagation appears as
the mere growth of the living entity (Karl E.v. Baer). Secondly, the
organic conditions for the occurrence of shame of the body are not

6
given whenever a living entity's essence appears to exhaust itself in
propagation instead of the latter being only one among other of its
vital activities. It is only when the life-time of an individual begins to
span beyond propagation-time, i.e., backwards towards birth and
forward towards death, and whenever the birth and death of the
parents and the individual's own death become both in function and
time increasingly distinguishable from the propagation act itself,
and when both life-time and propagation move more and more
away from one another, that we have before us the possibility of
organic preconditions for possible shame.
There is yet another tendency we find in the series of living
creatures which would fit in with the above: the feeling of shame
becomes possible with the slow but steady increase of the prepon-
derance of the significance which the quality o/propagation has over
against its quantity - by virtue of an increase of selectability for
mates. To such an increasing preponderance of quality over quan-
tity, there corresponds a decrease of the selective degrees of elimina-
tion among the variations of fertilized eggs [Keime] and individual
living entities - as considered with the same result for them in terms
of number and qualitative value. Already in plant life sexual natural
selectiveness [Zuchtwahl] is possible only through the mediation of
animals or men; whereas in the animal world, especially in bisexual
animals, there exist powers anticipating a possible result of propa-
gation manifesting themselves in sexual selections for the strongest
and aesthetically most pleasing mate, as can be seen in fights over
mates. The unselective process on the lower levels of life (copula-
tion, conjunction) resembling chemical compounds is replaced here
by a preferring, or not preferring, of mates through instinct. It has
been until now unknown whether during fights and play, antecedent
to animals' intercourse, which distinctly reveal the phenomenon of
coquetry, feelings and impulses playa part, which would have to be
regarded as a first step toward human feelings of shame; it is also not
known whether and to what extent females overcome by undesired
males have this sort offeeling, or, whether and to what extent males,
overcome by rivals and thus being forced to settle for less desirable
females, have or do not have feelings akin to shame. Even conclu-
sions by analogy are not permissible here before we know more
exactly the factors guiding sexual selection, and the sensations and
representations in which such factors are given to the animal.

7
 Let us now turn our view on the progressive lines of life in
another direction. We then find that organs, functions, and habits
of comportment serving propagation become more and more
separated from organic sensation and excitation and the organism's
unified reaction and sensation by being simulaneously independent
of the above-mentioned directions of variation. The organs, func-
tions and habits of propagation begin to spread out in terms of
clearly distinguishable differences between male and female, and
especially with regard to ever more distinguishable living units
delineated by space and time (components of the nucleus). Let us
disregard for a moment the question of where in the gradations of
life the opposites of male and female first become manifest, and the
question whether this opposition does, perhaps, as the ancients
thought, encompass all of life, and whether or not male and female
qualities must be assumed to be present in the chromosomes of the
nucleus of the cell (by way of division and amalgamation of the
propagation of one-celled living entities). In any case the first occur-
rence of the division between male and female is on the whole an
obstruction of the pure propagating process insofar as the propaga-
ting sum of living beings must, ceteris paribus, split in half since
propagation is here attached not to one living unit but to two
qualitatively different ones. The meaning of this new qualitative
division in propagation can not be the preservation of a species over
against the variations determined in reproduction alone because it is
without sexual differentiation that such preservation would be,
under equal conditions, far more probable. The division between
male and female on the whole is as much a kind of obstruction of the
pure propagating process which the lowest levels of life appear to
consist in, as it represents clearly an indication that from this
division onward we are not so much concerned with preservation
but with richer possibilities of individualization of the live entities to
be procreated through increased qualification of propagation.
It is with this preconditional division between male and female
that something like "choosing" prior to procreation becomes a
power determining somehow the values of the procreated living
being, be this choosing referred to as sexual instinct, love, etc. The
ancient theory of sexual love as we find it already in Plato's Sympo-
sium, and as has often been held in a modern scientific disguise, is,
on the basis of the above, in extreme contradiction to the facts: for

8
sexual loving cannot be traced back to a drive to restore a whole
which existed in earlier development. It is only through the division
between male and female that love and choice enter into the process
of procreation. It is they which make possible the process of enhan-
cing procreation toward noble and strong life. It is not the function
of sexual love to tend to restore an old state of life in which sexes
were undifferentiated.
We shall see later that some kind of sexual love is a condition of
the feeling of sexual shame. Yet, the phenomenon of shame will not
prove itself to be necessarily tied to a sexual form of conjunction or
the division of sexes, no matter how much sexual shame is con-
spicuous among diverse manifestations of shame and also prior to
psychic shame and its kinds like awe. It is also important for us to
realize that whenever sexual differentiation happens it is the female
part which preserves deeper similarity with older levels of organic
life where sex differentiation is not yet distinguishable. And this
again would correspond to the fact that it is the female who bears
the burden of reproduction and that the female's organism matches
this very task. Everywhere in nature the male principle represents a
younger form oflife than parthenogenesis and reveals lesser degrees
of necessity for procreation than the female part does. This fact will
prove itself important to us when we treat below the distribution of
shame of body and psychic shame in relation to both man and
woman.
As is the case with a tree's male and female blossoms, pollen and
pistils, the male-female differentiation belongs to only one indi-
vidual whole, the tree, whereas on higher levels of life the female and
male principles each begin to coincide with differentiated individual
wholes themselves. It is only when the female and male principle
becomes increasingly tied to such a more delineated individual
life-unit that a gradual subordination of sexual functions under the
whole of an individual organism finds completion.
Organic gradations of animals go hand in hand with the above-
mentioned directions of variation. In comparison with plants, the
basic organic schema in animals expresses, despite the very large
number offorms of animal schemata, the general fact that sensation
is subordinated (1) to drive and motoric impulses, (2) to the trans-
mission of individual preservation, (3) to the preservation of the
species through propagation, and (4) to the tendency toward enhan-

9
 cing a species by way of the coming into action of factors of choice
without which sexual conjunctions would still remain possible. We
have to sharply distinguish already in animals the pure sexual and
propagating drives from factors of choosing the mate. This distinc-
tion is a necessary condition, as we shall see, for the occurrence of
the feeling of sexual shame. A scope for the emergence of sexual
shame becomes possible when something like individualization and
value-choice happens within the process of propagation and when
the schema of subordination of sexual functions under the individual
drive of self-preservation is in effect (as the condition of the above
distinction between sexual drives and factors of choosing a mate).
An increase oflife is itself, in turn, tied to the presence of such a drive
of individual self-preservation. In contrast to plants the outer ap-
pearance of the anatomic structure of most higher animals shows a
certain subordination of sexual organs to the whole of their anato-
mic structure. It is perhaps not so poetic an idea when Schopenhauer
remarks that plants present an open and naive view of their sexual
organs 3 as if it were a culmination of their existence totally by
reproduction, whereas in animals with this increased individualiza-
tion and motoric and aggressive nature sexual organs are more
"concealed" and subordinated to the system and central nervous
organs. One could speak here of an almost objective phenomenon of
shame. 4 This phenomenon precisely expresses a stable form of
existence which shame feelingly intends: a subordination of sexua-
lity under a whole of life.
Let us now take a look at the temporal structure of the individual
life-processes. The same subordination under a vital whole for the
sake of propagation is present in increasing degrees on the same
levels of the vital processes which coincide with the directions of
variation thus far mentioned. This is evident in looking at the
periods of the mating time in animals and at the increasing prolong-
ing of sexual ability with respect to death. In contrast to reproduc-
tion in plant life which is dependent on environment and seasons,
animal propagation during mating time appears to be connected
with afeeling and drive that can also deviate somehow from periodic

3. I.e., already through their formative organization of organs.

4. As one speaks of mimicry, for ehample, as an "objective defensive lie."

10
mating time. s In a certain way, the human feeling of sexual shame is
a more flexible substitute feeling for the weak traces left in man of
the objective rhythm of a wakening and ceasing of sexual and pro-
pagation drives. The flexibility of this emotive substitute, of course,
is connected with the more significant function of withholding or
yielding to drive excitations in connection with individualization.
It is in human beings only that the pure phenomenon of shame,
manifest already in the above states of affairs, loses its objectively
real character in favor of ajeeting proper. A human being hides his
sexual organs even if he does not "clothe" himself for weather
protection. The probable reason for the latter is that adaptation of
sexual organs to protecting covers preceded other "adaptations" of
the whole body in that their vulnerability, caused by the covering
function of shame, to temperature and other influences spread
indirectly more and more to other affected parts of the human
organism through such influences. It is far from being true that
shame originated from clothing and that the latter resulted, in turn,
from a desire to have protection for the body. How could one
understand, on this basis, for instance, that with many primitive
peoples only the so-called sexual parts [Schamteile] are covered?
Rather, the most primitive form of clothing stems from shame, and
the need to cover other parts of the body comes from a secondary
adaptation of the organism to ramified influences resulting from
covering shame. It is likely that the "doublet" [Wams] was a transi-
tional cover. Man clothes himself because of shame - first of all
because he is ashamed of those parts of his organism which bind him
most deeply with the whole realm of submental nature which man
feels he dominates. But he feels at the same time that those parts pull
him down into the tremendous natural chaos from which he strug-
gled and began to feel a rise of his divine nobleness (facial tenden-
cies). Shame in this respect is not a consequence of natural needs,
but, conversely, useful clothing is first a "cover" [Bekleidung], i.e., a

5. And thereby brings with it the posslbtlity of an accompanying emotIOn, which

among men would be called "shame."

11
cover under which man still feels his nakedness, 6 a feeling civilized
man has lost. Civilized man clothes himself even in bed. He feels
that nakedness is tantamount to taking off clothes, rather than
clothes being the cover of nakedness.
It is not surprising when ethnologists tell us that it is, in general,
first the male - and not the female human being - who covers sexual
organs. This would correspond, however, to our introductory thesis
that shame arises originally by way of the contiguity between higher
levels of consciousness and lower drive-awareness. As a more di-
vided and more dualistic creature, it is the male who experiences this
opposition more deeply than the female. Men are, as it were, more
"above nature" than in it. 7 Already the aforementioned "objective
shame," which we find in the animal world as opposed to the plant
world, as well as the conditions that we connected with this shame,
as a consequence of the fact that awareness in animals becomes freer
from its ties to the being of the on-coming moment the more it
embodies the tendencies of the animal world in general. Beyond the
general vital phenomenon of entelechial movement (not "purpose-
ful motion") and practicing, the animal possesses an instinct sur-
veying longer stretches of time - without calculation or conclusions-
and in addition possesses the capacity for "learning" (without
remembering) in regard to movements and changing forms that lie
within the scope of instinct and possible changing forms. Beside
momentary "tendencies" the animal shares with plants, animals
possess an experimental nexus of their lives which can bring order
into those former tendencies - no matter how little their awareness
may detach itself from the service to life. No wonder that we find
between man and woman relations analogous to those between

6. The phenomenon of "nakedness" is here a consequence of being aware of

clothes. A natural man is not "naked" but feels his skin to be his "clothes," if! may
say so; he is only "unclothed." That a secondary "stimulation" of nakedness - be it
erotic or aesthetic - is only a consequence of clothes, needs no proof. These
comments are addressed to our "naturist people."
7. We will discuss later the questions whether a woman has more modesty "by
nature" than a man and whether female shame is only socially valued higher than a
man's shame and, therefore, of higher value - according to laws of marginal utility-
because a woman has, by nature, less modesty than a man.

12
animal and plant. However, it would be erroneous to deny to the
conservative, natural woman [Naturweib], who preserves animal-
nudity longer than a man, 8 the feeling of shame, or to see it only as a
consequent of education by males.
In the positivistic theories of shame 9 we find a basic error. Those
theories take shame for the feeling of shame, and the feeling of
shame for forms of its expression 10 which happen to be found among
peoples of higher civilization. A black woman not covering her
sexual parts [Schamteile] possesses a very distinct feeling of shame.
When she is asked by, say, a missionary to cover them she refuses to
do so with all natural expression of shame. If she obeys, however,
against her will she runs a way and hides behind bushes or in a hut.
For a while she cannot be induced to come out of hiding and show
herself with the cover. This explains the simple fact that she expe-
riences her skin as cover, the hair around her sexual parts as her
string apron [Schurzfell], but an apron or skirt given to her as
something that precisely directs public attention to her sexual parts.
This, of course, must be the case for the men of her tribe whose
forms of observation she has psychically adapted. Whatever is
experienced as the guiding factor of the observation of one's own
feeling of sexual parts it is this which a wakens shame - no matter
wherein the "novel" element may consist - for instance, in this or
that initial "mores." What has been said could not contradict the
possibility that a woman's constitution has a lesser degree of shame
than a man. This would have nothing to do, of course, with the
intensity and genuineness of the wellings of shame as in the case
mentioned. If the above suffices to have brought into a focus the
location of shame in nature as a whole we are now faced with the
problem of setting the feeling of shame off from other feelings, and
to analyze it more sharply and familiarize ourselves with its func-
tions and role in human life.

8. As Darwin already saw.

9. See Havelock Ellis, op. cit.
10. PositivIsm proceeds in this respect from the James-Lange theory of emotIOns,
which considers sensatIons and feelings of shame as a consequence of (inner and
outer) movements of e>..pression. We will refer to them later. Concerning
e>..pressions of shame, see pp. 28 fT.

13
 II. SHAME AND RELATED FEELINGS

The terms "love" and "sensibility," and "senses" designate basic

facts of our spiritual and psychic life. "Sexual love, ""sexual
sensibility," and "sensation" are only special applications of these
terms. They can also refer to sexual love, sensibility, and sensation
alone. "Shame" also has this kind of twofold meaning, in the ap-
plication of the term. 11 The double usage is not by chance, but is
rooted in the phenomena concerned. One must not, as naturalist
philosophy often does, assume that such primal phenomena de-
signate exclusively sexual and erotic facts or that an association with
nonsexual facts or a genetic development of experiential facts would
have caused a more or less analogous application of these terms to
nonsexual experiences. This position would amount to the same
error if one were to consider "disgust," which we first appear to
have on the occasion of adverse tastes and smells, as something tied
originally to the senses yielding this feeling, and the usage of the
term disgust was then transferred to something else, for example, a
person's "being disgusted by another person" or "being disgusted
with morals." Such extensions of usage must not lead us to such
mistakes despite the first appearances of such phenomena in the
senses. Neither must we be led to such mistakes on the basis that
these phenomena perhaps affect experiences of those external areas,
as, for instance, all disgust affecting stomach and vomiting, all
shame affecting an influx of blood in the head characteristic of sex-
ual excitations, (orgasmic blushing, blushing by rage, shame;
mechanism and functions). The latter belongs only to that which W.
Wundt pointedly referred to as the "principle of association of
emotively analogous sensations." 12 This principle explains that our
facial expressions are the same with either "harsh," "bitter," or
"sweet" emotions as they are with respective sensations of taste. If,
however, one isolates the basic phenomena from the facts of imme-
diate and mediate affects on the lived body and from their function

11. There is, strictly speaking, a threefold meaning insofar as the word "shame"
[in German] can, without a suffix, also denote the female sex organ.
12. See W. Wundt, "Algemeine Formen der Ausdrucksbewegungen," in
[Grundzuge der]Physiologischen Psychologie, Vol. II.

14
in certain areas (and does not fall victim to James' and Lange's
theory of affects) they are simple and basic qualities of emotion.
The same is the case with shame. Shame is not an exclusively
sexual feeling because it is not even exclusively a social feeling. The
term shame can originally refer to having "shame of one's own self'
and to "being ashamed of oneself," as well as being ashamed of
somebody else. This also holds for body-shame and spiritual-psyc-
hic shame which we will distinguish later. A bashful girl is ashamed
of looking at and of touching her body. In the process of autoero-
ticism shame does not play less a curbing role than it does with
regard to someone else's relations with the opposite sex. 13 Psychic
shame exercises the same curbs when we wish, for instance, to
subsume our own darksome, more or less submental impulses and
feelings under the light and rigidity of a concept or a judgement, or
when we desire to make our feelings more noticeable as it does when
we use "tact" or "discretion" while trying to make an inroad into
somebody else's personal secrets.
But one specific meaning of the term shame shows that shame is a
feeling which belongs to feelings of ourselves. For in all shame there
is an act of "turning to ourselves." This is especially clear when
shame sets in all of a sudden after an intensive interest of ours in
external affairs had prevented our being conscious and having a
feeling of our own self. A mother running to the rescue of her child
who is burning in a fire does not first put on a robe. She will run in
het slip or in the nude. But as soon as she has rescued her child this
turn to herself, along with shame, will set in. The love of a very
bashful woman for her beloved man can at a moment be so strong
that she is emotionally totally lost in him and his looks, despite the
tendency of her situation to produce shame. But the slightest dimi-
nution of her lost ness will induce shame along with an awakening
consciousness of her own self. Here, too, is this characteristic
"turn." Even one's knowing oneself to be seen by someone else is
not yet a condition for shame. Although for very different reasons, a
very bashful woman can feel as little shame when being a model for
a painter, being a patient of a physician, or when bathing in the

13. Shame is also independent of normal and perverse, especially homosexual,

excitations, even though it assumes the form characteristic of male and female
shame from the role played by the homosexual.

15
presence of a servant as she feels with her beloved in whom she is
lost. If she experiences herself in front of the painter as "given" for
her aesthetic quality and as a valuable visual thing for the arts, the
turn-experience will not occur. The same is the case when she is only
a "case" for a physician, or the "lady" for her servant. The reasons
are here the same: she does not experience herself as "individual."
But, by contrast, it is equally clear that when she experiences herself
only as an individual no reason for shame is present either. This
example furnishes us with a constitutive moment of shame as far as
the state of affairs is concerned, on the "basis" of which shame
occurs: let us have the painter, physician, or servant be for a mo-
ment distracted from their original intentions so that the woman
begins to feel this happening, and the "painting," "case," and
"lady" disappear. The woman will then strongly react with shame
while "turning" to herself. Conversely, let us have a woman feel that
her beloved one is distracted from her individuality and just looking
at her as a "beautiful woman" (or, in the painter's case, as an
"attracting painting") such that the woman feels he is comparing
her with, or she is reminding him of, another woman; or that he is
saying something she knows was said before to another woman: she
will immediately react in shame.
This means the following: the "turning to" one's self in whose
dynamics shame has its beginnings does not occur if one is "given"
to oneself as something general or as individual. It occurs when the
feelable intention of the other oscillates between an individualizing
and generalizing attitude and when one's own intention and the
experienced counterintention have not the same but an opposite
direction. 14 We feel an inkling of shame already when we subsume a
very individual experience of our own under a general conception
and "see" that we had an experience of say, commiseration or of
love. When we begin to think about ourselves and when we make
simple and naive reflections on ourselves and turn to judgments and
concepts, then judgment and concepts become a sort of "public" in

14. For this reason prostitutes can be without shame when they are with their
customers and at the same time show the greatest modesty and tenderness to their
beloved. There is in neither case a contradiction in intention. The customer seeks
the prostitute, not the individual, and the prostitute seeks the customer; in the other
case both seek the individual.

16
our mind. Our very individual experiences do not belong to this
kind of "public," in the same way as our private life does not belong
to newspaper publicity. From this we can see that sexual life must be
deeply intertwined with the feeling of shame although it is not
shame's origin but a distinct area of application of it. The reason for
this or that sexual life is at the same time the most general factor of
our lives we share with all animals and life and yet the most indi-
vidual factor insofar as there is neither a forum nor a judge for the
success and failures concerned, except sensations themselves. 15
Shame is a protective feeling of the individual and his or her value
against the whole sphere of what is public and general. Later on the
sexual feeling of shame will reveal itself to us as a typical conse-
quence of the dynamics of two basic movements which regulate
sexual relations: first, love (both spiritual and passionate love)
which is (1) directed toward values and (2) to devotion to the object
and which is (3) the qualifying and individualizing factor in the
coming about of sex-relations; second, the basic movement of the
purely sensuous sex drive which represents (1) instead of values,
states of pleasure feelings, (2) instead of devotion, a being driven to
one's own sensuous pleasures, and which (3) is the quantifying and
generic [gattungsmassige] principle of sexual relations. A point
must be made here: a being not capable of the experienced tension
between the powers oflove and sex drive - albeit powers directed to
the same sex object - would not be capable of sexual shame. Sexual
shame is nothing else but the clear-cut measure for the dynamic
constellation of both powers vis-a-vis the other or one's own person.
With this the nexus between the pure phenomenon of shame and
sexual shame is demarcated: shame is a counter-reaction grown into

15. For this reason there is no affective release, like revenge or sublimation,
possible here for even the strongest offenses conjoined with unrequited love, or for
the strongest and most penetrating humilJations of the soul. This e>-plains the fact
that "sublimation" and its harmful consequences generally set m with these
affectations (see also K. Mittenzwey). Every "separation" and public atonement is
e>-cluded, just as is any negotiation or discussion, which otherwise remam
possibilities in so-called "matters of taste." Even an affective release through
conversation and thereby accompanying "abreactIOn" must fail here because it
would itself constitute a shamelessness and, moreover, meet only with mockery.
Therefore, no one is more e>-cluded from the saymg "Shared suffering is half of
suffering" than the one who is unhappy in love.

17
a feeling; it is the "anxiety" of the individual over falling prey to
general notoriety, and over the individual's higher value being
pulled down by lower values. It is a phenomenon which is also given
in the aforementioned "objective shame."
In having referred to subjective shame as a feeling of individual
self-protection I did not mean to imply that shame must always
relate to one's own individual self. The fact is that we can ourselves
be ashamed "before" somebody else or before ourselves, as we can
feel shame "for" someone else. In the latter case shame and what it is
about refers to other persons present. This is clear in cases (which I
have often observed in myself) when someone tells an off-color
story among men only, and when the story is told with a woman
present. In the former case shame does not occur, in the latter it
does. Even if the woman would herself not be ashamed of what has
been told, and if no fellow feeling or emotional contagion would
playa role, her very presence would be enough for strong shame and
a blushing face to occur. Indeed this "shame" for someone "else"
cannot only be "for" him but also, while it is not related to me or a
third person, to this very person himself (analogously to being
ashamed of one's self) as is well expressed when we say, "I feel
shame deep within your soul." Shame is a feeling, therefore, of guilt
for a selfin general. It is not necessarily for my individual self but can
be related to any self. This shows that shame is not, like sorrow and
sadness, something attached to an ego. One cannot be "shameful"
in the same way that one is sorrowful and sad and perchance
partake sympathetically in these feelings with another. The basic
phenomenon is here "to be ashamed" which is al ways about a state
ofaffairs that solicits it independently of the ego and its states. This
"shaming oneself' is an emotion unto itself which does not yet
imply shame of one's self. There is no experienced relation to the
ego, let alone one of my being ashamed "of' myself. For this reason
shame "wells up," it "overcomes" and "befalls one" (Sonnet of
Petrarc).
It is on the basis of the above that we can now take a brieflook at
the feeling of shame and related emotions.
There is a basic relation between shame and pride, on the one
hand, and humility, on the other. It is surprising that shame should
have something in common with both. The connection shame has
with pride lies in the fact that both shame and pride are feelings of

18
self-value. Pride is also a positive feeling of self-value even if one is
proud "of' someone else, as of children, a spouse, or of a student. In
contrast to pride, however, shame is not related to such things or to
other possessions, or to rank, etc. It is wholly related to an indi-
vidual, not only to one's own self as is the case with pride. We
cannot be proud "for" someone in the sense we can feel shame for
someone. 16 In addition, a proud person is aware of the possession of
self-value and keeps it under his controlling powers. If his qualities
and actions are challenged in their value, he takes refuge in deeper
levels of his self to hold fast to his value. Shame, by contrast, is only
an attitude of protecting and preserving a self. It can become a
silently begging or imploring shame with regard to others. And in
this it resembles humility, much as shame is far from being humility.
Shame, in contrast to humility, completely lacks awareness of un-
worthiness of one's self and a free subordination under the higher
value felt in the love of another person. Much as shame is distin-
guished from pride in that the self-value is to be neither firmly
guarded as a possession nor controlled - be it by defense or escape
into deeper levels of the self - a positive worthiness - not un worthi-
ness - of the person's self, veiled in the protective function of shame,
is given. With respect to humility we are directed in love to the
higher value of another and become lost in the other's value. For
humility casts its radiance unto us and comes from this bearer of
value given in love. We are given as "unworthy" to ourselves in this
radiance. But shame, too, is not possible without love, as I showed.
However, shame is more coy than humility. We do not give oursel-
ves in it as we do in humility. Rather, we look back in a questioning
manner onto our vaguely felt self-value "whether or not the beloved
is meritorious of it." The devotion in shame makes it akin to
humility. If, in the dynamics of the opposites of self-value and
devotion, which are at the base of shame, love persists and overco-
mes shame, it is humility that replaces shame.
In quite a different manner repentance and the feeling of honor
are akin to shame. The aforementioned double meaning of "shame"
reveals, like "disgrace" [Schande] and "dishonor" [Schandung], an

16. There is an equivocation in "shaming," because it refers both to welling of

shame and to wellings of sympathetic feelings of honor, as in the case where one has
been made ashamed by someone else (= to be brought discredit).

19
intermediate feeling of shame. Shame's double meaning was estab-
lished (1) as the welling of it, and (2) in the expression of "you
should be ashamed of yourself' (to order shame is impossible), or
"to feel shame before someone," which can refer to welling of
shame before someone, when he is, for example, looking at an
individual and "grasps the disvalue of his comportment by the blame
of someone else while reliving this blame so that the disvalue is
repented. This is the case, for instance, with admitting a lie. Shame is
here related to repentance because of this "being ashamed of one's
self." True, shame is not directed toward anything of negative value
as is the case with repentance, let alone solely to a moral value.
Indeed, a demonstration of a personal advantage to others or even
before our own mind a wakens deeper and purer shame than the
shame of a mistake. But if this individual advantage coincides with a
negative value we have an intermediate feeling of shame in the
above sense, viz. when a negative value comes to the fore in the act
of repenting. Both shame and repentance enter into a kind of
mixture in children when they are aware ofa negative value through
their parents' blame, - i.e., when they are not "caught like a thief."
Children come to know themselves by such blame, or think they do,
and having been blamed they become "ashamed" of the fault. On
the other hand, the feeling of honor and of shame are closer related
with one another in a woman's soul. A lacking feeling of shame with
women can almost al ways be reduced to a lack of a feeling of honor.
This is because in both men and women the feeling itself of honor
and of chastity has deeper levels of confluence and because sexuality
in woman is felt more individually than in men. Whatever the
reasons for this, it follows that the protecting feeling of sexual
shame coincides, in part, with the feeling of one's honor.
In terms of a dynamic opposition and restriction, shame is also
related to ambition, vanity, and desire for fame as well as sexual
exhibitionism, just as it is related to all tendencies that aim at
attention, including esteem, love and reputation. Exhibitionism is
the same desire for attention for an embodied person as vanity is for
the social status of a person, as ambition is for a person involved in
social deeds and accomplishments, and as fame is for the spiritual
person and his masterpieces. All these psychic powers would just by
themselves drive man into losing himself in the outer world and rid
him of any care for his intimate self. Shame, however, represents the

20
being and justification of the intimate self and the detachment from
public judgment.
Deeper analogies can be found between shame and disgust and
aversion and between spiritual shame and reverence. Shame and
disgust have been called the "chief dams" hindering the realization
of sexual drives (Freud). Apart from their common effects during
puberty, especially among girls, they both protect the individual
from an all-too-early intercourse. In their purer form they have the
psychic component of resisting and strong (passive) "repugnance"
to what is disgusting. This is accompanied by an anticipating feeling
of harmfulness and vague irritations of nausea. Shame, on the other
hand, always has the strong psychic undercurrent of components of
attraction to what is resisted in it. But this difference between shame
and disgust does not prevent cases where bashful resistance and
defense are hardly distinguishable from the resistance against dis-
gust and its weaker form, "aversion." A certain empirical conjunc-
tion is already at hand because those parts of the body around which
shame settles and in which feelings of lust and titillation occur,
along with excitations of the sex drive, are the very same parts of
excretion and urination. With the latter certain sensations of lust
can easily combine although they also function as primary vehicles
for disgust. Disgust and aversion are undoubtedly an innate capa-
city l7 of emotional reaction. They are reactions against desires, for
example, against rotten or organically decayed material, wounds, or
puss. They are reactions to certain forms of life, like those of mice
and snakes, whose common ground for arousing disgust has not yet
been detected. Disgust is connected also with "oversaturation" by
things that normally do not arouse disgust. Finally, disgust (and
aversion) can represent perversions of an earlier drive or appetite as
is the case with diseases in which the disgust (of meat, etc.) can have
a function for differential diagnosis. In all of this disgust has the
character of an anticipatingfeeling for the harm the body may suffer
from eating, digestion, or contagion.
The above shows that disgust is analogous at least to sexual
shame insofar as it has the same value-selecting and curbing func-

17. See in this regard A. [Eduard] Pfli.iger, Die teleologische Mechanik der
lebendigen Natur, Bonn, 1877; also W. James. There is no immediate disgust of
inorganic substances.

21
tion for hunger impulses as the feeling of sexual shame has for the
sexual drive and drive of propagation. 18 In contrast to hunger, which
is only an urging organic feeling state, and in contrast to "being
hungry," which is only a most general organic desire for food after
feelings and sensations of titillation around the stomach have
ceased because the stomach has been filled, appetite is, as similar to
impulses of scratching one's skin during sensations of tickling, a
momentary emotive pre-examination of the state of our body and of
the digestibility of the food and is accompanied by secretions of
saliva and flo wings of gastric acid [Magensaft] (Pavlov). By ana-
logy, the male's sexual drive and the female's drive of propagation is
a general urge whose wellings are determined by another form of
titillation and desires of pleasurable completion. It is here that the
very wellings of love and only sexual sympathy emotively pre-
examine the value of a possible sexual union satisfying the drive.
And it is the components of resisting and defense of shame that

18. Inevitable, the method of our eugenic racial politicians to substitute this
value-selecting power of love by pairing men and women artificially on the basis of
scientific hereditary la ws, is as nonsensical as trying to substitute the value-selecting
powers of appetite, aversion, or disgust with laws offood chemistry and its objective
data on the nutritional value of meals and their composition. Or, to those who
believe the former to be nonsensical but the latter to be sensible (such as a great
segment of mechanistic psysiology), we say: the latter makes as little sense as the
former. The source of error is in both cases a philosophical one. Every problem of
"heredity" must be decided only according to the facts of propagation, whose
existence and quality is already dependent upon the function of the value-selecting
choice of love and its servant, chance. The factors determining the becoming of
propagation cannot be viewed by considering causally propagation that has
become. Likewise, any problem of objective nutrition and food values rests upon
the facts that have already been determined by the nature of appetite and disgust. If
appetite and disgust would play their role in a less complete fashion, those laws of
nutrition would, in turn, look different. Concerning love I have already stressed in
my book Zur Phiinomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegejiihle, Halle, 1913, that
the question cannot concern practically, therefore, a scientific-artificial substitution
for the organic and significant value-selecting powers; rather, it concerns, on the
contrary, freeing them from all their distorted rationalistic-utilitarian inter-
pretations and empirical treatment and makmg men attentive to their deeply
significant and refined language and value-logic. [The work cited was later
expanded into the Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (1923), 6th ed., ed.
Manfred S. Frings, Vol. 7 of the Gesammelte Werke (Berne: Francke Verlag, 1973);
The Nature oj Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
Ltd.; New Haven: Yale University Press. 1954).]

22
withhold this desire from satisfaction as long as love does not reach
sufficient levels of intensity, decisiveness and evidence.
The above-mentioned combination of primary objects of shame
and disgust on the basis of the anatomic unity of both sexual organs
and organs of excretion, and the analogous functions of disgust and
shame, make many intermediary phenomena understandable which
are hard to distinguish for an observer or the experiencing subject,
e.g., whether it is the sexual organ, or the same organ of excretion,
which belongs to aversion, disgust, or shame. This is perhaps so
because of the effects that bear on excitations resulting from food
and on wellings of the sex drive and sexual feelings (e.g., alcohol, or
foods exciting sexual sensations). The distinctions between disgust
and shame are especially difficult with women when by the absence
of transmission of excitation from the clitoris to the vagina, no, or
hardly any, vaginal sensation is aroused and when for this reason
there is an indifference to the male sexual organ. This indifference is
not yet an aversion but can entail aversion and disgust since the
indifference easily yields the image of the male sexual organ as one
of an organ of excretion. Quite the same abolition of enchantment
by the "erotic light," which for a man surrounds a woman's sex
parts, is at hand when a man's sexual drive takes a homosexual turn.
And any isolated observation of sexual organs and their appercep-
tive breaking out of the whole of the person - unknown to genuine
love - as well as their anatomic position in contrast to their being
fields of expression of inner and passionate movements - deprives the
sexual part of its erotic value and reduces it to an organ of excretion
and an object of disgust. Because modesty [Scham] curbs this
"breaking out" and the perception of sexual organs as physical
things, it has also an eminent function during intercourse. For it
curbs wellings of disgust and counters disgust. 19
Modesty is, as it were, the "natural veil of the soul" in our entire
sexuality. Nietzsche has justifiably emphasized Madam Guyon's
words that modesty is "ce qui enveloppe Ie corps." As stated before,
clothes are only a crystallization of shame. They are also a symboli-
zation of shame for bodies made in the arts. However, in a pheno-
menological focus, shame must be compared to a refined aura of

19. Shame, therefore, is indispensable even for mere sexual enjoyment, let alone
for the higher biological and psychic values implicit in the sexual act.

23
 invulnerability and untouchability felt to be an objective guard.
This also pertains to the objective phenomenon of shame. In their
most significant representations of Aphrodite the Greek sculptors
seem to have expressed this aura with unsurpassable art. It seems
that in their a wefilled attitude they dared to represent the goddess
in the nude only because they felt the immense power in their souls
enabling them to conceal Aphrodite far more by sculpturing an
almost material veil of modesty around her than any cover could
accomplish.
He who considers shame to be something brought about by
education must, of course, conclude that the impression of such
modesty, of chastity and purity residing in the appearance of a
bashful woman in the nude - even without her knowing her own
inner experiences - is based on "empathy," i.e., on a transference of
one's own feelings into the content of a perception which is sup-
posed to present "first" the mere bodily, anatomic appearance of the
woman. But precisely the opposite is the case. It is not an empathetic
addition or a plus that leads us to the appearance of the woman's
body and her sex organs, but a diminution and a minus. In the
original perception of her the natural cover is co-given, even when
the woman concerned lacks respective feelings; for instance, when a
small boy happens to see a naked prostitute, he sees her with this
natural cover which still envelops her flesh. And it amounts to a
deprivation and depossession when in a later perception this natural
veil disappears and flesh becomes visible, as is often the case when
shame decreases in low ways of life. It is not an "animating"
empathy of body and flesh on behalf of the observer that yields the
aura of untouchability and purity - it is a more or less guilt-filled
deanimation of the whole phenomenon that leads to perception of
flesh and bodyness. 20 A natural disgust for a woman as a mere body
is only a natural recompense for such guilt-filled deanimation. Lack
of shame thus punishes itself with disgust - according to a law
eternally inscribed in our hearts and which no arbitrary act can defy.

20. Just as jurists have recently sought to define the concept of violation of
honor without regard to violation of the feeling of honor (Binding) by correctly
regarding honor as a quality of the social person, who is the basis of claims respect,
so also should one refer to violation of modesty itself, rather than to "gross violation
of the feeling of modesty."

24
 Relations between shame and feelings of anxiety,fear, and reve-
rence again are different. Fear is a prefeeling of "dangers" spaning
all life, before harmful excitations of perilous things have an effect
on the organism. In fear, things feared are represented (Jennings).
Anxiety, however, is also a pre-feeling but without representations of
perilous things. Shame has little to do with fear, but much with
anxiety. Both are similar in their emotional attitude and their
expression (trembling in shame and trembling in anxiety are
partially identical). In shame the resisting and defending attitude
against attracting objects is a "guarding" element expressing
something like "oh, let this not happen!" And, in this sense, it is also
an anxious attitude of defence. This is especially the case before first
intercourse. Since the latter has not yet been experienced or may
even not have been heard of, fear cannot be involved because fear is
al ways directed to things already experienced. It is in such cases that
shame and anxiety have much in common. They are also very similar
in cases of timidity, a quality which distracts or curbs thoughts,
motivations, or volitions in the presence of others, and which curbs
intentions of expression by an experience of anxiety over the possible
effect. Timidity also curbs by the experience of being ashamed of
bringing into the open one's innermost concerns. If a strong bashful
tendency of withholding one's inner experience that is felt to be
known already by expression, is enhanced by an anxiety over the
threat of criticism by others, there arises, through a preponderance
of shame, "intimidatedness" [Verschiichtertheit], and through a
preponderance of experienced, intimidation fear [Eingeschiichtert-
heit] (Embarrassment 21 ).
Reverence [Ehrfurcht] is more akin to spiritual shame. Reverence
is a kind of fear whose object enjoys respect, love, and adoration

21. "Embarrassment" is connected with channelling attention back to psychic

processes in which an intention realizes itself in expression and action. Precisely
this channelling back is a curbing of this realization. Someone "embarrassed" does
not know where to put his hands and feet; he feels himself handicapped while
talking and acting. The reason for this channelling back is the imitating of the
embarrassed person's own watchfulness by observers and persons with whom he is
conversing that he feels is directed toward him. He is thus turned toward himself by
their imitation. Embarressment is a curbing of both thinking as well as motonc
process. But there is neither a tendency to hide nor a value foundation for this
tendency in embarrassment.

25
independent of its perilous aspects. The object of reverence is felt
and given as the bearer of a high value. The emotional division
between adoration and fear is analogous to the attracting and
repelling functions we find in shame. A deep conjunction of shame
and reverence isfearfulness [Scheu], especially the so-called "sacred
fearfulness." This conjunction makes shame play an important role
as a motive for views on God and of the world among peoples. Its
absence or lack also explains much about peoples. In the view of the
world of Asian Indians and of the Teutons every thought of the
world and of the gods is anchored in the reverence and fearfulness of
the depth and a "secret" in things; whereas among Jews, and to a
lesser degree among romance peoples, a sense of the secret is almost
missing. Schopenhauer with justification did not believe that the
Jews had "verecundia." World and God are given to them as mostly
understandable, and for this reason their religion lacks the element
of secret [Geheimnis] much more, and mystery. The romance peo-
ples, it is true, recognize the secret of the world and God, but they
have an inclination to define it with fixed concepts and definitions
and to make it a part of a system so that they can deal with it more
easily rather than to feel, see [schauen], or experience it.
It is fearfulness and reverence which yield to the world and the
human soul a secret depth and a feeling of a width and fullness
beyond our horizons. In this feeling rational understanding begins
to crumble and to know itself in its limitations. In anticipating
presentiment there is present in each thing a secret fullness of its
being transcending the things' knowable meaning, which surrounds
this meaning by infinitely stretching out beyond all horizons. On the
other hand, there is no doubt that these emotions have been ob-
structed by scientific conquests and, to a degree, by artistic endea-
vors. As long as the stars were woven into the latent divinity, and as
long as there was a fearfulness of the human corpse, astronomy
calculating over the stars and anatomy disecting the corpses had no
existence. Also the material of myth and of religious objects be-
comes for an artist sculpture, painting, or tragedy only when
religion, by way of an increased spiritualization of its object,
uncovers the veils of older and more objective [anschaulicher] ideas
of things divine by the phenomena of untouchability and of mystery.
Psychological analyses of man's self had to stop short of this kind of
shame as a limit to such analysis, more than anything else.

26
 III. BASIC FORMS OF THE FEELING OF SHAME AND THEORIES OF ITS ORIGIN

We have seen that the feeling of shame is both a turn of the

individual onto himself and a feeling of the necessity of protecting
the self from all general notoriety. It is also a feeling of indecision
between value-selecting higher functions of consciousness and ob-
jects of strong attractiveness to the lower drives and conations. In
this indecision there is manifest a tension between both levels of
consciousness. Hence, the feeling of shame has two essentially
different forms, not reducible to one another: (1) shame o/the body
or the vital feeling of shame, whereby sexual shame is the strongest
kind of vital shame and contains, in concentrated form, all kinds of
vital shame; and (2) psychic shame, or the spiritual feeling of shame.
Shame of the body is the index of the measure of the tension between
the value-selecting functions of vital love which is concentrated in
sexual love and the drive impulse toward sensible feelings of the
agreeable and pleasant, concentrated in the titillations of volup-
tuous pleasure. The drive impulse is specialized in terms of qualities
of sensory feelings. The strongest manifestation of this impulse is
the sex-drive. Spiritual shame represents the index of the tension be-
tween value-selecting functions of spiritual or psychic love and the
vital basic drive of enhancing life in general. Both forms of shame
pertain, however, to the sphere of application of protecting the
individual self-value from general exposure.
We have, therefore, in every feeling of shame two functions of
consciousness: a lower one which is value-indifferent (and automa-
tic in its process) and by which a decisively positive striving is
posited; and a higher, value-selecting and value-discovering one
(whose process is less automatic and, therefore, more flexible). In
this function there is still contained indecisiveness in changing
degrees. These two functions manifest themselves also in each feel-
ing of shame. In body shame there is the opposition between the
life-drive and the sensory drive, or between life-feeling and sensory
feeling; and in psychic shame there is loving, willing, and thinking of
the person as opposed to the vital sphere in general, depending on its
relations to the drive of preservation and the life-enhancing drive.
The significance of these two forms of shame will prove itself in
what is to follow. At this point we are only concerned itself in what is
to follow. At this point we are only concerned with pointing out the

27
importance which the phenomenon of shame has for the constitu-
tion of any consciousness and for the levels of consciousness which
manifest themselves in shame, no matter how consciousness may
otherwise be structured. Shame is present in the human person
possessing these levels of consciousness in a specific and empirical
organization. Even when ethnologists and anthropologists assure
us, as they do, that not all individuals and peoples have feelings of
shame, we would still be justified in declaring shame to be an evident
fact. For there is an interconnection of essence between those levels
of consciousness and their bearers and the phenomenon of shame. If
an ethnologist would tell us that a particular people had no feeling
of shame - his scope of experience goes no farther than making
claims - we would still be justified in telling him to go and find one in
this people,22 and that his own experience allows him only to state
that he had not yet discovered expressions of shame, but not that
there is no shame at all in this people.
Nevertheless, there is a difference between the two kinds of
feeling of shame: Body shame presupposes only the division be-
tween the sensory and the vital, in drive and feeling. But psychic
shame presupposes the person. Body shame is present in humanity
in general and at any phase of our development. Traces of it can be
found in higher animals. But psychic feelings of shame are surely
not human in general, let alone present on any level of development
of individuals or peoples.23
We shall first cast light on body shame and direct our attention to
theories of the origin and distribution of the feeling of shame.
A most naive theory, popular among circles with a special "en-
lightenment," is the one which considers shame to be a result of
education. This theory is hardly any longer a subject of scholarly
concern. It considers shame to be a consequence of the education
"according to moral principles" which prevails in a society (18th

22. Also, the interconnection between experience and expression is not causal,
but rather primarily one of an essential nature and, therefore, an interconnection in
cognition. See in this regard my book Zur Phiinomenologie und Theorie der
Sympathiegefiihle, Appendix I ["Theorie der Fremdgegebenheit"; "Die Fremd-
wahrnehmung," in Wesen und Formen der Sympathie; "The Perception of Other
Minds," in The Nature of Sympathy, pp. 238-64].
23. Although, feelings derived from and connected with psychic feelings of
shame, like awe, timidity, shame of compassion, etc., are not always present.

28
century}. Apart from the question of how educators arrive at a
concept of the feeling of shame, representatives of this theory of
so-called facts confuse three things with one another: (l) They
confuse the forms of the expressions of shame that have become
fixed by morals in various places and times with the living expression
of shame; they confuse the natural expression of shame (for in-
stance, blushing) with artificial expressions of it (for instance, ba-
thing suits), and they confuse thefeeling of shame with its expression
in general. 24 (2) They confuse the feeling of shame with moral inter-
pretation and application, i.e., they consider it to be in the domain of
the moral judgments of society - which interpretations can, of
course, be quite manifold while the feeling of shame remains con-
stant (for example, the concepts of chastity and purity). (3) They
argue that shame occurs through self-deceptions, which, indeed, do
occur, but they feel that there are no other motives of expression or
action that justify regarding shame other than in analogy with such
self-deceptions (for instance, when a woman feels shame by not
wanting to show her ugly side).
The form of the expression of the feeling of shame cannot be
determined by education; education cannot reach the expressions of
shame. But tradition, free compliance with it, and imitation can, in
many ways, determine this form. As we saw, an African woman's
covering herself, for instance, can arouse shame. In Japan there is
no shame when men, women, and children take baths together in a
hotel, whereas dancing and any kind of halfcover, such as low cut in
dresses, do arouse shame. One could mention many cases of such
different forms of the expression of shame. But the decisive factor is
that any deviation from such forms of shame-expression arouses
wellings of shame because these deviations focus, ceteris paribus,
attention upon the individual's body to more than a normal degree,
i.e., these deviations make the body conspicuously present to
others. For this reason the "elegant," which combines an aesthetic
form-value (elegant manners, elegant clothes) with extreme incon-
spicuousness and subordination of the individual under his social
level, is always connected with shame, whereas everything loud in

24. In the final analysis confuse the phenomenon of shame with the "feeling of
shame."

29
attitude or clothing and everything disproportionate to a social level
is more or less shameless.
It happens, of course, that forms of expression of shame that
originally stemmed from tradition lose their traditional relation to
shame, and that an application of these forms persists, through
historical inertness, as nothing but a lifeless continuation of what
traditionally was a lived relation to shame. In such cases the factual
expression of shame, insofar as it is an artificial one, does not
correspond to those older forms of tradition. This is precisely what
is called prudishness, which is typical of conservative peoples; the
English happen to be very much like this in their laws, mores, and
customs. Prudishness is a form of expression of shame empty of a
feeling of shame and having ceased to correspond to the tendencies
of living shame-expressions. The nature of prudishness consists in
willingly maintaining such forms by realizing symbolic forms of
expression instead of purposive 25 and expressive actions. This willful
maintenance functions prior to the activity; the activity does not
function within the form of expression. The theory concerned mis-
takes, therefore, prudishness for modesty [Scham]. Yet, we must
also recognize that those forms of the expression of shame that
prevail in a society can also be more or less expressive of shame - if
they belong to the positive grammar of shame expressions in ar-
tificial and semi-artificial forms (we will discuss these later), for
instance, the "smile" of a Japanese while in pain or receiving bad
news. They must be so if prudishness can be at all possible. For
prudishness is the conflict between objective and sUbjective shame.
The European woman, even if she were the most shameless prosti-
tute, lives with more objective shame by wearing clothes than the
most bashful black woman in Africa. But the factor determining
such forms of shame-expressions, and whose variations simulta-
neously change these forms, is, to be sure, changing by heredity
through the mixing of bloodlines and, therefore, changing with the
rhythm of genera tions and other genetic distributions of the blood.
But tradition is the vehicle of transferring given forms of expres-
sions of shame. As we will see later the changes in the semi-artificial
forms of shame-expression are connected with natural expressions

25. These pointed distinctions I have taken from Oskar Kohnstamm, Kunst als
Ausdruckstiitigkeit [: Biologische Veraussetzungen der A'sthetik], Munich, 1907.

30
of shame, while the artificial forms are connected with the semi-ar-
tificial expressions. 26
There is also a rarely-seen negative side to prudishness. It also
rests on the opposition between the lived wellings of shame and the
forms of its expression. This negative side of prudishness is cyn-
icism, the cynic's everyday look, his expression of "public indiscre-
tion," or of insolence, etc. It is far from the truth to hold that the
cynic lacks feelings of shame. Someone who has only strong volitio-
nal shame reactions against existing or supposed empty forms of
expressions of shame, i.e., if he does not react by pure shame
reaction, cannot be said to lack any shame or to be shameless. This
would amount to a self-deception. The ancient cynics, for example,
relieved themselves and masturbated in the open, and they showed
no respect for mores in attire and ways of life. They rejected
marriage and were spokesmen for free love. But in their moral
principles they praised the strongness of the soul highly and rejected
everything serving pleasures and lUxury while living lives of
itinerant preachers, and they declared the rejection of needs as a
cardinal virtue. These and analogous things are, however, the con-
sequences of a hyper-sensitive feeling of shame protesting defiantly
against prevailing forms of expressions of shame. We are concerned
here with the same phenomenon we find in the "willed insolence" of
rather timid persons: an intensification of shame of such persons
hiding their shame (or timidness) ou t of shame, artificially interrup-
ting the natural and traditional expressive tendency through a wil-
led reaction against extant expressive forms and even against natu-
ral ones. This tendency can be found on all levels of shame and its
expressions. On the organic level and in relation to natural expres-
sions, this tendency, in its more flexible artificial and semi-artificial
forms called "cynicism," is nothing bu t a drive of exhibition. Exhibi-
tion is far from being an impulse left over from infantile stages prior
to "the origin of shame feelings," as Freud very erroneously main-
tains. Rather, exhibitionism presupposes feelings of shame (and
sympathetic experiences by others) and grows out of shame only to
become perverted in its expression. But if this tendency of inten-
sification expresses itself in spiritual forms, such as in confronting

26. See pp. 35ff., 4lff., concerning the origins of English and American
prudishness and flirtation.

31
 others' actions, in philosophy, literature, or other forms of art, it has
the mark of cynicism.
To be mentioned here is also another related phenomenon, the
tendency towards the obscene. Whereas the cynic's attitude comes
from shame itself and tends to cover up the expression of shame by
diverting the normal expression through perversion or artificiality
into "symbolization" of shamelessness, obscene comportment does
not come from shame but is directed to one's own or another's
shame. True, obscenity is directed to a violation of shame and the
production of shocking displeasure which al ways accompanies this
violation. But "violation" is not a "negative" aspect in this case, nor
is it "annihilation." Obscene comportment is directed towards the
feelings of violation of shame in that such feelings are felt to be
pleasurable. But while this violation becomes purposeful and is not a
consequence of natural expression lacking shame, i.e., while it is
striven after by intention, the tendency of the natural expression of
the feeling of shame, and especially of its wellings, must be the basic
datum which is presupposed and upon which obscenity builds.
The fact that in obscenity an individual does not have the painful
stunning of the feeling of shame but enjoys himself is revealed in the
fact that obscene tendencies have a peculiar connection to cruelty
and shame. This cruelty is mostly one which makes the obscene
person refeel (not co-feel) another's pain, and even cause pain in the
other in order to enjoy it - perhaps even for the sake of a tendency to
a pleasurable self-infliction of pain. I find this to be true in cases at
least where obscenity occurs in its purest forms, as in the so-called
black masses during the Middle Ages, in the poetry of Baudelaire, in
Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, and even more expressly in Sade's
novels Justine and Juliette, where a connection of indecent ideas
with objects and persons otherwise suggesting modesty [Scheu]
such as churches, "holy" things, or young nuns, brings about the
effects which are sought. The "obscene" is totally different from the
indecent, or the shameless, because the violation of shame is vividly
felt, willed, and enjoyed. The origin of this tendency can be seen in
cases where very bashful persons at certain times talk to themselves
in indecent language in order to stun themselves. Many pious per-
sons throughout history testify to the fact that they had a common
experience during moments of prayer, of devotion to God, and of
nearness to God, where all of a sudden such moments were interru p-

32
ted by strong indecent ideas infiltrating their devotional feelings.
They claim that in such moments the devil was fighting with might
and main over their soul. Among individuals, social classes, and all
epochal tendencies, the obscene seems to be very much conditioned
through tradition and education by an antecedent intensified and
exaggerated cultivation of shame feelings - far beyond their mea-
ning and purpose - a cultivation which becomes shattered by the
intense intervention of a forceful drive. Peoples characterized by
strong sexual morals and a high valuation of shame, such as the
English, display obscenity more frequently than more naive and
natural peoples. It is not only in Baudelaire that the source of
obscenity lies in a false "hyper-Christliness" or in overly refined
"sensations of sin."
Education, as was pointed out, plays a considerable role in a
moral and religious-metaphysical interpretation of the feeling of
shame. But different interpretations must not be confused with this
feeling itself. The Christian churches in particular often gave this
feeling negative interpretations, saying that shame announces a
natural and absolute commandment of chastity and purity, a "Thou
shalt not," signifying a natural command for celibacy. But the
feeling of shame reveals itself to us as indispensable for procreation
because it restricts the sexual drive and the drive of propagation to
the province of love, as well as restricting the choice of a partner.
The negative interpretation of the Christian Churches obviously
impairs the meaning of shame to the same degree as certain modern
interpretations do. According to the latter, shame is only a tendency
to hide ugliness of the body, or one which conceals, in terms of
moral values, a lack of self-respect, or an anxiety of becoming a
laughingstock; or they suggest that the feeling of shame is a form of
protection, especially among women, from premature and premari-
tal sex, a security device that has gradually been imposed by society
and an idea of the universally useful. Of course, such lines of
reasoning must lead to illegitimate children for which society must
bear the burden. It is also held that shame is an organic continuous
restriction of puberty (Freud).
The metaphysical interpretations of sexual shame exaggerate its
sense to the same degree as the modern theories fail to grasp its
nature. Both types of interpretation fail to see the principle separa-
tion existing between sexual love and the sexual drive. The ecclesias-

33
tical interpretation that ties shame to a false idea of chastity, does,
however, contain a truth, viz,. that shame curbs the wellings and
especially expressions of the sexual drive. But it does not see at all
that shame is nourished by the intensities of this drive and that it is
the most natural assistant of love. Shame is a shell, as it were, in
which love grows until it genuinely breaks this shell. The ecclesias-
tical interpretation knows only of a sexual drive and at best of a
dutiful "application" of it for a divinely willed propagation of
offspring by those not empowered to follow natural chastity. Also,
the modern interpretations do not take love into account. They
consider love to be only a more refined form of the sex drive, not its
seeing and value-selecting function: love is not the consequence of
the sexual drive curbed by shame (be it for social usefulness of
individual growth), but it is the presupposition and foundation of
sexual shame and directed against blind sexual drives.
The above theories, coming as they do from education, must
entail extremely grave consequences. The squabbles among the
representatives of those theories over what appear to be grave
misconceptions amount to an overall contrived rationalism. One
faction is characterized by a ridiculously false dignity and silly
prudishness while the other, by display of mockery and cheap and
empty enlightenment [AufgekHirtheit], is trying to substitute, in a
disrespectful and impudent manner, the profound meaning of
shame by petty doctrines: who would deny that these theories would
eventually lead to both suppression and extinction of the feelings of
shame? For if shame were only a socially useful feeling it would have
to be replaced by rational deliberations showing its usefulness for a
society, especially because shame can be harmful to society when it,
for instance, prevents a woman from getting good care from a man
she does not love, or when it obstructs the growth of population
even in times of decreasing fertility. If shame were only an orga-
nically grown "repression" of the libido channeling its energy to
other activities, shame would have to be suspected of causing harm-
ful consequences for health. Psychoanalysts, indeed, hold this and
they also argue strongly against shame as a major source of repres-
sion and of "censorship" [Zensur] of the subconscious by the supra-
conscious.
While I do not wish to give specific advice to educators on the
subject, I do wish to say something about how education in general

34
should take a stance on shame. First, shame should be permitted to
develop freely in the individual, and all "violations" of shame, and
making someone ashamed, should be avoided at all costs. One
should also avoid making an individual attentive to shame and its
wellings. One should see to it that shame is not prematurely clogged
by utilitarian deliberations, or by fears of disease. Education has -
except in pathological functions of shame as we shall see later - only
a negative function. For even the connections between the natural
expression of shame and its natural motivations with existing "ar-
tificial" forms of shame-expressions, are matters of tradition , not of
education.
While these ideas of shame lead to an artificially-produced and
most harmful absence of shame, the ecclesiastical interpretations
lead to equally severe dangers. Since sexual shame is nourished by
sexual drives, sexual shame can never suppress these drives and their
wellings. What sexual shame can do is to suppress the noticing,
observing, or admitting to oneself that one has sexual drives. But
such suppression (without a specific objective) can lead to both an
exaggerated sexual sensibility towards any excitation that is far
removed from sex and to a channeling of this sensibility away from
sexual choice to more or less perverse, mental, or phantasmic ob-
jects. Such channeling can lead to a "mental sensuousness," harmful
for realizations of spiritual and biological positive values. Of
St. Alphons of Liguori it is said that he refused to shake hands with
women, and of St. Aloysius, that he refused to look at his own
mother. There are also reasons enough why it was a Spanish monk
who, sitting in his cell, invented the character of Don Juan.
The modern English-American "flirt" also reveals this kind of
hyper-sensitivity of sexual sensation and mental sex. Here we find
sexual gratifications in seemingly unwilled and "fortuitous" touch-
ings between men and women, often not even sought for or admit-
ted by the persons involved. The flirt is a consequence of the
puritanical moral code, which explains so large a part of old and
new English life (Max Weber). This code attributes to shame only the
negative role of suppression. Among the younger and more passion-
ate individuals this leads to bad substitutes for the lack of freely
lived gratification in love. The flirt, or the "amitie amoureuse," is
typical of this; both sustain the exterior moral standards of life and
protect one from unbearable marriages of financial or rational

35
convenience; and they make it impossible to fulfill genuine demands
of sociableness and amity, which the flirt covers with a repulsive fog
of equally dulling, unadmitted, and weak eroticism. Older indi-
viduals with their sexual drive on the decline - such as the "old
maid," seen in both sexes - use this moral code in order to find
situations that give a reason for shame and for their "moral indigna-
tion." This helps them to enjoy their last vestiges of sexual gratifica-
tion. Shame, without a positive service to love in this moral code,
becomes a powerful vehicle of value detraction from all relations
with the opposite sex - a typical form of resentment. And because in
this moral code the wellings of shame no longer have anything to do
with suppressing one's own sensations, they are used for the rejec-
tion of the wellings of others. Thus, the moral rejection of modesty
(genuine modesty as sexually provocative) in others is enjoyed as a
last form of gratification. If, however, the practicing of such a false
chastity leads to a long practice of ascetism which numbs the sex
drive, as, it is said, is the case with monks, chastity ceases to be
morally meritorious. And, with this, such an interpretation of
shame also reveals itself to be false from the beginning because
shame, always nourished by sexual drives, does not increase but
completely disappears and is replaced by extremely rude behavior in
the presence of anything sexual.
These are the consequences of those theories seeking to account
for the origin of shame in education. In these theories there is no true
nor genuine shame but false shame, or better: the feeling of shame
with its refined, guiding wellings is suffocated here by both wrong
interpretations and mistaken practical maxims.
There is a third series of factors that contributed to this notion of
shame originating in education. These factors are to be sharply dis-
tinguished from the above interpretations viz., shame deceptionsY
If one thinks of shame as a form of deception one is forced to argue
that shame feelings are the result of education, because deception
often comes from education. Shame-deceptions arise all the more

27. "Uber SelbsWlUschungen," Zeilschriftfiir Palhopsychologie I, no. I, Leipzig,

1911 [pp. 87-163]. [This work appears later as "Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis," in
Vom Umsturz der Werle (1915); 5th ed., ed. Maria Scheler, Vol. 3 of the Gesammelte
Werke (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1972), pp. 213-92; "The Idols of Self-Knowledge,"
in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1973), pp. 3-97.]

36
easily when feelings of shame are valued highly and lauded in a
moral code while a lack of shame suffers vituperation and rejection.
Thus, an individual may by means of his supraconsciousness hide a
negative self-value (for instance, a bad inner attitude, an inner
delicate stirring, a character trait perceived as negative by his own
judgment or feeling, or an ugly part or defect of his body) by
injecting shame into the emotive impulse of hiding. One may fancy
that one thinks one feels shame, but in fact one does not. From times
of yore the feeling of shame has been discredited with skeptical
mockery and wit - often just to conceal one's own inner negative
shamelessness - to the effect that shame was reduced to a moral
facade for what was merely an instinctive vanity and anxiety which
betrayed one's own weaknesses.
Shame decepitons of this kind can be found in abundance. By
their curious impression on one, they reveal themselves as deceptions
of resentment. In this resentment there takes place a transforma-
tion from a felt and vexing lack within the self into an illusioned
elevation of the feeling of the self. A positive value of the supposed
shame covers the negative value of this lack; however, this negative
value of the feeling of a lack within the self remains transparent and
is felt without being literally represented. The person concerned still
feels the truth which he is hiding from himself. But also the habitual
mockery or joking of others in all such cases of self-deception is
resentment, because it distracts one from one's own felt lack of
shame and its negative value. The value of shame is deprecated and
thus one frees oneself from feelings of guilt. The resentment of a
"prudish" lady and of a prostitute are practically the same. Comic
strips would, indeed, turn out better if they would not always dwell
on the former but also on the latter. The good woman with a
genuine feeling of shame, however, is totally different from them.
Friedrich Nietzsche makes the fully justified remark that beauty
belongs to shame. In general genuine shame is always built upon a
feeling of a positive value of the self. In the feeling of shame there is
an implicit question: whether any form of public boldness would
have the capacity to reach this positive value. This pertains, for
example, to psychic shame (modesty) of love, benevolence, or to a
character of good quality. A reflection of these already appears to
take something a way from them, especially if one all-too-generous-
ly admits them. This also pertains to all beauty of the body. As a

37
protecting feeling, shame can only be related to positive self-values.
Only positive self-values require protection. The nobler life feels
and knows itself in its depth the more shame is present. The more
danger there is through increased notoriety and general publicity,
the more shame veils with its protecting cover life's noblest centers.
And because the interconnection between shame and individual
self-value is one of essence, seeing a person feel shame or modesty is
seeing something "beautiful". For modesty is beautiful by virtue of
its aesthetic, symbolic value of the still unknown aspects of beauty
"pre-felt" that shame so eagerly tends to hide. There is a phenome-
non here, wonderful beyond all measure. Shame observed renders
to one who sees it a feeling of a depth of value which is never given
directly and is of a value-dimension different from visible values. In
this depth of valueness an infinity of other treasures of value, which
gleam magically through, continue to be dormant.
Shame, or modesty, is "beautiful" because it is a promise of
beauty. Its way of promising is "beautiful" because the promise is
not willed. Indeed, in hiding beauty shame reveals its secret exis-
tence. Also the goodness of a person that is concealed behind
modesty becomes beautiful through the immediacy of this good
person and his or her rough "shell" of shame. Strangely enough,
even what is visibly ugly, for instance, an ugly woman, still gains
something of the beautiful in expressions of shame, which say, as it
were: "I am not so ugly as you may think I am." By analogy,
reverence, too, allows us to see the depth of the value of the world
whereas someone without reverence must settle for its platitudinous
values.
All of this brings us to understand that in the sphere of sexual
relations shame of the body is effective as an eminently aesthetic-
erotic quality of charm. Perhaps there is nothing more attractive
among a woman's charms than her modesty concealing her charms.
It could appear, however, that shame must lose its protecting power
of hiding and defending at the expense of this increased charming
effect. But emotional life is not built up nonsensically. Such a
conclusion would be inevitable if shame were nothing but a negative
datum or a mere power of denying a man. Although shame is
nourished by the sexual drive, it is only present to the degree that the
capacity to love is also present. Shame does not deny its expression
to love. It denies its expression to the sexual drive until love becomes

38
confirmed love. This inner structure of the reaction of shame is the
same in the understanding comprehension of the beholder. Shame is
not understandable because there must have been an earlier expe-
rience of it to be reproduced only upon the occasion of another's
shame. We understand shame because its inner structure is shared.
The question of how much the beholder "understands" shame
depends on the intensities of his drives and acts which are directed
toward the person who feels shame. A man can be charmed by the
modesty of a woman only to the degree that he esteems her by virtue
of the simultaneous love which conditions its "understanding."
Love is a prerequisite for the charming effects. The beholder's love
is directed to her individual self-value and its preservation in a
manner similar to that in which shame, for its part, is directed. It is
directed to the self-value in the sexual sphere implying that the
woman will give herself only when she experiences the evidence of
love. The courted woman's modesty consists, as long as she does not
feel the evidence of being loved, in the denying of expressions of
sexual wellings of her giving herself, and even of self-observations of
such wellings in her inner perception, while the courting man's
modesty and his wooing her will last only as long as he knows or
believes that his love is returned. He can know or believe this, ceteris
paribus, on the basis of experiences with her, and only to the degree
to which he loves. For love and love's response form an essential
nexus. Insofar as a man loves he must affirm the modesty of his
beloved. He cannot do otherwise. It is only the expressions of his
love and the increasing -response to his own love that can make
shame give way in a rightful manner. This can never happen by
expressions or the consequences of wellings of drives. The latter
will, rather, increase shame until it becomes direct disinclination or
reaches the inception of disgust.
Although shame is an excitation in its double qualities of being a
token for (still undecided) 10ve 28 and for something beautiful antici-
pating still more than visible beauty, it excites only the love of the
lover through the value of beauty. It does not serve as an excitation
of drives whose wellings it withdraws from inner observation and

28. There is no doubt that the reaction of shame in a girl, such as blushing,
trembling, etc., is all the more intense the more there is germinal love for the
individual who causes this reaction.

39
whose expression and corresponding actions it seeks to curb.
For this reason, for a man the effect of shame is an increase of
love and withholding of drives. And as much as shame is the
expression of noble life it can entice only a more noble life to
love. A voluptuary, therefore, does not sense shame's beauty, but
looks at it only as an obstruction to his desires. He rapidly quits
wooing a woman 29 who confronts him with genuine and strong
modesty. But the true lover is influenced by her modesty, and
it keeps the courting man at a distance until shame begins to
dissolve in the face of the increasing decisiveness of love. We
shall later on consider how shame, in addition to its protecting
function, is also objectively valuable in sexual unions (i.e., for
the quality of procreation); and, as a value in exciting a more
noble man, and as a means for rejecting a less-thannoble male
individual, it is value-selecting of the existing wellings in the sex
drive within the "possible" scopes of procreation.
I wish to emphasize that the above propositions are with refe-
rence to only genuine shame (modesty) reactions. The above does
not hold for something similar to modesty in expression, viz.,
coquetry, which is its opposite. On the surface, coquetry shares
many things with genuine modesty, but an abyss separates the two.
Coquetry is a form of playing. It is no action with intentions or
purposes; rather, it is an arbitrary comportment, no matter how
coquetry can be used for intentions or purposes. Whereas expres-
sions of genuine shame in sub-human life are unknown, coquetry
can be found already among animals, for example, fish, birds, dogs,
etc. The drive to play is certainly present here and precedes mate
selection as a kind of preliminary struggle and sexual game. It is in
this that coquetry is much subordinated to shame. Animal coquetry
consists in expressive movements of the females. It consists in a
playful withdrawal from the male and at the same time in an
increased endeavor to excite and enhance the male's newly inten-
sified attempts. The female inflames the male's sexual drive by
increasing the prospects of final gratification through her expres-
sions and through the momentary and instantaneous [punktuell]
destruction of this prospect.

29. The bon vivant, for example, is much too "tired" to overcome shame.

40
 Let us not deal with the thousands of variations of coquetry. 30 It
is much more important for us to realize that coquetry copies, as it
were, only the progressive rhythms of titillation which are basic vital
feeling-sensations [Geftihlsempfindungen]. Coquetry can be incited
also by other qualities of the senses and their corresponding excita-
tions, but it does not coincide with sense qualities. The essence of
feelings of titillation which release ever-so-many vital feelings, lies
in the fact that they do not increase uniformly but only in progressive
stages of intensification along with intensifications of those sensa-
tions that release the titillation. It is the temporary easing and
appeasing of the implicit components of striving and tension them-
selves which enhance this tension and require more and more ap-
peasement along with adequate excitations (scratching, giving food
in presence of appetite, rubbing sexual organs in voluptuous plea-
sure feelings which have the most intense titillation). The feeling of
titillation and its progressive rhythm has a formal similarity to
chain-reflexes in which movements released by excitation, and the
sensations caused by it, form ever new excitations for continued and
still more increased movements. It is the consequence of this rhythm
in titillation that an increased prolongation of the quantity of excita-
tion releasing it within a unit of time (but without a growth of this
quantity) increases the magnitude toward a maximum of titillation,
at which point it is cancelled by adequate actions and a total
gratification for the whole organism, in terms of a feeling of consu-
mation, ensues. During tem'poral prolongation of the quantity of
excitation ever new phases of easing or appeasing of the initial
tension are added to the process. The final tension occuring at the
end of the excitation is magnified to a much greater degree than it

30. Simmel has connected - quite erroneously it appears - coquetry with sexual
love, even with the well-known Platonic definition of it, and finds in it an exchange
of devotion and abstinence. But coquetry has absolutely nothing to do with sexual
love. It is anchored entirely in the realm of drives and is generally much less
secretive than Simmel thinks. Above all Simmel fails to see that it is not at all
originally a genuine expression "of something" (e.g., of devotion and denial, and
thus not a psychic process), but rather it is only a rhythm of movements not
expressing anything at all. Coquetry is espeCIally not a genume impulse of devotion
nor an illusion of abstinence - this would make it more similar to shame. See
G. Simmel, "Die Koketterie," in Philosophische Kultur [: Gesammelte Essais,
Philosophisch-soziologische Biicherel, Vol. 27], Leipzig, 1911.

41
 would have been had it occured during a less prolonged time or with
less initial application of the same excitation. This rhythm also
explains such everyday facts as this: when we continuously hold a
bone in front of a dog, for instance, and keep taking it away from
him, the dog will intensify the force of his bites. 31 The rhythm also
explains what language so well expresses by "an itch to win." A man
will have this "itch" to different degrees depending on whether I
show him, in irregular turns, for instance, ten times five marks,
fifteen times ten marks, five times twenty marks, or whether I give
him three hundred of them at once. The psychology of the gambler,
whose passion undoubtedly increases with the number of his wins
and losses (with equal final success), also rests on this rhythm.
This also explains why coquetry is nothing but a natural increase
of male excitations during the prolongations of the time of excita-
tion and the contentment provided by the female. Coquetry is a
comportment fully adjusted to the law of the progressive increase of
the feeling of titillation. It is in this alone, however, that coquetry
lacks any psychic and especially moral significance. But it does
immediately gain this significance for man when the inborn rhythm
offemale activity leads,32 by way of an already experienced simila-
rity to expressions of psychic experience, to a more or less arbitrary
impulse of pretending such psychic experiences through the rhythm
(which, in itself, is no genuine expression).
No other psychic experience is more apt to have this function
than shame, whose expression reveals wellings oflove and unknown
beauty and awakens love in it. For shame does share much in its
expression with coquetry. Both the coquettish and the bashful per-
son, for example, "withdraw." Both look down and up in their
comportment and attitudes. But coquetry does not awaken love. It
only excites the drive; it does not protect. It can even endanger the
living being caught in it. In that coquetry is used to create an image
of modesty, it becomes "seducing" and morally blamable. For

31. In this explosively incessant feeling of appetite lie a series of relative points of
satisfaction, which begin shortly before the first bite, and whose existence and
number increase the tension. The satisfaction in the appetite is to be distinguished
from the satisfying of the appetite just as the satisfaction in sexual tension (e.g.,
increasing erection) is to be distinguished from the satisfying of this tension.
32. A man is coquettish only insofar as he has feminine characteristics that can
be shown to be "feminine" independently of his coquetry.

42
sexual "seduction" is not simply a willed sexual excitation of the
other but one of pretending love and values which are not present.
In this sense coquetry becomes an expressed imitation of modesty.
There is a vast difference, however, in the expression of a coquettish
look down or a coquettish withdra wing of a hand. In coquetry there
already lurks an intention to look up again, and to see the effect it
has produced. There is no "turn" to the self as there is in shame
which, when strong, can contain a wish of self-dissolution or of
"dying of shame" (as language expresses it). In coquetry a mental
attentiveness is sustained even in a defensive attitude and through-
out attentions paid to harmless things or to the self. Attentiveness
remains cool and clear here vis-a-vis the other. In a bashful looking
down there is humility vis-a-vis a public claim of values, and it
contains a hidden awareness of the posi tive self-value which shame
protectively covers. By contrast, in the coquetry referred to there is
haughtiness and a conscious public feeling of self-assertion [Selbst-
geltungsgefiihl] and of a claim for such; but still it is accompanied by
a deeply hidden feeling of the awareness of a lack of inner self-
values. But quite independently of such frivolous coquetry there
remains in the woman the above-mentioned natural rhythm which,
especially when suboridnated to love, has its own existence which is
independent of shame.
Any objective symbolization of shame, however, for example in
clothes, that serves as a coquettish incentive is "frivolous," in the
pregnant sense of the term. A frivolous human being is quite diffe-
rent from an indecent person, and still more so from an obscene and
impudent human being. No matter whether we find frivolous ele-
ments in a remark, in a passing joke, in a person rather modestly
dressed, or outside erotic domains in "frivolous" detractions of
what deserves awe and fearfulness, the frivolous always implies that
a symbolic value - be it one of expression, or of sign, functioning as a
value-symbol for what is covered by shame, fearfulness, or reve-
rence - is used as a value-symbol for the uncovering and surrender of
what shame covers. This is contrary to the nature of a value-symbol.
The conflict between the symbolic value of shame and the utiliza-
tion of it as a value-symbol for what is shameless appears to me to
be inherent in the nature of the frivolous. This complicated pheno-
menon is clearly at hand, however, in frivolous evocations of ev-
erything half-covered, of everything which seeks to stress openly

43
what cover is supposed to cover. The cover is here a symbolic value,
but it functions as a value-symbol for the uncovering of precisely
that which shame forbids to be unveiled.

IV THE SEXUAL FEELING OF SHAME AND ITS FUNCTIONS

In the following I shall restrict myself to the sexualfeeling of shame.

Sexual shame plays the most important role in shame feelings of the
lived body. Indeed, the sexual feeling of shame represents the con-
centration of bodily feelings as a whole.
Feelings of shame of the body as well as the sexual feeling of
shame belong to levels of feelings which I designated in another
work asfeelings oflife. They are distinguished from all feeling-sensa-
tions such as itching and the series of the feelings of what is agree-
able or not agreeable to the body. They are also distinguished from
spiritual feelings, such as sadness, grief, or joy. The feeling of shame
of the body, therefore, belongs to the same class offeelings to which
feelings of strength, weakness, health, or illness, the feelings of
growing and declining life, feelings of suffering and enjoying also
belong. The respective shame impulses belong to the series of vital
impulses. The vital impulses are distinguished from sensory drive
excitations by their lack of localization in specific organs and by
their capacity to curb sensory drive excitations. They are also
marked by a completely independent la wfulness of their occurring
and disappearing. It can happen, for example, that in the presence of
intense hunger (which is a sensory drive impulse mixed with feeling-
sensations near the stoma~h) there is no accompanying appetite, but
a feeling of disgust for the food which makes it impossible to feed
such a hungry person. It can also happen that in the presence of the
strongest wellings of the libido (which as drive impulse is permeated
with ticklings of sensations of voluptuous pleasure [W ollustgefiihls-
empfindungen] in the sexual organs) there is neither a vital feeling
nor a corresponding act. Too, it can happen that there is such a total
sexual aversion present that any sexual union seems impossible.
These vital impulses are, in their forms of occurring and disappear-
ing, totally independent of the ego, choice, and arbitration, i.e.,
they are independent from the "I will" or "I desire," etc. Although
they are subject to the guidance of willing with respect to their

44
causation of actions (not, however, of expressions), they can never
be produced nor eliminated by the will. An analogous relationship
exists between vital impulses and sensory drive impulses. The vital
impulses, too, can control and direct sensory drive impulses, but
they cannot either produce or eliminate them. 33 But they can, on the
other hand, curb both the expressive forms of the drive wellings and
(ordinary) gratifying movements.

1. The Primary Accomplishment of the Feeling of Sexual Shame

As criticism of Freud's theory has already shown, shame of the body

is already present at the time of birth and grows with the wellings
belonging to various forms of feelings of tickling. The feeling of
titillation is basic to all feeling-sensations. In it, pleasure and displea-
sure are hardly distinguishable. Such kinds of titillation, however,
are less distinguishable at an earlier age than they are later on.
Voluptuous pleasure feelings, for instance, are not yet so sharply
distinguishable from hunger and satiation as they are later on; nor
are they so sharply localized as they are at the age of puberty. The
role of shame of the body vis-a-vis changing sensations and drive
impulses is firstly that this shame turns attention a way from them
and thus curbs their expresssion. It is not without shame of the body
that regular periods of excretion and urination take place with the
child. If the regularity is interrupted, the child's response is being
"ashamed" to follow sensory feelings. I do not believe that one can
reduce these first experiences and first expressions of shame with
children to disgust or to their sympathetic participation in the
disgust of others. For this feeling is also given with regular excretion
which the child announces by a cry. Nor can a fear of punishment at
this age playa part in shame. The child experiences initial wellings
of shame already under the pressures of his needs; he cries out. He is
ashamed afterwards because of the impotence of those first wellings
of shame when he was under pressure. Havelock Ellis, who attempt-

33. It can happen with a man, for example, that sensuous lust in his sexual parts
~an exist and be Increased by masturbation without an erection as a condition for
such an act because such an impulse is missmg. WIth eunuchs, however, who also
lack such sensation of lustful titillation In the organ, such an impulse can
nevertheless be present.

45
ted to reduce shame to a complex of feelings of fear, is completely
wrong in saying that in both civilized and very primitive peoples the
habit of excreting and urinating in the absence of others is shame-
conditioned and that, among primitives, the habit of excluding third
persons from eating also has its basis in shame. Excretion and
urination in the absence of others must be reduced to sympathy with
the feeling of others' disgust and perhaps with an anxiety over
displeasing them, but not to shame. And the desire to eat alone is of
a completely different origin. It has an analogy with "wanting to
keep something to oneself," a phenomenon we find already with
regard to the mere visibility of a woman in a harem. In these cases
we are concerned with anxiety over greed and over competition with
others which, in the latter case, is enhanced by jealousy. Shame has
nothing to do with such mores. 34
Shame of the body, we said, wells up during the first years of the
child's life. It grows the more as the independence of the feeling of

34. It makes absolutely no sense to reduce feminine modesty to male possessive

tendencies as an enforced motive leading to obedience, i.e., to wish to attribute to
feminine shame the mores of marriages, as it is done, according to Havelock Ellis,
by Celine Renooz, who characterizes the rules of modesty as imposed on women by
men and considers it a "consequence of mores" (op. cit., p. 7 [Studies in the
Psychology of Sex, I, 3]). But shame is the ground of mores. Similar views have been
held by Waitz, Schurtz, and Diderot. The tendency of woman to free herself from
these obligations, whereby she may show herself either to no other man only if her
face and body are covered, stems essentially from the vanity of men to "show off'
their women, not from a natural will to do this - according to Renooz - which the
man suppresses entirely on his own will and out of jealousy. Hebbel's drama Gyges
und sein Ring [Gyges and His Ring, trans. Leslie Holdsworth Allen, in Three Plays
(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1914)], based on
Herodotus's account, is a good example of this. Experience teaches even that male
violence often obstructs female shame and makes a woman more submissive to
eventual male seduction. In a certain sense the affectations of shame presuppose
freedom. This does not imply that men have not often sought to take advantage of
woman's natural shame for their own advantage and preservation of their
institutions of power. According to Ms. Renooz one would have to expect that with
increasing emancIpation of woman from male domination feelings of modesty
disappear. But in practice emancipation causes shame to separate itself more
distinctly from feelings of anxiety and fear. Emancipation frees a woman's shame
from immediate Identification of her honor with the man's honor. The motive of
"preserving her man's honor" often does not allow her own personal feelings of
shame to appear.

46
life gradually rises above sensory feeling states. This is especially the
case with regard to an intermediary form of shame which I shall call
the "libidinous feeling of shame." This shame is between general
shame of the body and sexual shame, and at the same time it is a
starting point for the development of sexual shame. It differs from
body shame in that it takes its origin in excitations of the zones of
voluptuous pleasure and their titillations while it curbs its general
spreading and its gratification. (The zones of voluptuous pleasure
feelings are not yet as sharply demarcated with children as they are
with adults. Prior to female puberty these zones are only around the
clitoris, not yet spread over the vagina; prior to male puberty they
are only around the glans, not around the whole penis.) Libidinous
shame is distinguished from sexual shame because it is not directed
to the other sex nor to any other being; it is solely directed to the
tickling sensation itself. It is present long before sexual sympathy
occurs, which itself arises only in puberty. For any longing for
intercourse, is, apart from other conditions, connected with the
factual presence of sensations in the vagina and the penis. This
makes them have a feeling for one another. This is supported by the
fact that the drive toward the other sex is still diminished in puberty
because the necessary sensations in the vagina and the penis are still
missing, and childish autoeroticism, which expresses itself in invol-
untary climax and masturbations, continues to be present.
Hence, the "sexual drive" does not coincide with the libido, i.e.,
sensory impulses directed to the tickling of voluptous pleasure
feelings. The sexual drive is tied to two conditions: (1) the spreading
of the libido through the vagina and the penis, and (2) to a prior
sexual sympathy which is the presupposition, not the consequence,
of the sex-drive. And "sexual" shame is again the consequence of the
presence of the sex-drive. It is well known that both girls and boys
are almost bare of sexual shame prior to puberty. They play with
one another "naively." They do not blush when they touch one
another. When boys or girls are in the nude by themselves they do
not feel shame of the body more than when they are in the nude
together, although the young girls appear to have less body shame
than the young boys.
It is only during puberty that this harmless relationship between
girls and boys disappears and that particular signs of sexual shame,
such as blushing or quivering, are visible. This has often been cited

47
as the reason why shame comes up only during those years. But this
assumption is undoubtedly wrong. We find wellings of shame al-
ready prior to puberty in the libidinous shame which has no sexual
"direction." It is also during the child's first sensations of volup-
tuous pleasure feelings - always a shocking event in this life no
matter how fortuitously or mechanically this may happen - that the
curbing function of shame is present. Those parts of the body which
are affected become subject to shame; at the same thime the atten-
tion is distracted, and blood flows from those parts toward the
face. 35 Shame is also the main force curbing masturbation at this
age. 36 What is astonishing here is not the factually wide-spread habit
of childish masturbation during the early experience of the incompa-
rable impression of titillation of voluptuous pleasure feelings; what
is astonishing here is that there are exceptions to it. Libidinous
shame can explain this. The feeling of "guilt" or "pressure" after
masturbation is not based in anxiety or the reproach of the parents,
for instance, who might come to know about it (for such feelings of
anxiety or reproach are often also present when such things have
never been discussed); they come from a violation of the shame
reaction which forbade masturbation prior to the act. The anticipa-
tion of being reproached because the action is in itself reproachable
is therefore quite independent of an experienced reproach. The
latter explains, in fact, the fear of the possible knowledge of it by
parents or others.
The above shows, as we shall also see later, that not only does
shame have an eminent importance for the timing and rhythms of
the first intercourse and for the processes of procreation, for the
health of both the individual and its species, for the best selection
of mates through love, and for the preservation and increase of good
hereditary values; its significance also lies in the fact that it plays not
only an accessory but conditional role in the origins of the sexual
drive (as well as in the female drive of procreation). Without shame
and its central curbing effects against the lower centers of impulses

35. This type of shame, therefore, is generally not initially a social form of feeling
but rather a feeling that regulates the processes within the organism itself.
36. Also, excretions prior to puberty are in subsequent reflection accompanied
by shame and certainly are essentially different from shame that accompanies bed
wetting, for example.

48
directed toward the titillations of voluptuous pleasure feelings, i.e.,
against the lower libido, man would remain completely "auto-ero-
tic" (Ellis). His psychic energy would be completely used for his
individual sensory sensations. It is by virtue of the distractions of
attention from these urging feeling-sensations and by virtue of the
restriction of the merely libidinous drive that man becomesjree for
sexual sympathy so that a "sexual drive" proper can form. For the
sexual drive is present when a person of the opposite sex is anticipa-
ted, not when gratification of libidinous wellings is expected
through the rubbing of the genitals. It is present when, on the basis
of a sympathetic co-feeling with another, there is the desire to give
that person, possibly in one and the same act, the same happiness as
one experiences in oneself. The sexual drive is, therefore, a structure
having three powers independent from one another: libido, shame,
and sympathetic feeling.
"Libidinous" shame is prior to the formation of the sexual drive
and makes possible, by its partial suppression of auto-eroticism, the
relationship of the libido to the opposite sex. It is a basic error of
existing theories of shame when they presuppose a sexual drive in
order to explain shame. On this basis one can never see the full
significance of shame, viz., that the primary accomplishment of
shame (especially with women) is not even protection from all too
early, too frequent or choiceless sexual unions, but the formation of
an inclination for possible union and the formation of a "sexual
drive" per se. Whenever shame falls short of fulfilling its eminent
organic effectiveness in this respect, we always find libidinous au-
toeroticism fixed in such individuals, and accompanied by a hyper-
silent, fearful, withdrawn, and hidden comportment, and often
rejection of the opposite sex. Such people are characterized by
solitary and lonely ways of life and have regularly taken to mastur-
bation in the early stages of their lives. At the age of puberty also the
gradual spreading of the sensations of voluptuous pleasure feelings
around the vagina or penis seems to be disturbed with them.
We have firm reasons to come to this conclusion: ifthere were no
shame and if shame, with its natural power of concentrating the
mass of individual libidinous excitations, with its usual power of
curbing their expression, and with its power of turning away atten-
tion from them and their respective organs (plus the accompanying
influx of blood to these organs), were to become nil so that no sexual

49
drive and no human procreation could develop, it would be because
formerly shame's primary and earliest accomplishments were not
recognized and, instead, shame was known only in its derived
functions or even as a mere crystallization of "mores" and "good
behavior" that it was given relatively little significance. And on such
a false basis the question arose whether or not shame is proper to
women as bearers of a predominant drive of procreation, or wheth-
er or not shame is proper to men as the bearers of a predominant
sex drive. But inasmuch as the libido is the common presupposition
for both female and male psychic drives, and inasmuch as "libidi-
nous" shame as the most original shame presupposes nothing but
libido shame must be equally present in both men and women.
Shame becomes different among them only when we are concerned
with different comportments of men and women toward one ano-
ther when both the sexual drive and the drive of procreation are
already present in them. 37
Just as shame is a factor in the origin of the ordinary sexual drive,
so also, as "libidinous" shame, it has an eminent significance not
only in early life but also during the entire span of life. In old age,
too, shame is the condition for man's freedom of spiritual and
practical devotion to objective contents and values because it re-
stricts the always-existing strong tendency toward libidinous impul-
ses and all sensory feeling-sensations. Shame accomplishes "objecti-
vity" and "concentration of the will" and a continuous psychic flux
uninterrupted by the wellings of the flexible multiplicity of sensory
feeling-sensations. This function of shame goes far beyond the func-
tion it has with regard to the opposite sex. Prooffor this can be seen
in the fact that, among all cases of mental illnesses, fifty percent of
those cases reveal that shame, more than any other higher feeling, is
strongly affected. The deterioration of the unity of a human being's
spiritual life, especially the disintegration of the unity of its logical
capacity which, among healthy people, is already in effect in auto-
matic psychic processes (not conditioned by arbitrary actions), is
always accompanied by an increasing disappearance of the feeling
of shame. This shows the role shame plays in the unity of spiritual
life and the unity dfthe person it represents and preserves as a unity
of life vis-a-vis manifolds of sensory drive excitations. During the

37. See the chapter on female and male shame.

50
first stages of paralysis, a lack of shame is the first criterion for this
disease. Conversely, an express feeling of shame is an eminent factor
in the health of the body and soul of the person.
Theories about shame have hitherto gravely overlooked not only
the social significance of shame and its significance in sexual selec-
tion, as well as its physiological accomplishments - i.e., the redis-
tribution of the blood in the organism along with variations of
attention - but also its inner psychic accomplishment and, even prior
to its protecting function, its power to prevent "situations" necessi-
tating protection. Through this inner psychic accomplishment of
shame, the sensory feeling-sensations and impulses remain with-
drawn from "noticing," and the second level of attention remains
withdrawn from "taking notice of' continuous attitudes in them,
and also from analyzing consciousness. The sensory feeling-sensa-
tions remain withdra wn at least to the extent that they will not fit or
belong to the sense of the complex of our life extending beyond,
single moments. Thus, shame reactions occur in thoughts, represen-
tational images, fantasies, and even in dreams in the same manner in
which they occur in conjunction with actual objects affecting sensa-
tions or representations of them in art. Shame accomplishes still
more: it keeps experienced sensory wellings as special data of our
life underneath the thresholds of consciousness so that the wellings do
not at all turn into "thoughts." Likewise, shame accounts for a
lessening of the degree of excitation by objects which trigger sensa-
tion. The best and most profound modesty is, therefore, "purity"
of fantasy and of wishing, i.e., where we are not yet concerned with
willing and acting. Shame can, indeed, reach a point where "every-
thing is pure to a pure person." The "anima candida" manifests
itself not primarily in shame reactions to "what is coming to one's
mind"; rather, it manifests itself in that so many things do not come
into the mind at all, but they do come into the mind of someone who
lacks shame.
Freud, too, was a ware of this state of affairs. In all of his writings
he looks upon shame as an eminent power of "censorship," a term
he uses in analogy to administrative censorship which searches out
lascivious passages in literature. Freud's censorship consists in a
series of powers that prevent the entry into our subconsciousness of
all those ideas and feelings of our mental and dream world that
could lead to moral rejections or feelings of moral inferiority. The

51
censorship of shame, says Freud, makes an individual "not admit to
himself' what in fact he does desire and think about; or, as Freud
puts it, the censorship of shame "represses" [verdrangt] such expe-
riences. In this position of Freud's there is implicit a totally erro-
neous interpretation of facts, although Freud does see certain states
of affairs in their own right, even though one-sidedly and with lack
of precision. For in the entirety of his theories about mental life
Freud cannot assign to the psychic effectiveness of shame which is
directed to libidinous wellings anything else but a hide-and-seek
game, a continuous masquerade that one plays and puts up with in
one's factual life. Under this presupposition he assigns to the phy-
sician the task of removing, through psycho-analytic technique,
such masks and inner covers of our lives, i.e., to free us from our
deceptive shame. The reason for this position of Freud is that he
considers the libidinous wellings, which shame or modesty darkens,
to be the actual substance and reality of our lives, and because he
considers the contents of our subconsciousness to be just a more
refined and more complicated symbolism for the former, i.e., a mere
"epiphenomenon." Anyone, of course, who thinks this way must
condemn shame as an organic form of lying to oneself and contrast
it with genuine self-knowledge.
Precisely the opposite is true. It is our "supraconscious" spiritual
self that our inner perception always intends to perceive. But we
perceive and live this mental self only insofar as our "inner sense"
permits it, i.e., the sum of our sensory bodysensations and impulses
that seek at any moment to take over the whole of our consciousness
and tend to move us away from a genuine and true view of the
depths of our being. True, what we generally refer to as our "con-
sciousness" and its contents is only a sign or symptom or an epiphe-
nomenon; not one of our subconscious drive-life: It is a sign of
the continuous strife between our higher, spiritual self and the
"supraconscious" existence and subconscious sensations. Hence the
"deceiving" and "covering" power referred to lies in the changing
manifolds of sensory wellings. And because shame darkens them
and keeps them away from a probing consciousness it diminishes
their deceptions and enlightens at the same time the depths of our
being and life. Shamejrees us more and more from the deceiving
powers of this "inner sense" which selects everything of our expe-
riences in terms of the importance it has for sensory titillations.

52
Even an individualized passion for one woman is possible only by
this darkening of our sensory impulses which change from one
excitation to another. This is love - as we will show later - as
administered by shame against the senses - administered as if by a
beautiful and devoted advocate. This is the unity oflife which shame
lifts up and preserves from all that could dissolve love into evapora-
ting sensations. Shame is no form of self-deception but it is its
opposite: the power to abolish self-deception; shame is the pioneer
into our selves.
Such philosophical importance of shame in principle also implies
the possibility that Freud did see significant facts and phenomena,
although they led him to erroneous interpretations of shame. For
example, it makes a big difference whether shame curbs or even
annuls the becoming of representations, fantasies, or desires by
darkening or curbing their pure libidinous wellings, or whether it
reacts only to already existing formations of representations and
desires so that shame sets in subsequently to them. There is also a
third possibility, viz., that someone is ashamed of possible social
judgments and reproaches. There are indeed, people who have the
most shameless fantasies while their sex life is in tact. Their sex life is
motivated by "possible" social reproach.
In the first of these three possibilities, shame is by no means a
power of repression, as Freud very erroneously thinks it is. Shame
does not repress an idea or a desire, because it nips the formation of
such ideas and desires in the bud and curbs them. Shame spares us
from repression. Shame is, like so many other vital feelings, a
pre-feeling of what is coming upon one and a turn toward what
becomes possible. It is, in its original and pure function, not an
emotional reaction to something. This is why a bashful person has
either no or only little chance of getting into situations in which he
would have to be "ashamed" of something. He has little chance of
seeing a "situation" with appropriate states of affairs that could
arouse shame. A shameless woman, for example, always gets herself
into "situations" that make her weaknesses look "forgivable."
Bashful women do not avoid such situations, as the so-called "fine
woman" thinks it should be her maxim to do. They do not anticipate
them at all.
The second and third possibilities above are the only ones Freud
knows of which can lead to "repression." And when such repression

53
becomes constitutive for the individual, it can lead to consequences
harmful to health, as in the many instances in which Freud showed
this to be the case. But genuine shame is in no way involved; rather
there is fear and anxiety o/possible social consequences, be it only a
"possible" reproach of conscience or (as it would be in the above
third case) of society. It is true, of course, that an individual often
interprets the withholding offantasy and corresponding actions as
being "modesty," and is deceived in this. I have often found cases,
especially among highly hysterical women, where such persons
interpret their deeply seated organic and inner psychic shameless-
ness to be "veracity and honesty to themselves." Their shame
feelings cannot curb the inception of formations of images and
desires corresponding to their libidinous wellings. They release
them. These women presuppose that others also have these fantasies
and desires - only these "others" are supposedly not honest enough
to admit them. Since this is part of Freud's theory, he appears to be a
victim of unconsious contagion from his own patients. This inter-
pretation, however, of the hysterical person bears the mark of
"resentment" on its face. This resentment is about the same resent-
ment we find among prostitutes who think that a bashful woman
has shame because of her "bad underwear. "38
All cases, however, where inner psychic shamelessness forms
itself with a simultaneously correct and habitual comportment ap-
proved by a society rest on a number of peculiar conditions. One of
these can be that a narrow-minded traditional sexual morality - not
a compulsion of conscience - is intertwined with an environment
where sensually exciting activities get the better of the ordinary
innate feeling of shame (e.g., young women coming from "fine
families" living near exciting big cities). Through continued "viola-
tions of their shame" there gradually builds up this inner psychic
shamelessness which does not yet break the barriers of traditional
moral codes, but which does continue to increase in their fantasy and
desires. This condition is further nourished when a blockage, cen-

38. See my work "Uber Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil," in Zeit-

schrift fur Pathopsycho!ogie I, no. 2/3, Leipzig, 1912 [later expanded into "Das
Ressentiment im Aufbau de r Moralen" (1915), in Vom Umsturzder Werte, 5th ed.,
ed. Maria Scheler, Vol. 3 of the Gesammelte Werke (1972), pp. 33-147;
Ressentiment, trans. William W. Holdheim, ed. Lewis Coser (New York: The Free
Press of Glencoe, 1961)].

54
tralization, or ideation of libidinous excitations occur by means of
an aversion to ordinary gratification, be this in cases of vaginal
insensitivity or in cases of an early antipathy against a man or against
sex in general. In such cases also libidinous excitations reach the
thresholds of consciousness with such a force that they must eventu-
ally break through the barriers of shame. It is these and similar cases,
which Freud studies and which were so frequent in his own social
milieu. It is on them that he built up his theory that shame is a
repressive power. And it is because Freud generalized and extended
these cases to ordinary people that he made errors which, by the
way, do not pertain to the medical significance of his theories.
The biological significance of shame with regard to its relation to
the two sexes and its significance with regard to the quantity and
quality of human procreation rests on the aforementioned organic
physiological and "inner psychic" effects of shame. Its biological
significance is again independent of all social and historical
conditions such as the utilization of the feeling of shame for main-
taining "good behavior," "mores," or relationships between man
and woman. Prior to considering the large differences between
sexual shame in women and in men, it is necessary to characterize
the functions of shame in men and women.
It is most important to begin with correct evaluations of the
number and types of drives as well as their cooperation with higher
vital and mental acts regulating the choice of a spouse and the whole
business of procreation. These are the following: (1) the libidinous
welling, i.e., the peripheral and sensory striving directed to titilla-
tions of voluptuous pleasure, (2) The "sexual drive" with all its
aberrations (perversions) wholly different from the aforementioned
libidinous wellings. This drive is proper to both sexes, but with the
difference that with women it is subordinated to (3) the drive of
procreation, and that in ordinary cases any wellings of the sexual
drive within women build upon the drive of procreation, whereas a
man does not possess such a central drive of procreation. Procrea-
tion is for him a "wish" or a "will" to have a child which follows his
sexual drive. (4) The drive and instinct of infant-care [BrutpfJege]
proper only to the woman. This drive is only a modification of her
dri ve of procreation which is necessary for pregnancy. This instinct
is necessary for the formation of some notion of what lies ahead

55
after a woman has given birth.39 (5) Sexual sympathY,40 which is one
variety of the vital ability to (a) understand or relive other lives
beyond the limits of one's own life, and to (b) "participate" in
another life (shared joy, commiseration, and their subdivisions).
And (6) sexual love.
The above factors must, without exception, be taken into full
consideration not only with regard to the cognition of the functions
of shame in men and women, but also with regard to all questions of
the biological, social, and historical significance of sexual relations.
It is also important that these factors are not only understood in
their differences and underivable status but also in the far-reaching
independence of their existence and effectuation.
Of special importance is the distinction between the libido and the
sexual drive, between the sexual drive and the drive of procreation,
as well as the distinction of all of these "drives" from sexual love
and from the maternal love which corresponds to the drive of
procreation. "Sexual love" is not a blind drive at all. It is a value-se-
lecting and "intentional" function of the heart. It is through this
function of sexual love that the drive, which is "driving" in all
directions toward plain gratification without being tied to an indi-
vidual or a value, obtains positive objects and ends of value . Love as
sexual love, let alone love as "good-heartedness," is never merely a
"refined sexual drive" or a form of the "libido," as Freud contends;
nor is it, as others equally superficially have contended, and "indi-
vidualized sexual drive,"41 - i.e., a contradiction! Independently of
empirical knowledge of the existence of a person of the opposite
sex, and his or her qualities, sexual love is a quality and direction of
the movements of love itself as a basically underivable act of our
spiritual life . It is Rot comparable to a "love of art," or a "love for a
nation," in which love is characterized by the objects "art" and
"nation." Sexual love is a special kind and quality of loving itself

39. This cannot be proven here.

40. See my work: Zur Phiinomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefilhle und von
Liebe und HajJ, Halle, 1913.
41. See also J. J. Rousseau, whose definition was borrowed also by Marcel
Prevost in his Lettres a Francaise Mariee [1908]; also, M. Hirschfeld, Gesetz der
Liebe [: Aus der Mappe eines Sexualforschers nach dem gleichnamigen Kultur- und
Spielfilm der Humbolt-Film-Gesellschaft (Berlin: Verlag der Neuern Gesellschaft,
1927)].

56
which for this reason can only be "fulfilled" or "not fulfilled" by
persons of certain value qualities. I do not assert that in vital sexual
love and "passionate love" each individual would choose only one
individual through this sexual love. This type of individualization is
a possible accomplishment only of a higher and more spiritual
form oflove that is independent of all vital wellings of love, inclu-
ding those of sexual love. Yet, the choice of any number of indi-
viduals having bodily value qualities such as vitality, youthfulness,
attraction, grace, strength, and beauty, and whose bodily hereditary
qualities are desirable for the kind and quality, not for the quantity,
of propagation, rests on the value-selecting power of sexual love
independently of the libido, the sexual drive, and the drive of
procreation. Just as "appetite" is a pre-feeling entirely independent
of "hunger" and, vis-a-vis the sphere of sexual love, subordinate to
the sphere of nutrition, a pre-feeling of the organic value of meals
and their digestibility and indigestibility relative to the various
changing states of an organism, e.g., illness, and not a reaction to
meals already chosen - a psychic pre-examination of what should
reach the tongue - sexual love is apre-feeling that guides the interest-
taking perception of individuals (out of those who are "perceiv-
able" through the senses) and a pre-feeling of the procreation of
precisely these individuals' best and noblest qualities. Love is not a
psychic reaction to an object affecting the sexual drive and, through
it, the libido; nor is love something that would "accompany" the
libido's excitations; nor is love something "added" to existing exci-
tations to be conveyed into either a female or male "soul." I do not
deny psychic love, for example, friendship, but I distinguish psychic
love sharply from sexual love. And I reject the idea that sexual love
is a "composite" of the sex drive and such psychic love.
The difference between sexual love and sexual sympathy must
also be stressed. Sympathy has nothing to do with love. Sympathy
splits into two functions: (1) a re-feeling of the psychic experiences
of others, which is present even in cruelty, Schadenfreude, envy,
maliciousness, and rudeness, and (2) the reaction of shared joy or
commiseration to what is given in this re-feeling. This general
quality of people (and higher animals) becomes "sexual" when we
are not only concerned with men and women but also when we are
concerned with their differences in sex. In this sense sympathy is not
a condition for libidinous excitations, but it is the condition for the

57
formation of a sexual drive. Sympathy is by no means a conse-
quence of this drive, as Charles Darwin held. If there is, as in the
case of a typical woman-hater, no sexual sympathy present, and if
sexual sympathy has been obstructed by early experiences in child-
hood, for example, a boy's rejection by a mother who generally is a
cold spouse, or the rejection of a young woman by a first
husband, the young person's libido veers away from its direction
toward the opposite sex to the same degree to which it was rejected.
The very formation of a sexual drive is already obstructed here.
Perversions can have their origins in this. Moreover, the conditions
for such rejections are especially pronounced when the maternal
instincts for infant-care are lacking, for they are not replaceable by
"dutiful" feelings. Such dutiful feelings will always lack organic
motherly "warmth." Since those instincts are the extension of the
drive of procreation, this lack of warmth makes the child feel that
his existence was not sufficiently striven for organically, and that he
did not fill an "empty spot" in his mother's heart. And thus there is
sown in the child an attitude of distrust and a plain rejection of an
"understanding" of what is female or male. Thus, the lack of a
maternal instinct for infant care bears directly on the restriction of
the possibility of the procreation of her bloodline. Sexual sym pathy
is, therefore, a necessary condition for the ordinary function oflove
in sexual selection. (Also, exceptional individuals, such as homosex-
uals, can, of course, love more or love less.)
What, then, is the place of shame in this interplay of so many
drives and acts? We have shown (1) that the feeling of shame, by
freeing us from autoeroticism (the altruistic effect of shame), plays
an eminent role in the formation of the direction and concentration
of libidinous wellings of the sexual drive toward objects in general,
and (2) that shame, by releasing sexual sympathy, plays an irreplace-
able role in the relationship to the opposed sex. Let us call this the
primary accomplishment of shame. This primary accomplishment
stays with one throughout one's whole life. It is not dependent on
phases of sexual maturity, nor does this accomplishment of shame
diminish after the loss of male potency or of the female ability to
give birth. For the libido lasts from birth to death, and it is only the
measure and the degree of excitation caused by voluptuous and
pleasing objects that change in the phases of age quantitatively and
locally within typical limits. A man, therefore, does not lose the

58
feeling of sexual shame when he is impotent through age, just as a
woman does not lose this feeling after menopause.

2. The Secondary Accomplishment of the Feeling of Sexual Shame

The secondary accomplishment of the feeling of sexual shame

consists in the deferment of the first ordinary gratification of the
sexual drive to the age of sufficient sexual maturity, and in the
temporal and numerical regulation of the sexual act.
In comparison with other kinds of shame, we thus far have paid
to virginal shame more an exaggerated than too little attention.
Many researchers refer to shame as a function that preserves virgin-
ity as long as possible. With such an exaggeration, however, they
fell victim to a social and utilitarian evaluation of shame based on
the importance a man attributes to virginity when choosing a
spouse. The peculiar "tartness and coyness" with which one asso-
ciates virginal shame is, in my opinion, not an outcome of genuine
virginal shame. Rather, this tartness results from feelings of anxiety,
fear, or disgust mixing with shame, for instance, in virginal "shiel-
ding." In addition, there is the natural rhythm of coquetry and of
automatically rhythmic charming, devoting, and withdrawing
which, as we saw earlier, is on a macroscopic scale only a replay of
the rhythms of the feeling of titillation and the form of its excitation,
the rhythmic movement which in virgins is more articulated. One
should also pay attention here to expressions of "ridiculing ano-
ther's shame" [SchamgeHichter] and "giggling" which pertain more
to coquetry than they do to shame. One must also consider expres-
sions of crying, and shivering graduating to expressions of feelings
of chills with chattering teeth that reflect components of fear and
anxiety within the whole state of the individual. Insofar as virginal
shielding is based in fear and anxiety of what is still "unknown,"
often mixed with fears of the loss of virginity and its accompanying
pain, and of remnants of disgust of the male's genitals, fears the girl
had during her age of mere clitoric excitability prior to vaginal
sensations - it is always accompanied by the silent wish that the man
should overcome her shielding when there is no doubt that sexual
love is involved. A man fulfills the will of the woman, even when
with amounts of force. But I must disagree with many researchers

59
who argue that a woman wants this because of the essence of shame.
Force only hurts a genuine feeling of shame, often incurably.
It is also wrong to argue that shame increases a man's drive to
overcome a woman. This does not hold, at least in ordinary cases. If
a feeling of shame is understood and truly refelt, there is nothing of
the kind. It could at best result from natural coquetry with its
momentary withdrawals. But genuine shame has the effect of being
enticing, as we said earlier, and is overcome only through increasing
love without hurt. Shame never excites drives or senses. It remains
enticing as long as it has not yet turned into an expression of
decision and realization. If love is realized, then the complexes of
fear, anxiety, and slight disgust may continue to some degree. And
in such a case a man may overcome with some force any intensity of
the woman's shielding. If, however, there is pure shame in the
presence of a realized love, shame has more of the effect of being
offensive than of being enticing, because it casts doubt upon the first
signs of the expressed decision and becomes a sign of indecision and
insecurity.
It is a bad mistake to think that all virginal shielding rests on
shame. A young man feels what comes from a young woman's
shielding (apart from her anxieties and fears), but without experien-
cing the other components which lie in virginal shielding. As rape
(especially in the crimes committed on virgins) and the legal senten-
cing of such a crime shows, it is, of course, very difficult to tell
whether a woman's resistance was based on a central and cold "not
willing," on anxiety, fear, and reactions of disgust that may ac-
company even the most lovable consent of woman in love, or on
shame alone. One must reject the common opinion that a mere
shielding out of shame would exclude here the possibility of rape -
in contrast to decisive rejection and a cold "I will not." Such an
argument presupposes shame wellings of the sexual drive, that the
modest woman defending herself would, indeed, in her innermost
being will to be used, and that in such a case the "volenti non fit
iniuria" would obtain. This is wrong. For rejection out of genuine
shame determines the will, i.e., when neither coquetry nor defense
directed against no particular person is involved. Hence in the
presence of strong shielding out of shame, one must arrive at the
conclusion that rape was involved.
For this reason the secondary accomplishment of shame is of

60
essential importance, and not important only for a virgin and a
young man per se, attributed to it when it has the function of a
utilitarian application for the prupose of caring in marriage. The
fact that in modern society a young woman's virginal shame is rated
higher than that of the young man is only justified insofar as female
shame, as we will show later, plays a much more essential and
responsible role in procreation, which adds more value to her
shame. This value extends over the value of the shame curbing her
sexual drives. One must not, however, argue that a woman's virginal
shame is of higher value than a man's because the woman has her
physiological "virginity" to lose while a young man does not.
Indeed, one is lead to argue that a woman's shame which disappears
with her loss of virginity was not genuine shame but rather fear and
disgust, and that it is the woman's shame that must be trusted to be
much purer than the girl's. A girl often mistakes her fears, anxieties,
and remnants of aversion prior to puberty for "shame," or may
even pretend shame for the benefit of the capital value ofvirginity.42
It is clear that a girl, whose heart is still "free," deserves, in a
well-based morality, more freedom than a woman. Insofar as so-
ciety thinks differently in this regard, it has the lowest utilitarian
reasons. This is the case when married women are given more
freedom than young unmarried women, so that marriage, represen-
ting a union oflove, is sought as a safe place yielding more freedom.
Utilitarian reasons have nothing to do with shame, no matter how
often they may be covered up by a higher valuation of virginal
shame. The principle leading to such judgments is itself one of
shamelessness because it depicts shame as something which one
takes off with the wedding gown. True shame reveals itself, how-
ever, in that it does not only stay throughout marriage, in the
presence of other men, and it even purifies itself in this, but also in
that it persists even in the presence of the husband throughout all
libidinous wellings which emerge from increasing wellings of love.
For the la w of shame makes one feel "guilty" in conscience at any

42. There are for this reason "innocent" coquettes who, except for what would
deprive them of any capital value, allow anything that is desired to be done to them,
and even encourage this, because they associate mostly with impotent bon vivants.
Perhaps this type of woman, is the purest case of a prostitute. The "demivierge"
forms a transition to this type. She is distinguished from the innocent coquette
much more by the extent of her abilities than by her nature as a human being.

61
enthrallment that are bare of stirrings oflove, that are bare of being
lost in the other, including the chosen beloved.
This shows us also that the secondary accomplishment of shame
of deferring loss of virginity and of diminishing the frequency of
intercourse during a certain period of time is statistically true, but
that it is due not to immediate and causal but only to mediate
accomplishments of shame. The genuine secondary accomplish-
ment of shame consists in something other than this: it consists in
the curbing effects that keep the person from yielding to wellings of
the sexual drive or drive of procreation without a prior resolute love
and wellings of love. It is because resolute love of another is so much
rarer and more unlikely to occur than sexual inclinations effected by
another, and it is because the wellings of love toward someone else
are so much rarer and unlikely to occur than momentary excitations
of the drive aroused by another, that genuine shame, on the average,
preserves virginity longer and tends to diminish the frequency of
intercourse.
With this we have the true and magnificent secondary accom-
plishment of shame before us. It can hardly be emphasized enough.
In one word: shame is the "conscience of love." Shame is the
magnificent factor which institutes the unity of all sexual drivings, of
the sexual and procreative drives and of all higher and the highest
functions of human spirit. Shame is that which fills, as it were, the
immense emptiness that yawns between spirit and the senses: it is as
if shame has had bestowed upon it from spirit its highness and
seriousness, from the senses its grace and its inviting beauty which
entices love. And the greater the gap is in a person between spiritual
aspirations and the power oflife and senses, the greater must be the
shame so that the being of the person does not break apart. Thus
genuine shame is equally of spirit and passion, and, therefore, the
most charming and most graceful teller of humanity's inner pola-
rity. People of great polarity seek to find one another, perhaps, by
the token of the magnificence of their shame.
The full meaning of shame is understood only when we see in
sexual love the power of all higher life to select on the basis of the
predominantly female drive of procreation and of the predomi-
nantly male sex drive and through the mediation of sexual sym-
pathy, the fittest exemplars of the opposite sex for the enhancement
of life (in contrast to mere preservation of the individual or of the

62
species). True, an isolated sexual drive and an isolated drive of
procreation would suffice for procreation. But because both drives,
insofar as their respective concepts are separated from love (which
actually always accompanies them to some degree), function when
isolated from one another, they can never warrant an increase of
life, of its power, and an ennoblement of its forms without making
choices. If this should occur through an isolated drive, it would be
pure chance. If sexual love is not confused with libidinous wellings
or utilitarian motivations (financial marriage, class marriages), with
intellectual, moral, or aesthetic "estimation," or with ambition or
commiseration, it will, in its pure form, select and realize, from all
sexual unions which can possibly be formed by the two drives and
sexual sympathy, those optimal cases among them which represent
the maximal sum of the noblest qualities of life for hereditary
enhancement in procreation.
It is sexual lave, therefore, and neither the sexual drive nor the
drive of procreation, that leads to the ennoblement of man's
procreation. Sexual love is not to be confused with sexual morality
(for instance, the moral prohibition to marry individuals with such
hereditary diseases as syphilis and tuberculosis) which contributes
to individual, social, or racial health and sustains such health. For
health is a vital value of preservation and not a value of enhance-
ment, even as racial health is distinguished from national health in
that the latter can be furthered while the former is being curbed. But
sexual love is that which makes us anticipate and pre-feel possible
values of enhancement within a domain of life delimited in its
organization and species. It does not make us "judge" those values
by criteria or "reasons." Sexual morality and hygiene - important as
they are - are only negatively effective: they amount to a system of
prohibitions, which even where ideally obeyed and practiced scien-
tifically, would do nothing more than preserve extant hereditary
values. It would not enhance possible hereditary values and provide
for the acquisition of new hereditary values. All morality and hy-
giene tell us only with whom we may mix and with whom we may not
mix if individual social and hereditary vital values should not dimi-
nish. Morality and hygiene do not tell us with whom we should mix
within that domain oflife that remains after strictest obedience and
ideally correct recognition of moral norms ha ve been observed; nor
do they tell us which is the best choice for humanity'S enhancement

63
and ennoblement. For such a choice cannot be based on "moralis-
tic," "hygienic" or scientific considerations ofthe objective traits of
individuals. This is up to sexual love, which prefigures, as it were,
the best and most beautiful exemplars of humanity. Sexual love
realizes what has never before been "experienced" because it is the
eternally constitutive condition for the possibility of such experience.
If it should be the case that sexual morality is a tactic of life-pro-
cesses moving to ever new forms through individuals, then sexual
love must be its strategic genius. If sexual morality and hygiene have
a moral and hygienic function then it is sexual love which has a
eugenic function. Schopenhauer is wrong in asserting that the
"composition of future generations" would be decided in the wel-
ling of sexual love. True, such generations' existence is warranted by
a sexual drive and drive of procreation, but their "composition" is
determined by a large number of various motives, viz., those which
can lead to marital and non-marital sexual unions and also those
which are guided by economic factors or those of vanity or ambi-
tion. The deciding factor of sexual love for the composition offuture
generations is its possible biological surplus value beyond given gene-
rations and the possible value of the enhancement of the given
generation. If one were to measure sexual love only by scientific
biology in terms ofthe basic value of the preservation of the species,
sexual love would be purposeless to the highest degree. Science is
always concerned in these matters with what has become; becoming
is for science only an artificial and hypothetical substitute for what
science cannot determine within those stretches of "what has be-
come." But it is a philosophical biology that can direct our gaze
toward "becoming" and the form of the becoming of each entity
that has now become (including the form of becoming of what has
become in the realm of the past). This fascination of the sciences for
"what has become" makes it clear that sexual love might in scien-
tific terms even be harmful for the species. It is true that sexual love
in the highest types of persons can lead to death - Wagner pro-
foundly showed the immanently tragic element of sexual love in his
Tristan. It is also true that cold statistics reveal that the most
flourishing youth can be stolen away by it prior to a procreative
effect; it is also true that the image of a more beautiful and richer life
that the youth sees in his love and needs could be destroyed before it
can be realized. But sexual love by its very existence also effects, in

64
its individualizing function, an exclusiveness of sexual ties which
diminish the quantity of possible variations of those who have been
procreated without sexual love and of those who could have been
procreated by the individuals concerned. In precisely this, however,
sexual love restricts the power of the "selection of those who fit with
one another," because it diminishes the number of chance varia-
tions (germ variation and organic variations) which are the material
of selection. From the standpoint of selection, love between the
sexes would be extremely harmful and contrary to natural purposes.
If one considers sexual love only as serving the preservation of life,
and if one, in a theory of the development of life, reduces all
developmental values to epiphenomenal values of preservation, and
reduces all qualitative enhancement of the value of life to the
preservation, of "fortuitously" best fit variations and, thereby, the
qualities of progress and regress to a function of the quantity of
fertilized cells and those procreated, sexual love is bound to appear
as a senseless, absurd, and fortuitous fixation of the sexual drive and
drive of procreation and appears to be extremely harmful to the
biological processes of development. But in fact sexual love is not
one function among others but life itself in its highest potency and
concentration. It is for its purposes that all vital actions of the indi-
vidual are there. Sexual love is not a means for vital purposes but the
deepest sense and highest value of vital processes themselves. But it
is also a means if it is not related to a purpose but to possible
enhancement of life that lies ahead of the value of all its present
bearers. Deployment [Entfaltung] and development are in fact no
"epiphenomena" of processes of procreation. For all "preser-
vation" is already a phenomenon of dying and of a relaxation of the
energy of life adapting and attaching itself to inanimate nature. 43
A correct comprehension of life and its development reveals
sexual love as the very power advancing to a higher and more
valuable type of humanity which produces new human values, whe-
reas both the sexual drive and the drive of procreation only repro-
duce present human values. Sexual love is the dynamic principle in

43. Many accurate points concerning these basic questions of biology are
contained in the book by Henri Berson L'Evolution creatrice [(1906); Creative
Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd,; New York:
Holt and Company, 1911)).

65
the renovation of life, whereas these drives are its static principles.
True, genuine sexual love is, in its purest and most magnificent
forms, immensely rare, and indeed, only to be found in a small
aristocracy of human beings. And a great part of their pre-felt
value-types does not even come about. This must be so because of
extant coincidences between lower systems of values and those most
generally accepted. In this lies the immanent tragedy of sexual love.
Yet, this small aristocracy is the avant-garde of races' and peoples'
mythos toward higher kinds of values. All others benefit from this
aristocracy and from the indirect accomplishments of sexual love in
spiritual culture. All powers that form and expand our environ-
ment, in contrast to those only reacting to given "environments"
delineated and formed by them and preserved and utilized by tradi-
tion, are the powers of these types of persons procreated in
admixtures of blood through sexual love; that is, it is the abilities of
the "nobility" and "masters," as distinguished from "common
people" or "slaves," as I elsewhere referred to them, or, it is the
noble abilities, as contrasted with the common ones, that form and
expand man's environment. 44 On the other hand, one must not
forget, in the best examples of noble, magnificent, passionate
sexual love recorded in history (amour passion) what this very same
power, working without publicity and beyond the small corners of
individual life, and belonging intensively and extensively to histori-
cal recollections, at each moment effected in smaller degrees and
without determining the whole lives of other persons.
A number of severe errors arise through the insufficient linguistic
distinctions made between the terms "sexual love," and "sexual
drive" or "drive of procreation." One uses sexual love in regard to
wellings of the sexual drive (with an explicit absence of sexual
sympathy) or even in referring to the objectless libidinous drive; one
uses sexual love also in the sense of the primitive selecting functions
of "drive" in sexual life. Errors following from this are reflected in

44. J. Morley justifiably reduced the superiority of the Anglo-American type to

the absence of money marriages. The common custom of money marriages, on the
one hand, and the preponderance of purely sensual pleasure motives in blood
mixtures, on the other, are the deepest cause of the slow disintegration of European
nobility and the values belonging to it, and therewith of the growing victory of the
values of the common man. See in this regard my treatise "Uber Ressentiment und
moralisches Werturteil."

66
explicit ideas of racially oriented politicians according to which
sexual love does not guarantee a positive procreation because it is
filled with "uncalculable" factors, because it is indifferent to
healthy or ill individuals, and because it would one-sidedly react to
sensory excitations, etc. These politicians maintain, therefore, that
sexual love should be replaced by an objective and scientific politics
of selection: but it is not sexual love that "reacts to external sensory
excitations" but the libido that does this, even though an individual
may take it for sexual love in self-deception; or it is done by those
"sensory" excitations that are symbolic values for extant positive life
values. Sexual love is not concerned with individual biological
values, within the limits where it can justifiably be maintained. The
reason for this is to be seen in the fact that individual values have as
little importance for the formation offuture generations as "natio-
nal health" has for the health of a people, the latter being sharply
distinguished from the former. The external symptoms of racial
health or of degeneration, however, appear to be very strong factors
in aversions of sexual love. But such symptoms are a consequence of
marriages and sexual unions among ancestors with whom sexual
love was not a sufficient motivation. 45 And even though sexual love
can seek the diseased life in a diseased individual (not the diseased
individual himself who can himself nevertheless be a bearer of a
healthy life in general), - J. M. Charcot says "les nerveux se
cherchent" - this pertains especially to sexual love - sexual love is
also in such cases a positive and concentrated power of disposing of
ill life in its continuous renovation. Sexual love is to be distinguished
from selection and is biologically highly meaningful and purpose-
ful.
In assessing the whole positive accomplishment of sexual love
one is compelled to attribute to it already most elementary accom-
plishments in the spheres of very primitive wellings outside mere
drives. Neither libido nor its accompanying sexual drive but the
most elementary accomplishment of sexual love is present in sexual
selections not only in the love of, say, Romeo and Juliet, but even in
the most elementary preferring of youth to age, vitality to feeble-

45. That likewise sexual love is, entirely independent of all mores and changing
legal institutions, the natural reason and sanction for barriers against incest,
cannot be shown here.

67
ness, bodily beauty to ugliness, one's own race to another's race.
One has only to imagine a hypothetical case of a group without the
guiding power of sexual love yet with a strong sexual drive and drive
of procreation: what if they had to live by "scientific" value judg-
ments on the biological values of their fellow men? What comical
absurdity: factually, sexual experiences always reveal drive and
love, libido and sympathy, in some degrees together. A pure sexual
drive, which seeks totally arbitrarily, sheer otherness in sex, or
which would be restricted by motives of morality, health, or nutri-
tion, is rare. It has never existed as a purely isolated manifestation.
Neither has there ever been an exclusive "grand amour" of a man
for a woman, which, for its part, does have much independence
from degrees of libidinous sensibility, drive, and sexual sympathy.
With the above, we have now rendered a clear understanding of
the secondary accomplishment of the feeling of sexual shame: this
feeling of shame curbs the expressions and the effects of the drives of
sex and procreation as long as sexual love has not yet completed its
decisive role of selection. Shame is, as it were, a chrysalis; sexual love
grows within it until it breaks through. As the curbing power of
drive-wellings - not of the drive which presupposes it - it is a magnifi-
cent aid for the production of the noblest human types possible. For
this reason a high valuation of the feeling of shame and any protec-
tion of it from being violated constitutes an eminent ethical demand.
It is more than deplorable that this is so little realized. It is the feeling
of shame which curbs and excludes an admixture of noble life with
low life and which preserves the sexual drive and drive of procrea-
tion from maximal biological manifestations. Any loss and diminu-
tion of the feeling of shame is tantamount to a degeneration of the
human type. For such diminution causes the number of biologically
unequal partners to increase because the drives, no longer curbed by
shame, realize themselves more and more arbitrarily, or because
utilitarian choosing of a spouse takes the place of choosing through
love. Shame is not only the self-protection of the organism against
too great an usurpation of libido and drive; it is first of all the
self-protection of noble against ignoble life. There is a principle rule
that the nobler a race or a generative community in a race is, the
stronger and more delicate is the feeling of shame among men and
women. The traits of shame which have been reported of the chival-
rous teutonic heroes are almost more touching than those of their

68
women, whose shame and chastity won the highest praise from
poets. The French nobility revealed also at that time a deep cultiva-
tion of the feeling of shame, despite the emancipation oflove aided
by the magnificent and serene movement of the troubadours in
Provence a way from a rigid ecclesiastical morality that amalga-
mated the institution of marriage and the soul. This nobility lost this
feeling gradually, however, through an increasing number of
marriages based upon financial convenience, with common people 46
and through its subservience to a king.
The decline of the feeling of shame in modern times is undoubt-
edlya sign of racial degeneration. It is not, as is sometimes super-
ficially held, a consequence of higher and increased cultural devel-
opment. The low valuation of shame is one sign among many
expressions of the rising domination of those values which the
common man produced by his endlessly quantifying production
and by the gradual abolition of higher social strata which became
subject to such values. He who understands the Germans well will
find that it is the tall, blond, blue-eyed and long-faced people of
lower Saxony that have the most refined feeling of a shame easily
aroused. And if one ignores prudishness and cant among the Eng-
lish,,)me will find that it is the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh
peoples that have a most refined feeling of shame and traces of a
master-type. What alone produces true culture, and justifiably so, is
the gradual transition of more conventional expressions of shame in
mores into more changeable ones and a transition from more bodily
shame to more psychic shame. It is due to a preponderance of
culture that the European woman is permitted to show her face,
arms, and in higher social levels also parts of her breasts through
low-cut dresses. This is in contrast to the oriental woman who
conceals even her face and arms, while the rest of her body seems to
be less accentuated by shame. And many primitives consider it to be
shameful when especially men cry from pain or sadness; and, in
Japan, an expression of joy is solicited in the presence of its opposi-
tes (the famous "Japanese smile" during injury or while receiving
bad news). Such functions of shame are different among other

46. See in this regard the recent demonstrations by W. Sombart in his book
Luxus und Kapitalismus, Munich 1913 [Luxury and Capitalism, trans. W. R. Dittmar
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967)].

69
peoples for whom freer expressions of more general emotions are
permissible, rather than shame of individual sufferings or enjoy-
ments. Yet on a higher cultural level something can be shameful
which is not so on a lower cultural level, for instance, the feeling of
knowing that one is commiserated with. In higher cultures it is,
therefore, far more the forms of good conduct which change, be it
through comportment, clothes, dancing, etc.
Just as shame is the gift of a noble human being to preserve the
most valuable inner feelings and protect them from any admixture
with the low or bad, so also shame is a token of the capacity to love
and of a strong drive. People who have little shame and are not shy
often have a cold and empty nature. Children who have little
shyness and are eager to exhibit their abilities, for example, by
voluntarily reciting a poem, are also colder in their nature. Con-
versely, strong modesty reveals increased passion, for which reason
shame is so attractive to a noble person. For what is called "pas-
sion" is here always the continuous tension between a drive and an
object of love and at the same time the unity and amalgamation of
both. Passion is not to be confused with "sensibility," nor with
strong affectability [AffektuosiHit]. The latter can well exist without
passion and can be accompanied by the greatest coldness of heart.
This inner nexus of shame and passion explains the concentrated
and gathering power of shame as opposed to the many drive-wel-
lings. If drive wellings would be left to themselves, they would
crumble and scatter in all directions. But the gathering power of
shame makes them mere ripples on one great stream of passionate
emotion whose direction is warranted by the act of love determining
value and individuality. There are no such movements in sensory
drive wellings. Drive wellings are given as something other than
changing states in experiences and have the character of direction-
less points. It is through shame that they become compo,,~d into
moments of one passionate stream, and thus they enter directly into
an intentional relation to a person, for one person. In this sense drive
wellings are in the service of shame. While shame dams the drive
wellings, they increase at the same time, and the many rivulets flow
into a unified stream of one large vital movement.
These effects make shame the precondition for a deeper satifac-
tion in sexual giving. Even an eudaemonistic theory of value would
have to value shame highly. For the value of satisfaction of a sum of

70
many separated experiences of pleasure is al ways smaller than the
same sum of (only imagined) units of only one experience. Because
shame reduces the number of single satisfactions, it renders depth
and intensity in satisfaction. This is why shame increases the passion-
nate, emotive movements and "captivates" him who sees it. This
function of shame is not to be confused with its power of convincing
the mind of its "concealed" beauty, which we mentioned earlier.
For the latter rests in the essential nexus of shame and the conceal-
ment of positive values. Every new dimension of the depths of
experienceable positive values that remain more or less concealed
and render reverence before the world and God a wakens and en-
hances love, not what has been referred to as "passion." As we sa w,
coquetry increases only excitations of sensory drives. These inter-
connections show that a woman bare of shame leaves another
individual's "heart" cold, even ifshe is, as in the case of prostitutes,
physically attractive. Whatever such a woman's body promises to
the sensory drives and possible pleasures, her lack of shame will
remove someone else's deeper vital strivings in the spheres of satis-
faction. Even a small amount of welling love can be destroyed by a
sudden expression of shamelessness. Conversely, shame deters all
individuals without passion and with only intentions for sensory
pleasures, and thus curbs a valuable individual from shameless
actions which are adverse to procreation.
Hence, the secondary accomplishment of shame is characterized
by a mutually supporting structure of a highly meaningful series of
subfunctions for which judgments of reason can never be substitu-
ted. 47

3. The Tertiary Accomplishment of the Feeling of Sexual Shame

The tertiary function of sexual shame is its accomplishments during

sexual intercourse both after a sexual drive was present (primary

47. We cannot treat in further detail this negative secondary function of shame,
which curbs intercourse with others after a choice of a sex partner has been made.
This secondary function of shame is absolutely not a result merely of the positive
institution of marriages but rather is the basic natural power for the formation of
this institution. For the theory that the instituton of marriage has only economic
reasons is no less false than the theory that marriage rests on the nature of mere
sexual love as its most adequate form, or that it is a mere form for "propagation."

71
function) and after a choice for a spouse has been made in love
(secondary function).
As has already been stressed, the feeling of shame is significant
for abstinence from sexual union that does not come from actual or
passive wellings of love, but that does come from a consciously
loving attitude. This also pertains to continued sexual relations in
marriage. The actual wellings as well as the conscious attitude of
love can change to a great extent throughout a given basic quality in
such love [Liebesgesinnung]. If there is a basic quality of love but an
absence of the attitude of love during physical approaches, or if there
is a basic quality of love in the presence of an attitude of love while
there are no wellings of love, shame forbids intercourse even in the
presence of strong drive-wellings. Shame immediately reacts against
drive wellings even if there is a clear quantity of love present. If
someone comports himself to the contrary, there arises a feeling of
shamelessness, or such comportment will at least be rejected in
subsequent shaming repentence, in a "being ashamed of oneself."
Here again shame is the preserving power of love without which
love would be severely violated. If spouses have a mutual basic
quality of love but neither the attitude nor the wellings of love, and
continue to yield to their drive wellings, they run the risk of the
present basic quality of their love not continuing to realize itself
later on. If they continue such a relation, they tend toward the
destruction of love and its reversal into hatred. Nothing else brings
about hatred more easily than a continued violation of the feeling of
shame and a continued "shaming of another." Especially for a
woman who has shame after an act of intercourse because her
surrender did not allow her to love, a deep hatred must enkindle
itself in her against anyone who forced her into a prostitution of her
inner being - maybe, even, under terms of so-called marital duty - a
case that is more likely to happen in marriages concluded on the
basis of utilitarian financial convenience.
There are five important functions of shame during sexual inter-
course: (1) Shame blocks intercourse brought about by intention or
purpose. (2) It curbs the attention to the genitals and the mechanism
of intercourse. (3) It acts against apperceptive isolation of the sexual
zones of the body from the whole embodied spiritual person. (4) It
excludes manifestations of visible and tactile contents of sexual
organs (during seeing and touching), including one's own, and lets

72
the organs be only as fields of expression and the contents of sensa-
tion only as symbols of psychic movement. The feeling of shame
also blocks acts of conscious intention towards one's own sensation
of voluptuous pleasures; (5) it prepares the external conditions of
the environment (preference of the night, darkness, etc.) and effects
the blocking of all aforementioned acts of "shamelessness."
As to the first function of blocking the intention for, and purpose
of, intercourse which, for instance, we find in individuals who
intend from the beginning to seek only sexual sensations of plea-
sure, there is no doubt that shame reacts against purposes by its
"beshaming" function in the presence offelt purposes. Intercourse,
no doubt, should not function as an action or movement of a
purpose, but should be a movement of expression, i.e., of love uniting
two individuals. Shame precisely prevents intercourse on behalf of a
purpose. Any agreement of partners prior to the act and any planning
for outer condi tions of the act, even when such conditions are made
by third persons, as is the case with mothers' care in their prepara-
tions for the wedding night, is extremely shameless. The low levels
of sexual morality in our times are not only revealed by such
obvious "preparations," or by the setting of a date for the wedding
night, but even more by discussions many of our ecclesiastical
moralists entertain with their venerable peers. They ask the question
whether or not intercourse should serve the purpose of pleasure or
only propagation. These venerable discussants do not seem to real-
ize that this very alternative is a severe violation of shame. It is not a
particular purpose but the implicit purposefulness of the action
involved that is contrary to shame which itself furnishes foundations
for all normative moral propositions. It is an interesting historical
fact that the ecclesiastical moral proposition that intercourse has
the purpose of procreation did not come from the noble germanic
peoples whose deep sense of shame we stressed above, and also not
from original Christian tradition. It stems from the Jewish sexual
morality, long before the times of Jesus, and it is a basic tenet of the
rigid Jewish sexual morality. The act, which should be nothing else
but an immediate expression, becomes here a form of purposeful-
ness. On the basis of what I said earlier about the Jewish lack of
"verecundia" banning all secrets from contempla tions of world and
God and which makes people the bearers of rationalist movements,
it is quite conceivable that shame and its most akin feeling, that of

73
reverence, had to be replaced by a surrogate of narrow and rigid
moral norms. The purposefulness ofthe sexual act would, however,
take on another meaning if it only implied that intercourse is
objectively connected with procreation, and if one would justify this
only to the extent to which such objective relation between inter-
course and procreation exists. I cannot go into the details implied in
such an assertion. As far as it is a correct proposition, however, it is
precisely the feeling of shame itself, and its blocking of a subjective
manifestation of pure expression, that could sustain such objective
purposefulness.
The second function of shame during intercourse is, as we said, its
curbing of the attention paid to the sexual organs, to respective sen-
sations, and to the mechanism of the act itself. This function of
shame is highly purposeful because attention during intercourse not
only reveals a lack of love, but also curbs the process of intercourse
itself. The sexual act is subject to the same laws as are all automatic
movements (breathing, heart beat, speaking), including expressions.
These are always disturbed whenever attention is directed to them or
to their accompanying sensations. Hence shame serves also in this
case to further happiness and to deepen satisfaction. The eternal iro-
ny of a hedonist is that he loses more pleasure, the more energetical-
ly he strives for pleasure - and not for the things that yield pleasure.
The third function of shame is connected with this. It curbs the
isolation of the privy parts and zones from the embodied spiritual
person. This isolation would occur without shame because those
parts of the body and wellings of voluptuous pleasure feelings
would make such isolation necessary. There is no doubt that an
isolation of the sexual parts arouses shame in any individual. Even
when, for some reason or other, an isolated look at the sexual parts
becomes necessary, the individual still wants to hide them. Accor-
ding to Ellis it happens often in gynecological practice that women
either close their eyes or cover them with their hands. Sexual
sympathy, accompanied by shame, also blocks an attentive isola-
tion of one's own sensations of voluptuous pleasure, and love
toward the person exludes a refelt isolation of the others' sensations.
Again, shame reveals itself as an aid oflove. Whereas shame remains
silent as long as an individual stays within the intentions oflove and
remains lost in the other, no matter what objectively may happen,
the slightest getting out of this intention suffices for the occurrence

74
of a beshaming isolation and for the aforementioned turn away
from the embodied person. Again the metaphysical nature of shame
reveals itself to us: just as shame a wakens as soon as an individual
with bodily needs and spatial limitations feels the starting point of
acts directed to the purely objective, so also it a wakens when indi-
viduals, lost in love and in the infinity oflife, suddenly find themsel-
ves to be beings that need the sexual mechanism to partake in this
infinity of life.
While shame curbs this isolation and any apperceptive breaking
of sensations out of the stream of experience, it also effects some-
thing else: shame prevents a conception of sexual organs and their
mechanisms as being merely parts of an organism, i.e., as a purely
bodily happening. As I have shown elsewhere, all natural "under-
standing" of the other is characterized by the fact that all psychic
phenomena are given to us as expressive symbols of acts stemming
from an ego, and that psychic phenomena in objective considera-
tions are given as symbols of solid things or material bodies and
their movement. This pertains equally to the face, the eyes, move-
ments of the hands, etc. During natural conversation with an ordi-
nary individual, everything is given as a field of expression for
intentions: an individual's raising his hand may signify a pointing to
something, it may signify asking for something, it may signify a
gesture of giving a command, or it may signify a threat. His eyes are
not given as a moving ball consisting of the pupil, the eyeball, and
the retina. They are given to us as a starting point of rays oflooking
in different directions, as qualities of expression such as goodhear-
tedness, weakness, forcefulness, scorn, distrust, question, trust, and
doubt. It is not generally the case that our grasping the value
expressions of physical phenomena (color, lines, forms) would have
to penetrate our grasp of the images of the same phenomena
through which we perceive bodies and their objective properties.
This can, of course, happen. If it does, there exists a more or less
pathological case, i.e., a lack of the functions of re-feeling and
co-feeling with the other. In general, however, our understanding of
the other does not at all go through the perception of the other's
body; rather, we grasp the pictorial contents immediately as sym-
bols of expression of his psychic individuality.
The fact that, in our case, there is no body comprehension is
essentially caused, besides these general conditions of the compre-

75
hension of others, by the feelings of modesty. It prevents this from
the beginning by surrounding the sexual organs with the character
of the secretive, of the untouchable. Solomon Reinach and Emile
Durkheim 48 proved that the sexual organs among a large number of
both savage and cultured people are "taboo." Even pictures and
names of them and their functions have this character. But Reinach
and Durkheim fell victim to the positivistic misconception that the
feeling of shame must be explained from this taboo or the many
sexual shame ceremonies, whereas the taboo undoubtedly is a pri-
mitive, social expression of special shame-covers which our sexual
organs also have. 49 The many mores of peoples' marital ceremonies
have, despite all fortuitousness, one and the same meaning: to take
a way from the sexual organs any possible grasp of them as merely
bodily organs.
The two functions of shame, the curbing of isolation and the
curbing of body comprehension prior to and during sexual inter-
course, obtain a particular significance which is indeed the neces-
sary condition for such intercourse, making procreation possible. In
the absence of such curbing not only the sexual organs lose their
mysterious attraction and what I would like to call their erotic
gleaming, but also at the same time positive disgust would occur
because they are seen as isolated parts of the body which draw reac-
tions of disgust to themselves that are connected with the process
and products of excretion. It is here that I find the solution to a bio-
logical paradox which ecclesiastical writers have used to justify their
resentment-laden devaluation, defamation, and, indeed, soiling
of the sphere of sex in general. For it must, indeed, at first sight be
deeply degrading for someone to know that organs destined for the
highest achievement of giving birth to human nature are anato-
mically and functionally so directly connected with the function of
excretion. And this seems to be not only degrading but also not
biologically useful. The fact that procreating acts happen is, among
other things, based on the absence of any disgusting effects from

48. See S. Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, p. 172 [Cults, Myths, and
Religions, trans. Elizabeth Frost (London: D. Nutt, 1912)]; E. Durkheim, "La
Prohibition de l'Inceste," L'annee Sociologique 1 (1898): 50.
49. See H. Ellis's elaborations on wedding ceremonies, veils, etc., op cit., pp. 80
ff. [Studies in the Psychology of Sex, I, 54 ff.].

76
those organs. But this particular effect comes about so easily by the
very location of those organs and by feelings of disgust which so
easily travel from excretions themselves onto those organs.
It is, however, precisely this organization of the body which
allows a much more profound view of these things than the eminent
wisdom of nature and its creator could give us. There is neither
language nor sermon that could ever tell us better than the organi-
zation of the body itself that the sexual act should happen with
modesty and under its guiding light. For the state of affairs involved
implies that any lack of shame not only makes the genital organs
bare of value but also immediately posits the most repelling,
frightening, and strongest repulsion among all emotional impulses:
disgust. It is by means of the location of genital organs that inter-
course without shame is to be avoided because negative results of
propagation would ensue. Nature presents us with this one set of
alternatives: shame or disgust. Nature seeks to exclude anything that
lies in between these alternatives as well as any cold search for
pleasure alone. Nature excludes shamelessness from the generative
gardens of life by placing at its own borders the guardians of disgust
for those who approach these borders in shamelessness. The whole
nexus of emotions that guide the process of procreation is highly
purposeful. This nexus is not tantamount to "degrading the nature
of people" but is to enhance humanity'S true dignity: forgetting
human dignity through shamelessness is only followed by the
punishment of disgust. And it becomes clear also that playboys,
prostitutes, and similar categories of people, bare of feelings of
shame, often show an express repulsion toward intercourse and
become more or less prone to submit to perverions. Such perversions
- and probably many other kinds of them - are biologically
purposeful in a negative sense. It is through them that a life no
longer worthy of procreation exludes itself from procreation.
The last form of the feeling of shame in sexual life is what I
referred to earlier: repenting shame. This feeling is not an antici-
pating and protecting feeling like the feeling of modesty per se; nor
does it curb sexual unions in the presence of still undecided love.
Repenting shame occurs when there is a looking back at what mod-
esty or shame in the former sense had forbidden. This feeling of
shame is totally different, in its immediate experience, from shame in
the former sense. Whereas shame in the former sense is rather warm

77
and often even mixed with pleasure feelings, the latter is imbued
with a piercing sharpness and is an extremely painful experience. It
is a feeling of shame different from the lovely warmth of the slight
blushing of a virgin. It is rather a "burning shame" which crushes life
and soul that is conjoined with self-hatred and rejection of one's
own life. Repenting shame can be found in a woman who believes
herself to have submitted to a man in an undignified manner; it is in
a man who realizes that he took something without having been
loved. Language delicately distinguished this peculiar experience
from other experiences of shame. Sometimes it is called "being
ashamed," or this experience is expressed by the notion of being
ashamed about something. The genetive form [in German] "to be
ashamed of' does not yet imply this. I can say: "X is modest about
his noble sentiments, or about his benevolence [i.e., his shame, in
the form of modesty, stems from his noble sentiments]. But I cannot
say that he "is ashamed of his noble sentiments, or benevolence."
The expression "violation of the feeling of shame" implies first of all
the causes that ensue from this feeling. [The distinction that Scheler
is able to make in German is, for the most part, lost in English.]
I stressed earlier that this feeling is not simply repentence or a
welling of "conscience" in the usual sense of these terms. Nor is it to
be confused with wellings of the feeling of honor, no matter how
much it may be mixed with these feelings. A woman who submitted
herself without love will feel shame in this sense of "burning
shame." She will do so even if the person to whom she submitted
was worthy of it, or in marriage when no moral law has been
violated and reverence to other persons has not been put into
question. She may also repent otherwise, but this kind of repentence
is not to be confused with a reaction of shame. "Burning shame" is,
in contrast to more spiritual repentence, a revolt of the whole orga-
nism and of its inner life against the action completed; it is organic
rejection of one's own existence. One can say that repenting shame,
firstly about oneself and secondly about one's act or about any
quality, is the specific conscience of sex and its living judge which is
different from the other moral conscience.
The analogy of the experience of repenting shame with pangs of
conscience and repentence as such reveals a connection with a
shame that is not sexual but is directed to actions that have nothing
to do with sex. This is the case when we are ashamed of a lie, of a

78
theft or of a crime, or when we say "you should be ashamed of what
you are doing." These forms of shame are interesting because they
are, contrary to what we said earlier, not directed toward positive
values, but toward negative values of one's own self. This is the
reason why a number of theories hold that the basis of shame lies in
complexes of feelings of fear (Ellis), or in the fear of arousing
disrespect in others.50 But different factors are confused in such
theories. For in the cases of "being ashamed about something," the
shame reaction does not aim at a negative value or a comportment;
the reaction occurs in light of the idea of positive value-being that
existed prior to the act "about" which one is ashamed. This "sha-
ming about something" occurs because one perceives the action in
lieu of the idea which is now destroyed by the action. Shame about
something, then, is a posterior reaction of shame which, as with all
types of shaming, is directed to the preservation and protection of a
positive value while all ofa sudden, however, the loss of this value is
realized post festum. Hence, also, such cases are no objection to my
assertion that all feelings of shame are related to positive values and
the feeling of them, and are never related to negative values. And
this explains why we can also be ashamed of insufficient feelings of
shame and insufficient reactions of shame toward our past lives.
Indeed, this fact puts the very stamp of "burning shame" on such
expenences.
While shame is a judging "conscience" of sexual life, it is at the
same time a most significant fountain of the origin of conscience in
general. In the genealogy of morals, the myth of the Old Testament
reveals a deep wisdom in its pictorial formulation of a universal
truth. It reveals the reaction of shame to be the origin of the
knowledge of good and evil: "For God doth know that in what day
soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall
be as gods, knowing good and evil." After the fruit was eaten: "And
the eyes of them both were opened, and when they perceived them-
selves to be naked, they sewed together fig leaves, and made them-
selves aprons." (First Book of Genesis 3, 5, 7) The first stirrings of

50. I have shown elsewhere that likewise repentence has absolutely nothing to do
with fear or anxiety (fear of social consequences, punishment, etc.). Rather, it is in
the vital sphere of mind, an act of self-retaliation. It is precisely fear that, as long as
it lasts, excludes repentence.

79
conscience in a child are undoubtedly reactions of shame - the
organic basis of conscience in general. All my studies in the genea-
logy of "morals," i.e., in the systems where factually rules of value
preference are present among historical peoples, lead me more and
more to see that any given sexual morality neither is a mere part of a
prevailing morality, nor does it represent a group of norms con-
trived and imposed on men for the realization of extra-sexual values
(such as general well-being, welfare, work accomplished through
civilization, culture), as most genealogists of morals have believed.
Rather, sexual morality is the root andfountain ofall morals [Moral],
including prevailing moral precepts. It is, as it were, the independent
variable within the formation of all moral ideas of values. It is not by
chance that language identifies "mores" [Sittlichkeit] with sexual
mores; philosophers assert this to be a chance and try to correct the
usages of language from the high horse of their insights. The coin-
cidence of language usage, however, clearly corresponds to the
facts. And this also explains the above "to be ashamed about
something" (a lie, theft). Any analysis of a morality has to start with
its sexual morality, and all other moral rules are dependent on it,
although not deducible from it. Let us not pursue further these
series of thoughts. Sexual morality, however, is not the cause of the
feeling of shame, nor is the form of sexual morality the cause of the
form of shame; rather, sexual morality is only a subsequent abstrac-
tion made from objects and contents arousing the feeling of shame
in a society. The feeling of shame, and its inner laws reveals one of
the "natural" roots and sanctions of all morals, quite independently
of all standing rules [Satzung].
The basic understanding of this historical insight of the rela-
tionship between the primary nature of an existing sexual morality
and all morality is to be gained from the simple fact that it is, above
all, the type ofperson who makes understandable a morality; and it
is the value of this or that type of person that makes understandable
the value of this morality. Both the qualities and the value of a type
of person are influenced, first, by the precepts and norms of the
sexual morality, and only secondarily by other moral precepts and
norms. For it is sexual morality that determines the measure and the
type of procreation, its positive or negative direction of values, and
the ascent or the decadence of the type of person involved.
The above state of affairs has its ultimate foundation in the fact-

80
although only for biological values and for the genealogy ofvalua-
tions, not for their factual meaning and objective worth - that
among social drives the sexual drive and drive o/procreation are not
the most intensive but the most urgent (I stress this in opposition to
extant theories), and that among vital functions of value-choosing it
is sexual love that is/oundational and decisive in the existence and
types of all other value-choosing vital functions. Again, language
justifies the identification of "sensuousness" (without qualification)
with libido. I will furnish a proof for this in the future. I wish only
to counter the existing theory which holds that the drive of nutrition
- undoubtedly an intensive drive - is the most "urgent" one; i.e., a
drive whose gratification is said to be connected with other "less
urgent" drives. This theory is predominant throughout our whole
national economy. It has lead to the opinion that, in causal explana-
tions of history, it is the nutritional resources, the status of the
economy, and the techniques of production that basically determine
the types and measures of procreation. 51 Instead, it is the quantity
and quality of the growth of population, of blood mixture, etc., that
is the independent variable in this process. Darwin and Malthus,
and many other representatives of the economic understanding of
history, fell victim to this error, something I cannot show here in
detail.
The economic theory holding that the drive of nutrition is a more
urgent one than the sexual drive is also false because a special
nutritive drive cannot form itself without the realization of the
instincts of child care [Brutpflege] on the part of the parents, espe-
cially the mother, who is the first to give food. The newly born child
may have "hunger" but does not have a drive of nutrition yet, which
forms itself through the offering offood, after the child's first act of
sucking, for example. And the motherly instinct of child care is only
an extension of the drive of procreation that turns, after the child
has been delivered, into the drive of preserving the newborn child.
Thus, the formation of the drive of nutrition and its gratification (in
the child) is tied to the presence and gratification of the extended
drive of procreation (in the mother). Further physiological founda-

51. Walther Rathenau, in his book Zur Kritik der Zeit (1912) [Vol. 1 of the
Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1915, 1925»), makes a delightful
exception.

81
tion is needed for our assertion here concerning the relationship
between the growth of cells and the nutrition of the cells, as well as
the relation of growth to the regeneration of cells through cell-divi-
sion. This I cannot show in our context here.
With regard to the value-regulating functions of drives it must
also be realized that sexual love and the measure, type, and direction
of its wellings consists in the instinctive prefeeling of the value of the
human being to be procreated, and that it is the condition of all
other value-selecting functions within the sphere of vital values,
since the latter functions are dependent on the value of the procrea-
ted type of person which can never be higher nor lower than precise-
ly this type (as measured by objective values). What the child can
select through these functions for instance, its own sphere of value
preferences and its structure, is dependent on the fact that this very
child, and no other one, was chosen through the love (or its lack) of
its parents, and that it was born by virtue of the presence of sexual
drives as one "among possible children." Perhaps Goethe saw this
point in the verses that are deeper than they might first appear:

We strive toward the Absolute

As the highest good of all.
I leave it up to everyone.
Yet, before all else I noticed
It commands us think
Of love as unconditional link.

V. PSYCHIC AND BODILY FEELINGS OF SHAME IN MAN AND WOMAN

We have referred at different places to the differences in male and

female feelings of sexual shame. This difference corresponds
exactly to the role of men and women in sexual relations and
procreation. One must be very carful in formulating the problem
involved, i.e., to ask whether a man, or a woman, originally has this
feeling in such a way that one would have obtained this feeling
subsequently from the other, or to ask which of the two would have
more feelings of shame, i.e., to pose the problem as a quantitative
consideration.
We showed that the phenomenon of shame belongs, in essence, to

82
the structure of a spiritual-vital consciousness and, furthermore,
that psychic and bodily shame belong to the essence ofthe structure
of a spiritual-vital-sensory being and that it is not necessarily tied up
with sexual differences. There is no doubt, then, that wherever this
structure enters consciousness, i.e., whenever the wellings of these
spheres of consciousness conflict, the feeling of shame must set in -
and that, therefore, shame equally belongs to man and woman. Any
theory must be rejected that either considers the woman to be
originally endowed with the feeling of shame such that a man would
obtain this feeling from her by emotional contagion, or that holds
men to be responsible for having educated women to have this
feeling. It also appears to me to make no sense to ask whether a man
or a woman has more feelings of shame. The many answers given to
this question stem from the opinion that one would have to assign
the various expressions of shame in either man or woman to the
essence of shame. One tends to find lesser degrees of shame, of
course, in the other sex, or even tends to assert that the other sex
originally has no shame at all.
There appears to me, however, some truth in the theories of
Nietzsche and many others who assign to men a more refined feeling
of shame than they do to women. They saw correctly that men have
at least a more refined psychic feeling of shame both in the sexual
and non-sexual spheres. But they did no see that it is the woman who
has a more refined feeling of shame of the body, again in both its
sexual and non-sexual spheres. The last point cannot be explained
by saying that women blush more easily and express shame in a
more direct and flexible way, for this is only a consequence of the
high intensity and flexibility of female emotional life which is, in
general, accompanied by less articulated and less sharp sensibility
[Sensibilitat] .
What does explain this difference is that specifically spiritual acts
[geistige Akte], as executed principally independently of drives and
functions of life, are in terms of their intensity and articulatedness
less detached from vital functions in woman than they are in man.
Her spiritual personality and her immediate consciousness of her
"self," her self-consciousness as such, rise less sharply and distinctly
above the vital sphere of her lived body. But it is the constitutive
condition of all psychic shame that there is a consciousness of
distance between spirit and the lived body-soul, i.e., the tendency to

83
lose oneself spiritually in some way or other into a kind of objective,
value domain so that subsequently one becomes a ware of his limited
and needy lived body as the starting point of these acts. The nature
of the woman, however, lacks this tendency toward the objective as
a tendency that is still quite independent of specific acts and efforts;
she lacks the ability to be absorbed by things, their interconnections
and laws. The woman lives a less expansive and a more bound and
ego-related life. All her thoughts, willings, values, perceptions, and
representations do not detach themselves from her body-conscious-
ness as is the case with a man. This explains her lesser degree of
duality between spirit and body and, therewith, a lack of the condi-
tion for the experience of psychic shame. There is no doubt that
empirical facts reflect this. The woman distinguishes far less
sharply, for instance, between matters concerning her occupation
and private matters, between public-social and private-individual
experiences than a man does, is more prone to mix these up, and is
less affected by shame in talking about private affairs. In this sense
the woman has a more child-like existence and less hidden difficul-
ties. What causes this to be the case is not only her increased
irritability, conjoined so closely to her emotional life and its chan-
ging expression that the interplay of mimicry and pantomine reflect
her emotional states even in the presence of a strong will not to show
them openly, but also her .wider cultivation of spiritual activity
through the vital sphere of the body. Whereas a man's face tends to
assume a trait offixation in which life has engraved its own traces, a
woman's face always has the character of softness, of being mallea-
ble [Bildsamkeit] and flexible, a character that can absorb the most
fleeting wellings and which - depending on the life-situation - endu-
res more and greater changes of life than a man's face. Just as a
woman hides her secret life less than a man does, so also she shows
less respect of other's secrets. Her nature is less "discreet"; she lets
out more than a man does. For discreetness rests on a co-feeling
with the psychic shame of another person. Her tendency to prattle,
chatter, and gossip, with which men of all peoples and of all times
have found fault, is a consequence of the woman's lesser degrees of
psychic shame.
What is more often overlooked than the above is also the fact that
there is principally a different emotive relationship between a wom-
an's lived body and the spheres of life, on the one hand, and her

84
objective body and the sphere of the senses, on the other. The nature
of the woman's feeling of life is more unified and more separated
from sensory experiences and their variations than is the case with a
man. The woman plays a much more important role in the business
of life, procreation and enhancement, than a man does. She is,
therefore, the genius of life, whereas a man, as genius of spirit, by
comparison remains a mere bungler in all immediate cognitions of
feelings and instincts necessary for the realization of particular
life-values. The instincts that we still find in man, i.e., abilities
essentially different from understanding that anticipate and pre-feel
on-coming values important for life without traces of conclusion-
making steps or analogous acts, are in the woman, as the biolo-
gically older being, much more developed, and she posseses in all
areas, such as "tact," more feelable values than a man.
This entire and rather complex state of affairs cannot be exhaust-
ed here. But it is the condition for the difference between the
woman's inner perception of her lived body, still more of the value
or disvalue of it, and of her feeling for these values and those of a
man.

85
Repentance and Rebirth
Behind the stirrings of the conscience, its warnings, its counsel, its
condemnations, the spiritual eye offaith is ever a ware of the outline
of an invisible, everlasting judge. These stirrings seem to form a
wordless natural discourse from God to the soul, prompting the
course of its salvation and the world's. It is here an open question
whether it is at all possible to separate the peculiar unity and the
sense of the so-called stirrings of conscience from this view of them
as a secret "voice" and symbolic language of God, and yet preserve
intact the unity of what we call conscience itself. I doubt it, and
believe rather that if it were not for the participation of a divine
judge those very stirrings would disintergrate into a host of phenom-
ena - feelings, images, opinions - and that there would no longer
remain any basis for conceiving them as a unity. Furthermore, it
seems to me that no positive act of interpretation is demanded
before we attribute the function of adumbrating such a judge to the
psychic material of these stirrings: on the contrary they exercise of
their own accord this God-intimating function, and one would have
to close or avert one's eyes to avoid experiencing it as an integral
part of them. Just as phenomena of pitch and color, unlike pain
and well-being, do not present themselves as mere sensations of our
bodies (which are simply "what they are") but from the outset as
objective phenomena that cannot be "sensed" apart from their
function of bringing us, with their own content, information about a
real world, just so there dwells from the outset within these stirrings
of conscience the implication of some invisible order, and of some
spiritual, personal subject presiding thereover. We are no more led
by a "causal inference" from these stirrings to Gods's existence than
we are led to existence of a red ball by a "causal inference" from its

89
extended red appearance. But in both cases something is presented
in the act of experience: something transcending the medium of
presentation, yet nevertheless apprehended in it.

Among the stirrings of conscience repentance is the one whose

characteristic is to judge, and to concern itself with our past lives.
Its nature, its meaning, its connection with the whole course and
purpose of our life have been so frequently, profoundly and funda-
mentally minsunderstood by the desordre du coeur of the present age
that it is essential to clear the ground for the proper determination
of its positive nature. We must therefore subject the modern theo-
ries of its origin, sense and worth, which for the most part are
altogether facile and superficial, to a critical examination:
Modern philosophy almost invariably sees in repentance merely
a negative and, so to speak, highly uneconomical, even superfluous
act - a disharmony of the mind which may be ascribed to lack of
thought, or to sickness, or to illusions of the most diverse kind.
When the medical layman observes rashes, purulence or boils on
a body, or those unattractive deformations of skin and tissue asso-
ciated with healing wounds, he can for the most part see nothing
more therein than a symptom of one sickness or another. It takes the
pathologist to show him in detail how these penomena are at the
same time highly developed and ingenious methods whereby the
organism rids itself of certain poisons in order to heal itself, and how
indeed pernicious conditions which the organism would otherwise
suffer are often checked in advance by their intervention. Even mere
shivering is more than a symptom of chill: it is also a means of
warming us. Our nature comprises distinct stages of being, which
may not, as superficial monisms will have it, be reduced to a single
one: mind, soul; flesh, body. Nevertheless, certain comparable regu-
larities are to be found in the first three stages, which exhibit a
profound common analogy. Thus repentance too has, together
with, and even in consequence of, its negative, demolishing func-
tion, another which is positive, liberating and constructive. It is only
to the casual observer that repentance appears as a mere symptom of
some disharmony of the mind oreven as a useless deadweight which
is more of a hindrance than a help along the way. People say:
"Surely having regrets leads us to dwell morbidly on a past which is
done with and unalterable, and whose content - as determinists

90
maintain - happened exactly as it had to happen, given all the causes
of our regretted behaviour" And "No regrets! - just try harder next
time!" is the jovial slogan of the plain man, with his indulgent smile
and well-meaning impatience.
Thus judged, repentance is not only a "useless deadweight": it
originates moreover, in a form of peculiar self-deception. This
supposedly consists first in our setting our faces against past reality
and absurdly attempting both to eject that reality from the world
and to reverse the current of the river oftime in which our life flows
by; but it is said also to consist in our subconsciously equating the
self that regrets the deed with the self that performed it, whereas
(through subsequent mental events, and even through the deed itself
and its sequel) the self has become, by any test of identity, something
constitutionally different. Because we like to think that we could
now refrain from the deed, we imagine - so it is said - the possibility
that we could have refrained from it when we performed it. Others
go even further, maintaining that in the act of repentance we con-
found our memory-image of the deed with the deed itself. It is then,
they would have us know, to this image that the pain, suffering and
grief comprised in repentance adhere; they do not adhere to the deed
itself, which lies behind us so still and silent, speaking to our
understanding only through its effects, of which the image is just
another one. But inasmuch as we now transpose this present mem-
ory back to the time and place of the deed, the deed itself is clothed
for us in that character which is no more than an emotional reaction
to the effect of the present image.
Such is the "psychological" way in which for example Nietzsche
has sought to explain a way repentance as a kind of inner deception.
The repentant la wbreaker, in his opinion, cannot endure the "image
of his deed", and "calumniates" the deed itself through this
"image". According to Nietzsche, repentance, like "bad con-
science" in general, arose when passions of hate , revenge, cruelty and
spite of all kinds, which once were allowed free play against fellow-
men, came to be dammed in by state, law and civilization, and
thereupon turned for their satisfaction against the life-matter of
those who felt them. "In times of peace, man the warrior must needs
attack himself."
Rather less "wild" than this hypothesis is the suggestion that
repentance is a kind of revenge upon oneself, a reflexive tit-for-tat,

91
the mere carrying out of a kind of self-punishment, which in its most
primitive form is not necessarily directed exclusively against what is
considered "wicked", but is also exemplified in such expressions as
"I could tear my hair for doing that!" or "I could kick myself!", on
occasions when it is plain in the event that one has acted against
one's own interests or otherwise made some "slip". If the drive to
revenge of a wronged man B against wrongdoer A may find satisfac-
tion through the action of some - as it were - depersonalized force of
retribution (whether it be a sympathetic third party or, at a later
stage, government and authority in a similar role), it can be imag-
ined that the retributive impulse set going by any "wrong" might
avail itself of the urge to self-punishment which has just been
described, and that in this way retribution comes to be exacted even
in cases where one is oneself the author of a reprehensible deed or
injustice. It is noticeable that this theory envisages the will to make
reparation and do penance as a stage prior to true repentance, and
as rather its c~use than its consequence. By this reading, repentance
is an intensified will to reparation.
Finally, I shall mention three more "modern views" of repen-
tance which are much in favor: the Fear-theory, the "Hangover"-
theory, and that view of repentance as a psychological malady
which is different only in degree - not in essence - from pathological
self-accusation, from masochism, from "self-indulgent wallowing
in one's own sins", etc - in short, from any kind of mental self-tor-
ture.
The Fear-theory is probably the prevalent conception in the
theology, philosophy and psychology of recent time. According to
this, repentance is "nothing but" (as you know, most "modern"
theories take this "nothing-but" form) "- nothing but a kind of
wish that one hadn't done something", which wish is founded in a
fear, that has become as it were pointless, of possible punishment.
Therefore, no repentance but for a pre-existent system of punish-
ment! The only thing by which the anguish of contrition differs from
ordinary fear of punishment is the absence of any particularized
image of the pain of punishment, of the agent of punishment, of the
type and method of punishment, or of the time and place of its
carrying out. Repentance is thus a hereditary echo of earlier
experiences of punishment, where, however, the middle terms are
missing in the chain of association between the mental image of the

92
relevant deed and the pain of punishment felt long ago; perhaps it is
itself, as Darwinists like further to maintain, a beaten path of
association between the two things, which has become an inheri-
tance ofthe individual. By this interpretation repentance is a kind of
cowardice grown systematic, which refuses to accept the conse-
quences of one's actions and is at the same time a weakness of the
memory which serves the interest of the race.
It is not then, in this view, a pointer to a divine judge. It is, rather,
an interiorization of yesterday's policeman.
The second point of view, the "Hangover"-theory, is somewhat
more rarely encountered in philosophy, but all the more often in
everyday life. Repentance is said to be basically a state of depression
which normally supervenes once the tensions accompanying an
action have been relaxed, whenever the after-effects have proved
harmful and unpleasant. Thus Repentance is by nature a kind of
"moral hangover", which admittedly finds a subsequent "higher
significance" in the act of judgment. In particular, excesses in the
satisfaction of sensual instincts (in eating, drinking, sexual inter-
course, fine living, etc.) and their depressive after-effects form, in
this view, the basis of a melancholy state of mind in which we
afterwards repudiate these excesses: Omne animal post cortum triste,
and "Young whores make old penitents". The doubtless correct
observation that, even outside this sphere of what is harmful to
health, other mishaps may dispose one to repentance, appears to
lend support to this point of view.
For everyone of the above-mentioned attitudes, repentance
represents, naturally, behaviour as pointless as it is senseless.
"Pointless" is indeed the favorite epithet with which it is dismissed
by the mass of people today. Really clever people add that repen-
tance is not only pointless but also "harmful," since its effect can
only be to hamper our living and acting, and since it resembles
nakedly retributive punishment in having something distasteful
about it which its capacity for increasing the sum of pleasure in
life-as-a-whole can by no means justify. For even if repentance is
occasionally productive of good resolve and improvement, it is not,
so they say, essential to the purpose, and can very well be dispensed
with. And at the end of life, of what use is a deathbed repentance, a
customary and particularly forceful instance, if it results in nothing
but,just now and again, this trend of improvement? It is much truer

93
 to say that, far from improving matters, it hampers life while life is
still running its course, in that it chains us to an unalterable past.
All these explanations and indictments of repentance, from
Spinoza via Kant to Nietzsche, rest upon grave errors. Repentance
is neither a spiritual deadwight nor a self-deception, it is neither a
mere symptom of mental disharmony nor an absurd attempt on the
part of the human soul to cast out what is past and immutable.
On the contrary, repentance, even from the purely ethical aspect,
is a form of self-healing of the soul, is in fact its only way of
regaining its lost powers. And in religion it is something yet more: it
is the natural function with which God endowed the soul, in order
that the soul might return to him whenever it strayed from him.
One of the principal causes of the misconception of repentance
(and one which underlies all the supposed "explanations") is a false
notion of the internal structure of our spiritual life. One can in no
way fully understand repentance unless one places it within a deeper
overall conception of the nature of our temporal life-stream in
relation to our permanent personal self. That becomes at once
apparent if one examines the sense ofthe argument that repentance
is the meaningless attempt to turn a past act into something which
has never happened. If our existence as a person were a kind of river
which flowed past in the same objective time wherein natural events
take place, resembling that stream even if differing in content, this
way of talking might be justified. No "afterwards" part of the river
could then turn back over a part "gone before" or effect any kind of
alteration in it. But standing in opposition to the continuous flux of
inanimate nature with its movements and changes - whose "time" is
a uniform one-dimensional and one-directional continuum, lacking
the tripartition into past, present and future - there are present to us
in the experience of everyone of our indivisible, temporal moments
of life the structure and idea of the entirety of our life and personal
selfhood. Every single one of these life-moments, corresponding
with just one indivisible point of objective time, contains within
itself its three extensions: the experienced past, the present being
experienced and the future, whose ingredients are constituted by
awareness, immediate memory and immediate expectation. It is by
virtue of this wonderful fact that - perhaps not the material reality-
but the sense and worth of the whole of our life still come, at every
moment of our life, within the scope of our freedom of action. We

94
are not the disposers merely of our future; there is also no part of our
past life which - while its component natural reality is of course less
freely alterable than the future - might not still be genuinely altered
in its meaning and worth, through entering our life's total
significance as a constituent of the self-revision which is always
possible.
Let us imagine our experiences up to a given point in time as the
parts of a line P(past)-F(uture), which represents a section of objec-
tive Time.

P abcdefg F

It would not then be the case, as in inanimate nature, that b was

determined unequivocally at a given moment by a, then c by b, dby
c, and so on. Rather is it the case thatg, the latest event, is in principle
determined through the whole row R (a to 1), and that moreover
everyone ofthe events a, b, c, d and e are capable of becoming once
more "effective" upon g and upon all the events to come. The event
lying in the past has this capability without first entering (whether as
itself or as a so-called "image" of itself) as a component into the
positionf immediately preceding g. Since, however, the total ef-
ficacy of an event is, in the texture of life, bound up with its full
significance andfina! value, every event of our past remains inde-
terminate in significance and incomplete in value until it has yielded
all its potential effects. Only when seen in the whole context of life,
only when we are dead (which, however, implies "never", if we
assume an after-life), does such an event take on the completed
significance and "unalterability" which render it a fact such as past
events in nature are from their inception. Before our life comes to an
end the whole of the past, at least with respect to its significance,
never ceases to present us with the problem of what we are going to
make of it. For no sooner does a section of objective time enter into
that extension-category of our experience which we know as our
past, than it is deprived of that fatality and completion which past
events in nature possess. As past this time-content becomes "ours" -
is subordinated to the power of the persona! self. Therefore, the
extent and nature of the effects that every part of our past may

95
 exercise upon the sense of our life lie still within our power at every
moment of our life. This proposition is valid for every "fact" in
"historical reality", whether in the history of the individual, the race
or the world. "Historical reality" is incomplete and, so to speak,
redeemable. I grant that everything about the death of Caesar which
appertains to the events of nature is as complete and invariable as
the eclipse of the sun which Thales prophesied. But whatever belong-
ed on that occasion to "historical reality," whatever is woven of it
as meaning and effect into the fabric of man's history, is an incom-
plete thing, and will not be complete until the end of world-history.
Now, our nature possesses wonderful powers of releasing itself
from the further effects of one or other member in the chain of past
experiences. Even the clear, objective remembering of the event in
question, though this mental function is commonly misconstrued as
a factor without which the past may not take effect upon our life, is
such a power. For the act of remembering depends for its effective-
ness upon a source of strength identical with the life-nerve of that
force which, in accordance with the above principle of psychic
efficacy, goes on mysteriously living and acting within us; that force,
then, receives a vital hurt from the objectification, the precise loca-
ting of time and place, to which the remembering mind directs its
cool perception. If a falling stone were able, in a given phase of its
fall, to remember the preceding phase - which alone is determining it
to fall through the succeeding phase according to a prevailing law -
the law of gravitation would immediately be nullified. For remem-
bering is the beginning of freedom from the covert power of the
remembered thing and occurrence. It is precisely by being remem-
bered that experiences usually make their exit from the inner temple
of our life; it is the way in which they become detached from the
centre of the self whose attitude to the world they formerly helped
to form, and in which they lose their direct impact. Memory, then, is
so far from being a factor in the "stream of psychic causality" that it
really interrupts this stream and brings parts of it to a halt, is so far
from transmitting the effect of our past upon our present life that on
the contrary it liberates us from the determining power of that
effect.
History comprehended frees us from the power of the history we
live. Likewise the knowledge of history (as distinct from that saga of

96
human and intellectual adventures which "tradition" hallows) is
first and foremost a liberator from historical determination.
The phenomenon of repentance also has its place in this general
scheme of ideas. Repenting is equivalent to re-appraising part of
one's past life and shaping for it a mint-new worth and significance.
People tell us that Repentance is a senseless ~ttempt to drive out
something "unalterable". But nothing in this life is "unalterable" in
the sense of this argument. Even this "senseless" attempt alters the
"unalterable" and places the regretted conduct or attitude in a new
relation within the totality of one's life, setting it to work in a new
direction. People tell us repentance is absurd, since we enjoyed no
freedom and everything had to happen as it did. It is true that no one
would be free who could not repent. But only repent - and see how as
a result of the act you acquire what in the beginning you unwisely
deemed a prerequisite of that act as you saw it -freedom! You are
nowfree from the floodtide of bygone guilt and wickedness that was
sweeping you relentlessly a way ,free from that rigid chain of effect,
such as subsisted before repentance, which produces ever new guilt
from old so that the pressure grows like an avalanche.
It is not repented but only unrepented guilt that holds the power
to bind and determine the future. Repentance kills the life-nerve of
guilt's action and continuance. It drives motive and deed - the deed
with its root - out of the living centre of the self, and thereby enables
life to begin, with a spontaneous, virginal beginning, a new course
springing forth from the centre of the personality which, by virtue of
the act of repentance, is no longer in bonds.
Thus repentance effects moral rejuvenation. Young forces, as yet
guiltless, are dormant in every soul. But they are hampered, indeed
smothered, by the tangled growths of oppressive guilt which in the
course of time have gathered and thickened within the soul. Tear
away the undergrowth, and those forces will rise up of their own
accord.
You may choose always to resemble Prometheus and never
Epimetheus. But the more "progressively" you speed forward, borne
down the stream oflife, the more you are dependent on this pressure
of past guilt, and the more you are bound by it. Your are merely
fleeing your guilt while you think to take the crown of life by storm,
for your storming is your secret flight. The more you close your eyes

97
to what should be a subject of repentance, the more tightly you bind
on your feet the chains that encumber your progress.
But even the ordinary upholder of free-will errs when he speaks
of repentance. He mistakenly insists that it is conditional upon that
new freedom which is in fact first realized in the act of repentance.
Well may the plain man say, "No regrets! - just resolve to do better
in future". But what the plain man fails to tell us is where we may
find strength to make those resolutions, still less the strength to
carry them out, if repentance has not first liberated the personal self
and empowered it to combat the determining force of the past.
Resolutions not intimately linked with a consciousness of strength
and ability to carry them out are precisely those good intentions
with which the "road to hell" is so invitingly paved. There indeed we
have a profound proverb which is vindicated by the principle that
every good resolve which does not carry within it the strength for its
execution does not merely reveal its uselessness by maintaining the
existing torment of mind, but adds to the self a new and positive
defeat, which it even serves to entrench and consolidate. The path to
the utmost self-contempt passes nearly always through unfulfilled
resolutions which were not preceded by any genuine repentance.
After any non-fulfilled resolution the self is no longer on the same
level, but finds itself far more deeply degraded than before. This
therefore is the paradoxical position: Even supposing it were true
that the sole value of repentance lay in its possible amendment of
future intention and conduct, the immanent sense of the act of
repentance would still have to relate exclusively to the past misde-
meanour, without any surreptitious regards to future reformation.
But the supposition is erroneous.

As for the objection that the act of repentance does not affect deed
and conduct during the deed but only the memory-image, which
itself has not arisen uninfluenced by the deed and its sequel, it is in
like case: an entirely false conception of memory underlies such
talk. Memory does not consist in there being in our present cons-
ciousness a pre-existent "image," which is referred to something in
the past only by conscious adjudgment. On the contrary, the origi-
nal act of remembering comprises a kind of re-possession a/the very
situation appearing in the phenomenal past, a living and dwelling
within that, not the possession of a present image which must a wait

98
inspection before being referred to the past or "assumed" to be
there. Whatever memory-images are present during the act of
remembering are, moreover, conditioned by the trend and purpose
of the intention of that act. The images follow this intention and
change in accordance with it; the intention does not follow in
haphazard or mechanical fashion a train of images linked by mental
association.
What we call the person or personal self, that central concretion
of our responsible acts ranging over the course of time, can of its
nature - de jure - contemplate every part of our past life, can lay hold
of its sense and worth. The only factors which are dependent on
prevailing physiological conditions, on the reproductive causes
which they govern and on the associated principles of this reproduc-
tion, are those which determine what selection is made from that
life-realm which is in principle accessible to the act of remembering.
Therefore repentance is in the act a true incursion into the past
sphere of our life, and a genuinely effective encroachment upon it.
Repentance genuinely extinguishes the element of moral detraction,
the quality of "wickedness," of the conduct in question, it genuinely
relieves the pressure of the guilt which spreads in all directions from
that wickedness, and at the same time deprives evil of that power of
reproduction by which it must always bring forth more evil. In
accordance with the general rule whereby the value-qualities of our
life are presented to the memory before any other of its significant
qualities, readiness to repent provides a light which shines into our
past to such good effect that we begin to summon up images of
many things which we did not previously recall. Repentance breaks
down that barrier of pride which restricts resurgence to such past
events as furnish pride with satisfaction and justification; it relieves
one from the repressive force of "natural" pride; it thus becomes a
vehicle of truth against oneself.
At this point the special connection of readiness to repent with
the system of virtues in the soul becomes clearly apparent. Just as in
its absence truth against oneself is impossible, so readiness to repent
is itself impossible in the absence of humility, which works against
the natural pride ensnaring the soul in the focal here-and-now of the
active self. It is only possible when humility, resulting from steady
self-reform, inspired by that clear idea of absolute good which we
know to measure our inadequacy, dispels the repressive, hardening

99
 and obdurative tendencies of pride and sets the active self, which
pride had isolated from the dynamic ofthe life-stream, once more in
a fluid relation with this stream and the world. Man is rendered
obdurate far more by pride and presumption than by the fear of
punishment born of his concupiscence, and the more deeply guilt is
embedded in him, the more it has become, as it were,part of him, the
greater is his obduracy. It is not confession, but the initial surrender
of himself, which is so difficult for the hardened impenitent. He who
repents his deed also confesses his deed and overcomes himself -
overcomes even the shame which would close his lips at the last
moment. l
It follows that repentance must therefore be generally misunder-
stood in its nature, sense and achievement where it is confused (in
conformity with that theory of memory which reduces the function
of remembering to the reproduction of "memory-images") with
conditions which may well pre-dispose and facilitate it, but by no
means constitute repentance itself. It is quite correct that the failure
or unhappy consequences of "wicked" conduct more easily dispose
human weakness to repentance than positive success, that thus for
example injury to health, etc., resulting from guilty excesses, or
punishment and disgrace imposed by society, frequently induce the
act of repentance in cases where it might not otherwise have been
induced. Nevertheless, the suffering attendant on repentance per se
is divided by a deep gulf from all these various revulsions conducive
to rueful introspection. Quite a host of fallacious psychological
theories of repentance fall into this basic error - Hmong others - of
confusing the act of repentance with its predisposing circumstances.

The peculiar nature of the role which memory plays in the act of
repentance is not, however, exhausted by the foregoing. There are
two basically different types of memory, which may be differentia-
ted as static and dynamic, or phenomenal andfunctional memory. In
remembering of the first type we do not relive isolated incidents or
situations of our past but reinhabit the central attitude to the world

1. Church doctrine correc1ty assumes that the "perfect" repentance which

washes away all guilt automatically produces the readiness to make both inner
acknowledgment and oral confession, and that where such a readiness is lacking
the repentance may not be deemed perfect.

100
which we then adopted, together with its tendencies of thought and
will, love and hate; we conform to our total attitude of that time, in
other words to the identity and disposition of the Self which then
prevailed. This is a distinction which certain pathological pheno-
mena bring into sharp focus. In a German lunatic asylum, some
years ago, I came across an old man of seventy who was experien-
cing his entire environment on the plane of development reached in
his eighteenth year. That doesn't mean that the man was still lost
amid the actual objects making up his world when he was a boy of
eighteen, that he saw his home of those days, with its attendant
people, streets, towns, etc. No, he saw, heard and experienced
nothing but what was going on around him in the room, but he lived
it all as the boy of eighteen he once was, with all that boy's individual
and general impulses and ambitions, hopes and fears. The special
kind of re-living in memory which is here demonstrated in its
extreme form and as a self-sufficient system enables us to know not
only what we in fact did and how in fact we reacted to our environ-
ment, but also what we would have done, what indeed we could have
wanted to do, how we would have reacted, when confronted by this
or that circumstance. In this kind of remembering the path does not
lead from the content of our life to the self which lived it, but from
the experiencing self into which we displace ourselves to the specific
content of the life.
But the kind of remembering which contributes to the deeper and
more important type of repentance comes under the heading of
functional memory. In this case, although the past deed appears in
memory and is related to the unworthiness of our conduct in per-
forming it, the deed is not the actual object of repentance. Instead,
the constituent self in our total person out of whose roots the deed,
the act of will, arose is re-experienced and, in the course of repen-
tance, cast down and thrust out of the totality of the personal self.
Where then certain writers distinguish between a repentance ofbeing
and a repentance of conduct, or even between "repentance" and
"rueful introspection", they can only be referring to whether it is the
objective disvalue of the past constituent self or that of the momen-
tary active self performing the deed which preponderates in the
repentant memory. Schopenhauer in particular used to stress that
the deepest state of repentance is not expressed in the formula
"Alas! what have I done?" but in the more radical "Alas! what kind

101
of a person I am!" or even "What sort of person must I be, to have
been capable of such an action!" It is, moreover, his intention to
illustrate that although empirical determinism first lends repen-
tance its proper weight, the far deeper and more overwhelming
character of that second form of repentance is a proof that our
"intelligible character" (which Schopenhauer inaccurately equates
with "innate character") is nevertheless regarded as a consequence
of the exercise of free will.
But this is a theory which rends asunder the whole meaning of
repentance. It is implicitly not possible to repent one's very person
in its quintessential Being. We may, I grant, be sorry that we are
what we are, or even be shocked, but - quite apart from the fact that
our sorrow itself would be colored by our essential nature - we
cannot repent our Being. Once we cease to regard exclusively the
details of our past conduct, the only thing left for us to repent is that
we then were such a person as could do that deed! It is not the deed,
and certainly not our essential self, that in this act of repentance lie
both "behind" and "below" us, but that concretion of the selffrom
which memory showed us the deed arising - "necessarily" arising, if
such a concretion may be at all supposed.
The unique impact and significance of the deeper act of repen-
tance - which impels no mere adjustment of outlook or good resolve
but a veritable transformation of outlook - can be understood only if
we take account of the following. The manner in which we reflex-
ively experience ourselves has definite levels of concentration and
self-appraisal, and the change from one level to another is not
unreservedly determined by the overall psychic causality which
determines psychic processes within anyone level. Relatively to the
causal pattern which governs the empirical contents on each level, a
radical alteration of the very level, or range of levels, whereon the
personality currently dwells is afree act of our total personal self.
And in the last resort it is to this total self that all the successive
concretions of self belong as empirical constituents out of which, as
this or that circumstance is revealed by memory, we see the deed ari-
sing. It is when such a freely effected alteration of the focal level of
our whole inner life is seen to be its attendant phenomenon that the
deeper act of repentance becomes fully comprehensible. However
necessary the deed appears to us on the level of our existence at that
time, however "understandable" it is, down to its smallest details, in

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the strict historical sense - once we are confident of having "placed"
that level - there was no like necessity for us to have been on that
level. We could have altered that level. Not only could we have
willed and acted otherwise, we "could" equally have been other than
we were. Therefore this ability to have been other than we were is no
mere illusory and misconceived back-dating of the quite separate
fact that we now could act otherwise or think that we could. On the
contrary, the act of repentance shows us this ability, this central
will-power, as an ingredient pervading the whole earlier situation.
However, present acknowledgment of evil in the old self, and
present awareness of the better beings we could have been or better
things we could have done, have their way of bursting through once
we know from present experience our capacity for improvement of
conduct. One might conclude that it is not the act of repentance
which effects the alteration of level, that this act is only a sign and
consequence of our present superiority to the old self and its deed.
From this point of view we could now repent only because we are
now freer and better. Indeed, when measured against the newly-felt
capacity for improvement there evidently falls across the earlier
deed and situation the shadow of a guilty constraint, in which we see
them now lying far below us. But this is not a matter which may be
reduced to such a simple, rational either/or.
For it is the peculiar nature of repentance that in the very act
which is so painfully destructive we gain our first complete insight
into the badness of our self and conduct, and that in the same act
which seems rationally comprehensible only from the "freer" van-
tage point of the new plane of existence, this very vantage point is
attained. So the act of repentance precedes in a certain sense both its
point of departure and its point of arrival, its terminus a quo and its
terminus ad quem.
It is repentance, then, which first brings home to us the know-
ledge of a past capacity for better conduct. But this knowledge is in
no way productive; it is mere awareness, a penetration ofthe instinc-
tual fog which blinded us. It produces nothing: it only informs.
Thus the continuous dynamic of repentance enables us to
glimpse the attainment of an altogether higher, ideal existence - the
raising through firm self-revision of the whole plane of our moral
existence - and lays open to our gaze, far below us, the whole
condition of the old self. This is the deepest mystery of that vital,

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 deeper act of repentance, and it has given rise to many difficulties in
systematic theology. We find, in particular, an analogous problem
underlying the interaction between divine remission of guilt and the
new quality of man initiated by sanctifying grace. It appears that
only the free grace entering with "perfect" repentance can truly
erase and eradicate the guilt of sin - not merely so order matters, as
Luther would have it, that God closes his eyes to guilt and "counts it
not", while man lingers on in sin and guilt. And yet again the
admission of grace would seem conditional upon the removal of
guilt. For grace, like the higher existence conditional upon it, can
only make inroads into the human being in so far as guilt is re-
moved. Many theologians (Scheeben for example) make use at this
juncture of a felicitous simile: guilt, they say, retreats before the
advance of grace into the soul "as darkness before light".2 In this
way repentance no longer appears to presuppo.se the very upraising
of the moral being which it is assumed to initiate. It is therefore one
and the same act which effects both the seWs upstriving to its
potential height of ideal existence and the perceptible descent ofthe
old self, its destruction and expulsion.
Just as, when climbing a mountain, we see both the summit's
approach, and the valley sinking beneath our feet, each picture
entering our experience under the control of the one act, so in
repentance tHe person mounts, and in mounting sees below it the
former constituent self.
The more repentance ceases to be mere repentance of conduct
and becomes repentance of being, the more it grasps the root of guilt
perceived, to pluck it out of the person and restore the latter's
freedom, and the more also it makes the transition from shame over
a particular deed to that completeness of "hearty contrition" out of
which an indwelling force of regeneration builds up a "new heart"
and a "new man". To that extent, then, repentance even assumes the
character of a true repentance of conversion and leads finally from
good resolutions through a deeper alteration of outlook to trans-
formation of outlook - that is, to a positive "rebirth" - wherein,
without detriment to its formal and individual identity, the spiri-
tual core of the person, which is the ultimate root of our moral acts,

2. Cf. Matthias Scheeben, Die Mysterien des Christenturns [The Mysteries of

Christianity], Freiburg 1912, p. 531.

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appears to burn away all remnant of the objects of its former regard
and to build itself anew.

Something remains to be said about two of the skeptical theses

mentioned earlier: the fear-theory and the revenge-theory.
The fear-theory was already to the fore in the early history of
Protestantism. Luther and Calvin find the essence of contrition
itself in the terrores conscientiae, in that fear of hell whose onset
succeeds man's perception of his inadequacy to observe God's law.
For Luther this terror is the only motive driving man, aware of his
burden of sin and of his necessary insufficiency before the la w, to
secure justification through faith in Jesus' redeeming blood and in
the atonement and divine mercy which that blood obtained. In that
Jesus "shields" the heart of man, sinful now and sinful to remain
until death, from the eye of God with the fulness of his merits, "the
sin is not counted" against the sinner; in other words, the punish-
ment of the sin is remitted. "Good resolve", as well as a certain
diminution of sinfulness, are expected to ensue when man is fully
conscious of the wholly undeserved mercy of God and its attendant
state of grace. And so resolve is here completely divorced from
repentance. In this view the divine "forgiveness" of sin has the sense
of neither a true extinction of guilt as a pre-existent condition, nor a
healing displacement of guilt by a new sanctifying quality within the
soul. Its whole meaning resides in the remission of punishment and
in the assumption by the sinner that God now "turns a blind eye"
upon his sin - a somewhat unintelligible assumption, and one which
runs altogether counter to the omniscience of God.
But more recent secular philosophy also takes the Fear-theory as
a point of departure:
"Repentance 3 is no virtue, and does not spring from reason; but
whosoever repents a deed is doubly oppressed and incapable." "For
whosoever repents a deed suffers doubly, in that he permits himself
to be overcome first by a reprehensible desire and thereafter by
disgust concerning it." Spinoza is also one of those who find in fear
the origin of repentance, that "disgust, accompanied by the idea of
the deed, which we believe we have performed out ofa free decision
of the mind", to quote his untenable definition. According to his

3. Spinoza, Ethics IV, Proposition 54.

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further explanation, repentance is a consequence of blame and of
penalties imposed by society, with an attendant fear, based on
observed effect, that attaches itself to the idea of any deed we come
to regard as "wrong". "Thus does man according to his education
repent or glory in a deed." Spinoza therefore sees in repentance no
more than a relative virtue, a virtue for the common herd. "The
people should be feared in so far as they do not fear." But repen-
tance is no virtue for the "free man"; he is guided by reason itself.
What radically contradicts the fear-theory is above all the fact
that it is on the contrary fear which normally prevents us from
reaching that mental level of unflinching self-"ingatheredness" in
which true repentance becomes possible. Fear directs our attention
and interest outward - to face oncoming danger. An active type of
criminal, while he knows himself the object of a hue and cry, will
defiantly stand by his crime, devoting all his energies to "not letting
himself be caught". One of more passive disposition will allow fear
to cow him and reluctantly submit to his fate. In either case, even
were nothing else to hinder repentance, fear would prevent it. A
man must know himself out of immediate danger before he can
come to that ingatheredness which is a prerequisite of true repen-
tance. Then for the first time he can find that being alone with
oneself and one's deed, without which there is no repentance. Apart
from that, we are able to make a very clear conscious distinction
between retrospective repentance of a deed and the simultaneous
fear which looks future-wards; at the same time we confirm that the
two occur in - so to speak - entirely different strata of our existence.
We see how the fear breaks forth from the center of our conscious-
ness of life, and would be completely removed if its vehicle, the
body and its sensations, were abstracted: Repentance, on the other
hand, is felt to flow forth from the psychic center of personality, and
after abstraction of our tenement of clay would not only remain
possible but be enabled to reach perfection, through our release
from the strait-jacket of fleshly instincts, which distract us from
perception of our wickedness. This independent but simultaneous
existence offear and repentance in relation to the same valuation of
the deed shows at once that repentance cannot be a psychic "evolved
form" of fear, since if that were so the fear would have had to be
consumed and transmuted in forming the new pattern of repen-

106
tance; therefore it could not still pervasively co-exist in us with
repentance.
These naturally remain valid propositions when we consider fear
of divine punishment. Mere fear of the pain of punishment - "servile
fear" - has nothing in common with repentance. Nor is it even
attritio, which theology rightly distinguishes from contritio - that is,
from "perfect" repentance founded on the act of loving God as the
highest good and intrinsically the most worthy of love. No, attritio
neither is fear of the mere pain of punishment, nor is it even based on
such fear. Certainly it may be "triggered" by fear of the punishment
itself as an utterance of divine justice, but never by fear of pain qua
pain. But even then repentance proper stands apart from this
"triggering" process as something altogether new and distinct from
fear of punishment. Moreover, the so-called fear of (eternal or
temporal) punishment is powerless to precipitate genuine repen-
tance unless its primary object is not the mere pain but the punish-
ment itself as an act and expression of eternal justice, unless there-
fore its roots lie also in reverence and respect for the divinity
administering this justice and meting out punishment. If then attri-
tio represents a stage inferior to contritio, it must also be that
whenever contritio is possible for a person, mere attritio presents a
positive hindrance to the admission of contritio, according to the
rule whereby in general fear hampers rather than assists the devel-
opment of repentance.
From the viewpoint of a theory of fear it is no less difficult to
grasp how it comes about that fear is transmuted into repentance
only when the thing or conduct detracting from the person has some
moral and religious significance. How is it that for example an ugly
face, organic defect or deficiency of talent - things that are always
coming to light, things one is unhappily obliged to encounter again
and again - how is it that all these factors of detraction are never the
object of repentance but at the most objects of self-torture, of grief,
of self-loathing, of revenge upon oneself? How is it that we never
repent an unsuccessful venture, or a work of art that falls short of an
ideal, in the same way as a theft or forgery? "Never"; that is, save in
so far as we are forced to ascribe poor achievement to moral
insufficiency in the exercise of requisite skills: we never repent our
deficiency of talent. Do we then feel that the sheer disgust which
may arise from such defects, from un intelligence or inadequacy of

107
disposition, is intrinsically any the less important? - and is there any
the less cause for fear and disgust in "the idea of oneself as the cause
of our disgust?" Of course not. Notwithstanding, in such cases
everything is lacking that could be called repentance.
Now, if it is a necessary part of repentance that the repented
deficiency should be of that quality which is specified as "evil", and
that it should be discovered in the sensing of evil which goes to the
making of repentance, why should not this deficiency, that is the
inner character of evil, in itself suffice to determine its emotional
negation in the act of repentance? What does there remain for a fear
of consequences to contribute, as a superfluous vehicle of the qual-
ity "evil"? Or what need is there that the after-effects of this fear
should intervene, to assist the realization of repentance? Fear does
from time to time occasion repentance, but still more often - such is
the general finding - it adulterates repentance. In every possible
form fear, even devoid of any specific object, is a presentiment, a
premonition, before the actual hurt, of danger or of harm to life:
Repentance necessarily is retrospective.

The revenge-theory cuts rather deeper. There is undoubtedly an

impulse to revenge directed against oneself. When a child hits itself
for doing something "wrong", when we "could tear our hair" for
acting in this or that way, when countless forms of self-punishment
known to history do not necessarily represent religious penance or
mortification of the flesh but bear all the marks of natural expiation
or revenge upon the self, then it appears one may correctly assume
that a man possesses a primordial revenge-impulse even against
himself. For it is hardly feasible to reduce such an impulse to a mere
psychic infection with foreseen social blame or, as Adam Smith does
in his fallacious doctrine ofsympathy,4 to an involuntary sympathy
with the revenge-impulse of another - that is to say, a collaboration,
against our will or without its participation, in the fulfilment of
revenge against ourself. The revenge-impulse thus precedes primor-
dially the specific choice between self and not-self for its object. In

4. See my book, Zur Phdnomenologie und Theone der Sympathiegefiihle, 1913.

[Enlarged 1923: Wesen und Formen der Sympathie; Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 7, ed.
by Manfred S. Frings. Translated by Peter Heath as The Nature of Sympathy,
London 1954.]

108
its original nature it can as well turn against ourselves as against
other persons.
There are today writers whose whole output seems - if one may
speak thus - to feed upon a savage inner thirst for revenge against
themselves and everything with which they are associated. In their
satires they only appear to let fly against their invented characters: it
is themselves alone whom they have in mind. It is therefore scarcely
necessary to regard, with Nietzsche, such self-revenge as primarily a
consequence and extreme retroversion of revenge-feelings against
others, and similar impulses that are frustrated of outlet. Both the
unbridled revenge-impulse and its rational, civilized form, the im-
pulse to mete out proportional retribution, represent an immediate
reaction to certain kinds of faulty conduct which from their nature
"demand to be expiated".5 It is noteworthy that the impulse to
retribution ensues before the perpetrator is known or envisaged: the
search for an object is a later step, and therefore does not exclude
admitting oneself to be the uncovered perpetrator.
Yet no matter how one "spiritualizes" these two impulses, the
reality of repentance remains unexplained! Well may the revenge-
theory appear to elucidate many features of repentance which are
quite unamenable to (inter alia) the fear-theory: features such as the
essential necessity of reference to the past, the peculiarly overwhel-
ming keenness of remorse, the urge to expiate and repair the wrong,
etc., etc. Nevertheless, the hypothesis still fails entirely to illuminate
the dark core of the act as a whole. The attributes particularly
lacking in revenge and self-retribution which would lend them an
affinity, albeit at one remove, with repentance are I. spirituality6
and inwardness, together with the medium of calm, repose, gravity
and "self-possession" in which repentance is embedded; 2. the
ascent to a higher plane of life which is realized in repentance and is
accompanied by the envisaging of the ideal worth, indeed the very
salvation, of our person - that is, by an image once hidden from us to

5. Cf. my analysis of expiation in my book,Der Formalismus in der Ethlk unddie

materiale Wertethik, 1913/16. [Gesammelte Werke, Vol 2, ed. by Maria Scheler.
Translated by Manfred S. Frings and Roger Funk as Formalism in Ethics and
Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethics of
Personalism, Evanston 1973.]
6. Cf. my remarks on page 106 concerning the possible abstraction of the body.

109
which we are now drawn in love, in "love of our eternal good";
3. the strengthening through repentance and the liberation of our
moral selffor good resolve and amendment of outlook; 4. restriction
of reference to evil and moral guilt; this is characteristic only of
repentance, whereas revenge may attack any kind of suspected
personal defect and any cause offaulty conduct. Revenge against the
self is undertaken in a mood of excitation, devoid of any foundation
in a positive guiding-image of the seWs being and development; in
these circumstances the attitude remains quite fruitless.
One thing, I grant, is beyond dispute: that in regard to any
condition of self-torture of self-loathing, no matter how determined
- be it even pathologically - which has resulted in a certain situation
or course of conduct, we do have a strong tendency to mistake it (if
at all possible) for genuine repentance or to put it to our credit as
repentance. But such self-deceptions, which so often lead to the
deception of others, presuppose both the phenomenon of genuine
repentance and its positive valuation. In their cruelty to themselves,
in their morbid love of pain, which "wallows in suffering for sin", in
their thirst for revenge against themselves, in their moral debilities,
in their secret fear of the past or their obsessive brooding on it, in
that jaundiced eye which they from time to time cast on themselves
and all the world, these men do indeed tend to fancy the image,
well-pleasing to God, of a contrite heart, and to mask these their
secret vices or mental illnesses under the semblance of a virtue. But
this fate, which repentance shares with every virtue, not to say every
merit, that it can be simulated to the delusion of oneself and others,
should give no cause for anybody who considers himself a psycho-
logist to lose sight of repentance itself behind its array of semblan-
ces.
Repentance is not, as is generally the first assumption, an inert
"feeling of disgust" attached to certain "ideas" concerning conduct
of which a man acknowledges himself to be the author. Let us put on
one side this platitude of orthodox associational psychology. Re-
pentance is on the contrary a purposeful movement of the mind in
relation to guilt, aimed at whatever guilt has accumulated in the
human being. The goal of this "movement" is an emotional nega-
tion and neutralization of guilt's continuing effectiveness, an inner
striving to drive guilt out of the vital core of the Person, to make that
person whole. What creates the anguish of repentance is the reaction

110
against this movement of the pressure of guilt, which is immediately
increased in the act of repentance. As the unyielding quality of guilt
increases, so does the anguish, and the deeper guilt is embedded in
the core, the more it is unyielding. The first thing, is not the anguish,
but the movement against guilt and the threat to its continuance; the
anguish is secondary and consequent. The anguish of repentance is
by nature keen, burning, overwhelming; it has no dullness. But
apart form this quality of pain there arises from the whole process a
simultaneous peace and contentment which may rise to the height of
bliss. Peace and enjoyment have nothing in common with discon-
tent and disgust; yet see, this more deeply felt appeasement rises
even as the anguish gains in force. Can it then be the inward
perception that in this pain guilt's expiation lies - is it to this that the
contentment testifies? Or to the removal of guilt's pressure as repen-
tance takes its course? One could assume the first if repentance were
envisaged as a kind of mental, reflexive retribution. But this as-
sumption has been shown to be false. When one bows to a demand
for expiation, one does penance, one does not repent. Such obe-
dience is even possible without any basis of repentance. For though
willingness to do penance is a necessary consequence of repentance -
as necessary as readiness to confess - it is not conversely true that
repentance must result from willingness to do penance. Still less is
such willingness identical with repentance. Least of all is repentance
a self-gratifying pain, though this may appear to be so when the
place of genuine repentance is usurped by an illusion of repentance
founded on love of pain. Among others, the pietists have often
confused the two things: hence the highly sensual, almost masochis-
tic colouring of their writings on repentance.
And so progressive contentment is in fact a consequence of the
gradual lifting of the pressure of guilt. It comes automatically to
fruition as guilt is objectified and displaced from the center of the
person.

If repentance is a neutralization of guilt, then there must be guilt

somewhere when the reaction of repentance sets in.
But where is this "guilt" then? It is that quality of "evil" which in
the course of time has accreted to the person, the very seat of action,
through its evil acts. And so guilt is a quality, not a "feeling". What
is known as a "sense of guilt" differs from other feelings only in its

111
inner reference to this quality. So whether one feels guilty or not, the
guilt sticks fast. It is most important to distinguish between on the
one hand the existence of guilt and its measure, and on the other the
varying subtlety or obtuseness of the sense of guilt, that is, the
liminal values of the sensing of guilt. For one of the most mysterious
ways in which guilt works is that itprovides its own concealment and
blunts all sensitivity to its existence. And conversely it is characteris-
tic ofthe growth of humility and holiness in a person that as the life
of every saint bears witness, sensitivity to guilt becomes more acute
functionally as guilt is objectively removed, and that therefore
smaller and smaller failings are felt to be grave. And so the act of
repentance is directed throughout not against the sense of guilt -
which it is quite likely to extend and expand - but against the
objective quality of guilt itself. But it is "through" sensivity to guilt
that it is directed against guilt, just as the act offocusing one's own
or someone else's attention is directed to an object through listening
to or through seeing that object. In every case, then, the act of
repentance must be induced by some feeling of guilt, usually unac-
companied at first by any pinpointing of the "how?" and "towards
whom?" But only in and through the act of repentance does the
sense of guilt normally find its expansion, location, direction and
depth - often even its specific object in, say, this deed or that one.
Admittedly, if guilt has grown so great that it entirely or almost
stifles all feeling of its existence, it has indeed come to that partial or
total hardening through which repentance can no longer break, or
break only with difficulty. Since guilt is a quality of the person, the
center of action of the human being, and has through the person's
acts and deeds accreted to it as a pervasive "complement", it re-
mains latent, as long as it persists, in every act performed by the
Person. It is not necessarily the real, causal consequences in nature
of evil deeds which produce further evil: In a purely causal sense
they are just as likely to issue in good or indifferent effects. There is
no moral causality in that sense. But guilt, the dark work of these
deeds in the very soul, enters into everything a man wills and does,
and it determines, without his knowing, that he shall proceed in its
direction. And so to this extent every repentance of conduct is not
repentance directly concerning a deed, but repentance concerning
the guiltiness which the deed has imposed on the person. Neverthe-

112
less, repentance of conduct still differs from repentance of being in
its primary concern with the moral deficiency of the deed.
But what may repentance accomplish in its attack upon guilt?
Two things - of which it alone, and nothing else, is capable. It
cannot drive out of the world the external natural reality of the deed
and its causal consequences, nor the evil character which the deed
acquires ipsofacto. All that stays in the world. But it can totally kill
and extinguish the reactive effect of the deed within the human soul,
and with it the root of an eternity of renewed guilt and evil. Repen-
tance, at least in its perfect form, genuinely annihilates the psychic
quality called "guilt". And so it bursts the chain of evil's reproduc-
tive power which is transmitted through the growth in evil of men
and times. This then is the way in which it enables men to embark on
new and guiltless courses. Repentance is the mighty power of self-
regeneration of the moral world, whose decay it is constantly work-
ing to avert.
There lies the great paradox of repentance, that it sorrowfully
looks back to the past while working mightily and joyfully for the
future, for renewal, for release from moral death. Its mental concern
and its living action are in diametric opposition. The progressive,
the meliorist, the perfectionist, they all say No regrets! - but do better
in thefuture. Why, to them, even, good is no more than the better of
tomorrow! But here is another paradox: - The more such people
look to the future, the more projects for "improvement" they
continue, in their fear of inaction, to turn over in their minds, the
more terribly all their inner activity is hounded by past guilt, houn-
ded not merely in the execution but before that, in the selection of
material for schemes and resolutions. Thus the eternal fugitive from
his present and past sinks deeper and deeper into the dead arms of
that very past. For the less one sees the guilt of history objectively, to
repent it, the more mightily it is at work. And so the rubric is rightly
not "Forget repentance and vow past action to future amendment"
but "Repent, and therefore do better!"
Not utopianism but repentance is the most revolutionary force in
the moral world.

When we thus consider good resolve, amendment and transforma-

tion of outlook, the "change of heart" , we see they are not arbitrary
measures subsequent upon, but divorced from repentance, nor are

113
they a kind of by-product, dispensable and inessential. They all
spring from repentance as of their own accord. This is simply the
fruit of the natural activity of a soul which has yielded itself to be
cleansed from guilt and reinstated in its original and rightful emi-
nence. The less the intention of "good resolve" is contained in the
initial act of repentance, the more powerful it is in the end, raised up
out of repentance as if by its own strength and almost without the
assistance of conscious will. Moreover, the less the penitent allows
his spiritual attention to digress towards the goodness of his newly
repentant self, turning repentance into a fresh occasion for vanity
and private glorification in his own or even in God's eyes, and the
more painfully he is as lost in the depth of his guilt, the more
majestically his god-created soul, all unbeknown, is rising to its
height out of the dust of earthliness that used to stifle and pervade it.
Meanwhile, the more deeply repentance penetrates into the roots of
being of a Person's source of action, the more it appears the equiva-
lent, on a higher, spiritual plane, of that most elementary phenome-
non of biology, described by A. Goette, in which the death and
rebirth of an animal coincide as if one sole process, and the self-de-
stroying animal builds itself anew.
For there is no repentance which does not from its inception
enclose the blueprint of a new heart. Repentance kills only to create.
It annihilates only to rebuild. It is already building secretly where it
still seems to destroy. So it is that repentance forms the driving
power of that miraculous process which the Gospels call the "re-
birth" ofa new man out of the "old Adam", the acquiring ofa "new
heart".

It is very superficial to imagine that the only occasions of repentance

should be certain quite special and obvious misdeeds and moral
failures, forming a concrete debit, which must then be balanced by
an equal credit oflikewise quantitative repentance. The dark earth-
realm of guilt we are discussing has such deeds and failures only as its
visible peaks. Within the soul, guilt itself is the hidden reservoir
which feeds each individual moral failure. Into this subterranean
realm of the soul, into the hidden realm of its guilt, repentance must
descend, must as it follows down the slope awaken a new conscious-
ness of this dark and hidden existence. If anyone therefore should
say, "I am not conscious of any guilt in myself, therefore I have

114
nothing to repent" - he must surely be either a god or an animal. If
however the speaker is a man, he as yet knows nothing ofthe nature
of guilt.

One should also be sure of this: Repentance is not only a process in

the individual soul; like guilt it it basically also a social, historical,
collective phenomenon. The great principle of the solidarity 7 of all
the children of Adam in responsibility, guilt and merit implies that
the subsistence of collective responsibility, together with each indi-
vidual's awareness that he does in fact share responsibility for all
events of the moral cosmos, has no primary connection with those
perceptible, demonstrable effects which individuals exercise on one
another whether directly or through whatever middle-terms, in the
causal context of society and history, and which are accessible to
their understanding. On the contrary, these effects, and our aware-
ness of them, serve only to locate those points of the moral cosmos
for which we can know with certainty our collective responsibility.
But they do not create this responsibility, nor the feeling for it which
- so far as we are morally awakened - is our constant companion.
There is, however, a pure form of collective responsibility: it com-
prises an unceasing awareness that even the total moral world of all
past and future, of all stars and heavens, could be radically different
if "I" were only "different"; it comprises a deep intuition that the
mysterious laws of the interresonance of love and hate, the laws of
their propagation through infinity, gather all stirrings of all finite
hearts either into an occasionally varied concord or into a dishar-
mony that is incessantly varied, all being heard and judged by the
ear of God as an indivisible whole. This fundamental sense of
collective responsibility is just as essential to the subsistence of a
moral subject as the sense of responsibility for itself. Collective
responsibility is not first assumed by special acts of obligation or by
pledging oneself to others; indeed such engagements are implicitly
conditional on its pre-existence.
And so repentance is as fundamentally concerned with our share
in all guilt as with our individual culpability; it is as fundamentally
concerned with the tragic guilt to which we blamelessly fall a prey as

7. See my formal deduction of the principle of solidarity in Formalism in Ethics

etc., Part 2.

115
with the guilt which we freely incur; with the collective and heredi-
tary guilt of communities, families, peoples and all humanity as with
individual guilt. Considering that the principle of solidarity lies at
the roots of Christian doctrine, it is very superficial to say that one
should rest content with "not judging" the guilt of others but rather
be mindful of one's own individual guilt. Now this is the true
meaning of the doctrine: that one should not only be mindful of
one's own guilt but feel oneself genuinely implicated in this guilt of
others and furthermore in the collective guilt of one's age; one
should therefore regard such guilt as also one's "own", and share in
the repenting of it. That is the true sense of mea culpa, mea culpa,
mea maxima culpa!
Similarly we see even in history how repentance can grow into a
mighty torrent; how it rushes for a generation through whole peo-
ples and civilizations; how it opens obdurate hearts to compassion;
how it historically illumines the past of nations which was hidden by
racial pride; how it broadens the once ever-narrowing future into a
broad, bright plain of possibilities - and so prepares the way for the
regeneration of a collective moral existence. Such processes of
communal repentance - for an accumulation of communal guilt -
recur, with a rhythm all their own, throughout the history of nearly
all great communities. They have the most diverse forms and modes
of expression, according to the social system of the people concern-
ed, and according to its positive religion and morality. It was not
least through the. invincible tears of its repentance that early Chris-
tianity renewed the outgoing world of antiquity, hardened by plea-
sure-seeking, by lust for power and glory, and poured into that
world a feeling of rejuvenation. How great a part of all the thoughts
and feelings of patristic literature is shot through with this repen-
tance! Yet another mighty wave of repentance ran through the
peoples of Europe after the increasingly savage, life-destroying
brutality of the eleventh century had taken hold. On this occasion
repentance put an end to the final, desperate utopian hope, for the
end of the world and the Second Coming were thought to be
imminent, and thus it prepared the ground for that spiritual and
religious rebirth whose greatest leader was to be Saint Bernard of
Clairvaux. Dona lacrimarum - such was the name given to the gift,
bestowed by grace, of a new will to penance and repentance, which
brought Europe to its senses for the great enterprise of the Crusades

116
and ensured the revival of a Church formerly paralysed by a wither-
ing and coarsening of spirituality and by the unbridled, arbitrary
tyranny of worldly powers. "There a woke out of the raging passions
and outbreaks of brutal force a mighty feeling of penance."8 Con-
struction, paralysis and cultural fragmentation, then once again
resolution through repentance and fe-acceptance of the old ingre-
dients into a new, creative will to life and spirit of total rebirth: It is
not only the little individual soul which breathes in this rhythm, but
the great soul of mankind in history. Even in the field of history, the
more deeply searching eye will fail to discern in any direction the
spectacle of continuous "progress" - that mirage which for so long
mocked our nineteenth century and hid from our eyes the more
beautiful, more sublime law which comprehends all progress, the
law of death and transmutation.
Borne of such an outburst offeeling, commensurate in power and
extent with the collective guilt of Europe, which in World War I was
incurred more expressly and publicly than before, - borne on a wave
of repentance, that conversion will also come to pass which is
intrinsically the sole condition for the formation of a new political
system of European union. No new juristic wisdom, no diplomat-
ic good will (no matter how good), not even any "revolution" nor
any "new men" can take the place of this change a/heart among the
peoples. For this great object, too, the conversion of the soul is the
inevitable form of the new dispensation. Here, too, the necessary
form of consciousness, out of which alone can be born new positive
attitudes and finally new plans of political reconstruction, is that
recent feeling of profound revulsion from the man-made historical
system as it existed before the war; it is the gradual revelation, under
the spur of repentance, that the roots of that event sprang from the
catacombs in the soul of the type of man foremost in every nation.
All those numerous philosophies which modern man has cultiva-
ted and excogitated in evasion of the guilt growing within him - they
will all have to be smashed in the process. For the latest type of man,
who would seem finally to have crossed the bounds of Christianity,
to have left its framework of vital acquisitions, has now reached the
following basic position: Having allowed the guilt of the age to grow

8. Neander, A., Der heilige Bernhard und sein Zeitalter [St. Bernhard and his
Age], Gotha, 1865.

117
to the point where he dared not feel or think - much less expiate - it,
he finds the guilt he guiltily obscures confronting him as, appar-
ently, a purely objective force of "circumstances" (e.g. economic
circumstances), before which one must uncomplainingly bow. To
him, then, I would say: Tear off the maskfrom your "circumstances",
and you will see guilt. His own unrepented guilt, or that of his
forefathers, takes on for modern man the outward form of a spectre
in which his soul no longer recognizes itself. Guilt stands before his
bewildered mind in the guise of a new thing, an external power, a
"fate". The spectre demands whole complex, scientific theories for
its "explanation". All historico-deterministic theories (e.g. the eco-
nomic theory of history) in fact subconsciously derive their suste-
nance from this feeling of helpless constraint, which is no more
than the natural consequence of a spiritual condition and attitude
that, systematically and on principle, excludes the only answer to
the recurring necessity for liberation, the unfailing air-duct which
may rescue the self from suffocation under the weight of history -
the way of repentance. Self-deception over guilt which, though
scarcely felt any more, is all the more effective; self-deception
through boundless activity, efevating the simple process of work to
an absolute value, or self-deception through the headlong plunge
into the primitive pleasure-world of sensuality; eternally provision-
allife, postponing automatically all assessment of life to the future,
to the deathbed, to the "next time", and then seeking a logical and
moral justification in the doctrine of the will to "progress" - that is
the kind of "system" prevailing today.

We said at the beginning that in the stirrings of our conscience we

become aware of an invisible order, concerning our soul and its
relation with its lord and Creator, which presents itself spontaneous-
ly, without interpretation on our part. Likewise repentance as-
sumes its full meaning and becomes, as it were, fully articulate only
when we come to envisage it (over and above its neutralization of
guilt, which still belongs to the order of nature) within the universal
framework of metaphysics and religion. It assumes its full meaning
when it no longer strikes at the merely "bad", but at the "bad"
which is sin in the eyes of God. As it thus looks up to God the soul
learns to understand the renewal and peace of repentance as the
mysterious process known as "forgiveness of sin" and as an infu-

118
sion of new strength from the center of things. Grace is the name of
this strength. It may depend on very many conditions what form the
representations and attendant dogmatic concepts of this great pro-
cess take, and how the system of a church presents repentance,
confession, penance, justification, reconciliation and sanctification
as positive institutions of salvation. The root of all such representa-
tions and institutions is, however, always one and the same. They
are all founded in the fact that repentance, though it is directed as a
personal act against our own guilt-laden heart, of its nature yet
transcends our heart, and looks beyond the confines of its impotence
to assist its re-immersion in a suspected center of things, the eternal
source of all strength. Such, in the full measure of the experience, is
the immanent "sense" of repentance.
Even if there were nothing else in the world from which we might
create the idea of God, repentance alone could dra w our attention
to God's existence. Repentance begins with an indictment! But
before whom do we indict ourselves? Is it not then in the nature of an
indictment that there should be a person who receives it and before
whom the charge is laid? ... Repentance is, furthermore, an inward
confession of our guilt. But to whom do we then confess, when lips
are sealed and we are alone with our soul? And to whom do we owe
the debt of guilt which oppresses us? ... Repentance ends with a clear
consciousness of the removal, the annihilation of guilt. But who has
taken the guilt from us? Who or what is capable of such a thing? ...
Repentance pronounces its verdict according to a law felt to be holy,
which we could not have prescribed to ourselves but which never-
theless dwells withing our hearts. Yet almost in the same breath
repentance releases us from the consequences of his la w for us and
our conduct! But where is the giver of this law, and who but the
lawgiver could restrain the law's consequences? ... Repentance en-
dows us with a new strength of resolution and, in certain cases, a
new heart risen from the ashes of the old. but where is the source of
strength, and where is the idea for the construction of this new heart,
and where the effective power for its making?
And so every manifestation of this great moral process sets in
motion a purposeful reaching out to an invisible world, and if we
leave this movement to itself, if we refrain from diverting it with
premature interpretations, it will of its own accord bring before our
minds the mysterious outline of an eternal and infinite judge, an

119
eternal and infinite mercy, an infinite might, and eternal source of
life.

The foregoing is still not specifically a Chri-stian thought, and is far

from resting on any positive revelation. It is Christian only in the
sense that the soul itself is, as Tertullian says, anima naturaliter
christiana. And yet it is only in the Christian Church that even these
natural functions of repentance have retained their full meaning and
illumination. For it is only through Christian teaching that we are
able to understand why repentance should possess the central func-
tion of rebirth in the life of man.
It is a fearful thing that we can win life only on the dark via
dolorosa of repentance. But it is glorious that we have way to life.
And do we not necessarily lose it through accumulation of guilt?
What kind of a world must it be, and how created, in which such a
thing should be both necessary and possible? In what strange rela-
tion to its Creator must such a worl<;l stand? And how is it that this
thing is necessary always andfor everybody? I answer with a thought
from Cardinal Newman's Apologia pro vita sua:
" ... either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a
true sense discarded from His presence .... - if there be a God, since
there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible
aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its
Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and
thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes
to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence
of God."9
This thought of Newman's, as simple as it is great, we would
ourselves formulate as follows: I possess a perfectly clear and self-
evident mental vision of the nature 10 of a possible God as that of an
infinite Being and a summum bonum. I ascertain that I have neither
received this idea from any factual form in the internal or external
real world, nor in any way deduced or borrowed it therefrom. The
contrary is rather the case: that I apprehend the world, just as I

9. [Part VII, "General Answer to Mr. Kingsley," # 7; Translator.]

10. It is not a question here of the revealed nature of God per se (independently
of God's relation to the world), but only of the essential content of the natural idea
of God.

120
apprehend myself, in the light of this idea - in lumine Dei, to use
Augustinge's phrase. It is, moreover, an essential feature of the fully
developed idea of a spiritual person that only a reality correspon-
ding to it - if such there be - can attest it to man: attest it in
self-revelation. 11 Therefore: if there is a reality corresponding to this
idea, I can never be in a position to confirm this reality through
spontaneous and conscious acts. It is evident to me that I could
never distinguish the non-existence of a reality which in its nature
exactly corresponds to my clear idea of a personal God from the
mere enduring silence, the withholding of such a reality, But I believe
that, after traces of it had become visible at various points, with
more or less clarity, in the universal revelation inspiring history, the
reality of this Being was manifested in the Old Covenant and, in the
completest form, in Christ.
Such are some of the basis of my knowledge of God. If I know
accordingly of God's reality, without having concluded or borrow-
ed this reality from the existence of the world, I next have good
grounds for assuming that this world is not absolutely self-suf-
ficient, and does not originate before God, but has proceeded from
his creating hands. 12 But now that I have reached that conclusion, I
cast my eye over this world, such as it is, and on man, such as he
appears in the total trend of his activity throughout the history
accessible to me. Now can world and man have proceeded, such as
they are, from the hands of the Creator? Everything in me answers
No! But at once there spontaneously arises the idea of some kind of
fall, of taint and inherited sin, as the sole explanation of the differ-
ence between a world created by the absolute perfection of God
and the world as it is known to me in reality.
It is in this context that repentance, like so much else, acquires its
full meaning - at least it is in this way that it becomes the enduring
necessity which we earlier saw it to be.
Guilt stands at the beginning of the history of this world! How
then could eternal regeneration take any other form than repen-
tance? I have hitherto made no comment on the Christian doctrine

II. [Scheler's thought is less elliptically expressed on pp. 333 ff. of his book, On
the Eternal in Man, London, SCM Press 1960, Translator, (Vom Ewigen im
Menschen, translated into English by Bernhard Noble)].
12. Creation in time IS here left undecided.

121
of contrition, and the forms which this doctrine has assumed in
Christian Churches and sects, for it was my intention to show how
far one may be taken by purely philosophical considerations. But if
I now compare what I have established with these doctrines, I find
that the deepest understanding of the meaning and significance of
repentance is to be encountered in Christianity and, within Chris-
tianity, in the Catholic Church. Setting aside all tenets of justifica-
tion, two things particularly seem to me to characterize the Chris-
tian concept of repentance: first, the blatantly paradoxical notion
that not only does the rhythm of culpability and repentance necessa-
rily belong to the life of fallen man, but perfect repentance even
raises man above the state of innocence into a higher existence
which, but for prior sin and subsequent repentance, would have
been unattainable. This thought is expressed macrocosmically, as it
were, in the doctrine that Christ's act of redemption did not merely
erase the sin of Adam, but brought man henceforth into a commu-
nion with God that was deeper and holier than Adam enjoyed -
although the person redeemed by the effects offaith does not regain
the full integrity of Adam, and undisciplined longings, "concupis-
cence", persist. We have a further instance of the same rhythm -
falling, then rising above the primal status - in the proposition of the
evangelist that there is more joy in Heaven over one repentant
sinner than over a thousand of the righteous.
The first of these two thoughts, especially, illumines the full
sublimity of man's fall in Adam, and his raising to divine commu-
nion through Christ's assumption of humanity. Almost from the
beginning it was felt by Christian theologians that scant justice was
done to the sublime nature of the Incarnation by a concept which
placed its essence and purpose exclusively in God's compassionate
mercy for fallen man, in simply a healing and restoration to which
God was - so to speak - obliged by the fall and original sin. God
could have found other ways to save and forgive than that he - the
Infinite - should himself become flesh and man. On the other hand,
the Incarnation - according to the universal teaching of theology -
could ha ve ensued without the fall, without original sin. And so the
Incarnation remains a free act of God. Yet there is an absurd
disproportion between a mere restoration of man to his natural
height before the fall, and the eternally sublime action of the Lord of
things who takes on the form of man. The only reason why the

122
Church may sing its felix culpa with respect to the fall is that the
raising of man and the world through God's entry into humanity
lifts man to a plane incomparably more lofty than that on which he
dwelt in the origin of things. "Since the fulness of the human race",
says Saint Leo, in accord with many other, "fell in our first parents,
the merciful God wished so to succour the creature made in his
image, through his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, that the restora-
tion of the same should not lie outside nature, and that the second
state should exceed the dignity of that creature's origin. Happy
creature, if it had not fallen a way from that which God had made;
happier still, if it abide in that which he has restored! It was some-
thing great to have received form from Christ; but it is a greater thing
to have one's substance in Christ.]3 Therefore, it must be thought
that in the depth of his eternal wisdom God designed the Incarna-
tion for the exigency of the fall, which was foreseen from eternity;
but at the same time it has also to be assumed that man was, in the
fall, permitted freely to incur the guilt of sin only because the
Incarnation was already decided in God's eternal wisdom. In this
way we are led to a full understanding of the idea that God, through
the Incarnation, is performing a greater work than a mere coming to
the rescue of man in his wilful guilt, that he is primarily, and out of
that infinite love which continues the immanent witness of the Son,
glorifying himself and also taking up man -likewise the world in this
its noblest part - into his glorification. - But we are straying beyond
our theme.

There is a second momentous factor, inseparable from the fore-

going: the new relation between repentance and love. In both senses
of the phrase, "perfect" repentance seems borne on the love of God.
Firstly, in that God's love, constantly knocking at the door of the
soul, sets up before man, as it were, the portrait of an ideal Being
and enables man to appreciate for the first time, in comparison with
this vision, how base and restricted is his real condition. Secondly,
in that man, after the spontaneous consummation of repentance,
and in growing awareness of forgiveness and sanctification, comes
finally to the knowledge that he has received strength for that
consummation as a token of God's love and mercy. This he knows

13. Leo the Great, Second Sermon De Resurrectione (Sermon 72, section 2).

123
inasmuch as his loving approach toward God, rendered first pos-
sible in the process of repentance, gradually restores his full capacity
for loving God, and, through removal of his guilty limitations and
the barriers guilt has interposed, effects his reconciliation and reu-
nion with the center of things.
Love stirred within us. At first we thought it our love - love of
God - our love of him. We came to know it for his love - the love of
God. His love of us.

124
Exemplars of Person and Leaders
 INTRODUCTION

From the mysterious powers and forces peculiar to both individual

and community that can turn our lives into either good or bad
lives, I wish to point to two such powers being at the same time
different in their own nature and yet closely related to each other:
The powers that emerge from exemplary persons and leaders.
Understood as basic to both sociology and the philosophy of
history, it comes to us as no surprise that the problem of exemplary
persons and leaders - along with the questions of the qualities types,
selections and education of leaders; forms of unison existing be-
tween leaders and their followers, all of which belonging to the
subdivisions of this problem - must be a burning problem for a
people whose historical leaders from all walks of life have, in part,
been swept away by wars and revolutions. This fact we also find in
all salient epochs of history characterized more or less by changes in
leadership. It is precisely for this reason that in our own time every
group appears to struggle ever so hard with this problem, namely,
who their leaders should be. This pertains equally to a group within
a party, to a class, to occupations, to unions, to various schools or
present-day youth movements, and even to religious and ecclesias-
tical groupings.
Beyond any comparison, there is yearning everywhere for lead-
ership. It is so powerful that at times it appears to assume most
objectionable, erroneous, and grotesque expressions. Perhaps, this
is most clearly evidenced in the countless new "communities,"
"circles," "orders," "sects" and "schools," with all their specific
interests, that have mushroomed suddenly. Each of them has at its

127
center its own savior, prophet, or revolutionary. Each of them
voices highest claims of improving and saving our world. l Also in
this regard, our own age reminds us of the fall of the Hellenic period
in antiquity.
I do not wish to go into the details of such formations of sects and
factions in our time. I propose, rather, to take into precise and
theoretical consideration the problem of leaders in all essential areas
of our lives, such as religion, of the state, the economy, and the
nation. However, I will consider these problems on the background
of a specific philosophical view of life and the world which I will
outline as much as is necessary for our purposes. I will try to address
the material we have on leaders and followship as it is provided by
philosophy, sociology, psychology, and ethics, and especially, by
the tales and lessons history has given us as a task. This material has
a typical, general nature.
I also wish to address, at the beginning, the small amount of
material, no matter how unimportant, that knowledge and science
have provided us on the subject. In doing so I hope that all of this
will contribute to an understanding of the immense problem of our
lives: How and whom we should elect to be our leaders. To avoid
any misunderstanding, I wish to make clear that I do not want to
play myself up as "leader," or even to commend any specific one of
them. I am a teacher, and no leader. It is my intention here to furnish
objective knowledge on leadership and the significance it has in our
lives and history. This is substantially distinct from wanting to be a
leader. 2
There are various forms of attachments that society may display
to its leaders. They can be of a purposeful nature when, for instance,
"this or that person represents my own interests." They can be of
tradition when, for example, one is attached to a legitimate ruler
because "it's always been that way." Attachments to leaders can
come from law or discipline; they can hold between parent and
child, the young and elderly; they can be inherited attachments, i.e.,

l. As examples may serve: anthroposophy, the Johannes Muller Circle, The

Action Circle, the Stephan George Circle, the School of Wisdom [Schule der
Weisheit], psychoananlytical cells, the Circle of Solidarists (Stadler: "Conscience"),
new religious sects and communist factions, etc.
2. See Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf [Science as a Profession], Munich
1919.

128
whenever leadership is tied to la ws, conventions, or mores. And
there can be personal, affective followship directed to the individu-
ality of a leader, i.e., when "charismatic" personal leadership is at
hand, in contrast to the charisma of an office, or of heredity (Sohm,
Weber). In all of this there are various kinds of forces binding
leaders and their following together. The force may be a belief, a
trust, an erotic or non-erotic love of a leader; it may also be devo-
tion, the force of loyalty, or of the self-identification of a follower
with a leader's own destiny and being. There may also be forces like
fear, awe, or inhibition. A personal, charismatic leader, however,
affecting our lives most profoundly, is everywhere the most power-
ful and original form of leadership. Indeed, one can make the point
that even the charisma of office (e.g., in Roman Catholicism), and
the charisma of a particular heredity, or the traditional legal, or
lineal forms of attachment, are all based in this highest type of
charismatic leadership. In times of revolution and changes in the
tenor of mentalities, the charismatic attachment holds an over-po-
werful sway on followers. This is because in such times none of the
aforementioned forms of attachment either comes from any com-
municated knowledge or from any teachings. It is basically two
different things to be a leader or a teacher.
I do not wish here to refer only to leaders but - and this is to me of
more importance - I wish to refer to the significance of "personal
exemplars." While it is true that we can find an immense literature
on the problem of leadership, there are only few who have seen the
significance, formation, and effectiveness - the power of the moul-
ding of our souls - that exemplary persons have exercized. Such is
the case, for instance, with the exemplar of a sage, of a noble soul a
human being may possess, of the ideal of the gentleman. No
wonder. For while the effectiveness of leaders can be seen on the
wide and visible platforms of public life, that of personal exemplars
remains veiled in darkness and mystery. The exemplary person is
residual - moves and changes - in the depths of every human's and
group's soul. This model-person is hard to grasp. The psychological
study that follows will show that the effectiveness of the exemplari-
ness of a person is strongest whenever a human being is not a ware of
it, and even less aware whence it came. An old saying of a well
known mystic expresses the significance of the exemplary person in
equally deep and beautiful words: "Above everyone there hovers an

129
image of what he should be. As long as he is not that, he will not be
in full peace with himself."

I. SOME GENERAL COMMENTS CONCERNING PERSONAL EXEMPLARS AND LEADERS

Before we enter into a specific discussion on personal exemplars,

leaders, and their types, their ways of effectiveness as well as their
forms of origin; and before we enter into the discussion on the
equally important "counter-exemplars," it is necessary for us to
clarify some conceptions concerning the nature of personal exem-
plars and leaders and the relations they have among themselves.
1. Leadership and its followship is characterized by mutual and
conscious relationship. This is not the case with personal exemplars
(prototype) and their personal after-image. A person functioning as
an exemplar to someone else neither has to know nor have the will to
be such an exemplar, even when the person for whom he is such an
exemplar knows him to be such. By contrast, a leader must know
both that he is a leader and must have a will to lead. Throughout
history, there has never been a great leader who has made his own
consciousness of self-value and, in case he was a religious leader, his
grace of God, dependent upon any continued recognition of his
followers.
2. The relation between exemplars and persons who are their
after-images is an ideal one. It is independent of space, time and
the concrete present and, indeed, independent of the concrete his-
torical existence of a prototype. On the other hand, the relation
between leaders and their following is a concrete and sociological
one. A human being can become my exemplar no matter when he
lived in the past: Caesar, Socrates, Jesus Christ ("imitatio Christi"),
Buddha. But a leader who leads must be here and now. Furthermore,
it is not only real, historical people or the myth about them that can
be exemplary for us, but also figures provided by poets, such as
Faust, Hamlet, or Beatrice, who can be exemplary. Leaders, howe-
ver, must be real. Indeed, personal exemplars (and their opposites)
have not primarily been human beings for all peoples and groups,
but also gods and demons. At best, leaders are those who have
somehow been determined, moved, bestowed with grace, illumina-
ted or rejected temptations offered by their gods and demons.

130
Furthermore, exemplars can be imaginary figures we find in peo-
ples' dreams, such as in myths and sagas. To be mentioned also is
the idea of the hero of the ancient Greeks: Heracles, Ulysses, Solon;
and among the Teutons: Siegfried or Hagen. There are also non-
personal exemplars that can be exemplary, such as accomplish-
ments or the state. Styles in art develop alongspeciflc works and can
become exemplary; the style of a certain painter may become exem-
plary for other painters. French Absolutism became the model for
the young, rising Prussian state; Roman Law became a model for
Canon Law. The "gentleman" became exemplary for a large part of
the world.
3. The concept of "leader" is a most general and value-free,
sociological concept. The la w holding between leadership and fol-
lowing, or better, the law according to which every group (e.g.,
family, clan, tribe, people, nation, community, cultural unit, units
of occupations, classes, gangs of thugs and thieves) is composed, is
of two parts, viz., a smaller part being leadership and a larger part,
the following. This is one of the most general sociological laws. First
of all, this la w is based in organic life itself, including bio-psychic
life. Every group reveals a profound analogy with any organism and
with the make-up of all psychic being and happening (implying no
organismic sociology). Any multi-celled organism possesses organs
of different value for its growth. There is a hierarchy of organs and
functions which are either more guiding and leading, or more
serving and carrying out in their nature. The central nervous system
is a guiding and leading one in all animals equipped with such a
system. In all our conscious, inner experiences there is not one single
moment, in which an object (goal) is represented and simultaneous-
ly valued, that would not have an overriding importance and a
guiding and leading role in the run-off of psychic processes,
vis-a-vis all the remaining contents in our consciousness. Among
individuals this pertains to predominant attitudes of valuation or to
dominant affects or drives; among groups, this would pertain to
"dominant tendencies or ideas." The law of the contraction of our
consciousness, with its oscillating points of attention making specific
contents especially vivid and clear, while others remain dark and
serving (attendance), is the expression of the same property of all life
for the sake of which there are always leaders and followers who
show psychic and vital relations (men and animals). For this reason,

131
the aforementioned law by no means holds for humans only. Lea-
ders and followers, alpha-animals and herds (Espinas), can be
found in animal groups; i.e., in groups where there is even no mutual
"understanding" except that of psychic contagion. There are "pio-
neers" and "imitators" to be found in any animal group activity and
in all "learning." In contrast to a gradual, step by step, and
uninherited variations of adaptations of one organ and function
throughout the development of the species, there are changes in
races and species (which De Vries called the "mutations") that are
spontaneous and inherited, i.e., they affect the whole of the
organism. It is likely that in them there occurs not only propagation
and reproduction but novel production, birth of species, ascendence
of life [Hinaufpflanzung].
Let us set aside such analogies that inscribe these general sociolo-
gical laws of leadership deeply into organic life. Let us instead
clarify what it means, and does not mean, in a human, sociological
regard. One can give it a formula first furnished by the Austrian
sociologist and lawyer, von Wieser: In all our conscious awareness
of others there is al ways a small number of people leading others.
Wieser called this the "la w of the small number." In a general sense,
I wish to refer to this small number as that of leadership and to the
larger number as that offollowing. But this law holding among all
human groupings and being based, as we saw, in organic and
psychic life, must not be confused with factional views of social or
political affairs guided by some Weltanschauung or special inter-
ests. Such views, for example, pertain to the question of whether
one values, thinks, or feels, in a democratic or aristo-cratic way, or
whether one is a communist, socialist, or solidarist, or whether one
is a repUblican monarchist, or God knows what.
All of such important differences in our willing, thinking and
believing belong to one question only that we have not touched and
will not touch upon at this point, namely: How a small number of
leaders who rule, and only rule, should be selected, or are, in fact,
selected in accordance with lineal laws at hand, or by some conven-
tional or legal modes of election. And from which classes, occupa-
tions, or estates should they come? Furthermore, this implies the
problem of the qualities such a small number should have, and
which degrees of dependence and independence the small number
should have from its following as to decision-making and actions.

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When and how should such a small number of leaders undergo
changes? Hence, the sociological generality of this law holds well
within a republic or a monarchy, well within a radical democratic
party or a distinctly aristocratic one. The law of the small number
has absolutely nothing to do with differences of valuation and
Weltanschauung. 3
It is for this reason that we will use the term "leader" without any
meaning of a value. For a leader can be a savior or a ruthless
demagogue; he can be a positive leader or a seducer; he can be a
leader of a moral alliance, or of a gang of robbers; in a sociological
sense of the term he is a "leader" in as much as he wants to lead and
has following.
This is quite different from a personal exemplar. The pregnant
meaning of the concept "personal exemplar" is always one of value .
We consider our exemplars as something good, perfect, and as
something which ought to be, while we follow and have them. Every
soul is conjoined with a personal exemplar by some kind of love and
positive value-valuation, be it in a religious, moral, or aesthetic
sense. There is always a passionate and affective relation. But a
leader can be despised if he does only lead. True, a personal exem-
plar can also be (objectively) bad but, in the intended meaning of the
term, this is never the case.
This peculiarity that personal exemplars have is revealed dis-
tinctly by the highest models of exemplary persons, as I wish to call
them. Our concepts of them are not empirically abstracted from
fortuitous experiences of world and history. Rather, they are the
highest categories of values corresponding to the nature of the
human mind: they are the ideas of the holy, of mental values, of
nobleness, and of the useful and the pleasant. As given by them-
selves, they are, as it were, "a priori" ideas of values (i.e., indepen-
dent of the quantity of our fortuitous experiences). Their number
equals the personal spectra of value-ranks: The idea of the saint, of
the genius (sage), of the hero, of the leading mind ofciviliza lion, and of

3. See Roberty Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens. Oligarische Tendenzen

der modernen Demokratie [Toward a Sociology of Parties. Oligarcic Tendencies in
modern Democracy); Ph. A. Koller, Das Massen- und Fiihrerproblem in denfreien
Gewerkschaften [The Problem of the Masses and of Leaders in free Trade Unions],
Tiibingen 1920.

133
the master in the art of living. These ideas of exemplars of person are
exclusively formed by (1) the idea of the person, and (2) by underly-
ing ideas of values. Great human beings from history are often
admixtures of them, i.e., our comprehension of great human beings
who have lived conforms to these ideas; we analyze them in accor-
dance with them and we measure great humans by such ideas. 4 On
the other hand, the models of personhood become effective only in
conjunction with the empirical, historical material that humans
provide. There is an empirical and a priori moment in every model
person, there is both a being and an ought, and a component both of
an image and a value in such exemplars.
There are four points that a theory of exemplary personhood
implies; (1) the types of models and exemplars, as we can find them
in occupations, families, or with national anonymous models (the
"gentleman"); there are male and female models ("belle ame").
(2) There is an order of the ranks among objective models and those
pertaining to a particular period. (3) The types of their origins, and
(4) the types of effectiveness they have in our souls. To be mentioned
also are the limitations of pure exemplars, their "individual des-
tiny" (are there "absolute exemplars"?); exemplars and their
counter types, their relationship to the coming about of ''fate''
(analytical psychology), andforms of transfers of exemplars. Above
all, the enormous power of personal exemplars, hitherto still widely
unknown, must be demonstrated with practical examples.
A theory of personal exemplars is of special significance in ethics:
It represents a first condition for any further valuations. 5 It is
impossible that a human possesses all the virtues and no vice at the
same time. Everyone of us be "true," and in his own stead. We must
find the point of our strength; we must seek our adequate exemplars
- insofar as a "seeking" is here possible. What has a forming and
grafting effect on our souls is not an abstract, universal moral rule
but always, and only, a clear and intuitive grasp of the exemplarity
of the person. 6

4. Demonstrations for the apriority of these ideas may be found in my book

Formalism in Ethics, loc.cit., VI B, 4, 6 b.
5. See Eduard Spranger, Lebensformen [Forms of Life], Halle 1921.
6. Concerning exemplars and after-images, exemplars and ethos, see my
Formalism in Ethics, loc.cit., VI B, 4, ad 6.

134
 4. Finally, leaders demand action, accomplishment and com-
portment. An exemplar demands our being and the cast [gestalt] of
our souls. Willing and acting follow only from our being (value of
being - value of accomplishment).

If it is true that leaders and exemplars are so different from one

another, and so different objects to be investigated, one must ask
about the relationship they may have with each other. Well, leaders
can be exemplars, especially religious and moral leaders and leaders
in politics and education. but they need not be so. They are exem-
plary only in cases when their followers are charismatic ally affected
by them. In all other cases they are not exemplary. If one wanted to
state a general relation between leaders and exemplars one could,
without any doubt, say the following: It is the effective personal
exemplars that causally determine, or co-determine, the selection,
election and, above all, the qualities of leaders. The clarity of this
proposition equals that of the proposition according to which our
acts of willing are determined by our ways of valuation - and, in the
final analysis, by what we love or hate, by the structure of the
preferring or not preferring of values: not vice versa.
For this reason a theory of personal exemplars is much more
important and fundamental than the question of leaders which is
given so much one-sided attention today. Our decision and choice
of a leader will always be the result of the gods we want to serve, in
that we let them secretly, or consciously, become our exemplars.

II THE MIND OF THE PERSON IN THE FORMATION OF HUMAN GROUPS.

THE VEHICLES OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PERSONAL EXEMPLARS
(THE FORMATION OF FATE). MODELS OF PERSONAL EXEMPLARS.

Besides my own work on the subject, a personalist philosophy,

metaphysics and ethics, as they have recently been introduced - such
as the valuable work done by Rudolf Eucken, William Stern, and
Hans Driesch - will mirror the imperial place, and right, of our
personal form of existence in the being, nature and life of groups
and in every form of human sociation. A personalist philosophy will
vehemently counter collectivism, first developed by Condorcet, i.e.,
any collectivism which implies that the primary vehicle of all civili-

135
zation and culture are the people, or their socalled "mind," any
anonymous collective will or the masses. It will counter any collecti-
vism that considers models of persons and leaders of religion, the
state, philosophy, art and economy to be only exponential spokes-
men, and not as spontaneous personsforming such areas of culture.
What ultimately determines the being, kind, formation and deve-
lopment of human groups is neither a personless "idea" (Hegel),
nor a freely floating "order of the la ws of reason," nor a rational will
(Kant, Fichte), nor a reason or knowledge that develops through
formalla ws of a "fatalite modifiable" (Comte); nor is it the sequen-
ces of relations of production (Marx), nor even the dark and im-
mense fate bringing about the admixtures of the blood of peoples:
What determines at least the basis, and the main direction, of the
being, of the kinds, forms and development of groups are solely the
ruling minorities of personal exemplars and of leaders.
In every soul, taken as a whole and at any of its moments, there
governs a personal, basic direction of loving and hating: This is its
basic moral tenor [Gesinnung]. Whatever a personal soul can will or
know, the spheres of its cognitions and effects or, in one word, its
possible world, is ontically determined by this direction. In any soul
and group-soul we can trace three levels of underivable centers and
la wfulness. (1) The processes of possible representations regulated
by la ws of association corresponding in their psychic manifestations
to mechanical principles in nature; (2) The vital center, making use
of, directing, and steering possible psychic and chemical processes
of the body and associative processes "towards" the preservation,
growth, and development of the organism. The vital center moves in
an automatic way following its inherent autonomous laws; (3) The
free center of mind andreason, i.e., the center of the person , which, by
its own (religious, ethical, logical) la ws makes use of both our inner
and public lives in their individual directions and towards the goal
of trans-finite existence. Both from an epistemological and meta-
physcial point of view, the mechanisms of outer and inner nature are
neither true copies of being and happenings, nor are they necessary
constructions corresponding to categories of thinking. They are
only schemata of thinking which takes its origin from the domina-
tion of technical goals. They are a mental picture of the world in
order to preserve the inner and outer world so that this picture
would contain no more, and no less, than the most immediate

136
targets of our practical actions and movements toward merely vital
values and the functional dependencies of such targets. We know a
priori that we can exercise control, and can predict for the purpose
of control, b0th inner and outer nature only insofar as nature
follows mechanical causility. It is for this reason that positive science
holds it to be both purposeful and valuable to set aside (1) the
existence and the effects of vital centers with their unpredictable fate
(concrete causality), and (2) the existence and effets of all personal,
free forces so that science, in a systematic way, can ask the following
question: What is the world like, and what would become of this
world, if these primary factors would not exist - if there would be no
personal God, no finite minds and no spontaneous movements of
life? It would be childish, however, to ignore such artifical abstract-
tions, their practical-technical sense and their conditions, on the
basis of an exclusive affirmation of the value of life-, or to hold that
vital- or person-centers could be deduced from world-mechanisms,
or, for that matter, that they represented only special cases of
mechanical combinations.
Both metaphysics and religion put all technical goals out of
action, and along with that, the biologically valuable symbolism of
positive science. Already the historical sciences must do so. For they
aim at what is true as a whole, not at a small part of what is true, a
part which, too, is purposeful in the sense of vital values. They are in
search of a knowledge of "world" and a world of God. They do not
aim at "environs" important for human actions.
What we find in an individual's soul we can also find, by analogy,
in groups and their essential/arms; in the mass, in organismic life-
communities (clans, tribes, families, peoples, races), in society set up
intentionally and artificially as well as in spiritual collective perso-
nalities (church, cultures, nations, state). Throughout a mass of
people there prevail random la ws which one can also find among
animal herds such as the contagion of affectations coming from
alfa-animals and going to sensory stimuli. In a mass, the sponta-
neous imitations that follow la ws of association engender a momen-
tary but continuously changing soul spreading at times like an
avalanche into a direction bringing about events in a mass that no
one was aware of, willed or wanted. In a pure mass humans would
resemble animals. Yet, there are leaders to be found also in unorga-
nized masses and herds. Throughout a life-community, an organic

137
causality holds its sway. It is firstly in a life-community where we
can find the duration of a whole group lasting beyond the lives of its
members and generations. In it, something like irreversible history
already happens. Blood, tradition, customs and costumes, involun-
tary co-experiences with the whole of the life-community as well as
an understanding without mutual inferences made among its mem-
bers built on it - all ofthese factors form a bond of organic together-
ness (status). But the human being is only an organ and member here,
not yet a mature person.
Romanticism erroneously tried to reduce all such understanding
in groups to this form of togetherness. It did so in contrast to
liberalism and socialism which, in turn, equally falsely and one-
sidedly, tried to conceive groups under the aspect of aims in society,
under the aspect of clique-interests, under the aspect of class-strug-
gles with all of their basically separated centers of understanding. 7
The form of togetherness, called society takes its origins during the
collapse and the leveling-out oflife-communities (e.g., classes origi-
nate during the disintegration of castes, estates and occupations).
But it is in this very collapse, this dying and death, that the mature
human being is born - a free man, a self-willed and self-reliant
individual moving about as he likes - an individual making ex-
changes, dra wing up contracts, forming a society with others by way
of deliberate purposes but without a push from any unified will of life
and love, and enjoying himself in forms of international customs. 8
Both this human being's understanding and accomplishments,
being under the sway of technical goals, correspond to a mechanical
view of the world, just as to a human being who is a member of a
life-community there corresponds the ancient, organismic concept
of the world: the world as an organism. But it is only the spiritual,
collective personality in its forms of church, nation, culture and
state, that rises above such forms of togetherness as we find them in
life-community and society. For it is only in the former social
structures that the mind, and the goods brought about freely by
groups, gains the full power of becoming truly human.
Neither is the human being here only a member of a whole as he is

7. Cf. Ferdinand T6nnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [Community and

Society. Charles P. Loomis, trans!., New York, Harper & Row, 1963].
8. Usefulness and pleasure are the pivots of a society.

138
in a life-community, nor is he an isolated individual; rather, he is at
the same time an independent and self-responsible center of actions
and a member co-responsible for the deeds and accomplishments of
the collective personality that he belongs to. It is metaphysics and
religion - both can potentially be supra-national and cosmopolitan-
and the types of knowledge that belong to them that correspond to
the particular form of togetherness of a life-community. These
forms of knowledge are not international in character as in the
positive sciences wherein any individual can be exchanged or
represented by any other individual. For metaphysics and religion,
any person, including the collective personality, is irresplaceable
because it lies in the essence of these objects to be known adequately
only in the togetherness of persons.
No matter how varied are the empirical subdivisions that are
built on the above social forms, there obtains one specific law
having an exact analogy to the structure of the human soul itself: In
all of their centers there are personal centers (or a minority of them)
which are (I) personal exemplars and (2) leaders. In every group we
can find leadership and following. Exemplars and leaders are a
minority, a "small number." Von Wieser called this the law of the
"small number." French and Italian researchers refer in this regard
to a "circulation des elites" as the content of history.
"To lead" means acting, pointing ways, initiate good or bad
directions of life ("the seducer"). But "exemplar" taken as a (objec-
tive) bad or good exemplar, means much more and something quite
different from this. For an exemplar amounts to the cast of a value
formed by personhood and it is envisioned by an individual's or a
group's soul. Depending on whether or not the soul finds itself in
harmony with its exemplar, the soul grows into this exemplary cast,
it forms itself into it. It measures its own being, life, and actions by
this exemplar, either in a secret or deliberate fashion; it affirms,
praises, negates or disapproves of itself after this cast of value.
Exemplars also have their counter-exemplars: They are frequent
forms into which humans develop because of the hatred they have
against someone who should be their exemplar but is not (e.g., a
child's hatred against his father).
It is not the leaders, however, who determine the exemplars, it is
the prevailing exemplars (along with other forces) who determine
who and what kind of leaders there should be. An X can have

139
 become an exemplar for a Y without the X knowing or even wanting
for this to happen. This does not hold for a leader. Indeed, the
mystery of the effective force of an exemplar is even deeper: Some
one (or a group) who possesses an exemplar need not even have
conscious awareness of it or even know that he is in possession of it,
nor that the exemplar is forming his life and moral tenor. I would
like to say even this much: One seldom knows it as a positive idea
which one could well describe. One knows the less about it the more
powerful its effectiveness works on one's development. We must,
therefore, make a distinction between a "vividly effective" and a
"reflected upon" exemplar. The former is effective as aesthetic laws
are effective in an artist. For an artist has no awareness of aesthetic
laws; rather, their validity becomes conspicuous only, and firstly,
during experiences of deviations from them while the artist may be
painting or chiseling; or they become conspicuous when they are in
evidential agreement with the artistic structure created. All of us, for
instance, teem with something like an erotic type. It is almost
impossible for us to describe it - even more difficult to know of its
history. This type is given to us only in an awareness of its being
fulfilled or contradicted, i.e., when a factual person approximates,
or shows contrariety with, such a type. And it is only when we are
able to combine the terms of fulfillment and of contrariety into one
form during respective experiences that we begin to be in the posi-
tion to say something about this type. Exemplars can be effective in
such mysterious and powerful ways.
Furthermore, leaders only affect our will. But exemplars (and
their counter-types) determine the moral tenor beneath our will.
They are not given in volition, but in value-consciousness and, first
of all, in love (or hatred). They cast the center of our personhood
prior to our willing this or that. For this reason the exemplars
determine already the scope of our possible volitions and actions.
Our being becomes similar to them while we love them.
If it is the case that the soul of all history is not to be seen in actual
history but in the history of ideals, systems of values, norms, and
forms of ethos by which human beings measure their practical
actions - so that this soul of history brings to full understanding all
actual history - then the history of exemplars, their origins and
transformation, makes up the very center of this soul of history. I
therefore maintain that the value-systems, and their dependent

140
norms and systems oflaws human beings obey or disobey, must be
reduced always to prevailing personal exemplars and their value-cast
in the form of the person. We do not choose them, for they possess
us, and attract us, even before we can choose them (attractive power
of the exemplar).
If we wanted to make some classification of the types of moral
changes with regard to the degrees of effectiveness that one subject
may have on another, be it in a good or bad way, the role of the
invariable through such classifications must be assigned solely to
personal exemplars or to what one calls good or bad examples
attached to such exemplars (education). This invariable can neither
be assigned by command, nor by obedience, nor to a universal norm
or comportment following such a norm.
But how do such mysterious personal exemplars, and their coun-
ter-types, originate when they are supposed to form the depth of
lives?
First of all, there is a general schema of all possible forms of
exemplars, or as I wish to refer to them, of models of exemplary
persons. They are the following: the saint, the genius, the hero, the
leading mind of civilization, and the master in the art of living. It is
in an essential manner that these models belong to the human mind.
They are not products of abstraction made from experiences with
historical people. But they are not "innate ideas" either, as Plato
would assume. Yet, as always existing ideas of value-persons we
imagine them in our intuition when we meet factual people but we
are at the same time aware of the degrees of difference existing
between these people and those ideas. And it is a fact that there are
as many models of exemplary persons as there are insoluble basic
ranks of values for our preferring, or not preferring values for our
loving and hating. I reduced, on other occasions, such basic values,
which already Aristotle determined as TO ,,00, TO XPrl<Hl.tcrV, TO
KO'AOV, to the following five ranks: to the rank of what is agreeable,
or to values of luxury; to the rank of the useful, or the values of
[technological and societal] civilization; to the rank of nobleness, or
values of life; to the rank of mental values (true knowledge, beauty,
justice), or values of culture; and to the rank of the holy or religious,
basic values.
I have maintained that a person is "good" when he possesses the
readiness in his own moral tenor to prefer a value that is higher than

141
that which precedes it. These basic value ranks are constant
throughout history. It is the ranks of values that are the polar star of
mankind. For it is the case that the changes taking place throughout
all historical goods do not pertain to those values but only to things
representing such goods, i.e., to what obtains, in each and every case,
as agreeable, useful, noble or base, as true or false cognition, as holy
or unholy, as right or wrong (for instance, in theft or murder). And
it is precisely these five models of exemplary personhood that, in an
ascending order, correspond to these basic value-ranks: the master
in the art of living, the leading mind of civilization, the hero, the
genuis, and the saint. It is not an empirical conception abstracted
from "common attributes" holding among historical persons that is
peculiar to these ideas. Rather, we break down under the guidance
of these models and measure empirical human beings on the scale of
the ideas of them. 9
However, these schemata expressing the basic directions of all
human love, and the basic values in the form of the person, are, by
themselves, completely insufficient to nurture our minds and moral
lifes in a vivid and powerful manner. These tender and shadowy
casts must drink the appropriate blood from the wells of the expe-
rience of history. It is only when they do this that they become
concrete models.
Every religion has its own peculiar ideal of a saint, of a homo
religiosus. It is different in Buddhism than in Christianity. Every
religion shows a series of peculiar, partly epochal, partly individual,
and partly occupational manifestations of the everlasting idea of
sanctity. Every people and age has its peculiar geniuses, heroes,
leaders, and masters of the art oflife. And all the delectable contents
of the dishes that these models represent will be finished in the
interpenetrations of these successively orginating images in the
progress of history and when they extinguish their unilateral fea-
tures and condense their positive values.
The most condensed sense of history is revealed for us in the
ever-increasing manifestation of concrete model persons as well as
in the order of ranks holding among them. The sense of history does
not reveal itself in predictable, historical goals and ends which,
without revelation, our minds are too small to grasp. Within the

9. Cf. Formalism in Ethics, lac.cit., VI B, 4 ad 6b.

142
depths of our soul the highest exemplars reveal steps on which they
pull us up towards our maximal goal: To become, as Plato once said
God-like, and as perfect like God the Father, as the gospel would
say.
There are no immediate paths toward divinization, as a false
mysticism often dreamed them up, or as, in trying to modernize
religion, Christians construed them by extinguishing the ideal of
following - found in Bernhard of Claisvaux, St. Francis Assisi, and
Thomas a Kempis - for the sake of a mere faith in man's past
salvation through Christ's blood as reported in printer's ink. There
is only an ascending chain, or a pyramid, of ever surpassing personal
models. Initially, man is drawn up by his more fitting models whose
highest kinds are drawn by God and whose very highest is, accor-
ding to Christian faith, God and man. And man ascends up this
pyramid but on winding paths to reach out for his deepest self:
"Become who you are."
If we look at the series of exemplars in families, especially those
of parents, or at those found in estates, occupations and peoples in
their five value-directions, as well as at saintly exemplars, it is as if
human beings pull themselves up by such interhuman exemplary
strings. It is by the personal exemplars that our past remains present,
ative and effective in the golden fabric of their moral value; it is
through this past that all gracious geniuses dwell in the presence of
the moment and release their forces toward a better future. There
are two sides to any personal exemplar because of the pure and the
experiential directions of an exemplar's look. The former points
into the future in that it forms and holds sway of our souls; this side
of the exemplar has one-sidely been stressed in all messianism. The
other look of the exemplar points into the past because it has been
nourished by the life of the past; this side of the exemplar has
one-sidely been stressed in all traditionalism. The future direction of
its look and activity prevents an exemplar's followship from mere
imitation and copying of its being and life ("you imitated well the
way he cleared his throat and spat"). The direction of the past
prevents emptiness and utopia. There is no empirical human being
who is exemplary in everything, but I daresay, nevertheless, that
everyone of us has at least one trait that is exemplary. 10

10. See Goethe's "Noten und Abhandlungen" (Allgemeines) of his West-

143
 In time, the transference of the contents of exemplars from man
to man occurs in terms of three essentially different media of causa-
tion: The first one is heritage, the second tradition and spontaneous
co-experience and imitation, the third is "faith in" an exemplar, not
in a religious meaning of the term, but in the sense of a well-foun-
ded, evidential and true love, and of the full understanding of the
knowledge of the exemplar and his value.
Let us not deviate from our theme by discussing the physical
processes of inheritance still relatively unknown. But we can say
that among higher animals, and especially among humans, possible
formations and admixtures of inherited values are also determined
and borne by one psychic power: the selection made within the other
gender and a love a/the other gender. Whereas the sexual drive and
the drive of propagation are only at the service of the preservation of
the species, and not of the perfection and enhancement of the
species, love of gender possesses - outside the appreciation of its own
value - at least the teleological proclivity of realizing the best, and
most fitting, hereditary values for future generations; and love of
gender does so with the support of its own conscience and with a
withholding, saving, and preserving modesty. It is as if in this form
of life a perfect image of future generations is pre-sketched by our
souls without knowledge and consciousness of its happening so that
the reality of procreation and birth may fill out the elbow-room of
this or that exemplar and grow into the intelligent trials of the soul.
In true love there is no false arbitrariness. For the love between
individuals always orbits, as it were, within more general inclina-
tions and disinclinations of the group which protect it well from
going wrong. This is the case within larger scales of both instinctive
and inclinations and disinclinations among races (prohibitions of

Eastern Diwan. People standing around an almost decayed, dead dog keep
kicking it, one after the other, each of them using abusive words.

"Now when it came to be Jesus' turn

without abusive words, and with good intent,
he spoke from his kind nature:
"This dog's teeth are white like pearls."
The people standing around began to feel hot,
like cooking shells."

144
mixtures of races), among peoples, estates, and occupations which
themselves, in part, rest on heredity rather then possession.
It is only when the lure ofloveless lust, or the equally base desires
of money and possession, surpass all well-directed love as embed-
ded in the intelligent instinct of a preserving modesty that the
quality of the value of specimens offuture generations is subject to
decrease. This happens even when "human trash" or the "ware-
house nature" as Goldscheid and Schopenhauer referred to it,
spread like a case of elephantiasis.
The second vehicle of the effectiveness of exemplars is that of
tradition. It is automatically mediated in our souls and is located in
between heredity and intelligent receptiveness (instruction, educa-
tion). It represents receptiveness of various kinds of mentality,
volitions, and valuations coming about through contagious and
spontaneous imitations of expression of living milieu. It is essential
to this second vehicle that one does not know what has come down
as tradition. One holds the will of someone else for one's own will
because one neither values, nor makes choices, prior to the receptive
nature of tradition. Whatever lies in this tradition one believes to see
or makes judgements on, etc. Before education and instruction have
taken hold of a child, a long time has already elapsed in which the
schema of the child's future destiny is formed through spontaneous
imitations and co-experienced attitudes, expressions, and actions
which precede all conscious understanding. Everything is highly
important for this child. Whatever the adults in a family think to be
insignificant - such as perhaps disagreements, love and harmony, a
faked or well intended smile, or even a look - all of this amount to a
tremendous drama in the child. This drama is all the more exem-
plary for the child's existence and growth the more malleable the
child's physiological-mental organism is, and the younger the child
is in understanding this. It is not only the images of his mother and
father, sisters and brothers, and relatives that determine the child's
love or hatred toward these persons, but they determine what the
child does love and hate at all. And they also determine the very scope
of properties of any thing, of schemata of values within which the
child's future love and hate will have their play. Our recent psycho-
analytical science will teach us much more about the formation of
the fate of a human being (experiences in childhood) despite the

145
exaggerations found especially in its new unnaturalistic forms
found with Adler, Maeder and Bergson in contrast to Freud. ll
The fate of peoples comes about through the forms of thinking,
intuiting, and valuing the world as contained in myth and, first of
all, through personal exemplars in myth. How much meaning is
there in Heracies, Orestus or Ulysses l2 for the Greeks; how much
meaning is there in persons of Teutonic sagas? But it would be false
to restrict all anonymous exemplarity having no historical models,
although effective in mythological tradition, to only prehistoric
peoples. One need only make mention of such important national,
anonymous models of our modern world, originating in certain

II. Destiny and exemplars: An exemplar is the more efficacious the earlier it is
obtained in the development of a person -; and as to when we make an experience of
strongly felt values that move us makes a difference. It is the exemplar of the value
concerned that determines the scope of our possible experiences in that it becomes
detached from our first fortuitous experiences from which it later develops into an
idea. Its effects resemble something like a subjective category. Furthermore, its
effect is the stronger the less a person is aware of it. Destinies of great leaders are
determined by their individual exemplars (Mohammed, Napoleon). When leaders
exercise determining effects on a people it is, in turn, also such leaders own destiny
that has an infinite determining effect on the destiny of such a people.
Destiny, formation of destiny? What is destiny? It is a complex of meaning in
comparison to a "milieu." [Concerning "milieu" see the author's Formalism in
Ethics, loco cit., tr.] The early exemplars determine the schemata of our future,
possible experiences, ("prejudices," "judgments of experience" and "experiential
judgments"): This happens when the content of a value that has strongly been
experienced during our early lives "enters into function" with, and toward, a
psychological a priori, i.e., the early content of the value concerned serves as a law
of selections made throughout experiences of our later lives. Biographically, this
would hold, for instance, for Peter Krapotkin, for Goethe's experience with
Friederike von Sesenheim, or for Schopenhauers hatred of women. It would hold
for the ancient exemplars of Frederic the Great. The Sesenheim experience
bestowed on Goethe both a form and a schema which made him see the tragic
element of all of our future lives, i.e., that one has to leave a "beautiful moment"
behind for the sake of necessary , future development; return: Frau von Stein; most
clearly in the bet of his Faust. Concerning Schopenhauer's Ueber die Weiber: did he
make such experiences? Yes. But - that he made them presupposes an image of
negative values in women. He experienced only schemata that had been determined
by his mother and father.
12. There exist also analogies to this: the Oedipus complex. Orestes in Greek
mythology and the "escape from the father." See Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht
[Matriliny].

146
estates or occupations, setting up high measures for whole peoples:
the exemplary prototypes of the "gentleman", of the "bushido," of
the "prince" (Confucius), of the "cortegiano," of the "homme
honnete," or of the "Biedermanns. "13 Poets al ways work on them
anew and mix their souls with figures that tradition furnishes. By
cultivating them they infuse their vitality into them. Playwriters of
comedies tend to depict counter-exemplars equally important as the
exemplars (comical categories; the "characters" of Theophrastus,
La Bruyere).
A third vehicle for the effectiveness of exemplars is our mind's
understanding and the "faith in" persons built upon it. We affirm in
love, or negate in hatred, always the complete whole of a person
before we affirm or negate individual actions and expressions of his
moral tenor, before we recognize or reject values and propositions,
before we obey or disobey orders from a person. There is no greater
error as that in a psychology or sociology that says we love or hate
persons only because they said or did this or that, or because they
have certain traits of character or because of the looks of their noses
or smiles. Our souls are not so didactic as our understanding which
always lags behind our loves and hates.
We entertain attachments and apathies we can not explain to
ourselves. Rather, we love or hate, first of all, whole and total
persons on the basis of an impression of their personal cast. When-
ever we love or hate we also tend to consent or reject, to follow or to
resist to follow. A teacher hated as a person can cause in us a disgust
for an entire field of knowledge. The highest, purest and most
spiritual form that the effectiveness of exemplars can assume is the
faith, or the lack of faith, in a whole person whom we learned to
understand from out of the spiritual center of his life by way of
placing ourselves into him and by co-executing that person's moral
tenor and acts. We did not come to understand him from his outer
appearances as someone would who only imitates.
It is at this juncture that we can reveal the sharp contrast between
free followship and spontaneous imitation or copying. The best

13. Concerning the significance of exemplars for whole peoples see my essay
"Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses. Eine national-piidagogische Erorterung,"
1916. [The Origins of the Hatred of Germans. A National-Educational Discussion.
chapter 5. [in: Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 4, ed. by Manfred S. Frings.J

147
example at hand is Christ's imitation which is continuous follow-
ing, although always one-sided and an inadequate reproduction in
the center of the followers' soul of Christ's nature and spiritual cast.
St. Paul meant it literally and not metaphorically when he said that
in rebirth there is the dying of the old Adam and aformation of our
person's center through the essence of the beloved Savior, and that
the old deceased self was replaced by Christ the person. He meant it
literally, too, that in this process we become truely "divinized,"
reaching a higher status and more intimate closeness to God than
Adam had ("I live no more than Christ lives in me," Galater, c. 2 V,
20).
The great models of exemplary persons as I tried to sketch them
also possess an essential lawfulness in the types, with the scope of
their effectiveness being commensurate to their everlasting ranks.
Heretofore, this has hardly been noticed.

III. THE SAINT

1. Typology of Exemplars and Leaders in Religion

To recognize the typolc5gy of both religious exemplars and leaders is

a necessary undertaking for our knowledge of the history of re-
ligions as well as for a positive sociology of religions. 14 This typo-
logy is very much independent of positive religions and their socio-
logical forms of so-called "churches," "sects," "schools," or
"mystic" groups. 15 It is also important to recognize the rank order
that these exemplars and leaders have. We must ask the question of
whether or not certain of their properties, extricable by induction
and comparision, can be more understood, or even deduced from
the very nature of this type ofhuman being and his range of being and
value (independence and autogenetic development of religion).
N otwi thstanding figures like the "magician," "sourcerer," or the

14. Systematic, comparative phenomenology of religion. See my "Probleme der

Religion," (Introduction). [Problems of Religion, in: On the Eternal in Man, tr. of
Vom Ewigen im Menschen, by Bernhard Noble, London, 1960.]
15. Cf. Mall. Weber's and Ernst TroeItsch's works on the sociology of
religion.

148
"quack" as we find them among primitive peoples, we can come up
with a division among exemplars and leaders by introducing the
principle of the contrary concepts of "original" and "derived." A
second division among them can be obtained with respect to the
main psychological properties these persons have as they influence
our lives.

Division according to Originality

1. The original holy person and founder.
2. All persons who had immediate contact with a founder of a
religion represent his first following and propagated the faith.
How far they achieved this (e.g., in Judaism) is dependent on
the contents of a religion. They are referred to in Christianity as
"apostles" or "disciples" something very different from being a
"student" learning theories. Personal exemplarity and the
charismatic relationship are decisive here.
3. Witnesses and martyrs who bore witness to their faith in their
practical lives through suffering or death.
4. All those persons who were actively participating in the forma-
tions of dogmas and the constitutions of the sociological devel-
opment of a religion. To such persons belong, for instance, the
"fathers" of a church, whereas those who objectively conceptual-
ized the aforementioned formations and constitutions are called
"teachers. "
5. Those human beings who were later on regarded as "saintly"
within a religious community and who oriented themselves
in immediate and primordial relationship with a founder.
6. The so-called "reformers" (Savonarola, Luther). It is their essen-
tial nature that they never teach anything new but only call out
"back to the origins" and make the assertion that religion and
church have become secularized and are in need, from top to
bottom, of reform.

These pure types in religion must be distinguished from:

1. The leaders having only charismatic importance through their
office. They are leaders and not necessarily exemplars. They are
called "priests." They are neither "inventors" nor "builders" of
a religion (l8th century), but only the administrators of religious
goods. The origins of this type of religious leader presupposes (a)

149
 the constitution of a church and (b) a charismatic, personal
exemplar who conveyed upon them their dignity.
2. The mixed types of persons of which there are several:
(a) the pastors and shepherds. They live closely with the religious
and ecclesiastical life of a people and try to direct or guide its life.
(b) The ecclesiastical types of persons (especially the great
church-politicians) leading a religious community through the
perils of the world. They are mixtures of a religious person and a
politician. In a wider sense of the term they are also ecclesiastical
la wyers and jurists.
(c) The preachers. They are powerful, spiritual preachers of the
Word of God. Also the missionaries belong to this type.
(d) The large group of occupational leaders having religious
attributes such as a saintly king, prince, sage, physician, etc.
(e) The theologians bringing faith into a scientific system.
(f) The geniuses who are inspired by religion only, (Dante, Dos-
toevski), artists and philosophers. Cases bordering on this type
are Socrates, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Kant, Schleiermacher.

Division according to Psychological Regards in Religion

1. The persons of grace and moralists. They do not pertain to
theories (grace and freedom) but are religious types of human
beings. Overall, Asian religious leaders and exemplars are moral-
ists, as Confucius and Buddha. The divine is thought as some-
thing resting in itself and as peaceful being in which man seeks
to partake through self-redemption. The divine is not thought
of as having active power over men. On the whole, the divine
is -thought to be personless (the Chinese heaven; Brahman
Nirvana).
By contrast, occidental religious leaders are predominately
those of "grace," experiencing themselves as chosen, illumina-
ted, or graced by God. In the cooperation between grace and
freedom the old Christian church represents balance. However,
Luther, Calvin, and Cromwell, are persons of grace. In Asia we
find both activism and passivism toward the divine, and pre-
dominantly quietism toward the world. In the western world we
find extreme divine activism and human passivism toward the
divine, but extreme activism toward the world (the historical
power of persons of grace). Judaism remains predominantly

150
 "moralist," and the ideal of the sage in antiquity is completely so
(Plato, Aristotle). Throughout the western world the founder of
a sect is predominantly a moralizing type (moral aristocracy). He
searches to establish a religious aristocracy which, when orga-
nized, sets itself off from religion taken in a wider sense of the
term.
2. Those persons who seek self-communion and self-divinization as
well as the "open-minded" ones (serious or serene), homme clos
and homme ouvert: Benedictus and Francis; Greek and Roman
religion, objectified in postures.1 6 Christian saints are mostly
those who seek self-communion, immersing into their selves.
3. The prophets and mystics (posture: velie, amare in deo).
4. The dualists and harmonic persons (Augustin, Thomas).
5. Those who are born "once" or "twice," who right from the
beginning develop continuously in religious fashion. Further-
more the types seeking conversion.
6. The "pure" and the "loving."17
7. In addition there are the sham-figures, types of pretended re-
ligiosity: the gnostic, the ambitious and loveless priest; the here-
tic continuing his course only on the basis of opposition; the
demagogue being mostly a beneficiary of religious fanaticism
("religion as the foundation of the state"); the sceptic and the
insecure; the connoisseur and aesthetic.

2. General Comments on Exemplars and

Leaders in the Area of Religion

Before we turn our attention to the "original" holy men and foun-
ders let us make some general observations:
1. In the area of religion, exemplars and leaders coincide as to their
higher ranks. Religious exemplars form the main types of all
"charismatic" powers. This lies in the quintessence of their per-
son.

16. Cf. Heiler, F., Das Gebel [The Prayer], Munich 1918,
17. Cf. Cardinal Newman's "Sermons." Among the "pure" Newman makes
mention of both Johns and the Mother of the Lord. Among the "loving" he
mentions Peter who betrayed Christ ("John sees, Peter acts"), as well as Paul, Mary
Magdalen, Francis and Ignatius.

151
2. The primordial exemplarity of all religious, human exemplars is
the idea of God and its meaning. This idea possesses an essential
relation with the specific kind of the spiritual personhood of a
"founder." "Equality" or "similarity" to God is the highest
measure against which a founder himself measures himself.
3. All other types of exemplary persons, ranging from the genius
and hero down to leaders of economics, are either directly or
indirectly dependent on prevailing religious exemplars. Re-
ligious leaders and exemplars encompass and "inspire" all other
exemplars and leaders (for instance, the ancient hero - Christian
hero, Greek tragedy and Christian tragedy). This has three rea-
sons: (a) Among the mental factors of history religion is original
to art, philosophy, science; (b) religion is always already present
when higher levels of culture and civilization begin to develop;
(c) the power of religion is, among other spiritual powers, the
most lasting and most intense power. The powers of Confucian-
ism, Buddhism and Christianity survive both states and units
of culture. The spiritual nature and outer appearance of certain
religious exemplars and leaders hold sway over the epochs of
religious history and the history of the churches simultaneous
with larger spheres of religion and culture. This is the case for
instance, with the Buddhist and Islam world despite their ethnic
difference (Arabs, Indians, Turks, etc). For these worlds form a
spiritual unity in the same sense as Western and Eastern Chris-
tianity (Harnack). Spengler's assumption that religions are only
a part of culture is a basic error.
4. All true religious exemplars and leaders refer to a specific positive
source of cognition and of experience in their statements, in-
struction, advice, and enactments. In so doing, they go beyond
"natural revelation" in nature, reason, or history. They also refer
to a specific community of existence of life with absolute, holy
Being, which only they possess. They refer to revelation, grace
and illumination in contrast to the sage and genius; that is, they
refer to sources of knowledge surpassing natural and universal
reason. He who does not do so as - for instance, the historical
Buddha does not - is no original homo religiosus but a metaphy-
sician, teacher of salvation, or moralist (Confucius). Religious
exemplars and leaders refer to divine desclosures of the substance
of God (Christ) or to a divine disclosure of the content of divine

152
 Will or Knowledge (Prophets). Whenever God is conceived to be
apersonal God this kind of mediation between the knowledge of
God to man is constitutive through persons. For no person is
knowable by way of spontaneous penetration but only by way of
free self-disclosure toward another person. This is not the case
when the divine is conceived as order (China) or as a subject
matter [Sache] (Pantheism).

Throughout historical religions there are many manifestations of a

natural idea of God; that is, the idea of holy, absolute and infinite
being. However different, their most important sources are: (a)
the "people's God" (Jehova, God of prophets); (b) the God of the
original or derived saint, or of the "homo religiosus; " (c) the ideas of
God found in philos?phical speculation (Plato, Aristotle). It is only
a peculiar admixture of these various materials of the idea of God -
an admixture different among the positive religions - that engenders
so-called "dogmas" and, secondarily, theology as the science of
dogmas and what these dogmas say to the Divine with the influence
of priests. 18
But it is the origianl holy person, it is that person's primordial
image in any religion concerned - the "founders" of the larger
world-religions - who represent the fundamental power of guidance
and leading.

3. The Original Saint

Let us focus on what is essential to the original saint as an idea. I

wish deliberately to set aside all variations of these highest casts of
human beings in history as well as all positive faith.
The original saint is placed in the mysterious darkness and twi-
light of history19 and, for this reason, is quite different from a
genius, hero, or the leading minds of civilization. He appears as if
concealed by the magnificent radiance inherent in his own nature.

18. Religious tradition is essentially conservative among peoples. A philosophi-

cal idea of God becomes relevant only when it is built up on in theology. However,
theology is secondary to religion.
19. Cf. Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen [Berlin, 1919, 1921
and 1929]. [Ideas on World-History.]

153
 Be it Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius or Laotze, as a
historical being the original saint is very difficult to reach. This fact
betokens the tremendous life emanating from these persons. It is
equally difficult for Christian and Buddhist theology to separate
their historicality from their mythic image and later dogmas. 2o
There is everywhere the central question: To what degree is he
subject and object of the religion (orthodox and liberal orienta-
tions )?
Among his following, the original saint is never "one among
others," as this holds true even among the greatest genuises or
heroes. "Unique" is he, always. 21 And this amounts to a remarkable
law for this type of person. For even the greatest among genuises
supersede each other without denigrating each others' rights:
Dante, Goethe, Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes; Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant. Who would not admire and
love all of them, adore them simultaneously? The original holy
person, however, in at least all monotheism (tolerance of poly-
theism), all~ws of only one thing: "He who is not for me, is against
me." True, within a group of humans he may be substituted by
another, but the other can never be of equal value to him. No
wonder. He brings to us an essential message of the living, one God,
of His nature or of His will, having a special access to God's
revelation, illumination and self-disclosure. There is one God and
one person to whom He discloses most perfectly His essence. If the
disclosure is not only one of revelation and illumination through a
specific rational or volitional act of God, but a disclosure of God's
person and substance to man by way of a creating act as its highest

20. Cf. H. Beckh, Buddhismus [Buddhism], and H. Oldenberg, Buddha, sein

Leben. seine Lehre. seine Gemeinde [Buddha, his Life, Teaching and his
Community].
21. Among different historical epochs one could mention, for example,
Zoroaster, Buddha, Mohammed, and Christ. There can be many subsequential
saints. Of course. it lies outside the province of philosophy to determine who,
among existing persons, is the exemplary saint, nor can phenomenology give any
guarantees that he will enter my room within three minutes. However, in case the
original saint is given in immediacy, and is intented so, phenomenology can
guarantee that he will displace, and deprive of their rights, all other persons in
history that had laid claim on exemplary sainthood before. For the exemplariness
and uniqueness of the original saint belongs to the essential nexus of his nature.

154
form, and different in essence from rational or volitional act-revela-
tions - as all this is the case in Christianity: the uniqueness becomes
absolute for past, present and future. Christianity is not the most
perfect religion but it is absolute religion. It belongs to the essence of
Christian religion that it can not be surpassed by future historical
developments. That is its so-called "absoluteness" (Troeltsch). For
Christian religion alone corresponds to the peculiar, ontic link and
shows this peculiar awareness of a linkage that Christ shares with
God. "If Christ was only a great human being (and even if he had
been the greatest among all past prophets) he was less than this:
Either a fool or a Iyer" (Roscher). Since faith is a free act of the
person anyone can say: I do not believe in him. But he who does
believe in him must also believe that Christ is the center of world-
history. He is either nothing, or the center of the world. For this
reason there is "completeness of revelation." "Development"
means only penetration into the content of the religion. This also
pertains to all persons as founders, but to lesser degrees: It belongs
to the essence of this type of person and to the type of value he
represents.
In his intention, the holy person is al ways originally related to the
Divine in love and contemplation. He is not related primarily to the
world as is the case with the other types. (All great types of person-
hood possess a decisive and governing direction of love.) His follo-
wers "believe" what he has "in view" and what they themselves can
not see. This brings us to the quintessence of original sainthood,
separating it from all other personal exemplars: There is no univer-
sal measure and norm above him against which his willings, acts and
actions, as well as his own value ever could be measured. He
represents a type of human who findsfaith among hisfollowing, not
because one finds his actions to be good and his words to be "true"
as measured against a present norm, but because one believes in him
and his person by virtue of the charismatic quality of his person,
being, and nature. It is for this reason that one holds his word for
true, his actions for good. This amounts to the clearest criterion
there is for the original saint. His wonders, thoughts, noble deeds
and actions, are not proofs but testimony, demonstrations, and signs
of his unique ties to God and sanctity. Nowhere is this expressed with
such clarity than in Christ's words: I am the way, the truth, and the

155
 life. He did not tell the truth 22 : He is truth. He is truth in the form of
his personhood and of a worldground as personal ground. This
constitutes the essence of Christianity. The first meaning of Chris-
tianity is the faith in the person of Christ who is "the way, the truth
and the life!" Christianity does not mean: to believe in an idea, for
instance, to believe in the idea that Christ is the son of God, or to
believe in the everlasting, central, and living presence of the person
of Christ in world and history. Even the proposition "Christ is
God" obtains only for the sake of Christ's own testimony (error
made by gnostics).
The content given in the holy person's viewings, feelings and in
his love is revelation. If revelation is tantamount to self-revelation,
the essence of its content is perfection. This content is not subject to
any conceivable variation, increase or diminution, growth, devel-
opment, or progress. On the other hand, the conceptualization of
the content of revelation in terms of dogmata of the church, made
by its head, are subjected to variations insofar as more than one
dogma can be pronounced. A fortiori, all scientific systematics,
interpretation, and definition of the concepts contained in dogmata
made in theology are subject to progress and development, as is the
case in all science. This also holds for all technical values of the
holy, to all forms of worship. The intuition of the content of the holy
allows only comportment of understanding, and an ever deeper
immersing oneself into this intuition.
Immediate, clear presence belongs to the essence of the holy. The
holy person's effect on his followers is not comparable to that of a
hero whose effects live in deeds that have to be narrated, or live on in
some way or another. Nor is his effect comparable to that of the
genius whose spiritual presence lives on in the immediacy of the
genius' work. Rather, the holy person himself lives among his
foll<;?wing. The primary vehicle of his presence is his immediate
following and the ever new reproduction of the cast of his person
through saints deriving from his. The secondary vehicle of his
presence is authority and tradition co-determined by this immediate
personal interconnection. Whereas the genius reveals his exemplary
presence through his works, and whereas that of the hero reveals

22. The idea of truth is here presupposed. The absoluteness of truth is evident
only because he asserts it.

156
itself in his actions, through traditions within his own nation and
amoung different nations through the media of historical sciences,
the original saint dwells in his immediate following throughout
world-history, unrestricted by nations and cultures. Even to
connect a true view of him or his given ness to us, to a condition of an
understanding of a particular work, say, to holy Scriptures, or,
within Christianity, to the Bible, implying that he is given to us
through the Bible (even if with the assistance of the Holy Ghost,
"assistentia divini ingenii") would constitute a diminution of the
original holy person to the level of a mere genius. His factual
givenness is the in-d welling in his following, of which Scriptures cast
a first symbolic shadow. 23
It is essential for the exemplary holy man to be effective only
through the being 0/ his person, and not through virtues, and even
less through acts, works, deeds or actions. They are only pointers to
his being and holiness. What is characteristic for the holy man in the
full sense is what Friedrich Schiller said about the preference of the
noble soul over the base one, viz., that "it pays with what it is, not
with what it does." This follows from the essence o/personhood: the
person exists only in the execution of acts or in their welling-up. Its
being is continuous self-creating. Hence, being, life and work are one
and the same in the person. Even a derived saint lives through acts,
works and deeds. His effects are in the inner splendor of his virtues
("halo") giving an immediate "pure and good example." Yet, the
kind of his virtues are already determined by the person of the
saintly exemplar.
The ties between the derived and original saintly exemplar con-
sist primarily of immediate co-experience, and only secondarily in
immediate following as it had earlier been explained. This is in
contrast to other relationships through which people can be given to
us. For this reason it is not a fortuitous but an essential, intelligible,
and necessary fact that the original saint does not bequeath upon us
any self-written work that would make his person directly accessible
to us in subsequent history. It is precisely the absence of such a work
on which the co-conditions of his boundless efficacy rests. He who

23. Reading Holy Scriptures amounts to contemplation, edification and mental

exercise. This type of reading is quite different from reading scientific works. The
former amounts to taking attitudes and psychic techniques.

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does bequeath a work, such as Laotze or Confucius is, rather, a
sage. In any case he leaves behind him testimonies of his nature. In
the ancient Greek world preferring the sage to the saint, it was
Socrates who came closest to holiness. He, too, wrote nothing and is
known to us only through other comments, as those of Xenophon
and Plato. Any person's efficacy known to us only through a work,
is dependent on the material existence, preservation, and possible
understanding of such work, or dependent on the measures of such
understanding, on language, etc. It is already this factor that makes
a person's efficacy dependent on material subject to chance-factors
of each causal nexus it is embedded in. True, there are accounts of
the exemplary saint but, in essence, he bequeathes his following
upon nothing but himself. But this "himself," the cast of his spirit,
this is everything.
The efficacy of the original saint, therefore, extends as far as does
the idea of a community-oj-love ojpersons as a whole. It is the sphere
of his claim. There are realms of efficacy for any kind of leader, but
that of his efficacy is both "supra-worldly" and "inner-worldly." It
does not encompass only the world as is the case with the genius, or
a nation or people as is the case with a hero. It encompasses God as
the origin of all possible worlds. The exemplary saint is related only
to the idea of the infinite person, God. He sees and regards every-
thing else only in the origin of the light of God Whom he has "in
view." The relation of the derived saint is one of mediation. He does
not follow him like someone who is obedient to la ws, but heJollows
with him. Obedience is only the path on which he will reach free
following-in-love.
The original saintly exemplar is, therefore, above "glory." Glory
is beneath him. This only pertains to him and this may only be so for
him. The original saint brings salvation. There is no awe of him as
there is for a genius, no adoration as there is for a hero. Everyone
seeks refuge in his heart, seeks his, and the world's, salvation.
The original saint's afterlife in his disciples is mysterious beyond
all measures. Equally mysterious is the everlasting presence of his
existence and efficacy. Such immediate presence and inhabitation in
others does not come about by tradition which lets the past appear
in living presence, in contrast to the science of history placing
tradition into the past. To understand this inhabitation through
tradition is a deception. For what is contained in tradition belongs,

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in fact, to the past, and it is only an absence of our recollecting
consciousness that makes its contents appear in the present. But the
original saint is truly present in his disciples and lives in them. Let me
try to focus on this some more.
There is a kind of givenness we are concerned with here that is
diametrically opposed to it. This is our habitual and conscious
"remembering" something. An act of remembering something sets
in in situations, or with parts of that situation having spatio-tempo-
ral relations, similar to a situation when we saw another human
being and remember "that we sa w him or her before," or that "he or
she said this or that." When so remembering we recall a state of
affairs. Also, the value "that he or she was nice or good" is thusly
remembered. The chances for this to happen are often replaced by
reminders, for instance, by knots we tie in our handkerchiefs, or
memo pads, by the ringing of church bells in their various meanings,
or by the institution of the repeating cycles of feasts making us
remindful of something specific, or by burial ceremonies as in the
liturgy of the ecclesiastical year that reproduces Christ's life in terms
of symbols. To such a kind of remembering also belong interpreta-
tions of natural phenomena as the rising and setting sun betokening
a sign of a prophet, as is the case among Mohammedans. Such
characteristics we find only in respect to great men or a great event,
such as a victory.
A quite different phenomenon is at hand, however, in an internal
hearing-again, for instance, of a melody, or seeing-again of a land-
scape, or feeling-again of a value, or in the pre-feeling of a positive
or negative event when all of these are given in remembrance. 24 In
such cases the melody, landscape, or value is not "remembered" in
the aforementioned sense, rather, they are presentified and are
factually seen, heard, and felt. However, this is so without a charac-
ter of the reality of what is so presentified. The character of reality
stays with the past event. Thus, there exists a pre-feeling of oncom-
ing death, or a re-feeling of love passed away. This is something
quite different from a recollection or expectation saying that I had
this or that feeling or will have it. For in the former case I see, feel,
and hear a content: this contentpresentifies itself to me. It is only its
reality that stays in the past or lies in the future. As has been shown,

24. During adolescence intuitions of remembrance are constitutional (Jaensch).

159
it also frequently occurs that only the value of something is present
to us while the conceptual meaning and image of this something is
absent. The above state of affairs is still less comparable to a "repro-
duction of experience" without remembrance which only colors in
peculiar fashion present contents, as this occurs with recalled colors.
But the retrievals in feeling, seeing, and hearing are themselves co-
given and differ sharply from what we "already have had." For in
the latter case I am aware that I saw or felt something before, and
my seeing is "past" and given "as" past. But in the other case there
is the facticity ofliving-something-again, seeing-again and hearing-
again, and this feeling and seeing is in the present, even if conoted
with a consciousness of an immediate identity of something past or
without a necessity that this identity pertains to something specific.
This state of affairs must also be distinguished from another one:
the immediate co-feeling, co-loving, co-hating and co-striving. This
is very different from "knowing that the same is loved or hated that
another loves or hates," or to know, to want or esteem, the same
that another wants or esteems, as occurs, for instance, in friendship.
To clarify this, let us take three exemples: (1) Parents who loved their
child are positioned in front of the child's corpse. They have two
kinds of pain and complexes of bodily feelings: for instance, they
may feel weak. But they share one suffering which they feel with
"one another." (2) Someone else joins the parents who was not as
close to the child as they are. He has "sympathy with the parents; he
grasps their suffering as present in his perception, viz, he sees "that
they suffer" but without any trace of co-feeling their suffering. He
experiences his own suffering only "with" the state of affairs con-
cerned. (3) Someone else again sees the parents' tears and woes (say,
an elderly errand woman) being induced by spontaneous impulses
of imitation toward analogous impulses of movements. In this third
person there occur feeling-states tied to analogous impulses of
expression. Such feeling-states have, of course, no relation to the
dead child, or they may only afterwards have such a relation by way
of a judgment.
If we join both facts in the unity of an act, the re-living and
co-living, it is possible, therefore, to have an immediate presence of
acts of person - the acts in which alone a personality exists and "run
off by themselves." However, it is evidentially clear that this entails
no relation to the psychic experiences of this human being and

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which experiences had their places in objective time running off in
causal necessities. There can be quite different contents, situations,
and milieus which I, nevertheless, grasp with "his" own hands, if
you will, see or hear with "his" inner eyes and ears, love and hate,
with "his" loves and hates.
I ask the question: what is it that the saints who, "followed
Christ" wanted, experienced or did: They certainly did not want to
be [physically] contaminated by him as members of a mass infect
each other when they show their fists, accuse, are irate, arson,
murder, or are hypnotized by a leader. Neither wanted Christ's
followers to just "imitate" Christ (as the ill-chosen expression of
"imitatio Christi" would suggest), nor wanted they to copy him,
say, to live in Galilee, or be in despair in Gethsemane or die on the
cross: nor did they want to have sympathy with him, not share the
joy "with" his glorification. They wanted something else: They
wantid to co-live and re-live in one act the Spirit of his historically
fortuitous, small and poor life. And this they did, of course, along
quite different contents of their lives, in terms of quite different
experiences, deeds, actions, and works. Yet, they leavened and
saturated all their fortuitous qualities, talents, milieus, historical
situations, occupations and duties, with the individual essence of
Christ's person. This amounts to a unique jump into the center of a
person; it amounts to an intuitively seizing hold of its well, and a
"life" from out of this center, i.e., everyone of them living his own,
fortuitous, historical "life. "25 This is precisely what the act of "fol-
lowing" implies. It is not an approach from the outside as historians
must make such approaches. This type of knowledge of Christ is
quite different from historical knowledge transmitted to us in theo-
logy. It is basic knowledge.
It is this "center" that his followers had of him, possessed, and
acted out in such lived manner which is holy and alone can be called
so. They thusly eternalize the being and life of his person through
actions everlasting insofar as they re-live and co-live them. The
original holy man, in contrast to a genius living on through his
works, possesses "presence of self." This self-presence consists in

25. Peculiarities in religious language: to have sinned "in" Adam, to be crucified

and risen "in" Christ, to be sanctified and spiritulized "in" Him, or to have one's
substance "in" Christ.

161
the coincidence of his being, works and actions, in the nature of his
personality. And for this reason the "presence" of the original saint
who is "person" through and through, is neither dependent upon,
nor conditioned by, the destiny of anyone of his works which are
different form his very being. He "himself' can truly be present
without being restricted by any material symbols. And since the
material with which the original saint works and creates is neither
wood, stone, nor paint, but the person of the human being itself and,
therefore, of all possible human beings, he can only be present
through, and in, persons. In persons, however, he can in truth be
present. Whatever remains past, is not he himself but only his own
historical appearance.
What lies yet deeper than the acts of the center of the person are
the unitary fulfilments of the moral "abilities," and the "ought," of
the person related to values and given in intuition (without an image
or conceptual contents of volitions concerned). What I am referring
to are the virtues. The person is given to himself in them as if through
different rays aiming in all directions. A derived saint experiences,
first of all, the abilities and the ought of the exemplary saint. In
contrast to the case when only the acts are co-lived or re-lived, the
acts themselves and their directions flow toward him as they stem
from the presence of the virtue of exemplarity. The derived saint
"mirrors" the virtues of the exemplary holy person in lived manner.
It is in the dynamic and timeless chain of such acts of following
that the everlasting presence of the original exemplar realizes him-
self. This happens in a fashion as ifhe were silent historicity present
in every point of history: the archetypal force propelling history
from one point to the next.
Another way of demonstrating the presence of the original holy
exemplar lies in the fact that it is impossible not to remember or to
be a ware of him. One can only "forget" him. But "to forget"
something is quite different from "not remembering" something.
To forget is a positive act. In contrast to not-remembering-some-
thing the act of forgetting contains a feelable presence of something
within remembrance even if only as to a value. In addition, forget-
ting something has built on it an instinctive (i.e., not arbitrary)
looking away from what announces itself. But the presence of the
primary exemplar is so forceful and imposing that it is impossible
not to be aware of it. Everyone must be aware of him to such a

162
degree that one could either only completely forget or repress him.
The original, holy exemplar, as founder of a religion, also exerci-
zes maximal power (in both extention and in terms of duration) over
all minds. His nature leavens and tinges all legal systems and values
of the mind, their styles, forms, contents, and their bearers. This is
even the case when human beings do not want to hear of him or
when human creators of mental values are not aware of him.26 He
who seeks the least amount of power possesses maximal power. In
intention, it is the weak that is the strongest - what is mild is most
powerful. And it also belongs to the peculiar efficacy of this person
that his power both encompasses and determines his own foes'
animosity and desires of persecution. The momentum of his person
still resides in their enmities, hates, and persecutions. He who
persecutes, follows (Nietzsche). His peculiar quality thusly encom-
passes both friend and foe. One may develop toward his exempla-
rity, or against it - , but not independently of it. Every opposition
and rebellion against him amounts to silent recognition of him.
Throughout history, for instance, there are only very few who
contradicted Christ, they gave only new interpretations of him.
The everlasting presence of the holy exemplar is equally quiet and
silent among his disciples and followship. His presence is also the
deepest possible knowledge of him. All other sources of knowledge
of him, for instance, the institutions of ecclestiastical authority,
traditions of him, the contents of holy Scriptures, the cultural forms
which built around him and, above all, mere historical science of
~lim: they amount to sources which have to be considered as derived,
albeit in various measures and ranks.
We must make mention still of one particular paradox. As values
exist only in goods, so also the type of the holy man exists only in
real persons. A saint as a positive, historical figure must have

26. Sainthood encompasses all other forms of human greatness, including that
of the genius, of the hero, and of the benefactor of bodily well-being and health.
Any other prevailing exemplars live from the exemplary saint, e.g., the ancient
ideals of the genius, sage and hero; the ancient tragedies and the Christian
tragedies. All "occupations," too, are rooted in him. Thus, the exemplary saint has
an effect on all life-values and areas of culture. Periods and divisons of world
history are based in his appearance and scope of activities. Subsequent saints put
the stamp of the religious life-forms on whole generations: Benedict, Francis,
Dominic, Ignatius, and also Luther and Calvin.

163
historical reality. This is an essential nexus. It would be senseless to
deny Jesus' historical existence and to simultaneously worship his
holiness. For in this case his person would be replaced by an "idea."
But it is equally evident that a derived saintly person in whom he is
present, and who possesses the original holy exemplar in both a
most perfect way and in self-givenness, has no need of knowing
anything about the colorful pieces of his historical existence or any
real history. Indeed, he can be subject to any deception in this
regard. It is clear therefore: Whatever the historical science of Jesus
may contribute, it tells us nothing about the holy Jesus.

IV. THE GENIUS

The typical bearer of purely mental values as I have explained it

elsewhere is a genius. He is represented by three basic forms: the
artist, the philosopher or sage, and by the legislator or judge. These
basic forms are derived fromt he pure ideas of the beautiful, of pure
knowledge, and of right.
Together with Kant and Schopenhauer, we wish to reject a
misuse of the term "genius" when it is applied .to military command-
ers, statesmen, colonizers, or inventors. I would consider it shame-
ful to add anything else to what has already been said about the
habit of our age that assigns the rank of a genius also to such people
as founders of a bank, potato farmers, or businessmen, a habit
which already Jacob Burckhardt exposed as ridiculous. Kant also
emphasizes that it is false to speak of geniuses of science. For Kant
held that he who is a genius creates something original and exem-
plary without formulas. Sciences, however, he says, are subjected to
the formulas of their methods. No doubt, Kant is right in this. For it
is only the discoveries of new methods, forms and categories of
thinking, that border on the domain of the genius. But Kant was
wrong in asserting that a philosopher could not be a genius. For
philosophy, and all pure and absolute knowledge, can make all
forms of thinking and intuition, and afortiori all methods, to be an
object of philosophical experience and cognition. Kant had to come
to his own conclusions because he did not assign to philosophy a
pure and independent task, but restricted philosphy to looking "for
mere presuppositions of scientific knowledge." True, philosphy

164
addresses our attitude toward pure knowledge and determination of
essences. But it does not belong to philosphy to be itself subject to
presuppositions of specific methods.
The efficacy of the genius lies in his work through which his
individual personality is objectively present. (There is not yet any
differentiation between being and deed.) But he himself does not
explicitly will this to be so. What he "wills" is, rather, the subject
matter in his passionate love towards an idea. (He is against any
conscious desire to be original.) And the more he "wills" his subject
matter the more does his product bear the imprint of his personality.
It is easy to see that this happens only with maximal works of art,
with philosophemes,and systems of moral la ws, la ws - but not with
any kind of artifact or work of science. I understand "work," or the
value-substance of a work, to be nothing else but the imprint of the
individuality of a person on any kind of material. Hence, it can not
be the work of a genius that is subject to causal explanations by
science. It is only its tones and expressions that can be so explained;
for instance, the material it is composed of, the language it is written
in, or the ideas used as a means to imprint the individual character
of a person into the material used as they pertain to various kinds of
environment, epochs, and historical phases. But whatever consti-
tutes a work of a genius to be such work is, in essence, not subject to
causal explanations by science. It can only be made understood, and
intuited in its nature, by the art of philology (history - opening up of
culture)Y The core and the individuality of the person who created
such masterpiece becomes livingly present to us only when we peel
the tones, forms of expression, and symbols off from it. 28 The ef-
ficacy of the genius is smaller than that of the saint, whose contents
encompass both the world and the sphere of transcendence.
The efficacy of the genius pertains to the whole of the spatio-tem-
poral world: that is, to all points in space and time where we can find
intelligent persons. In this sense the genius' efficacy is "cosmopoli-

27. Cf. H. Bergson, "L'intuition philosophique," a 1911 lecture in Bolognia.

[L'intuition philosophique. Conference faite au congres de Philosophie de Bologne
Ie IO avril 1911. Oeuvres, Presses Universitaire de France, Paris 1959, pp.
1345-1365. Ed.]
28. Significance in the historical sciences: To extract the purity of the work its
milieu, heritage, and history.

165
 tan." The efficacy is also independent of where the species man
resides: it relates to the very realm of intelligent persons in general
inasmuch as those appear in the unity of the world. 29 But we must
also mention that the cosmopolitan domain is to be distinguished
from the sphere of the "international." This domain is equally above
the "national" and "international." The term "international" is a
negative term. The concepts of "international interests," of "inter-
national work," of international values of usefulness and agreea-
bleness, are formed in a regard to what can be common to all men in
terms of interests, work, and values. But this is done by not taking
into consideration the peculiarities of what a culture, or a nation, can
contribute. The term "international," furthermore, relates to a pre-
sent and its specific intersts, values, etc. The concept of "cosmopoli-
tan," however, is, as this word implies, a positive concept. As the
usage of the term among the Stoics and in the eighteenth century
would suggest, a "citizen of the world" is a person who is unified
with other persons independently of their historical times and pla-
ces, and one who reaches out his hands to them while having the
same matters in view and sharing with them common understan-
ding, spiritual joy, and intellectual activity. The realm of what is
cosmopolitan, therefore, is not restricted to a present time but
pervades all of history. Schopenhauer is right in saying that all great
philosophers reach out their hands to each other, beyond all times,
and that they form a grand assembly having a conversation with
itself. This is not at all the case with other human beings living
simultaneously. Only those belong to such a realm who are related
to mental values and are active in realizing and understanding them:
such is their aristocracy of enculturation. The phrase "international
work" is a justified one, but to speak of "cosmopolitan work" is
senseless. There are correspondences among national cultures and
geniuses whereas there is internationality among the sciences. Ac-
cording to the essence and basic intention implicit in the concept,
what is "cosmopolitan" is in no way confined to the earth and its
human species. Rather, in all of its intelligent applications, the term
implies that cosmopolitanism begins and ends wherever intellectual
persons are directed to the highest mental values of this world and

29. This is in contrast to the saint who not only encompasses the living, but also
the dead and the non-human souls. It is also in contrast to the hero.

166
are occupied with those values. Marsmen, too, if there were any,
could form a cosmopolitan realm.
We said that a genius lives in his work. It is not his person,
however, but the individuality of his person that does so. (The holy
person has no individuality, be he godlike or exemplary. He is given
to us simply as a spiritual person and, in this sense, given not
different from God, because God, too, has no individuality.) It is
already for this reason that the nature of the genius allows there to
be many of them, whereas it lies in the nature of the original holy
exemplar to be the "only" one. In saying that the individuality of the
person of a genius is present in his work (his "original") we do not
mean to say that this pertains to his empirical and historical indi-
viduality, insofar as his body and hereditary factors also determine
his personality. It is only the individuality of his person that lies in
his work. 30 This would explain a curious fact: We neither necessarily
need to have any information or knowledge of his work's outer
criteria, nor need we to know the connection it had with its creator,
to recognize that work as his own. This state of affair holds true only
for a genius. And this makes the work of a genius most sharply
distinghuished from any scientific accomplishment, from any pro-
duct of a trade, from technology or industry. Apart from the met-
hods applied in these areas, they are independent of persons, na-
tions, and cultures. For it belongs to the essence of such products
that they could have been made by persons other than those who
made them. By contrast, masterpieces of a genius, such as individual
works of art, various books in philosophy or parts oflegal systems,
are intuitively unified with the unity of the genius' personality and
not only with empirical ties to their creator. Thus, a direct iden-
tification of both masterpiece and genius is possible without any
recourse to information or clues (outer criteria). For this reason
phrases like: "This is a Rembrandt." As such, "a" Rembrandt is
instantaneously given, much as there may frequently occur decep-
tions in cases involved. But any other type of work must require
positive information given by some source to determine its author;
this is precisely because its author is replaceable in that some one

30. To "ennoble" a genius would amount to duncery. The importance of

hereditary values is smallest with the saint and it increases with the genius and
becomes maximal with the hero.

167
else could have made the work concerned here. We can therefore
say: It is only the work of a genius that is at the same time the
original of its own source. It gives testimony by itself of its creator
and its creator's nature. It may be valued only by the objective
intuition residual in it.
Looking through the work of any genius we see the totality of a
"world." His work is truely a testimony of a "microcosm" (Bruno,
Leibniz) juxtaposed to "the" world as "macrocosm" as it is given to
a collective personality. With reference to Schopenhauer, Tolstoy
speaks of a "world on a smaller scale." But mental products of those
who are not considered a genius in ordinary civilization show only
individual aspects of a "world" conditioned by specific milieus of
their producers. (Philosopher - specialists.) Individual works of art
or other creations of geniuses have, however, besides their self-value,
always a higher meaning being the jumping board for grasping a
genuis' world (or its structure). For it is impossible to grasp a genius'
entire world through anyone of his works. For in his masterpiece
there is not only present what he saw in his own work but also the
very individual peculiarity of his mental view and the corresponding
structure of his world. His masterpiece allows of gaining access to
this peculiarity of his own viewing. As an exemplar, Goethe is more
important because of his poetic view of the world than he is through
his "Faust." For it amounts to a relative chance which masterpieces
have been begun, finished and completed. Whenever we set out to
understand the work of a genius it is his peculiar "world" we first
refer to. He who wants to comprehend Plato's philosophy from the
viewpoint of historical science [geisteswissenschaftlich] must not
pay attention to the mental processes of the Athenian called
"Plato;" processes, that is, which belonged to the so-called history
around Plato and, in a wider sense, to Greek history. 31 He is, rather,
compelled to acquire knowledge of the whole of the world as seen by
Plato himself. Only then can he succeed to correctly understand
Plato's works and their parts; indeed, he can succeed in "understan-
ding them better than Plato understood himself' (Kant).
Totally independent of the individuality found in the masterpiece
of a genius is his "lived-body-environment," that is, his psycho-
physical character and hereditary dispositions. His work is called

31. Cf. V.v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Platon.

168
"classical" whenever this is the case. A work is called "classic" when
its meaning is, in principle, both intelligible and exemplary for
persons of completely different milieus or even for members of
different races, nations, peoples and ages. (Classic and historical
philology.) Much as a work of art may represent highest perfection
within specific and peculiar la ws and feelings of style, and within the
possibilities of the understanding of a race; and much as it can
thusly be accessible indirectly to all peoples when they have studied
such styles and empathized respective feelings into them, such work
of art can not be called "classic." It may be called "characteristic,"
or "filled with a particular character," but the predicate "classic"
lies not in it. What is classic is above what is of character, just as
what is of character is above what is conventional. (Classicism is
only a weakening imitation of what is classic.) It is for this reason
that a classical masterpiece can be accessible to persons of very
different milieus - because its origin is free from any special envi-
ronmental influences of its creator.
The primary task of any science of culture must be the demon-
stration of this ultimate and positive meaning and value of the work
of the genius. This must be done by making accessible to historical
and causal explanations whatever does not belong to the substance
of the value of such work. It is neither such work, nor its substance,
which is subject to historical explanation. The masterpiece must be
cleansed from historical explanation as well as stripped from all the
covers in which it is handed down to subsequent generations, that is,
from all its specific materials or corporeal bearers in which it
represents itself. 32 Therefore, what is called with full justification a

32. Just as no historical explanation can be made of a genius' work so also there
is no sociological explanation possible. (The same sociological conditions hold for
quite different kinds of genuises and their works.) Yet, there is "much" in a culture
that must sociologically be explained: 1. Who are the specific geniuses whose
intentions enter historical reality, for instance, the political or economical
conditions: a noble Greek youth was not allowed to become a sculptor; conversely,
a slave without leasure, or an inborn painter without a brush, or moneys for his
training, are not known in history. (History's cross-check. The content and the
realization of an idea; the theory of real and ideal factors. The scope of what is
possible [Cf. the author's Probleme einer Sozi%gie des Wissens (1924), Section I,
Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 8. Translated by Manfred S. Frings as Problems of a
Sociology of Knowledge, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1982. Concerning-

169
true interpretation of such a work is, in part, a negative activity. As a
whole this activity is an act of the liberation and salvation from the
initial, foggy appearance of its historical existence. There is only one
positive goal of all interpretation: To let the work speak for itself,
and to open, as it were, both the meaning and intuition for its
mysterious language which it itself speaks, and it only speaks. True
interpretation must peel off both the history and the environment of
the genius that conceal it in order to reach its deeply seated sim-
plicity, and everlasting plainness, from out of the complexity of its
eternal existence and composition.
It follows that the work of a genius is no passing point of mere
progress or regress as this is the case with all accomplishments of
exact science, trade, industrial products, techniques and machines
(utilitarian values). There is a "totality" residual in its nature, even
if it is not a final or perfect one. Its existence is never just a phase,
even though there are transient vogues among classic works.
In order to make a genius' masterpiece comprehensible and
understandable for later generations there is a necessary factor that

the above see also the author's "Ueber die positivistische Geschichts-
philosophie des Wissens, (Concerning the positivist philosophy of the history of
knowledge) in Vol. 6, Gesammelte Werke; Ed.] Above all, however, a genius will
always have some inherited values that color his work, nothwithstanding the fact
that such values can not be deduced in terms of heredity (cf. Taine's History of the
English Literature, and Nadler's Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stiimme [History
of the Literature of Germanic Tribes]. 2. The forms in which an ideal content of
personhood is represented are sociologically explainable; for instance, the poetry of
the estates as found with the minnesingers, the epic novel, the Greek and modern
theatre (Shakespeare, Calderon, the modern bourgeois theatre); opera. Yet how
little is Dostoevski characterized by the fact that he presented the magnificent and
prophetic songs of his Brothers Karamasov in the form of a trashy novel. And how
little is Mozart characterized by the fact that he presented the almost saintly, pure
music of his Don Juan - which some experts consider even to be religious music - in
the form of a light italian opera. The contents of French naturalist-materialist
philosophy in the eighteenth century are aristocratic while in Germany they are
bourgeois in the nineteenth century. 3. Both the dissemination and the measures of
recognition of a culture are sociologically explainable. Often, the same holds true
for the simultaneity of a political victory won by a state and its mentality-change
engendered by the conquered, e.g., the Greeks and the Romans, or for a beaten and
humiliated Russia and the dissemination of her ideas. There is the lonely genius or
the one who finds only belated recognition: Spinoza, Schopenhauer.

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is not required in the exact sciences with their own understanding of
the process of civilization: This necessary factor is congeniality.
Despite its corporeal presence throughout an era, the work of a
genius may stay completely concealed, unexplored, and remain
veiled in darkness. It may stay there in silence and unheard of. And
no matter how intense and marvelous the acts of understanding of
some may be, to catch its particular characteristics in terms of
interpretation they do not penetrate its concealed core. It s only
when a congenial person "re-visions" its quintessential meaning
that such a hidden work may begin to speak to us again. A "conge-
nial person" is not the one who duplicates another genius; rather,
the congenial person possesses the same co-vision and re-vision
withing an aesthetic or cognitive intuition as a derived saint has
them with respect to the original holy man. All skills of interpreta-
tion of particulars are dependent on such re-discovery of a pure
masterpiece, should such interpretation reach its goals at all. (In
this, we are against associative psychology.) Such a congenial func-
tion may be found among the great persons and artists of the
Renaissance, re-discovering the works of classical antiquity. We
may find it with Winkelman concerning Greek sculpture, with Ger-
man romanticists rediscovering the Middle Ages, and with the
Grimm brothers concerning the German language. The merits of all
those individual interpretations and assertions made by such pio-
neers of re-discovering the cores slumbering in any such works have
not been affected by later refutations or corrections.
Within the pure spiritual contents of a culture, within all master-
pieces of geniuses at a particular time in history (in contrast to
bearers of culture such as statues, writings, etc.) we have a phenom-
enon before us unknown in other areas of values: This is the
phenomenon of "renascence," the revivification of the apparent
death of a masterpiece. Everything can rise again in the area of pure,
spiritual culture. This is its trait. But in the area of technical values,
for instance, of values of utility, a renascence would be tantamount
to "regress." This is because both continuous progress and interna-
tionality belong to the essence of the bearers of the latter types of
values. The cosmos of civilization [Zivilisationskosmos, as distinct
from culture] can and must be carried on. It makes good sense,
therefore, to speak of respectively present levels of civilization in the
description of the development of civilization-values. Any one-

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sided preoccupation in this area leads necessarily to a historical
description amounting to saying, "How wonderful has our progress
been. "
Concerning values of culture, however, such a description of
history makes no sense. For the fact that masterpieces may not be
effective for, and alive at, a given present time does not necessarily
imply that they could not be discovered in the future. To this
Leopold von Ranke already pointedly testified: Who could ever
have foreseen that Plautus' and Terence' commedies, rejected
throughout the early and later Middle Ages, would have been
rediscovered in the French comedies of Moliere?
The wholes and parts of masterpieces have so little to do with the
stream of events of history that they are rather covered up by such
events and must laboriously be brought to light and uncovered
(preservation and re-discovery). The greatest misunderstanding,
therefore, of the meaning of a culture lies in regarding it to be just an
expression of a particular time and the life of this culture and of its
so-called "spirit." (Historical relativism: Hegel, Comte, Spengler.)
On the other hand, of course, a masterpiece can be seen or misused
by an historian as a mere symbol or sign for the nature of the
interests of an age (for which we may better use the term "zeit-
geist"). But even such misuse is not possible on the basis of the
properties making a masterpiece classical for a culture, but on the
basis of those properties concealing its very nature. Still, the various
kinds of a so-called spirit of the time, i.e., the interests characteri-
zing an age, are manifested by the particular ways of how a zeitgeist
has related to an existing meaning of culture or has reacted to any
one of its parts. (Perspectival interests of an age.) For instance, it
matters very little for the value of the Shakespearian theater how the
zeitgeist of the Enlightenment in the English and French eighteenth
century judged Shakespearian theater (Voltaire, Hume). Yet, res-
pective judgments, made throughout the eighteenth century zeit-
geist, are very interesting.
As to cultural masterpieces, a zeitgeist shows a drive-related
attention (which is not of an arbitrary kind) toward certain parts,
aspects, and characteristics of certain works of a culture. And since
this attention is not an arbitrary one, so-called "children of the
times" have, of necessity, no knowledge of it. The direction of a
zeitgeist has an effect similar to a hypnotic suggestion, similar to an

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obsession, or to blinders (as the materialist theory of history has
them). Thus, a zeitgeist conceals much more of a given culture than
it demonstrates or shows of it. Its effects are like those offog or dull
media which have to be penetrated so that one can reach into a
culture's core.
Nevertheless, history in the sense of a process of concrete psychic
and historical life, and including zeitgeist, does have a particular
meaning for the disclosure of culture. It consists in the fact that
while the torchlights of different spirits of the times [Zeitgeister]
may illuminate various parts of culture, the one-sidedness of each of
them becomes restricted by another following it. The spirits of times
give a masterpiece the possibility of representing itself in more pure
and adequate fashion throughout the anarchic struggles such var-
ious spirits of times have with one another in their mutual self-de-
struction and extinction. There are not only substitutions among
the one-sided aspects that culture is subjected to in this exchange,
but also mutual extinctions of the partial images culture presents
itself in. In an effort to purify our mind's eye for an understanding of
the works concerned, it is, for instance, very important to make the
various aspects of classical antiquity in general, as well as of Greek
philosophy or art in particular, themselves objects of historical
description (history of the image of Jesus). It is also when we learn
to see to what degree, for instance, an understanding of Spinoza's
ethics was lost in the eighteenth century that we can begin to sense
the significance of the re-discovery of the intuition ensouling his
work as seen by such thinkers as Lessing, Herder, Jacobi, Novalis
and Hegel, whereas Spinoza's own special endeavors of applying
Euclidean methods of proof had covered up its contents. (Erwin
Rohde, Jacob Burckhardt and the antiquity.) What is today often
called "history of culture" mostly boils down to descriptions of the
various ways the works of the mind escape and conceal themselves
from various spirits of times.
With the above we have gained another determination of the
essence of a genius' masterpiece that has often been mentioned but
with out further details. This is the "inexhaustibility" of its com-
prehension in the endlessness of history, or, the nature of the infinite
depth of its meaning. No given time in history would be enough to
cover its evidential, adequeate and complete comprehension. I wish
to emphasize that depth and inexhaustibility hold also for the

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empirical, creating genius himself. In his elaborations on Plato's
"Ideas," Kant writes with full justification that it is possible "to
understand a philosopher better that he understood himself." The
same holds for works of art. Whatever it was that an artist esteemed
and loved in his work, or whatever he intended to put into it, must
not serve as a measure for the contents of his own work. What he
accomplished often goes far beyond his intentions, or, for that
matter, stays behind them. It was already Schelling who stressed this
point when he compared the creative acts of a genius with the
spontaneous ways of organic production (Goethe as an example).
Yet, it would be a mistake to go beyond what this comparison of
Schelling's contains.
The relationship a masterpiece has with regard to objective time
is essentially an ordered one. In contrast to the being and actions of
a saint (person) a genius' work is both related to "temporality" and
a specific place of its origin in objective time. The being of the saint,
and his work, are essentially "eternal" and, for this reason, "supra-
temporal." And it is only the values pertaining to a saint that may be
called "eternal values." The work of a genius, however, has an
"origin" into time. Nevertheless, it does not have (as a value-sub-
stance) any "beginning" as any historical event, for instance, a war,
would have, or as beginnings belong to all manufactured products
and even to their forms, such as the form of a chair or a table. The
value-substance of a masterpiece does not allow of any genetic
causal explanation for this reason. For it belongs to the nature of a
work of a genius to contain both an objective claim, and an objec-
tive guarantee, of endless duration in time. Yet, the work of a genius
is not eternal since its nature necessitates it to be cast into material,
much as it is independent of all material forms and qualities, and
especially independent of "corporeity," "real causality" or even of
the given forms of ultimate, phenomenological materiality given in
inner and outer perception. But it is its material all the same that
links the work of art to time. (Objective idea of fame as earthly
immortality.33)
33. A genius possesses fame, but no honor. The desire for fame is desire for the
eternalization of the person in his "work." Factual fame does not rest in honors
bestowed upon by other human beings. Human beings honor themselves by
recognizing the fame of a person insofar as such a person is residual in his work,
and by esteeming and adoring this person.

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 Spiritual personality, as explained earlier is, in essence, supra-
temporal. If a positive value consists only in the very personality, as
is the case with the holy person, this very value, too, is of supra-tem-
poral character. By contrast, the acts of a person arise into time; an
act originates point-wise, as it were, into time and acts itself out
point-wise without requiring a span a time. No act has temporal
extension. On the other hand, acts among themselves do have places
and orders in time. In precise analogy to this, works of art have this
relation to both time and to other works of art. They originate in
sequence while each one of them, having thusly taken its origin,
possesses both the guarantee and the claim of endless duration. As
we shall see later, it is this point that makes the work of a genius
distinct from any technical or manufactured product and, indeed,
distinct from any civilization-born work that obtains its importance
only on the rung it occupies in ever higher structures of movements
of progress, or which importance they may lose as soon as they are
not anymore of service to such progress.
The "claim" and what "ought to be" in said duration is founded
in the pure and spiritual value of the masterpiece as represented in
pure knowledge and in highest aesthetic values. The basic guarantee
of the duration concerned is founded in the fact that, at least in
principle, the work of the genius is reproducible out of any concei-
vable material, or that its remnants are "re-constructible" without
there being a "plan" in doing so other than the one already contai-
ned in it or in its left-over debris. For example, if a painting is copied
it remains the same work (albeit not necessarily the same value of
representation) present in the original ofthe copy made. Thus, it is a
matter of course that philosophical knowledge as contained in
Plato's Theory of Ideas, for instance, will remain "the same work"
no matter how the original has been copied or translated; and it also
remains the same work, in addition, throughout all representations
and interpretations provided by philosophy throughout the ages.
(Copies, translations and representations are in this sense possible
in terms of infinitely approximate precisions and adequations, as is
any kind of re-construction, no matter how intuitive congeniality
may be a condition for this.) If we are faced with a genuine work of
art the spirit of the individuality of its creator must be grasped in any
of the remnants ofthis work: The aesthetic intentions residual in the

175
 whole of this work of art. This whole can be reconstructed from
those remnants left of it. If the corporal bearer of a work has been
lost through natural disaster while we at least know of a past
existence of such a work we are able to reproduce such a lost work in
the spirit of its creator in terms of those works of his that did come
down to us and revealing to us how the genius felt and saw the
world. And even if the entire work of a genius was subject to the fate
of complete destruction, subsequent works of artists having a
unified intention in their individuality, can give us a hunch that an
unknown genius was behind them all, and they can enable us to form
a specific idea of his nature.
Such a procedure is possible but only meaningful to the extent
that the genius put the stamp of his individual mind on the endless
and enduring matter itself, not on the specific pieces, or even kinds
and forms, of matter he chose to make impressions upon. As much
as certain materials are more advantageous than others for the
appearance of a work of art, for instance, marble, ivory or wood for
sculpture, oils or water colors for painting, combinations of vowels
and the syntax of a specific language for poetry, or a specific
instrumenta tion for the musical work of art, all of this pertains only
to greater or lesser serviceabilites and not to the essence of the work.
One must also keep in mind, for example, that the choice of the
material used in sculpture pertains to the aesthetic value of appear-
ance and to the chemical-physical composition of the material. The
aesthetic value of appearance can even be given in materials other
than those used, depending on technical development. However, we
must even assert more than this: In principle, it is the case that a
work of a genius, and its core as such, can be transferred into all
languages of sensory appearance and into all the various arts resting
on their differences. A musical work can be translated into the
plastic art or the art of painting, a sculpture can be translated into
poetry or dance. All specific materials and all sensory media are, in
the final analysis, only a "vestment" of the purity of the master-
piece. True, there are relationships between the pure work, sensibi-
lity and material in general, but there is no relationship to any
specific sensibility or material. It is precisely the depth ofthe materia
pura into which the genius "reaches back" in creative fashion, to
build and create out of it, that raises his work well above the

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accidents and the fate its material may be subject to throughout all
causations in nature; this is what preserves its duration. And it is by
virtue ofthis "reaching back" into this depth that the efficacy of the
work of the genius possesses an anlogy to the idea of divine creati-
vity, so often and justifiedly stressed.
For this reason our noble word "creating" should be used only
with reference to the genius in contrast to the "work" some one may
do in the sciences, industry or in trade. Even the inventors of new
forms (of technical tools, of machines, of telegraphy and tele-
phones), in which workers and industrial activity put to use common
materials by following plans based in divisions of labor, must
conform to general natural laws (more specific laws are most of the
time already a consequence of inventions, especially those of more
simple and scientific instruments). It is only the genius, and his own
masterpiece, that are free from any obedience to natural laws. The
work of a genius can be transferred principally to worlds having
totally different naturalla ws than those that characterize our own.
The entire set of characteristics found in the work of a genius can
not be found in any product that is not of a genius, even if they
would belong to the sphere of art, and by no means can it be found
in any product oftechnical civilization. A tool or a utensil, a table or
a chair, for instance, is always "manufactured anew" according to
general rules and by way of the principles of composition. The
genius, however, is a being who creates exemplariness "without
rules" as Kant correctly saw. It is from the works that he created
that all concepts of rules of "style" and "forms" are abstracted. If
we reconstruct technical objects, say, a bridge, we do not do this
because of its peculiar individuality as is the case with a reconstruc-
tion of a work of art (and insofar as this bridge, in the case concern-
ed, is not a work of art); but we reconstruct technical objects either
because of our veneration of its designer, or because we think that
parts of the old bridge can be used for a new one, thusly avoiding
additional work and costs. Moreover, technical products are tied to
specific corporeal material they are made of, and they are subject to
special laws of disintegration proper to such material. Their forms
are maintained only through continuous and new activities of ma-
nufacturing them. But a work of art remains the same work of art,
no matter how often it is copied and reconstructed.
The general rule of production of industrial products compares

177
to basic forms of thinking and methods in the sciences. The more a
branch of science uses methods the more it becomes fortuitous that
a researcher A, and not a researcher B, brings about new results.
There is nothing that distinguishes a work of a genius, and especially
one in philosophy, from results gained in the sciences than its
unpredictability. Like a miracle it comes into existence. This is in
marked contrast to the fact that even the most fundamental scien-
tific discoveries have more or less simultaneously been made and by
more than one person independent of the others' knowledge. This
pertains, for instance, to the discoveries of the law of inertia (Galilei,
Leonardo da Vinci), of the principle of the conservation of energy
(Leibniz, Robert Mayer, Helmholtz, Joule), of non-Euclidian geo-
mentry (Riemann, Lobatschewsky), of differental calculus (Leibniz,
Newton). By analogy, many important discoveries have been made
by various peoples (compass, gun powder). It is the method which,
to a certain extent, produces by itself the progress concerned.
Researchers are more servants than their own masters. One can
almost always say: If someone had not made a certain discovery
some one else would have. We are also accustomed to the fact that
scientific problems are always, as it were, "in the air." But who
could have made any prediction of Plato's work, of Spinoza's
Ethics, or of the Critique of Pure Reason?·It is not thinkable that
others could have formulated their basic propositions. True, if we
treat a work in philosophy in scientific manner, such that one
analyses its propositions and tries to find out which of them had
already been found by others before, it may be easy to find earlier
sources for such propositions. However, Bergson is correct in
saying that this is the surest way to miss both the nature and the
spirit of a philosopher. 34 Individual propositions have their full
meaning only in regard to the basic intuition ofa philosopher. And it
is this intuition which ought to be represented. This is also why
researchers in the exact sciences, while working on specific pro-
blems, are frequently in competition with each other. The genius,
however, competes with no one unless, by way ofa certain analogy,
he competes with God.
At this juncture it is opportune to say something about the
essential difference existing between philosophy and science. Philo-

34. Cf. the above mentioned lecture of Bergson given in Bolognia.

178
sophy is absolute cognition [Erkenntnis]. This is why philosophy
must even clarify all types of cognition relative to forms of thinking
and special kinds and unities of it, as for example, operations and
methods. This happens when those forms of thinking and methods
themselves become object of formless unconditional cognition. For
this reason both the dicoveries of new forms of thinking, and
especially of new methods, can stem from philosophical cognition -
and with this even quite new scientific ideas may emerge. No
wonder, that there is a coincidence between science and philosophy
at the point when new sciences spring up and that philosophers may
become scientific researchers or vice versa. Yet, the very nature of
both philosophy and science remains strictly distinct. Thus, Descar-
tes developed an entirely new idea of science. And he conceived this
idea as a specific result of his proposition regarding the quantifiabi-
lity of all qualities and applied it to various spaces, discovering
analytic geometry. Thus, also, Leibniz's ideas of a geometry of situs,
and of infinitesimal calculus, originated in the most formal logical
concepts. There exists an intermediate realm posing the question to
us of whether certain persons belong to scientific researchers or to
philosophers (Newton, Galilei, Descartes). The same holds for the
genius and the saint (Socrates), as well as for the genius and the hero
(St. Augustine). But the essential person-types remain different
from each other.
Must we not, however, recognize a consequence of this: namely,
that philosophical cognition, too, has to have such kind of personal
form which is peculiar to the purest mental values? It does not seem
to be a curious paradox that absolute cognition of pure and absolute
facts takes on apersonal form while the more subjective and relative
cognition of science is independent of the person and can progress
and proliferate. Since this point refers to one of the most deeply
seated prejudices of our time, I wish to refer to objections made
against it.
The expression "absolute and true cognition "for" a person" can
be taken in different senses. It can be taken in the sense that there is
no absolute truth of any object, and that every age, people, and
every person has its own kind of truth. This is held by scepticism and
relativism. Without giving up their presupposition that the differen-
ces of factual psychic and physical organization would make this
point a necessary one, they have been corrected by a philosophy

179
providing only "presuppositions of scientific cognition" to the ex-
tent that truth, or "absolute truth," is to be replaced by another
idea, viz., the "universality and necessity of judgment," or by a
"univocal detemination of facts" giving up the idea of absolute
truth (the Marburg School), and denying it -, or at least giving up the
cognition of such truth in order to find satisfaction in only such
univocal determinations offacts. This new truth, relative to catego-
ries of understanding and methods, is, therefore, universal and
necessary. But it is non-personal. It seems as if the truth of science
had been "saved" by this argument even though cognition of abso-
lute truth had to be sacrificed.
The above expression, however, can also mean something else. It
can mean that absolute truth of cognition is not "for a person."
Rather, it is necessary that both content and object of absolute truth
are for one "person," and can be only for one person insofar as
absolute and true cognition should be given, and insofar as the
claim of striving toward this cognition is to be intensified to a
maximum degree. As long as a human being has not approximated
the content of the truth for his person as well as his "personal world"
he remains occupied with relative truths, or better, with truths of
relative objects, i.e., relative to the species, a psycho-physical bea-
rer-person of these truths belongs to.
With this no so-called "subjectivity of all truth" has been asser-
ted nor has philosophy been given a right which the sciences have.
The opposite is the case. Scientific truth is relative to the "subject"
in the sense of the general nature of the intellect whose forms
philosophy brings into view and which philosophy, in the selection
of phenomena, explicates from out of the purposefulness essential
to life. But scientific truth is not individually subjective truth, as,
for instance a true judgment made on an hallucinated object, but
it is "universally subjective" truth. By contrast, it is the nature of
philosophical truth to be absolute and of subject-matter only [rein
sachlich]. Precisely for this reason both the content of philosophical
truth and the object toward which our cognition proceeds is person-
al. It is not universal, rather, philosophical truth exists and is valid
only for the person.
Philosophical cognition provides us with the totality of the world
in the sense of a microcosm. True, this world is an "individual" one,
but it is this world that is individual, not its cognition. This does not

180
make the world any less an absolute one even though the existence of
an absolute world as such can only be given to God. In addition, this
does not make the world any less objective either; rather, it is the
case that it is far more objective than both our life-world and the
world of science. For both the worlds of our natural standpoint and
the world of science are, strictly speaking, no worlds but only
manifestations of its parts subject to controls through possible
actions ofliving beings. Science and life-world yield only the human
"milieu," the former reducing it to formalisms, the latter yielding it
on the basis of natural categories. This is to say that the objects of
science are, when compared to those in philosophy, necessarily
co-determined by mere general human conventions of bringing
objects under control. World as such, in the sense of a macrocosm,
is given only to an infinite person according to laws of essence
pertinent to such macrocosm; to an infinite person, that is, who is
not restricted by the ideas of embodiment and individuality, and
that alone is God.
Formerly, a confusion had been made between the individually-
subjective on the one hand -, i.e., with regard to which the univer-
sally subjective already implies a higher value of cognition, and, on
the other, the personally "objective" but individual, being superior
to all merely subjective cognition. This confusion gave rise to the
curious deception that philosophy should become either a science -
and, therefore, have both relative and universal cognition - or that
philosophy should only deal with individually subjective opinions,
or, to use a phrase of Sophie Germain, that philosophy presents us
with nothing else but "novels written by thinkers." What happened
was that one confused the level above the objectivity of scientific
cognition with the level below it. It is a thoroughly unfounded
opinion, and a habit of our age, to reprimand philosophy because its
cognition is only a personal one, or because philosophy begins and
ends with philosophers, or because "it does not progress, like
science does, in a continuous manner," or because it is "not able to
entertain divisions of labor" like the sciences are, or because it can
not find "universal recognition," having nothing to offer in the area
of firm, general, and recognized terminology, or because there is
little of outcome to be seen from its conventions and congresses. In
fact, however, all of these charges are compliments made to philos-

181
ophy stemming from its nature, not from any of its historical
developments.
Such odd opinions and charges have been advanced by people
who were scholars of particular branches of science. They were
faced with particularly difficult questions held to be "almost unsolv-
able." All supposedly scientific liabilities along with all the hard
nuts that could not easily be cracked, were thrown into a bag, called
philosophy. Philosophy came to be the inefficient nutcracker for
specially difficult and general scientific problems. Thus, there arose
the travesty of a "scientific philosophy" which amounted to a
distortion of philosophy, and the very existence of it to an offense of
science itself. For science will always, and with full justification,
preserve its prerogative to resolve its own problems arising from its
own foundations and from the unity of its method. Science will
al ways exercise the rights of its household not to permit entrance to
the aggravating intrusion of philosophy that could bring to a quick
stop the endless progress founded in its very nature. Scientific
philosophy, in its nature, is a reactionary phenomenon.
I said earlier that the masterpiece of a genius offers us a vista into
a microcosm, that it is a totality having an individual soul, and that
it had no model or rule from which it emerged. It is from this, and
from what we said about its duration, that one can explain a form of
movement that a masterpiece shares with all highest goods of cul-
ture, in contrast to goods of technical civilization and those of
values of usefulness. Whereas the highest cultural goods grow
throughout history, they do not have progress. All a holy person
does, as well as his being, cannot grow. What can grow is only our
penetration into the contents he sa wand experienced. In this area
we are faced only with growing concentrations in the contents of
"revelation," along with new conceptualizations of it, and with ever
new virtues coming forth from the center of the holy person. But the
works of geniuses as a whole, i.e., the quintessence of culture,
"grow" in history in the sense that all new works are created and
add to the older ones, but without any loss of any specific value of
the earlier and older works (philosophia quaedam perennis). The
image of this type of growth is characterized by a specific moment.
Each level reached does not lose its importance and value because of
the levels subsequently reached. This type of growth is obviously
different from advance or from "progress." Both art and philoso-

182
phy, therefore, know of no progress (Ranke). The total structure of
culture only increases, as it were; like a dome it hovers above past,
present, and future generations of humanity. And it is always a
blessed experience, filled with spiritual joy, to behold through the
medium of various kinds of cultural cogniton all its parts spreading
over into the directions of all ages and their peoples. Nothing of this
we find in "progress." In progress, any older phase is devalued by a
new one pertinent to the goods of technical civilization at hand. Any
tool more useful makes the past levels of this tool more obsolete.
This not only pertains to tools but equally to all cognition based in
technical objectives sketching a world for us to be conquered. It
would make no sense today, for instance, to seek new scientific
knowledge by studying ancient chemistry and physics. Indeed, it
would make no sense either to base one's research in chemistry on a
book written ten or twenty years ago. We will return to this impor-
tant point once more.
But this is not the only kind of relationship existing between the
various works of geniuses, on the one hand, and, mediated through
them, between the geniuses themselves, on the other. It is not so as if
one work follows another and a work following would be complete-
ly independent of earlier works. There exists a peculiar kind of
mutual stimulation among geniuses mediated through their works,
and there is also growth of fullness and depth in a work following
that it gained from earlier works. This is because those works are
always present in terms of time-phases, not in terms of successions.
What is this kind of stimulation? It is neither an imitation, nor a
copy, of mere additions of new elements. Rather, this stimulation
consists in a specific taking seize of the vision and thought of a
previous genius by a present one. But the genius following does not
give up his own individuality or even any of its parts. Rather, he
enriches himself with the vision and thought of the earlier genius.
There is no addition but only true penetration of one mind. This
amounts to the extreme opposite from mere learning from another,
or doing so as if one were another. It is through this stimulation that
we have the possibility of endless as well as intensive growth of the
contents of culture going toward increasing perfection different
from extensive growth referred to earlier.
It is through this form that there occurs a true expansion of
looking at and valuing the world in the pregnant sense of the term

183
"expansion." This kind of expansion has nothing to do with copy-
ing or adapting to our natural milieu. A genius goes a step further
into the world as world not comparable with mere extensive en-
richments of contents of the world.
This expansion can not be reduced to those forms of growth of
fullness that an object may have for our intuition. Those forms
consist in a growth of our attention and observations, but in
themselves they do not yet consist in our more concentrated inter-
ests which are determining factors of our attention. The more
complete fullness a genius has of an object belongs to the fulness of
ultimate essences of appearances. This is thefullness ofpure phenom-
ena. The world of a genius is richer, and he possesses it at any point
of his concrete world. The world is for him that which God is for the
holy person, or which the milieu is for a hero. He takes steps into this
world and enriches our own view of it. And this he does by virtue of
the high levels of purity that his mental acts have vis-a-vis all goals
of his life's actions and vis-a-vis all their drives and needs. Figurati-
vely speaking, a genuis' mental views and feelings tear off from all
services to life in whose limits the mere technical activities of the
mind remain enclosed. This attitude is the condition for the comple-
tion of a free and pure intuition and cognition of the world. It is the
condition also for a full, pure understanding of another's world or
another's microcosm.
What, then, is the foundation ofthe acts of a genius? What is the
positive act ensuing the genuis' intuitions and feelings disconnected
from values and purposes tied to mere life. One must ask this
question. It does not suffice to argue with Kant and Schopenhauer
that, in this matter, one is concerned with intuitions and compre-
hensions of values "devoid of interests" (Schopenhauer's value-
comprehension devoid of interests would, for Kant, be a contra-
diction). And how should one understand the determining factor of
the growth of the world in terms of diminution and negation or
cancellations of interests in things? If one understands "interests" as
a limitation of the intuition pertaining to the value of the "agree-
able" and of the "useful" it is correct to say that a genius does not
have such limitation. However, if one takes the term "interests" in
the sense of an active and positive movement toward things, and as a
penetration into their content, the intuition of a genius is guided by

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interests to the highest degrees. Obviously, both Kant and
Schopenhauer do not take into consideration the possibility of a
positive principle of movement in the mind which can make
plausible to us how lower levels of interests can change and extend
into higher ones - so characteristic for the genius.
It was within this context that Lorenz v. Stein, Friedrich
Nietzsche, and others, rejected with justification this merely negative
and quietistic principle of intuitions devoid of interests. Is it not
rather the case, asks Nietzsche, that a work of art amounts to an
invitation of, and a "promise to happiness?" What is devoid of
interest with respect to the aforementioned lower meaning of the
term is, in fact, a high intensification and universality of interests
encompassing the entire fullness of the object. The lower and more
one-sided interests conceal this fullness. One can not reduce the joy,
embedded in the visions of the genius, to an awareness of only a
silence of the heart, or to a silent retreat from the "wheels of the
will," as Schopenhauer says. Rather, in this joy the world as world is
encompassed with such delight, devotion, longing, and fervor, as
some one loving the lips of the beloved could only be.
Hence, there is a positive act of spiritual love towards the world
from which said intuition devoid of interests only follows. Kant and
Schopenhauer were mistaken to regard this intuition to be essential
and basic to that of the genuis. And in this it does not matter
whether the highest form of love of the world is set in motion by
cognition, aesthetic intuition, or by artistic structures of the world.
We showed elsewhere that the act of love is the vehicle proper
toward both the expansion and penetration into the world of values
and in all dealing with values. For the holy person, love of God
becomes creative for the given intuited content of the Godhead. It is
his love of God through which he ever deeper penetrates into the
nature of God, gaining dispositions to receive ever new revelations
about God. For a genius it is his love of the world that becomes
creative for his given view of the world. Mere lack of interests alone
would lead to a completely tedious and increasingly impoverished
view ofthe world, and, in the end lead to the disappearance of all of
its contents. For all possible interests in things are not extinguished
in the intuition of the genius but are compressed in the unity of one
act. Kant's own unfamiliarity with the positive love of world led
him to equate all forms of love with "sensorial interests" leaving

185
only reason, with its formal ordering of appearances, to be non-sen-
sorial. The same unfamiliarity led Schopenhauer to falsely reduce
all forms of love to sympathy and to the dissolution of the self.
The direction of the love of the genius is toward the world as such,
and whatever he may love becomes a symbol of this world, or it
becomes something through which he, in love, embraces the world
as a whole. The being and essence of the world itself makes the genius
silently and devoutly tremble, and independently of all of the
world's positive things and goods. Whereas a non-genius remains
captured in the differences among values and, indeed, mostly in
differences among social values, the genius grasps in love the mag-
nificent and encompassing nature of the world in that space and
time, into which the world extends, air and water, earth and clouds,
rain and sunshine, become objects and joy. It is its very being - the
being of the world - that propels his love even before he in particular
cases may realize what the things in this world are.
As seen from the objective side of the essential accomplishments
of the love of the world there is disclosure of things, a welling up of
their mysterious richness, a gleaming of new and new values tied to
an awareness of the endlessness and inexhaustibility of this process.
And as seen from the subjective side, there is the redemption from
the angst in life tied to the mind's own links to this life. Only
secondarily does this angst generate fear, anticipation, calculation,
prudence and purposefulness of our moral tenor [Gesinnung]. In a
certain sense, angst amounts to the psychic root of all civilization
and, indeed, to the mind of civilization in general. As Friedrich
Schiller stated, it is only in a genius, or in the comportment com-
mensurate to his nature, that our "earthy angst" is gone. The
extreme opposite, therefore, of the love of the world is that which
emerges from the angst of life: care in the sense of worrying [jenes
Sichsorgens] which already the gospel rejects. True, all motivation
toward the technical handling of the world as well as all meaning of
technical civilization stems from angst of life and care - but it is they
at the same time that do most of the harm to love of world.
The mind oftechnical civilization expressing itselfin precaution,
prudence, care, and a sense for controllable parts of the world, is an
express opposite of the love of the world. For this mind is out to
transform the world and change it in terms of human, practical
purposes. From this necessarily ensues a hostile and distrusting

186
relationship characterizing a basic mentality in which technical
activities have their play. For this reason also any philosophic view
of the world stemming from the love of the world is the extreme
opposite of any philosophy born out of the spirit of technical
civilization. Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy, insofar as we see it as
a conceptual formulation of a world-view built up on basic Greek
instincts, presents a world whose levels and "forms," whose har-
mony and logicity, untouched by technical civilization, deserves our
love. As long as our mind's eye looks at such a world which at
bottom encompasses both reason and form, there can not be any
motive to either attack or transform it. Whenever there is such a
motive, however, the emotive relation toward the world must, in
principle, be hostile - and all values must be seen as given to the
world through actions and work of men. Bergson rightly says that
"confidence" is the philosopher's basic attitude toward the world,
"defiance" that of science 35 (speculation a baisse, i.e., abstraction
from free persons and from centers of life).
One must come to the conclusion that the sapping of the ancient
love and trust of the world in favor of a one-sided concentrated love
and trust of God in Christianity and, along with this, the devalua-
tion of the world, its loss of spirit and soul throughout various ages
and to various degrees, made this world ready for impending tech-
nical transformations and treatment. The world had to be relatively
deformed, as it were, and bereaved of its immanent spirit and form
so that it could become the material of purposeful activities. On the
whole, this is why the most one-sided and supra-naturalist form of
Christianity plays a part in the formation of the motivating forces
that produced the mechanical civilization of our time. Modern
technology and capitalist economy were not initiated by friends and
followers of the Renaissance - who, like the pantheist Giordano
Bruno, Spinoza, and others, bestowed on the Renaissance love of
the world classical-philosophical formulations. It was the followers
of protestant denominations, especially those coming from Calvin-
ism, who claimed that all the work being done on the world should
be for the sake of transforming it for the glory of God and for the
sake of fulfilling the ascetic, divine obligation. Work on the world
was not for the sake of enjoyment, nor was it intended to find satis-

35. Cf. the above mentioned lecture of Bergson delivered in 191 I.

187
faction in working. The world view of the Renaissance, whose
"dynamic pantheism" at its core was ever so subtly described
by Dilthey, did not contain any motivation toward technical
civilization with its boundless drive for work and profit, a drive that
only later would start up modern technical machinery. Modern
technical civilization rests more on hatred than on love of the world.
It is a world experienced without immanent spirit and value, as a
vale of tears, as it were, that can give rise to the most intense
motivations of bringing it under control as it happens in our time.
This world-hatred and negation of the world has reached its
maximum degree in modern Pragmatism. Independently of human
work, the world is conceived here as something undetermined,
chaotic, void and valueless, as an admixture of objects that has no
inner sense or reason; but for any possible work on, and control
over this world, there are no limits set.
It is one of the most devastating errors of average historical
science to assert that modern technical civilization is the result of an
increased love of the world whereas the Middle Ages had been
unable to bring about civilization because of its flight from reality
and spirit of transcendence. True, the medieval love of the world
does not show anything of the one-sided love of the world to be
found in the Renaissance distinct from a transcending love of the
Divine, and characterized by Spinoza's amor intellectualis Dei and
Giordano Bruno's concept of heroic love. Yet, the Middle Ages
reveal much more concern for love of the world than we could find it
in present-day protestantism. The amalgamation of Christian
ideas with Aristotelianism called for a world view that, in the har-
mony existing among its parts, allowed of much more room for love
than present-day economic civilization ever could have, a civiliza-
tion in which values, purposes and forms, have disappeared. The
one people which, according to Sombart's penetrating investiga-
tions, contributed most to economic civilization, was, beyond
doubt, the Jewish people whose mentality of race lacks most,
among all peoples, a love of the world. For this reason modern
civilization did not ensure a growth of the world but a delimitation
and narrowing of the view of the world toward those of its parts which
can be practically handled.
There are two kinds of love of the world: One thatflowsfrom a
divine person by way ofa detour, as it were, through the origin of the

188
world. It flows in and with the divine person. For the other kind of
love of world the world is an immediate object of a contemplation in
frenzy, and of an ecstatic enthusianism to the degree that every
thing, and every form of existence, drowns, during such ecstatic
states, in the tides of being and life. In earlier times it was Bruno and
Spinoza, and recently it was Walt Whitman and Verhaeren who
formulated and taught this second kind of love of the world.
The first kind of love of the world, in which the world is never
given independently of the love of the personal Deity from whom
the world comes and is continuously guided, appears to us most
deeply manifest, and given in a unique and wonderful relationship
between love of world and of God, in the activities and sermons of
Francis Assisi.
The more the second, pantheistic love is a one-sided one, it
necessarily becomes complete quietism and makes man idly kneel
before all things. And if it would govern all of us all technical
activity would be without motivation and sense. Only when the love
of the world is seen through God and His image of the world,
through God's ideas and values, can there be a motivation to raise
and idealize the world in the direction of divine ideas and values as
this happens in both culture and civilization proper. On the other
hand, pantheist love of the world, or better, the frenzy of the world,
is completely indiscriminate and principally hostile toward any
positive form of existence. It is not only hostile to love of God but
also hostile to the love of all individual things and forms which
appear only like waves and ripples of the one being of the world
given in love.
By contrast, in the highest and noblest form of theistic love of the
world as exemplified by Francis Assisi, such one-sidedness and
exaggeration can not be found. In that both matter and the person
of God are mediated in this case by the infinite richness of levels of
higher and lower forms and values of existence this kind of love
makes distinctions between what is nearer to God or farther from
God; it makes distinctions among things that, as individual things,
are more worthy of love, or less.

189
 V. THE HERO

Within the objective order among ranks of values the idea of the
"hero" had previously been assigned to the value of life, or vital
values. This essential rank of values was sharply distinguished from
those values above them, the purely mental values (genius) as well as
from technical-mental values (science, for example) and from those
value-ranks that are lower than values of life, i.e., the values of the
useful and of what is bodily agreeable. 36
It is also among life-values themselves that we find two basic
kinds: 1. There are "pure" values of life, or the values of develop-
ment or unfolding; 2. there are technical life-values, or values of
preservation. The latter values are at the service of the former. A
value of development is, for instance, the health or perfection of a
race, i.e., the health and perfection of inherited values (basic ten-
dency of conservative parties); a vital value of preservation is the
health of a people (basic tendency of democratic, liberal parties).
Anyone trying to advance the productive powers of an e«onomy
concerns himself with values of development (mercantilism), and
anyone trying to advance only material and monetary wealth is
concerned with values of preservation (physiocracy). Anyone wan-
ting to advance the political power of the state over and above the
vital needs of a given population and beyond its anticipated, regular
increase so that the population concerned could even more increase
than had been in the past, directs himself toward values of develop-
ment; and he who wants to only advance the well-being of people
directs himself toward values of preservation.
Within the realm of organic becoming the development going
from lower to higher organizations can never be reduced to a mere
preservation of cases of the fittest. 37 To be distinguished are criteria
of adaptation and of organization, "variation" and "mutation"
(birth of a species). The theory of heredity (Mendel) shows that
variations of adaptation happening by chance are not hereditary - in
contrast to genuine criteria of organization among animals and

36. Cf. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, loc. cit., II, B 5.
37. See Oscar Hertwig's and Hans Driesch's criticism of Darwin. See also the
criticism of vitalism and mechanism as well as the correlative theories oflife-values
and utility-values in my Formalism in Ethics, V. 6

190
plants which are easily concealed by mere differences of adaptation.
(We do not discuss here the quantitative laws involved.) The distinc-
tion between development and preservation runs through all orga-
nic nature. The expansion of the life, activity, and of domination in
a milieu and, secondarily, the expansion of the senses and ofpercep-
tion, as we find it starting from one-celled jellyfish up to man, can
not, as Darwin and Spencer held, be reduced to the mere values of
usefulness of increasing, so-called adaptations to a milieu common
to all living beings. 38 This expansion possesses non-mechanical
origins (drives of perfection, "elan vital," entelechy of the genus of
genuine species, etc.) By analogy, the same holds when we look at
the inner life of living beings, i.e., their vital soul which is to be
distinguished from the mental soul [Geistseele], and from mecha-
nical associations of psychic life -, for instance, concerning the
life-feelings; simplest, vital reactions (attempts in making move-
ments, instincts, actions).
Vital values of development have a common denominator: this is
the quintessence of what is called "noble" (Plato). The opposites of
noble and vulgar [gemein] are biological. The meaning of "nobil-
ity" pertains to possession of the strongest values of development in
a group as well as to the most perfected values of inherited blood.
(Natural nobility - nominal nobility.) We want to subsume values of
development under the title of "weal" [Wohlfahrt] which can be
related to an individual or to a life-community (bonum commune).
This bonum commune is not "the greatest happiness of the greatest
number" (values of usefulness and agreeableness). Rather, the great-
est happiness of the greatest number is a value that pertains spe-
cifically to a society (Bentham). The weal is no additive magnitude,
just as vital "feeling well" is not a sum of pleasant sensations (by
way of analogy also feelings of health and disease, of growth and
decline, of the automatic life- and death-drives).
What we call a "hero" is an ideally human, or semi-divine (the
heroes of the Greeks), or a divine type of person (for instance, the
Power- or Will-God in Islam or Calvinism). The core of a hero is
oriented toward what is "noble" as well as toward the realization of
what is noble, i.e., the realization of pure, not technical life-values.

38. See J.V. Uexkiill, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere [The Milieu and the
Internal Lives of Animals].

191
His basic virtue is the natural nobleness of both body and soul and a
respectively noble composure. One should not refer to those humans
as heroes who are only directed to their own well-being and that of
their group. Those persons should be referred to as benefactors, as
we can find them among great physicians, leaders in economics and
technicians - vis-a-vis statesmen, commanders and colonizers.
Like the genius, the hero, too, must possess a more than normal
and rare exuberance of specific mental functions. These functions
must be seen in an abundance of the will, in its concentration,
firmness and sureness with regard to his drive-life. They are not to
be seen in a power of opening up for grace (as is the case with
religious humans) or in an abundance of thought and vision vis-
a-vis utilizations for needs oflife (as is the case with the genius). A
hero is a man or woman of the will and at the same time one of
power. The heroic soul may live in a weak body but it is never
conjoined with weak vitality. What belongs to the nature ofa hero is
strength, intensity, power and fullness as well as an inner, automatic
order of his vital drive-life (something quite different from the
genius). Likewise, his nature shows the ability to concentrate, mas-
ter, and prolong the far goals of his drive-life by virtue of his will,
and by virtue of a minimum of diversibility. This, precisely, is what
is called "greatness of character."
The rank of a hero is tantamount to the measure of the tension
existing between the intensity and the fullness of his drives and his
will having just enough harmony between them. If this harmony
suffers any damage we find a dualist type of hero resulting from high
tensions between drives and will (the teutonic hero; Siegfried, Lu-
ther, Bismarck). If the drive-impulses are too small we are faced
with a superactive and aggressive "fanatic" (the duke of Alba). If
the fullness of drive-life is too weak in comparison to the will we are
faced with a one-sided, ascetic and tragic type of a hero (the heroes
among Slavs), or with a suffering, enduring and sustaining hero
being passive and defensive (Kutusow, Russian war strategy and
tactics - Napoleon; "do not resist woes").
Among the heroic virtues self-control is basic. For it is the case
that anyone trying to gain power over others must have power over
himself. For human beings themselves are the highest objects of
gaining power over. Only those can achieve this when they have
power over themselves. But the hero's will to power is essentially

192
tied up with a maximal degree of responsibility, and love of
expanding this responsibility.
For a hero the world is, first of all, resistance, i.e., the world is for
him the real world. He is a person of realism. In contrast to the
genius, who envisions only his ideas, the hero infuses his ideas into a
concrete world. But both a high degree of culture and a religious
consciousness must be behind him, lest he becomes blind. He is
related to a unique, contingent, and fortuitous world with all its
possible hard realities: He is both a great realist and practitioner.
In comparison to men of fear and security-minded persons the
hero is a person of boldness, courage, bravery, of presence of mind,
a man of decision and love of struggle, of daring and peril. He is a
person sustaining suffering and of the capacity of patience (capacity
as measured by the degree of being able to suffer, Herades), no
matter what the purposes may be (the opposite of the martyr).
Proper to the hero are also beauty of body and form; dexterity in
games, dance and behavior; smoothness without artificial mecha-
nism, and aptitude (the Roman "virtus").
The hero is a man of giving, not of taking. He is gracious because
he is lavish, and he is ready to make sacrifices for friends and
community alike.
He feels a distance to everything common (honor and code of
estate: "To each his own," and not "The same for all"). He is also
characterized by the mastery of erotic instincts. He is bearer of the
erotic ideal in a twofold sense, i.e., that woman longs for what is
"heroic," and that he himself determines what is longed for most.
There is a difference in whether a man creates the ideal of a woman,
or whether woman creates the ideal of a man as we can find it in
effeminate times (like those of eithteenth century France). The hero
is the exemplar of a race which determines both the selection of
mates and the qualitative mixture of inherited values of future
generations (independently of the forms in which selections among
mates are made). The hero does not only co-determine what his own
children will be like but also what the nature of all other children
will be like, viz., what obtains to be beautiful among them.
The main types of heroes are the statesman, the commander, and
the colonizer. Whenever a statesman and a commander coincide in
one and the same person, as was the case with Caesar, Alexander,
Napoleon, Frederic the Great and the Duke Eugene, such persons

193
represent the highest forms of active heroism in the unity of plan-
ning and responsibility. When this is not the case a commander
ought to be at the service of the statesman. War is the continuation
of politics as a power-struggle (Clausewitz) by means of force -
hence, such "means" must not become ends.

VI. THE LEADING MIND OF CIVILIZATION

Let us briefly mention some characteristics by which the leaders of

progress of technical civilization (such as researchers, technicians,
leaders in economy) differ in essence from the aforementioned types
of person.
The value of such a leader does not lie in disclosing his self-value
in history. His value lies in action and accomplishments. He works
al ways on one particular process whose direction was already there
for him. Above all else, he serves the "progress" of values which,
however, can not be "everlasting" or grow like higher mental values
do. For throughout any progress of values, every value subsequent
to an earlier one becomes disvalued. This holds, for instance, in the
exact sciences in contrast to philosophy, throughout technical fac-
tors used in, and in contrast to, art proper. A leading mind of
civilization has also a more fixed place within the historical se-
quence of accomplishments made, and this place is less flexible.
In his own rank, the leading mind ought to will progress. Whene-
ver he does not fulfill his duties, or whenever romantic tendencies
prevent him from fulfilling them, there is a reaction: Progress is
being looked for where there isn't any, as the saying goes. While one
thusly neglects the tasks ofloving, of penetrating and of waiting for
growth, one stops all that which can progress. But there exists a
justified dominance of the will here, and to restrict this dominance is
of greatest evil. Reason and will should not become superfluous so
that there is only left mind, play, automatism.
He who wills something other than that which can be willed
blocks at the same time the basis of the highest values that can not be
willed and he neglects, at the same time, what alone can be willed.
But this is, insofar as an individual's will is concerned, the desire of
pleasure and usefulness.
Why did the greatest heroes of the will, those "willers," not

194
believe in "free will," not in the sphere of will power? They did not
do so because, in their own value, the most intense volitional
intensions are possible only when love, interest, and attention,
divert from the willing of something.
None of the highest values can be willed. Thus, one must will the
lower ones. One must will an "earthly paradise," not heaven. But in
order to will earthly paradise - one must possess heaven.
A leading mind, too, is guided by love: his love for humanity or
human society.

Types of Leading Minds

The leader of work:

a) in the exact sciences with their international character, and with
their ever progressing character, and their exchangeability of
persons.
b) in technology: the meaning of technology in all areas. The
formal idea of use and power over against nature for the sake of
freedom of culture (Philosophy of Technology). "All possible
machinery." Technology and culture. Technology and the me-
chanistic view of nature. Metaphysics and manual work and craft
as the origin of science. Tools and machines (craft and industry).
The error of technicism. Types of technology: material produc-
tion; vital technology of agriculture; technology of humans
(economics). Psychic techniques.
c) in economics: the entrepreneur and organizer.

A technologist serves the "power" over nature. He still has a part in

the vital value of well-being, but, materially, he relates to the value
of usefulness. He represents the highest form of the spirit of pro-
gress. Exact research serves him by providing him with rules perti-
nent for his activity.
A genuine technologist has no self-interest.
But a physician serves well-being in more immediate ways. He
ranks higher than technologists and researchers of the exact scien-
ces. The physician of the psyche and the physician of vitality; the
"healer," (the prophylactic). Physicians' relationship to priests
(quarrels among the disciplines). A physician of the race and of
society; the physician of individuals (the psychiatrist).

195
 The importance of the modern entrepreneur. He represents origin-
al power which has the tendency to run free. He does not pursue
hedonist goals.
A leader of economy is he who finds new ways and forms that are
beyond economic needs, and who stimulates new needs through
production. In the age of capitalism an outstanding leader of eco-
nomics - he who has the nature of the entrepreneur - is, in contrast to
a bourgeois, never a hedonist or egoist. 39 He resembles large
amounts of energy seeking their effects in profit, and seeking power,
and not domination, in the controls of an economy. Marx says of
him that he is "serious about the gospel of renunciation because he
is more in love with the fetich of gold than with his own bodily
pleasure." This is a one-sided view. For there is a difference between
an industrialist and technologist, on the one hand, and a business-
man, on the other. In the age offinancial capitalism a businessman
is doing just his financing and he is not tied to subject matters. An
industrialist, however, is devoted to both subject matter [Sache] and
to his work. Like a strategist, he works on long term bases.

VII. THE MASTER IN THE ART OF LIVING

The master in the art of living is, although belonging to the lowest
rank among values, a pure type of person. It is characteristic of this
person that he develops into a sovereign art all enjoyments and
pleasures. His existence is characterized by only one principle: to
prefer pleasure to what is unpleasurable. Indeed, he turns all values,
even the holy, and ajortiori the values of the mind, of the noble and
the ignoble, into objects of enjoyment. His inner consistence of
doing so makes the master in the art of living a "pure type" of
person (Aristippus).
He has the distinguished insight that the principle of sensual
desires and agreeable things will necessarily lead (1) to preferring

39. See Werner Sombart, Der Bourgeois. [The Bourgeois], Munich and Leibzig:
Dunker & Humblot, 1913. See also Max Weber and Walther Rathenau. [consult
also the author's own essay: "Der Bourgeois und die religiosen Machte" (The
Bourgeois and the Religious Powers), Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 3, ed. by Maria
Scheler. Ed.].

196
the individual's maximal desires and agreeable things to any other
form of expansions and, (2) to considering it to be senseless to prefer
the desires and agreeable things beneficial to one's whole life to the
desires and agreeable things that are present here and now. The
master in the art of living sees that the pleasurable, in its essence,
occupies only a point in space and time, and that any objective
increase of it can only harm it (Bentham's critique).
His importance lies in the fact that he does not want to be merely
dependent on what is pleasurable. He denies symbolic values. He
does not want pleasure but he wants "to enjoy." He is a discoverer
of new values of the agreeable.
He correctly sees that the extent of what is agreeable is no
consequence of titillations but a consequence of stimuli of enjoy-
ment. Hence he turns enjoying into a profound art (Socrates and
Aristi ppus).
He also sees that the useful is not to be preferred over the
agreeable insofar as he believes there to be no values higher than the
value of agreeableness.
He also sees that the lowest values are positive values. Clearly, a
complete materialist must, within his own value-system, become a
master in the art of living, if he has a correct understanding of
himself.
He sees that any sacrifice of one's own value is meaningful only
when there are higher values than the agreeable and pleasurable. He
is an egoist. For what is agreeable to one is, in principle, an
indigenous value [Eigenwert]. Sensual pleasures can only be felt by
oneself. This is so because of their "location."
The master in the art ofliving is not at all like an animal. For he is
aware of all the wellings coming up in him.
But he is also the person who, on the basis of pleasure, wants to
justify both civilization and work. For work exists either for values
higher than sensual pleasure or for only sensual pleasure.
By contrast, a "utilitarian" suffers from a most curious form of
shortsightedness. Not being related to any higher ideal of life and
serving only desires, he denies himself, however, sensual desires
because of "instructions" given to him on them. The extreme oppo-
site, therefore, of the master in of the art of living is a "philistine,"
that is, the representative of perfected "moral stupidity," who,
without having any other value than that of pleasure, still avoids

197
pleasure. He is a type of person incessantly filled with resentment
against anyone who, like said master, knows the art of living.
It is because of the master in the art of living that there is luxury.
He expands luxury by tracing new qualities of the agreeable which
are represented in goods and work. But lUxury is the starting point
of all economic progress. Any original lUxury will eventually turn
into a "need." This is so because needs only develop when some-
thing agreeable was given first in enjoyment. Generally, present-day
foods have initially been means of enjoyment.
The master in the art of living reaps the fruit of the leading mind.
In doing so he bestows a right of existence on the latter in one
respect. For the master in the art of living is, in principle, a person
who only shifts the final condition of the agreeable (the role of
luxury). Yet, he is disquieted by progressive leaders. For it is they
who make possible the best selections of life-values; it is they who
make possible the selection of the most vital people for procreation;
it is they who make possible that their virtues will serve the state, i.e.,
that they become their best form of expression and action and that
the enjoyment of what is agreeable of the part of the vitally best
becomes possible.
The master in the art ofliving provides the progressive mind with
"goals." But the latter provides the former with the possibility of
existence. By increasing the ability to enjoy himself, the master in
the art ofliving steps up possibilities of stimuli. The leading mind of
technical civilization does the same by way of the type of stimuli he
produces.
A master of the art of living is a grandchild, not a predecessor
(decadence ).

198
 Bibliography of English Translations
of the Works of Max Scheler

"Future of Man." Translated by Howard Becker. The Monthly

Criterion 7 (February 1928).
The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Heath. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1954.
"On the Tragic." Translated by Bernard Stambler. Cross Currents 7
(1954): 178-91. Reprinted in Tragedy: Vision and Form. Edited by R.
W. Corrigan. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, n.d.
Philosophical Perspectives. Translated by Oscar Haac. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1958. "Philosopher's Outlook," "The forms of
Knowledge and Culture," "Spinoza," "Man and History," and
"Man in the Era of Adjustment."
On the Eternal in Man. Translated by Bernard Noble. London:
Student Christian Movement Press, 1960.
Ressentiment. Translated by William Holdheim. Edited by Lewis
A. Coser. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961.
Man's Place in Nature. Translated by Hans Meyerhoff. New York:
Noonday Press, 1961.
"The Thomist Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." Translated by
Gertrude Neuwith. [Misleading title, and reduced translation of:
Der Bourgeois und die religiosen Machte.] Sociological Analysis, 25
(Spring 1964).

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"An a priori Hierarchy of Value-Modalities." Translated by Daniel
O'Connor. In Readings in Existential Phenomenology. Edited by
Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O'Connor. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.
"Towards a Stratification of the Emotional Life." Translated by
Daniel O'Connor. In Readings in Existential Phenomenology. Edited
by Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O'Connor. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.
"Problems with a Sociology of Knowledge." Translated by Ernest
W. Ranly. Philosophy Today 12, no.4 (Spring 1978).
"On the Positivistic Philosophy of the History of Knowledge and Its
Laws of Three Stages." Translated by Ranier Koehne. In The
Sociology of Knowledge: A Reader. Edited by James E. Curtis
and John W. Petras. New York: Praeger Publishers; London:
Duckworth, 1970.
"Lived Body, Environment, and Ego." Translated by Manfred S.
Frings. In The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian
Dualism. Edited by Stuart F. Spieker. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.
1970.
"The Sociology of Knowledge: Formal Problems." Translated by
Rainer Koehne. In The Sociology ofKnowledge: A Reader. Edited by
James E. Curtis and John W. Petras. New York: Praeger Publishers;
London: Duckworth, 1970.
Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt
toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Translated by
Manfred S. Frings and Roger Funk. Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1973.
Selected Philosophical Essays. Translated by David Lachterman.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. "The Idols of
Self-Knowledge," "Ordo A moris, " "Phenomenology and the
Theory of Cognition," "The Theory of Three Facts," and "Idealism
and Realism."
"Metaphysics and Art." Translated by Manfred S. Frings. In Max
Scheler (1874-1928): Centennial Essays. Edited by Manfred S.
Frings. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.

200
"The Meaning of Suffering." Translated by Daniel Liderbach, S.J.
In Max Scheler (1874-1928): Centennial Essays Edited by Manfred
S. Frings. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
"The Idea of Peace and Pacifism." Translated by Manfred S.
Frings. The Journal of the Britsh Society for Phenomenology
(October 1976): 154-66; 8 (January 1977): 36-50.
"Reality and Resistance: On Being and Time, Section 43." Trans-
lated by Thomas Sheehan. Listening 12, no. 3 (Fall 1977).
"The Idea of Man." Translated by Clyde Nabe. The Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology 9 (October 1978).
"Concerning the Meaning of the Feminist Movement." Translated
by Manfred S. Frings. Philosophical Forum (Fall 1978).
Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Manfred S.
Frings. Edited by Kenneth W. Stikkers. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1980.
"H umility." Translated by Barbara Fiand. Aletheia II, 1981.
"The Psychology of So-Called Compensation Hysteria and the Real
Battle against Illness," Translated by Edward Vacek, S.J. in:
The Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Vol. 15, no. 2, Fall
1984.
Person and Self- Value. Three Essays (Shame and Feelings of
Modesty; Repentance," "Exemplars of Person and Leaders.")
edited with an Introduction and partially translated by Manfred S.
Frings. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.

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