Why Max Scheler believed that love is the essential key to true philosophical knowledge
In short: Max Scheler, once hailed as the strongest philosophical force in early twentieth-century Europe, argued that logic alone is insufficient for understanding reality. Instead, he proposed that a specific moral attitude—rooted in the movement of love—is the necessary prerequisite for seeing the essential values that define our world.
Born in Munich in 1874, Max Scheler was a central figure in the development of phenomenology. While he built upon the work of Edmund Husserl, Scheler diverged from the idea that phenomenology was merely a methodical procedure. He viewed it as a spiritual attitude, a way of seeing that requires the philosopher to engage directly with phenomena rather than treating them as stationary objects to be analyzed through cold, scientific logic.
For Scheler, the act of love is the fundamental engine of philosophical inquiry. He argued that because the primal essence of reality is characterized by love, one can only achieve deep participation in that reality by sharing in its movement. Love is not just a reaction to value; it is the very condition that allows us to perceive higher values in the world. When we love, we open our spiritual eyes to ever-higher qualities; conversely, hatred acts as a barrier, closing us off and leading to the devaluation of the world.
Scheler’s ethical framework organizes values into a hierarchy, ranging from sensible comforts to spiritual and religious values. He defined good and evil based on the realization of these values within the sphere of human will. Goodness, he argued, stems from the basic moral tenor of the person, where intended actions align with preferred values. This focus on the person and their moral disposition became central to his later work in philosophical anthropology, where he sought to strip away inherited prejudices from religion, science, and philosophy.
Despite his immense influence—acknowledged by contemporaries like Martin Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset—Scheler’s life was marked by personal and physical volatility. A heavy smoker of up to eighty cigarettes a day, he suffered a series of heart attacks in 1928, dying in a Frankfurt hospital at age 53. His planned major work on anthropology remained incomplete, leaving behind only fragments that continue to challenge how we understand the human condition.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Max Scheler
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