Current Fellow-in-Residence Adriana Alfaro’s latest scholarly work, “Max Scheler and Charles Taylor on Self-Knowledge: Dispatches from ‘the Swarm’,” was published this month in the edited volume Legacies of Max Scheler, edited by Eric Mohr and J. Edward Hackett.
Abstract
This chapter explores Max Scheler and Charles Taylor’s respective considerations on self-knowledge. As I try to show, their respective diagnoses of what impairs self-knowledge, as well as their respective conceptions of the self that such knowledge is supposed to disclose, overlap significantly. Still, their prescriptions regarding how to deal with what threatens self-knowledge, so that we can successfully pursue and attain it, are noticeably different, and ultimately revolve around what is known as “personalist ethics” in the case of Scheler, and “ethics of authenticity,” in Taylor’s case. Having explored their similarities and differences regarding both what prevents self-knowledge and how to pursue it, I consider which perspective can better inform self-knowledge today—more specifically, in view of what Byung-Chul Han has called “the swarm.” In the contemporary political landscape, Taylor’s version of moral realism—much more informed by diversity, conversant with secularist arguments, and compatible with efforts toward decolonization—is more appropriate. However, as I try to argue, in “the swarm,” self-knowledge would very much benefit from virtues and strategies that are more akin to a Schelerian perspective, and which revolve around modesty, silence, and emulation.
Find the volume here.
Read about Adriana Alfaro Altamirano here.