Max Scheler Quotes on Virtue
Max Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 1913–16) gave early twentieth-century phenomenology its most influential alternative to the dominant Kantian formalism in moral philosophy. The central thesis is that values are not the products of the rational will’s self-legislation but the irreducible objects of an emotional intuition (Wertfühlen) through which the cultivated moral consciousness apprehends the hierarchical orders of values — sensible, vital, mental, and religious — and the corresponding analysis of virtue (above all in Scheler’s distinctive treatment of love, ressentiment, and the saint as the highest moral type) supplies a phenomenology of the moral person grounded in the responsive recognition of objective values. The framework, drawing on Husserlian phenomenology and the Catholic ethical tradition, shaped subsequent personalist philosophy through Karol Wojtyła and the broader twentieth-century value-ethics tradition.
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:
“The hierarchy of values is intuited, not deduced.”
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“The medieval peasant prior to the 13th century does not compare himself to the feudal lord, nor does the artisan compare himself to the knight. … From the king down to the hangman and the prostitute, everyone is “noble” in the sense that he considers himself as irreplaceable. In the “system of free competition,” on the other hand, the notions on life’s tasks and their value are not fundamental, they are but secondary derivations of the desire of all to surpass all the others. No “place” is more than a transitory point in this universal chase.”
L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 56