Max Scheler

Max Scheler , 1874-1928, German philosopher. He taught at the universities of Jena (1901-7) and Munich (1907-10), where he was influenced by Franz Brentano and the followers of Edmund Husserl . From 1910 he concentrated on writing, but he returned to university teaching at Cologne and Frankfurt after World War I. Scheler was concerned with the permanent values in human personality and human action; this concern brought him to important work in phenomenology , which spread beyond Germany, chiefly through his influence. In his early thought, for which he is best known, Scheler taught that love is the great principle of human association, and he regarded God as the source of all love. His most basic work is Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (2 vol., 1913-16; tr. 1973); other important works include On the Eternal in Man (1921; tr. 1960) and Man's Place in Nature (1928; tr. 1961).

Bibliography: See his Selected Philosophical Essays, tr. with an introd. by D. R. Lachterman (1973); biography by J. R. Staude (1967); studies by E. W. Ranly (1966), A. R. Luther (1972), and A. Deeken (1974), and J. H. Nota (1983).

Scheler, Max (1874–1928) Director of the Institute for Social Scientific Research and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cologne from 1919, Scheler was important in the development of phenomenology, the sociology of knowledge, and the sociology of culture. Under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl, Scheler attempted to avoid the relativism of the sociology of knowledge by adopting an essentialist view of human nature in his philosophical anthropology, which was also shaped by his own Roman Catholic beliefs. He recognized the plurality and relativism of belief systems but argued that human nature was universal. For Karl Marx's ‘base/superstructure’ metaphor Scheler substituted a ‘life/spirit’ dichotomy. He held a pessimistic view of modern industrial society, which he saw as a corruption of genuine values. His principal works were Ressentiment (1912), The Nature of Sympathy (1913), Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (1926), and Man's Place in Nature (1928). Scheler's contribution to the sociology of knowledge has been unwarrantably neglected.