Max Scheler Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Antiquity believed that the forces of love in the universe were limited. Therefore they were to be used sparingly, and everyone was to be loved only according to his value.

Max Scheler
In the ancient notion of love, on the other hand, there is an element of anxiety. The noble fears the descent to the less noble, is afraid of being infected and pulled down. The sage of antiquity does not have the same firmness, the same inner certainty of himself and his own value, as the genius and hero of Christian love.

Max Scheler
The kingdom of God has become the other world, which stands mechanically beside this world —an opposition unknown to the strongest periods of Christianity.

Max Scheler
It is precisely the essential feature of egoism that it does not apprehend the full value of the isolated self. The egoist sees himself only with regard to the others, as a member of society who wishes to possess and acquire more than the others. Self-directedness or other-directedness have no essential bearing on the specific quality of love or hatred. These acts are different in themselves, quite independently of their direction

Max Scheler
Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper organic mendacity. Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness. There is organic mendacity whenever a man's mind admits only those impressions which serve his interest or his instinctive attitude. Already in the process of mental reproduction and recollection, the contents of his experience are modified in this direction. He who is mendacious has no need to lie! In his case, the automatic process of forming recollections, impressions, and feelings is involuntarily slanted, so that conscious falsification becomes unnecessary.

Max Scheler
The ultimate goal of the arriviste's aspirations is not to acquire a thing of value, but to be more highly esteemed than others. He merely uses the thing as an indifferent occasion for overcoming the oppressive feeling of inferiority which results from his constant comparisons.

Max Scheler
To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness. These affects have become fixed attitudes, detached from all determinate objects. Independently of his will, this man's attention will be instinctively drawn by all events which can set these affects in motion. The ressentiment attitude even plays a role in the formation of perceptions, expectations, and memories. It automatically selects those aspects of experience which can justify the factual application of this pattern of feeling.

Max Scheler
The precepts Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you … are born from the Gospel's profound spirit of individualism, which refuses to let one's own actions and conduct depend in any way on somebody else's acts. The Christian refuses to let his acts be mere reactions—such conduct would lower him to the level of his enemy. The act is to grow organically from the person, as the fruit from the tree. … What the Gospel demands is not a reaction which is the reverse of the natural reaction, as if it said: Because he strikes you on the cheek, tend the other —but a rejection of all reactive activity, of any participation in common and average ways of acting and standards of judgment.

Max Scheler
Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the past has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.

Max Scheler
When we are told, in the same tone, that these people will be rewarded in heaven for their distress, and that heaven is the exact reverse of the earthly order (the first shall be last), we distinctly feel how the ressentiment-laden man transfers to God the vengeance he himself cannot wreak on the great. In this way, he can satisfy his revenge at least in imagination, with the aid of an other-worldly mechanism of rewards and punishments.

Max Scheler
Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education.

Max Scheler
The old maid with her repressed cravings for tenderness, sex, and propagation, is rarely quite free of ressentiment. What we call prudery, in contrast with true modesty, is but one of the numerous variants of sexual ressentiment. The habitual behavior of many old maids, who obsessively ferret out all sexually significant events in their surroundings in order to condemn them harshly, is nothing but sexual gratification transformed into ressentiment satisfaction. Thus the criticism accomplishes the very thing it pretends to condemn.

Max Scheler
Even after his conversion, the true 'apostate' is not primarily committed to the positive contents of his new belief and to the realization of its aims. He is motivated by the struggle against the old belief and lives on for its negation. The apostate does not affirm his new convictions for their own sake; he is engaged in a continuous chain of acts of revenge against his own spiritual past. In reality he remains a captive of this past, and the new faith is merely a handy frame of reference for negating and rejecting the old. As a religious type, the apostate is therefore at the opposite pole from the 'resurrected,' whose life is transformed by a new faith which is full of intrinsic meaning and value.

Max Scheler
The highest and ultimate personality values are declared to be independent of contrasts like rich and poor, healthy and sick, etc. The world had become accustomed to considering the social hierarchy, based on status, wealth, vital strength, and power, as an exact image of the ultimate values of morality and personality. The only way to disclose the discovery of anew and higher sphere of being and life, of the kingdom of God whose order is independent of that worldly and vital hierarchy, was to stress the vanity of the old values in this higher order.

Max Scheler
If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion.

Max Scheler
It is peculiar to ressentiment criticism that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil. The evil is merely the pretext for the criticism.

Max Scheler
We have a tendency to overcome any strong tension between desire and impotence by depreciating or denying the positive value of the desired object.

Max Scheler
The medieval peasant prior to the 13th century does not compare himself to the feudal lord, nor does the artisan compare himself to the knight. … From the king down to the hangman and the prostitute, everyone is noble in the sense that he considers himself as irreplaceable. In the system of free competition, on the other hand, the notions on life's tasks and their value are not fundamental, they are but secondary derivations of the desire of all to surpass all the others. No place is more than a transitory point in this universal chase.

Max Scheler
Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of criteria for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no object that has not stood the test of criticism

Max Scheler
When we cannot obtain a thing, we comfort ourselves with the reassuring thought that it is not worth nearly as much as we believed.

Max Scheler
The fake love of ressentiment man offers no real help, since for his perverted sense of values, evils like sickness and poverty have become goods.

Max Scheler
All the seemingly positive valuations and judgments of ressentiment are hidden devaluations and negations.

Max Scheler
To a lesser degree, a secret ressentiment underlies every way of thinking which attributes creative power to mere negation and criticism. Thus modern philosophy is deeply penetrated by a whole type of thinking which is nourished by ressentiment. I am referring to the view that the true and the given is not that which is self-evident, but rather that which is indubitable or incontestable, which can be maintained against doubt and criticism.

Max Scheler