Max Scheler, philosopher

  • Thread starter Thread starter NJada
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
N

NJada

Guest
Max Scheler was an early 20th century German philosopher of the school of phenomenology. He was a teacher to St. Edith Stein, he helped to bring her and Dietrich von Hildebrand to the Church, and was an influence on Pope St. John Paul II. After having read some of his work, I’m surprised he isn’t more well-known, especially among Catholics.

I’m not entirely clear on his religion, but it seems he was Catholic for some time, then left the Church, but retained a great respect for her. It’s sad that he left the Faith (at least it seems), but it certainly had a very strong effect on his work.

I’ve read most of his book “Ressentiment” (1915). It’s short, but not particularly easy to read, but very much worth it. I think the first segment is probably the most difficult. Chapters 2-4 give such profound insight into what really makes genuine Christian love different from everything else that came before it and after it. He also very astutely critiques Nietzche’s views on Christianity. And “ressentiment” is just a good concept to consider how it might effect us: one person summed it up, “When you can’t reach the goal, so you despise it.”

I’m no professional philosopher, so I may not be able to pick apart all the nuances, but I have not noticed anything of his work that was incompatible with our Catholic Faith. If someone does notice anything seriously to look out for, please do point it out,

Please share anything else you know about him and his work that is worth knowing.

There’s a free PDF here of Ressentiment:


en.wikipedia.org

Max Scheler - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Last edited:
First of all, PROPS to you for making it as far as you did into his book. I once did a course and we literally took just ONE chapter to decipher.

His departure from the Church, which is really a dark night of the soul, had to do with Kant.
 
Last edited:
Wow, a whole course on a chapter of this book? That’s awesome! What was the course? I’m guessing it was a Catholic college? I was wondering if any colleges assign his writings.

And that’s really sad. I hadn’t heard any detail about why he left the Church. I hope to get a real grasp of sound Catholic philosophy in order to be able to discuss the underlying philosophical reasons that people don’t believe in the Faith, and I know Kant would be one of the main people to know about. But it’s definitely daunting, and I shouldn’t be too quick to jump into it. Hearing this reaffirms the need to be very careful about it.
 
Modern philosophy can be differentiated into analytic philosophy and continental philosophy.

The Continentals are weird to me. But I was trained in an analytic department.
 
Oh cool, and I’ve been wanting to get around to her writings! I’ve had a book of her memoirs for a while. Any particular recommendations?
 
I have a collection of her writing/lectures.
I think it’s called “On Women”, or “Women”.
Something like that.
I bought it from Amazon
 
Some quotes I saved. A sample of Ressentiment:

Basic idea of ‘ressentiment’:
Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments.
Click to expand...
The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite. . . . Thirst for revenge is the most important source of ressentiment. . . . Yet all this is not ressentiment. These…lead to ressentiment only if there occurs neither a moral self-conquest (such as genuine forgiveness in the case of revenge) nor an act or some other adequate expression of emotion (such as verbal abuse or shaking one‟s fist), and if this restraint is caused by a pronounced awareness of impotence. . . . Feelings of revenge are favored by strong pretensions which remain concealed, or by great pride coupled with an inadequate social position. . . .
Click to expand...
All the seemingly positive valuations and judgments of ressentiment are hidden devaluations and negations.
Click to expand...
Christian Love and Ancient Greek Love:
The Christian view boldly denies the Greek axiom that love is an aspiration of the lower towards the higher. On the contrary, now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar…the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans. The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility. He acts in the peculiarly pious conviction that through this “condescension,” through this self-abasement and “self-renunciation” he gains the highest good and imitates God.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Christian Love and Modern Altruism:
“There are two fundamentally different ways for the strong to bend down to the weak, for the rich to help the poor, for the more perfect life to help the “less perfect”. . . .
Click to expand...
Love in Jesus’ sense helps energetically. But it does not consist in the desire to help, or even in “benevolence”. Such love is, as it were, immersed in positive value, and helping and benevolence are only its consequences. The fake love of ressentiment man offers no real help, since for his perverted sense of values, evils like “sickness” and “poverty” have become goods…so that raising the small or curing the sick would mean removing them from their salvation. . . . The usefulness may be great with little love or none at all, and it may be small while love is great. The widow’s mites (Mark 12:42-44) are more to God than the gifts of the rich—not because they are only “mites” or because the giver is only a “poor widow,” but because her action reveals more love. . . . In the very act of self-renunciation, the person eternally wins himself. He is blissful in loving and giving, for “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). Love is not valuable and does not bestow distinction on the lover because it is just one of the countless forces which further human or social welfare. No, the value is love itself, its penetration of the whole person . . . The important thing is not the amount of welfare, it is that there should be a maximum of love among men. The act of helping is the direct and adequate expression of love, not its meaning or “purpose”. Its meaning lies in itself.
Click to expand...
But 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. Turning toward others is but the secondary consequence of this urge to flee from oneself. One cannot love anybody without turning away from oneself. However, the crucial question is whether this movement is prompted by the desire to turn toward a positive value, or whether the intention is a radical escape from oneself. “Love” of the second variety is inspired by self-hatred, by hatred of one’s own weakness and misery. The mind is always on the point of departing for distant places. Afraid of seeing itself and its inferiority, it is driven to give itself to the other—not because of his worth, but merely for the sake of his “otherness”. 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.
Click to expand...
 
Nietzsche’s criticism incorrect about Christianity itself, but correct about corrupted forms of Christianity:
Nietzsche interprets Christianity from the outset as a mere “morality” with a religious “justification,” not primarily as a “religion,” and he applies to Christian values a standard which they themselves refuse consciously: the standard of the maximum quantity of life [rather than the maximum quantity of love: John 15:13; Ps 63:3].
Click to expand...
The forces and laws which rule the evolution of life and the formation and development of political and social communities, even wars between nations, class struggle, and the passions they entail—all those are taken for granted by Jesus as permanent factors of existence. He does not want to replace them by love or anything else. Such demands as universal peace or the termination of the social power struggle are entirely foreign to his religious and moral sermon. The “peace on earth” for which he asks is a profound state of blissful quietude which is to permeate, as from above, the historical process of struggle and conflict which governs the evolution of life and of human associations. It is a sacred region of peace, love, and forgiveness, existing in the depth of man’s soul in the midst of all struggle and preventing him from believing that the goals of the conflict are ultimate and definitive. Jesus does not mean that the struggle should cease and that the instincts which cause it should wither away. Therefore the paradoxical precept that one should love one’s enemy is by no means equivalent to the modern shunning of all conflict. Nor is it meant as a praise of those whose instincts are too weak for enmity (Nietzsche speaks of the “tamed modern gregarious animal”)! On the contrary: the precept of loving one’s enemy presupposes the existence of hostility, it accepts the fact that there are constitutive forces in human nature which sometimes necessarily and cannot be historically modified. It only demands that even the true and genuine enemy—he whom I know to be my enemy and whom I am justified in combating with all means at my disposal—should be my “brother in the kingdom of God”. In the midst of the struggle, hatred should be absent, especially that ultimate hatred which is directed against the salvation of his soul.
Click to expand...
The greatest mistake would be to interpret the Christian movement on the basis of dim analogies with certain forms of the modern social and democratic movement. Jesus is not a kind of “popular hero” and “social politician”. . . . Yet Friedrich Nietzsche’s own conception of Christianity is strongly influenced by this widespread Jesus picture, which was propagated by Christian and non-Christian socialists. Therefore he thinks that the motives and arguments which set him against modern Socialism and Communism also apply to Christian morality and its genius. But Nietzsche’s attack touches Jesus and the core of Christianity as little as the praise of those “socialists,” since both share the same mistaken premise.
Click to expand...
 
And I’m the opposite to you. I was raised in the continental department. We had one analytic lecturer, and I always found him to be riveting. Wrote with a BEAUTIFUL Monblanc fountain pen I always envied.
 
Do not quote me thus, but I think he left the Church due to his problem with an “institution” as such. He never ever lapsed into atheism, however.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top