ABSTRACT
Max Scheler was one of the best known German philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century, but somehow his influence has not yet been felt very strongly in English speaking countries. He was a flamboyant and interesting character whose father was Lutheran, while his mother was orthodox Jewish and who himself converted to Catholicism. He was a phenomenologist who had been taught by Rudolf Eucken and who was also inspired by the work of Henri Bergson in France and by the life philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), which preceded phenomenology as a method for understanding the interconnections between all human sciences. It was Dilthey’s insistence on the need to distinguish between natural and human sciences that led to the idea that in the human sciences a different method was required than in the natural sciences. It was Dilthey who first spoke of the need for description in the human sciences. This fuelled Scheler’s understanding of human relations, which like Dilthey before him, he found to be inherently connective and meaningful. According to Dilthey we did not need empathy, because all human beings were fundamentally in accord with each other, as we are all essentially intersubjectively connected and have the same understanding of human needs, desires, fears and objectives. Max Ferdinand Scheler agreed with this perspective and based much of his thinking on these ideas.
