The material a priori is one of the most consequential concepts in the philosophy of Max Scheler. Against Kant, who sought the a priori exclusively in the formal — in the pure forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding — Scheler shows that there are also insights filled with content, insights bearing on the matter itself, which are nevertheless necessary and universally valid. Whoever grasps, for instance, that every promise generates an obligation, or that love is by its essence directed toward the good of the other, cognizes not a mere empirical regularity but an essential law — something that cannot be otherwise.
These essential insights are not gained by abstraction from experience, but are grasped in the phenomenological intuition of essences. One must behold a thing, turn toward it, understand it as if from within — and then its essence lights up, with an evidence that requires no further justification. The material a priori is therefore the foundation of Scheler’s entire ethics of value: the hierarchy of values, the laws of the order of preference, the structure of the value-response — all of these are material a prioris, neither merely subjective sensations nor merely formal rules.
The significance of this concept for the question of personhood is considerable. For if there are material a prioris, then it is also possible to make substantive, necessary statements about the essence of the person — not as definitions that one arbitrarily posits, but as insights into what the person is by its essence. The Munich-Göttingen School of phenomenology made this approach fruitful in manifold ways.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. Bexten 2017, pp. 139–155 (Scheler’s value ethics and the material a priori).
Further sources:
- Scheler, Max (1913/16): Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Halle: Niemeyer. — Critical edition: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2. Bern: Francke, 1954.
- Hildebrand, Dietrich von (1916): “Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung III, pp. 126—251.