ABSTRACT
Max Scheler is—horribile dictu—a system thinker. Ethical, epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical issues are variously intertwined in his work. Few other phenomenologists have dealt as extensively with the phenomenology of emotions as Scheler. He developed a general account of emotions, suggested his theory of the so-called ‘feelings of sympathy’, but also discussed a number of distinct emotions. A central idea of Scheler’s theory of emotions is the assumption of a stratified emotional life. Scheler seems to follow Husserl’s remarks on the difference between feeling-sensations and feeling-acts. Scheler claims that there is such a thing as an a priori ethics of feelings. The argument for this claim is connected to several assumptions about the intentional nature of feelings. Scheler describes the values of the agreeable and the disagreeable as belonging to the lowest value-modality. They are sensually given (with their modes of enjoyment and suffering).
