Axiology Quotes

Love loves and in loving always looks beyond what it has in hand and possesses. The driving impulse [*Triebimpuls*] which arouses may tire out; love itself does not tire. This *sursum corda* which is the essence of love may take on fundamentally different forms at different elevations in the various regions of value. The sensualist is struck by the way the pleasure he gets from the objects of his enjoyment gives him less and less satisfaction while his driving impulse stays the same or itself increases as he flies more and more rapidly from one object to the next. For this water makes one thirstier, the more one drinks. Conversely, the satisfaction of one who loves spiritual objects, whether things or persons, is always holding out new promise of satisfaction, so to speak. This satisfaction by nature increases more rapidly and is more deeply fulfilling, while the driving impulse which originally directed him to these objects or persons holds constant or decreases. The satisfaction always lets the ray of the movement of love peer out a little further beyond what is presently given. In the highest case, that of love for a person, this movement develops the beloved person in the direction of ideality and perfection appropriate to him and does so, in principle, beyond all limits.However, in both the satisfaction of pleasure and the highest personal love, the same *essentially infinite process* appears and prevents both from achieving a definitive character, although for opposite reasons: in the first case, because satisfaction diminishes; in the latter, because it increases. No reproach can give such pain and act so much as a spur on the person to progress in the direction of an aimed-at perfection as the beloved's consciousness of not satisfying, or only partially satisfying, the ideal image of love which the lover brings before her―an image he took from her in the first place. Immediately a powerful jolt is felt in the core of the soul; the soul desires to grow to fit this image. "So let me seem, until I become so." Although in sensual pleasure it is the *increased variety* of the objects that expresses this essential infinity of the process, here it is the *increased depth of absorption* in the growing fullness of one object. In the sensual case, the infinity makes itself felt as a self-propagating unrest, restlessness, haste, and torment: in other words, a mode of striving in which every time something repels us this something becomes the source of a new attraction we are powerless to resist. In personal love, the felicitous advance from value to value in the object is accompanied by a growing sense of repose and fulfillment, and issues in that positive form of striving in which each new attraction of a suspected value results in the continual abandonment of one already given. New hope and presentiment are always accompanying it. Thus, there is a positively valued and a negatively valued *unlimitedness of love*, experienced by us as a potentiality; consequently, the striving which is built upon the act of love is unlimited as well. As for striving, there is a vast difference between Schopenhauer's precipitate "willing" born of torment and the happy, God-directed "eternal striving" in Leibniz, Goethe's Faust, and J. G. Fichte."―from_Ordo Amoris_

Max Scheler

All that is worthy of love [*die Liebenswürdigkeiten*], from the viewpoint of God's comprehensive love, might have been stamped and created by this act of love; man's love does not so stamp or create its objects. Man's love is restricted to recognizing the objective demand these objects make and to submitting to the gradation of rank in what is worthy of love. This gradation exists in itself, but in itself it exists "for" man, ordered to his *particular* essence. Loving can be characterized as correct or false only because a man's actual inclinations and acts of love can be in harmony with or oppose the rank-ordering of what is worthy of love. In other words, man can feel and know himself to be at one with, or separated and opposed to, the love with which God loved the idea of the world or its content before he created it, the love with which he preserves it at every instant. If a man in his actual loving, or in the order of his acts of love, in his preferences and depreciations, subverts this self-existent order, he simultaneously subverts the intention of the divine world-order―as it is in his power to do. And whenever he does so, his world as the possible object of knowledge, and his world as the field of willing, action, and operation, must necessarily fall as well.This is not the place to speak about the content of the gradations of rank in the realm of all that is worthy of love. It is sufficient here to say something about the *form* and *content* of the realm itself.From the primal atom and the grain of sand to God, this realm is *one* realm. This "unity" does not mean that the realm is closed. We are conscious that no one of the finite parts of it which are given to us can exhaust its fullness and its extension. If we have only *once* experienced how one feature which is worthy of love appears next to another―or how another feature of still higher value appears over and above one which we had taken till now as the "highest" in a particular region of values, then we have learned the essence of progress in or penetration into the realm. Then we see that this realm cannot have precise boundaries. Only in this way can we understand that when any sort of love is fulfilled by an object adequate to it the satisfaction this gives us can never be definitive. Just as the essence of certain operations of thought which create their objects through self-given laws (e.g., the inference from *n* to *n* + *I*) prevents any limits from being placed on their application, so it is in the essence of the act of love as it fulfills itself in what is worthy of love that it can progress from value to value, from one height to an even greater height. "Our heart is too spacious," said Pascal. Even if we should know that our actual ability to love is limited, at the same time we know and feel that this limit lies neither in the finite objects which are worthy of love nor in the essence of the act of love as such, but only in our organization and the conditions it sets for the occurrence and *arousal* of the act of love. For this arousal is bound up with the life of our body and our drives and with the way an object stimulates and calls this life into play. But *what* we grasp as *worthy of love* is not bound up with these, and more than the *form and structure* of the realm of which this value shows itself to be a part."―from_Ordo Amoris_

Max Scheler

Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds: the feeling of the *sublime* and that of the *beautiful*. The stirring of each is pleasant, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton's portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer's portrayal of the girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have *a feeling of the sublime*, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, *a feeling of the beautiful*. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime; day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime *moves*, the beautiful *charms*.

Immanuel Kant

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