Volume 79, Issue 1, Winter 2005
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
Pages 21-37
On the Rehabilitation of Virtue
Max Scheler’s essay on virtue, first published under a pseudonym in 1913, begins with some reflection upon the decline in his era of a concern for virtue. Its central theme is a phenomenological exhibition of the Christian experience of humility, reverence, and related concepts, together with an exploration of their historical and social embodiments in Western culture. The core of humility is a spiritual readiness to serve, related to love, that produces in its possessor a liberation from the ego. The core of reverence is its sense of what surpasses our vision. It has the power to reveal to us the deeper value and being in all things. The paper contains elements of a polemic directed against scientific naturalism.