Max Scheler
Phenomenological · Europe · 1874 to 1928
German thinker who held that values are independent of the things that carry them, in an order of rank.
What it is
Max Scheler (1874 to 1928) was a German philosopher of the phenomenological movement. He was born on 22 August 1874 and died on 19 May 1928 in Frankfurt. He is best known for an ethics built on values.
He studied under Rudolf Eucken at Jena and moved to Munich in 1906. In 1910 he lost his teaching post there after a scandal about his private life. He became a professor at Cologne in 1919, and died in 1928, just as a post at Frankfurt was to begin.
The main ideas
- Values are real. He held that values are independent of the things that carry them, much as colours are.
- Felt first. Values are grasped in feeling, as something we meet directly, and not by working them out as a conclusion.
- An order of rank. The values stand in an objective order of rank, so that higher values ought to be preferred to lower ones.
- The person. He put the individual person at the centre of his thought, and held that persons alone are ethically responsible.
- A different phenomenology. He took up the movement begun by Edmund Husserl but was strongly opposed to Husserl's method.
What it looks like in practice
Picture someone who finds that they admire a neighbour who gave up a good deal of comfort to look after a sick relative. On Scheler's view, that admiration is not a conclusion drawn from a rule. It is a direct sense that something higher than comfort is at stake. This is an illustration of his line of thought, not a passage from his writing.
Books and moments
- Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value (1913 and 1916) is his major work on ethics and values.
- On the phenomenology and theory of sympathy, and of love and hate (1913) deals with fellow feeling, love and hate.
- The spirit of war and the German war (1915) is another of his works, written in the first year of the First World War.
- His work was suppressed by the Nazis after 1933, which is one reason his reputation faded.
Questions and criticism
- Feeling as a guide. If values are known through feeling, it is fair to ask how one tells a true feeling of value from a mistaken one, and who decides when people feel differently.
- A fixed order? He spoke of an objective order of values. It is fair to ask how such an order can be shown, and whether it holds across cultures.
- Method. Scheler opposed Husserl's method, which leaves the question of what takes its place and how others could repeat or test it. It is fair to ask whether that is a strength or a weakness.
Close neighbours
The pages on Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein sit closest: Husserl founded the movement Scheler joined and departed from, and Stein heard Scheler lecture at Göttingen.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Who they connect to
Influenced by
- Edmund Husserl · He took up phenomenology and applied it to values and feelings.
Other Phenomenological thinkers
- Franz Brentano · 1838 to 1917
- Edmund Husserl · 1859 to 1938
- Edith Stein · 1891 to 1942
- Hans-Georg Gadamer · 1900 to 2002
- Emmanuel Levinas · 1906 to 1995
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty · 1908 to 1961
- Paul Ricoeur · 1913 to 2005
Sources we used
- Max Scheler · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
- Max Scheler · Encyclopaedia Britannica, read on 29 October 2026