Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (Routledge Revivals)

Max Scheler, Manfred Frings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415628402
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136233005
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1980, Manfred S. Frings' translation of Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge makes available Max Scheler's important work in sociological theory to the English-speaking world. The book presents the thinker's views on man's condition in the twentieth-century and places it in a broader context of human history.

This book highlights Scheler as a visionary thinker of great intellectual strength who defied the pessimism that many of his peers could not avoid. He comments on the isolated, fragmented nature of man's existence in society in the twentieth century but suggests that a 'World-Age of Adjustment' is on the brink of existence. Scheler argues that the approaching era is a time for the disjointed society of the twentieth-century to heal its fractures and a time for different forms of human knowledge to come together in global understanding.

Part one

The essence and concept of a sociology of culture

1 Cultural sociology: sociology of real factors, and the hierarchical laws governing the effectiveness of ideal and real factors

The following studies pursue a limited goal. They are an attempt to point out the unity of a sociology of knowledge as a part of the sociology of culture, and, above all, to develop systematically the problems of such a science. They do not pretend to solve any of these problems conclusively but only to discuss in detail the directions in which their solutions seem to lie for the author. They attempt to bring about some systematic unity in the rhapsodic and disordered mass of problems at hand, some of which have already been taken up in detail by science and others only half met or barely suspected, problems posed by the fundamental fact of the social nature of all knowledge and of its preservation and transmission, its methodical expansion and progress. The relationship of the sociology of knowledge to the theory of the origin and validity of knowledge (epistemology and logic), to the genetic and psychological studies of knowledge as it evolves from brutes to man, from child to adult, from primitive to civilized man, from stage to stage within mature cultures (developmental psychology), to the positive history of the various kinds of knowledge, to the metaphysics of knowledge, to the rest of the sociology of culture (sociology of religion, art, law, etc.), and to the sociology of real factors (sociology of blood groups, power groups, economic groups, and their changing ‘institutions’)—all this must necessarily be touched upon.

In establishing the overall concept of ‘sociology’ two criteria will serve us here. First, this science deals not with individual facts and events (in time—history) but with rules, types (average types and logical-ideal types), and, where possible, laws. Second, sociology analyzes the whole gamut of the (predominantly) human content of life, subjective and objective, whatever it may be called, and it investigates this content descriptively as well as causally according to its factual determination only, not its ‘lawful’ or ideal determinacy according to which the content of life is supposed to be. It investigates this content through the temporally successive or simultaneous forms of association and relation that exist among men in experiencing, willing, behaving, understanding, action and reaction, as well as in a real and causal way, that is, a way that does not have to belong to the consciousness-of-something of the person involved.¹

The principal divisions of sociology, which we merely introduce here without further analysis, can be arranged according to the following points of view: I Essential considerations, in contrast to the investigation of contingent facts, i.e. a pure a priori² sociology in contrast to an empirical-inductive sociology. 2 The simultaneous and successive connection and relationship among men and groups, that is, sociological statics and dynamics (Comte). Sociological dynamics differs from all philosophies of history in its exclusion of objectively viewed goals, values, and norms and consequently in its strictly causal and (artificially) value-free position. Of course, it does not exclude taking into account values, ideals, and the like as psychological and historical causal factors. 3 The investigation of the predominantly spiritually conditioned activity, valuation, and behavior of man, directed toward spiritual or ‘ideal’ goals, and the investigation of activity, valuation, and behavior resulting predominantly from drives (drives toward propagation, nourishment, power), which at the same time are directed toward the real alterations of such realities according to their social determinacy.

This ‘predominant’ intention—for every human act is at once spiritual and determined by drives and more precisely, the intention ultimately directed toward the ideal or the real goal, is that according to which we have to distinguish between a sociology of culture and a sociology of real factors. Certainly the experimental physicist, the painter, and the musician also change reality when they perform an experiment, paint, play music, or compose. They do this, however, to reach an ideal goal only, for example, to acquire knowledge of nature or to obtain for themselves and others an aesthetically worthy meaning for intuitive understanding and appreciation. And surely, on the other hand, the business administrator, as well as the simple industrial worker of lowest qualification, man in general as a producing and consuming being, and any worker whose end and goal is to change realities (for example, the practical technician as distinct from the scholar and technologist), the prominent statesman as well as the voter in an election, still deal with a great many preparatory and especially intellectual activities directed toward the ideal realm. But they do so only for the sake of a real objective, i.e. for the sake of effecting a change in reality. On the one hand, the activity terminates in the ideal realm, on the other, in the real world. We reject as fatuous forms of spiritualism all theories that try to delimit the foundations of economics without going back to the hunger drive, that delimit the foundations of the state and state-like structures without reference to the drive for power, and that delimit marriage without reference to the sex drive. It is senseless to maintain that economics has nothing to do with the drive for nutrition and the feeding of men because there are publishing houses and art shops, because one can buy and sell books and buttercups, and because even animals have a drive for nutrition and nourish themselves without economics. It is senseless to maintain that therefore economics is intellectually and rationally conditioned and finalized in exactly the same sense as are art, philosophy, science, etc. This is simply not so ! Without the nutritive drive and the objective goal that it serves biologically, viz. nourishment, there would be no economics — and no publishing houses or art shops either. Without the drive for power there would be no state, no political culture, no law laid down by the state, no matter what affairs it may deal with. The only thing correct about the above thesis is that without mind and its normative regulation there would be no economics, no state, etc. Therefore, a spiritual theory of man is a necessary pre supposition for cultural sociology, and an instinct-drive theory of man is a necessary presupposition for the sociology of real factors.³

This division of sociology into cultural sociology and the sociology of real factors, the sociology of the superstructure and substructure of human life, is, of course, a division which sets up two extreme poles between which there are a great many intermediate transitions, for example, technology, which depends for its growth on economic and political-juridical factors as well as on scientific ones, or, in contrast to a ‘pure’ art, a purposive, utilitarian kind of art, conditioned by the values and ideals of those in power, say, a religious ruling class. But to characterize typologically and determine by specific rules a sociologically conditioned event with reference to these two poles and to establish by specific rule what in this event is conditioned, on the one hand, by the autonomous self-development of mind, such as by the logical-rational development of law or by the immanent logic of religious history, etc., and, on the other hand, by the determination of sociological real factors, which are factors of the particular institutions and their own causality — this is, indeed, a main task of sociology. But without the above-mentioned distinction between the sociology of culture and the sociology of real factors this task cannot be accomplished.

True, this division is not only ‘methodologically’ but also ontologically grounded; but it is for the intrinsic end of sociology a provisional division to the extent that sociology’s ultimate and proper task consists in examining the kinds and the orderly sequence of the reciprocal effects of ideal and real factors as well as of the spiritual and drive factors that determine the contents of human life, which is always socially conditioned by nature. Indeed, I see that the highest goal of all non-descriptive and non-classificatory sociology, that is, of all causal sociology, is knowledge of a first law of sequential order—not in the same sense of a mere temporal succession of events in human history (which was Comte’s false and senseless ideal, senseless because the history of man passes only once) governing the realization of ideal and real factors of determination for all life-contents belonging to human groups, factors ‘sociologically’ conditioned, viz. through relationships among men, various kinds of relationships, and human groupings. This sociology treats not only the phase-rules that pertain to the relationships and forms of economy, power, and reproduction (to name the most important divisions of real factors) belonging to different groups and cultures in their temporal coming-to-be, or of religion, metaphysics, science, art, and law in their temporal coming-to-be as ‘ideal factors’. Important as this descriptive task may be as a preliminary undertaking, this sociology also treats something altogether different, namely, the law of order governing the realization of ideal and real factors out of which results, at every point of time within the historical-temporal passage of human social processes, the undivided totality of the life of the group. This is not a law of completed, temporally successive events, but a law of the possible dynamic coming-to-be of any completed event in the order of temporal efficacy.

Such a law, which I sought for years and which I believe I have found in principle without being able to give its full demonstration here, ⁴ would have a number of characteristics that can be accurately described.

1 First of all, this law defines the principal kind of effective interdependence within whose scope ideal and real factors, the objective spiritual and real conditions of life and their subjective human correlate, i.e. their particular ‘spiritual’ and ‘drive’ structures, work out their effects upon the potential movement of social-historical being and activity upon preservation and change. Our thesis is as follows:

Mind, in the subjective and objective sense as well as in the individual or collective sense, determines only and exclusively the particular quality of a certain cultural content that may come to exist. Mind as such has in itself no original trace of ‘power’ or ‘efficacy’ to bring this content into existence. Mind may be called a ‘determining factor’ but not a ‘realizing factor’ of possible cultural developments. Within the above-mentioned scope the negative factors, or selective real factors of what is always possible through understandable motivation, are always the real, drive-conditioned factors of life, that is, the peculiar combination of real factors: the constellation of powers, the factors of economic production, the factors of the qualitative and quantitative conditions of populations, as well as geographical and geopolitical factors that may in each and every case be given. The ‘purer’ mind is, the less potent it is in its dynamic effect upon society and history.⁵ This is the great common element of truth in all skeptical, pessimistic, and naturalistic conceptions of history, economic as well as racial, power-political as well as geopolitical. Only to the extent that ‘ideas’ of any kind are united with interests, drives, and collective drives or ‘tendencies’, as we call the latter, do ideas indirectly acquire the power or the possibility of being realized, for example, religious or scientific ideas. The positive, realizing factor of a purely cultural content is always the free act and the free will of a ‘small number’ of persons, primarily the leading persons, model persons, and pioneers, who in turn, by virtue of the well-known law of psychic contagion, of deliberate and non-deliberate imitation (copying), are followed by a ‘large number’, a majority. It is in this way that a culture ‘spreads’.⁶

Quite different is the relationship of determination between existing ideal and real factors and their subjective correlates in men (spiritual and drive structures) with respect to newly emerging real factors, such as a new international allocation of political powers, the economic relations of production, racial miscegenation, and racial tension. The latitude for their objective and real ‘becoming possible’ is determined in existence and nature not by ideal factors at all but only by the particular makeup of real fäctors that were previously given. With respect to these (precisely the inverse of the previous case) everything that we call ‘mind’ has only a negative, ‘guiding’ (i.e. restraining or non-restraining) casual role, in principle, only a negative role for realization and, therefore, noquality-determining role whatsoever. Human mind—of the individual as well as the collective person—and the will can do but one thing: restrain or not-restrain (release) that which, by reason of a strictly autonomous and real causality or development, blind to meanings (conscious-wise), wants to come into existence. If mind sets up qualitative goals and goals for transforming real factors, goals that are not at least within the latitude of the causal relationships peculiar to these real factors, it bites on granite and its ‘utopia’ fades away into nothing. What is called a planned economy, or a ‘constitution for world politics’, or a planned, legal eugenics and racial select...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Translator's note
• Introduction
• Part one The essence and concept of a sociology of culture
• Part two Sociology of knowledge
• Notes
• Name index
• Subject index