Phenomenological Film Theory and Max Scheler’s Personalist Aesthetics

What is it about?

This article explores Max Scheler's theory of aesthetics, which he never worked out in much detail. It argues that his aesthetics must be understood through his personalist philosophy. This means that art should be understood through our ability to know a person in a profound way through the loving intuition and experience of that person's fundamental "moral tenor." To know a person in this is to have insight into the "order of love" that makes up their unique individual destiny and their moral universe. I then demonstrate what such a theory would mean for the understanding of film--in terms of our experience of the artists behind the film (director, actors, writers) and our experience of characters. I also contrast Scheler's approach to standard phenomenological accounts of film experience.

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Why is it important?

This is important because Scheler's aesthetics is quite overlooked in the literature on phenomenology and art. It is offers an opportunity to understand Scheler's personalism in more detail (and the influence of the Christian personalist philosophy of his teacher Rudolf Eucken). Although not an emphasis in this paper, if Scheler's view has merits, then further development of it would demand research into the overlooked aesthetics and philosophy of film of French, Catholic phenomenologists Amédéé Ayfre and Henri Agel (as well as the aesthetics of Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier).