Max Scheler was born in Munich, Germany, on August 22, 1874, to a Lutheran father and an orthodox Jewish mother. As an adolescent, he turned to Catholicism, probably because of its conception of love; during his forties he became increasingly non-committal.
Scheler studied medicine in Munich and Berlin, and philosophy and sociology under Dilthey and Georg Simmel in 1895. He received his doctorate in 1897, and his associate professorship (habilitation-thesis) in 1899, at the University of Jena. His adviser was Rudolf Eucken, a 1908 Nobel Prize winner for literature and a correspondent of William James. Throughout his life, Scheler retained a strong interest in the philosophy of American Pragmatism.
From 1900 to 1906, Scheler taught at the University of Jena. In 1902, he met the renowned phenomenologist E. Husserl for the first time in Halle. Scheler was never a student of Husserl's, and their relationship remained strained, but he was influenced by Husserl’s ideas. Later, Scheler was in contact with several of Husserl's disciples during his years (1907–10) as a professor at Munich. Scheler was somewhat critical of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900) and Ideas I(1913), and he also harbored reservations about Being and Time, by Heidegger, whom he also met at various times.
From 1907-1910, Scheler taught at the University of Munich. There he joined the Phenomenological Circle which had formed around M. Beck, Th. Conrad, J. Daubert, M. Geiger, D. v. Hildebrand, Th. Lipps, and A. Pfaender. A personal matter put him in an unfair position between the predominantly Catholic university and the local socialist media, and resulted in the loss of his Munich teaching position in 1910.
From 1910 to 1911, Scheler lectured at the Philosophical Society of Goettingen, and made other and renewed acquaintances there with Th. Conrad, H. Conrad-Martius, M. Geiger, J. Hering, R. Ingarden, D. von Hildebrand, E. Husserl, A. Koyre, and H. Reinach. Edith Stein was one of his students. Scheler unwittingly influenced Catholic thinkers to this day, including Stein and Pope John Paul II, who wrote his Habilitation and many articles on Scheler's philosophy.
After his first marriage had ended in divorce, Scheler married Märit Furtwaengler, the sister of the noted conductor, in 1912. During World War I (1914-1918) Scheler was drafted, but discharged because of astigmatism of the eyes. In 1919, he became professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne, where he stayed until 1928. Early that year, he accepted a new position at the University of Frankfurt, and looked forward to meeting Ernst Cassirer, Karl Mannheim, Rudolf Otto, and R. Wilhelm, to whom he sometimes referred in his writings. In 1927, at a conference arranged by Graf Keyserling in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, Scheler delivered a lengthy lecture, entitled Man's Particular Place (Die Sonderstellung des Menschen), published later in a much abbreviated form as Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Man's Situation in the Cosmos). His well known oratory style and delivery captivated his audience for almost four hours. Toward the end of his life, many invitations were extended to him, including some from China, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States. His health kept him landlocked, however, as his doctor advised him against travel, and he had to cancel his reservations on the Star Line.
At that time Scheler increasingly focused on political development. He had met the Russian emigrant-philosopher N. Berdyaev in Berlin, in 1923. Scheler was the only scholar of rank in the German intelligentsia who warned in public speeches, as early as 1927, about the dangers of the both Marxism and the growing Nazi movement. Politics and Morals and The Idea of Eternal Peace and Pacifism were subjects of talks he delivered in Berlin during 1927. His analysis of capitalism revealed it to be a calculating, globally expanding "mind-set," rather than an economic system. While economic capitalism may have had some roots in ascetic Calvinism, Scheler detected its real motivation as a modern, sub-conscious insecurity expressed in an increasing need for financial and personal security, protection, safety, and rational manageability of all entities. Max Scheler denounced the subordination of the value of the individual to this global tendency, and predicted a new era of culture and values, which he called "The World-Era of Adjustment."
Scheler also advocated the establishment of an international university in Switzerland. He was supportive of programs such as "continuing education," and of what he seems to have first called a "United States of Europe." He deplored the gap existing in Germany between political power and mind, a gap which he considered to be the source of an impending dictatorship, and the greatest obstacle toward establishing a German democracy. Five years after his death, the Nazi dictatorship (1933-1945) suppressed Scheler's work.
No comments:
Post a Comment