The following paper presents a comparative analysis of Max Scheler’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s concepts of compassion, in the light of Scheler’s critical treatment of Nietzsche’s ethical and anthropological ideas. In The Nature and Forms of Sympathy, Scheler develops a graded classification system of various types of sympathy, distancing himself from the metaphysical theory of Schopenhauer as well as from Nietzsche’s one-sided criticism of compassion as emotional contagion. While some key parts of his phenomenological method look – at least at the first sight – opposite to the ones of Nietzsche, many of his arguments and goals, such as the development of a rational mechanism of control upon the manifestations of compassion, coincide with the