Max Scheler: Czym się różni duch od życia

" In his philosophical anthropology, Scheler attempts to demonstrate that the human being also participates in the movement of spirit and that spirit is essentially different from the movement of life. The human being has a “special” place in the cosmos because the human being participates in both the movement of life and spirit, because each human being is an embodied spirit, i.e., a finite person.

There are at least four ways in which Scheler distinguishes spirit from life.

1. Spirit is the activity of objectivizing, a rendering of the world and of beings in terms of what they mean. Mere living beings, by contrast, relate to objects in their environment not as objects, but as that which satisfies the drives. For example, for the living being, the apple is experienced as merely something to fulfill one’s desire, whereas for the spiritual being, the apple is given as apple, as a kind of food.
2. Related to this first characteristic, is the value latent quality of spirit. The movement of spirit is the disclosure of value. According to Scheler, life-urge is value blind and is motivated solely by greater fulfillment. Spirit is motivated by the good and is structured according to agape, a charitable and self-sacrificing love.
3. Spirit is self-consciousness. Each living being, by virtue of having a body, exhibits a type of body-consciousness, a relating of oneself to others in a given environment. Spiritual beings not only can take themselves to be objects of reflection, and thus can be critical of who or what they have become, but are also aware of themselves as being seen by others, as having a different world of experience than others.
4. The final distinguishing characteristic is spirit’s quality of world-openness. Spiritual beings are not restricted in their reflections to the here and now, or even to the specific context of their immediate life concerns. This type of world-openness is what is captured by the Greek sense of wonder, a metaphysical wonder and astonishment that there is something rather than nothing. Spiritual beings are able to contemplate the meaning of being, time, death as well as the purpose of existence itself. These are not merely theoretical concerns, but that which transcends, or is beyond, life."

[za: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scheler/#PhiAntMet]