Il problema delle sfere in Scheler

Wolfhart Henckmann The Problem of Spheres in Scheler “Sphere” means in Scheler’s ontology and theory of knowledge an unreducible whole of objects, by which the totality of whatever can be thought of is divided into a few regions of essentially the same kind of being. In general, but not consequently, Scheler distinguished five such unreducible spheres: socially personal beings, beings of the outer and inner world, living beings, physical beings – all these belong to the world of reality. Opposed to it is the world of ideal beings (fictive beings, values, numbers etc.), and both of them were distinguished from the world of absolute being. These spheres make up the material groundwork of his system of philosophy. The different spheres overcut each other, developing certain relations between them, mainly of foundational nature, but Scheler did not seem to have been very much interested in to him seemingly secondary questions like these. Though he worked on the problem of spheres through all the years of his academic career, he did not come to a definitive solution, neither in his neokantian period until 1906, nor in his conceptions on phenomenological or theistic grounds (until 1922), nor in his efforts to develop a metaphysical anthropology in the 1920ies. So at his early death (1928) he left a complex, multilevelled problem as an open question, documented in many fragmentary papers, and this fragmentary character may be one of the reasons why this part of his philosophy is generally neglected.