Max Scheler’s Philosophy

Abstract

When Max Scheler suddenly passed away in 1928 at the age of barely fifty-four, his friend Ortega y Gasset dedicated to him a beautiful eulogy. He was the first genius, the Adam in the new paradise of eidetic intuition which Husserl’s phenomenology had made accessible, the first to whom all things, even the most familiar ones, revealed their essence and their meaning. They appeared to him in a new light with unambiguous outlines like mountain peaks in the early morning. Thus he was overwhelmed by a wealth of new discoveries. And he had to proclaim so many lucid notions that he staggered, bewildered by cognition, drunk with clarity, inebriated by truth. He was in the true Platonic sense, an “enthusiastic” philosopher. But he lived in continual mental haste, and for this very reason his writings are characterized by both clarity and disorder; without organization and structure, they are full of inconsistencies, and it will be the task of future generations to supply his thought with the missing architecture and order.