Max Scheler

Early Life and Formation

Max Ferdinand Scheler was born on August 22, 1874, in Munich, the son of a Protestant father and Jewish mother who converted to Catholicism. Scheler himself was baptized Catholic and received a Catholic education, though his relationship to Christianity was complex and shifted throughout his life. He studied at Munich, Berlin (under Dilthey and Simmel), and Jena, where he came into contact with Rudolf Eucken, who influenced his early vitalist and anti-naturalist commitments.

Scheler received his doctorate from Jena in 1897 and his habilitation there in 1899, writing on the logic of psychological method. He was appointed Privatdozent at Jena and then, from 1907, at Munich — where he encountered the circle around Edmund Husserl that was developing phenomenological method. The encounter with phenomenology transformed Scheler's work, providing him with the methodological tools he needed to articulate his vision of a new ethics grounded in emotional cognition.

The Munich Phenomenological Circle and the Discovery of the Emotional A Priori

Scheler's engagement with phenomenology in Munich (1907–1910) was enormously productive. He developed the concept of 'the emotional a priori' — the claim that certain emotional acts, particularly the acts of valuing (Fühlen) through which we apprehend values, have their own a priori structure independent of cultural variation and subjective preference.

This was a revolutionary claim. Both Kantian ethics and sentimentalist ethics agreed that emotion (or feeling) is subjective and empirical — a matter of psychological fact, not objective value. Scheler argued, against this consensus, that emotional acts can be intentional — that they can genuinely apprehend objective features of reality — and that the values they apprehend are real features of the world, not projections of subjective preference.

Personal and Professional Difficulties

Scheler's career was repeatedly disrupted by personal scandal. In 1910, he was forced to resign from his Munich position after an affair became public. He spent several years working independently in Berlin and Göttingen, supporting himself by lecturing and writing. During this period he produced some of his most important work, including Resentment (1912) and the first volume of his ethics.

In 1919, he was appointed to a chair at the University of Cologne, where he remained until 1928 — his most productive and celebrated period. The Cologne years saw the completion of his major systematic works and the development of his later philosophical anthropology and sociology of knowledge.

Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values

Scheler's Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (published in two volumes in Husserl's Jahrbuch, 1913 and 1916) is his masterpiece. The work begins with a sustained critique of Kantian formalism: Kant was right that ethics requires an a priori grounding, but wrong to seek that grounding in formal reason alone. The formal categorical imperative is empty — it cannot tell us what to do without illicitly importing material content.

Scheler argues that there is a material (non-formal) a priori: a hierarchy of values grasped through emotional cognition that is objective, universal, and independent of cultural variation. This hierarchy runs from the lowest to the highest: (1) sensory values (pleasant/unpleasant), (2) vital values (noble/common, strong/weak), (3) spiritual values (aesthetic, juridical, cognitive), and (4) sacred values (holy/unholy). Higher values are intrinsically preferable to lower; the moral task is to realize the highest value available in any given situation.

The key phenomenological concept is Fühlen (feeling or emotional sensing): a mode of intentional cognition through which we genuinely apprehend objective values in the world. This is not mere subjective feeling but a form of cognition with its own a priori structure — what Scheler calls 'the logic of the heart' (following Pascal's raisons du coeur).

Resentment and the Sociology of Morality

In Resentment (Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen, 1912), Scheler applied and extended Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment — the reactive emotion of hatred and envy that the powerless direct against the powerful and which, Nietzsche argued, was the psychological root of Christian and democratic morality. Scheler accepted Nietzsche's psychological analysis but rejected his evaluation: Christian love is not identical with ressentiment-morality; genuine Christian agape is a spontaneous outpouring of love from fullness, not a reactive devaluation of what one cannot have.

Scheler also argued that bourgeois humanitarian morality — the modern secular ethics of universal benevolence — is infected with ressentiment: it arises from envy of aristocratic privilege and substitutes abstract love of 'humanity' for genuine love of concrete persons.

The Nature of Sympathy and the Human Person

In The Nature of Sympathy (Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, 1913), Scheler distinguished several forms of fellow-feeling — emotional infection, fellow-feeling, true sympathy, benevolence, and love — arguing that they are irreducible to one another and that love (as distinct from sympathy or benevolence) is the highest form of other-directed emotional cognition.

His theory of the person (Formalismus, Part II) argued against both Kantian and empirical accounts: the person is not a rational subject abstracted from experience, nor a bundle of psychological states, but the irreducible center of free spiritual acts — a unity that is given in the performance of acts, not in any content of experience.

Later Work: Philosophical Anthropology and the Abandonment of Theism

Scheler's later work (from about 1922) underwent a dramatic development. He moved from his earlier Catholicism through a kind of panentheism toward what some have called 'atheistic spiritualism' or a non-personal absolute. In his lectures on philosophical anthropology — collected posthumously as Man's Place in Nature (Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 1928) — he argued that the human being is uniquely characterized by Geist (spirit), the capacity for acts that transcend vital drive and biological adaptation. Humans alone can say 'No' to the pressures of drive — can adopt a stance of Weltoffenheit (openness to the world) rather than being locked into a species-specific environment.

This 'philosophical anthropology' — the systematic philosophical analysis of what distinguishes human beings from other animals — was enormously influential, shaping Helmuth Plessner's and Arnold Gehlen's anthropological philosophies and establishing philosophical anthropology as a distinct German philosophical subdiscipline.

Scheler died suddenly on May 19, 1928, in Frankfurt, from a heart attack, just before taking up a new chair at the University of Frankfurt. He was fifty-four, and his late philosophical transformation had not reached its completion.

Legacy

Scheler's influence is wide but often indirect. His material value ethics influenced Nikolai Hartmann's axiological phenomenology. His emotional a priori and theory of the person influenced Edith Stein and other Catholic phenomenologists. His philosophical anthropology shaped the entire tradition of German philosophical anthropology. His sociology of knowledge — developed in Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (1924) — anticipated Karl Mannheim's more systematic Ideology and Utopia. Pope John Paul II's doctoral dissertation was on Scheler's ethics, and Scheler's thought has been a significant resource for Catholic social philosophy.