Max Scheler

Manfred S. Frings

This monograph constitutes a response to the criticisms of Christianity outlined in Nietzsche's GENEOLOGY OF MORALS, in which Nietzsche argues that Christianity is a "slave revolt" of the weak--an attempt by the impotent to bring down the vitality of the capable nobility. Scheler's response is multi-faceted but centers on Nietzsche's failure to understand the nature of Christian love. Christianity is not a destructive enterprise trying to bring everyone down to the same low level of its impotent faithful, who must put their trust in the next world because they can get nowhere in this one. Rather, it attempts constructively to bring everyone up to a new level of human flourishing. Christianity's preoccupation with the poor, weak, and marginalized stems from a recognition, through divine love, of the miracle of God's creation and infinite possibilities present even in them.

Ressentiment

The human place in the cosmos

Kīn-tūzī

Editor Harold J. Bershady provides a richly detailed biographical portrait of Scheler, as well as an incisive analysis of how his work extends and integrates problems of theory and method addressed by Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons, among others.

Selected Writings

On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing

A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism.

A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism

Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values

Scheler startet in diesem Buch einen Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus. Nachdruck des Originals von 1921.

Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik

From the mysterious powers and forces peculiar to both individual and community that can turn our lives into either good or bad lives, I wish to point to two such powers being at the same time different in their own nature and yet closely related to each other: The powers that emerge from exemplary persons and leaders. Understood as basic to both sociology and the philosophy of history, it comes to us as no surprise that the problem of exemplary persons and leaders - along with the questions of the qualities types, selections and education of leaders; forms of unison existing be tween leaders and their followers, all of which belonging to the subdivisions of this problem - must be a burning problem for a people whose historical leaders from all walks of life have, in part, been swept away by wars and revolutions. This fact we also find in all salient epochs of history characterized more or less by changes in leadership. It is precisely for this reason that in our own time every group appears to struggle ever so hard with this problem, namely, who their leaders should be. This pertains equally to a group within a party, to a class, to occupations, to unions, to various schools or present-day youth movements, and even to religious and ecclesias tical groupings. Beyond any comparison, there is yearning everywhere for lead ership.

Three Essays

Person and Self-Value

Bruno Bauch

Paul Menzer

Hans Vaihinger

Max Frischeisen-Köhler

Arthur Liebert

Kant-Studien

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Herbert List

In the 30s, Herbert list had compiled a portfolio of photographs for a large book on Greece. The outbreak of the war prevented the project from being realized. In association with the Herbert List estate, Schirmer/Mosel first produced a reconstruction of the planned book in 1993. The photographs--landscapes, fragments of sculpture, ruined temples, people at the sea--conjure up a vision of classical Hellas bathed in light and beauty, with the traces of the 20th century largely excluded. In view of the tempestuous assaults made by "civilizing" development, Herbert List's photographs themselves are today like archeological discoveries that have come down to us from a distant, long-vanished Golden Age. Edited by photographer Max Scheler, the book contains an essay by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in which the Austrian poet and dramatist describes his first journey to Greece in 1922. Now available again in a special low-price softcover reprint.

Hellas

Bruce Weber

Matthias Harder

Gunter Metken

Herbert List s photography has become part of the classical canon of 20th-century pictorial art. By their metaphysical and visual presence, his pictures are as familiar to us and as influential as de Chirico's visions are in painting. This monograph on List's oeuvre presents for the first time all phases of his creativity: the early fotografia metafisica; his Greece photographs blending Antiquity, Mediterranean light and Eros in visions of Classical Hellas; his sensitive homoerotic pictures; his artist portraits of the 40s through to the 60s; and the human interest photography of his late work. Essays by noted authors explore List s particular interests and the photo-historic context of his oeuvre. A selection of List s own writings, a comprehensive chronology, a bibliography, a list of exhibitions, and a list of publications complete this lavish volume.

Photographs 1930-1972

The Essential Herbert List

Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus.

Politisch-pädagogische Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre

The Nature of Sympathy explores, at different levels, the social emotions of fellow-feeling, the sense of identity, love and hatred, and traces their relationship to one another and to the values with which they are associated. Scheler criticizes other writers, from Adam Smith to Freud, who have argued that the sympathetic emotions derive from self-interested feelings or instincts. He reviews the evaluations of love and sympathy current in different historical periods and in different social and religious environments, and concludes by outlining a theory of fellow-feeling as the primary source of our knowledge of one another.A prolific writer and a stimulating thinker, Max Scheler ranks second only to Husserl as a leading member of the German phenomenological school. Scheler's work lies mostly in the fields of ethics, politics, sociology, and religion. He looked to the emotions, believing them capable, in their own quality, of revealing the nature of the objects, and more especially the values, to which they are in principle directed.

The Nature of Sympathy

Upon Scheler’s death in 1928, Martin Heidegger remarked that he was the most important force in philosophy at the time. Jose Ortega y Gasset called Scheler "the first man of the philosophical paradise." The Human Place in the Cosmos, the last of his works Scheler completed, is a pivotal piece in the development of his writing as a whole, marking a peculiar shift in his approach and thought. He had been asked to provide an initial sketch of his much larger works on philosophical anthropology and metaphysics--works he was not able to complete because of his early demise. Frings' new translation of this key work allows us to read and understand Scheler's thought within current philosophical debates and interests. The book addresses two main questions: What is the human being? And what is the place of the human being in the universe? Scheler responds to these questions within contexts of said two projected much larger works but not without reference to scientific research. He covers various levels of being: inorganic reality, organic reality (including plant life and psychological life), all the way up to practical intelligence and the spiritual dimension of human beings, and touching upon the holy. Negotiating two intertwined levels of being, life-energy ("impulsion") and "spirit," this work marks not only a critical moment in the development of his own philosophy but also a significant contribution to the current discussions of continental and analytic philosophers on the nature of the person.

Max Scheler

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