Max Weber was a German sociologist who is best known for his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which argued that it was the influence of Protestantism which made the great victors of capitalism and industrialism – the US, Great Britain, and Germany – succeed in a way that the major Catholic powers, such as Spain, the Austrian Empire and later Italy, did not. Many of us also read his two lectures, “Science as Vocation” (“Wissenschaft als Beruf”) and “Politics as Vocation”, which are often published together. I first read the former, which is our subject today, at Cambridge as part of a paper on German thought, and must have read it several times since then. In fact, this is not even my first attempt at writing on it here. It is a work that has become more exciting as I have grown.
The translations for quotes come from the NYRB version of the Vocation Lectures, where this essay is translated by Damion Searls as “The Scholar’s Work”. I prefer “Science as Vocation” because of the more religious connotations of “vocation” compared to work, something which is even discussed in the introduction (!); however, I admit that “scholar’s” is more suitable than “science”, given that Weber is talking about all systematic pursuits of knowledge, not just beakers and test tubes. Either way, this is the only complaint I have about the translation.
Context
Weber was invited to give the first of his lectures on November 7th, 1917, by a group of students. By this point Germany’s war effort was beginning to flag. A food shortage was ongoing, and victory already appeared an unlikely outcome. Wars – especially the great wars of the 19th and 20th centuries – traditionally offered the warring populations a huge amount of meaning at their outset, as feelings of patriotism swelled. But in defeat the opposite happened, as all meaning was torn away. We might see something of this as an explanation for why Weber deals with meaning, because that is as much the topic of “Science as Vocation” as are the practicalities of being an academic.
An Unexpectedly Practical Introduction
We modern readers mostly read “Science as Vocation” because of the idea of “disenchantment” that Weber first speaks of here, but like Weber’s student audience we will be disappointed by what we hear when we begin to read. The essay starts with a very practical, earthy discussion of the differences between American and German academic systems. In the German system at the time for most academics there was no salary; instead, they received money from the students attending their lectures. At the same time, they had no free choice of lecture topic, because the most popular topics were granted to the more senior staff members – which naturally dampened still further their income.
In the US, meanwhile, one receives a very small salary as an assistant, and is swamped with work while more senior academics spend their time researching or reclining in their armchairs. The American can be fired for failing to secure sufficient attendance, while his German equivalent cannot be – though the latter can starve to death, which is its own problem. Promotion is often through connections, rather than skill, which means that the whole academic world is fairly disheartening to its inhabitants. Weber further reminds us that the skills needed “to be both a good scholar and a good teacher” are often quite discrete and unevenly distributed. As lectures were how universities decided whether an academic was worth keeping, this was not ideal.
Innovation, also, is not a thing that necessarily fills a lecture hall. If anything, it turns people away. Instead, “superficial qualities: the teacher’s personality, even his tone of voice” are what bring people to the lecture halls. Today, perhaps, we have an opposite situation, where the only thing that matters is the number of citations an academic has. This too brings its own problems, and is not necessarily a good metric for judging an academic’s value. Weber finalises his unencouraging tour of academic life by noting the constant and growing specialisation of academia, which is also often unattractive to those in search of knowledge and who wish to compass all knowledge with a spectacular breakthrough.
So, Who Should Be a Scholar?
Weber’s introduction lets him move on to answer the question of who should be a scholar, and who not. Certainly nobody bothered by the above should enter academia. Instead, one must have passion – “this strange intoxication, mocked by all who do not share it”. This is because “nothing is humanly worth doing except what someone can do with passion.” But beyond passion, one needs to work hard, and one needs inspiration too. Without passion, one cannot do the task; without the others, one cannot succeed at it. Weber is keen to emphasise that the importance of passion goes beyond just academic work. “A real personality is nothing other than a capacity to experience life authentically.” In other words, having a personality means being passionate about life.
The scholar must be passionate – “wholly devoted” – to what he or she studies. Only this passion can grant dignity in the face of the inevitable injustices of the world. And only passion for the work can make the work possible, given the next problem, which is the challenge of its limited meaningfulness.
The Meaning of Scholarship
It is a common human longing to wish to make a mark. Yet scholarship, in Weber’s view, will not reward us if that is what is our only motivation. This is because “scholarship, unlike any other cultural endeavour, is subjected to – dedicated to – its own obsolescence.” Each discovery wants to vanish under weight of each subsequent discovery, and even those of us with a background in the humanities will have noticed we read the more recent critics over the older ones, even if the object of the criticism is a thousand years old. If academic scholarship is merely an infinite sequence of discoveries endlessly replacing each other, then the value of an individual discovery is infinitely small – that is to say, it has no value at all.
Weber extends this idea with respect to progress in general, in what is an uncomfortable truth for those of us who have never stopped to consider progress as we strive for it. “In the context of modern civilization, with its theoretically infinite “progress”, an individual’s life necessarily lacks any ultimate purpose. Here is always another step to take on the path of progress; no one dies at the peak or end of his journey, because the path continues into infinity.” Tolstoy, Weber notes, was afflicted with this realisation around the time he was writing Anna Karenina. The thought gradually destroyed the meaning of his existence, and it was only through religion that Tolstoy was able to save himself. More on this later.
Disenchantment
The problem of meaninglessness is where Weber’s famous disenchantment comes in. Our world is rationalised and intellectualised to the extreme. What this means is that anything that we wish to know, we can know it. I may not know how a plane flies, but I know that I can discover it. The world in such an age has no mysteries, because all “can be mastered through calculation.” This idea of solving these mysteries becomes an obsession with us. But because there are an infinite number of mysteries, this obsession quickly comes to destroy us. We cannot meaningfully change the number of remaining mysteries, so we are left only with a kind of disappointment in our lack of impact and in the lack of magic the world has left for us.
Weber contrasts this view of life with a more ancient, cyclical one. Abraham, “or indeed any farmer from a bygone age”, did not search in the same way as we do. When he died, “his life had given him whatever it had to offer, in terms of meaning too.” He could die satisfied, because he accepted the magic of the world, rather than being disappointed by what remained to be done. Abraham’s death “in a good old age, an old man, and full of years” [Genesis 25:8] can be contrasted with Weber’s description of the death that meets us today, a person who might become “tired of life”, but can never be “fulfilled by it”:
“Not only does he get wind of merely a tiny fraction of all the new ideas that intellectual life continuously produces, but even those ideas are merely provisional, never definitive. As a result, death is simply pointless for him. And so too is life as such in our culture, which in its meaningless “progression” stamps death with its own meaninglessness.”
This is rather depressing stuff. The rest of the lecture is Weber trying to understand the full extent of what this disenchantment means, and what scholarship might have to do with solving the problems that it poses.
How Disenchantment Came About
Science did not always lead to disenchantment; the problem is that it can never now lead to anything but disenchantment, for Weber. The great tools of learning – the concept and the controlled experiment, once were trees that showed little signs of producing fruits that might rot. For Renaissance artists, chief among them Leonardo da Vinci, learning and systematic knowledge were “the path to true art”; later religious thinkers saw science as a way of finding traces of God’s presence – the argument of intelligent design, where the complexity of the universe is evidence of a higher creator.
Systematic and rationalistic thinking, however, have now reached a point where the above arguments do not and cannot work. They cannot bring happiness, for the reasons Tolstoy notes. They cannot prove God, because we now know (more than Weber did) about the extent to which our universe is random. In fact, what Weber finds as being the use of science is much less fun – “if science can do anything, it is precisely to uproot and destroy the belief that the world has any such thing as a “meaning””.
Tolstoy’s Questions, Weber’s Answers
“Science is meaningless, because it provides no answer for the only question that matters: “What should we do? How should we live?” Tolstoy could see enough to destroy the false meanings of the world – in money, power, progress. But he longed for something to replace them, and rejected science and such thinking when it could not provide him with this. In the end, he turned to the peasants. He saw in the strength of their religious beliefs a kind of proof of their truthfulness, and used that to help him construct a new vision of Christianity, which worked well enough for him, but which mostly appears a little silly to the rest of us.
Weber does not deny the truth of Tolstoy’s complaint. But he does not consider it important, because it is an attack that is unjust. For Weber, this is because Tolstoy is blind to the assumptions underpinning science and systematic thinking more broadly. Weber notes that without these assumptions, we cannot do science at all. And the assumption that is most important is that science is worthwhile. We cannot be an academic if we do not consider our work meaningful, or certainly not a happy one.
Science does not deal with questions of worth. If we do it, we say that it is worthwhile. If we reject it, it may be because we consider it valueless or wrong. But the questions that natural sciences answer, for example, are “what should we do if we want to use the techniques at our disposal to control life?”, and not “whether we should control life through technology, whether we want to, and whether it’s ultimately meaningful to do so.” The questions of value are out of bounds. This is as true about legal studies or medicine as it is about natural sciences. To question the value of such things is already to do something other than them – it is, if we feel like calling it that, to philosophise.
This distinction is important when we get on to political matters in particular. Studying politics is not the same thing as discussing the value of this or that party or person, in Weber’s view. It is about understanding the structures and realities, without judging them. He takes a harsh view of those professors (and this ties back to the introduction about the practice of teaching) who preach from the lectern. They are abusing their power to talk in an environment where they cannot be talked-back-to, and not sharing their knowledge. They are being – and here is one of Weber’s own values – “irresponsible.”
Questions of Worth
If science cannot tell us how to live, how then are we to live? There are two important answers given by Weber. The first, which we must acknowledge, is that there can be no universal meaning any longer. Once, religion could be that, but no more. It cannot be so again, not after Darwin and the “Death of God.” Weber knew that his listeners, the students, wanted prophets. But “this prophet, so longed for by so many in the younger generation, does not exist and will never come in the full force of his meaning.” The offerings of the National Socialists and the Soviets deserve nothing besides condemnation for trying to delude us into thinking otherwise. They are attractive, because prophets (and ideologues) save us from having to think for ourselves. But to let them lead us is to demonstrate a terrible dereliction of personal duty and awareness.
Where does this leave religion? We might assume that Weber would be as critical towards it as he is towards the nascent ideologies of his age. But for the person of private religious inclination, he is more conciliatory. Everything comes down to a choice. If the religious person chooses to believe in miracles, then this comes from its own assumptions, just as the scientific explanation for things like the parting of the Red Sea rests on its own assumptions. They will contradict each other, but neither can invalidate the other within its own system. Weber’s problem is when such views are designated as universal or exclusively true, when they most manifestly are not. Whether this is done by a religious fundamentalist, a communist, or someone else, all are making a mistake.
Value Pluralism and Choices
With no universal truth, Weber describes the ultimate values of individuals as being “in irresolvable conflict.” The classic example is wanting absolute freedom and absolute security – which we all, in theory, desire. One must compromise, but each person draws their dividing line in a different space. How do we choose? Weber will be no prophet for us. “It is up to the individual to decide which is God and which is the devil for him. And that is how it goes with every other decision about how to conduct one’s life.”
Yet academic knowledge and study absolutely have a role to play in this, even if we do not find our meaning through them. This is because they offer us a toolkit for being responsible with our choices. Logical, rigorous thinking gives us the ability to understand the choices that we make and to follow them properly. If we are rigorous, we know what follows on from a given view. If we do not like it, we cannot lie to ourselves about it, but we can change our view accordingly. Essentially, “we can force, or at least help, an individual to reckon with the ultimate meaning of his own actions.” This ultimate meaning and sense of the consequences of a line of thought forces us to be responsible. It deprives extreme viewpoints of much of the support that they gain by having deliberately vague means and ends.
In this, I am reminded a little of Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language”, which I compared with Simone Weil’s thoughts on the topic a few months ago. Orwell saw clearly that many sympathisers of the Soviet regime were willing to use language to avoid the responsibility of saying that they supported its actions. Weber cannot say, within Science as Vocation, that the Gulag system is universally wrong. But if intellectuals were sufficiently honest about what their beliefs meant – locking political opponents away is justified because it serves the great good of the movement – then their ideologies would have fewer supporters in practice, and hence much less power.
Conclusion: Decisions, Decisions
Ultimately, we might say that “Science as Vocation” is quite simple in its argument. We have to decide what is meaningful for us, and the value of scholarship and learning in this context is that it teaches us to clarity and method so that we can make responsible, albeit necessarily conflicting choices, about what to value in our lives. It is a painful work because it denies the possibility of a unifying, general meaning of the sort that prophets and ideologues offer. But it is not so pessimistic as it seems, for it leaves open religious belief and the valuing of enquiry in and of itself, should we choose such paths.
Tolstoy was unable to accept the lack of a universal value. He tried to convince himself that the peasants were the bearers of it and that mere snobbery had kept the philosophers from discovering this truth. Alas, this was just his truth, his choice, which he desperately clung to, but which kept him alive, as all those truths we truly let ourselves believe in do. As for us, we have to live, and live with our choices and our own beliefs. Where Weber shines in this piece, for me, is in three things – the clarity of his destruction of progress or science as sources of meaning, his insistence upon integrity, and in his arguments for the value of rational thinking in making responsibility and responsible choices possible.
It may not be what we want to hear. But it has to be enough.