Max Scheler 1874 – 1928
Max Ferdinand Scheler was a German phenomenologist and the most important phenomenological ethicist of the early twentieth century. Drawing on but moving beyond Husserl, he argued in Formalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethics of Values that values are objective, intuited objects of feeling rather than constructions of rational will, and that they are arranged in a hierarchy rooted in the person. His later writings on sympathy, ressentiment, religion, and philosophical anthropology shaped Heidegger and the wider continental tradition. Edith Stein described his lectures as transformative.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Phenomenology, Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Max Scheler:
“The person is not a thing; the person is the bearer of acts.”
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Attributed to Max Scheler:
“Values are objective and given to feeling.”
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Attributed to Max Scheler:
“Love is the discovery of higher worth in another being.”
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Attributed to Max Scheler:
“Ressentiment is the poisoning of the moral life by suppressed envy.”
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Attributed to Max Scheler:
“Man is the only being whose existence is a problem to himself.”