Chapter Lavoro e amore in Max Scheler. Per la reintegrazione del lavoro nell’intero dell’essere e della vita

Abstract

In his Preface to the second edition of Formalism (1921), Scheler showed no doubts: the false heroism of duty and work, taught widely in German philosophy starting with Kant, is at the origin of the betrayal of joy and love as the original sources of all well-being, and is also the cause of the frightful disorder of the heart that afflicts the contemporary idea of work. For Scheler, it was a matter of retracing a horizon of meaning that, drawing upon that aknowledged source of the ontological dynamism that is love, can reintegrate work into the overall becoming of being, freeing it from the economic requisition that happened in the modern age and, at the same time, restoring its essential transcendental function of “leading to realization” at the service of ethics and metaphysics.