Abstract
The reassessment of intentionality as “tendency” or “drive,” already important when the intentionality at stake designates the directedness of lived experiences toward a particular object, might be even more crucial when the orientation toward others is concerned. How do drives and affects intermingle within our intersubjective life and fashion our relations to others? The present paper will address this question by focusing on a particular or even primary kind of intersubjectivity: the mother–child relationship, that received a particular, yet still insufficiently noticed attention in early phenomenology. Scheler and Husserl both analyse this relationship, indeed, in terms that imply drive intentionality as well as affective intentionality (that is, for what concerns the mother, maternal instinct and maternal love). In their view, this relation also has a crucial ethical significance, and may even be taken to be paradigmatic for ethical relationships as such. Accordingly, drive intentionality is understood as an instinctive orientation toward others, that love takes up and develops, thus providing an affective and even instinctive ground for ethical behaviour. All this imples the depart from an ethics grounded on the primacy and sufficiency of reason.
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The reassessment of intentionality as “tendency” or “drive,” already important when the intentionality at stake designates the directedness of lived experiences toward a particular object, might be even more crucial when the orientation toward others is concerned. How do drives and affects intermingle within our intersubjective life and fashion our relations to others? The present paper will address this question by focusing on a particular or even primary kind of intersubjectivity: the mother–child relationship, that received a particular, yet still insufficiently noticed attention in early phenomenology. Scheler and Husserl both analyse this relationship, indeed, in terms that imply drive intentionality as well as affective intentionality (that is, for what concerns the mother, maternal instinct and maternal love). In their view, this relation also has a crucial ethical significance, and may even be taken to be paradigmatic for ethical relationships as such. Accordingly, drive intentionality is understood as an instinctive orientation toward others,Footnote 1 that love takes up and develops, thus providing an affective and even instinctive ground for ethical behaviour. All this implies the departure from an ethics exclusively grounded on the primacy and sufficiency of reason, while also suggesting that drives and affects must be part of a complete phenomenology of reason.Footnote 2
To show this progression from tendencies and drives to affectivity and ethics, I will first (I) examine the Husserlian account of the mother–child relationship and its profound relevance for an understanding of intersubjective life through the prism of generativity, which amounts to insisting on the “generative connection” of subjectivities. From this point of view, the mother–child relationship appears as a primary form of intersubjectivity that has a considerable impact on the beginnings of subjectivity as well as on world-constitution, since it implies a specific form of intercorporeality and the remarkable intertwining of two spheres of experience. The instinctive orientation toward others, that exemplarily manifests itself in the case of the mother and the child, is also one of the most prominent expressions of drive-intentionality. Furthermore, as I will attempt to show in a second moment (II), it is by paying particular attention to the ethical dimension of maternal conduct that Husserl is led not only to part with Brentano’s ethics of the highest practical Good but also to recognize the remarkable teleological continuity that exists between instincts, feelings and ethical behaviour and that demands to reconsider the idea of an ethics of pure reason. It is why the mother’s instinctive and loving valuation of her child(ren) can become a paradigm for a new understanding of ethical life as consisting in “duties of love”. An inquiry into Scheler’s phenomenological analytic of love (III) will provide us with an alternative account of the mother–child relationship that fruitfully challenges the supposed continuity between maternal instinct and maternal love, but also rests on a conception of instinct which is less careful to avoid its naturalization. Scheler’s main point, however, is that maternal love implies a resistance to the tendency of identification (Einsfühlung) with the child that is so powerful in instinct, and thus necessarily develops itself as love of another person. Having established this, a final section (IV) will seek to highlight both the divergences and the convergences of Husserl’s and Scheler’s accounts of motherhood and to argue for the complementarity of the manners in which they understand the peculiarities of this intersubjective, affective and ethical situation.
The Mother–Child Relationship and the Instinctive Orientation Toward Others: The Husserlian Account
The publication of Husserl’s research manuscripts has provided, since the 1970s, significantly new insights into his phenomenology of intersubjectivity, famously outlined in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. This is particularly the case for his research from the 1930s, which reveals the increasing importance of the “generative problems” of phenomenology, that the published work only stealthily mentions.Footnote 3 The genetic account of transcendental life, which deals with immanent temporality and self-temporalization, is thereby significantly complemented by the generative one, which insists on the fact that each subjectivity belongs to a “generative connection (generativer Zusammenhang)Footnote 4” that fashions the peculiarity of both its intersubjective and its historicalFootnote 5 life. In one of the C-Manuscripts from the early thirties, Husserl even speaks of “the connection of transcendental generations (Zusammenhang der transzendentalen Generationen)” as highly determinant for the subject of world-constitution (Husserl, 2006: 392, Hua Mat VIII), thus clearly stressing the transcendental significance of generativity and providing one of the many confirmations that the field of the “generative problems” fully belongs to transcendental phenomenology.Footnote 6
Generativity chiefly manifests itself through the fact that one is born,Footnote 7 which expresses the relational, intersubjective, and even intercorporeal emergence of each subjectivity. This is why, in an Arbeitsmanuskript from 1933 or 1934 published in Husserliana XLII, Husserl can raise the “questions concerning what is properly < meant by > ‘procreation’ from a monadic [i.e., transcendental] point of view (die Fragen, was, monadisch gesehen, unter dem Titel ‘Zeugung’ eigentlich < zu verstehen > ist)” (Husserl, 2014: 25, Hua XLII). The famous “Universal Teleology” research manuscript from September 1933 convergently deals with procreation (Zeugung), as it is involved in sexual drive,Footnote 8 and with “drive intentionality (Triebintentionalität),” as it designates the (sexual and social: “geschlechtlich-sozial”) orientation toward others. The research field that is thus delineated, Husserl adds at this occasion, comprises the “problems relating to parents and, above all, to mother and child, which also arise in connection with the problematic of copulation (die Probleme Eltern, oder vor allem, Mutter und Kind, die aber auch im Zusammenhang der Kopulationsproblematik erwachsen)” (Husserl, 1973b: 594, Hua XV). Such issues are undoubtedly even more difficult to tackle nowadays when medically-assisted procreation multiplies the forms of parenthood and makes it possible to dissociate genetic motherhood and gestation, on the one hand, and gestation and maternity, on the other.Footnote 9 Admittedly, Husserl does not distinguish between biological parenthood and social parenthood, no doubt because he sees them as going mostly hand in hand. However, it is important to stress that both forms of parenthood must be considered when dealing with the “generative connection” of subjectivities, insofar as this connection concerns not only procreation and birth but also the fact that the child’s progressive awakening to consciousness and the development of her directedness toward the world and the others are relational or intersubjective processes themselves.
It is true, nonetheless, that Husserl is particularly interested in the mother–child relationship that is built through pregnancy or gestation, as he specifically reflects on the fact that birth is preceded by a prenatal life—an original or primary childhood (Urkindlichkeit), as he says—which already implies a certain kind of intentionality and world-possession; and this primary, original intentionality must precisely be described as instinctive. Thus, in another research manuscript from 1933–34 that aims to disclose, once again, the “universal teleology” running through “the process of the global constitution since the very beginnings” (its title is “Enthüllungsgang der universalen Teleologie als Gang der gesamten Konstitution von den Anfängen an”), Husserl contends that an “‘instinctive’ relatedness to the world (‘instinktive’ Weltbezogenheit)” begins in the mother’s womb, during prenatal life (Husserl, 2014: 222, Hua XLIIFootnote 10), as it is passively triggered through affection and sensitive stimulation long before the awake, conscious life can commence. One of the C-Manuscripts edited by Dieter Lohmar in 2006 also argues that it is already since the “primary childhood (Urkindheit)” spent within the maternal womb that the child has a life of interests oriented toward the world and toward beings, that is, an “instinctive intentionality (instinktive Intentionalität)”. For this reason, and insofar as, in world-constitution, that which is constituted closely depends on the constituting subject, Husserl can state that “the world itself has a childhood (Die Welt selbst also hat Kindheit und wächst heran zur reifen Welt)” (Husserl, 2006: 74, Hua Mat VIII). The manuscripts recently published as Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins also confirm that world-constitution responds (to quote a text from the beginning of the thirties) to “instincts toward worldliness (Instinkte der Weltlichkeit)” (Husserl, 2020b: 174, Hua XLIII/3) which are distinct, Husserl suggests, from the very first instincts that lead a newborn to seek the presence of her mother.Footnote 11
Importantly, it is not only the relationship to the world but also the orientation toward others that Husserl regards as instinctive.Footnote 12 And it is also in this respect that he repeatedly stresses the significance of what counts for him as the most original intersubjective bond: the relationship to the mother, as she often is the most prominent of the “first others (die ersten Anderen)” (Husserl, 1973b: 604, Hua XV) that a child encounters in her life.Footnote 13 Accordingly, Husserl claims that the “instinctive relatedness to others (instinktive Bezogensein auf Andere)” that commands the beginning of our intersubjective life originates in the relation to the mother (“auf die Mutter in der Genesis von Anfang an” (Husserl, 2014: 461, Hua XLII)). The child’s instinctive orientation toward the mother—or, one should add, toward the primary caregiver or attachment figure who occupies the maternal position when the (genetic, gestational or social) mother herself is absent—is firstly “intertwined with the instinct of nourishment and with the instinct of objectivation,” but afterwards progressively develops itself into specific feelings, turning “into empathy and < into the > most original human love, the love for the mother (Der Instinkt zur Mutter hin, verflochten mit dem Nahrungsinstinkt und dem Instinkt der Objektivierung, arbeitet sich aus in der Einfühlung und < in der > ursprünglichsten menschlichen Liebe, als Liebe zur Mutter)” (Husserl, 2014: 465, Hua XLII). Such a progressive and even teleological development of intentional and intersubjective life pleads for the acknowledgment of a remarkable continuity between instinct and affectivity.
Empathy and love are nonetheless possible only when the mother has been identified as an other. Immediately after birth, as well as during prenatal life or during “primary childhood,” the separation of the self and the other has not yet been made. Husserl pays particular attention to this situation that is unique and irreplaceable within subjective and intersubjective life: in another research manuscript from 1932, he mentions “the child in the mother’s womb, with sensory fields undergoing smooth changes (Das Kind im Mutterleib, mit Empfindungsfeldern, die im glatten Wandel sind),” and then elaborates in a marginal annotation:
The child within the mother. Don’t we have <here> an intertwining (ein Ineinander) of primordialities, which is not based on empathy (Einfühlung)? Does the mother possess, among her inner sensory fields—which, due to their smooth mutability, do not lead to any objectifying configuration—also those of the child, her sensations of movement, her kinaestheses? If not, what kind of community is this? In what way does the mother suffer when the child does not feel well? (Husserl, 2014: 27, Hua XLII)
As we can see, Husserl questions here the gestational experience of the mother and what we might call its transcendental meaning: what kind of intersubjectivity is built through the intercorporeality of pregnancy? Can the mother live the Urkind’s sensations and movements as her own? How does she experience the fact that the pre-infantFootnote 14 is someone else and also belongs to her own body? These classical interrogations that the philosophical and phenomenological account of pregnancy has abundantly put forth since Beauvoir, Kristeva, and YoungFootnote 15 are raised here by the founder of phenomenology himself.Footnote 16
If Husserl often describes the relationship between mother and child—which he also depicts in a 1927 text as the “most original genetic continuity” (Husserl, 1973a: 504, Hua XIV)—as “formed instinctively in an original manner (ein ursprünglich instinktiv sich ausbildender Konnex)” (Husserl, 1973b: 582, Hua XV), one has to ask, though, what is the meaning of the instinct in question. Does it remain true to the precept of avoiding the naturalization of transcendental life? Otherwise said, does it completely dismiss a biological or naturalistic understanding of instinct? And most of all, can we bestow instinct a properly transcendental meaning? Undoubtedly, the fact that the mother will always stand out as the first other toward whom we are instinctively oriented is also in line with Husserl’s traditional (if not patriarchalFootnote 17) vision of family. This vision is manifest, for instance, in a 1921 text where the reference to what is “natural” overshadows the historical, social and cultural as well as the transcendental dimension of intersubjective life. The question as to whether the naturalization of this life is successfully avoided at all times also emerges when one reads the following: “In the family community that develops in a natural way, we easily see that what comes first is the solicitude (Fürsorge) of the mother for the children, which develops in a natural and naive way” (Husserl, 1973a: 180, Hua XIV). More generally (and also more optimistically), to quote an even earlier text (from 1916–1918), Husserl believes that “in the relationship between parents and children” we are dealing with an “original drive to satisfy the needs of others, to alleviate the suffering of others (ursprünglicher Trieb zur Stillung fremder Bedürfnisse, zur Beseitigung fremder Leiden)” (Husserl, 2014: 85, Hua XLII). The drives that govern parental behaviours are undoubtedly depicted here in an overly simplistic and insufficiently nuanced manner, in a regrettable indifference to the penetrating insights that history, cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology or psychoanalysis had already started to provide with respect to them. Such an indifference can also be regretted when Husserl plainly claims that the mother, “with her maternal instincts, ‘lives in the child’ (Die Mutter mit ihren Mutterinstinkten ‘lebt im Kinde’)” (Husserl, 2006: 170, Hua Mat VIII). If motherhood is thus undoubtedly idealized in a way that makes it impossible to account for the immense variety and even the radical heterogeneity of maternal conduct, it is also in order to present it as a vocation (see Donohoe, 2010) and to make it function as an ethical paradigm. This means that mothers are also idealized insofar as, for Husserl, they count as unrivalled models from the outset, since their instinctive orientation toward their children, insofar as it is likely to develop into love, is supposed to make them act like good mothers.
The Absolute Ought of Maternal Love, a Paradigm for Ethics
The ethical dimension of the reference to the mother grounds in a conception of maternal love as absolute and unconditioned, which plays a clearly paradigmatic role in Husserl’s late ethics.Footnote 18 This striking peculiarity has drawn the attention of scholars even previous to the publication of the ethical research manuscripts from the Freiburg period in Husserliana, volume XLII.Footnote 19 In one of these texts, Husserl famously writes that “the mother is subject to the absolute ought of her maternal love, the duty to care for the object of her love (Die Mutter steht unter dem absoluten Sollen ihrer mütterlichen Liebe, ihr Geliebtes zu besorgen)” (Husserl, 2014: 357, Hua XLII). The good of her child is the supreme value for her, and this shows, for Husserl, that “individual vocation is always directed toward values, but can also be blind and instinctive, as in the case of the originally blind maternal instinct (dieser individuelle Ruf immer auf Werte zurückgeht, aber instinktiv blind sein kann wie der ursprünglich blinde Mutterinstinkt)” (Husserl, 2014: 359, Hua XLII). Such a claim not only suggests that “Husserl’s later account of absolute values takes the absolute value of our relation to another [person] as its basis and inspiration” (Leon-Carlyle, 2021: 41), but also challenges the possibility of a self-sufficient ethics of (pure) reason as it reveals the “irrationality of the absolute ought (Irrationalität des absoluten Sollens)” (Husserl, 2014: 384, Hua XLII) and the unexpected continuity between instinctive and affective life, on the one hand, and ethical life, on the other.Footnote 20 The maternal figure is meant precisely to embody and illustrate this continuity, as she acts out of instinct and love, and not out of reason alone, and is a good mother as such;Footnote 21 if her child is an absolute value to her, it is on the ground of affective rather than exclusively rational evaluation. The numerous occasions where Husserl speaks of maternal love take up the reference to maternal ethical behaviours that arise instinctively and thoughtlessly as evidence for the thesis that absolute duty begins in instinct and affect: maternal love is indeed, in the phenomenologist’s view, both “instinctiveFootnote 22”—in a sense that Husserl strives, but sometimes fails to fairly distinguish from a biological driveFootnote 23—and ethical.
The axiological consciousness is at the very heart of this transmutation of instinct into an ethical behaviour. Like Scheler,Footnote 24 Husserl acknowledges an indissoluble link between affectivity and valuation. In a research manuscript written around 1920 and recently published in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, he reflects upon the difference between “instinctive feelings (Triebgefühlen)” and “axiological feelings (Wertgefühlen)” (that are distinct from perceptions of values or Wertnehmungen), and he significantly chooses the example of “instinctive (triebhaft)” mother love in order to suggest that the two kinds of feelings are nonetheless related, insofar as “the mother can also see that the child is a value in herself (Mutter kann auch sehen, dass das Kind ein Wert ist an sich)” (Husserl, 2020b: 459, Hua XLIII/3)Footnote 25 and operate, on the ground of her love for the child, an act of conscious and even rational valuation.
While Husserl’s late ethics has received important attention during the last decades, and the paradigmatic example of mother-love has often been highlighted, the relation between ethical mother love and mother instinct, as it provides itself the chief example of the instinctive relatedness to others, has been more rarely discussed.Footnote 26 It might be particularly illuminating to insist here on the remarkable convergence between the personalist orientation of Husserl’s late ethics (see Peucker, 2010) and the generative turn of his late phenomenology of intersubjectivity, within which, as shown above, the mother–child relationship also counts as the most fundamental link implied by the “generative connection (generativer Zusammenhang)” of subjectivities.
The ethical dimension of maternal behaviour might even be the very first trigger of Husserl’s attention to the mother–child relationship. Since the publication of his early lectures on ethics in 1988 (Husserliana, volume XXVIII), Ulrich Melle, the volume’s editor, provided some very precious insights into his late Freiburg ethics and into the reasons that led him to dismiss the Brentanian ethics of the highest practical Good. Husserl mentions indeed, on a sheet inserted in the manuscript of his 1919–20 lecture, Einleitung in die Philosophie, that it is as early as 1907 that Moritz Geiger addressed him with the “justified objection” that “it would be ridiculous to ask a mother to consider whether the promotion of her child is the best thing in her practical field” (Husserl, 2012: 146, Hua Mat IX, footnote).Footnote 27 As Melle suggests, Geiger’s objection also points to the incommensurability of values and to the fact that their objective ranking doesn’t unmistakably provide the right response for moral choices (objections that might also work, in fact, against Scheler).Footnote 28 Against Brentano, indeed, Husserl argues that what has to be done and what is best do not necessarily coincide: “Playing a Mozart sonata is more beautiful than washing the child, but the latter is a duty when the time is right now (Das Spielen einer Mozartschen Sonate ist schöner als das Waschen des Kindes, aber das letztere ist Pflicht, wenn es jetzt eben an der Zeit ist)” (Ms. A V 21, 122a/b, quoted in Melle, 1988: XLVII, now published in Husserl, 2014: 390, Hua XLII). It is precisely this incommensurability of (absolute) values that makes their objective ranking impossible and confers a tragic dimension to moral choices.Footnote 29 Accordingly, ethical life is inescapably made of dilemmas and sacrifices, and mothers appear as ethical models not only insofar as they (are supposed to) prefer what “has to be done” for their child to “what is best,” but also as far as they exemplarily lead a life of difficult choices (see Donohoe, 2010: 134; Leon-Carlyle, 2021), especially when they have more than one child.Footnote 30 Brentano’s “law of absorption,” according to which the higher practical Good “absorbs” the inferior ones, is challenged by such moral choices where two absolute values stand in an irreducible conflict.Footnote 31 Husserl’s prime example is the conflict between the (maternal) love of the child and the love for the country—a conflict that countless mothers of soldiers, including his wife Malvine, had faced at the time during the Great War.Footnote 32 Such a conflict cannot be solved through an objective ranking of values, since both are absolute values or, as Husserl puts it, “values of love (Liebeswerte)Footnote 33” that each command particular “duties of love (Liebespflichten)” (Husserl, 2012: 146, Hua Mat IX, footnote). Considering the ethical subject in her specific, irreducible and unique situation—since every person’s moral obligations are dictated by the domain of her love (“jedermann hat seine Liebessphäre und seine ‘Liebespflichten’Footnote 34”) (Husserl, 2012: 146, Hua Mat IX, footnote)—, Husserl doesn’t seem to fear the moral relativism or even the moral disorderFootnote 35 that such a claim could imply, seemingly considering that love is always “right”.Footnote 36 A more developed phenomenological analytic of love might nonetheless be required in order to support this assumption.
Scheler on the Antagonism between Maternal Instinct and Maternal Love
It is precisely while thoroughly elaborating a phenomenology of affectivity—and of love, in particular—in his Nature of Sympathy (first published in 1913 with the more precise title Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (Phenomenology and Theory of Sympathy Feelings and of Love and Hatred)) that Scheler notably focuses on the mother–child relationship. In fact, it is the peculiarity of maternal love that draws his attention, insofar as it is a feeling that spans between the blindness of instinct and the conscious valuation of the beloved, and thus concerns the very transformation of blind affects into valuative affects.
First of all, given that “the bond between mother and child (der Konnex zwischen Mutter und Kind)” appears as “the typical case of identification (Einsfühlung),” the reference to maternal love allows Scheler to question and reject “the identification-theory of love, i.e., the formula that ‘love’ of another consists in assimilating the other’s self into one’s own by means of identification (Aufnahme des Ich dieses anderen ins eigene Ich durch Einsfühlung)”. Just like Husserl will do, Scheler pays special attention to the intercorporeality of pregnancy that this bond lies upon most of the times and which presents us with a “special, unique case in which the loved one really was once a spatial, corporeal (körperlich-räumlich) ‘part’ of the one who loves” (Scheler, 1973a: 37, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 25). Yet, he firmly rejects Eduard von Hartmann’s claim that love is “just an extended form of egoism, or (more reasonably), an extension of the instinct of self-preservation beyond the immediate self (eine Ausdehnung des Egoismus oder (sinnvoller) des Selbsterhaltungstriebes über das eigene Ich hinaus),” and thus, “an ‘enlarged form of egoism’ extending to what was once part of the mother’s own body (Teil des eigenen Leibes)Footnote 37” (Scheler, 1973a: 37 and 192, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 26 and 193). Love is neither primarily nor ultimately directed toward oneself, but is always essentially love of the other, love of another person; that is to say that narcissistic love is not true love.
This is one of the important reasons why the transition from instinct to love cannot be as smooth as Husserl might think. Scheler considers, indeed, that “there is no sort of continuous development from self-preservation (and its impulses) into maternal love. The psychic continuity lies, rather, between the reproductive and parental instincts (Fortpflanzungsinstinkt und Brutpflegeinstinkt)” (Scheler, 1973a: 38, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 26f.). And even when the fundamental instincts of the living being are at stake, Scheler acknowledges an “antagonism” between self-preservation and reproduction (antagonism that can lead, for instance, to abortion or infanticide). The gap between instinct and love is then even more profound, since maternal love, as it exemplarily manifests itself in self-devotion and self-sacrifice, is not selfish (or narcissistic), but “ecstatic”Footnote 38 (Scheler, 1973a: 38, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 27), thus expressing the mother’s intrinsic openness to the otherness of her child. What is more, while also paying attention to pregnancy and to the the biological dimension of procreation, Scheler refuses to derive maternal love from the physiological aspects of motherhood and to regard it as the ultimate expression of an innate biological instinct. And even if he sometimes argues for a “gradual transformation of the parental instinct into the conscious sentiment of mother-love (kontinuierlicher Übergang des Brutpflegeinstinktes in seelisch betonte Mutter-liebe),” (Scheler, 1973a: 37, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 25) he also considers that “the continuity between the parental instincts and what we are first entitled to call mother-love is not so complete as is often asserted”. For here as well, an antagonism can occur, which means that “instinct and love very often run counter to one another (Instinkt und Liebe hier sehr häufig einander entgegenarbeiten)” (Scheler, 1973a: 38, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 27).
This is undoubtedly one of Scheler’s most precious insights into mother love: to consider that the very essence of love, remarkably present in maternal love, goes against instinct; and that the tendency toward the identification (Einsfühlung) with the child which is specific to maternal instinct is contradicted by mother love.Footnote 39 Suggesting that mothers can and even must move from instinct to love—that is, from the tendency to identification with their offspring toward the valuing of the child as an autonomous person –, he contends that “the unremitting solicitude (die unaufhörlichen Fürsorglichkeiten) of those mothers who are most ‘motherly’ in this respect is often a positive hindrance to any kind of independent development of personality in the child, and frequently retards its mental and spiritual growth the more, in seeking to promote its physical welfare,” and he wonders: “Does it not seem as if the purely maternal instinct—unmixed with love—were seeking to draw the child back, as it were, into the protecting womb (als ob der pure—mit Liebe unvermischte—Instinkt der Mutter das Kind am liebsten wieder in den schützenden Leib gleichsam zurücknehmen möchte)?” (Scheler, 1973a: 38, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 27). By contrast, Scheler insists, “it is maternal love which first checks this tendency, directing itself upon the child as an independent being, slowly making his way from the darkness of mere physical life into the increasing light of consciousness (Erst die Mutter-liebe ist es, die diese Tendenz aufhebt und auf das Kind als selbständiges Wesen hinzielt, das sich langsam aus der Dunkelheit des Organischen zu steigendem Bewußtseinslicht emporarbeitet)” (Scheler, 1973a: 38, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 27).Footnote 40 Hence, the major resistance to the naturalization of maternal love and to its confusion with instinct and with the tendency toward identification comes from the fact that the mother loves the child as another person and thereby guides her toward self-consciousness and freedom. For Scheler, as A. R. Luther puts it, “love is a metaphysical act” that “discloses a dynamic interpersonal structure,” (Luther, 1972: 12 and 16) and it is as it possesses such a metaphysical, non-naturalizable dimension that maternal love cannot be grounded on a biological condition or propensity. Also, as persons capable of loving, mothers are not irremediably blinded by obscure, irrational instincts, as Kant might have thought: maternal love is not contrary or indifferent to morals.Footnote 41 Scheler resolutely parts with the view of mothers as harmful for the moral development of their child,Footnote 42 and pays attention instead to how, through love and care, mothers can transform their helpless, dependent child that was once “a part of them” into a person. This means—even though Scheler doesn’t explicitly stress this point—that unlike what happens for other kinds of interpersonal love, like erotic love or friendship, the mother loves the child as a person while also leading it to become a person.
Nonetheless, in spite of Scheler’s distinct contention that “the mother’s identification with her child” occurs “in the maternal and parental instinct, not in mother-love (im Falle nicht der Mutterliebe, sondern des Mutter- und Brutpflegeinstinkts)” (Scheler, 1973a: 84, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 73), his use of concepts is not always perfectly consistent. He also speaks, indeed, of “the instinctive identification of mother-love (instinktive einsfühlende Mutterliebe)” (Scheler, 1973a: 106, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 97f.), and praises “the ever-watchful parental instinct (den stetig lebendigen Brutpflegeinstinkt)” of the mother that makes her wake “at the slightest sound from her child (but not in response to much stronger stimuli from other sources)"Footnote 43 (Scheler, 1973a: 39, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 28). By doing this, Scheler clearly continues to believe in the “intuitive psycho-somatic unity (vorbewusste vitalpsychische Einheit) of mother and child” (Scheler, 1973a: 39, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 28), and doesn’t really allow imagining that this unity could be broken, deficient or even nonexistent (like in the case of post-partial depression or abusive mothers). He also weakens the separation between maternal love and maternal instinctFootnote 44 by seeing in the mother’s instinctive identification with the child the ground that radically distinguishes mother love from father love and hinders parental love from being homogeneous and unequivocal. The father is considered, indeed, to lack the instinctive power of identification with the child: it is for this reason, Scheler believes, that “we do not have a Vaterliebe (father-love) corresponding to Mutterliebe (mother-love); the word ‘father-love’ actually leaves us in doubt as to whether the father is the loving or the loved one, whereas ‘mother-love’ is absolutely definite in referring to the mother’s love for her child” (Scheler, 1973a: 173, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 172). There is a strong assumption here that deserves to be highlighted: namely, that before even hoping for reciprocity,Footnote 45mothers have to love first.Footnote 46 Should “the ‘family’ as a whole [be] a fabric built out of love (ein Bauwerk der Liebe)” (Scheler, 1973a: 193, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 194), in Scheler’s view it is always the mother who loves first and provides the fuel for this love community.Footnote 47
Conclusion: The Unexpected Convergence of Two Complementary Accounts
Husserl undoubtedly meets Scheler here, since he also speaks of family—more precisely (and the precision is not negligible) of “normal family”—as a “community of love” (Husserl, 2014: 512, Hua XLII).Footnote 48 Nonetheless, given that Husserl’s account of the mother–child relationship is mainly developed out of a concern with the genesis and forms of intersubjective relations rather than with the modalities of affectivity, he doesn’t provide us with an analysis of maternal love as developed as Scheler’s. His treatment of the mother–child relationship might appear though as more systematic—insofar as it is commanded by the more general concerns with the “generative connection” of subjectivities and with the teleological development of drive intentionality—, but it is also less attentive to its empirical variations and modulations. The two phenomenologists also polarize the mother–child relationship in a different manner when they approach it: Husserl’s descriptions focus most often on the child as an emerging subjectivity, while Scheler’s are rather primarily concerned with the mother as a loving subject. Also, Husserl does not strive to separate mother love from maternal instinct,Footnote 49 as he more willingly pleads for a continuity between drives and feelings which is an important sequence of the teleological unity of subjective life. However, whereas Scheler draws a sharper distinction between drives or instincts and feelings, insisting even on their potential antagonism, Husserl attempts to emancipate instinct from a mere biological or naturalistic meaning, as he assigns it quite a crucial role in his analysis of intersubjectivity, hence progressively inscribing it within a transcendental horizon. The Freiburg phenomenologist also leads further the ethical potentialities of maternal love, by regarding it as a paradigm for ethical behavior, while in Scheler’s view, maternal love doesn’t seem to fulfill the ultimate conditions of moral action by itself: “In all endeavour there is a content to be realized, which is inherent as its goal (or ‘purpose;’ when we will). Love does not have this at all. What does a mother seek to ‘realize (realisieren)’ when she gazes lovingly at her bonny child asleep?” (Scheler, 1973a: 146, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 141). Also, when Scheler recalls that “Kant […] excluded love from the whole field of morally valuable conduct because it cannot be imposed as a duty, and because he thought it possible to base the concept of moral value upon obligation and duty alone” (Scheler, 1973a: 146, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 141)Footnote 50, he seems to remain skeptical himself toward the idea of “duties of love (Liebespflichten),” which is so important in Husserl’s late ethics: he is, for instance, particularly sensitive to the fact that “love does not necessarily lead to goodwill and good-doing. One can also become angry, and hurt another out of love,” since “love is directed not to the well-being of someone but to the highest value of his person” (Scheler, 1954: 232, GW 2; Scheler, 1973b: 225). Also, in spite of their “common [Brentanian] matrix,” (Venier, 2015: 250) Husserl’s conception of “values of love (Liebeswerte)” is more attentive to the uniqueness of individual situations and moral conflicts than Scheler’s account, who still believes that, albeit their resistance to intellectualization,Footnote 51 values can be objectively ranked. In this regard, Scheler’s realism with respect to values implies a closer proximity toward Brentano’s ethics of the higher practical Good, which finds itself firmly rejected by Husserl after the Great War.
These important divergences must not overshadow, though, the fact that there is also a “profound theoretical vicinity between Husserl and Scheler,” (Venier, 2015: 250) which explains the proximity of their two pioneering phenomenological accounts of the mother–child relationship that seem to have been developed in an entirely independent manner. In effect, they both use the reference to this peculiar relationship as a guiding thread and tend to consider it as a paradigm, be it for a phenomenology of intersubjectivity (Husserl) or for a phenomenology of affectivity (Scheler), and they also both closely reinforce the ties between axiological consciousness and affective consciousness, providing the foundations of a new, personalist and yet non-formalist ethics.Footnote 52 Here, their common debt to Brentano reflects itself in their shared criticism of Kant’s view on ethics and affectivity.
A focus on Husserl’s and Scheler’s common attention to specific intersubjective situations like the mother–child relationship can also contribute to showing to what extent the proximity between Scheler and Heidegger (a rapprochement suggested and encouraged by Husserl himself,Footnote 53 and still present in contemporary readings)Footnote 54 is, to some regards, only apparent and even profoundly misleading: Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein clearly confronts us with an empirical underdetermination of the existential of being-with (Mitsein), which is approached, in Sein und Zeit, § 26, without using any particular guiding phenomenon and without prominently putting forth paradigmatic forms of togetherness.Footnote 55 It is also difficult to deny that Heidegger’s analytic of affectivity, quite little concerned with interpersonal feelings, would hardly allow developing a phenomenology of (interpersonal) love.Footnote 56 That is to say that, when the phenomenology of intersubjectivity and affectivity is at stake, Husserl and Scheler are far closer to one another than (they might have) expected.
Notes
As Julia Jansen puts it, “Husserl seems uninterested in distinguishing instincts from drives in a technical manner” (Jansen, 2022: 148).
See for instance Cartesian Meditations, § 61 (Husserl, 1950: 169, Hua I; Husserl, 1960: 142; regrettably, Dorion Cairn translates “generative Probleme” with “genetic problems…”), and the Crisis of European Sciences, § 55 (Husserl, 1976: 191, Hua VI; Husserl, 1970: 188; David Carr also translates “Probleme der Generativität” with “problems of genesis,” even though on another occasion, he doesn’t refrain from adopting the term “generativity”. See Husserl (1970: 253).
The abundant presence of this significant expression (whose synonyms, like generative Kette, generativer Konnex, or generative Verbundenheit, are also to be found) in Husserl’s late work has scarcely been noticed (see, for instance, Husserl, 1973b: 38, 178f., 199, 219, 391, 584, 596, 602, 611, 623, 628, Hua XV; Husserl, 2014: 101, 440, 515, Hua XLII). A remarkably telling passage belongs to the Crisis of European Sciences, § 71: “Factually I am within an interhuman present and within an open horizon of mankind; I know myself to be factually within a generative framework (in einem generativen Zusammenhang), in the unitary flow of a historical development in which this present is mankind’s present and the world of which it is conscious is a historical present with a historical past and a historical future. Of course I am free here to transform actively [the factual details]; but this form of generativity and historicity is unbreakable (diese Form der Generativität und Geschichtlichkeit ist unzerbrechlich), as is the form, belonging to me as an individual ego, of my original perceptual present as a present with a remembered past and an expectable future” (Husserl, 1976: 256, Hua VI; Husserl, 1970: 253). The Cartesian Meditations mention, § 61 again, the “generative nexus of psychophysical being (Generationszusammenhang der Animalität)” (Husserl, 1950: 169, Hua I; Husserl, 1960: 142).
That is to say that “human persons, delineated by finitude and mortality, are also generative beings who are able to connect to one another across the boundaries of birth and death” (Heinämaa, 2020) and that they are “embodied and relational from the very origin of their lives” (Miglio, 2019: 82). On this point, see as well Serban (2023).
This way of presenting transcendental phenomenology through the prism of generativity brings us perhaps the closest to what might be Husserl’s proposal for a phenomenological (and even, transcendental) anthropology. As texts published in Husserliana, volume XV (i.e., among the late texts on intersubjectivity) suggest, the “generative connection (generativer Zusammenhang)” that runs through the field of intersubjectivity is also the basis of a “co-humanity,” insofar as it expresses the original bonds of human togetherness (see Husserl, 1973b: 38, 393, and 584, Hua XV).
The field of generative phenomenology has been famously outlined by Anthony Steinbock in his Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (1995) with a particular emphasis on the polarity between homeworld (Heimwelt) and alien world (Fremdwelt). In Limit-Phenomena and Phenomenology in Husserl (2017), special attention is complementarily paid to natality (see Steinbock, 2017: 21–35). Christina Schües’ understanding of Husserlian generative phenomenology has even more resolutely stressed the decisive conceptual link between birth and generativity. See Schuës (2008) and Schuës (2016/2017).
I leave aside here the question of whether, for Husserl, “the essential sociality of sex is reduced to a desire for procreation” (Al-Saji, 2010: 16).
The dissociation between genetic fatherhood and paternity—in the sense of social and juridical paternity—is much older, because of the irreducible uncertainty that once surrounded the identity of the father, while the mother’s was revealed and ensured by the fact that she gave birth: mater semper certa est.
Husserl also provides here a remarkable definition of world-constitution as “a unique system of drives, drive fulfillments, goal configurations, purpose configurations (Ein einziges System von Trieben, Trieberfüllungen, Zielbildungen, Zweckbildungen: Weltkonstitution)”.
Accordingly, Husserl speaks of an “instinctive joy of seeing,” which is distinct from the fulfillment of the first basic instincts of a newborn: “Die ersten instinktiven Erfüllungen sind noch nicht die Enderfüllungen der Instinkte (abgesehen von den Instinkten des Saugens an der Mutterbrust, überhaupt geruchsmäßige, wärmemäßige Instinkte mit Kinästhesen des Näherseins bei der Mutter etc.). Die instinktive Freude am Sehen ist ein Prozess instinktiver Intentionen und Erfüllungen, und die Erfüllungen lassen immer noch etwas offen; der Instinkthorizont geht weiter” (Husserl, 2020b: 174f., Hua XLIII/3).
Others—and especially, the “first others (die ersten Anderen)” (Husserl, 1973b: 604, Hua XV)—can nonetheless be at the same time the first objects constituted as beings. See for instance Husserl (2020b: 185, Hua XLIII/3), where Husserl speaks of the “first constitution of an appearing being (spatial thing or mother) (die erste Konstitution von erscheinend Seiendem (Raumding bzw. Mutter))”.
I use here Nicole Miglio’s term (Miglio, 2019).
Phenomenological literature on pregnancy has become quite abundant during the last decades, since Iris Marion Young’s famous paper on “Pregnant Embodiment” (1984), republished in On Female Body Experience. ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays (Young, 2005) and contemporary of Louise Levesque-Lopman’s work (Levesque-Lopman, 1983). See Depraz (2003), Heinämaa (2014), as well as the two collective volumes: Coming to Life. Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering (Adams & Lundquist, 2013) and Phenomenology of Pregnancy (Bornemark & Smith, 2016).
As Nicolas Smith puts it, “Husserl comes across as a thinker who has devoted an exceptional amount of writing to an understanding of sexuality, to womanhood, intrauterine life and birth—and to the philosophical problems it raises. It also becomes clear that these investigations have not been inconsequential sidesteps, but have gradually come to have a decisive effect on the very project of transcendental phenomenology” (Smith, 2016: 29). It is thus clear to what extent Manfred Frings’s verdict in an ancient paper (posterior, though, to the publication of Husserliana, vol. XV) was unfair: “conceived as an ideality, the ego is seen by Husserl from the perspective of adulthood and little consideration is ever given to the growth and development of the ego from birth to maturity” (Frings, 1978: 146).
To quote Rawb Leon-Carlyle’s outright statement: “It is clear that Husserl’s general definition of the vocation of motherhood is premised on sexist structures of oppression that, as Sara Ahmed famously points out, encumber Husserl’s wife Malvine [and their domestic employees, one should add] with the task of taking care of their children so that Husserl may pursue his own vocation as a philosopher” (Leon-Carlyle, 2021: 52).
In Sara Heinämaa’s words, “the paradigm of love for [Husserl] is love for persons, epitomized by the case of the loving mother. Husserl’s main aim, however, is not to praise or prioritize this form of love but to use it to illuminate the general structure of all genuine love” (Heinämaa, 2020).
See, for instance, Loidolt (2012).
One should add here that this (teleological) continuity of subjective life also goes from instinct to reason. Se Husserl (2014: 384, Hua XLII and text nr. 27).
In order to present mothers as an “example of heroism” (Cavallaro, 2022: 57), Marco Cavallaro recalls Primo Levi’s narration, in If This is a Man, of the scene he experienced the night before his deportation to Auschwitz: “All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children’s washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?” (Levi, 1959: 6, quoted in Cavallaro, 2022: 45) As Cavallaro insists, Husserl considers himself that a mother would not give up her loving behavior even if she knew that the world ended tomorrow (see Husserl, 2014: 309f., Hua XLII, and de Warren, 2022: 82ff.).
One can find a discussion of the tension between the biological and the personalist motives present in Husserl’s phenomenology of drives in Pugliese (2016). As it is well known, the feminist critiques of the naturalization of motherhood and of the common belief in a maternal instinct have become extremely numerous since Beauvoir’s Second Sex, which gave them a decisive impetus. See for instance Badinter (1981) and Adams (2014).
Consensus seems to be particularly difficult to reach among scholars with respect to Scheler’s debt toward Husserl or Scheler’s influence on Husserl. For some, it is by following Husserl that Scheler becomes interested in values (see Slama, 2017: 348). For others, it is undoubted that (the late) “Husserl […] was tacitly drawing on Scheler’s work (and not always with due credit)” (Tuckett, 2018: 314). In recent papers, George Heffernan considers that “Scheler’s work appears to have played no role in the development of Husserl’s moral philosophy,” (Heffernan, 2022: 99, note 81), while Sophie Loidolt notices that in the thirties, “Husserl comes very close to Scheler’s […] personalist ethics […] although he does not mention him” (Loidolt, 2022: 153). For a more developed discussion, see Melle (1997), as well as Venier (2015), who stresses the remarkable contrast between “Husserl’s explicit allegations of contempt towards Scheler” and “the constant presence of Schelerian motives in the Freiburg period” (Venier, 2015: 250, footnote). See as well Le Quitte 2015.
Furthermore, Husserl also implies here that there might be an axiological dimension in every “natural drive,” and that the knowledge of the value in question might “‘ennoble’ (‘adeln’)” the drive.
A notable exception can be found in Sophie Loidolt’s work. See for instance Loidolt (2022): 151: “we can see how Husserl can integrate instincts and drives into his ethics: by not understanding them as blind automatisms and external biological explications of behavior, but as internal motivations. These motivations are experienced and lived through. As such, they can even be experienced as an ‘absolute ought’. Drives and instincts can thus be transformed into normative and rational motivation structures. If this is the case, they are not experienced any longer as passive and forceful testimonies of heteronomy. Instead, they are undertaken in an active decision of the will and thus point to a possible teleology of ethical development”.
The remembrance of Geiger’s theoretical objection was probably enhanced by Husserl’s personal (yet indirect) experience of motherhood during the Great War, when his younger son was killed. As Rawb Leon-Carlyle puts it, “Husserl’s account of vocation is clearly shaped by his and Malvine’s experiences” (Leon-Carlyle, 2021: 53). However, it is noticeable that the example of the mother mourning her child, present in the late Freiburg ethics, can already be found in texts written around 1900 or 1910. See Husserl (2020a: 496ff., Hua XLIII/2).
To quote Sophie Loidolt: “Husserl only scarcely develops on a material axiology in terms of a value-ranking, like we know it e. g. from Max Scheler. He roughly discriminates between sensuous and spiritual/intellectual values (sinnliche und geistige Werte) and locates the latter on a higher rank than the former—but apart from this, one will not find any ‘rankings’ or classifications of values in Husserl’s ethics” (Loidolt, 2012). Jagna Brudzińska also insists on this point: “It should be noted that on this conception we do not become ethical by relying on a rational-analytical calculation, or on objective orders of values, and here the difference between Husserl’s position and that of Max Scheler, e.g., becomes clear” (Brudzińska, 2022: 39).
A thorough analysis of this point can be found in Leon-Carlyle (2021).
Husserl oversees, though, the fact that sometimes the child herself will be sacrificed by the mother: the Greek figure of Medea (that Euripides, Seneca and Corneille have famously depicted as fascinating and horrifying at the same time) embodies such a maternal choice against the child that is still seen as one of the worst abominations, in the case of infanticide mothers. For a more nuanced ethics inspired by the maternal posture, which is not only an ethics of moral conflict, but also an ethics of ambivalence, see Ruddick (1995), and especially Adams (2014).
As Sophie Loidolt insists, “the ‘law of absorption’ is […] substituted by a tragic conception of ‘sacrifice’” (Loidolt, 2022: 155). She quotes the following passage from a 1926 or 1927 research manuscript: “By sacrificing one good, I am sacrificing myself and the pain of the sacrifice is insurmountable” (Husserl, 2014: 415, Hua XLII).
See Hua XXVIII, p. 471, where Husserl reconstructs the inner speech of a mother who consents to the sacrifice of her child for what appears as a higher value (a pattern that can also notoriously be found in Abraham’s sacrifice, that Husserl mentions in a 1931 research manuscript when dealing with sacrifice: see Husserl, 2014: 466, Hua XLII). One could also think here of the moral choice famously faced by Sophocle’s Antigone, for whom the “duty of love” gives preference to family obligations imposed by blood ties with respect to civic duties.
On this point, see Heinämaa (2020), where two eloquent examples of conflicts of values can be found: that of the main character of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice, a mother who is forced by a Nazi physician to choose between her two children (and she chooses the son over the daughter), and that of Gauguin, who abandons his family to pursue his painter career in Tahiti. One could easily also think of conflicts between motherhood and artistic (or scientific) vocation, that can equally lead a mother to neglect (or even abandon) her children.
This implies that the “experience of an ‘ought’ is not an abstract universal structure (like in the Kantian experience of the ‘fact of pure reason’) but a personal experience of being called by a special value or vocation which individuates the person” (Loidolt, 2012).
The tale of Donkey Skin (Peau d’Âne) or the legend of the Irish princess Saint Dymphna also narrate a quite archetypal (potentially incestuous) situation, that of a widowed father who falls in love with his daughter and challenges the boundary between parental love and erotic (sexual) love. Such an example already suggests that a more extensive analytic of love is necessary in order to support Husserl’s claim that “the daimon that leads to true vocation speaks through love (der Daimon, der zum wahren Beruf führt, spricht durch Liebe)” (Husserl, 2012: 146, Hua Mat IX, footnote).
Husserl admits, nonetheless, that there are “differences (Unterschiede)” in love (Husserl, 2012: 146, Hua Mat IX, footnote), which means, as Saulius Geniusas puts it, that “one cannot love everything and anything the same way. One cannot love all children the way one loves one’s own, and the same goes for one’s friends, one’s parents, or one’s country” (Geniusas, 2023: 457, footnote 26).
It is noticeable that Scheler repeatedly speaks in mereological terms (describing the child as a “part” of the mother’s body during pregnancy) and doesn’t reflect in more depth on what Husserl calls the “intertwining (Ineinander) of primordialities” during prenatal life (Husserl, 2014: 27, Hua XLII).
Developing this idea, Scheler considers that “the dreamy state of a woman absorbed in contemplation of her present and future role as a mother is just such a state of kinaesthetic ecstasy, as it were, in which the presence of the child-to-be is disclosed to her (Der träumerische Zustand der an ihr Muttersein und -werden hingegebenen und erwartenden Frau ist solche gleichsam innerorganische Ekstasis, in der ihr die werdende Frucht gegeben ist)” (Scheler, 1973a: 38, GW 7; Scheler, 2008: 27).
One could also consider, though, that Scheler’s understanding of instinct is overly simplistic. For a more nuanced account of maternal instinct from a sociobiological perspective, see Hrdy (1999).
The way Scheler describes the antagonism between mother instinct and mother love with respect to the child anticipates Heidegger’s ulterior distinction, in Sein und Zeit (1927), § 26, between the two “extreme possibilities” of Fürsorge (solicitude or concern): the solicitude through which the other is kept dependent, and the liberating solicitude (Heidegger, 1977: 163, GA 2; Heidegger, 1996: 114f.).
A tacit devaluation of mother love can be found, for instance, in Kant’s Lectures on Pedagogy, where it is argued that by their way of loving them, “generally mothers spoil their children […] and coddle them altogether” (Kant, 2007: 466). Mothers also appear to Kant as plainly indifferent to the moral education of their children, which has to be assumed by fathers (see Kant, 2007: 471).
Such a view was already challenged, with specific arguments, by Rousseau, in his Emile, or On Education (1762): “let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled. This first point, this point alone, will bring everything back together” (Rousseau, 1979: 46). Yet, in spite of these perspicuous insights into motherhood, Rousseau conventionally considers that “as the true nurse is the mother, the true preceptor is the father” (Rousseau, 1979: 48); maternal love has an undoubted moral effect on the child, but the crucial issues concerning (moral) education are to be taken up by fathers.
Beauvoir has insisted that “what makes maternal love difficult and great is that it implies no reciprocity” (Beauvoir, 2011: 684); it would be more accurate to say that reciprocity is never given from the outset: if she hopes to be loved one day, the mother has to love first and to teach love. And of course, even when the young child begins to say “I love you,” it would be naive to say that symmetrical reciprocity has been achieved.
In Scheler’s view, fathers lack this absolute and radical initiative of love: they will rather expect to be loved before loving, or their love for the child might be conditioned by their love for the mother or by the acknowledgment of the child’s qualities. See Scheler (1973a: 173f., GW 7), Scheler (2008: 172f.).
An even more developed account of the differences between mother love and father love can be found in Wilhelm Schapp’s late (and seemingly, completely forgotten) work, Zur Metaphysik des Muttertums (Schapp, 1965), an intriguing essay, which occasionally relies on literary and historical sources, but doesn’t really take up a phenomenological method, nor does it include a scientific bibliography.
Furthermore, one could even say, with Sophie Loidolt, that “the ‘community of love’ (Liebesgemeinschaft) […] constitutes the highest form of sociality for Husserl,” insofar as “the feeling of love is thus disclosive of a community of loving persons in their plural vocations” (Loidolt, 2012). On this point, see as well Geniusas (2023: 456–458).
Husserl’s Introduction to Ethics lectures from the beginning of the 1920s, while discussing Hume’s moral philosophy, do mention, nonetheless, “the monkey love of a foolish mother (Affenliebe einer törichten Mutter),” stating that it doesn’t express what is essential to the love of one’s neighbor in general (Husserl, 2004: 184, Hua XXXVII). Scheler also refers to this Affenliebe, which is a simulacrum of true mother love, in the Nature of Sympathy (Scheler, 1973a: 38, GW 7). Some forms and manifestations of mother love have often been dismissed as vulgar and contemptible—as Sophie Tolstoï herself, mother of thirteen children (quoted by Beauvoir in The Second Sex), disdained “the womb’s vulgar love for its offspring” (Beauvoir, 2011: 679)–, and Husserl doesn’t seem to escape this trend. However, his concern is also to avoid the naturalization of love.
This reading is undoubtedly partial, when one remembers that, in Metaphyisk der Sitten, § 46, Kant defended the unity of “love” (Liebe) and “respect” (Achtung) in friendship.
As one can read in The Formalism: “On the assumption that moral values—indeed, all value-facts—are comparable to straight lines and triangles in that they do not belong to the sphere of contents of sensation, one concludes that they are only ‘meanings comprehensible through reason’. Yet a child feels the kindness of his mother without having even vaguely comprehended an idea of the good (ein Kind spürt der Mutter Güte und Sorge, ohne irgendwie die Idee des Guten erfasst zu haben)” (Scheler, 1954: 176, GW 2; Scheler, 1973b: 166).
It is true, however, that the reference to the maternal figure in Husserl was most probably inspired by Geiger, and that his work bears no visible traces of a significant reception of Scheler’s phenomenology of sympathy and love. Also, the generative turn of his phenomenology of intersubjectivity, as well as his late Freiburg ethics, are posterior to Scheler’s premature death in 1928.
One can hardly forget that, in 1931, the “Phenomenology and Anthropology” conference firmly condemns the “anthropologistic” trend to which Scheler and Heidegger are both supposed to belong. Scheler’s reception of Husserl, in return, is similar to that of many of his Göttingen students: a strong fidelity to the Logical Investigation that goes hand in hand with a vigorous criticism of the idealist turn (see Frère, 2006: 64sq.).
See for instance Frère (2006: 73): “ce qui distingue la phénoménologie de Scheler de celle de Husserl est également ce qui la rapproche de celle de Heidegger”.
This is one of the reasons, for which I cannot subscribe to the Heideggerian reading of Scheler recently developed by Juan Velázquez (see Velázquez, 2023: 53).
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Acknowledgment
This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania—Pillar III-C9-I-8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled “The Life of the Heart: Phenomenology of Body and Emotions,” contract no. 760052/23.05.2023, code CF 21/14.11.2022.
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Serban, C. From Tendencies and Drives to Affectivity and Ethics: Husserl and Scheler on the Mother–Child Relationship. Hum Stud (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09707-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09707-8