Max Scheler Quotes (1874-1928)

“In ressentiment morality, love for the “small,” the “poor,” the “weak,” and the “oppressed” is really disguised hatred, repressed envy, an impulse to detract, etc., directed against the opposite phenomena: “wealth,” “strength,” “power,” “largesse.” When hatred does not dare to come out into the open, it can be easily expressed in the form of ostensible love—love for something which has features that are the opposite of those of the hated object. This can happen in such a way that the hatred remains secret. When we hear that falsely pious, unctuous tone (it is the tone of a certain “socially-minded” type of priest), sermonizing that love for the “small” is our first duty, love for the “humble” inspirit, since God gives “grace” to them, then it is often only hatred posing as Christian love.”

“A new feeling of freedom is something we can only receive from our collective repentance for collective guilt.”

“Jesus’ view of nature and life, which sometimes shines through his speeches and parables in fragments and hidden allusions, shows quite clearly that he understood this fact.”

“The systematic perversion and reinterpretation of the values themselves is much more effective than the “slandering” of persons or the falsification of the world view could ever be.”

“Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education.”

“The “noble” person has a completely naïve and non-reflective awareness of his own value and of his fullness of being, an obscure conviction which enriches every conscious moment of his existence, as if he were autonomously rooted in the universe. This should not be mistaken for “pride.” Quite on the contrary, pride results from an experienced diminution of this “naive” self-confidence. It is a way of “holding on” to one’s value, of seizing and “preserving” it deliberately. ... His naive self-confidence is by no means “compounded” of a series of positive valuations based on specific qualities, talents, and virtues: it is originally directed at his very essence and being.”

“The “noble” person has a completely naïve and non-reflective awareness of his own value and of his fullness of being, an obscure conviction which enriches every conscious moment of his existence, as if he were autonomously rooted in the universe. This should not be mistaken for “pride.” Quite on the contrary, pride results from an experienced diminution of this “naïve” self-confidence. It is a way of “holding on” to one’s value, of seizing and “preserving” it deliberately. ... His naïve self-confidence is by no means “compounded” of a series of positive valuations based on specific qualities, talents, and virtues: it is originally directed at his very essence and being.”

“There is a completely different way of stooping to the small, the lowly, and the common, even though it may seem almost the same. Here love does not spring from an abundance of vital power, from firmness and security. Here it is only a euphemism for escape, for the inability to “remain at home” with oneself (chez soi). Turning toward others is but the secondary consequence of this urge to flee from oneself. … Modern philosophical jargon has found a revealing term for this phenomenon, one of the many modern substitutes for love: “altruism.” This love is not directed at a previously discovered positive value, nor does any such value flash up in the act of loving: there is nothing but the urge to turn away from oneself and to lose oneself in other people’s business. We all know a certain type of man frequently found among socialists, suffragettes, and all people with an ever-ready “social conscience”—the kind of person whose social activity is quite clearly prompted by inability to keep his attention focused on himself, on his own tasks and problems.”

“Jesus’ “mysterious” affection for the sinners, which is closely related to his ever-ready militancy against the scribes and pharisees, against every kind of social respectability ... contains a kind of awareness that the great transformation of life, the radical change in outlook he demands of man (in Christian parlance it is called “rebirth”) is more accessible to the sinner than to the “just.” ... When the noblest men are in the company of the “good”—even of the truly “good,” not only of the pharisees—they are often overcome by a sudden impetuous yearning to go to the sinners, to suffer and struggle at their side and to share their grievous, gloomy lives. This is truly no temptation by the pleasures of sin, nor a demoniacal love for its “sweetness,” nor the attraction of the forbidden or the lure of novel experiences. It is an outburst of tempestuous love and tempestuous compassion for all men who are felt as one, indeed for the universe as a whole; a love which makes it seem frightful that only some should be “good,” while the others are “bad” and reprobate. In such moments, love and a deep sense of solidarity are repelled by the thought that we alone should be “good,” together with some others. This fills us with a kind of loathing for those who can accept this privilege, and we have an urge to move away from them.”

“Dr. Scheler has attempted in this volume an exhaustive discussion and exposition of what he regards as the philosophical method par excellence. He has endeavored to combine the transcendental method so called with the psychological method. The present situation is one that in the author’s opinion imperatively demands a reconstruction of philosophical ways of procedure, and the question, as Dr. Scheler puts it, is not contained in Windelband’s maxim that “To understand Kant is to transcend Kant,” but rather “How shall Kant be transcended.” That this has yet been done Dr. Scheler cannot bring himself to admit, even in the face of the many admirable contributions that have latterly been made to philosophy. Under the influence of Professor Eucken, the philosophical method which Dr. Scheler has developed is termed the noological method. The following are some of the results: Apart from the principles of formal logic, there is no absolutely solid or self-evident datum from which philosophy in any or its forms may proceed. Neither the axioms of mathematics, nor theorems of physical science, nor “experience” in the transcendental sense, nor sensation, are entitled to lay claim to the dignity of such datum. The transcendental method is quite inadequate for treating the problems of philosophy; so is the psychological method. The noological method is an attempt to combine the divergent methods of procedure of the transcendental philosophy and the transcendental psychology. Its fundamental concepts are: “World of work” (Arbeitswelt) and “form of spiritual life” (Geistige Lebensform). By “world of work” are understood the relations recognized as interconnecting the achievements of human civilization; it is not in itself a self-evident datum, but a “well-grounded phenomenon.” Mind, and therefore also its constituent “intellect,” is at the beginning of the quest for its contents a perfectly problematic conception. It is the x that renders the “world of work” possible. Inasmuch as the “world of work” is being continually enriched by the progress of human history, it is not possible to say precisely at any one point in history what the conception of mind is. A systematic deduction of a priori principles for “all possible experience” is impossible. The formal principles have too much content to hold valid for all possible historical experience, and have too little contents to be vigorously applied in any actual historically-determined civilization. Such is the sum of Dr. Scheler’s philosophy. It will be seen that it conforms to many respects to the spirit of our time, which is gradually drifting away from the anchorage of the formal philosophy of which Kant was the greatest exponent, and of that ideal of rigor which the stupendous development of the mathematical and physical sciences of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth centuries had established as the goal of perfection which research in every department of human inquiry should strive to attain. Dr. Scheler’s work is not uninstructive reading, and his discussion of some of the present dilemmas in philosophy are not without value.”

“At one time in his life the apostate radically changes his political, religious or philosophical convictions by taking up all possible means of argumentation against that which he formerly held to be true, and lives now for the sake of its negation. His new ideas and opinions consist in continuous acts of revenge on his spiritual past.”

“Scheler himself emphasizes the passive aspect of resentment and remarks on the prominent place it occupies in the psychology of women who are dedicated to desire and possession. The fountainhead of rebellion, on the contrary, is the principle of superabundant activity and energy. Scheler is also right in saying that resentment is always highly colored by envy. But one envies what one does not have, while the rebel’s aim is to defend what he is. He does not merely claim some good that he does not possess or of which he was deprived. His aim is to claim recognition for something which he has and which has already been recognized by him, in almost every case, as more important than anything of which he could be envious.”

“Our vulnerability [to ressentiment], is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which relative equality of political and other rights and formally acknowledged social equality go hand in hand with enormous differences in genuine power, possessions and education; a society in which everyone “has the right” to consider himself equal to everybody else, while in fact being unequal to them.”