Logic of the Heart: Affective Ethical Valuing in T. E. Hulme and Max Scheler

Chapter 3 invites a reconsideration of T.E. Hulme’s apparent anti-emotionalism by emphasising the influence of Max Scheler’s phenomenology on Hulme’s war writing, highlighting the affective response to trench warfare evident in Hulme’s personal correspondence and in the poem, “Trenches: St. Eloi.” This poem, which captures the negative affects aroused by trench warfare, also suggests the necessity of fighting, and is read in the light of Hulme’s account of the revelation of objective ethical values through affective experience in his ‘War Notes’ and ‘A Notebook’. Hulme takes his term for this affective ethics – ‘logique du coeur’ – from Pascal, but his most significant debt is to Scheler, for whom ethical values are both revealed and hierarchised through acts of feeling, a phenomenology echoed in Hulme’s attack of pacifism.