Abstract

The student of Max Scheler's work encounters several difficulties. First, the range of his preoccupation is unique in our time. During his most creative years, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and the phenomenology of emotional life were at the center of his interest. Later he became more and more involved in the ontological problems of society and reality and laid the foundation of a new sociology of knowledge. Second, Scheler's thought evolved in the course of his short life--he died in 1928, barely fifty-four--through various phases which were hardly compatible with one another. He started as a student of Rudolph Eucken, the philosopher of life, who imbued his disciple with an admiration for St. Augustine and Pascal; he became deeply influenced by Nietzsche, Dilthey, Bergson, and above all, Husserl. Converted to Catholicism, Scheler became a convinced Christian--both a personalist and a theist. But very soon his attitude toward religion underwent a complete change; in a last pantheistic phase, he dedicated himself to the philosophical and sociological exploration of the human condition. He then conceived the development of world history as a progression from illogical and blind vital urges to the fulfillment of the destiny of humanity in the realms of values and spiritual existence, and interpreted the whole process as the manifestation of divine force, the becoming of God in the world. A third difficulty for the student of Scheler's thought is the lack of organization of his books, originating in his disdain of any attempt to visualize life in an artificially unified perspective of the kind which the construction of a philosophic system might offer. He was, as Ortega y Gasset said, in the true sense of Plato an "enthusiastic" philosopher. Overwhelmed by the wealth of his discoveries, he lived in a continuous haste of mind. He had to proclaim so many lucid insights that he staggered, bewildered by cognition and inebriated by truth. This explains the frequent inconsistencies of his thought and the lack of structure of his writings.