Max Scheller

Scheler, Max Ferdinand (1874–1928)

Max Scheler, usually called a phenomenologist, was probably the best known German philosopher of the 1920s. Always an eclectic thinker, he was a pupil of the neo-idealist Rudolph Eucken, but was also strongly influenced by the life-philosophies of Dilthey and Bergson. While teaching at Jena he regularly met Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, and his mature writings have a strongly phenomenological, as well as a Catholic, stamp. Later he turned towards metaphysics and the philosophical problems raised by modern science.

Scheler’s interests were very wide. He tried to do justice to all aspects of experience – ethical, religious, personal, social, scientific, historical – without doing away with the specific nature of each. Above all, he took the emotional foundations of thought seriously. Many of his insights are striking and profound, and sometimes his arguments are very telling, but his power to organize his material consistently and to attend conscientiously to the business of justification is poorly developed.

Scheler is best known for his anti-Kantian ethics, based on an a priori emotional grasp of a hierarchy of objective values, which precedes all choice of goods and purposes. He himself describes his ethics as ‘personalist’, and makes personal values supreme, sharply distinguishing the ‘person’ from the ‘ego’, and linking this with his analysis of different types of social interaction. In epistemology he defends a pragmatist approach to science and perception; thus philosophy, as the intuition of essences, requires a preparatory ascetic discipline. His philosophy of religion is an attempt to marry the Augustinian approach through love with the Thomist approach through reason. In his later work, to which his important work on sympathy provides the transition, he defends a dualist philosophical anthropology and metaphysics, interpreting the latter in activist terms as a resolution of the tensions between spiritual love and vital impulse.

1 Life

Scheler was a Bavarian, born at Munich on 22 August 1874 to a Protestant father and a Jewish mother. He was three times married and twice divorced. He died at Frankfurt am Main, 19 May 1928.

Between 1894 and 1899 he studied at the universities of Munich, Berlin (under Dilthey), Jena (under Rudolph Eucken), and Heidelberg (to hear Max Weber). Both his doctoral promotion and habilitation were achieved under Eucken. He was baptised a Catholic on 20 September 1899.

While lecturing at Jena, he had several meetings with Husserl, who helped him transfer to Munich in 1906. He quickly won a leading role among the Munich phenomenologists (see Husserl, E.; Phenomenological movement). However, irregularities in his private life led the university authorities to withdraw his license to teach. There followed a period of unofficial lecturing at Göttingen in 1910–11, thanks to the phenomenologists there, and then also in Berlin from 1912, where his first mature works began to appear: Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Haß (On the Phenomenology and Theory of Sympathy and of Love and Hate) (1913), Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values) (1913, 1916) and Vom Umsturz der Werte (The Subversion of Values) (1915a). Poor eyesight disqualified him from active service in the war, but he was employed by the state to give propaganda lectures.

In 1918 he was called to the chair of Philosophy and Sociology and the Directorship of the Institute of Social Sciences at Cologne, where he published Vom Ewigen im Menschen (On the Eternal in Man) (1921), Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Society and the Forms of Knowledge) (1926) and Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (The Place of Man in the Cosmos) (1927). In 1928 he was called to Frankfurt, but died of a heart attack before he could take up office. Philosophische Weltanschauung (Philosophical Perspectives) was published in 1929.

2 General characteristics of his philosophy

Scheler’s work is usually divided into three periods. His few early writings show the influence of Eucken’s neo-idealism, and are separated by about eight years from a productive period beginning around 1912, with his second marriage, and lasting till about 1922. Scheler is here at his most phenomenological and Catholic. But in the early 1920s, at Cologne, he begins to pay less attention to what is timeless in human experience, and more to what is changing and evolving. Theism gives place to pantheism. This change is first apparent in his sociologically inclined writings, but then dominates his metaphysics. This late work only reached the stage of partial sketches before his death.

Scheler’s philosophy is hardly ever academic or dry. Like Eucken, he thought that philosophy should change people’s lives, and this gives his phenomenology a very different feel from that of Husserl. Even when not primarily engaged in some critique of the modern world, as in many of his minor works, he often seems to be trying to create a change of heart in the reader. Even his metaphysics is conceived in terms of ‘engagement’ for the full unfolding of the deity, in which he sees the meaning of the developing universe. He never preaches, but his writings have a vital, passionate and challenging quality.

One formal key to his thought is his use of the categories of higher and lower. Like Greek and medieval thinkers, he is always revealing hierarchies: of values, forms of social relating, levels of consciousness and embodied existence, of types of being. These often furnish an effective instrument in the critique of other philosophical positions. They culminate in his late philosophical anthropology, where the hierarchical structure of human being, now focused on the duality of spirit and drive (a dualism nearer to Kant than Descartes), becomes the key to the metaphysics.

Scheler’s thought is highly eclectic. His receptive mind could not help learning even from those he most strongly criticized, above all Kant. But he also took much from Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Dilthey. Even his conscious borrowings (from Augustinianism, Malebranche, Pascal, Maine de Biran, for example) are always thoroughly assimilated. He took nothing that he could not experience for himself. It is this that gives his work its ultimate unity.

Scheler made an extremely powerful impression on his contemporaries, both academic and lay, especially as a lecturer and teacher, but also as a writer, clearing the ground in many spheres and making new beginnings or revivals possible. Had it not been for the twelve-year Nazi ban on his work, his influence on later generations would probably have been much greater. In fact, many related thinkers, including Heidegger and the early Sartre, owe more to him than is often acknowledged, and his influence in the social sciences was considerable, and is growing once more. Both the sociology of knowledge and philosophical anthropology received their initial impetus from his later work. But perhaps his greatest achievement was to re-open people’s eyes to a world where vital, spiritual and religious values and phenomena (essences and necessary relations between them) could all be acknowledged in their own right, free of the monistic reductions of psychologism or positivism, or the anthropocentric distortions of Neo-Kantianism.

3 Philosophy and other forms of knowledge

Although Scheler also called himself an ethical personalist, he implies that he was already thinking along phenomenological lines when he met Husserl, by whom he was clearly influenced. However, he differs from him in important respects. Apart from a lack of interest in method as such and a refusal to follow him in his ‘idealist’ turn, Scheler has a different approach to the intuition of essence, the question ‘what exactly is given in experience?’. Husserl saw ‘phenomenological reduction’, which enabled us to investigate essences without the distractions of real objects and states of affairs, as a ‘bracketing’ of existence, a purely intellectual operation. But Scheler interpreted existence as ‘resistance to striving’. It is ‘given’ to us (though never known) at the lowest level of psychic functioning (analogous to Aristotle’s ‘vegetable soul’), where our vital impulses blindly encounter something that confines them. Thus phenomenological reduction must be an inhibition of impulse. This removes the barriers to spiritual cognition of all kinds. Philosophy thus requires a moral culture of humility, self-knowledge and self-control.

This account of philosophy occurs in On the Eternal in Man. Later he calls it Bildungswissen, or knowledge for ‘formation’, since spiritual persons are ‘formed’ by the essences and values that become part of them. All knowing is, in Greek and Scholastic fashion, ‘having a share in’ an object without changing it. The object known, qua essence, is henceforward ‘in’ the mind of the knower. Philosophy is also a ‘desymbolization of the world’. Our natural, self- or group-centred ‘vital’ approach to things (later writers talk of the ‘life-world’) rests on a classification according to vital importance. Perception itself thus selects from the totality of the given. The partial aspects of an object’s nature that we take in (the redness of a cherry, for example) function as symbols of the object both as it essentially is and as it relates to our purposes. But the philosophical inhibition of impulse enables us to get beyond the screen of concepts to the entire essential nature, and see what ‘can only be seen’.

The ‘natural worldview’ given in culture and language is the basis for control over our environment. Knowledge from this viewpoint can, however, be as adequate as that of philosophy or, at the other extreme, science. But its objects are relative to the concerns of the human species (with cultural modifications). Scientific objects, on the other hand, are relative to those of living beings as such, since science transcends the limits of human sensory equipment, and thus the range of human concerns. The world as reduced by science, largely unintelligible in terms of our sensory imaginations, is an almost pure (and largely probabilistic) schema of the world, from which the essential content of things has almost disappeared. The schema is structured as a device for control, the world of pure pragmatism. Scientific knowledge is thus Leistungswissen, or knowledge for achievement.

The third form of knowledge is Heilswissen, or knowledge for salvation. In Scheler’s Catholic period, salvation concerns moral and religious knowledge and practice, and the salvation of the spiritual individual as member of the ‘community of love’. But in the last period Heilswissen is metaphysics, and salvation itself concerns the resolution of all tensions and oppositions in the absolute being, whose spirit is the sphere of emergent essences and whose body is the material universe. Human beings provide the arena where this reconciliation of the spiritual and the material takes place. Thus metaphysics is engagement for the deity, an active spiritual love of essences and values together with an ecstatic participatory ‘yes’ to the blind processes of material and vital energy. The Nachlaß volumes which supplement the last lectures and papers show us something more of this grand conception, but very little is worked out in any detail.

4 Ethics

Scheler’s ethics depends on his theory of value, which did not change in his last years. His first phenomenological and Catholic works are, inter alia, concerned to defend the objectivity of values and a less materialistic approach to the world. Among his particular targets are Nietzsche, with his attack on Christian morality, and the utilitarian or calculating attitude to morals, based on an all-devouring resentment (‘Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen’ (Resentment in the Structure of Morals) (1915)) and the elevation of hedonic values above those of vitality. His great ethical treatise, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, rich in subtle analyses and distinctions, is primarily intended as a refutation of Kantian ethics, together with the philosophical assumptions Kant uses to justify his position (see Kantian ethics). The huge, rambling, but immensely impressive work has six parts, each criticizing some specific Kantian theme.

In the course of it Scheler defends his thesis that values are the intentional objects of feeling. They are qualities felt in or on objects, and are hence inaccessible to the understanding. They constitute an ‘emotional a priori’, since the phenomena of goods and purposes, and even the attractions of pleasure, presuppose them. Far from being formal, they are given to us, in positive and negative forms, in distinct kinds of material and in a hierarchical order, with the hedonic or sensory values at the bottom, then those of vitality, then spiritual values of beauty, justice and assent to pure (non-pragmatic) truth, and lastly the values of holiness. A separate category of welfare values is sometimes inserted between the hedonic and the vital. There are also other hierarchies of ‘relatively formal’ values, depending on the nature of the value-bearers concerned. But moral values are personal and of a logically second order. A person’s act has moral value when it intends the realization of a first-order value intrinsically higher than the given alternatives. Since choice of value depends on the structure of one’s loving, the main foundation of personal being (see Bildungswissen above), Scheler’s ethics has something in common with virtue ethics, and a corresponding distaste for moral obligation, though this is accepted as a regrettable necessity. It also contains illuminating discussions of ethical relativism (where he defends the absoluteness of values as such against various relativities of ethos, ethic, moral code and moral conduct), levels of the emotional life, and retribution and punishment.

5 The person and society

The last section of Formalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethics of Values is a long treatise on the person as individual and social being. The influence of Kant is strong in the first part, though Scheler insists that the spiritual person is not just a rational or intellectual being, but also performs emotional acts, acts of will and, above all, acts of love. These depend on the otherwise ‘automatic’ mental functioning of the ‘ego’, ‘through’ which the ‘functional unity’ of the person acts, thereby raising ego-functioning to a higher level, where questions of meaning and validity are inescapable.

The analyses of forms of social relating begin from the distinction between community and association, but are illuminatingly extended, and integrated with the value-philosophy and analysis of the individual person. Scheler’s interesting treatment of the problem of ‘other minds’ comes in Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (The Nature of Sympathy) (see Other minds). He here argues that the acquisition of knowledge is, inter alia, a matter of filling with particular content and in a definite order the initially empty spheres of being which are given to human consciousness as such. The social sphere (a possibly unfulfilled experience of ‘we’) is, in fact, filled before the sphere of individuality. Hence the main assumption of the ‘problem’ of other minds, that self-awareness must come first, is the false insinuation of ‘individualism’. Our actual knowledge of the ego-functioning of other egos depends on the ‘universal grammar of expression’ to which we have access as living beings; in so far as this behaviour is raised to the dignity of spiritual activity, we can know it by performing the acts ‘with’ or ‘after’ the persons concerned.

6 Religion

The theory of spheres of being goes with a theory of specific spiritual acts relating to the typical contents of each sphere. In On the Eternal in Man Scheler argues that at some time or other we all perform religious acts, which include repentance, petitionary prayer, thanks, praise and worship, in relation to the absolute sphere. It is only through performing such acts that we fully grasp the meaning of holiness, the highest value. This gives us a key to answering the most fundamental question: whether our own religious acts are directed to an adequate object, or only to an idol, such as knowledge, fame or comfort. He also held that the absolute sphere of being is the first to be given some determinate content. Since religious acts presuppose the absoluteness and holiness of their object, which for Scheler denotes the supreme Good, our first and most deeply bedded experiences are of perfect objects and absolute qualities.

This religious, or ‘Augustinian’, road to God, open to all who try to work out their salvation in practical life, has its counterpart in a philosophical road, which starts from wonder and a concern to grasp the nature of ultimate reality. Scheler briefly expounds the ‘three fundamental philosophical truths’ in ‘Probleme einer Soziologie des Wissens’ (Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge) (1926). They are, first, that there is ‘something and not nothing’, second, that existing beings must either be absolute or dependent on something else for their own being, and third, that all being has both essence and existence. Scheler insists that the first two have an emotional content, which can only be grasped in wonder, humility and reverence, and a shuddering glance into the abyss of absolute nothingness. The absolute being which can thus be directly cognized is in complete ‘conformity’ with the perfect being encountered in religious acts. The two approaches to God are complementary.

7 Sympathy

We may finally return to The Nature of Sympathy, which many critics have considered his best work. The general importance of the emotional in Scheler’s thought is clear, but this work also contains some excellent phenomenological analysis of the different types of sympathy itself, ignored by most writers of ‘sympathy ethics’. He goes on to discuss metaphysical theories of sympathy, especially Schopenhauer’s, and devotes much attention to Einsfühlung (‘feeling one with’), which is needed for the ‘engagement’ of the later metaphysics. The second part of the work contains an analysis of love and hate. Love is the key to the spiritual and personal, since only love opens up the world of essences and values. Humanity is, for Scheler, the Ens amans, the being that loves. His own analysis of love as a creative movement of the heart which brings out the higher values of its objects (hatred is destructive, working in a contrary direction) is difficult but profound. The metaphysical writings introduce us to Eros or vital love, which plays an important role in his account of evolution, and in the metaphysical reconciliation between spirit and drive.