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Introduction

Why Put Edith Stein and Max Scheler into Dialogue?

Timothy A. Burns, University of St. Thomas (Minnesota); Travis Lacy, Providence College; Eric
J. Mohr, St. Vincent’s College

The significant range of historical connections, intellectual debts and interests that are shared by

Edith Stein and Max Scheler make it imperative to place these two remarkable thinkers into

dialogue. And yet, this volume offers the first collection of scholarship (combining work from

philosophers and theologians alike) toward a conversation on these important interconnections.

Max Scheler (1874-1928) was born in Munich. He studied at the Universities of Berlin

(1894-95) and Jena (1895-99) under Rudolf Eucken, teaching for a time at the University of

Jena. He returned to Munich in the fall of 1906 or 1907,1 gaining an appointment at LMU

München with Theodor Lipps at the recommendation of Edmund Husserl. Scheler arrived at

Munich just as students in psychology there began transferring to study phenomenology in

Göttingen with Husserl (the so-called Munich invasion). Due to an extra-marital matter that

became a public scandal in 1910, Scheler was prohibited from teaching or holding lectures in

German universities, and eventually relocated to Göttingen, writing and working as an

unaffiliated lecturer until 1919, when he received an appointment at the University of Cologne.

In 1913, Scheler was brought on as co-editor of the Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und

phänomenologische Forschung. Edith Stein recounts in her autobiography that during that

summer of 1913, the Göttingen Philosophical Society “chose [for discussion] the second major

work in the Yearbook, […] Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values […],
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which had probably affected the entire intellectual world of recent decades even more than

Husserl’s Ideas” (Stein 1986, 258).

Edith Stein (1891-1942) was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia (now Wrocław, Poland). Her

father died when she was very young, leaving behind a widow, seven children, and a lumber

business. Edith’s mother, Auguste, continued to run the lumber business and saw to it that her

children were well educated. Edith Stein was a gifted and precocious student. She earned high

marks, but she chose to leave school for a while rather than transfer to the Realgymnasium (Stein

1986, 138-139). However, she returned to her studies after about a year. The entrance exam

placed her into Obersekunda, which was highest in the class of applicants (Stein 1986, 159).

Edith excelled in Latin, Greek, German, literature, history, and mathematics. Upon passing her

Abitur examination, Stein entered the University of Breslau where, from 1911 to 1913, she

studied psychology and philosophy with William Stern and Richard Hönigswald.

The fame of Husserl’s Logical Investigations was widespread by the time she was in

university. After reading the first volume, Stein decided to move to Göttingen to learn

phenomenology. She arrived in April 1913. While there, she learned phenomenology not only

from Husserl, but also from Adolf Reinach and by attending Scheler’s unofficial lectures, which

were arranged by the Philosophical Society in the social rooms of hotels or cafes due to the

prohibition against him.

Stein writes about her impression of Scheler in her autobiography. “One’s first

impression of Scheler was fascination. In no other person have I ever encountered the

‘phenomenon of genius’ as clearly. The light of a more exalted world shone from his large blue

eyes. [… He] spoke with great insistence, indeed with dramatic liveliness” (Stein 1986, 259).

Stein notes that Scheler’s inability to finish his lectures during the allotted time meant that daily
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meetings were required. After the lectures, Scheler “would stay on for hours in the cafe with a

smaller group,” she recounts. “I participated in these follow-up sessions only once or twice.

Eager though I was to snatch at as much pertinent stimulation as I possibly could, an element

was present here which repelled me: the [contemptuous] tone used when Husserl was

mentioned” (Stein 1986, 258-259).

Stein’s perception of a certain disrespect toward Husserl seems to have carried significant

weight in framing her lasting judgment of Scheler. She mentions Husserl and Scheler’s meeting

in Halle in 1901 and since then, “they often met for a lively exchange of ideas” (Stein 1986,

259). However, there grew between them a “competition for priority” that soured their

relationship; though, Stein notes that despite the tension they remained “mutually friendly”.

There arose a question of philosophical dependency. Scheler was never a student of Husserl’s

and is said to have stressed independence from Husserl’s phenomenological method—even

crediting himself, in part, for its discovery—while “Husserl was convinced of Scheler’s

dependency” (Stein 1986, 259).2 Secondly there was a concern regarding students, which would

have included Stein. Scheler’s way of philosophizing was unsystematic, but “dazzling and

seductive” (Stein 1986, 259). He would speak on “topics of vital personal importance to his

young listeners”; in contrast, Husserl “took great pains to educate us to rigorous objectivity […]

and addressed sober, abstract matters” (Stein 1986, 259). Stein seems to have had ultimately

greater devotion to Husserl’s methodical approach than Scheler’s, in contrast to “some, like

[Dietrich von] Hildebrand and [Rudolf] Clemens, [who] depended more on [Scheler] than on

Husserl” (Stein 1986, 258). Still, despite her allegiance to Husserl, Stein recognizes Scheler in

“The Meaning of Phenomenology as Worldview” as one of the three most important

phenomenologists of the era (Stein, 2025, page number will have to wait for typesetting).3
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Despite his tension with Husserl, Scheler’s “Catholic ideas at the time” and the

“brilliance” and “eloquence” he employed in expressing them affected Stein profoundly “beyond

the sphere of philosophy” (Stein 1986, 260). She notes that while Scheler “did not lead me as yet

to the Faith [… Scheler’s ideas were] my first encounter with this hitherto totally unknown

[Catholic] world. […] The barriers of rationalistic prejudices with which I had unwittingly grown

up fell, and the world of faith unfolded before me. Persons with whom I associated daily, whom I

esteemed and admired, lived in it […] and so, almost without noticing it, [I] became gradually

transformed” (Stein 1986, 260-261). Stein would eventually enter full communion with the

Catholic Church on January 1, 1922. Writing in 1932, Stein retrospectively credits Scheler’s

concern for material values with “opening the eyes of many especially to religious values, indeed

in a specifically Catholic sense. Ideas such as virtue, contrition, humility, understanding of which

had completely vanished in modern circles of unbelief, he made again accessible in their original

sense to the educated among those who scorned these ideas. We owe a debt of gratitude to this

thinker, now deceased, for opening up the way for so many to a genuine Catholic faith” (Stein

2025, page number will have to wait for typesetting).

The majority of what we know about Scheler and Stein’s connections come from Stein,

due to her being seventeen years younger. However, it’s worth noting—especially given that

seventeen-year age difference—the attribution given by Scheler to Stein’s work on empathy in a

revised edition of his Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle (The Nature of

Sympathy). Originally published in 1912, this work was significantly revised and republished a

decade later as Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Essence and Forms of Sympathy). In the

preface to the new (second) edition, Scheler refers to “having reviewed the critical comments”

from Edith Stein, among others. Scheler cites Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy on three
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occasions, praising Stein her work for having “decisively refuted” a claim by Stephan Witasek

about understanding and vicarious feeling (Scheler 2008, 13) as well as for offering a “just

criticism” of Theodor Lipps on the degree of identification (according to the famous example)

between the acrobat and spectator (Scheler 2008, 18). The section on emotional identification

was newly added in the second edition largely on account of this important debate between Lipps

and Stein.

While the collected essays in this volume cover a range of topics and texts, they can be

loosely grouped into three topical ranges: human personhood and individuality, human

embodiment and sociality, and contributions to philosophy of religion and the indebtedness of

their thought to theological resources. Additionally, to conclude the volume, we are pleased to be

able to publish—for the very first time in English—a translation of Edith Stein’s 1932 review of

the phenomenological movement in her essay, Die weltanschauliche Bedeutung der

Phänomenologie.

Part I: Human Personhood and Individuality

Given their sustained attention to human personhood and the significance of personal

individuality, Stein and Scheler’s respective treatments of these themes offer several points of

instructive overlap and contrast alike. Eugene Kelly’s essay touches on both the complementarity

and potential irreconcilability of their treatments. By considering the different vocabularies used

by each to describe the person—for Scheler, a “trace of essence”; for Stein, a “core of the

person”—Kelly notes that both thinkers demonstrate that the human person is necessarily

ineffable, a mystery to the self and to others, and ultimately beyond total comprehension.
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Nevertheless, Stein is more comfortable attending to the perduring, soul-like substance that

remains in every self over time, while Scheler prefers to emphasize the variability of the self

across a range of intentional acts. At the very least, though, both thinkers would agree that to be

a person means more than having a set of experiences that could be simulated—say—by a brain

in a vat.

Eric Mohr picks up on these themes by observing that Stein’s indebtedness to scholastic

metaphysical and ontological claims in framing her later anthropology potentially problematizes

her continued ability to account for human uniqueness and individuality. Unlike Scheler, Stein is

comfortable referring to a human person (and the “I”) as a substance, a “something,” a quid that

can be constituted in intentional acts. Scheler, however, insists that human persons are only

disclosed through the intentional act of love, which further indicates that Scheler thinks a human

person can only be known phenomenologically. Stein can adequately uphold the individuality

she is eager to protect, Mohr argues, only by leaning more into the relatively Schelerian notes of

her methodology, which counterbalance the later, more metaphysical anchors in her thought.

Elise Dravigny contends that these differing approaches to human individuality and the

unity of that individuality arise, at least in part, due to Stein and Scheler’s varying treatments of

empathy. While Scheler insists that persons are unified in act, and in the Wesen und Formen der

Sympathie he locates sympathy as a particularly unifying act for both person and community

alike, Stein’s view of a human person as constitutively a body-soul unity forms the basis for her

own critique of Scheler’s view. Without a concrete “I” which can “feel-into” (Einfühlung)

another person, Scheler’s account of sympathy remains unsatisfactory.

Mette Lebech similarly attends to the way in which Stein’s intellectual development

unfolds in part due to an ongoing dialogue with Scheler. Through a close analysis of Stein’s
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engagement with Scheler’s 1915 essay, “Idole der Selbserkenntnis,” Lebech demonstrates that

Stein develops a crucial distinction between the “pure I” and the “psyche” precisely by way of

negotiating the relative inadequacies of Scheler’s treatment. Stein thinks that because Scheler

ignores the Husserlian notion of constitution in his phenomenology, he cannot effectively

distinguish human persons in their own right from the intersubjective relations of which they are

a part. True, intersubjectivity is a crucial theme for Stein, and so she appreciates Scheler for his

emphasis on this aspect of personal existence. But she does not believe that Scheler, who has no

place for the constitution of an “I” as a phenomenon to be observed, can thus adequately

distinguish between psychic causality and sentient contagion. Lebech concludes, therefore, that

Stein’s analysis is a more promising avenue for self-knowledge, since Stein’s method allows a

reflexive grasp of the self and its attendant influences in a way Scheler’s does not.

Susan Gottlöber, in turn, finds Scheler more adequate in the attention to the role that

“spirit” plays in both philosophers, noting that their differing methodologies and relative

openness (or closure) to the empirical sciences causes them to depart from one another in their

conception of “personhood,” despite other points of overlap. Stein’s philosophical method,

Gottlöber argues, is immune to the discoveries of empirical sciences and therefore develops a

concept of “personhood” more influenced by a priori philosophical and theological

commitments, while Scheler—who is more hospitable to the sciences—has a much less “secure”

understanding of personhood, one which can perhaps be more readily applied to non-human

creatures, or which even cannot be accurately applied to human beings in specific instances.

Part II: Human Embodiment and Sociality

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Rigorous practitioners of the phenomenological method, both Scheler and Stein highlight

embodiment in their anthropologies, and moreover pay considerable attention to the interplay

between individual embodiment and the social contexts in which bodily development occurs.

Michael Andrews considers the phenomenological response to Husserlian tendencies toward a

transcendental solipsism, and focuses on Scheler’s and Stein’s development of a “relational

ontology” and its significance with respect to embodiment. Andrews argues that Scheler’s

conception of a collective consciousness presents a polar counter-position to Husserl’s and

interprets Stein’s view as falling in between these two poles. Stein provides a balanced and

dialogical space between the I and the We, in a way that anticipates later insights of Merleau-

Ponty on the body. Andrews notes that, for Scheler, the body allows for a phenomenological

ethics rooted in sympathetic acts; for Stein, body places an ineradicable limit on empathy, a limit

which then invites an identification with the other that nevertheless respects this very otherness.

Daniel Neumann subtly looks at the way both Scheler and Stein discuss how we

experience essences. In everyday experience, we do not encounter “redness” per se, but a red

apple, a red car, a red chair, and so forth. To what degree is the essential property of “redness” a

distinct object of intuition over and against the objects in which redness inheres, and moreover,

what ontological status do such essential properties have? Such questions are attendant upon any

consideration of the relationship between the body and our embodied access to essential and

universal properties.

Martina Properzi also places Stein and Scheler in dialogue with broader philosophical

conversations by considering the phenomenological relevance for contemporary debates

regarding body-ownership, specifically in connection with research in cognitive science and the

position of eliminativism. Properzi looks to Scheler and Stein to offer a greater degree of
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complexity to the debate. Stein’s account of the lived body rightly highlights the role that

feelings or affective acts play in generating bodily givenness; Scheler’s account, Properzi argues,

more adequately notes the intersubjective context that gives rise to bodily awareness.

Conversely, William Tullius applies Hans Jonas’ analyses in The Gnostic Religion to

Scheler’s anthropology, particularly The Human Place in the Cosmos, to argue that Scheler’s

personalism is haunted by gnostic motifs. Scheler’s theory of the human person as irreducibly

“outside” the surrounding world, Tullius argues, undercuts his deeper, more personalist impulses

that anchor the human person in a web of embodied relations. Tullius proposes Stein’s

anthropology as a corrective to the perceived dangers of the late Scheler.

Valentina Gaudiano takes a different approach in her essay on Bildung in Stein and

Scheler: by her analysis, both thinkers remain deeply interested in questions of education and the

role of social influences on the human person. For Scheler, Bildung occurs through a kind of

personal openness to the surrounding world of persons and values. A person’s own hierarchy of

values is clarified precisely through the refining process of engagement with and openness to

others. Similarly, Stein thinks that external models are crucial in the process of Bildung, although

Stein more explicitly looks to God as the Urbild upon which all Bildung is modeled.

Finally, Olivier Agard analyzes Stein and Scheler’s respective political philosophies.

Agard notes the varying intentions and driving interests in their work, observing that Scheler is

more interested in the political role of solidarity as a corrective to overreaches of state

sovereignty, while Stein wants to provide a philosophical justification for the sovereign function

of the state per se. Both thinkers thus stand as interesting critics of political liberalism who

nevertheless resist the nationalist reactions to liberalism that had arisen during their lifetimes.
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Part III: Philosophy of Religion and Theological Indebtedness

The final group of essays looks at both Stein and Scheler’s contributions to philosophy of

religion as well as the theological premises on which those contributions depend. Despite

Scheler’s strained relationship to Roman Catholicism throughout his life, he nevertheless

remained intellectually indebted to explicitly theological themes and concepts, which recur in his

work throughout his career. A canonized saint, Edith Stein’s personal and intellectual

commitment to Catholicism embarked on an intellectual project to harmonize the Catholic

theological and philosophical traditions with her own phenomenological training, an endeavor

that culminated in her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being. Thus, this last group of essays

teases out some of these more religious or even theological themes and considers the premises

that lead to these overtly religious investigations.

Maximilian Lu examines the concept of the “philosophical worldview” in Scheler. In an

essay from 1930-1931, Stein criticizes Scheler’s notion of the philosophical worldview, but Lu

notes that Stein’s criticism perhaps fails to attend to the nuances of Scheler’s actual position. The

fecundity of Scheler’s position, Lu contends, is precisely in the philosophical anthropology

undergirding the possibility of any philosophical “worldview formation” at all. The human

person’s spiritual qualities allow him immediate intuition of God and a kind of cooperation in the

divine ordering of world history. Thus, the audacity of Scheler’s position arises from his

anthropology, which privileges humanity’s fundamentally religious capacity.

Crucial for this idea is the role of the “spirit,” which Sarah Borden Sharkey attends to in

her essay. While each thinker has points of overlap, Scheler’s contrast in The Human Place in

the Cosmos between Geist and Drang highlights “spirit” as a specifically human quality: it is that
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by which the human person is “open” to the world in a way that distinguishes them from animals

or inorganic objects (whose interactions with their surroundings are either purely passive or

limited by the will to live, Drang). Stein, however, sees “spirit” as intrinsic to all creatures, and

for her the main contrast is between spirit on the one hand and matter on the other. Stein’s

account is more indebted to (while nevertheless not purely identifiable with) Aristotelian

hylomorphism, and thus is interested in the varying ways in which matter is a site for the spirit’s

“unfolding,” for all material beings and not just human persons. Borden suggests that Stein’s

treatment of “spirit” is perhaps less dualistic than Scheler’s, seeing spirit and matter as co-related

principles rather than as opposed “things.”

Tareq Ayoub takes up a similar theme by contrasting Stein’s and Scheler’s respective

accounts of spiritual life: both thinkers are interested in faith as a uniquely intentional (and thus

phenomenologically disclosive) act. For Scheler, love takes primacy over the act of faith, and it

is precisely by co-enacting God’s love in the world that specifically religious knowledge is

disclosed. Stein sees faith as a way of intending the non-given, the transcendent mystery that is

present but not phenomenally immediate in the world.

The function of love in Scheler’s epistemology derives from the Augustinian (and later

Pascalian) notion of the ordo amoris, a theological influence that Travis Lacy sketches in his

essay. For Scheler, the objective order of values in the world is disclosed through properly

ordered love; love is thus the condition for seeing value rightly. Stein also gives love a privileged

place in her epistemology, yet she is less confident than Scheler that the gaze of love yields as

much as he thinks it does. Part of their divergence, Lacy argues, has to do with their respective

methodological commitment to metaphysics. For Stein, love is as much about a kind of

“openness” to the gratuitous rhythm of being, as it is an ecstatic gaze that possesses the beloved.
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Timothy Burns then teases out the implications of Scheler and Stein’s social ontologies in

order to apply their insights to ecclesiology. It is an axiomatic commitment of Christians—

notably enshrined in their creeds—that the church is “one.” Burns asks what it means for a

community, itself composed of irreducibly unique individuals, to be united, or more specifically,

to be “of a single mind.” Burns notes that the biblical ideal of unity, which likens the oneness of

the church to the unity of human organs into a single person, is a rather exacting standard to

attain. His essay examines the varying forms of social unity in the work of Scheler and Stein and

their abilities to provide theological clarity.

Part IV: Translation of Stein’s Die weltanschauliche Bedeutung der Phänomenologie

Walter Redmond’s translation of Edith Stein’s “The Meaning of Phenomenology as Worldview”

(Die weltanschauliche Bedeutung der Phänomenologie) offers English readers the chance to

become familiar with a text that was rescued from the ruins of a Carmelite convent in the

Netherlands and has been published several times in its original German form, but never before

in English. In this essay, Stein asks about the significance of phenomenology both as its own

worldview and for our present worldview. She begins with an understanding of a worldview as

“a closed picture of the world [Weltbild]: an overview of whatever there is, the orderings and

connections wherein everything stands and in particular the place of man in the world, his

whence and his whither.” She then reviews the prospects of several different types of world

view: religious, scientific, and philosophical. Next, she sets out her understanding of

phenomenology before discussing the differences between three of the leading phenomenologists

of her day—Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Max Scheler—and ventures an assessment
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of each of their philosophies vis-à-vis their impact on the worldview of her own time. She

concludes with a comparison of the Catholic and Modern worldviews. This essay will be of

special interest to scholars interested in Stein qua phenomenologist and the way in which she

evaluated the phenomenologists of her time.

In closing, the essays offered in this volume represent a wide array of expertise,

questions, and themes within the thought of these two brilliant German philosophers. Some

essays emphasize their continuity, while others highlight the differences. But the collective

analyses presented yield a collage of two thinkers who—given their common interests and

intellectual debts—have much to say to each other, and therefore, to us today as well.

Reference List

Mohr, Eric. 2012. “Phenomenological Intuition and the Problem of Philosophy as Method and
Science: Scheler and Husserl.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy
16 (2): 218-234.

Scheler, Max. 2008. The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Heath with a new introduction
by Graham McAleer. Transaction Publishers.

Scheler, Max. 1973. Selected Philosophical Essays. Translated by David Lachterman.

Northwestern University Press.

Staude, John Raphael. 1967. Max Scheler: An Intellectual Portrait. The Free Press.

Stein, Edith. 2025. “The Meaning of Phenomenology as Worldview.” Translated by Walter

Redmond. In Edith Stein and Max Scheler in Dialogue, edited by Timothy Burns, Travis
Lacy, and Eric Mohr. Lexington Books.

Stein, Edith. 1986. Life in a Jewish Family (1891-1916): An Autobiography. Translated by

Josephine Koeppel O.C.D. ICS Publications.
1
There is a biographical discrepancy about the date.
2
While it may seem ludicrous for Scheler to have claimed some credit for the “discovery” of the

phenomenological method, there is evidence suggesting that Scheler considered himself to have

developed his own, independent approach to phenomenology, based upon two key differences. First,

Scheler’s conception of phenomenological intuition was, to some extent, an application of Bergson’s

theory of intuition to phenomenological content. See Staude (1967, 20-21) on Bergson’s influence on

Scheler. Second, Scheler always resisted speaking of phenomenology as a method, and preferred

instead to speak of it only as an “attitude.” See Scheler (1973, 136 ff.) and Mohr (2012) on the

phenomenological implications of this difference.

3
See the final chapter of this volume.