Scheler, Max

Max Scheler (1874–1928) was a German philosopher and social theorist, who significantly contributed to the anthropological and phenomenological turn in German philosophy at the beginning of the last century. Scheler studied philosophy and sociology under Dilthey, Simmel, and Eucken in Munich, Berlin, and Jena. Influenced also by the work of Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, Scheler taught at Jena, Munich, Göttingen, Cologne, and Frankfurt/M. While his actual contribution to the laying of new foundations of contemporary European philosophy is often underestimated in the light of his influential contemporaries Husserl and Heidegger, it was Scheler who most vividly pursued an application of the new philosophical framework beyond the confines of narrow philosophical debate. He applied phenomenological thinking to subjects and topics as varied as values, capitalism, sympathy, elites, world age, Christianity, and Buddhism, as well as pacifism and feminism, to name just a few. Especially during the First World War, Scheler engaged in the political debate, not just in writing. His rather patriotic position during that time leaves room for interpretation. However, some years later, Scheler was one of the few scholars who warned of the dangers of the Nazi movement, which once in power suppressed his work. Despite a spread of interests and his rather nonsystematic and aphoristic style of writing, all Scheler's thoughts radiate toward a central issue: What defines human personality, and what is the position of human existence within this world? In pursuit of an answer, Scheler developed a distinctly nontranscendental and [Page 673]contextual understanding of human nature and existence. Much of his persistent enthusiasm for this issue has to be seen against the background of a continuous engagement with Catholic religion. His most influential works are Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1916), his attempt to outline an applied phenomenology; Man's Place in Nature (1928), in which he sets out his philosophical anthropology; and The Forms of Knowledge and Society (1925). Scheler is the philosopher of “love” and “sympathy” who stresses the role of the emotional as constituting for the human milieu. But at the same time, he maintains the importance of “world-openness” as the uniquely human potential to reach outside a given environment. With his emphasis on the emotional, Scheler distinctly moves away from a pre-Kantian and Kantian understanding of human nature as defined by reason and intellect, while with his emphasis on milieu, he attempts to understand humans not as beings above nature but as intrinsically embedded in this world via certain historical and cultural environs. In developing his ideas concerning the human milieu, Scheler also made a significant contribution to the sociology of knowledge through reemphasizing the role of situated practical knowledge(s) as opposed to universal scientific knowledge. Scheler managed only to sketch out his ideas of a phenomenolgically based philosophical anthropology, as his life, marked by intellectual as well as emotional restlessness, came to a premature end at the age of 54. His work has influenced thinkers such as Cassirer, Heidegger, Berdyaev, Gehlen, and Mannheim. Outside Germany, he had lasting influence in the Spanish-speaking world, mainly through the mediation of the work of Ortega y Gasset.

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