Max Scheler (1874 to 1928), a German philosopher of the phenomenological school, set out in The Nature of Sympathy (1913, enlarged 1923) the different ways in which people share each other’s feelings: feeling together, understanding another’s feeling, fellow-feeling proper, being swept up in a mood, and identification, in which the boundary between self and other dissolves. He held that real fellow-feeling keeps the other person distinct, that the higher forms grow out of the lower, and that modern Western people had largely lost the capacity for identification, including with the living world, a loss he thought should be made good. His account of identification as a way of knowing sits close to the shamanic practice of shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer.
Who was Max Scheler? #
He was born in 1874 and grew up in Munich in an orthodox Jewish family. He studied and first taught at Jena, then at Munich, and became one of the leading figures of phenomenology, the movement begun by Edmund Husserl that sets out to describe experience exactly as it is lived. From 1919 he taught at Cologne, where he was brought in as the institute’s Catholic thinker, though he later grew critical of the Church’s institutions. He moved to Frankfurt in 1927 and died there the following year, aged fifty-three. Because of his Jewish background and his opposition to fascism, his work was suppressed in Germany from 1933 to 1945.1
His books range across ethics, values, love, resentment and what it is to be human. The Nature of Sympathy is among the most widely read.
What did he mean by sympathy? #
Something wider than the everyday word. He went back to the Greek, syn, ‘with’, and pathos, ‘suffering’ or ‘feeling’, and used ‘sympathy’ for all the ways in which feeling passes between people. He then set them apart from each other, each with an example.2
In feeling together, two parents stand beside the body of their child, and their sorrow is one sorrow, held in common. In fellow-feeling, a friend comes into the room and feels for the parents, and the friend’s feeling is directed at their grief, and the grief stays theirs. In emotional contagion, someone walks into a cheerful bar, or into a crowd, and is caught up in its mood without knowing or caring what the mood is about, which, in a mob, can sweep away any sense of personal responsibility. Underneath fellow-feeling there is also vicarious feeling, grasping what another person feels without feeling it oneself.2
The point of the distinctions is that real sympathy is not merging. In fellow-feeling the distinction between oneself and the other remains clear; it is a feeling with someone, not instead of them.3
What is emotional identification? #
The furthest form, where the boundary goes altogether. Either one’s own self dissolves into the other, or the other is taken wholly into oneself, and in both cases there is no longer an individual consciousness standing apart. Scheler’s examples include a person among the peoples he called ‘primitive’ identifying with an ancestor, a parrot or a stone; the initiates of the ancient mysteries becoming one with a god in ecstasy; a child playing ‘in earnest’ at being its mother; mother and infant; and lovers.4
He made two historical claims about it. Modern, ‘civilised’ people, on his account, have increasingly lost the capacity for identification, which survives more in children, dreamers and the peoples he called primitive, so that civilisation has lost capacities as well as gaining them. And certain kinds of knowledge can be had only through identification, so what is lost is not just a feeling but a way of knowing.4 He linked this to a wider loss in the West. His remedy was reciprocal: the West should “cultivate in ourselves the sense of emotional identity with the living universe”, whilst Asia, in turn, learnt from the West’s humane, personal love.5 On his account the higher forms of sympathy rest on the lower, so a culture that has lost identification has weakened the ground the others grow from.
Did he think sympathy was enough to live by? #
No. In his view an ethics cannot be built from shared feeling alone. Love comes first, and it is love that opens us to understanding another person. Scheler also refused the old philosophical puzzle of how one isolated mind could ever know another. For him we begin not as separate minds that later meet, but inside a shared ‘we’, out of which each ‘I’ gradually comes to know itself.6
How does Scheler’s account connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most directly in the difference between sympathy and empathy. In Therapeutic Shamanism sympathy, in its everyday sense of pity and sorrow for someone’s misfortune, is not enough. Empathy goes further. It is embodied and visceral, and to feel it we have to open ourselves up to experiencing being the other, to shapeshift into them to a degree. Reconnecting with people brings empathy in its wake, so that empathy is not so much learnt as followed, and to regain it fully we have to go beyond the human, to the more-than-human world and to our own wild Soul.7 Scheler’s ‘sympathy’ covers both of these. Empathy, in this sense, reaches into what he called identification, whilst keeping the clarity of fellow-feeling.
Shapeshifting is that reaching, done on purpose. Becoming another being in a journey, communicating with it from the inside, brings a deep sense of empathy and connection, and for hunter-gatherer peoples this relationship with the other Peoples and the land was not an idea or a belief but something heartfelt.8 Expansion journeys go further still, loosening the narrow focus on individuality and separation, so that someone becomes not just water but the whole lake, and then the valley around it.9 See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
Scheler’s claim that civilisation lost the capacity for identification also has a counterpart in the teaching on the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. People who live shamanically experience being part of a world that is alive and can be communicated with, whilst most modern people experience themselves as separate individuals; the deeper experience of being parts of a larger whole is what the Fall cost us.10 See What is the Fall? and What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On what identification is. Scheler counted it as an extreme form of emotional contagion, the least personal kind of shared feeling, and listed the peoples he called primitive alongside neurotics and hypnotic subjects as the ones who keep it. The same passage that calls identification a way of knowing also files it under the pre-personal.11 In Therapeutic Shamanism shapeshifting is not a lapse into something childlike. It is a skill, entered deliberately and left deliberately, and healthy shamanic practice keeps one foot in this world, and the ability to move between the worlds at will is what separates it from being lost in either.12
And on the ladder of beings. Scheler arranged living things in layers, from the plant’s blind urge through animal instinct and intelligence up to spirit, which he gave to humans alone, and described animals as bound to their surroundings where humans are open to a world.11 Therapeutic Shamanism sets no being above another; humans are not superior to animals, nor animals to plants and stones.13 Human self-awareness sits at one end of a continuum whose other end is collective-awareness, and plants, far towards that end, are conscious in a way most people do not even recognise as consciousness.14 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
