SCHELER, MAX

born Aug. 22, 1874, Munich, Ger. died May 19, 1928, Frankfurt am Main German social and ethical philosopher, remembered for his phenomenological approach, after the philosophical method of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. In 1901 Scheler became a lecturer at the University of Jena; by that time he had already been influenced by Husserl. Scheler later met several of Husserl's disciples during his years (190710) as a professor at Munich. Retiring to Berlin in 1910, he wrote his major works before 1917, when he joined the German Foreign Office as a diplomat in Geneva and at The Hague. In 1919 he became professor of philosophy and sociology at Cologne. By 1920 he had become a pacifist and a convert to Roman Catholicism, but about 1924 he turned toward a more pantheistic view of man and the world. As a phenomenologist, Scheler sought to discover the essence of mental attitudes and their relation to their objects. He differed from Husserl in his readiness to assign an independently real status to the objects. Scheler's work falls into two periods. During the first, his work contained a number of Christian orientations, as in the main work of this period, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (191316; Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values), which is in part a severe critique of Kant. Scheler shows that what one ought to do presupposes a feeling of the value of what ought to be done and divides all values into five ranks, which are given a priori and which are anchored in each person's ordo amoris, an order, or logic, of the heart that is not congruent with the logic of reason. In holding this view, Scheler followed the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal. According to this logic, moral acts and deeds are individual and originate in an individual's prerational preferring (or rejecting) of values. Moral experience lies in the call of the hour, in which the a priori rankings among values become individually transparent, no matter how much the ordo amoris may be distorted by feelings of resentment, hate, or other passions. The only vehicle for attaining a higher moral status is the exemplarity of a person, which pulls the individual toward his exemplary self-value. While the first period centred on the incontrovertible value of the individual person, in his second period Scheler set out to determine the meta-anthropological status of humanity. In Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928; Man's Place in the Universe) and in manuscripts edited after his death, he offers a grandiose view of Being: man, God, and world are one self-becoming cosmic process in absolute time. This process has two poles: spirit (Geist) and life-urge (Drang). By itself, spirit is powerless, unless its ideas can functionalize with life-factors (material conditions) allowing their realization, a concept similar to those of American pragmatism, in which Scheler took a lifelong interest. Divine spirit also needs human life and history to become real. Reality lies in the resistance between these two poles. Resistance qua reality is central not only in his phenomenology but also in his Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (1924; Sociology of Knowledge). Manfred S. Frings The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica Additional reading Manfred S. Frings, Max Scheler (1965); John R. Staude, Max Scheler, 18741928 (1967); Eugene Kelly, Max Scheler (1977).