War. Another circle formed at Munich around 1905, initially among the
students of Theodor Lipps;^36 its members maintained contact with Göttingen
and fed recruits to Husserl as pupils, finally breaking up at the end of the war.
The most flamboyant new star to come out of these networks was Max
Scheler. Of a slightly earlier generation, Scheler had already met Husserl in
1901 through their mutual connection with the Neo-Kantian Vaihinger, but
his major creativity did not come until 1912, soon after he fell in with the
circle of Husserl’s followers at Munich, while simultaneously maintaining a
bridge to Göttingen. Like the still bigger star-to-be Heidegger, Scheler was a
renegade pupil of a Neo-Kantian teacher (in this case Liebmann, the originator
of the “back to Kant” movement); both revolted against the subjective screen
of Neo-Kantian categories, taking phenomenology as a mode of access to
objective essences in themselves. Scheler dramatically widened the application
of phenomenology to an emotional epochê and the intentionality of emotional
acts. Scheler’s phenomenology consists to a large extent in imputing underlying
motives: for instance, he claims that modern ethical subjectivity, taking values
as moral attitudes of the individual mind, is the result of ressentiment, a
quasi-Nietzschean revolt of the weak against the objective values they cannot
fulfill. This, together with the hierarchy of values culminating in the church,
earned Scheler a reputation as “the Catholic Nietzsche.” There is in fact a
network contact: Scheler’s teacher was Eucken, a former colleague of the young
Nietzsche, who had become famous in the early 1900s for his vitalist spiritu-
alism. All three of this lineage—Nietzsche, Eucken, Scheler—stood out by
combining academic with popular audiences (Schnädelbach, 1984: 186–188;
Gadamer, 1985: 29–33; Staude, 1967). Scheler quickly eclipsed Husserl’s fame,
especially for wider audiences; it was Scheler, less technical in his analysis, who
spread the fame of the movement by the 1920s. He was the first to visit France
and make contact with French philosophers, and the first to be translated into
French.
As with many philosophers, Husserl’s position was transformed by an
implicit struggle over his own movement when he acquired followers. His most
aggressive convert, Scheler, had taken command of the naturalistic level of
phenomenological analysis; at just this time Husserl, dancing past him in the
opposite direction, moved closer to the Neo-Kantian stance. As his own move-
ment of technical phenomenologists became known in the 1920s, Husserl dis-
tanced himself once again.^37 He gave priority now to the life-world and to the
historical unfolding of time, downplaying eternal essences. In his early work
Husserl had characterized existence—the merely empirical, material realm—as
what is here and now, in time and space. Space is recoverable for the ideal
realm (via geometry), but time is not; time is the locus of individuation and
matter (Roberts, 1972: 175). This lesser realm is promoted in Husserl’s later
742 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths