Max Scheler: A Sketch of His Moral Philosophy

Abstract

By nearly all accounts, Max Scheler was one of the most brilliant thinkers of his day. He was widely recognized, even by Martin Heidegger, as the strongest philosophical force in Europe at the time of his death in 1928. A man of intense emotions and superior learning, Scheler was born in 1874 in Munich. His father was Protestant and his mother Jewish, while Scheler himself converted to Catholicism. By 1922, however, he had fallen away from Catholicism, for various reasons, in favor of a pantheistic conception of divine “becoming” in history. Scheler earned his doctorate at Jena in 1897, where he was influenced especially by the liberal idealism of his mentor, Rudolf Eucken. In 1907 he took a position at Munich, where he met Franz Brentano and several disciples of Edmund Husserl. Under their influence, his thinking took a phenomenological direction. His nine years as a private scholar and lecturer between his academic positions at Munich and Cologne (1910–19) were among the most productive of his life, yielding a prolific outpouring of major phenomenological studies, especially in ethics and related fields. His latter years in Cologne were focused on philosophy of religion, sociology of knowledge, and philosophical anthropology. He died on the eve of assuming his final post in Frankfurt in 1928.