 On reading the Ethics, the overall impression is of a kind of cautious optimism in face of an apathetic and pessimistic Modern culture. Hartmann was familiar with both Nietzsche’s and Scheler’s critiques of ressentiment and Modern culture (Nietzsche 1989 [1887]; Scheler 1994 [1914]), but Hartmann believes that the human sense for values can be cultivated, that we can learn to see the value abundance in the world and our relations to others again, and that we can be creative actualizers of higher values in the world. But to make this possible, what is first needed, counter to the long ethical tradition, is to make the “central task” of ethics “an analysis of the contents of values” (ET1Foreword). Against the formalism and intellectualism of Kantian ethics, it highlights the importance of our affective sense of values; against the relativism and subjectivism of Nietzsche, it shows that there are universal features of value experience and a structure to the domain of values which can give some guidance in prioritizing and synthesizing values in conflict.