Scheler was the only scholar of rank of the then German intelligentsia who gave warning in public speeches delivered as early as 1927 of the dangers of the growing National Socialist movement and Marxism.
Five years after his death, the Nazi dictatorship (1933–1945) suppressed Scheler's work.
In his analyses of capitalism Scheler argued that capitalism was a calculating, globally growing 'mind-set', rather than an economic system. While economic capitalism may have had some roots in ascetic Calvinism (cf. Max Weber), its very mind-set, however, is argued by Scheler to have had its origin in modern, subconscious angst as expressed in increasing needs for financial and other securities, for protection and personal safeguards as well as for rational manageability of all entities. However, the subordination of the value of the individual person to this mind-set was sufficient reason for Max Scheler to denounce it.
Scheler never agreed with Husserl that phenomenology is a method in the strict sense, but rather "an attitude of spiritual seeing...something which otherwise remains hidden...."
Rather, that which is given in phenomenology "is given only in the seeing and experiencing act itself." The essences are never given to an 'outside' observer with no direct contact with the thing itself. Phenomenology is an engagement of phenomena, while simultaneously a waiting for its self-givenness; it is not a methodical procedure of observation as if its object is stationary. Thus, the particular attitude (Geisteshaltung, lit. "disposition of the spirit" or "spiritual posture") of the philosopher is crucial for the disclosure, or seeing, of phenomenological facts. This attitude is fundamentally a moral one, where the strength of philosophical inquiry rests upon the basis of love. Scheler describes the essence of philosophical thinking as "a love-determined movement of the inmost personal self of a finite being toward participation in the essential reality of all possibles."
Scheler 相信先驗 這說明了 為什麼 天主教會喜歡他 Frankl也喜歡他 所以Frankl講的意義是一個先驗的存在 或正確的說 是一個我們已經失去的先驗的存在 這可以說明 will to meaning的will 是一個多麼徒勞的意志 以上 可以說明 我是多麼沒有庇蔭的活著 這件事 對我很重要 我是說 沒有庇蔭
Scheler's appropriation of a value-based metaphysics renders his phenomenology quite different from the phenomenology of consciousness (Husserl, Sartre) or the existential analysis of the being-in-the-world of Dasein (Heidegger). Scheler's concept of the "lived body" was appropriated in the early work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Scheler planned to publish his major work in Anthropology in 1929, but the completion of such a project was curtailed by his premature death in 1928. Some fragments of such work have been published in Nachlass.
Six volumes of his posthumous works (Nachlass), so far not translated from German, make up volumes 10-15 of the 15 volume Collected Works (Gesammelte Werke) edited by Maria Scheler and Manfred S. Frings as listed in http://www.maxscheler.com/scheler4.shtml#4-CollectedWorks
