[Buddha-l] Reading assignment

[r.g.morrison]

Richard Hayes:

: On Friday afternoon I heard a short talk by Manfred Frings, who has
: dedicated much of his life to editing the works of Max Scheler. Frings
: claims that Scheler (most of whose good ideas were later pirated with
: hardly any acknowledgement by both Heidegger and Sartre) was the only
: German philosopher who spoke out against the rising of National
: Socialism and Hitlerism.

Scheler is reasonably well known in Nietzschean scholarship.  He wrote on 
two of Nietzsches favourite topics - sympathy [Sympathie] and resentment. 
His is supposed to be one of the best accounts of the phenomenology of the 
various kinds of sympathy, which is of interest to Buddhists.  He also 
thought that without love [Liebe] one cannot 'see' real values, again, quite 
Buddhist.  This mention of Scheler has sparked of my old interest in him, 
but looking for a copy of his 'Nature of Sympathy' on Amazon, the only 
available copy is going for 210 UK pounds (around 410 US dollars), and that 
is a used copy!  (Watch that arising resentment; cultivate sympathy!) 
However, I had no idea he was actively anti-Nazis (he died in 1928).  I 
imagine that 'Scheler's and Buddhism's Conception of Human Nature' could 
make a good PhD subject.

Robert Morrison