Max Scheler

Max Ferdinand Scheler (; 22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers, Scheler developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology.

Biography

Childhood

Max Scheler was born in Munich, Germany, on 22 August 1874, to a well-respected Orthodox Jewish family: He converted to Catholic Christianity in 1901.

Student years

Scheler began his university studies as a medical student at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; he then transferred to the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin where he abandoned medicine in favor of philosophy and sociology, studying under Wilhelm Dilthey, Carl Stumpf and Georg Simmel. He moved to the University of Jena in 1896, where he studied under Rudolf Eucken, at that time a very popular philosopher who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1908. (Eucken corresponded with William James, a noted proponent of philosophical pragmatism, and throughout his life, Scheler entertained a strong interest in pragmatism.) It was at the University of Jena that Scheler completed his doctorate and his habilitation and began his professional life as a teacher. His doctoral thesis, completed in 1897, was entitled Beiträge zur Feststellung der Beziehungen zwischen den logischen und ethischen Prinzipien (Contribution to establishing the relationships between logical and ethical principles). In 1898, he made a trip to Heidelberg and met Max Weber, who also had a significant impact on his thought. He obtained his habilitation in 1899 with a thesis entitled Die transzendentale und die psychologische Methode (The transcendental and the psychological method) directed by Eucken. He became a lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Jena in 1901. Scheler disagrees with Husserl that phenomenology is a method of strict phenomenological reduction, but rather "an attitude of spiritual seeing … something which otherwise remains hidden …."

The movement and act of love is important for philosophy for two reasons: (1) If philosophy, as Scheler describes it, hearkening back to the Platonic tradition, is a participation in a "primal essence of all essences" (Urwesen), it follows that for this participation to be achieved one must incorporate within oneself the content or essential characteristic of the primal essence. For Scheler, such a primal essence is most characterized according to love, thus the way to achieve the most direct and intimate participation is precisely to share in the movement of love. It is important to mention, however, that this primal essence is not an objectifiable entity whose possible correlate is knowledge; thus, even if philosophy is always concerned with knowing, as Scheler would concur, nevertheless, reason itself is not the proper participative faculty by which the greatest level of knowing is achieved. Only when reason and logic have behind them the movement of love and the proper moral preconditions can one achieve philosophical knowledge. (2) Love is likewise important insofar as its essence is the condition for the possibility of the givenness of value-objects and especially the givenness of an object in terms of its highest possible value. Love is the movement which "brings about the continuous emergence of ever-higher value in the object--just as if it was streaming out from the object of its own accord, without any sort of exertion...on the part of the lover. ...true love opens our spiritual eyes to ever-higher values in the object loved." Hatred, on the other hand, is the closing off of oneself or closing one's eyes to the world of values. It is in the latter context that value-inversions or devaluations become prevalent, and are sometimes solidified as proper in societies. Furthermore, by calling love a movement, Scheler hopes to dispel the interpretation that love and hate are only reactions to felt values rather than the very ground for the possibility of value-givenness (or value-concealment). Scheler writes, "Love and hate are acts in which the value-realm accessible to the feelings of a being...is either extended or narrowed."

Material value-ethics

Values and their corresponding disvalues are ranked according to their essential interconnections as follows:

Religiously relevant values (holy/unholy)
Spiritual values (beauty/ugliness, knowledge/ignorance, right/wrong)
Vital values (health/unhealthiness, strength/weakness)
Sensible values (agreeable/disagreeable, comfort/discomfort)

Further essential interconnections apply with respect to a value's (disvalue's) existence or non-existence:

The existence of a positive value is itself a positive value.
The existence of a negative value (disvalue) is itself a negative value.
The non-existence of a positive value is itself a negative value.
The non-existence of a negative value is itself a positive value.

And with respect to values of good and evil:

Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a positive value in the sphere of willing.
Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a negative value in the sphere of willing.
Good is the value that is attached to the realization of a higher value in the sphere of willing.
Evil is the value that is attached to the realization of a lower value [at the expense of a higher one] in the sphere of willing.

In this book, Scheler argues for a tabula rasa of all the inherited prejudices from the three main traditions that have formulated an idea of man: religion, philosophy and science. Scheler argues that it is not enough just to reject such traditions, as did Nietzsche with the Judeo-Christian religion by saying that "God is dead"; these traditions have impregnated all parts of our culture, and therefore still determine a great deal of the way of thinking even of those that don't believe in the Christian God.

Death

Scheler planned to publish his major work in anthropology in 1929, but on May 19, 1928, he died in a Frankfurt hospital due to complications from a severe heart attack. Some fragments of the incomplete work have been published in Nachlass.

Legacy

After Scheler's death in 1928, Martin Heidegger affirmed, with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler and praised him as "the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and in contemporary philosophy as such." ended in divorce. Scheler married Märit Furtwängler in 1912, who was the sister of the noted conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Scheler's son by his first wife, Wolf Scheler, became troublesome after the divorce, often stealing from his father, and in 1923, after Wolf had tried to force him to pay for a prostitute, Scheler sent him to his former student Kurt Schneider, a psychiatrist, for diagnosis. Schneider diagnosed Wolf as not being mentally ill, but a psychopath, using two diagnostic categories (Gemütlos and Haltlos) essentially equivalent to today's "antisocial personality disorder".

Religion

An adult convert to Catholicism, after 1921 Scheler disassociated from Catholic teaching and even from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, committing himself to pantheism and philosophical anthropology.

Health

Scheler had developed the habit of smoking between sixty and eighty cigarettes a day which contributed to a series of heart attacks throughout 1928, forcing him to cancel any travel plans.

Works

thumb|Max Scheler

Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass, 1913
Der Genius des Kriegs und der Deutsche Krieg, 1915
Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 1913–1916
Krieg und Aufbau, 1916
Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, 1917
Vom Umsturz der Werte, 1919
Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus, 1921
Vom Ewigen im Menschen, 1921
Probleme der Religion. Zur religiösen Erneuerung, 1921
Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, 1923 (newly edited as: Zur Phänomenologie ... 1913)
Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre, 3 Bände, 1923/1924
Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, 1926
Der Mensch im Zeitalter des Ausgleichs, 1927
Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 1928
Philosophische Weltanschauung, 1929
Logik I. (Fragment, Korrekturbögen). Amsterdam 1975

English translations

The Nature of Sympathy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954.
144 pages. (German title: Philosophische Weltanschauung.)

480 pages.

201 pages. .

359 pages. .

620 pages. . (Original German edition: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 1913–16.)
239 pages. .

201 pages. .

267 pages. .

79 pages. .

References

Sources

205 pages. .

221 pages. .

282 pages. .

223 pages.

118 pages.

176 pages.

324 pages. . 2nd ed., 2001.

260 pages. . 2nd ed., 2001.

203 pages. .

247 pages. .

213 pages. . (Original Dutch title: Max Scheler: De man en zijn werk)

130 pages.

188 pages. .

327 pages. .