My past research clarified Sheler’s concept of personal love as a specific form of intimate communication to better understand and recognize the narrative personality and its diversity. I also pointed out that this communication of love is significant for human dignity not in the sense of formal equality but for protecting the substantial diversity of the individual. Indeed, against Kant’s notion of dignity in the sense of formal equality, Scheler himself established his value-­ethics in his work Formalism in Ethics and Non-­Formal Ethics of Values (1913-­16). Therefore, the purpose of my present research under the JSPS Research Fellowship (April 2016 – March 2018) is to reconstruct Scheler’s concept of love in relation to his value-­ethics. For this purpose, I plan to complete the following four tasks: (1) First, to attempt to interpret Scheler’s value ethics based on his concept of love and person, as ethics of the virtue directed emotionally toward values. (2) Second, to undertake reassessment of Scheler’s theory of the emotional value-­intentionality in the context of current Anglo-­American philosophy of emotion and value. Further, I will seek to understand his concept of love-­solidarity sharing the value-­intentionality as a form of collective intentionality discussed recently in social philosophy. (3) Third, to try to explain the relation between personal love and sexual love in Scheler’s ethics as integration of person as a mere mental existence with the bodily life against a bio-­political system in modern society, which led to World War I. (4) Finally, summarizing the above three tasks I will attempt to present the actuality of Scheler’s concept of love in comparison with the notion of “solidarity” in social philosophy and “care” in ethics. Through these four tasks, my research will make a contribution to the contemporary research program to clarify the social significance of love, against the background of modern discussions which have for a long time regarded love as a mere private phenomenon.

On the basis of my research under the JSPS Research Fellowship, I would like to conduct research on the second task mentioned above at the University of Basel. Scheler’s value-­ethics is often criticized for not explaining how values can be justified to obtain the general validity (cf. G. Schönrich:“Option einer philosophischen Werttheorie”, 2008). In order to support Scheler’s argument against such a criticism, I will attempt to understand his theory of the value-­intentionality as a eudemonistic approach to justify values from the point of view of the following question: How constitutive are these values for one’s own self or one’s own good life? Indeed, Scheler thought that emotion as intentionality is not only directed toward a value but also expresses an emotional state of one’s own self. This recursive structure of emotion toward the self in the value-­intentionality can be interpreted as eudemonistic. With respect to this I will refer especially to Martha Nussbaum’s theory of emotion in Upheavals of Thought (2001). Nussbaum, the most eminent American contemporary philosopher writing about philosophy of emotion, takes a similar approach to Scheler’s. She defines emotion as value judgment in the sense of an evaluative attitude toward a valuable object in relation to one’s own good life. Moreover, I will refer to Christine Korsgaard’s philosophy of value in The Source of Normativity (1996) where she attempts to justify more directly values in relation to one’s own personal identity. However, this eudemonistic approach to justify values in relation to one’s own self or life is not enough to account for the general validity of values, as far as this approach does not explain that one’s own self is partly shared with others. This weak point can be indicated also in the theories of Nussbaum and Korsgaard. My past study clarified Scheler’s concept of personal love as a specific form of intimate communication which helps us to understand and to recognize mutually the narrated personality and its diversity of the others. Based upon this analysis, I will interpret Scheler’s concept of love-­solidarity as a form of sharing the emotional intentionality toward values and, therefore, as a form of collective intentionality currently discussed in social philosophy. Building upon the discussions of John Searl (“Collective Intentions and Actions”, 1990), UIrich Baltzer (Gemeinschaftshandeln, 1999) and Hans Bernhard Schmid (Kollektive Intentionalität, 2009), who analyze collective intentionality exclusively as social joining actions, I will try to expand the concept of collective intentionality from action to emotion, say, to love. In the end I would like to argue that, communicatively mediated, the love-­solidarity as collective value-­intentionality can serve to justify and recognize value difference and diversity between partners.