Christian Ferencz-Flatz, “The Determinate Negation of Scheler in Early Critical Theory,” in Burt C. Hopkins, Daniele De Santis (eds), The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy vol. 23, Routledge, 2025.
In this chapter, I engage with Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer and Kracauer’s early engagements with Scheler’s philosophy. To this extent, I present their critical and even derisive views of his work, while also exploring the ways in which they have come to draw inspiration from his philosophy despite their fundamental reservations. In order to do so, I first briefly tackle the insights they derive in a historic perspective from Scheler’s philosophy as a telling episode in the history of phenomenology and philosophy more generally. Subsequently, I focus on three points wherein Scheler’s philosophical considerations have been particularly stimulating for Frankfurt School theorists, albeit as an object of determined negation, rather than as a positive inspiration: his anthropological considerations, his reflections on social emotion and empathy and his theory of ideology. A main point of my presentation is to show how these topics connect in the reflections of the aforementioned critical theorists.