Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge by Scheler Max;

Author:Scheler, Max;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1075280
Publisher: Routledge

Concerning a synthesis of Western and Asian technologies (cultures of knowledge) and a revival of metaphysics

The question remains entirely open whether in the future of European-American civilization there will develop psychic techniques or inner vital techniques, known thus far only to the great Asian cultures as technical correlates of their predominantly metaphysical, non-scientific cultures of knowledge. I hold the answer to this question to be a decisive one for the destiny of Western technicism. Because, under the brilliant victories of his admirable technological accomplishments, Western man during the last centuries, like no other creature in known human history, has almost completely neglected and forgotten how to control his own self, his inner life, and, moreover, his self-reproduction through systematic psychic and vital techniques, so that today Western peoples as a whole appear much less self-governable [unregierbarer] than in former times. The art of self-control, however, is the root of the art of control over individuals as well as groups. Western man knows this inner art only in its ethical form but not in the form of a systematic, self-developing psychic technique. It appears to me that the most noble and most promising fruit of the new ‘cosmopolitanism of cultural fields’, characterized earlier and based in the spiritual exchange between European-American peoples and Asian culture, would be if the inevitable Europeanization of these peoples, with regard to positive science and technological and industrial methods — a process that cannot be hindered even by reactionary movements like those of Mahatma Gandhim111 — were complemented and compensated for through the systematic takeover of their psychic techniques by the European-American peoples. Until recently this was only a dream, in which the deep-thinking psychologist, William James, was already passionately immersed during his last years, and today still only sparse signs of its possible realization can be found. But surely these signs resemble a young dog’s first attempts to walk and, with regard to their value and final success, have to be assessed, in my opinion, rather critically. As social ‘movements’, however, they are of great interest to the sociology of knowledge. Such attempts include, for instance, the anthroposophic movement, the Christian Science movement, and the psycho-analytic ‘circles’ of Freud and Adler. The fact that questions concerning the psychic techniques could already gain so much popularity among the masses is a sign of a direction of social needs that deserves the greatest interest of the sociology of knowledge. The present-day efforts of individual and social psycho-therapeutics are only loosely connected with it (against whose exaggeration important physicians, such as the internist, Fr. Kraus, 112 have already warned). Such efforts, on the one hand, are reminiscent of older forms of pastoral medicine and, on the other, have brought once again the professions of physician and clergyman so unusually close together from both sides that one is reminded of social eras when the physician and the priest were not generally sociologically distinct.113 But these psychic techniques, in which the goals of health, salvation, and philosophic cognition strangely intersect,

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