 Scheler’s first and most influential work in phenomenology was his study of ethics, Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal (or Material) Ethics of Value. This work was motivated in part by a critique of the highly scientific or formalistic approaches to ethics introduced by Immanuel Kant and then later developed by the Neo-Kantians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Kant’s influence on Scheler’s thought cannot be underestimated. With Kant, Scheler rejects both utilitarianism and eudaimonism, and holds that ethics rests upon an a priori, an obligation non-relative to future consequences or happiness. For Kant, the a priori is expressed in the form of a categorical imperative, an imperative that is universalizable. For Scheler, such a formulation of the a priori is abstract and as a consequence, fails to account for both the unique obligation one has to another person and the unique call to responsibility given in the ethical imperative (GW II, 34). The ethical imperative, Scheler insists, is given as what one ought to necessarily do, but it is also experienced as what ‘I,’ and not merely anyone, ought to do (GW II, 94).