Spiritual Loving and Mental Health: A Schelerian Perspective

Abstract

In this paper, I question what the relationship between psychology and spirit would mean for mental well-being if the ideas of the human being and the notion of spirit are viewed from the perspective of Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology. Scheler provides a view of the human being and of spirit that differs radically from the generally held views, and his philosophical anthropology provides intellectual nourishment. This approach means that I do not look at spirituality as a religious activity or technique, but rather as a dimension of what constitutes the human being, and I explore how this view of spirituality is related to mental health. This paper is therefore divided into two parts. In the first part, I provide a summary of Scheler’s view of five ideologies of the human being in the history of Western philosophy that he identified, pointing out what he saw as their shortcomings. Next, I examine Scheler’s own philosophical anthropology that views the human being as the meeting place of the interpenetrating movements of spirit and impulsion, and as ens amans—a loving being. After that, I explore Scheler’s notion of spirit and personalism, drawing attention to the crucial role of what he describes as the dimension of spirit in his anthropology. In the second part of this paper, I explore the basic theories of well-being—hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories—and question what a reading of spirituality as the participation in the movement of love would mean to addressing mental health. I conclude that spirituality should not be viewed as just another source of practices and techniques that could enhance human mental health. Rather, spirituality should be understood as a human being’s execution of the act that constitutes the core of his or her being. Spirituality viewed as the execution of the spiritual act of love—spirituality as loving being.

“[I]n the final analysis we should promote welfare for the sake of the dignity of man’s spiritual personality; within that dignity the crown and nucleus is the freest and purest readiness to love. It is in the way of humility, in free and loving service, that this very dignity must reach perfection. We should further the welfare of man so that he may become ripe to love and in loving sow the seed of all virtues.”

(Scheler 1960, pp. 367–68)

“The eternal irony of a hedonist is that he loses more pleasure, the more energetically he strives for pleasure—and not for the things that yield pleasure.”

(Scheler 1987, p. 74)

1. Introduction

The generally held views of the human being as homo sapiens and of spirituality as an activity or technique of tapping into an inner strength or in participating in the dimension of a higher power, seem to dominate the contemporary focus of the relation between spirituality and mental health. These views of the human being and spirituality seem to have resulted in the fixation on psychology and religion to understand the mental well-being of human beings, partly because human spirituality is viewed within the sphere of psychology. In this way, qualities of spiritual personality—such as compassion, empathy, gratitude, humility, sympathy, etc., are viewed as promoters of what is taken to be good mental health. This view of what promotes good mental health can be seen in the highlighting of these qualities within what is generally termed positive psychology as what enhances human mental well-being or the so-called human flourishing Huijs et al. (2024).

In this paper, I question what the relationship between psychology and spirit would mean for mental well-being if the ideas of the human being and the notion of spirit are viewed from the perspective of the early 20th century German philosopher Max Scheler. Scheler’s philosophical anthropology provides a view of the human being and of spirit that differs radically from the generally held views, and his philosophical anthropology provides intellectual nourishment. This means that I will not be looking at spirituality as a religious activity or technique, but rather as a dimension of what constitutes the human being, and I explore how this view of spirituality is related to mental health. This paper is therefore divided into two parts. In the first part, I provide a summary of Scheler’s view of five ideologies of the human being in the history of Western philosophy that he identified, pointing out what he saw as their shortcomings. Next, I examine Scheler’s own philosophical anthropology that views the human being as the meeting place of the interpenetrating movements of spirit and impulsion, and as ens amans—a loving being. After that, I explore Scheler’s notion of spirit and personalism, drawing attention to the crucial role of what he describes as the dimension of spirit in his anthropology. In the second part of this paper, I explore the basic theories of well-being—hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories—and question what a reading of spirituality as the participation in the movement of love would mean to addressing mental health. I conclude that spirituality should not be viewed as just another source of practices and techniques that could enhance human mental health. Rather, spirituality should be understood as a human being’s execution of the act that constitutes the core of his or her being. Spirituality as the execution of the spiritual act of love—spirituality as loving being.

With this brief introduction, let us now move on to the arguments of this paper.

2. The Five Ideologies of the Human Being

In his essay “Man and History” [Mensch und Geschichte] at the beginning of the 20th century, Max Scheler argued that philosophical anthropology was the most urgent task of philosophy. What he meant by this claim is an investigation into what constitutes the essence and nature of the human being and their relationship to the world. (GW IX.120; Scheler 1958, p. 65; 2015), That is, the physical, psychic, spiritual, and metaphysical origin of human beings, as well as the biological forces that move them and the directions of movement of their intellectual and social development. According to Scheler, only such anthropology can provide all sciences concerned with the subject of man a philosophical foundation and valid insights to securing the goals of their research. The importance of this investigation, he claims, can be seen in the fact that most conflicting conceptions of history and sociologies are based on fundamentally different ideas about the nature, structure, and origin of the human being. For, every theory of history has its basis in a certain kind of anthropology, regardless of whether the historian, sociologist or philosopher is aware of it. (GW IX.123; Scheler 1958, p. 69).

Therefore, a history of the self-consciousness of human beings, a history of the ideal basic form of their thought and how they saw and felt themselves in the orders of being, would have to precede any history of mythical, religious, theological, philosophical theories of the human being. (GW IX.121; Scheler 1958, p. 66) Scheler thus sets off to clarify spiritual situation on this great question, by outlining the sharp distinctions among the five basic types of human self-conceptions that prevailed in the West at the beginning of the 20th century, while at the same time questioning whether the periodic growth in human self-consciousness of themselves is a process in which they grasp more and more their position in the order of being, or whether such growth is an intensification of a dangerous illusion (GW IX.120–124; Scheler 1958, pp. 65–69). Let us now turn to the first ideology of the human being.

2.1. The Fallen Man

The first ideology of the nature of the human being that Scheler identified is an idea of religious faith from the Judeo-Christian tradition (GW IX.124–125; Scheler 1958, pp. 69–71). As he explained, this ideology represents a very complex mix of religious documents, especially the Old Testament and the Gospel that postulates the following: the well-known myth of a creation of man (according to body and soul) by the personal God; his descent from a first couple; the state of paradise (doctrine of origin); the fall of man seduced by a fallen angel; the redemption through the son of God and the restoration of the human being as children of God; a colorful eschatology that speaks of freedom, personality and spirituality, immortality of the so-called soul, resurrection of the flesh, Last Judgment, etc. Scheler contends that this idea of man is still widespread within Judeo-Christian circles of life, and also among those who no longer believe in this dogmatism but yet still hold on to the ideology of the human being entailed in it. The power and intrusiveness of this religious myth over people, Scheler stated, is reflected in how attempts are made to support and apologetically defend this religious anthropology by using rational arguments even though it is not a product of philosophy and science. As an example, Scheler points to the notion of fear that gave birth to the myth of the Fall of man and its hereditary guilt. This fear has become an incurable disease of Man as human being, still heavily weighs on Western views of the human being in the 20th century, (as could be seen in the emphasis on fear and anxiety in the works of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, etc.). From Scheler’s perspective, the man of this ideology still awaits the great “psychoanalyst of history” who would heal him from this constitutive pressure of this emotional feeling-state of fear which this Judeo-Christian idea of the human being is rooted (GW IX.125; Scheler 1958, p. 70). Let us now move on to the second ideology of the human being.

2.2. Homo Sapiens

The second ideology of the human being that Scheler considers is the homo sapiens. As Scheler puts it, this ideology is one of the most powerful and influential discoveries in the history of human self-assessment that also prevails in contemporary thought (GW IX.125–129; Scheler 1958, pp. 71–76). Scheler holds that the concept of homo sapiens is an invention of the Greeks [Erfindung der Griechen]—specifically the Greek bourgeoisie—and argues that classical Greek philosophy (Anaxagoras, Plato, and Aristotles) conceived this idea of the logos in the scope of a world view that basically placed human self-consciousness for the first time above all of nature.1 In addition, the idea of homo sapiens makes a fundamental distinction between human beings and non-human animals of all kinds. As a result, for Scheler, given that human nature was assumed to be stable and eternal like all creatures, the human being was given a specific agent [spezifisches Agens], reason (λόγος, ratio), which pertains to it alone, and not reducible to those elemental agents which belong to the plants and non-human animal souls. Consequently, it is only through this reason that homo is supposed to be able to know being as it is in itself, the divinity, the world, and themselves. This view also means that it is through reason alone that the human being can form nature in a meaningful way through activity (ποιεῖν), and act well towards their own kind (πράττειν). That is, to live in such a way that he develops this specific agent of creative reason (νοῦς ποιητικός) in the most perfect way. Accordingly, this so-called reason in human beings is regarded as a partial function (later only a creation) of the divine imaginative λόγος, νοῦς, who always brings forth this world and its order anew—not in the sense of a creation, but of an eternal movement and formation (GW IX.126; Scheler 1958, p. 72).

Scheler identified four particular qualifications of the homo sapiens. (1) The human being as homo sapiens has a divine agent within him, which no other creature in nature has. (2) This agent and that which eternally forms and shapes the world into the world (chaos, “matter,” rationalized into the cosmos), is ontologically or at least in principle the same, and is therefore really equal to the knowledge of the world. (3) As λόγος (realm of the “formae substantiales” in Aristotle) and as human reason, this is powerful and able in realizing its ideal contents (“power of the spirit,” “self-power of the idea”) even without the drives of the common to human beings and non-human animals (perception, μνήμη, etc.); (4) This agent is absolutely constant (stable) in terms of history, ethnicity and class (GW IX.126; Scheler 1958, p. 72).

By Scheler’s account, it is a fact that philosophical anthropologies in Western philosophy from antiquity (Aristotle) to the Age of Enlightenment (Kant and Hegel) have not changed significantly in terms of these four qualifications associated with the human being as homo sapiens. Only Hegel, Scheler points out, has been able to overcome one of these four qualifications, namely the constancy of reason through history.2 For Scheler, Hegel’s theory of history presents the last, highest, most pronounced theory of history within the framework of the anthropology of homo sapiens, and for this reason he saw in Hegel the greatest philosophical personality of post Kantian philosophy [die größte philosophische Persönlichkeit der nachkantischen Philosophie] (GW IX.126–IX.127; Scheler 1958, p. 74).

The fact that the ideology of homo sapiens has not changed since the Age of Enlightenment and has attained a self-evident character in Europe (and the West), mainly has to do with the presupposition that the human being is made in the image of God. However, the weight of this presupposition on the West does not hold back Scheler from objecting to this anthropology. Going by what Scheler says, as we saw above, the concept of “reason” itself is an “invention of the Greeks!” A view that he claims is shared by Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Nietzsche (GW IX.128; Scheler 1958, p. 74).

2.3. Homo Faber

The third basic idea of the essence and nature of the human being is the naturalistic, positivistic and pragmatist idea of a homo faber (GW IX.129–134; Scheler 1958, pp. 76–82). In Scheler’s perspective, this ideology denies human beings a separate faculty of spirit and reason, implying that human beings do not have any separate metaphysical origin that possesses an original order corresponding to the laws of being themselves, but are extensions of the psychic faculties whereby everything is understood through sense perception. Therefore, the human being is viewed in this idea not as homo sapiens but rather as a “creature of its drives,” or as an instinctive being, in the same way as non-human animals were thought of. The only “differences of degree” between the two types of animals is that one is considered to have a more developed technical intelligence. Consequently, “Man is a special kind of animal.” Scheler maintained that this view of the human being entails that the so-called thinking “spirit” is only subsequent epiphenomena and inactive reflections of consciousness of agents that are also active in the non-human animal world. Along with this, what is called knowledge in this ideology is merely a series and combinations of self-made symbols from the reaction of the organism to stimulus from the environment, which are “true” and “good” actions if they produce life enhancing responses, and “false” and “bad” if they don’t. In this way, the unity of the logos which forms the world and is at the same time active in us as our “ratio” is not required in this instinctive being, as long as one does not understand human insight as a representation of being itself. (GW IX.130: Scheler 1958, p. 77) As a result, this third ideology of the human being as instinctive being, Scheler contends, renders human beings as nothing different (organologically or physiologically) from non-human higher vertebrates. And that this can be seen in the three peculiar naturalistic theories of history that are based on the three primordial impulses of reproduction, growth and power, and the drive to nourishment.3 For Scheler, these three naturalistic ideologies have in common the belief that history is an inescapable movement towards a one great noble objective through the power of the human will and purpose alone.

Having discussed three ideologies of the human being that are grounded in theology, the idea of logos, and human instincts, let us now move on to the fourth ideology of the human being that purports to radically reject these three views.

2.4. Dionysian Man

The fourth ideology of the human being is “Dionysian man” who, like the homo sapiens, tries to exclude the drives and senses, but whose main desire is nothing more than to eliminate human spirit and reason (through trance, dance, and narcotics) (GW IX.134–140; Scheler 1958, pp. 83–90). As determined by Scheler, this desire to eliminate spirit and reason is directed towards becoming one with the creative nature of the human being (the natura naturans) in a feeling of life and oneness (GW IX.129; Scheler 1958, p. 75). Additionally, what is crucial about this anthropology is that it considers the so-called ratio and spirit to be the disease of (true) life itself. That is, the human ratio and spirit is viewed as a pathological basic direction of universal life (GW IX.136, Scheler 1958, p. 84). In the light of this Scheler explained that the Dionysian man believes that it is through reason that the human being abandoned life’s basic values, its laws, its sacred cosmic meaning, and have instead invented mere surrogates (language, tools, etc.) of the (true) vital qualities and activities that are capable of development. As a result, this anthropology views the human being to be living in a pathological surge in her self-confidence, making the human being the deserter of life in general and the dead end of what constitutes (true) life itself.4

As furthermore specified by Scheler, this anthropology of the Dionysian man takes the vital values of life to be the highest values, while spirit and conscious reason are discarded as that which destroys or annihilate life. That is to say, life and the so-called soul on the one hand, and spirit and conscious reason on the other, are considered two antagonistic and hostile forces, with the latter seen as a metaphysical parasite the burrows into life and soul in order to destroy them. What is more, spirit and conscious reason are viewed as developed because of the biological weakness of human beings, since their organic functions cannot grow in the same way as these functions grow and advance in other non-human species. Owing to this lack, human beings have developed instead the immaterial tools that have rendered the further development of these organs unnecessary.5 In this sense, history of the human being is seen only as a necessary process of death of a specie that was already deadly sick from the start—a faux pas of life (GW IX.138; Scheler 1958, p. 86). Consequently, human beings have lost more than they have gained not only in terms of being and existence but also their metaphysical insight. As a result, Scheler argues, the “Dionysian man” of instincts (as opposed to the homo sapiens “Apollonian man”) is seen as the hero who uses special techniques to eliminate this despotic, demonic destroyer of life, spirit, in order to regain unity with the life urge. It is this “Dionysian man” who is now viewed as closest to the metaphysical real, the truth. Therefore, it could be said that this vitalistic-romantic anthropology of the Dionysian man transformed spirit from a divinely creative and constructive principle into a demonic-metaphysical power that is hostile to life and being.6 However, Scheler contends that although the “Dionysian theory” rejects all intellectual and spiritual religions, it nevertheless comes closer to the Christian anthropology through the myth of the Fall. The fall in this sense does not refers to the “homo” who has fallen, but rather it is man as “homo sapiens” who is the fall, the guilt, and the sin itself (GW IX.140). Let us now move on to the fifth ideology of the human being, which is closely related to the ideology of the Dionysian man.

2.5. Übermenschenidee

Scheler describes the fifth anthropology as an ideology that causes the human being’s self-consciousness to soar to a level of a sudden, proud, dizzy, height—the highest value peak of being itself—as no other known doctrine has ever done (GW IX.141–144; Scheler 1958, pp. 90–93). As Scheler explains, this new anthropology has taken the Nietzschean idea of Übermensch and underpinned it in a new rational foundation, which states that a God must not and should not exist for the sake of man’s responsibility, freedom, purpose, and for the sake of giving meaning to human existence. This is a view that Scheler termed the “postulatory atheism of seriousness and responsibility,” which he claims has its emotional starting point in the feeling of “Disgust and painful shame” as described in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. In Scheler’s view, this feeling arises when human beings are compared to the shining figure of the Übermensch [Gestalt des Übermenschen], who is seen as the only responsible one (and glad to assume responsibility) the Lord, the Creator, the meaning of the earth, the history and direction of the world, and the only justification of what is called humanity and people. The crucial point to note of this fifth anthropology is the fact that it sees the highest exemplar of human being in the hero or the genius.

We have now studied the five ideologies of the human being that Scheler identified in the history of Western philosophy. These are the ideologies of the Fallen man, Homo sapiens, Homo faber, Dionysian man, and the Übermenschen, all of which Scheler saw as falling short of the nature and essence of the human being. Scheler’s own philosophical thinking is driven by the question as to what the human being is and their place in being (Scheler 2009). We will now turn to Scheler’s own philosophical anthropology that views the essence of the human being as the meeting place of the interpenetrating movements of spirit and impulsion—that is, the human being as a loving being, an ens amans.

3. A Loving Being (Ens Amans)

Scheler’s view of what constitutes the core of the human being could be expressed in terms of the Aristotelian “function argument” that defines the human being in terms of executing a characteristic function. However, unlike Aristotle, who views reasoning as the constitutive function of the human being, Scheler takes spiritual loving as the most peculiar and defining act of the human being. In his essay “Philosophical Outlook” [Philosophische Weltanschauung] (GW IX.75–84; Scheler 1958, pp. 1–12), Scheler described philosophical anthropology as a metaphysics that is located between the metaphysics of the borderline problems of the positive sciences (mathematics, physics, psychology, history, etc.) and the metaphysics of the absolute being. This description has to do with his view of the human being as essentially a loving being (ens amans) that he termed person. A person is the center of acts of an individual, the unity of all acts including acts consciousness that is felt and realized in the movements of spirit and impulsion, which constitute the attributes of what Scheler describes as the Ground of being. Thus, for Scheler, philosophical anthropology is a combination of what he describes as “metanthropology and metaphysics of act” [Metanthropologie und Aktmetaphysik]. That is, the metaphysics of the human being as person and the nature of their order of values that is felt in the unity of the center of acts.7 As specified by Scheler, we must distinguish the absolute order of values itself from the changeable human view of the order values. However, we must admit that an absolute order of values without a loving spirit realized in man is a contradiction in itself; just as it will be absurd to claim an order of ideas without a thinker, and a reality without a “drive” to posit it, that is, a reality without resistance. (GW IX.82; Scheler 1958, p. 10)

In his essay “Man in the Era of Adjustment” [Der Mensch im Weltalter des Ausgleichs],8 Scheler also argued that early 20th century ideas of the human being and of the divinity, which can only change together, were such that they no longer conformed to the world-historical level of the social structure of humanity. In Scheler’s view, early 20th century ideas placed the human being in a relation to the foundation of the world in a way that is characteristic of to the ages of an immature humanity that is firmly closed in different cultural circles that had little impetus toward reaching balance/adjustment. For this reason, Scheler holds, it is necessary to revise considerably the problem of human being’s metaphysical position in the cosmos as spiritual loving beings and integrate it into historical reality. (GW IX.168; Scheler 1958, p. 122) The metaphysical position of the human being that Scheler had in mind is exemplified in the ideal of the “All-Man” (or “All Human”) [Allmensch],9 who contains and has realized all his essential capabilities and would bring about the unification and balancing out of religion and socio-political class differences. The balance to historical reality will only be possible on the basis of this metaphysical view of the self, the world, and of God that embraces the unification and interdependence of spirit and life—a unification that constitutes a substance that stands above both spirit and life, idea and power, and can only be realized in a human history which encompasses human action.10

Thus, for Scheler, all the five ideologies of the human being that we considered above have been narrowly conceived and do not encompass this metaphysical view of the self, which is the spiritual loving being.11 The five concepts conceive of the human being like ideas of things, and thereby ignore completely the spiritual dimension which is essential to in constitution of the human being. In contrast, Scheler points out that the human being is not a thing but a direction of movement of the being of the universe itself, and even of its source.12 One may ask: why is this spiritual dimension so important for Scheler’s view of the human being? What does Scheler mean by the spiritual dimension of the human being and what is spirit itself? Let us examine this concept.

4. Spirit [Geist]

When Scheler talks of spirit [Geist] what he is referring to is a “higher-than-individual spirit” [übersingulären Geistes]. That is, spirit as one of the two known attributes of the Ground-of-Being; the other attribute is what he refers to as Impulsion [Drang]. It is important to note that for him spirit is not at all part of impulsion (the so-called vital force)—from which human, animal, or any life psyche stems—although it is related to it (Scheler 2008, p. 155). In The Human Place in the Cosmos, (Scheler 2009), Scheler describes spirit as an irreducible phenomenon that makes human beings what they are. This phenomenon, if reducible at all, can only be reduced to the ultimate ground of all things of which life happens to be one particular manifestation (GW IX.39; Scheler 2009, p. 34).

Being a higher-than-individual, and an attribute of the ground-of-being, means that spirit is not in any a reference to a fragmented notion of a spirit within the psychophysical world. As such, spirit is not a reference to the Christian notion of a Holy Spirit, or soul of man, nor is it a reference to an inner spiritual life of a human being. Spirit neither alludes to geographically or culturally acquired and inherited psychic qualities that result in the apparitions of ghosts of the ancestral past that come to haunt us, nor to (localized) deities who govern us from a spiritual realm and to whom we owe allegiance or submission (Roothaan 2011). Furthermore, spirit is not a reference to a wider notion such as William James’ notion of a “spiritual realm” reached through the continuity of human consciousness (Goodman 2024), nor is it part of or an extension of reason. Additionally, spirit is neither dependent on a historical extension or an objective/pragmatic realm of cultural and historical network patterns, nor is it a reference to the Hegelian notion of “Geist.”13 For Scheler, all these notions of spirit are extensions of the “psychic levels of impulsion, instinct, associative memory, intelligence, and capacity to make choices.” (GW IX.31; Scheler 2009, p. 26) From his perspective, such views of spirit could at best be seen as stemming from the actualized spirit already realized in human history.

In this respect, Scheler’s notion of spirit places it beyond our existential organic being and any intelligence derived from it, including our reasoning and abstract thinking. The distinctive feature of spirit is its powerlessness and impotence. Spirit has no energy of its own and relies on the sublimated human impulsion to manifest itself—to vitalize itself. This manifestation occurs in the part of an individual human being that Scheler refers to as “person” or “spiritual person.” Scheler’s concept of person refers to the feature of human beings’ capacity to receive what is given in the movement of spirit; it does not refer to an ideal version of a human being.14 On the contrary, what Scheler refers to as person cannot be identified by what he calls drive individualism, that is, the individuation structured by the movement of impulsions (GW II.505; Scheler 1973a, pp. 514–15). Rather, a person can only be felt in the direction of the movement of spirit.

Scheler’s emphasis on the spiritual dimension (spiritual being, spiritual self, spiritual nature, personal being) of human beings—what he sometimes refers to as the “cosmic potential of humanity” (Scheler 2008, p. 218)—has to do with the fact that persons are centers of acts through which spirit manifests itself, within all spheres of being, as values. This spiritual act makes human beings the only animal species who have the capacity to prefer one value over another within the different ranks of values. Spirit is experienced in the personal act of love and hate, when a person participates in the movement of love wherein a higher value of the beloved is realized.

This notion of spirit, as distinct from impulsion, is crucial to understanding Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology. In fact, if this distinction is ignored or misinterpreted, then Scheler’s entire anthropology and metaphysics breakdown and lose their significance. Scheler’s notion of spirit is a reference to an independent dimension or nature that is beyond the mental/thinking capacity of human beings, and, in this sense, he does not fall strictly under the rubric of idealism that takes the mental as the ultimate foundation of reality and the knowledge of reality as a construction from human thought (Guyer and Horstmann 2023). For Scheler, spirit is the matter-of-factness of what things themselves are.15 In reference to human beings, spirit refers to a dimension of freedom from impulsion. In this dimension of spirit, human beings cannot strive, desire, will, aim, intend, choose, determine, or evaluate, etc., as they are capable of in practical life. Rather, they can only receive values given in personal acts of preferring, spiritual loving and hating, and experience spiritual feelings-state of humility and pride, blissfulness, despair, etc., all of which are independent of “happiness” and “unhappiness (GW II.125–126; Scheler 1973a, pp. 108–10).

5. Personalism

From the above I argue that Scheler’s notion of spirit is closely related to his concept of personalism. It is important to note that, for Scheler, personalism is not a reference to an individual subject’s inner life or an inner world to which they retreat. In this sense, personalism cannot be a reference to an interiority, a unity of self-consciousness, or a subjectivity taken to be the irreducible core of a human being that accommodates an individual’s moral and religious dimensions, autonomy, freedom, as we see for example in the history of European and American concepts of personalism (Williams and Bengtsson 2022). Furthermore, for Scheler, personalism is not a reference to an individual’s lived-body or any psychophysical state. For him, personalism concerns an individual’s center of acts that is experienced in their spiritual dimension in movement of love. Personhood is only attained outside of one’s subjectivity and lived-body while participating in the act of love. That is, while executing the spiritual act of loving that constitutes the human being’s essence. It is this act of love that defines the human being as ens amans as we saw above. Thus, looking at Scheler’s notions of person, spirit, center of acts, order of love, order of values, one could argue that, for him, what is usually described as the spirituality of an individual subject refers to the order of love—ordo amoris—which is the basic structure of this individual’s acts of loving and hating, and therefore their order of values. (GW X.37–X.38; Scheler 1973b, p. 100). It is this order of love that structures the order of values from which ideologies of the human being are composed.

It should be noted that Scheler’s philosophical anthropology and metaphysics is not without controversies. His notion of spirit and his rejection of the classical theism of the Abrahamic traditions, which is already signaled in his criticism of the ideologies of the Fallen man and Homo sapiens, has been met with disapprovals from different scholars and philosophical groups (Baring 2019). For example, Martin Buber takes issue with Scheler’s notion of a “powerless” and “impotent” spirit and claims that the latter makes an empirically developed notion of powerlessness into one that is primally existing in his conception of the Ground of Being (Buber 1945, p. 312). Perhaps the most common criticism of Scheler’s anthropology is the metaphysical dualism of spirit [Geist] and impulsion [Drang] that it is said to entail. Apart from Buber, other scholars such as (Kelly 1997; Weiss 1998; Spader 2005; Davis 2015; Tymieniecka 2019; Hackett 2023), just to mention a few, have all argued in favor of the fact that Scheler failed to attain the unity he aimed at in his philosophical anthropology. However, scholars such as (Luther 1974; Smith 1974; Frings 1996) have argued against any claim of dualism entailed in Scheler metaphysics and philosophical anthropology, insisting that the sought after unity can be found in the person as a loving being, that is, when the human being is executing the spiritual act of love that constitutes the core of its being. As Frings clearly pointed out, love is the cornerstone of Scheler’s entire thought (Frings 2003, p. 24).

Thus far, we have studied the five different ideologies of human beings in the history of Western philosophy and have examined Scheler’s notion of a (non-theological) spirit dimension in the human being that he refers to as person located in the movement of the “higher-that-individual-spirit,” which I have described elsewhere as the downward movement of love as agape (Nyaku 2022). Let us now investigate the implications of Scheler’s view of the human being as loving beings for the mental health of individual subjects. To do this, I will provide a basic account of mental health from the perspective of the three main well-being theories and point out that the common notion of “good for” that they entail in fact refers to an ideal of a realized value to which individuals strive. I argue that these theories are structured by views of the five ideologies of the human being—the fear and guilt of the Fallen man, the divine agent within the Homo sapiens, the positivist notion of Homo faber as a creature of instincts, the Dionysian man’s view of the human being as the disease of life, and the Übermenschenidee—which Scheler criticized above. My claim is that well-being theories lay focus on feeling-states to which human beings could attain through their instincts and capacities to think, will, strive, and control, resulting in the fact that the importance of the spiritual dimension that constitutes the human being in their wholeness is completely overlooked. On the contrary, I argue that Scheler’s view of the core of the human being as a loving being entails that their well-being, which depends on their capacity to execute this spiritual act of loving, is a reference to their “spiritual personality” that extends beyond but also accommodates experiential well-being and its feeling-states. More importantly, for Scheler, it is in the spirit dimension that new values are felt, and it is this capacity to feel of new values that characterizes the core our being. Therefore, this paper is not intended to critique the internal logic of well-being theories and suggest a Schelerian alternative; rather, I mainly point out what seems to have been overlooked in the three main well-being theories on mental health.

6. Well-Being and Mental Health

Mental health is generally considered as a state of mental well-being of an individual subject. This state enables individuals to cope with stress related issues of life and reduce anxiety, build healthy relationships with members of the community, realize their abilities, etc. Mental health is in this sense a constituent of an individual’s well-being, whereby well-being refers to a psychophysical state that is “good for” the individual (Crisp 2021). This view of mental well-being is the focus of this paper, implying that I will not focus on the biological, physiological, and sometimes environmental sources that are the study of psychologists and psychiatrists who work on what societies consider as mental disorders (Dehue 2011).

In basic descriptions of contemporary well-being theories, hedonists view well-being as “the greatest balance of pleasure over pain;” the desire theories generally view well-being as a fulfilment of one’s (present, comprehensive, or informed) desires; and the objective list theories that that take well-being to be what is “usually understood as theories which list items constituting well-being that consist neither merely in pleasurable experience nor in desire-satisfaction.” (Crisp 2021). Or as Chappell and Meissner (2023) for example put it, the objective list is “a variety of objectively valuable things that contribute to one’s well-being.” It is important to note that the notion “good for” in these well-being theories suggests that one benefits from whatever it is that the “good for” refers. For example, the claim that reducing anxiety is good for mental health implies that there is benefit in acting to reduce anxiety, in this case good health, meaning that there is always something such as a physical, vital or psychic feeling-state16 that is beneficial in whatever activity that is declared “good for” for the individual subject, even if one follows an objective list out of duty. Fulfilling a duty is “good for” something. Thus, an individual acts, does something, makes an effort, or strives, to gain something that is “good for” them. This strive could be motivated from the basic drives or motivated from the individual’s subjectivity, or by objective goals. Being thus, a link could be drawn between striving on the one hand and well-being as a feeling-state on the other hand that is considered “good for” an individual’s mental health. This feeling-state could be anything encompassing healthiness, happiness, sadness, pleasure, displeasure, contentment, discontentment, fulfilment, satisfaction, etc. It is therefore perhaps for this reason that classical hedonistic theories presuppose that human beings have a basic strive to maximize pleasure and diminish displeasure—feeling-states—and that pleasure has intrinsically good value while displeasure or pain is intrinsically bad17.

According to the utilitarian approach of Chappell and Meissner (2023), the three well-being theories largely overlap in practice: “Hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories of well-being all largely overlap in practice. This is because we tend to desire things that are (typically regarded as) objectively worthwhile, and we tend to be happier when we achieve what we desire. We may also tend to reshape our desires based on our experiences of what feels good.” (Moore 2019)18. This insight that well-being theories overlap in practice suggests that these theories do share the common element, in this case desiring, just as we noted above about acting for benefit. This common element could be explained by the fact that in pursuance of the greatest balance of pleasure over displeasure, or in fulfilling their desires, or in following an objective list, the feeling-state of happiness rather than unhappiness or discontentment determines an individual’s mental well-being. Thus, even the objective list theory, which provides an eudemonistic account of well-being, also hinges on the idea that pursuing the already (rationally) established goods—norms, laws, methods, techniques, and strategies obtained from reflective judgement—is good for the well-being of the individual.19

The insight that well-being theories overlap in practice also confirms the importance of the notion of “good for” that is essential to these theories. The “good for” is a reference to the contentment, benefit, or satisfaction in adhering to the determined norms of what constitutes or advances well-being of human beings, which is usually taken to be a happy or joyful life or even whatever makes an individual’s mental health “good” or “perfect”. Thus, it could be argued that in practice the notions “good for,” satisfaction, or benefit, and the emphasis on pleasure (contentment, happiness) as good, instead of displeasure (unhappiness), seem to suggest that all three well-being theories are in fact basically eudemonistic.20

This notion that well-being theories overlap in practice suggesting that they are forms of hedonism underscores Max Scheler’s claim that all practical eudaemonism necessarily turns into hedonism. For Scheler, the lower sensible feelings that are the most easily reproduced in practice have their roots in the central wretchedness [Unseligkeit] of the human being. And “whenever man is discontent in the more central and deeper strata of his being, his striving acquires a certain disposition to replace, as it were, this unpleasant state with … the pleasure of the more peripheral stratum at hand, which is the stratum of feelings that are more easily produced.”21 The reason for this human reaction is that the objects that cause these lower sensible pleasures can be subjected to practical control, and this ability to manipulate these causes means that they can be generated by the choices human beings make. That is, they can be switched on and off and as such they are within the realm of the human will, control and autonomy.22 This easy production of sensible feelings results in the fact that the higher values, which are experienced in participating in non-controllable objects, are ignored or considered irrelevant and viewed with discontentment. For Scheler, this discontentment for higher values is characteristic of many forms of hedonism,23 an advance form of which is a sign of vital decadence in an era of human history.24 In fact, if hedonism is indeed a sign of decadence of an era, then it will be interesting to investigate which of the five ideologies of the human being discussed above would reflect this era the most. However, a detailed investigation into this question is beyond the scope of the present paper.25

What I have emphasized in this section is that from a Schelerian perspective, when well-being is defined by a feeling-state or mental-state—be it happiness or sadness, pleasure or displeasure, contentment or discontentment, etc.—such a state is only attainable by striving toward an ideal representation of a known value. For example, a hedonist strives to maximize pleasure and minimize displeasure by doing “x, y, z”; the desire theorist strives to satisfy whatever they desire by doing “x, y, z”; and the objective list theorist strives to follow the “x, y, z” on the list—where “x, y, z” refers to various activities within the psychophysical realm. In other words, the feeling-state itself to which individuals strive is structured by a value-complex, making the feeling-state a bearer of a realized value within this complex. I take this observation in turn to mean that an individual strives not to a feeling-state as such but rather to a realized value. Furthermore, it is important to note that the notions of happiness, contentment, joyfulness or even sadness, refer to experiences within the psychophysical realm of sensible, vital, and to some extent intellectual values only,26 and therefore these well-being theories seem to overlook the spirituality that structures an individual’s center of acts from which their affections, desires, and hence their mental health arise.

One might question what this discussion on well-being, desiring, and feeling-states would mean for Robert Nozick’s famous “experience machine” thought experiment—a machine designed to give the human brain any conscious experiences it desires? (Nozick 1974, pp. 42–45) (See also Crisp 2021; Chappell and Meissner 2023). Nozick attempted to show that human beings value other things than what he describes as immediate sensations, or how things feel from the inside only: human beings “value” their connections to a “deeper reality” experienced in engaging with other humans and things in the world. For this reason, Nozick contended that human beings would rather not plunge themselves into such an experience machine: “Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide.” (Nozick 1974, p. 43) In spite of the possible status quo bias that this thought experiment might entail (Chappell and Meissner 2023), I take Nozick’s position to refer to the crucial importance of the Schelerian view of human beings as living organisms that are constituted by impulsion which Manfred Frings describes as the “meta-biological vital urge” (Frings 1980, p. 137), and a spiritual dimension in which a more fundamental spiritual acts of loving and hating, and spiritual experiences of humility and pride, are felt. However, it is important to note that, for Scheler, this vital impulsion and spiritual dimension do not belong to an objective list that could be desired; rather they are primordial and together they constitute the grounds from which all human acts of desiring, choosing, willing, etc., arise. Because impulsion and spirit are primordial, one would not instinctively plunge into an “experience machine,” given that the desired experiences that the machine promises are themselves preconditioned by the vital urge to live in the “meta-biological ground of life,” which defines ultimate reality (Frings 1980, p. 140).

7. Conclusions

Thus far, the point that I argue in this paper is that the relation between spirituality and mental health should not be viewed in terms of how spirituality could be beneficial or is “good for” the mental health of the individual human being. That is to say, spirituality in relation mental health should not be reduced to practices such as meditation, praying, and reading, nor should it be viewed as the source of (religious) beliefs, inner strength, dignity, self-respect, sense of purpose, etc., the absence of which are usually linked to poor mental well-being. Rather, the relation between spirituality and mental health should also focus on the question as to whether human beings are in the position to execute the act that defines the core of their being. I have argued that, for Scheler, it is the felt personality in participating in the movement of love that defines the core of the human being. In executing the act of spiritual loving towards another person, one experiences their spiritual dimension and the order of love that defines their being. This means that spirituality is experienced in loving another human being. Spirituality, seen in this light, transcends the psychophysical dimension and therefore cannot be accommodated completely in the psychological sphere of the human being.

Scheler’s version of the Aristotelian “function argument” is that the human being is a loving being (ens amans). That is, it is not reasoning; but rather it is loving that constitutes the peculiar activity that defines the human being. This view of human functioning entails that human well-being is inherently structured by the spiritual act of loving in which new values are felt. It is this act of spiritual loving that distinguishes Scheler’s anthropology from the other five ideologies of the human being discussed in this paper. Therefore, perhaps, instead of defining human well-being in terms of striving to attain a feeling-state only, well-being should be viewed in terms of the functionality in which higher values of the person are realized. A theory of mental well-being that overlooks this spirit dimension of the human being fails to consider their unique characteristic.27 The mental well-being of human beings begins with their capacity to execute spiritual loving.