The German Genius

contemporary Weimar itself. 23 Moreover, it gave tacit approval to those movements associated with the idea of the Volk , then being spawned, that appealed not to reason but to heroes, that called for submission in the service of an alternative will to science, to those who, in Peter Gay’s striking phrase, “thought with their blood.” Heidegger did not create the Nazis, or even the mood that led to the Nazis. But as the German theologian Paul Tillich was to write later, “It is not without some justification that the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger are connected with the anti-moral movements of fascism and national socialism.”
    Martin Heidegger is remembered now as much for his involvement with the Nazis (see Chapter 34) as for Being and Time . Much less well known are two other philosophers, one of whom, certainly, is every bit as deserving of attention as Heidegger. Max Scheler, who was born in Munich in 1874 and died in Frankfurt in 1928, was—like Wilhelm Dilthey—one of those Germans we know far too little about. One man who thought he was very important was Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, whose PhD thesis in 1954 bore the title “An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler.”
    Scheler’s father was a Lutheran pastor, his mother was Jewish. He tried medicine first, then philosophy and sociology under Dilthey and Simmel, taking his doctorate at Jena. He met Husserl early in the new century and married Märit Furtwängler, sister of the conductor, Wilhelm. Scheler settled in Cologne and Frankfurt, where he formed a circle with Ernst Cassirer, Karl Mannheim, and others. 24
    Scholarship about Scheler has been intensifying lately, not just because of the late pope’s interest but also because his arguments have relevance in the animal rights debate and the abortion dispute.
    Scheler is known for two main ideas. The first centers around the phenomenon of sympathy. * The fact that sympathy exists and we cannot escape it, is for Scheler proof of God’s existence, that love is at the center of our existence, that the “heart,” not the mind determines values, and not in a rational way—values can only be felt, as colors are “seen,” without any rational explanation. The existence of sympathy means that each person is morally unique, and that—above all—we do not exist with others, we exist toward them: we should accept this and use it. His other idea was that there is an “ ordre du coeur ,” a hierarchy of values, from high to low as follows: values of the holy; of the mind (truth, beauty, justice); of vitality and nobility; of utility; of pleasure. Scheler thought that the mistake in most systems of ethics was to elevate one value above all others, rather than recognize that this hierarchy exists and tempers all judgments. He thought that when human beings elevate a lower value over a higher one “disorders of the heart” occur. For Scheler, reason has little to say about value (he overlapped here with Wittgenstein); instead the “heart” governs our approach to life rather than our intelligence; experience is what counts, not will. Feelings and love have a logic of their own, he said, quite different from the logic of reason. He was asserting that there is a fundamental connection among all of us, and that the work we do to render that connection stronger and clearer is the way to contentment. 25
    Like Dilthey, Ernst Cassirer’s main concern was to explore what was similar and what was different about the forms of knowledge we know as the sciences, on the one hand, and the humanities on the other, though he preferred the phrase “cultural sciences” instead of “humanities.” Cassirer was born in Breslau in 1874 into a cosmopolitan and well-off Jewish family. Another branch of the family lived in Berlin, where one cousin, Bruno, was a publisher and a second, Paul, a well-known art dealer. 26 In 1919 Cassirer was offered two professorships himself, one in Frankfurt and one in Hamburg. He opted for the latter, and taught there for several years, becoming rector in 1929, the first Jew to hold such a position. 27
    Cassirer’s main book, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen ( Philosophy of Symbolic Forms ), was a three-volume exploration of symbolic forms, in which he argued that moral experience and mathematical experience were essentially the same, exploring the basis that moral choices were as “necessary” as