ABSTRACT
Max Scheler was born in Munich on August 22, 1874, of a Protestant father and a Jewish mother. The period during the First World War was important to Scheler in various ways. He wrote a work which praised the "civilizing" agency of war and as a result became a popular public figure. The last period of Scheler's thought, concerned as it is with the concept of man, strongly suggests the influence of Nietzsche. Philosophers have completely and fully refuted the reasons which these three groups of thinkers gave for their negative attitude toward metaphysics. Metaphysics is always real. Man is capable of threefold knowledge—knowledge of control and achievement, knowledge of essence or culture, knowledge of metaphysical reality or salvation. Each kind serves to reshape a realm of being—that of things, that of the culture pattern of man himself, or that of the absolute.
