Max Scheler

Quick Facts

• Full name: Max Ferdinand Scheler
• Lived: 1874-1928
• Place: Germany; worked especially in Munich, Cologne, and Frankfurt
• Main fields: phenomenology, ethics, philosophy of emotion, philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology
• Best known for: value ethics, emotional intuition, the hierarchy of values, sympathy, the person, and ressentiment
• Main works: Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, The Nature of Sympathy, Ressentiment, On the Eternal in Man, The Human's Place in the Cosmos

The Big Question

How do we know what is valuable, and why do love, sympathy, envy, and resentment matter for ethics?

In One Minute

Max Scheler was one of the most original early phenomenologists. Phenomenology means describing how things show up in lived experience before turning them into theories. Scheler used that approach to study value and emotion.

His central claim is simple but unusual: feelings are not just private moods. Some feelings disclose values. When you feel admiration for courage, disgust at cruelty, reverence before something holy, or tenderness toward a suffering friend, you are not merely having inner weather. You may be noticing something about the world.

Scheler thought ethics begins with this value-perception. We do not first calculate a rule and then add feeling. Often we first feel that something matters, and only afterward explain it.

What They Taught

Scheler taught that values are real features of experience. A value is what makes something worth preferring, protecting, admiring, avoiding, or rejecting. A meal can be pleasant. A healthy body can be vital. A just law can be morally right. A painting can be beautiful. A saintly act can feel holy. These are not all the same kind of goodness.

This made him critical of ethics that begins only with rules, duties, pleasure, or usefulness. Against a purely formal ethics, he argued for a "material" ethics of value. Here "material" does not mean physical. It means content-filled. Ethics is about the concrete values we encounter: truth, beauty, justice, life, dignity, holiness, and love.

Scheler also thought values come in ranks. Lower values are not worthless. Pleasure and comfort matter. Usefulness matters. Health, strength, and vitality matter. But higher values can call us beyond lower ones. A person may give up comfort for health, health for truth, or even life for justice or holiness. Sacrifice shows the ranking. We understand the higher value by seeing what someone is willing to give up for it.

The heart is central here, but Scheler does not mean sentimentality. He means that love, hate, admiration, shame, reverence, envy, sympathy, and resentment can be directed at something. This directedness is called intentionality. A fear is fear of something. An admiration is admiration for something. In the same way, love can open a person to higher values, while hate can shrink or distort what the person can see.

For Scheler, the human being is not just a thinking subject or a bundle of psychological states. A person is the living center of acts: loving, judging, promising, forgiving, refusing, hoping, worshiping, and knowing. You cannot reduce a person to a job, a body, an opinion, or a useful function. A person has a unique "order of love," or ordo amoris: the pattern of what they love most, what they ignore, and what they are ready to serve.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Phenomenology: a way of describing experience as it is given. Instead of starting with a theory of "emotion," Scheler asks what admiration, shame, love, and resentment are like when we live through them.

• Value: a quality that makes something matter. The useful value of a hammer is not the same as the beauty of a song or the dignity of a person.

• Emotional intuition: the direct feeling of a value. "Intuition" here does not mean a lucky guess. It means immediate grasp. You may see that humiliating someone is wrong before you can give a theory of dignity.

• Hierarchy of values: Scheler's claim that values have an order from lower to higher. A rough ladder is pleasure, usefulness, vitality, spiritual values such as truth and beauty, and the holy. A student who gives up a fun night to care for a sick friend is preferring a higher personal and moral value over a lower pleasure.

• Person: the unique center of someone's acts and loves. A person is not an object to be measured like a tool. Treating a worker only as "labor cost" or a patient only as "case number" misses the person.

• Sympathy: fellow-feeling with another person while still recognizing them as other. If your friend is grieving, sympathy is not just catching a sad mood. It is feeling with and for your friend in their grief.

• Emotional contagion: being swept up by a group's mood. A crowd can make you laugh, rage, or panic before you have thought clearly. Scheler distinguishes this from genuine sympathy because contagion can erase personal responsibility.

• Ressentiment: a poisoned form of resentment in which blocked envy, revenge, or humiliation reshapes a person's sense of value. Someone who cannot bear another person's excellence may start calling excellence "arrogance" and weakness "virtue." Scheler takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche, but he rejects Nietzsche's claim that Christian love is simply ressentiment in disguise.

Major Works

• Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values - Scheler's major work in ethics. It argues that moral life is not built only from universal rules. We encounter concrete values in feeling, and those values have ranks. The book also develops his view of the person as the bearer of moral responsibility.

• The Nature of Sympathy - Scheler's study of fellow-feeling, love, hate, emotional contagion, and identification. The book asks how we know and respond to other people emotionally. Its main point is that genuine sympathy is not the same as losing oneself in another person's feeling.

• Ressentiment - A response to Nietzsche's account of resentment and morality. Scheler agrees that resentment can falsify values, but he thinks Nietzsche misunderstands Christian love. For Scheler, real love comes from fullness and openness, not from revenge against the strong.

• On the Eternal in Man - A collection of essays on religion, love, knowledge, and the holy. It shows Scheler's religious period, where he treats reverence and love as ways human beings open themselves to higher value.

• The Human's Place in the Cosmos - A late work in philosophical anthropology. It asks what makes human beings different from animals. Scheler's answer turns on spirit: the ability to step back from immediate drives, see things as meaningful, and be open to the world as a whole.

Why It Matters

Scheler matters because he gives emotions philosophical weight without making ethics irrational. He shows why moral life often begins before argument: in admiration, shame, love, reverence, disgust, gratitude, and sympathy.

He also gives a useful diagnosis of distorted moral judgment. Ressentiment explains how people can protect their ego by downgrading what they secretly admire. That makes Scheler useful for reading politics, religion, status anxiety, social comparison, and moral outrage.

His idea of the person also shaped later personalism and phenomenology. It gives a strong language for saying that people must not be reduced to usefulness, pleasure, social role, biology, or data.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Scheler developed Edmund Husserl's phenomenology in a new direction. Husserl focused heavily on consciousness, meaning, and intentionality. Scheler moved phenomenology into ethics, emotion, religion, and social life.

He reacts strongly to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's analyses of rank, value, and ressentiment helped Scheler, but Scheler opposed Nietzsche's attack on Christian love. Scheler thought love can reveal higher values rather than merely hide weakness.

Augustine of Hippo is an important background figure because Scheler's ordo amoris, or order of love, echoes Augustine's idea that a person is shaped by what they love.

Edith Stein engaged Scheler's work on sympathy, empathy, and personhood. Martin Heidegger learned from Scheler's attention to mood, personhood, and human existence, even though Heidegger did not accept philosophical anthropology as the deepest starting point for philosophy.

Emmanuel Levinas offers a useful contrast. Scheler grounds ethics in value, love, and the person. Levinas grounds ethics in the demand made by the Other.

Related Pages

• Edmund Husserl
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Augustine of Hippo
• Edith Stein
• Martin Heidegger
• Phenomenology
• Emmanuel Levinas