Max Scheler

German philosopher

• Born: August 22, 1874
• Birthplace: Munich, Germany
• Died: May 19, 1928
• Place of death: Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Scheler, a founder of phenomenology with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, was one of the most brilliant and creative moral philosophers of the twentieth century. His system of ethics, in sharp disagreement with Kantian ethics as well as with positivism, attempts to give the emotional life its due as an epistemologically reliable response to objective values.

Early Life

Max Scheler (SHAY-lur) was born into a family with considerable domestic tension. His father, Gottfried, died before Max entered high school, his will to live devoured by his own unhappiness and that of his wife. Although his father was of Protestant extraction and his mother was Jewish, Scheler became a convert to Roman Catholicism at age fourteen. He was attracted to the spirit of community that he found in the Catholic religious festivities.

While on vacation during the summer after his graduation from high school, Scheler met Amelie von Dewitz. She was married, had a small child, and was eight years older than Scheler. All this notwithstanding, she soon became his mistress. Eventually Amelie divorced her husband, and she and Scheler were married in a civil ceremony on October 2, 1899, in Berlin. The marriage was not a happy one, but it lasted for thirteen years. Amelie and Max had one child, Wolfgang, born in 1905.

In 1895, Scheler moved to Jena, where he completed a doctorate in philosophy with Rudolf Christoph Eucken as his adviser. In his dissertation, Scheler argued that values are not apprehended by the intellect but by a separate nonrational faculty in human beings that perceives values.

Scheler’s second work, Die transszendentale und die psychologische Methode (1900; the transcendental and the psychological method), showed the continuing influence of Eucken’s philosophy. This work earned for Scheler a position at Jena, where he taught ethics and the history of philosophy. Scheler was, however, gradually becoming dissatisfied with the transcendental, neo-Kantian approach of Eucken. A meeting with Edmund Husserl in 1901 sparked Scheler’s own search for an enlargement of the concept of philosophical intuition.

In 1906, Scheler moved from Jena to teach at the University of Munich. The move was precipitated by marital problems. Scheler’s professional life flourished in Munich, but his marriage continued to deteriorate. Within a year after the move, he was separated from his wife. Amelie avenged herself on her unfaithful husband by informing the Munich socialist newspaper that Scheler had gone into debt to support his affairs with other women, leaving her and his children in poverty. In 1910, Scheler was asked to resign from the University of Munich and was deprived of the right to teach at any German university.

Scheler moved from Munich to Göttingen, the center of the phenomenological movement in Germany, in the spring of 1911. There he quickly established himself as a phenomenologist of note and as a charismatic lecturer. However, a falling-out with Husserl occurred at this time. Tension between Husserl and Scheler became so great that Scheler moved from Göttingen back to Munich.

Life’s Work

The personal resentment and pessimism that Scheler felt as he found himself isolated and jobless in Munich in 1911 enabled him to express the resentment and pessimism of many in Germany at the time. Wilhelmian Germany was seething with criticism of modern industrial society. It was at this time that Scheler began work on Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912; Ressentiment , 1961) and other essays pointing to the need for modern society to return to precapitalistic Christian communal ideals. What the modern world was lacking, according to Scheler, was a metaphysics of community. It was only at the metaphysical level that true cooperation among human beings could take place.

Several years earlier, Scheler had met and fallen in love with Marit Furtwangler. Furtwangler’s mother had forced her to separate from Scheler after the scandal of 1910, but Scheler continued to correspond with Marit, who was living in Berlin. They decided to marry as soon as Scheler could secure his divorce from Amelie. Scheler and Furtwangler were married on December 28, 1912, in the Church of St. Ludwig in Munich.

World War I had a profound impact on Scheler’s evolving political consciousness and inaugurated his years of intense literary productivity, which lasted from 1915 until his death in 1928. In Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg (1915; the genius of war and the German war), Scheler praised the community-building powers of the German nation and welcomed war as a form of liberation from decadence. One year later, with the publication of Krieg und Aufbau (1916; war and rebuilding), he reversed both of these positions. By then he had come to see war as the evidence of decadence rather than as a means of liberation from it. He had also turned away from German nationalism to seek in the Church the community-building powers that he now failed to find in the German nation.

Most of Scheler’s thought and action during the remainder of the war years was related to his reconversion to Catholicism. From 1917 until the end of the war, Scheler proclaimed the need for a universal repentance. He now saw the war as God’s punishment for human greed. He lectured on such topics as “Germany’s Mission and the Catholic World View,” “The Contemporary Relevance of the Christian Idea of Community,” and “The Renewal of European Culture.”

In the postwar chaos, Germany’s universities were flooded with young men returning from the army. The rector of the newly reestablished University of Cologne, Christian Eckart, found it possible to overlook the Munich indiscretions that had blocked Scheler’s academic career. In January, 1919, Scheler accepted an appointment to the Sociological Institute, since the new university, supported by Cologne businessmen rather than by state funds, could not afford a chair of philosophy.

Scheler’s social and political ideas suffered a drastic reorientation between 1921 and 1924. In 1919, Scheler had believed that the resolution of the conflicting religious and political ideologies in the Weimar Republic could be found in the religious sphere, specifically in the Roman Catholic faith. By 1924, Scheler had lost faith in the community-building powers of the Catholic religion. He now believed that political and ideological disunity could only be resolved by persons who had scientific knowledge of the sociological basis of ideological conflicts. Modern society had become so diversified that no religious leader, no matter how charismatic, could win the allegiance of persons from every social strata. The solution was to recognize the partial truth of every viewpoint. Political leaders must learn to develop flexible practical programs based on the conditions of the time rather than on abstract ideological principles. This was Scheler’s position in 1923 when he published his pioneer work on the sociology of knowledge, Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre . Scheler’s work established sociology of knowledge as a significant field of study within German sociology for the next decade.

While he was teaching at the University of Cologne, Scheler became involved in an affair with a young, beautiful, and intelligent woman by the name of Maria Scheu. He still loved his wife but seemed powerless to break off the affair despite the fact that his marriage, his career as a Catholic philosopher, and his membership in the Church were all at stake. Scheler was unable to decide between his wife and his mistress for quite a while but finally chose to divorce his second wife and marry Scheu. The inner turmoil caused by this decision appears to have continued throughout the rest of his life. He continued to write to Marit and to see her until the time of his own death. After his marriage to Scheu, Scheler decided that he had to leave Cologne because of difficulties with his colleagues and superiors who refused to condone his personal lifestyle. Catholic students, especially seminarians, were forbidden to attend his classes. Scheler, in turn, attacked the Church for its crude dogmatism.

At the peril of contradicting his prewar attack on the Western scientific tradition, Scheler opposed the antirationalist tendencies of the 1920’s. Before the war, Scheler had denounced the modern industrial world and idealized the community life of medieval Europe. In the 1920’s, however, Scheler allied himself with the traditions of the Enlightenment. This allegiance became evident in his speech at the Lessing Institute for Adult Education in 1925 entitled Die Formen des Wissens und die Bildung (the forms of knowledge and culture).

In the face of the plethora of conflicting worldviews afoot in postwar Germany, Scheler adopted a relativistic approach toward truth as a sociologist, but as a philosopher he retained the insights into eternal essences offered by phenomenology. He also maintained his theory of absolute values, a product of his Catholic period. The link between his sociological and philosophical stances was provided by what be called “functionalization,” the process whereby truth is splintered as it descends from its absolute realm into its concrete cultural manifestations in history. Furthermore, Scheler argued that although different people saw reality differently, it was still the same ultimate reality that they were viewing from different perspectives.

In the last years of his life, Scheler devoted himself to the construction of a metaphysics of humankind. Scheler died before he had a chance to put his thoughts on this topic into book form, yet some idea of his central concerns can be drawn from his articles and lectures of the mid-1920’s. The human being, according to Scheler, is both a microcosm and a microtheos. The human person is a microcosm because he or she participates in all the aspects of being: physical, vital, spiritual, and personal. The human person is a microtheos because he or she participates in the ultimate metaphysical principles of the universe, mind, and instinct. Contrary to the claims of traditional Western metaphysics, the human person is not to be viewed as merely the imitator of a world of ideas that was already present in the mind of God before creation. Rather, human persons were to be viewed as the cocreators and coexecutors of the stream of ideas that enables the Absolute to realize itself in the course of world history.

In 1928, Scheler accepted an appointment at the University of Frankfurt. He died suddenly of either a stroke or a heart attack on May 19, 1928, immediately prior to beginning his work at Frankfurt.

Significance

Along with Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Scheler was one of the three founders of the philosophical school known as phenomenology. Scheler was the most versatile and comprehensive thinker of the three. Among the wide variety of topics treated in his writings are ethics, value theory, philosophy of religion, repentance, humility, the foundation of biology, psychology, metaphysics, the theory of cognition and perception, Buddhism, education, culture, philosophy of history, the sociology of knowledge, pragmatism, capitalism, the sense of suffering, love, death, awe, and shame.

One of Scheler’s most radically new contributions to philosophy was his development of a phenomenological theory of ethics. His theory of nonformal or “material” values situates the emotional experience of values as the primordium of all experience of reality. His ethics is based on this nonrational, intuitive grasp of values.

Scheler also made important contributions to the sociology of knowledge, in which he struggled for a middle way between idealism (a Hegelian approach) and materialism (a Marxist, or positivist, approach); the philosophy of religion, an area in which he has attracted a steady number of commentators, especially among Roman Catholics; and philosophical anthropology.

José Ortega y Gasset, Nicolai Hartmann, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alois Dempf, and Paul L. Landsberg are merely a few of the thinkers who have been influenced by Scheler. Scheler’s writings continue to inspire philosophers and others who are interested in the perennial and humanitarian themes of community, value, love, person, and God. Scheler offers no neat and tidy systematic treatment of any of these themes. Nevertheless, he can justly be described as an inspirational and brilliant philosopher who consistently offers creative and profound insights on these topics.

Bibliography

Deeken, Alfons. Process and Permanence in Ethics: Max Scheler’s Moral Philosophy. New York: Paulist Press, 1974. A systematic exposition of Scheler’s ethics. Generally thorough except for the lack of any discussion of community. Includes a bibliography and indexes.

Emad, Pravis. “The Great Themes of Scheler.” Philosophy Today 12 (Spring, 1968): 4-12. A concise summary of Scheler’s philosophy. A good place for general readers to begin.

Frings, Manfred S. Life Time: Max Scheler’s Philosophy of Time, a First Inquiry and Presentation. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2003. Examines Scheler’s concepts of time, including his idea of objective time and time experience.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Max Scheler: A Concise Introduction into the World of a Great Thinker. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1965. One of the earliest studies of Scheler to appear in English. Each chapter discusses one of the fundamental ideas of Scheler’s philosophy. A good overview, but lacks consideration of the chronological development of his thought. Includes a bibliography and indexes.

Kelly, Eugene. Max Scheler. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Despite its title, this work is not strictly a biography. It is an analysis and critique of Scheler as a phenomenologist.

Ranly, Ernest W. Scheler’s Phenomenology of Community. The Hague, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. This book is an outgrowth of the author’s doctoral dissertation on Scheler’s theory of community. It includes a careful discussion of Scheler’s description of the emotions and their role in community. Contains a bibliography and an index.

Schutz, Alfred. “Max Scheler’s Epistemology and Ethics.” Review of Metaphysics 11 (1957): 304-314, 486-501. A good, short explanatory article written by a fellow phenomenologist. Part 1 covers Scheler’s epistemology, and the second part covers his ethics.

Spader, Peter H. Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Examines Scheler’s ideas about ethics, describing how he developed these concepts.

Staude, John Raphael. Max Scheler, 1874-1928: An Intellectual Portrait. New York: Free Press, 1967. The most detailed biography of Scheler in the English language. The author offers an insightful and generally sympathetic interpretation, although he can be critical when he deems it appropriate. Includes a bibliography and an index.