article
Martina Properzi
The "Lebensproblem" and its Critical Solution: A Systematic Reading of Max Scheler's Biologie-Vorlesung 1926-1927
Volume 18 (2022), Numéro 2, p. 1-32
Abstract: To date, the collection of texts, known as Biologie-Vorlesung, is still an editorial work in progress. The intention of the editors is to provide the reader with a complete edition of the notes of the latest lecture on theoretical biology held by the German phenomenologist Max Scheler at the University of Cologne during the winter semester of the academic year 1926-1927. Of the six notebooks that make up the surviving fragments of the notes of the lecture, only the first and the second notebook have been fully published, together with some brief extracts from the third and the fifth notebook. Despite some relevant results achieved in the philological interpretation of the text, no systematic interpretation of Scheler’s Biologie-Vorlesung has been provided to date. My aim here is to fill such a hermeneutical gap by following two strictly interrelated interpretative lines. More specifically: 1) a text-based comparison between Biologie-Vorlesung and the so-called Biologievorlesung (1908/09), the edited version of the notes elaborated by Scheler for the first Munich lecture on theoretical biology dating back to 1908-1909, and 2) a reconstruction of the critical project of a phenomenology-driven philosophy of life, which is unfortunately only enunciated in Biologie-Vorlesung. I will stress the interrelation between these two interpretative lines. This interrelation may be seen as an attempt to highlight some aspects of continuity and discontinuity in Scheler’s lifelong proposal regarding the critical character of a phenomenological philosophy of life phenomena based on a theory of categories of biological sciences, which is highly sensitive to historical and sociocultural concerns. As I will show, according to the Schelerian interpretation, this means that the phenomenologist must justify or validate the categorial system adopted in a specific historical and sociocultural context, e.g., in the Modern Western culture, from which positive sciences originated. Despite this aspect of continuity, Scheler’s late critical project stands out for the need of a more structured character. According to my view, this character basically depends on the interplay between the phenomenological and the metaphysical theme established by the author through the theory of metasciences, whose aim is to achieve a critical knowledge regarding both the being of essence and the being of existence of the scientific objects, among the other objects of biological sciences.
Mots-clefs: Scheler, biology, life.
