Scheler Max (1874–1928), German phenomenologist, social philosopher, and sociologist of knowledge. Born in Munich, he studied in Jena; when he returned to Munich in 1907 he came in contact with phenomenology, especially the realist version of the early Husserl and his Munich School followers. Scheler’s first works were phenomenological studies in ethics leading to his ultimate theory of value: he described the moral feelings of sympathy and resentment and wrote a criticism of Kantian formalism and rationalism, Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Ethics of Value (1913). During the war, he was an ardent nationalist and wrote essays in support of the war that were also philosophical criticisms of modern culture, opposed to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ naturalism and rational calculation. Although he later embraced a broader notion of community, such criticisms of modernity remained constant themes of his writings. His conversion to Catholicism after the war led him to apply phenomenological description to religious phenomena and feelings, and he later turned to themes of anthropology and natural science. The core of Scheler’s phenomenological method is his conception of the objectivity of essences, which, though contained in experience, are a priori and independent of the knower. For Scheler, values are such objective, though non-Platonic, essences. Their objectivity is intuitively accessible in immediate experience and feelings, as when we experience beauty in music and do not merely hear certain sounds. Scheler distinguished between valuations or value perspectives on the one hand, which are historically relative and variable, and values on the other, which are independent and invariant. There are four such values, the hierarchical organization of which could be both immediately intuited and established by various public criteria like duration and independence: pleasure, vitality, spirit, and religion. Corresponding to these values are various personalities who are not creators of value but their discoverers, historical disclosers, and exemplars: the ‘artist of consumption,’ the hero, the genius, and the saint. A similar hierarchy of values applies to forms of society, the highest of which is the church, or a Christian community of solidarity and love. Scheler criticizes the leveling tendencies of liberalism for violating this hierarchy, leading to forms of resentment, individualism, and nationalism, all of which represent the false ordering of values. See also HUSSERL , KANT, NATURALISM , PHENOMENOLOG. J.Bo.