Max Scheler

Max Scheler (1874-1928), German social and religious philosopher, whose work reflected the influence of the phenomenology of his countryman Edmund Husserl. Born in Munich, Scheler taught at the universities of Jena, Munich, and Cologne.

In The Nature of Sympathy (1913; trans. 1970), Scheler applied Husserl's method of detailed phenomenological description to the social emotions that relate human beings to one another—especially love and hate. This book was followed by his most famous work, Formalism in Ethics and Material Value Theory (1913; trans. 1973), a two-volume study of ethics in which he criticized the formal ethical approach of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and substituted for it a study of specific values as they directly present themselves to consciousness.

Following his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1920, Scheler wrote On the Eternal in Man (1921; trans. 1960) to justify his conversion, followed by an important study of the sociology of knowledge, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Forms of Knowledge and Society, 1926). He later rejected Roman Catholicism and developed a philosophy, based on science, in which all abstract knowledge and religious values are considered sublimations of basic human drives. This is presented in his last book, The Place of Man in the Universe (1928; trans. 1961).