Scheler claimed that ultimately ethics is 'a damned bloody affair' and if it can give me no
directives concerning how 'I' 'should' be and live now in this social and historical context
then what is it? This remark could be fully understood as Scheler's response to Socrates'
question he asked in Platon's Politeia and the only change Scheler made here is to use the
first person 'I'. In this sense therefore Scheler's phenomenology of person or
phenomenological normative ethics is manifested in a sort of Socratism. This book will focus on
discussing Scheler's answer to this question and on that basis reveal the potential forms of
a phenomenological normative ethics. It shows that Scheler's ethics terminates not in a
normative theory that posits a table of values or a table of commandments to which a person
must conform but a kind of individualist personalism where I stand in solidarity with my
fellows and seek to become the highest person I can be.
