A antropologia filosófica de Max Scheler em a posição do homem no cosmos

Abstract

The research aims to explore Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology in The Human Place in the Cosmos. In view of the examination of this work, the present study had to proceed through two stages: (1) the assimilation of the presuppositions underlying the problem of philosophical anthropology, followed by (2) the analysis of the work itself. Accordingly, Chapter 1 set out to reconstruct the philosophical horizon of the problem of the human being in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which culminates in the foundation of philosophical anthropology as a discipline, precisely in Scheler. For the reconstruction of the horizon of the anthropological problem, we take as our point of departure the “identity crisis of philosophy” in the nineteenth century as a key to understanding. In Chapter 2, the exposition and analysis of the content of the work begin, with emphasis on it being understood as a proposed resolution to the foundational problems of a philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century. Scheler begins with an analysis of the four levels of life, ranging from plants to animals, and only afterward apprehends what is essential in the human being: spirit (Geist), conceived as a principle “outside of life,” which emancipates the human from nature and can never be understood on the basis of a scientific-natural investigation. Unlike animals, the human being is capable of objectifying its surroundings and apprehending essences, thus becoming open to the world (Weltoffenheit). In Chapter 3, the study sought to clarify the connection between anthropology and metaphysics, the latter understood as the ultimate foundation of the conceptual articulation of the anthropology of The Human Place in the Cosmos. It is argued that spirit and drive (Geist und Drang), the two principles uncovered by philosophical anthropology, are attributes of the supreme Being (ens a se) that appear as mediated in the human being. From this perspective, the human being in Scheler is a microcosm, attaining a special position in nature precisely because it presents itself as the only being that possesses in its constitution the two known attributes of the supreme Being, of the ens a se, of the macrocosm