Matteo Canevari
The Critique of the Age of Bourgeois in Max Scheler. From the limits of Marxism to the Aristocratic Revolution
Before the First World War, with the Critique of the bourgeois pragmatism, Max Scheler formulates the concepts of bourgeois type and person that will be expressed in Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik: Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus. These notes want to underline some political implications in his ethical reflection. In Der Bourgeois – Der Bourgeois und die religiöse Mächte – Die Zukunft der Kapitalismus. Drei Aufsätze zum Problem des kapitalistischen Geistes (1914), the bourgeois type in based on a peculiar system of interclass valuation. Capitalism is not a storically determined economic system, but it’s related to the capitalistic ethos (the spiritual essence of the burgeois type), that means the lifestyle of the Age of Capital. Scheler refuses the Marxist-materialistic model: the proletariat as well is a variant of the bourgeois mentality. The marxist conception and the materialistic reflection on the human essence are reversed. The model of the bourgeois type is the slave of the Hegelian Die Phänomenologie des Geistes. His slavery is implied into the materiality of his existence, because he’s damned to identify himself in the ethics of work. The slave can’t be uplifted (selfconciousness). His interests and his values are reduced to the mere concrete materialistic form. He’s not a person, because person is neither psycho-physical individual nor an abstract subject. On the contrary, Person is the individual axiologic-ideal essence. The aristocracy herself, submitted to the bourgeois mentality, has become slave because slave of the bourgeois system and its mentality.The end of the Age of Capitalistim could take place only with the power of a “noble type”, essentially different from the bourgeois type. So we have the paradox of a Revolution without a change of the organization of production. A superior and open-minded spirit could then become Head of a technologized and class-conscious society, where he embodies the model of anti-bourgeois value.