 The social and political tensions erupting in Germany and Europe, tensions Scheler feared would lead to a second and even bloodier World War, had their roots in a much deeper crisis, an ontological crisis, a crisis of the human being. This crisis is perhaps best captured by Scheler in his essay, The Human Being and History. Scheler writes, “In our ten-thousand year history, we are the first time period in which the human being has become fully and totally ‘problematic’; the first time period in which the human being no longer knows who he or she is, but also knows that he or she does not know” (GW IX, 120). The purpose of the later speculative work was not merely to clarify the nature of the crisis, but also to problematize what had become unproblematic, to show that the human being is a question that ought to be considered.