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Read the original ↗1921 · German original
Vom Ewigen im Menschen
by Max Scheler
Scheler's essays on repentance and rebirth, on the essence of philosophy, and on the grounding of religion are real apologetics done with the tools of phenomenology — an attempt to describe religious acts as they actually present themselves rather than to argue them into place from outside. Written in the wreckage of the First World War, and addressed to a Europe he thought needed rebuilding from the inside.
The convert behind the argument
Scheler was born to a Lutheran father and a Jewish mother and was received into the Catholic Church as a young man; the period of Vom Ewigen im Menschen is his most confessionally Catholic. He later moved away from that position again, which he never concealed, and his personal life was turbulent enough to cost him academic posts. The book stands as the record of what he saw while he was standing there.
Summary
The volume gathers essays written across the war years and just after — on repentance and rebirth, on the Christian idea of community and love, on the essence of philosophy, and on the cultural rebuilding of Europe — together with a substantial new section on religious renewal written for the book.
Scheler's preface explains the title: he is trying to lift his gaze above the storms of the moment toward what in man makes him man. The method throughout is phenomenological — describe the act of repentance, or of faith, as it is actually given in experience, rather than reducing it to psychology or deducing it from metaphysics.
The long central study on religious renewal is the properly apologetic part: it argues against what Scheler calls fideism, the retreat into a faith with no objective content, while equally rejecting the attempt to found faith on metaphysics and rational inference. His alternative is an investigation of the distinctive character of religious objects and values in their own right.
Who was Max Scheler?
Max Scheler (1874–1928) was a German philosopher, born in Munich to a Lutheran father and a Jewish mother, and one of the leading figures of the phenomenological movement alongside Husserl. He was received into the Catholic Church as a young man.
He held posts at Jena, Munich and Cologne, worked on ethics, sympathy and the sociology of knowledge, and was a public intellectual of some prominence during and after the war. Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1921) belongs to his most explicitly Catholic period; he moved away from that position in his final years.
Common questions
- What is Vom Ewigen im Menschen about?
- It collects Max Scheler's essays on repentance and rebirth, Christian community and love, the essence of philosophy, and the rebuilding of European culture, together with a long study on religious renewal — an attempt to treat religious experience phenomenologically, on its own terms.
- Is there a free English translation?
- No. The English version, On the Eternal in Man, dates from 1960 and remains in copyright. The German first edition of 1921 is free at Archive.org.
A note on the text. Vom Ewigen im Menschen is in the public domain. Its public-domain text is the Germanoriginal — the English translations still in print are under copyright, so we can't reprint them. Our own English edition is still to be made. The original text is also available free here.