Scheler, Max (1874–1928)

Abstract

The German Catholic philosopher and social theorist Max Scheler may well be forgotten today, but in his time this creative though controversial figure was considered a genius and a giant. He stands in the midst of an intellectual current that connects the historical philosophies of life of Dilthey, Simmel, and Bergson with the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, and his writings have significantly influenced those of Nicolai Hartmann, Edith Stein, Arnold Gehlen, Helmut Plessner, Karl Mannheim, and Alfred Schütz. Incredibly talented and productive, Scheler developed his own intuitive brand of phenomenology, proposed a material ethics of values as a systematic alternative to Kant's formal ethics, presented a series of subtle phenomenological investigations of emotions like shame, guilt, repentance, resentment, sympathy, love, and hate, reflected on faith, belief, and the essence of religion, founded the sociology of knowledge and visions of life as an autonomous discipline, laid the foundations of philosophical anthropology, and, toward the end of his life, sketched out a panentheistic metaphysics in which God progressively becomes, manifests, and realizes Himself in and through human history.