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.

Max Scheler was born in 1874 in Munich, the son of a Lutheran estate manager and a Jewish mother. He studied at Munich, Berlin, and Jena, where he took his doctorate in 1897 under Rudolf Eucken. After a brief and turbulent first academic career, ended by personal scandal in 1910, he supported himself as a private scholar in Munich and Gottingen and produced, in close conversation with the phenomenologists around Edmund Husserl, the works that established his reputation.

His major writings include Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1913-1916), the wartime essays The Genius of War and the German War (1915), the phenomenology of religion in On the Eternal in Man (1921), the sociology of knowledge in Forms of Knowledge and Society (1926), and the late philosophical anthropology of The Place of Man in the Cosmos (1928). He held chairs at Cologne from 1919 and at Frankfurt at the time of his death.

Scheler is the most important early phenomenologist of value, of the affective life, and of the social conditioning of knowledge. His hierarchy of values, his account of ressentiment, his analyses of sympathy and love, and his late thesis of an unfinished God in human history influenced Catholic personalism, philosophical anthropology, and the young Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II. He died of a heart attack in Frankfurt in May 1928.