Max Scheler

Max Scheler (born August 22, 1874, Munich, Germany—died May 19, 1928, Frankfurt am Main) was a German social and ethical philosopher. Although remembered for his phenomenological approach, he was strongly opposed to the philosophical method of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938).

Scheler studied philosophy at the University of Jena under Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926), receiving a doctoral degree in 1897. After completing a habilitation thesis for promotion to associate professor (1899), he lectured at Jena until 1906, when he moved to the predominantly Roman Catholic University of Munich. In 1910, after he was accused of adultery in a Munich newspaper, Scheler sued for libel but lost, and the university canceled his teaching contract. He moved to Göttingen, where he lectured in coffeehouses and other venues. His dramatic style attracted many students, including some of those who had attended Husserl’s own lectures at the University of Göttingen. This aroused Husserl’s anger, though he continued to support Scheler’s career. In 1919 Scheler became professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne. He accepted a professorship at the University of Frankfurt in 1928 but died before he could take up the post. Although he was recognized in the 1920s as Europe’s leading philosopher, his reputation was short-lived, in part because his work was suppressed by the Nazis after 1933.

Scheler’s philosophy encompassed ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, religion, the sociology of knowledge, and modern philosophical anthropology, which he founded. As a phenomenologist, he sought to investigate the constitution of the structures of consciousness, including the structures of mental acts—such as feeling, thinking, and willing—and of their inherent objects or correlates—such as (in this case) values, concepts, and projects. Although Husserl influenced all the phenomenologists of his time, Scheler and others criticized his work. Scheler rejected in particular Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (1900–01; Logical Investigations) and the analysis of an impersonal “consciousness-as-such” (Bewusstsein überhaupt) in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913; Ideas), maintaining that every consciousness is infused with the acts of the individual “person.” He also criticized the foundational role assigned by Husserl to “sensory intuition” and “judgmental” phenomenological method; any such method, Scheler claimed, presupposes a grasp of the phenomena it aims to investigate. Instead, Scheler proposed a “psychic technique” similar to that practiced by the Buddha, which involved temporarily suspending all vital energy, or “impulsion” (Drang). Impulsion is the nonphysical life energy that propels all biological motion and growth, up to and including all activities of the mind. According to Scheler, only by temporarily suspending impulsion would one be able to achieve pure intuitions of an unadulterated consciousness. Thus, whereas Husserl’s phenomenology was methodological, Scheler’s, because of the technique of suspension of impulsion, was intuitional.

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Scheler’s many works include Zur Phänomenologie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (1913; “On the Phenomenology and Theory of Sympathy, and of Love and Hate”), Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg (1915; “The Spirit of War and the German War”), Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses (1917; “Why the Germans are Hated”), Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1920; On the Eternal in Man), and essays on a wide variety of phenomena, such as resentment, shame, humility, and reverence, as well as on morality in politics and the nature of capitalism. In his major work, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (1913, 1916; Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values), Scheler argued that values, like the colours of the spectrum, are independent of the things to which they belong. He posited an order of five “ranks” of values, ranging from those of physical comfort to those of usefulness, life, the mind, and the “holy.” The experience of value through different acts of feeling is independent of any other act of consciousness and accordingly is prior to any rational or willing activity. What one ought to do, therefore, is preceded by a feeling of the value of what ought to be done. Moral goodness is not primarily an object to be pursued but a by-product of inclinations, or leanings, toward values higher than those felt in the present moment. For instance, when a child playing with toys in a garden suddenly picks a flower and presents it to his mother, his spontaneous feeling that the value of his mother is greater than the value of the toys results in a moral good. Furthermore, the vehicle for attaining a higher moral status is an exemplar, an ideal but nonexistent model of one of the value ranks. These ideal exemplars manifest themselves in historical role models, such as Buddha, Christ, Hannibal, Leonardo, and Napoleon. The self is the highest value that a person can have. Hence, equalizing persons in a democracy or under the law “on earth” does not preclude a moral aristocracy “in heaven” or before God, where all persons are morally different.

Scheler’s later works provide fragments of his final metaphysical outlook. Die Wissenformen und die Gesellschaft (1924; The Forms of Knowledge and Society) was an introduction to his projected philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. His Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928; Man’s Place in Nature) is a sketch for these projected major works. It offers a grandiose vision of a gradual, self-becoming unification of man, Deity, and world. This converging process has two polarities: mind or spirit on the one hand, and impulsion on the other. The ideas of mind or spirit are powerless unless they enter into practice, or realize themselves in life and practical situations, which are generated by impulsion and human drives. This observation related Scheler to American pragmatism, which he studied from 1909 onward. Humans, however, are metaphysically “outside” the cosmos because of their ability to make an object of everything, from the atom to the cosmos itself.