In 1894, Scheler started to study at the University of Munich.
Gallery of Max Scheler
Fürstengraben 1, 07743 Jena, Germany
In 1896, Scheler moved to Jena to study philosophy under Rudolf Eucken who was a popular philosopher at that time, and here he started his career in philosophy. In 1897, Scheler received his doctorate.
In 1896, Scheler moved to Jena to study philosophy under Rudolf Eucken who was a popular philosopher at that time, and here he started his career in philosophy. In 1897, Scheler received his doctorate.
Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism
(A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussio...)
A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism. A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism.
Max Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Scheler developed further the philosophical method of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and was called by José Ortega y Gasset "the first man of the philosophical paradise."
Background
Max Ferdinand Scheler was born on August 22, 1874, in Munich, Germany. His father came from an upper-middle-class Protestant family which can be traced to the sixteenth century; a number of his forebears had been clergymen and jurists in the city of Coburg. His mother was descended from a Jewish Orthodox family that had been settled in Franconia for many centuries. The clash of religious and cultural traditions in his home may account in part for the strains and tensions in his personality and work.
Education
In his early years, Scheler was not a very strong student but did show an early interest in philosophy. In 1894, he started to study at the University of Munich and by the fall of 1895 got himself enrolled in the University of Berlin. He studied medicine, philosophy, and sociology.
In 1896, he moved to Jena to study philosophy under Rudolf Eucken who was a popular philosopher at that time, and here he started his career in philosophy. In 1897, Scheler received his doctorate.
In 1898, Scheler took a trip to Heidelberg to meet Max Weber. In 1899, he received an associate professorship at the University of Jena. He taught at the University from 1900 to 1906. During this period he met Edmund Husserl in Halle in 1901, he was greatly inspired by Husserl's ideas, and a year later read his Logical Investigation. This was the beginning of Scheler's interest in phenomenology. After he ended his career in Jena in 1906, Scheler started working in Munich as Privatdozent. There he established a circle of "Munich phenomenologists."
From 1910 to 1919 Scheler remained secluded as a private scholar, lecturer, and freelance writer. These were the most productive years of Scheler’s life and during this time, he published his major works in phenomenology and works such as "Theory of Feeling of sympathy and of love and hate," "Formalism in ethics and non-formal ethics of value."
It was also at this time that Scheler became co-editor, along with Husserl, of the greatly influential journal, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung.
In 1910 Scheler gave up his connection with the University of Munich and moved to Berlin to live as an academically unattached writer. His first major works were written in this Berlin period. Among his close intellectual companions in those days were Walther Rathenau and Werner Sombart. The outbreak of World War I marked a turning point in Scheler's career. He threw himself with great ardor into the defense of the German cause. The articles and books in which he defended the "German war" with passionately nationalistic fervor brought him to the attention of a wider public than had noticed his more scholarly productions. In 1917 and 1918 he worked at various diplomatic and propagandist tasks for the German Foreign Office in Geneva and The Hague. During the war years Scheler, despite his intense nationalistic commitment to the "fatherland," moved closer to a Christian position in the realm of ethics, becoming finally a Roman Catholic convert.
In 1919 Scheler accepted a call to the chair of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne. During the next five years, he gradually developed his sociology of knowledge. About 1924 he began slowly to turn away from his previous commitment to Catholicism and eventually left the church. He then began to work on a comprehensive Anthropologie, in which he attempted to expound a kind of vitalistic pantheism that he had come to adopt. But he was not able to develop this new conception fully. He accepted a call from the University of Frankfurt at the beginning of 1928, but he died on May 19, 1928, at the age of 54, before assuming his new post.
When Scheler divorced Amalie von Dewitz and got married to Märit Furtwängler this endangered his position in the university as a Catholic professor. Seeing the conservative ideas of the Catholic Church he made himself distant from the Church and specified the nature of his work as philosophical not religious.
Politics
As a youth, Scheler identified himself as a social democrat and enthusiastic Marxist.
Views
Quite different strands of thought were woven into the texture of Scheler's thought at different times in his intellectual development. He was ever open to new ideas and did not fear to contradict himself. As a consequence, he failed to achieve a full synthesis of his thought but was able to appeal by virtue of his own intellectual restlessness to the restless young intellectuals of the postwar period. An erratic man, he was always to be a somewhat disturbing figure to the more settled members of the academic community while he gained considerable influence among younger sociologists and philosophers. Although he did not found a "school," he was a major intellectual pathsetter in pre-Nazi Germany as a social critic and moralist and as a sociologist and philosopher. Since World War n the vogue of phenomenology and existentialism in France has led to vigorous interest there in Scheler’s work. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, Scheler was until recently little known, except among scholars interested in the sociology of knowledge or among certain theologians and philosophers.
Scheler's major contributions to the social sciences lie in the domain of social psychology and the sociology of knowledge. His first major work, Ressentiment (1912), contains a comprehensive phenomenological description of this sentiment as well as an attempt to locate the ressentiment - laden man within the social structure. He developed the notion that certain social roles - the spinster, the mother-in-law, the priest, for example - predispose their occupants to ressentiment, an attitude arising from a sense of impotence in the face of the cumulative repression of feelings of hatred, envy, and desire for revenge. In contrast to Nietzsche, who coined the term, Scheler located the breeding ground of ressentiment in the modern bourgeois and post - bourgeois world rather than in Christianity.
In The Nature of Sympathy (1913), Scheler presented a detailed description of this feeling state. Here he wedded the phenomenological method to the Pascalian endeavor to outline a "logic of the heart." Scheler attempted to uncover eternal uniformities in feelings and emotions and to show that these, far from being the blind results of mechanistically operating associations, are actually means of knowing which reveal, through their intentionality, the situation of man in the universe and the ethical a prioris of a distinct realm of eternal values. As in much of his later work, Scheler defended the thesis that values exist independently of the men who make the evaluations and justified his resolute opposition to all pragmatist, naturalist, or positivist theories of value. Polemics against such philosophical currents, more especially against Kantianism and Neo-Kantianism, form a major part of Scheler's work. His Formalismus in der Ethik, first published in 1916 but written before the war, contains the most elaborate development of his anti-Kantian polemics as well as ethical speculations and sociological considerations that anticipate many of his later sociological ideas. On the Eternal in Man (1921) is the fullest exposition of Scheler's religious thought and also contains germs of his later sociological views.
Scheler's contribution to the sociology of knowledge is to be found in his "Probleme einer Soziologie des Wissens" (1924), two years later expanded in Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft. He attempted to synthesize a Platonic doctrine of eternal immutability of a world of value essences with a comprehensive relativism. He described how different groups of men have striven, each in its socially and historically limited way, to grasp aspects of the eternal sphere of value essences. The infinite variety of subjective a prioris, the fact that different groups, or periods, or individual types elaborate their own forms of knowledge, meant to Scheler that men are striving to attain the value essences in different ways at different times rather than that the immutability of these very essences is limited. Real factors (such as biological, political, or economic constellations) favor or oppose the actualization of ideal factors (for example, moral, religious, or intellectual values), but they can never determine their content. They can only act as "sluice gates of the spirit." Scheler rejected Comte's "law of three stages" and stressed that religious, metaphysical, and scientific knowledge do not succeed each other in regular progression but rather coexist in every age, rooted though they are in the conditions of life of different groups of men and different human types. Yet Scheler found a grain of truth in Comte's dogmatic assertion that there are stages in human history in the sense that in different periods different substructural elements determine the predominant cultural outlook of the age. At the dawn of history, "blood" that is, racial and vital factors chiefly controlled cultural life. After the emergence of the state, political factors moved to the foreground. With the bourgeois age, economic factors have achieved unquestioned predominance. While earlier periods accorded preeminence to religious and metaphysical types of knowledge, the bourgeois age is primarily the age of the scientist.
Scheler's world view has a deeply aristocratic cast. The idea of hierarchy is central to it, and the equalitarian tendencies of the modern age were therefore deeply abhorrent to him. His doctrine of moral values is hierarchical: pleasure values, those concerning the pleasant or unpleasant, are inferior to vital values, those promoting wellbeing and health, while these are again inferior to spiritual values; the highest values, however, are of a religious or sacred character. To such a hierarchy of values corresponds a hierarchy of men representing them. The saint incarnates the sacred values at the very top of the hierarchy; the genius stands for the spiritual values; the hero stands for the vital values; even in the lowest world, that of pleasure, "artists of consumption" are needed to guide our uncertain taste.
To the hierarchy of values and of men embodying them there corresponds a hierarchy of forms of sociation. The lowest form is the simple horde, in which emotional contagion and unconscious imitation constitute the only bond. In the vital community, on the other hand, in the family or tribe as well as in classes or professions, conscious solidarity binds the participants. As against the horde, the social here prevails over the individual; each member can easily be substituted for any other. In the third type of sociation, Tonnies' Gesellschaft, superficial contractual bonds between individuals replace supra-individual goals that are consciously supported. Finally, at the apex of the hierarchy, the Gesamtperson, the "complex collective personality," represents a type of sociation in which a quintessential solidarity binds the members in a community of love. This last form, of which the church and the nation are central examples, is eminently superior to all others; within it alone can the higher values be realized.
To posit equality between persons and so to level essential differences of value was, to Scheler, the chief aberration of the modern age. His full-scale attack against the post-Christian world, his rejection of liberalism, altruism, humanitarianism, and democracy can best be understood as resulting from his conviction that the modern world with its leveling tendencies has undermined the objective hierarchy of men and values. His cultural criticism hence proceeds from a profoundly elitist point of view. The modern social scientist will of necessity have to sift Scheler’s very real contributions to sociology and social psychology from the antidemocratic ideology in which they are all too often embedded.
Quotations:
"The purpose of art is... to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed."
"All the seemingly positive valuations and judgments of ressentiment are hidden devaluations and negations."
"It is peculiar to “ressentiment criticism” that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil. The evil is merely the pretext for the criticism."
"Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite."
"If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well - as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth - then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion."
Personality
Scheler was a target of various controversies regarding adultery and had reportedly been involved in affairs with various students after separation from his first wife. This was one of the main reasons for his negative image.
Physical Characteristics:
During World War I, Max Scheler was drafted but later discharged because of astigmia of the eyes.
During the spring of 1928, Scheler's health continued to worsen and he suffered from a series of heart attacks most likely due to the 60-80 cigarettes he smoked each day. His deteriorating health forced him to cancel his extensive travel plans abroad, and on May 19, 1928, Scheler died in a hospital in Frankfurt from complications of a severe heart attack.
Interests
Reading
Connections
When Scheler's first marriage, to Amalie von Dewitz, had ended in divorce, Scheler married Märit Furtwängler in 1912, who was the sister of the noted conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.