Seeds of a Second Renaissance Issue 11 (Jan 2026) - Max Scheler on Valueception
In this value-laden world, modernity’s “meaning crisis” arises not from an absence of available meaning, but an underdeveloped ability to perceive it. + Events and opportunities for inner-led change.
Welcome to Seeds of a Second Renaissance – a monthly newsletter for explorers of inner-led change towards radically wiser societies. For both seasoned travellers and those new to these shores, each edition offers a bite-sized exploration of keystone ideas, and thinkers whose work you may wish to know more deeply.
Excuse the gap – the writing team at Life Itself took a much-needed break over the holidays to restore our creative energies. Here’s hoping you also rested well.
To kick off the new year, we follow up our brief introduction to Christopher Alexander with further exploration of value realism – and the revival of Max Scheler’s notion of “valueception” (wertnehmung) within more recent metacrisis discourse. What are the consequences of a culture that excludes value from the field of reality, and how might we reorient collectively towards shared meaning and value?
Below, you’ll also find curated events, jobs, and opportunities for inner-led change.
Max Scheler on valueception in a world abundant with meaning
Amid growing awareness that our socio-ecological crises share metaphysical roots, a renewed discourse of value is gathering momentum. Might there be any intrinsic meaning to human existence — or beyond it? Is value more than mere opinion? If so, how can we orient collectively towards more goodness in our lives and societies?
Numerous philosophers now argue that value and meaning are intrinsic properties of the universe. In this value-laden world, modernity’s “meaning crisis” arises not from an absence of available meaning, but an underdeveloped ability to perceive it.1 The implications are stark: where value goes unseen, it is easily destroyed. To halt our nihilistic spiral of ecological destruction, we must re-learn our long-neglected human capacity to perceive it.
But contemporary voices aren’t the first to say so. Over a century ago, the pioneering German philosopher Max Scheler challenged the emerging reductive materialism of his time; elevating value as irreducibly real. In doing so, he articulated a distinctive human capacity for apprehending value, Wertnehmung — often translated as “value-ception.”
A meaningful, or a mechanical world?
Influenced by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lebensphilosophie movement, Scheler was critical of an increasingly flat and instrumentalised modern interpretation of reality. He saw a culture shaped by scientific method and industrial capitalism, relating to the world as a collection of objects for manipulation, likewise reducing human beings to a functional role.
By contrast, he proposed a world rich with meaning and real value. Value, in this view, is not invented by the subject but belongs to the world — much as the redness of a bicycle is rendered in the act of seeing without being created by it.2 Just as sight apprehends colour in perception, feeling and intuition apprehend value. Far from being invented or constructed after the fact through calculation, logic, or reason, value instead directs our attention — enticing or repelling us, prior to cognition.
Linking modern ills to a predilection for control, calculation, and certainty, Scheler affirms a philosophical stance that replaces the urge for mastery with receptivity. Through modes of valueception — wonder, reverence and love — the philosopher marvels at the inexhaustible depths of the universe. Philosophy itself is thus “a loving act of participation by the core of the human being in the essence of all things”.3
Modernity’s crisis of value reversal
If value is real and not relative, why are values so often in conflict? Scheler argues for an objective moral hierarchy: deeper values being preferred to those more superficial. Values that contradict one another occupy different levels; lower in tension with higher. Lowest in this ranking are pleasure and utility, based on sensory experiences, and satisfaction of basic needs and desires. Next come values relating to vitality, based on individual and collective well-being — such as health, loyalty, humility, and compassion. Superior to these are spiritual values such as truth, goodness, and beauty. And most important of all is the sacred — transcending the material realm, pertaining to the divine connectedness of all life and evoking awe and wonder. Scheler thus rejects — or at least demotes — the modern ethics of both utilitarianism (maximising utility) and eudaimonism (maximising pleasure).
Even at the turn of the 20th Century, Scheler lamented the tendency of modern culture to promote lower values of utility above appreciation of the sacred, critiquing the reductive mindsets that gave us economic rationalism and utilitarian ethics. In today’s world, it’s easy to trace the fall-out of this fatal “value reversal” in our current crises. Where non-material values are dismissed as fundamentally unreal, extractive capitalism reduces the living world to an object of utility, while liberal individualism locates human value in productivity and success.
The ethical responsibility to love
“Love is the movement in which ever higher values are disclosed.”
Scheler offers an ethical compass: to cultivate goodness is to move and open towards higher or deeper values. It’s our responsibility to attend to beings and situations in a way that realises their highest possible value. This role is fulfilled through love, an intentional act of the heart that discloses deeper layers of meaning in the world. To love something or someone is to perceive and affirm their fullest, essential value, beyond rational understanding. To hate is to obscure, diminish, or destroy it. Love is ultimately oriented toward the infinite and the absolute, grounding all knowing in relationship to what is sacred.
The value relativism of recent times should not be cast as entirely a negative force — far from it: since Scheler’s time important work has been done to challenge the claims of oppressive structures to total authority over meaning and worth. Conversely, neither should Scheler’s insistence on an objective hierarchy of values be mistaken for harmful ethical absolutism. Because each individual has their unique way of perceiving, valuing and making meaning, ethical responsibility for Scheler is personal, situational, and irreducible. While anchored by a universal hierarchy of value types, each must ask what they are uniquely placed to do — for a particular other, or for the flourishing of value in the world at large.
Value and love in meeting the metacrisis
To consult Scheler’s ethics in the context of today’s metacrisis is to be reminded that the necessary transformation can’t be achieved at the level of technologies, incentives, or even systems. A world shaped by value reversal — where utility eclipses vitality, truth, beauty, and the sacred — can only be set right by re-education of the heart. For Scheler and his heirs, cultivating valueception means learning to love more deeply: other people, the living earth, and the larger mystery in which we participate. Love is not an optional virtue but the fundamental ethical orientation through which a meaningful world can once again be disclosed.
Coda: value and a middle way between existence and non-existence.
Despite its potential to re-enchant our sense of the cosmos, the possibility of primary, pre-cognitive value can remain intuitively hard to swallow. We should not underestimate our own conditioning by a post-modern culture grounded in relativist ethics, which insists, often fiercely, that all value is subjectively imposed rather than discovered. But accepting the reality of value does not require us to abandon our doubts in favour of “naive objectivism” — an unexamined belief in fixed and independently existing fundamental values. Nor does Scheler argue for the material existence of values — but rather for important, non-material realities.
There may persist a subtler intuitive resistance to the idea of any quality as properly prior to or independent from consciousness. While readers may accept that there is some ‘way things are’ independently of our (or any) comprehension, they may nonetheless hold an intuition that value and perception co-arise, such that value cannot meaningfully be said to exist in isolation. The compatibility of meta-modern thought with a Buddhist-informed understanding of participatory perception is a question we hope to explore in future issues.
Explore the field of inner-led change…
A selection of events and opportunities recommended by readers, friends, and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.
👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: please suggest items to include in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.
Upcoming Events
Learning Planet Festival
📍Online 📅 21-28 January 2026 💸 Free
“Launched in 2020 by the Learning Planet Institute in partnership with UNESCO, the LearningPlanet Festival has been organised each January to celebrate the International Day of Education, bringing together hundreds of thousands of participants from 193 countries. In 2026, the festival returns for its 7th edition, … as part of a growing global movement to reimagine education in the 21st century. Transforming education cannot be done in isolation – it demands collective action.”
Highlighted events include: Youth Earth Citizenship for Planetary Peace and Wellbeing by Home for Humanity; Navigating Climate Emotions in the Classroom by One Resilient Earth; and Atlas of Peaceful Futures Practices by Learning Planet Institute.
Re-Indigenizing: Practices for Decolonizing and Re-Rooting [online course]
📍Online 📅 30 January - 8 February 2026 💸 As an experiment with radical trust towards post-capitalist economics, this course is offered on donation.
“Awaken your connection to the web of life through calling in your own ancestral roots, visiting the past to inform the future. … A’ida Al-Shibli, an indigenous Bedouin born in occupied Palestine who has lived in Tamera for the last 2 decades, invites you to explore how and why systems of oppression intend to cut us from our roots, and invites you to reconnect with your ancestral Indigenous lineage and relationship with land that predates our socialization into systems of oppression. We will be joined by wisdom carriers from different indigenous backgrounds. Our online course will include interactive learning, embodied cognition and self-reflection.”
Bioregional Hope 2026
📍Online 📅 19 January 2026, 7-9pm CET 💸 Free
“Across Europe’s bioregions, systemic change is taking root — not as theory, but as lived, place-based practice. On 19 January, Bioregional Hope 2026 brings these stories together. This year’s gathering focuses on systemic innovation across bioregions in Europe, with presentations from 7 Bioregional Weaving Labs. Each bioregion will share how innovation is emerging through land, water, food systems, governance, finance, and community — shaped by local ecology, culture, and long-term care. Rather than scaling solutions outward, we explore how change deepens in place.”
Second Renaissance London meetup
📍Newspeak House, London 📅 23 January 2026, 7-9pm GMT 💸 Free
“Join us to connect and explore ideas supporting a Second Renaissance - our name for a potential a new cultural paradigm of interconnectedness, wisdom and inner growth. …We’ll use break-out groups and relational exercises to deepen connection and facilitate dialogue - though there’ll be plenty of unstructured socialising too. … This week’s theme is the Game B community created by Jim Rutt and others.”
Cult or Community? The Line Between Control and Connection [webinar]
📍Online 📅 29 January 2026, 9-11am Pacific Time 💸 Free (optional donation)
“Renowned cult expert, Dr. Steve Hassan, and host of Cults I’d Join, Jesse Stone, join the [Foundation for Intentional Community] to discuss what differentiates healthy communities from coercive high-control groups. Explore the nuances and complexities that drive us toward belonging and how to practice discernment in the face of cults. … What makes some communities transformative and supportive, while others become manipulative or abusive? How can people tell the difference? And why, despite the risks, are so many of us still drawn to intense, visionary, or tightly bonded communities?”
Climate Majority Pints
📍Three Johns Pub, Islington, London 📅 10 February 2026, 5:45-9pm GMT 💸 Free
An informal get-together organised by the Climate Majority Project: “Several members of our core team and many collaborators will be meeting up in a pub - and we’d love to see you there! … So this is an invitation to whomever wants to walk in for a chat and a pint to do so! We believe this is a good opportunity to see each other in person and meet people who feel like they are part of the Climate Majority and want to connect with others 🍻”
Pocket Project: Integration Labs
📍Online 📅 February to December 2026 💸 Sliding scale participation fee: €175, €95, or €45.
“The Integration Labs are year-long online groups dedicated to exploring and addressing specific thematic or geographic dimensions of ancestral and collective trauma. Guided by Collective Trauma Integration facilitators, participants deepen their awareness, understanding, and digestion of collective trauma aftereffects, contributing to the healing of the scar tissue in our shared human body. Each person who joins brings a vital presence and witnessing capacity to this work.”
Topics include: “The Living Legacy of Dictatorship: Digesting the Shadow of Soviet Trauma and its Global Repercussions”, “The Collective Curse of “Success-ism: Restoring Wholeness Beyond Scarcity and Conditional Worth”, and “Ethics of Animal Harm: Wounds in the Collective Field: Opening ourselves to Animal Welfare & Ethical Violation in Factory Farming”.
Jobs & Opportunities
Community Steward (part-time) at Community Village
📍Remote with occasional community gatherings in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA 📅 To start in Feb 2026.
“Community Village is a community-first approach to meditation oriented towards people in their 20s and 30s…. Whether you want to learn how to meditate, or are an experienced practitioner: our intention is to co-create welcoming and supportive environments to build meaningful connections, get inspired and learn how to bring practice into everyday life. We are a peer-led community, co-created by its members. …This role will support the community to ensure that regular programs continue to operate smoothly, while freeing up the Leadership Crew & other volunteers to focus on their specific roles.”
Programs Assistant (part-time) at Foundation for Intentional Community
📍Remote 📅 Apply by 3 Feb 2026.
“The FIC is seeking a Programs Assistant to support the Programs Director (PD) in administrative, technical, and customer service tasks throughout the setup, execution, and tracking of our virtual learning programs and content. The PA’s responsibilities are primarily technical with opportunities for creative and collaborative contribution to the development of programs and the FIC as a whole.
The Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC) is a fully remote, nonprofit organization which serves as a resource hub for the intentional communities movement. Our mission is to champion social, ecological, and economic justice and resiliency through the support and growth of cooperative culture and intentional communities.”
Choose Our Future - film competition
📍Open to filmmakers, creatives and visionaries worldwide 📅 Stage 1 submission deadline: 31 March 2026.
“Imagine 2050: What will your story be? We invite filmmakers, creatives, and visionaries worldwide to tackle the most critical challenge of our time: defining the future. Envision and bring to life four archetypal scenarios for 2050, showing the world how the decisions we make today will shape tomorrow.”
Second Renaissance
“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.
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Finally, we leave you with some —
Art to nourish the soul…
This month, an uplifting song, “Alafu”, by Kenyan artist Monaja (Mwongela Kamencu), which responds to violent social and political struggles in Kenya. The song’s refrain ends with the message: “Alafu? Tuzidi kuzidi” (What next? Let’s keep on keeping on.) Monaja reflects:
I realised that the role of the artist in times of political turbulence is not to merely capture the spirit of the times that the people are living in. The role of the artist is to assist in shifting the political initiative from those in power to the masses – the downtrodden. After all, the promise of Alafu [What next?] lies with the people.
Read more here.
Thank you for reading the eleventh issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.
Chapter 26 of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things deals with real value, as does David J. Temple’s* First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come (2023). *Collective pen name for Zak Stein, Marc Gafni and Ken Wilber.
According values ontological status on a par with physical objects can assist a move from relativism to realism, but should not be taken as a directive towards reductive materialism — quite the opposite. From Husserl’s phenomenology to the Buddhist notion of emptiness, diverse traditions express the intuition that the redness of red (and more radically that the object-hood of objects) co-arises in dependence upon consciousness, rather than existing as a self-sufficient property. For Scheler, values are real, but they are disclosed, not detected. They are given only in intentional acts of feeling: value is always value-for a possible subject, even if not created by that subject.
Max Scheler, ‘On the Eternal in Man’.