Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper organic mendacity. Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness. There is organic mendacity whenever a man’s mind admits only those impressions which serve his interest or his instinctive attitude. Already in the process of mental reproduction and recollection, the contents of his experience are modified in this direction. He who is mendacious has no need to lie! In his case, the automatic process of forming recollections, impressions, and feelings is involuntarily slanted, so that conscious falsification becomes unnecessary.

About This Quote

About Max Scheler

Max Scheler was a 19th-century German philosopher. Max Ferdinand Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers, Scheler developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Read more on Wikipedia →

More quotes by Max Scheler