Schriften aus dem Nachlass – Max Scheler

Essays on ethics, models of leadership, and the forms of knowledge

What the Work Is

Schriften aus dem Nachlass is a German-language collection of Max Scheler’s writings gathered from his literary estate and issued in 1957. It belongs to the posthumous edition of Scheler’s complete works, where it constitutes the first volume of the Nachlass series, subtitled Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre (On Ethics and Theory of Knowledge). The volume brings together texts on moral philosophy and the theory of knowledge that Scheler worked on during his lifetime but did not publish as books. Among the pieces it contains is the long study Vorbilder und Führer (Models and Leaders), which Scheler reworked repeatedly between 1911 and 1921.

What the Book Is About

The writings collected here circle around two connected questions: how human beings come to know values, and how they come to be shaped by them. Scheler approaches ethics not as a matter of rules or commands but as a matter of lived experience — the direct, felt apprehension of values that he took to be the foundation of moral action. The volume also extends this concern into the theory of knowledge, asking what kinds of knowledge there are, what each is for, and how they relate to the formation of the person. Running through the collection is Scheler’s conviction that values are not invented by the knower but encountered, and that the moral life consists in responding to what is genuinely and objectively valuable.

Key Ideas and Themes

The experience of value. Scheler’s ethics rests on the claim that values are given to us in experience, not derived by reasoning. They are felt, intuitive phenomena with a character of their own — he compares them to a colour such as yellow, which cannot be reduced to any other colour. Whether a value is genuine is settled by an inner, felt evidence, not by deduction. This intuitive apprehension is complex and many-layered; Scheler is careful to distinguish it from mere pleasure and from inductive generalization. One consequence he draws is that studying the ethos of other ages and peoples can widen our access to the realm of values and expose the culturally limited character of our own value-experience.

Against Kantian ethics. Because moral goodness arises from the felt apprehension of value within what Scheler calls the personal sphere of the spirit, good action flows spontaneously and autonomously from the person who has grasped it. He sets this against Kant, for whom the rational will determines moral decisions in a way Scheler regards as externally imposed. Whether Scheler’s critique does justice to Kant is a question that later scholarship has raised.

The hierarchy of values. The intuitive experience of values discloses an ordered system. Scheler distinguishes “self-value modalities” — values that carry their worth in themselves — arranged in ranks: the pleasant and unpleasant as sensory values; the noble and the base as vital values; the right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, true and false as properties of spiritual values; and the holy and the profane as values of absolute objects. To these correspond “consequential values,” which show themselves in our responses to other people, art, science, and law — liking and disliking, approving and disapproving, esteeming and disesteeming, the useful and the harmful, requital, and sympathy. This hierarchy, Scheler holds, gives security and certainty to action.

Models and leaders. The study Vorbilder und Führer distinguishes between models (Vorbilder) and leaders (Führer) in a society. Scheler treats the term “leader” as value-neutral, with no connection to the later political use of the word. He argues that the question of models is more fundamental than the question of leaders: the models a society consciously or unconsciously chooses — “which gods we serve” — determine which leaders it will select. Models, unlike leaders, are not publicly present; Scheler describes them as dark and mysterious images dwelling in the soul, where they are moved and changed. The relation between leader and following is real, requiring the leader to be here and now; the relation between model and copy is ideal, so that models need not be historical persons at all — they may be gods, legendary figures, or characters from books, “floating shapes” that guide us.

Scheler identifies five types of model. The saint is always unique, and in this domain model and leader coincide; religious models and leaders inspire all other models and forms of leadership. The saint is believed in not because his deeds seem good or his words true, but because one believes in his person — his charisma — and his miracles, thoughts, and noble acts testify to his unique connection with God and holiness. The genius may be many; his basic forms are the artist, the philosopher, the sage, and the judge, and his effectiveness works through his work. He does not adapt himself to the world but enlarges it. The hero is the type oriented to the noble, a person of will and power in whom the will to power is joined to maximum responsibility and the love of extending that responsibility; statesmen and commanders are his chief types. The leading spirit of civilization is valuable not primarily as a person but through his achievements and services; he wants progress, and inventors are his example. The artist of enjoyment prefers the pleasant to the useful and makes all values objects of enjoyment; he is an egoist whose need is luxury, plucking the fruits of the leading spirit and passing on to it new goals to strive for. Scheler holds that the basic values named here are constant throughout historical development — “the pole star of man” — and that great historical figures are analyzed through these models while empirical people are measured against these ideas. Only when the models are oriented to history and experience, and “drink the blood proper to them,” do they become concrete models.

The forms of knowledge and the value of formation. In Die Formen des Wissens und die Bildung (1925), Scheler ties knowledge to his picture of the human being. Viewed purely functionally, he argues, the human appears as a developmental error of nature — inefficient in the effort it spends on self-preservation. Scheler rejects this scientific image of humanity as the sole guiding idea for education. The human being has spiritual needs, has “spirit” and “reason” that natural science cannot grasp; whoever sees spirit and reason only as a complicated by-product of the drive of life will not be able to follow the idea and value of Bildung — formation or education — which, Scheler says, “wants to posit a self-value.”

Drawing on newly recognized animal capacities such as technical intelligence, meaningful choice, tool use and tool-making, and altruistic behaviour — capacities once attributed only to humans — Scheler treats the older philosophical assumption of a sharp divide as a fundamental misjudgment. Yet he still holds that the human is more than his abilities. Unlike the animal, the human has spheres with their own meaningful inner structure, in which he can perform “acts of an autonomous lawfulness” not explicable by physiology. A person can, through reflection, prefer the preservation and realization of a spiritual value — honour, dignity, salvation, conviction — even over the highest vital value, the preservation of his own existence. An animal cannot choose between values or prefer one to another. The human spirit is marked by being guided by cultural values, by a capacity for desire-free love, by independence from drives, and by the ability to gain insight into the essence of things and to find universally valid values. Animals live entirely within their environment, but the human reaches beyond every possible milieu of life.

To realize this reaching-beyond, the human depends on formation. Through Bildung the individual can grow beyond himself and realize his own essence, his divine nature; the becoming-human and the becoming of the divine are inseparably bound together. In Scheler’s cosmology the human is a microcosm mirroring the macrocosm, and through formation gains knowledge of the divine and insight into cooperation with it, while the divine in turn comes to know, understand, and redeem itself. Formation thus takes on a cosmological dimension that surpasses everything individual — it is “the meaning of the earth, indeed of the world itself.” Scheler nonetheless insists he is no “dandy”: the human should not become a work of art, and formation is not the will to make oneself into one; in formation one should lose oneself in order to gain oneself, which happens by letting oneself be seized by a model. There is no single humanity valid for all people.

From this Scheler distinguishes three leading forms of knowledge: the knowledge of achievement and domination belonging to the positive sciences, aimed at practical goals; the knowledge of formation belonging to philosophy, aimed at shaping the personality; and the knowledge of redemption and salvation belonging to the religions, as a loving participation in the process of being itself. Each has its own motivation, cognitive aims, cognitive acts, exemplary personality types, social groups of acquisition and dissemination, and historical forms of movement. To these correspond the value modalities of vital values, spiritual values, and values of holiness. Scheler regards all three as necessary. The one-sided orientation of Western culture toward the knowledge of achievement endangers these values, while Asian cultures possess an enormous lead in philosophical formation and redemptive knowledge. To correct the imbalance he calls for a cultural exchange, in which the highest value falls to redemptive knowledge — alone free of purpose, and thus serving the becoming-human, with achievement and socially relevant knowledge ultimately in its service. Humanistic formation-knowledge therefore cannot be the final goal.

Structure and Approach

The volume is a collection rather than a single continuous treatise, gathering texts that Scheler revised over years and left unpublished at his death. Its approach is phenomenological: rather than deducing moral principles, it seeks to let the phenomena of value, of models, and of knowledge show themselves as they are experienced. Scheler works by distinguishing — separating genuine value-apprehension from pleasure and from induction, separating models from leaders, ranking types of value and types of knowledge — and by setting his positions against alternatives such as Kantian ethics and the purely scientific image of humanity. He also draws on the findings of other disciplines of his time, treating philosophy as obliged to take empirical results into account.

Significance and Influence

Scheler’s material value ethics, developed in connection with the phenomenological convictions of his era, has been described in scholarship as without doubt the principal achievement of twentieth-century ethics, and as comparable to outlooks that function as guiding principles in Asian cultures. The intuitive value-phenomena Scheler places at the foundation of individual action, on this reading, can be understood in a way analogous to Asian views, in which such phenomena are likewise the ground of responsibility for one’s own action. Scheler himself had wished, as early as 1925, for an exchange between Eastern and Western philosophies and theories of redemption — a wish that the writings collected here, with their call for cultural exchange and their ranking of redemptive knowledge highest, express in his own terms.

Scheler’s account of the three forms of knowledge is embedded in a broader philosophical anthropology that he regarded as his most persistent philosophical concern. In 1928 he published an outline of the areas he intended to treat within it: a typology of human self-consciousness; an essential ontology of the human being; a comparative presentation of human and animal; a doctrine of the temporal course of human life; a doctrine of the origin of the human being; a philosophy of the human being under social and historical aspects; the future of the human being; a comparison between different anthropologies on the basis of essential ontology; and the relation of the human being to the ground of the world. He had announced earlier that he would publish a foundational and comprehensive philosophical anthropology, but after his death it was established that he had never begun to write it. What he left behind were lectures and statements on anthropological themes scattered through other publications, the most extensive of which was Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, which exists as a book and offers a short, very compressed summary of some main points of the projected anthropology.

Among those main points is the essence of the human being. For Scheler as phenomenologist and metaphysician, this essence emerges from the development of organic life together with the activities of spirit. This combined view led to his teaching that the human being is to be regarded both as a biopsychic living creature and as a “bearer of spirit.” Contemporaries such as the phenomenologist Helmuth Plessner defined the human being exclusively from the organic and the historical. Scheler additionally sees the human being rooted in a “ground of the world,” which is the theme of the metaphysical side of his anthropology. The empirical sciences have their own access to anthropology; metaphysics, he holds, must take empirical results into account.

The Essence of Life

Scheler determines the human form of life first by comparing the human being with the animal. He sets out his picture of the living being in a model of organic stages, naming four organic stages in the development of biological and psychic forms of life. To each biological stage he assigns a psychic one, which he calls “stages from the inner side of life.” All these stages of development, which Scheler following the metaphysician Nicolai Hartmann also called “strata,” build on one another hierarchically. The categories of a lower stratum are transformed in the higher one and thereby enriched by something new. Scheler characterizes each stratum by a particular principle.

The first is the stratum of feeling-drive (Gefühlsdrang). Scheler gives it the properties “dark,” “undifferentiated,” and “ecstatic,” and names it as the drive behind everything animals and human beings feel, perceive, and imagine. He compares the working of the feeling-drive in the human being to the autonomous functioning of the vegetative nervous system. Even in plants, he holds, one may speak of a feeling-drive, which shows itself in growth. In animal and human being the life of drives is the expression of the feeling-drive.