Scheler und Nietzsche über das Mitleid: Ein zweiter Blick

Abstract

The paper presents a comparative analysis of Max Scheler’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s concepts of compassion, in the light of Scheler’s critical treatment of Nietzsche’s ethical and anthropological ideas. In The Nature of Sympathy, Scheler develops a graded classification system of various types of sympathy, distancing himself from the metaphysical theory of Schopenhauer as well as from Nietzsche’s one-sided criticism of compassion as emotional contagion. While the key aspects of his phenomenological method look – at least at the first sight – opposite to Nietzsche’s psychological-genealogical approach, many of his arguments and goals, such as the development of a rational mechanism of control upon the manifestations of compassion, coincide with the ones in Nietzsche’s philosophy.