ABSTRACT
Max Scheler is dead: amidst great work of wide-ranging importance, at the point of beginning anew to forge ahead into the ultimate and the whole, at the start of new teaching duties from which he expected so much. Quite apart from the extent and variety of his productivity, Max Scheler was the strongest philosophical power in contemporary Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe—in fact, in all of present-day philosophy. Through all the changes, in ever new beginnings and struggles, he remained faithful to the inner direction of his Being. The greatness of this philosophical existence lay in his relentless [courage to] face things head-on—to face that which time continues to roll obscurely towards us, to face that which cannot be reckoned into what has come down to us, to face mankind, which will not let itself be appeased and smoothed over into a shallow humanism which praises the past.
