Traditional approaches to Max Scheler’s work consider him a moralist and view his phenomenological project as a means of formalizing his ethics. We will however attempt to read his objective a priori and his axiological materialism from the sole point of view as his phenomenological approach. This is necessary to understand his criticism of Kantian rationalism and the originality of his emotional philosophy. His French posterity (Henry, Dufrenne, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty or Ricoeur) offers tools to extract the phenomenological element in his work, thus enabling it to live up to expectations. It also enables one to discover the difficulties of approaching Scheler from this perspective: how may one define the subjective pole of the intentional relationship which introduces us to the a priori meaning of objects in the world, i.e. their "values", if Scheler’s philosophy is first and foremost a phenomenology? And how may one reply to the phenomenological question of how values are erected if indeed the axiological import of the objects comes before this relationship?