On the Eternal in Man (Vom Ewigen im Menschen) – Max Scheler

A phenomenological inquiry into religion, the divine, and the human person

What the Work Is

On the Eternal in Man is a philosophical work by the German philosopher Max Scheler, first published in 1961. It belongs to the fields of religion, philosophy, and the intersection of the two, and it addresses religious experience and the nature of the divine from a philosophical standpoint. Scheler (1874–1928) was a leading figure in the phenomenological tradition, known for his contributions to ethics and philosophical anthropology, and was regarded in his lifetime as one of the most prominent German philosophers.

What the Book Is About

The work concerns religion as a subject of philosophical investigation. Its central concern is the eternal — the divine — as it presents itself to human beings, and the book examines the religious dimension of human existence through a philosophical lens. Rather than treating religion as a merely social or psychological phenomenon, the work approaches the eternal as something that bears on the human person directly, and it belongs to Scheler’s broader project of understanding the human being as a being oriented toward values and toward the divine.

Key Ideas and Themes

The book sits within Scheler’s larger philosophical outlook, in which the human person is understood as a spiritual being whose life is ordered toward objective values. Scheler held that values are not arbitrary or merely subjective but form an objective hierarchy, and that the person’s ethical and spiritual life consists in responding rightly to that order. In this framework, love occupies a central place: Scheler conceived of the ethical person as one whose heart is rightly ordered through love, and he described the human being as created in God’s image through love. The religious orientation of the person — the turn toward the eternal — is continuous with this understanding of the person as a lover of genuine values rather than a mere seeker of lower satisfactions.

Scheler’s philosophy of religion is also bound up with his account of the human being’s place in the world. He was sceptical of the unchecked power of mass culture and of the levelling of ethical standards, and he defended the individual human person as a unique and sacred value. Against views that reduce the person to drives, power, or social circumstance, Scheler insisted on the reality of spirit as a genuine dimension of human existence — distinct from, though related to, the vital energies of life. The eternal, in this context, is not a projection of human need but a reality toward which the spiritual person is genuinely oriented.

A further theme running through Scheler’s thought, and relevant to the religious concerns of this work, is his engagement with the question of what ails modern civilization. He was attentive to the ways in which human beings can become disordered in their loves — turning away from higher values toward lower ones, or inverting the true order of values so that what is genuinely higher is treated as lower and what is lower is exalted. This disorder, which he analysed in depth elsewhere under the heading of ressentiment, is at bottom a spiritual and religious matter, a corruption of the person’s relation to the realm of values and to the divine. The concern with the eternal in man is thus also a concern with the health of the person’s inner life and with the conditions under which genuine religious and ethical experience is possible.

Structure and Approach

The work proceeds philosophically, examining religion and the eternal as matters for reasoned inquiry rather than as objects of mere faith or sentiment. Scheler’s method is phenomenological: it seeks to describe the essential features of religious experience and of the human person’s relation to the divine, attending to how these present themselves in experience rather than reducing them to something else. The book is written in the tradition of Continental philosophy, and its arguments are developed through conceptual analysis and description rather than through empirical or historical investigation.

Significance and Influence

Scheler’s standing as a philosopher was considerable. After his death, Martin Heidegger affirmed, together with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler, praising him as the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany and in contemporary European philosophy as such. His works were placed on the Nazi book burn list, a fact that testifies to the perceived force of his thought in the political as well as the philosophical sphere. On the Eternal in Man forms part of the body of work through which Scheler’s influence on phenomenology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion was transmitted, and it reflects his conviction that the question of the eternal is inseparable from the question of what it means to be a human person.

Scheler’s analysis of ressentiment bears directly on the religious and ethical concerns of On the Eternal in Man. Ressentiment, he held, is a self-poisoning of the mind with definite causes and consequences: a lasting mental attitude produced by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects that are normal components of human nature — chiefly revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite. Such repression leads to a constant tendency toward value delusions and corresponding value judgments. Scheler understood ressentiment as belonging to the study of ethics, representing the antithetical process of his emotively informed non-formal ethics of values, and he treated it as at once his darkest and his most psychological and sociological topic, foreshadowing later findings in those social sciences.

The concept cannot be understood apart from Scheler’s account of the a priori hierarchy of value modalities. Values, on his view, are emotively experienced with reference to a universal, objective, constant, and unchanging hierarchy. From lowest to highest, these modalities — with their respective positive and negative dis-value forms — are: the sensual values of the agreeable and the disagreeable; the vital values of the noble and the vulgar; the mental (psychic) values of the beautiful and the ugly, right and wrong, and truth and falsehood; and finally the values of the Holy and the Unholy, of the Divine and of Idols. Ressentiment represents the dark underside, or inversion, of this vision of a personal and transformational non-formal ethics of values.

Ressentiment has its genesis in negative psychic feelings and feeling states that most people experience as normal reactive responses to the demands of social life — envy, jealousy, anger, hatred, spite, malice, joy at another’s misfortune, mean-spirited competition — occasioned by such things as personal criticism, ridicule, mockery, rejection, or abandonment. The ethical and psychological issue for the individual becomes how the energy from these feeling states will be channeled. Ressentiment is highly situational, always involving mental comparisons and value judgments directed at others who allegedly lack such feelings and who exhibit genuinely positive values; though it may begin with admiration and respect, it ends in a coveting of another’s qualities and goods — beauty, intelligence, charm, wit, personality, education, talent, skills, possessions, wealth, work achievement, family affiliation — in a manner resembling what is today called an inferiority complex. This comparing extends to externally acquired qualifiers such as status-symbol possessions, expensive fashion accessories, special privileges, club memberships, and plastic surgery, a principle captured in the colloquialism of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Ressentiment also typically extends to inherent social roles involving dominant and submissive relationships, not unlike Nietzsche’s Master–Slave dichotomy: the subordinate gender roles assigned to women in sexuality, child rearing, and nurturing; generational divides, in which an older generation rejects a younger one out of inability to accept its own changes and to move beyond the value pursuits proper to preceding stages of life, and the reverse rejection of the older by the younger out of inability to accept that the older generation understands and sympathizes with its challenges; progressive forms of inter-family and blended-family relations, such as younger siblings toward elders’ sense of entitlement, the hyper-critical mother-in-law toward the daughter-in-law, the abandonment of an ex-spouse in favour of a “trophy wife” or “trophy husband” as a status symbol, relational neglect of children from a previous marriage over those of the current, reactions to romantic relationships between partners of vastly different ages, and the efforts of a mediocre child to live up to a successful high-achieving parent; and the classic employee–employer adversarial relationship.

Scheler further identified what he termed “Man’s Inherent Fundamental Moral Weakness”: a sense of hopelessness that predisposes a person to regress and seek surrogates of lower value as a source of solace. When personal progress becomes stagnant or frustrated in moving from a negative to a more positive plateau, given a relatively high vital or psychic level of value attainment, there is an inherent tendency toward regression — indulgence in traditional vices and a host of physical and psychological addictions and self-destructive modes of behaviour, such as the use of narcotics. This tendency to seek surrogates inserts itself into consumerist materialism as an insatiable, self-defeating need “to have more” in order to fill the void of philosophical bankruptcy and spiritual poverty.

Pathological Ressentiment

Scheler distinguished ressentiment proper — “pathological ressentiment” — from its more ordinary forms. By its very origin, he wrote, ressentiment is chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority; where it occurs elsewhere, it is due either to psychological contagion — the spiritual venom of ressentiment being extremely contagious — or to the violent suppression of an impulse that subsequently revolts by embittering and poisoning the personality. Pathological ressentiment is therefore not materially linked exclusively to socio-economic status but cuts across all strata of society, including the most powerful.

In pathological ressentiment a sense of impotence develops, especially where situational and social factors render a person unable to release or resolve negative psychic feelings in a positive and constructive manner — what is today called repression. Ressentiment is defused whenever one has the power and ability to retaliate or act out against an oppressor; an ancient Roman citizen, as Master, could be expected to take revenge straightaway upon his Slave, while the reverse would be unthinkable. When such feelings can be acted out, no ressentiment results; but when a person cannot release them against those evoking them, thus developing a sense of impotence, and when they are continuously re-experienced over time, ressentiment arises. For Scheler, however, the essence of impotence here has less to do with an actual external oppressor than with a self-inflicted personal sense of inadequacy over limitations in the face of positive value attainment itself — one may have every advantage in life and yet lack the talent to achieve the goals one sets. These re-experienced feelings of impotence become rationalized on a subconscious level as knee-jerk attitudinal projections: prejudices, bias, racism, bigotry, cynicism, and closed-mindedness. Noteworthy is the abstract focus of ressentiment: specific individuals are no longer required for ressentiment feelings and their rationalized expressions to continue, since a representative member of the class in question suffices; members of a group can become random targets of hate borne out of impotence that seeks to level the group. This offers a plausible explanation for hate crimes, serial killings in part, genocide, the framing of an enemy in faceless non-human terms, and top-down or bottom-up class warfare. A psychic distancing of de-personalization between Master and Slave perceptions of “the other” is required for ressentiment to operate effectively.

Pathological ressentiment entails value delusion: a tendency to belittle, degrade, dismiss, or “reduce” genuine values and their bearers, done in a distinctively non-productive manner because ressentiment does not lead to affirmation of counter-values — the ressentiment-imbued secretly crave the values they publicly denounce. This represents a horizontal shift of value judgment concerning things and the world from a positive to a more negative orientation: what was once loved or thought good becomes devalued as “sour grapes” or “damaged goods,” and what was previously lacking in value is elevated to acceptability. Despite this negative direction, the ressentiment-subject remains plagued by the distractions of unattainable values, emotionally replacing them with disvalues issuing from impotence; behind this illusory and self-deceiving overturning of positive values there still remains the transparency of the true objective order of values and their ranks. Value delusion manifests as what is commonly called a superiority complex — arrogance, hubris, hypocrisy, double standards, denial, revenge, and self-projection of one’s own negative qualities onto the opposition. Emotionally, it turns happiness to sadness, compassion to hate, hope to despair, self-respect to shame, love and acceptance to rejection or competition, resolve to dread, and so on down throughout the human emotional strata; delusion is essential for the ressentiment-imbued person to maintain any semblance of mental homeostasis.

Pathological ressentiment ultimately manifests as metaphysical confusion, a form of value delusion that is more vertical in character with respect to the a priori hierarchy of value modalities. Here value delusion occurs as a twisting or false inversion of the hierarchy, wherein higher value-contents and bearers are viewed as lower and lower as higher — what is commonly called “having one’s priorities out of order.” Scheler illustrated such an inversion in his analysis of Western civilization’s humanistic, materialistic, and capitalistic propensities to elevate utility values above vital values. Carried to its logical extreme, ressentiment brings its most important achievement when it determines a whole “morality,” perverting the rules of preference until what was “evil” appears “good.”

Pathological ressentiment also results in a deadening — a psychological numbing — of normal sympathetic feeling states and of all higher forms of psychic and spiritual feeling. As opposed to the pure, well-ordered emotive life (ordo amoris) appropriate to the ethical person as created in God’s image through love (ens amans), pathological ressentiment emotively results in a disordered heart (désordre du cœur), or what is commonly called a “hardened heart.” For Scheler, morality finds expression in response to “the call of the hour,” or the exercise of personal conscience, which is based in the heart’s proper order of love in relation to positive and higher values; ressentiment, with its value delusions, wilfully favours varying degrees of a disordered heart and twisted emotions consistent with personality disorders. It is precisely the failure to feel for and identify with their victims — even to the extent of deriving sadistic pleasure — that characterizes the sociopath, the psychopath, the serial killer, the dictator, the rapist, the bully, the corrupt CEO, and the ruthless drug dealer, all of whom share this common denominator; Common Law refers to this quality as “cold-blooded.” The ressentiment-imbued person exercises such a pronounced psychic distance from his victims as never to achieve the desired lasting satisfaction produced through his own unethical actions: retaliation of this sort no longer yields any good, and expression of this sort lacks all possibility of positive results. In true ressentiment there is no emotive satisfaction but only a life-long anger and anguish in feelings that are compared with others.

Scheler held that the era suffers from a pronounced inability to feel higher levels of vital, psychic (intellectual and sympathetic), and spiritual feeling states. The process of the legal system, for instance, tends to convert the absolute character of moral sentiments into a “blameless” game of negotiating costs against benefits; and the culture has become so desensitized to outrage over public persons of power and stature lacking all feelings of shame over their wrongdoings that the greatest moral problem becomes one of complacency.

Ressentiment and the Wider Society

Pathological ressentiment bears a particular relation to the socio-political realm through what Scheler describes as man’s lowest form of social togetherness: psychic contagion — the phenomenon of uncritically following the crowd, or mob mentality, like lemmings charging over a cliff. Positive examples are good-natured crowds in a pub or at sporting events; a negative example is violent rioting. As a concept, psychic contagion bears an affinity to Nietzsche’s assessment of the Slave-type mentality. To the extent that the politically powerful — whether the “Master” faction or the “Slave” faction — are able to stir up collective cultural animosities through psychic contagion, they increase their ability to achieve their underlying socio-political objectives. Such methods usually take the forms of incendiary rhetoric, scapegoat tactics (such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, and hatred toward welfare recipients and the disadvantaged), class warfare, partisan politics, propaganda, excessive secrecy or non-transparency, closed-minded political ideology, jingoism, misguided nationalism, violence, and waging unjust war. The use of such methods of negative psychic contagion can be viewed as having propelled such historical figures or movements as the Nazis in 1930s and 40s Germany, with their genocide of the Jews and Aryan Master Race agenda, or Trump and the MAGA movement in the contemporary USA.

Ressentiment, Class, and the Person

It is a mistake to assess Scheler’s concept of ressentiment as chiefly a theory of psychological pathology, though it is surely that in part. It is also a philosophical and ethical concept from which to assess the spiritual and cultural health both of individual persons and of society as a whole — a task all the more urgent given economic globalization and its tendency toward carte blanche predatory capitalism. It is entirely acceptable to view human ethical transcendence as complementary and commensurate with a bottom-up psychology of needs and drives so long as the arch of that qualitative direction is positive in nature; the reverse, however, is false. Negative parallel aspects are irreducible to Scheler’s top-down metaphysical principle of good as emanating from personal development as spiritual beings. This distinction is illustrated by the many cases in which negative role models emerge as highly self-actualized, economically powerful individuals from a psychological standpoint — clearly “Superman”-type persons — yet are entirely lacking from an ethical, social, and spiritual standpoint: the drug kingpin or pimp whom young boys admire and look up to, or the corrupt CEO who absconds with obscene bonuses while his company goes bankrupt and the employee pension fund disintegrates. Such negative manifestations of values and value inversions demonstrate how the philosophical conception of ressentiment rests upon qualitatively different grounds transcending science and pure economics.

For Scheler, ressentiment is essentially a matter of the self in relation to values, and only proximately an issue of social conflict over resources, power, and the like — Master and Slave, or dominant and submissive relationships. What is called “having class” is not something as one-dimensional as power, money, or goods and services readily sold or purchased; rather, like the array of the a priori hierarchy of value modalities, “class” has to do with who one makes of oneself as a person, involving a whole range of factors including moral character, integrity, talents, aptitudes, achievements, education, virtues such as generosity, and reciprocal respect among diverse individuals — active citizenship. Since society must be guided by the rule of law above power, government must rely upon fairness and egalitarian principles in channeling national economic forces. Self-interest, as in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” is humanity’s and nature’s most highly efficient means of positively converting a Vital Urge into human economic benefits — the point at which “the rubber hits the road” — but it is also a force highly susceptible to greed. Governments must therefore ensure that the raw pursuit of utility value is not purely an end in itself but serves primarily to form an economic base upon which genuine value strata and culture can take root and flourish for the common good as well as for everyone’s respective individual needs. Living with less materially does not diminish in any way our access to greater emotional, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual fulfilment; only in such ways can virtue truly become its own reward.

Scheler’s Alternative to Nietzsche

Scheler’s contributions on ressentiment cannot be fully appreciated without reference to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who used the term to explain a degenerative morality issuing from an existential distinction between two basic character options: the Strong (the “Master”) and the Weak (the “Slave”). The Master-type fully accepts the burdens of freedom and decides a path of self-determination; the Slave, rather than becoming the authentic author of his own destiny, chooses a repressed, unsatisfying mode of life, blaming by projection his submissiveness, loss of self-esteem, and pitiful lot upon the dominant Master figure and his entire social class, who by contrast seem to flourish at every moment — a true enough assessment, given that economic exploitation always seems to lie at the heart of any intrinsic Master–Slave social arrangement, along with the Master class “washing their hands” of the burdens of social responsibility. This underlying ressentiment forms the rationale for a code of conduct belonging to the Slave-type or class — “Slave Morality” — such as passive acceptance of abuse, fear of reprisal for asserting personal rights due to implied intimidation, or inability to enjoy life.

Nietzsche was an atheist and harboured a particular disdain for Christianity, which he viewed as playing a key role in supporting Slave Morality: in supporting the weak and disadvantaged of humanity, Christianity undermined the authority, social position, and cultural progress of the Strong. He viewed the progress of such Slave Morality as a violation of the natural order and a thwarting of the authentic advancements of civilization available only through the Strong — a view of a “natural order” typical of 19th-century Europe, expressed in his principle of Will to Power. Scheler, by comparison, ultimately viewed the universal salvific nature of Christian love as contradicting Nietzsche’s assessments, and in later life developed an alternative metaphysical dualism of Vital Urge and Spirit: Vital Urge as closely allied to Will to Power, and Spirit as dependent yet truly distinct in character. Contrary to Nietzsche’s ultimate intent, much of his legacy ultimately led to an implosion of objectivity in which truth became relative to individual perspective, “might ultimately made right” (Social Darwinism), and ethics would become subjective and solipsistic. By contrast, Scheler — who was likewise sceptical over the historically emerging unchecked power of mass culture and the prevalence and levelling power of mediocrity upon ethical standards and upon the individual human person as a unique sacred value — was nonetheless a theistic ethical objectivist. For Scheler, the phenomenon of ressentiment principally involved Spirit, as opposed to Will to Power, drives, or Vital Urge, entailing deeper personal issues involving distortion of the objective realm of values, the self-poisoning of moral character, and personality disorder.

The Background of the Concept

The intellectual concern of the late 19th and early 20th century over the collective drift in Western civilization away from old-guard monarchical and hierarchical societal structures — in which one’s station in life was determined primarily by birth — toward the relative uncertainty and instability embodied in such Enlightenment-era ideals as democracy, nationhood, class struggle, human equality, humanism, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism, forms the backdrop of the concept. Ressentiment was first viewed as a pseudo-ethically based political force enabling the lower classes of society to rise in their situation in life at the perceived expense of the higher or more inherently “noble” classes. It thus first emerged as what some might view as a reactionary and elitist concept by today’s democratic standards, while others of a more conservative mind-set might view ressentiment as liberalism disguised as a socialist attempt at usurping the role of individual responsibility and self-determination.

The Author’s Standing and Legacy

Scheler is sometimes considered to have been both the most respected and the most neglected of the major early 20th-century German Continental philosophers in the phenomenological tradition. He developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1928, leaving a vast body of unfinished works; extrapolations from his thoughts have always since piqued interest and discussion on a variety of topics. His works were on the Nazi book burn list.