Abstract

Max Scheler was a thinker recognized as having the talent of discovering the essence of something happening in the present and projecting onto the future; a man ahead of his time. It is with this in mind that the present dissertation explores, explains, and evaluates Scheler's philosophy of religion as contained in his early philosophy, and principally as stated in his essay, "Problems of Religion." These early writings of Scheler have value and form a consistent "philosophy" by themselves without going into later things . However, the purpose here ultimately is to articulate the relevancy of Scheler's views on religion in relation to the contemporary human condition. ;The expository approach of this study has been to present Scheler's religious problematic, or problem of religion, both as an open issue to contemporary man who faces an age of nihilism, and as a concentric set of concerns which also involves and focuses all of Scheler's early philosophy. The nucleus of this "concentric" edifice is Scheler's formulation of his phenomenological grounds for natural religious experience as man's direct universal access to and involvement with God, salvation, and personal transcendence. ;Chapter 1 proceeds by introducing the reader to some background about Scheler's life and phenomenological orientation of philosophy, especially insofar as this type of information serves to better understand his philosophy of religion. ;Chapter 2 locates Scheler's concerns over the religious as an overriding focus for his early philosophy. ;Chapter 3 outlines, in an interpretative manner, the basic concepts of a Schelerian philosophy of religion, especially as such a philosophy attempts to unite man's propensity for such a thing as natural religious experience with positive religion proper . ;Insofar as the goal of this study entails a comprehension of Scheler's phenomenological grounds of religious experience as the focus of his philosophy of religion and early philosophy in general, Chapter 4 establishes some standards by which to do so through explaining Scheler's notion of phenomenological experience. ;Chapter 5 is an account of Scheler's essay, "Problems of Religion" wherein his views on religion, natural theology, philosophy of religion, religious experience; and the like are stated explicitly. This chapter is comprised of two parts, in which is first presented Scheler's assessment of traditional theological and philosophical ways of understanding the religious, and secondly, Scheler's own understanding of the religious in the form of his essential phenomenology of religion. ;Chapter 6 is a critical assessment of Scheler's phenomenological grounds for religious experience in that these grounds are examined in light of Scheler's standards regarding the nature of phenomenological experience. In so doing, the question arises as to why contemporary consciousness seems closed of, or insensitive, to religious experience, and what can be done, given the content of Scheler's phenomenological formulations, about this situation. ;Finally, Chapter 7 concludes on a positive note through clarifying and explaining some Schelerian insights which speak to the original task set for this work: that is, the relevance of Scheler's religious problematic to the contemporary human condition and the re-establsihment of a connection between man's natural religious proclivities and the overriding spiritual, historical, and cultural context of positive religion