Scheler, Max

(1874-1928)

   philosopher; a brilliant phenomenologist, deemed the equal of Edmund Husserl* and Martin Heidegger* by contempo-raries. He was born in Munich. His mother was Jewish, while his father, who had managed the estates of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, traced a centuries-old lineage of Protestant* clergymen. Rejecting both heritages, Scheler converted in 1889 to Catholicism.* His studies led to a doctorate in 1897 under the direction of Jena's neo-Kantian, Rudolf Eucken. After he completed his Habilitation in 1899, Jena appointed him Privatdozent. He came under Husserl's influence in 1901; the Gottingen philosopher helped secure his appointment in 1907 at Mu-nich. Scheler was a spell-binding lecturer. His ideas matured until in 1910 a charge of adultery (he divorced his first wife the same year) led Munich to demand his resignation. Banished from the classroom, he pursued a freelance career in Gottingen and Berlin. With Husserl, he produced Jahrbuch fur Phi-losophie und phanomenologische Forschung (Annual for philosophy and phe-nomenological research) while writing his primary work: Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil (On resentment and moral value judgments, 1912) and Zur Phanomenologie und Theorie der Sympathie-gefuhle und von Liebe und Hass (Contributions to the phenomenology and theory of sympathy and of love and hate, 1913). His Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in ethics and material value ethics, 1913-1916), inspired by Blaise Pascal, was a critique of Kant's approach to ethics and an outline of the structure of phenomenological values. A critic of bourgeois positivism, he was labeled a "Catholic Nietzsche."

   A proponent of Christian socialism, Scheler was also a committed nationalist during World War I. Aiming to justify and glorify German involvement in the war, he published the anti-English Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg (The genius of war and the German war) in 1915; he then lectured in Switzerland, Holland, and Austria on behalf of the Foreign Office's psycholog-ical warfare department. He recommitted to Catholicism in 1916 and repudiated militarism after the war. With support from Konrad Adenauer,* he was ap-pointed director of the University of Cologne's Sociological Institute. (A luke-warm democrat—he disdained the masses—he held a Center Party* mandate in Cologne's city council.) His refurbished outlook surfaced in Vom Ewigen im Menschen (On the eternal in man, 1921), a phenomenological treatise on the interaction between man and the realm of religious value.

   Disillusioned by Weimar's political and social disunity, and troubled by per-ennial marital problems, Scheler embraced corporatism and abandoned Cathol-icism in 1923 in favor of a pseudopantheism. His repudiation of positivism appeared in 1926 in Die Wissenformen und die Gesellschaft (Forms of knowl-edge and society). Finally, espousing metaphysics, he aimed to define the goal of history in Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (The place of man in the cosmos, 1927). In April 1928, after an extended international lecture tour, he accepted a professorship at Frankfurt; he died the next month.

   REFERENCES:Frings, Max Scheler; Kelly, Max Scheler; Staude, Max Scheler.