Weber’s listening: Non-purposive figures in Weber

Introduction

This article investigates a salient disjuncture in Max Weber’s work: the opposition between intentionality and attachment. My point of departure is a simple, intuitive observation: in no other sociological body of work do we find notions such as ‘calling’, ‘vocation’ or ‘devotion’ placed at the very centre of thought; in no other classic do we find existential descriptions of ‘destinies’ that have to be assumed, or ‘demons’ or ‘gods’ that have to be found, served and obeyed. Astute readers of Weber’s oeuvre will notice the figures of self-abandonment and self-investment that place modern man closer to the world than to his intentional self.

These figures surface in biographical writings about Weber and in his own publications and correspondence; they stir underneath his moral non-cognitivism, his ‘decisionism’, his ideal of a total devotion to certain ‘ultimate values’ of life-conduct and his idea of a ‘sacrifice of the intellect’ on behalf of the religious person. They can be found even where we might least expect them: in his methodological writings, where he writes about creativity, and in his theory of action, where he emphasizes the limits to intentional and conscious action. Most obviously, though, non-intentional figures surface in the concept of ‘the calling’, maybe the most important non-purposive concept in his whole oeuvre. This article attempts to uncover the impulses behind Weber’s persistent use of this term throughout his mature work. Here a register of Weberian thought may be accessed that breaks radically with his work’s dualist traits and with his ‘intentionalist’ theory of action.

The secondary literature has, I feel, sadly neglected the fundamental significance of this register in Weber’s vocabulary. It has almost exclusively nourished the dualist and Kantian Weber. In this article, I seek to restore balances. I wish to uncover a non-purposive and non-dualist layer in Weber’s thought neglected by his interpreters. Even so, other scholars have broken the ground for some of my investigations. Attempts to relegate Weber’s intentional, voluntaristic and actor-focused theory of action to the background and replace it with the ‘anthropological question’ are found in the work of prominent interpreters such as Wilhelm Hennis (1983, 1987, 1996), Friedrich Tenbruck (1959) and Joachim Radkau (2009: 112). Moreover, Wolfgang Schluchter (1988a, 1988b), Hennis (1987, 1996) and, notably, Harvey Goldman (1988) have occupied themselves intensively with Weber’s notion of the calling. Weber (2012) himself does not forget to tell us that ‘behind the “action” stands a human being’ (p. 328), and it is beyond question that this ‘human being’ – and it’s historically, culturally and religiously contextualized ‘life conduct’ [Lebensführung] – is of crucial interest to Weber (Hennis 1983: 14). This interest largely informs his sociology of religion, his ‘social-psychology’, his interest in the effects of modern capitalism and his attempt to circumscribe the process of rationalization.

In the first part of this article, I critically sketch, as an interpretive framework, what I take to be central dogmas in Weberian thought and in the literature blocking for new or different interpretations of his work and his notion of ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’. In the second part of the article, I investigate the concept of personality in late Weber, his picture of creativity in scientific (and political) practice, his concepts of charisma and charismatic inspiration and of the puritan calling. I try to demonstrate that Weber’s reflections in all these cases are grounded in non-intentional figures of profound significance for an up-to-date understanding of Weber’s concept of the calling, non-intentional figures that run counter to the Cartesian and Kantian vocabulary pervading much of his work. In conclusion, I try to assess the wider significance of my findings for our image of Weber and the merits of his sociology.

Exposing dogmas – Restoring ambivalences

Before we attempt to excavate the non-intentional gestures in Weber, some general remarks on Weber’s sociology and the Weberian literature are necessary. If we are to understand why the figures of attachment have not yet been sufficiently exposed, we should investigate why and to what extent this register in his work is overlooked. In the following, I shall critically address what I take to be apparent dogmas in the Weberian literature blocking for an engagement with the non-purposive impulses. Accounts of each of these dogmas could easily make for standalone critiques; they will only be rudimentarily sketched here.

First, regarding the very concept of the calling, there can be no doubt about the crucial significance of the concept across all of Weber’s work. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism from 1904–1905, Weber (2003) writes that ‘the rational conduct of life’ on the basis of the calling represents one of the ‘constitutive elements’, not only of ‘the modern capitalist spirit’ but of ‘the spirit of modern culture’ altogether (p. 180). However, if the notion of the calling is of such central importance for an understanding of modern occidental life, we should indeed ask whether Weber’s pessimistic picture of the historical destiny of the calling in The Protestant Ethic is adequate. In my view it is not. When the young Weber (2003) asserts that ‘today only the duty towards one’s calling’ remains (p. 276, my emphasis), that modern labour presents a ‘joyless lack of meaning’ since it no longer has any ‘religious justification’, and that capitalism has ‘forever destroyed’ the ‘worldly attractiveness’ of ‘all labour’ (2003: 161), he must be duly criticised. Evidently, the reduction of the calling to ‘duty’ and mindless labour goes hand in hand with an indiscriminately gloomy picture of the consequences of capitalism in the Western world. And yet, as far as I am aware, we find no such critical distance among Weber’s interpreters. ¹

However, not only are these claims of Weber’s indiscriminate and anachronistic, bound to historical forms of industrial or Fordist labour which, at least in the Western world, are largely disappearing, they should also be measured against the fact that Weber in his late lectures readily extends his use of the concept of the calling to the sphere of politics and science. In fact, by following threads in Weber’s own work, we see that the disappearance of the original religious framework around the calling has in no way reduced the calling to mere ‘duty’; rather, it has freed the individual in an equivocal manner. It has, if not illuminated, then at least made tangible the darkness behind our most existential and important decisions, but it has also paved the way for a modern notion of the calling that has little to do with ‘joyless duty’ or ‘lack of meaning’.

Inasmuch as this positive extension of the notion of the calling into modern life surfaces in the late work, one might even speculate about whether Weber’s pessimistic view in The Protestant Ethic regarding the fate of the calling in modern capitalism was not partly connected to his personal and creative crisis at the time of writing the early book. Does the reduction of the concept of the calling to tedious ‘duty’ draw from Weber’s inability to devote himself ‘fully and wholly’ to his own ‘calling’ at the time of writing? And conversely, might the positive extension of the calling in Weber’s mature work correspond with a return of felt creative sensibility and passionate devotion?

I shall come back to these biographical questions below. Germane at this juncture is that these questions reflect an opposition between self-possession and self-abandonment, between a ‘will to form’ forced upon ‘life’ from without found in the early work and a sense of formation (Bildung) rooted in creative devotion to the concrete matter at hand found in the late lectures. Indeed, we should remark that the German word for the calling, Berufung, is closely related to the term Beruf, meaning ‘occupation’ or ‘profession’. ² Martin Luther’s ‘conservatism’ – his insistence that the individual should ‘remain in his profession’ – is inseparable from his attempt to ‘move’ the individual closer to actual practical or intellectual endeavours. It is for the very same reason that Weber was fascinated by the Hindu Upanishads (Cf. Weber, 2009: 123). The notion of vocation or calling thus has a strong inherent relation to worldly and everyday matters; it calls on the individual to thoroughly invest himself or herself in the actual tasks of the profession and to carry these tasks through in a way that lives up to the honour – the reputation, renommé or Ruf – of that profession. In fact, this is the thought that moves Weber in his late lectures on politics and science. He insists that the honour or ‘dignity’ of the professions of politics and science – and of the individual therein engaged – depends on the individual’s concrete emotional and intellectual attachment to a definite political cause or to the actual ‘scientific’ explorative process. We are far from the scenario of a free ‘existential’ choice between value spheres, taking place in a somewhat extra-worldly vacuum – and being the only ‘binding’ force motivating in professional contexts once it is made. Rather, the clash between value spheres only gains existential importance because the individual is always-already engaged and absorbed in the actual ‘task at hand’. The notion of the calling is fundamentally related to a non-intentional register of experience and action, moving us closer, as it were, to our objects and endeavours – material or immaterial, practical or theoretical – than to our intentional and deliberative ‘selves’.

Weber’s distinctions between Calvin and Luther, and between activity and passivity, practice and contemplation, self-control and self-abandonment, and interiority and exteriority, are transcended in this late version of the calling. Indeed, when he considers the ‘vocation’ of science and politics, he starts to merge intentional and non-intentional registers: he mixes autonomy and external determination, detachment and attachment, self-abandonment and self-possession, methodological rigor imposed from above and passionate absorption. In Weber (2012), as we shall see, the devoted politician possesses cool ‘eyesight’, but also the facility to devote himself or herself wholly to a ‘cause’; the devoted scientist possesses rigor and persistence in the face of tedious and longwinded investigations – ‘very hard work’ – but is also utterly caught up in a ‘passionate’ relationship with the material (p. 339). In a sense, every concrete political or scientific ‘subject matter’ has its proper calling – to which corresponds a form of listening. Without an ability to let the subject matter speak with its own voice, there are neither authentic politicians nor scientists, but only fake prophets.

This sounds increasingly heretical to the conventional interpretation of Weber as a theoretician of intentional, subject-centred voluntarism. However, one should bear in mind that, except for passages scattered in his methodological writings and a single early article on the categories of interpretative sociology (Weber, 2012: 273–301), Weber’s (1978) theory of action only fills around 15 pages of the opening chapter of Economy and Society (pp. 3–26). The concept of the calling, in contrast, plays a key part in his work on occidental capitalism and religion, his ‘social psychology’ and his late methodological and political writings. This quantitative difference may alert us to misleading imbalances in the construction of Weber as a theoretician of ‘intentional’ action.

Second, I want to address Weber’s economism and the biases it entails. Weber represents an important nodal point in a line of pessimistic sociological thinkers reaching from Hegel and his account of ‘civil society [Bürgerliche Gesellschaft]’ via Marx, onwards to critical theory and including prominent classical sociologists such as Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel. This is a line of thinkers who all view the modern economy as antagonistic to all felt social sentiment. Thus Weber (2009), as do his predecessors, often reduces modern economic life to the play of antagonist interests: Money’ is understood (with Simmel) as ‘the most abstract and ‘impersonal’ element that exists in human life’ (p. 331); culture, ultimately, is reduced to a ‘struggle’, not merely between the different ‘value spheres’ or ‘world views’ but also between classes or individuals (p. 355). Again, such sweeping statements should hardly form a background for empirical work. It should not be forgotten that Weber’s (2012) bleak diagnosis of contemporary capitalist culture and his focus on the economic is meant to distil a deliberately radicalized and one-sided ‘ideal typical’ scenario (p. 113) – even though there is no doubt that Weber (2012) found the ‘economization’ of culture to be a profoundly real and all-important development (p. 248).

Weber’s critical outlook on capitalism, and the bleak picture of modern social life it entails, not only predisposes the interpreter to neglect numerous testimonies to the existence of collective dynamics scattered in Weber’s work (and the importance of such dynamics in his late lectures), but also reinforces the picture of action as inherently instrumental and subject-centred in relation to others and to the object world.

This brings us, third, to Weber’s theory of action and Verstehen. As is well known, Weber (1978) focuses on what he terms ‘subjectively understandable’ behaviour (p. 13). Ideally, we are dealing with forms of ‘meaningful’ behaviour in which the subjective ‘motive’ or ‘intention’ should constitute the impetus of action. It is this conception of action we find in the trendsetting secondary renderings of Weber’s concept of action, such as those of Talcott Parsons (1937) and Schutz (1967), and in the broad current of ‘interpretative sociology’ following in their wake. ³ The Weber that interests me in this article is effectively numbed by this voluntaristic and intentionalist perspective. Where, for instance, in this framework, are we to accommodate Weber’s (2009) depiction of erotic behaviour?

[T]he erotic relation seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfilment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other. This boundless giving of oneself is as radical as possible in its opposition to all functionality, rationality, and generality. It is displayed here as the unique meaning which one creature has for another, and only for this specific other. (p. 347)

Here, self-abandonment is in focus, not subjective motivation. The perspective is ‘decentered’ and Weber speaks about ‘a fusion of souls’. But what, then, if action can be decentered in all the ‘spheres’ of action? Indeed, how to explain the clash of value-spheres and the struggle among the different gods and demons, if they have no actual hold on us? Are we not, in fact, ‘always-already’ attached and invested? Weber’s ‘official’ theory of action decisively obscures this more fundamental scenario.

At this point, however, we should note Weber’s (1978) overt admission as to the limitations of his conception of action and ‘interpretation’:

In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to be aware of it in a vague sense than he is to know what he is doing or be explicitly self-conscious about it. In most cases his action is governed by impulse or habit. […] The ideal-type of meaningful action where the meaning is fully conscious and explicit is a marginal case. (p. 21)

A purely methodologically or epistemologically motivated preference for intentional action excludes the ‘great majority of cases’. Doesn’t this admission testify to the diminished relevance of Weber’s theory of action altogether?

This brings us to the question of what Weber actually excludes from his theory of action. Here I shall focus on two concepts: the concept of imitation (or contagion) and the concept of creativity. As to the concept of imitation, Weber is clear in his dismissal. But in my view, the exclusion of vague ‘mass psychological’ sensations or of unconscious ‘imitation’ or ‘contagion’ (Weber, 1978: 12, 17, 23–24) from the object field of sociology is damaging. It hinders Weber in seriously investigating the very collective dynamics that gain importance in his late work. Pre-reflective collective impulses – think of Weber’s repeated polemic against the intellectual ‘fashions’ of the younger generation (Weber, 2009: 127–128, 2012: 340–341) – play a crucial (negative) role in the late Weberian demarcation of the genuine ‘personality’ from mere ‘romanticist’ affection or ‘sterile excitation’ (Weber, 2009: 115, 127).

As regards the concept of individual creativity, it is amply present in Weber’s methodological writings. As we shall see, it is just as essential to his idea of personality in a ‘positive’ sense as is his concept of imitation in a negative sense. And here, again, we encounter impulses completely at odds with Weber’s ‘official’ theory of action. In fact, his notion of creativity is strongly connected to the later notion of the calling. It brings us closer to the ‘objects’ of our actions; it entails a register of sensitivity and self-abandonment in relation to the subject matter of the scientific investigation; in politics or religion, it contours forms of ‘charismatic’ inspiration surfacing from the ‘cause’ itself; in the realm of aesthetics, it connotes a state of being ‘seized’ by the artwork.

By excluding imitation and creativity from his theory of action – or by relegating them to a ‘residual’ existence – Weber has effectively barred himself from investigating these forms of action. ⁴ In his attempt to restrict his concept of action to subjectively meaningful behaviour, he is forced to ignore the pre-reflexive bodily and intellectual entanglement with the object world that creativity essentially is. Granted, the notions of ‘affective’ and ‘traditional’ behaviour are listed among the ideal-types for action. Yet what is interesting about these forms of action, from my perspective, is exactly that which ‘stands beyond what can be called meaningful behaviour altogether’ (Weber, 1978: 25), and this register of action is not only excluded from Weber’s interpretative sociology per definition, it is also falsely reduced to forms of ‘mechanic’, ‘determined’ or ‘instinctive’ behaviour. The most immediate register of thought and action, that is, the register wherein we are absorbed in our intellectual or practical endeavours, close to the objects, is obscured. The phenomenological body is torn from its world and pushed back into a detached consciousness wherefrom all action originates. Luckily, there are abundant passages in Weber that conflicts with this limited and insufficient understanding of what action is.

Fourth, Weber’s work is pervaded by Kantian dualisms. Traditional oppositions – action versus contemplation, spontaneity versus passivity, inner versus outer, freedom versus necessity, mind versus body – permeate not only his theory of action but also his substantial writings. They surface, for instance, in the opposition between the mystic and the Calvinist, between the unio mystica with god pacifying the mystic (2003: 112–113) and the Calvinist distance to god animating the Puritan (2003: 103–108). They are also present in his methodological work and in his theory of action in the form of the all-important distinction between mechanic ‘behaviour’ and conscious ‘action’ – indeed, it is this very dualism which, on the one hand, makes it possible for Weber to exclude the concept of imitation from his theory of action as merely ‘mechanical’ and, on the other, makes it impossible for him to include the concept of creativity. Then, creative behaviour defies the dualist distinctions between freedom and determinism, mind and body, inner and outer, and intentional and non-intentional, on which Weber’s theory of action and rational Verstehen is based. ⁵

The dualism of spontaneity and passivity is indicative of more fundamental Kantian and Cartesian attitudes in Weber’s work. The following well-known passage testifies to Weber’s (2012) Kantianism:

‘Culture’ is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of events in the world, endowed with meaning and significance from a human perspective. […] The transcendental precondition of every cultural science is […] that we are cultural beings, endowed with the capacity and the will to adopt a deliberate position with respect to the world and lend it meaning. (p. 119)

This Kantian template informs much of Weber’s thought, and it makes him deaf to the voices coming from the world. It forces him to tear apart subject and object, and to assemble all action and all meaning-bestowing faculties in the subject. ⁶ It entails Cartesianism, in the sense that it rests on a substantial ontological cleavage between mind and matter – res extensa and res cogitans. It separates the world into two halves that cannot, once torn apart, really be brought back together.

On the grounds set out above, it is apparent that a genuine understanding of the notion of the calling – and the listening it involves – cannot be achieved via Weber’s ‘official’ theory of action. It has to be found in the margins of his writings, where truth is allowed to emerge unguarded. And yet, once we start to look closely into Weber’s texts the rudiments of another – non-dualist – ‘theory of action’ surfaces. I will seek to outline this theory in the remaining part of the article.

The person and the Sache

One of the few interpreters to glimpse this non-dualist thread to Weber’s thought was his wife. Before we move on to this fact, however, we should note how Marianne Weber’s biography of her husband explicates the links between Weber’s work and his personal life. In fact, her precise rendering of Weber’s personal crises permits one to offer some – I admit, speculative – theories as to the connection between Weber’s psychological and creative crisis and his negative depiction of the fate of the calling in modern society in his writings in this period. Then, what really aggravates Weber’s condition and pushes him ever deeper into depression in the years 1898 to 1904 is – so much is clear from Marianne Weber’s account – his attempt to work on the basis of ‘duty’ alone: that is, as it were, without his being able to hear the ‘true’ calling emerging from the scientific material. Not surprisingly, Weber’s (1975) subsequent realization that he cannot overcome his incapacity to work by way of the ‘will’ (p. 261) or by ‘duty’ (p. 253) alone is the first step towards recovery. ⁷ What failed the sick and depressed Weber is first and foremost his ability to listen, to become interested, to improvise and to think creatively. This explains why Weber’s (1975) otherwise ‘plastic’ thought – permeated with ‘material from reality [wirklichkeitsgefülle]’ (p. 308, translation modified) – retreated in these bleak periods, and also why he could not teach.

There are thus clear connections between Weber’s early diagnosis of the destiny of the Calvinist calling in modern capitalism and his own personal crisis. Luckily, Weber recovered over the years, and with this recovery came an attenuation of the ‘puritan’, duty-bound and disciplining side to the calling (Radkau, 2009: 152–153) and an increasing emphasis on the connection to an actual object of interest and passion. The contrast between the scenario of vocation as ‘mere duty’ in The Protestant Ethic (1993) and the more ‘absorbed’ picture we find in the late lectures on science and politics is striking.

Marianne Weber is also one of the few interpreters who places Weber’s concept of personality in the conceptual nexus that does it justice. She begins the 11th chapter in her book in this way:

This chapter will attempt to present to non-scholars some aspects of Weber’s ideas which may give them a picture of his mind and, above all, add to their knowledge of his personality. […] The ideas presented here essentially developed at the point where scientific cognition and life-forming conviction meet, where his contemplative faculties were so close to the active ones that his writings illuminate his personality as thinker, teacher and politician. (Weber, 1975: 305)

At least three things about this passage ought to strike the reader. First, Marianne’s mentioning of the ‘professions’ of ‘politics’, ‘teaching’ and ‘thinking’: these three activities are not randomly chosen but correspond with professions where, ideally, personal ‘vocation’ or calling is at stake – they are also the professional vocations treated by Weber in his late lectures. Second, Marianne’s clear insistence on the strong connection between the personal and the professional: Weber, Marianne feels, tried to place himself where ‘scientific cognition’ – scientific practice – meets ‘life-forming conviction’. She traces a tight relation between Weber’s (notion of) personality and (his) actual ‘contemplative’ and creative work with the empirical material. Third, Marianne’s statement that the ‘whole’ of the personality is ‘seated’ exactly where the ‘active’ and the ‘contemplative’ forces ‘meet’: ⁸ Marianne is completely aware that in Weber’s own enterprise this dualism disappears. In short, only where speaking and hearing, spontaneity and sensibility coalesce is it possible to be an authentic politician, scientist, or teacher, that is, to really heed the calling. ⁹

The close connection between the development of genuine personality, absorbedness in actual vocational practice, and the suspension of the opposition between spontaneity and passivity is fundamental to the late Weber’s picture of true scientific or scholarly activity. ¹⁰ Illustrative is Marianne’s description of Weber’s indifference towards mere aesthetic questions of style and eloquence in the sciences. She sees in Weber’s convoluted writing an implicit critique of ‘a current trend [Zeitströmung]’ that places ‘undue importance [on] formal values’, and continues,

In this aesthetics of style Weber saw a mixture of intellectual spheres that obeyed different laws, and he particularly hated the unsimpleness [Unschlichtheit] of expression that could easily creep in as well as the straining for ‘personal touch’. He frequently quoted from Faust: ‘Es trägt Verstand und rechter Sinn mit wening Kunst sich selber vor [With little art, clear wit and sense suggest their own delivery]’. […] The person of the thinker must not intentionally obtrude itself in the realm of scholarship but should withdraw behind the subject. (Weber, 1975: 309)

Too much weight on aesthetics in science presents a confusion of value spheres. Affectedness implies that the candidate does not adhere whole-heartedly to the obligatory will to truth written over the entrance gate to the scientific sphere. ¹¹ But this sounds too abstract. What is at stake here is, again, the ability to listen to the emerging contours of the Sache, the concrete ‘task’ at hand; indeed, to refrain from self-assertion and instead to ‘withdraw behind the subject’. ¹² The following are Weber’s (2012) own words:

In any profession the task as such has its claims and must be performed in accordance with its own inherent laws. Any person who has to carry out a professional task must confine himself [to it] and eliminate everything that is not material [to it] – and especially his own loves and hates. And it is not true that a strong personality reveals itself by first looking, on every occasion, for its own unique completely ‘personal touch’. […] ‘[B]eing a personality is not something that one can set as a deliberate goal, and […] there is only one way in which one can (perhaps!) become [a personality]: by committing oneself unreservedly to a ‘cause’, whatever [that cause] and the ‘claims of the day’ entailed by it may look like in the individual case. (p. 307)

Again a non-purposive register of action emerges. The scientist steps back behind the Sache – surrenders to it ‘wholly and fully’. This ‘ethics’ demands from the scientist a continual effort to protect the tight relation to the matter of the investigation from the ‘vanity’ of the self, from external collective influences, from viewpoints belonging to other value spheres and from the desire for forms of the ‘sensational’ and ‘sterile excitation which have nothing to do with […] genuine [intellectual] passion’ (2009: 115, 127). Weber’s ideal of scientific practice is a form of non-purposive self-investment in the process of creative entanglement; it is an attempt to ensure that the inherent logic of the subject matter can be listened to without interference, and that factual and conceptual structure can be allowed to crystallize of its own accord. Of course, such creative processes involve disciplining and systematization, but if the researcher tries to control this creative process, it is ultimately distorted (2012: 339–349). In a letter to Else Jaffé from 1919, we find an illustrative passage:

For when I ‘receive’ ideas or contemplatively allow them to form inside me, everything flows – no matter whether it is a lot or a little, valuable or valueless – it flows in abundance – and then the struggle begins to capture it for the paper … and for me that is the true, almost unbearable torture. (Radkau, 2009: 98, 527)

Such creative processes cannot be mastered. They are not intentional. They have nothing to do with a form of action oriented towards ‘means’ and ‘ends’. They do not belong to the thinker – even though Weber ‘allows them to form inside’ him. Systematization is only possible post hoc.

And yet, paradoxically, the more the ‘true scientist’ abandons himself to this process, the more he is brought back to himself. Personal genius, genuine personality and expression of self only emerge through concrete work with the material. Personality, Weber (2012) tells us, cannot be ‘deliberately striven for’ – at least not when the goal is to assume one’s own: ‘in the realm of science, the only persons who have “personality” are those who are wholly devoted to the task [before them] [rein der Sache dient]’ (p. 340). Intellectual responsibility towards the calling is rooted in a continual effort to ‘distribute’ action evenly between subject and object. In reality, personality is a question of ‘self-restraint’, an attempt to make room for the Sache; it is about concrete forms of self-investment and expression, and not about an abstract existential choice of binding ‘ultimate values’ or a formal requirement for self-consistency imposed upon life from above. ¹³

The same considerations apply to the political sphere. Here similar psychological and social dangers surface, detaching the individual from the Sache by reducing his or her factual sensibility:

Therefore, daily and hourly, the politician has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity, the deadly enemy of all matter-of-fact devotion to a cause, and of all distance, in this case, of distance to one’s self. (Weber, 2009: 116)

The ‘sin’ against the calling in the political sphere begins exactly where the will to power of the politician detaches itself from the Sache. The politician loses his or her judgment exactly when he or she forgets why he or she wills the power. Moreover, as in the case of science, certain ‘fashionable’ ideologies (notably the ‘cult’ or ‘fashion’ of ‘personality’, or ‘romanticist’ currents among the young) endanger the ability to listen (2009: 127; 2012: 340). When the politician or the scientific scholar loses the Sache, the self is lost – and in that order. This is the fundamental meaning of Weber’s notion of ‘intellectual honesty’, ‘responsibility’ or ‘dignity’ (2009: 95, 99; 2012: 346, 350, 353).

Marianne Weber has been criticized for her lack of esteem for her husband’s methodological oeuvre. ¹⁴ Yet we now see that this accusation is partly unjust. Granted that Marianne does not expound the theoretical dimensions of Weber’s methodological writings, her biography, however, shows an unsurpassed understanding of the real ‘methodological’ ideals and values that underline Weber’s material work, most forcefully expressed in the crucial connections between the concept of the person and actual scientific work. In the late lectures, Weber moves beyond any narrow interest in restrictive conceptions of ‘method’ or ‘objectivity’. Indeed, the context of actual theoretical and empirical exploration and development sketched in late Weber is in no way to be compared to the irrational and fortuitous phase of scientific practice later described by Karl Popper and Hans Reichenbach as the ‘context of discovery’. In Weber, the ‘context of discovery’ contains its own forms of ‘justification’, its own reasonable and tangible contours – at least for those who listen.

It is thus not more justifiable to blame Marianne Weber for her neglect of Weber’s methodological work than to blame the ‘methodological’ interpreters for having forgotten the epistemological relevance of the concept of creativity, of intellectual ‘integrity’ and ‘responsibility’, of personality, and of the concept of the Sache. ¹⁵ Often Weber’s critique of Diltheyan ‘empathy’ or ‘intuition’ is emphasized in the literature while Weber’s repeated insistence on the absolute indispensability of intuition and creativity in all science is ignored. ¹⁶

To sum up, it seems to me that the Weber literature neglects the non-intentional impulses that are to be found – primarily but not exclusively – in his late work. These impulses run counter to his theory of action and Verstehen, and they undermine the dualist ontology and epistemology underlying many of his methodological reflections in the more narrow sense of this word. The opposition between spontaneous (or conscious) ‘action’ and reactive (or automatic) ‘behaviour’ found in Weber’s ‘official’ theory of action is suppressed in his late notion of personality and in his picture of the political or scientific calling. Here the ‘attached’, non-intentional, creative base of all agency asserts itself – and this explains the subsequent need for discipline, form, system and duty. Weber’s account of personality in no way amounts to a requirement for abstract self-assertion. Rather, he wishes for the person to be consumed by the Sache, by the creative processes, by the object of ‘passionate’ interest – he then lets the genuine ‘personality’ remerge out of the ashes.

In the following, I will demonstrate that we find the same dismissal of the dualism between spontaneity and passivity – action and behaviour – in Weber’s concept of charisma.

Charismatic inspiration

As is often remarked, the concept of charisma stands in somewhat uncomfortable relation to Weber’s theory of action in that it seems to let in a collectivist element, hardly welcome in Weber’s universe. However, what interests me here is charisma as a moving force in historic and intellectual development: as a notion of creativity and inventiveness (1978: 1117). ¹⁷ To be sure, charisma may be ascribed to the prophet or the leader by the collective. Yet the basis for the collective fascination the leader provokes – and thus for further collective ‘charging’ of his charismatic appearance – is personal ‘charismatic inspiration’. Weber is far from reducing this element to a social construction. Even though he remarks that the ‘inner experience’ of the charismatic leader is of less importance, and that the essential element of charisma is ‘the manner in which the ruled and led experience and internalize these ideas’ (1978: 1116), it is obvious that the two moments are related. In short, the authentic political leader – or ‘the prophet, the artist or the demagogue’ – does not only seduce others but is also seduced himself. Indeed, we are told, it is only because the genuine politician is devoted to the ‘cause’ in every concrete instance – ‘daily and hourly’ – that he or she possesses the ‘inner charismatic qualities that make a leader’ (2009: 113).

However, the word ‘inner’ should not be taken literally either. In politics, we have seen, ‘[d]istance to one’s self’ is obligatory (2009: 116). As a matter of fact, when Weber writes about the ‘intellectual distance’ of the politician it is not in relation to the cause or the Sache, but to the self. It is the politician’s first and foremost duty ‘to let the realities work upon him’ (2009: 115). Investment in the ‘cause’, paradoxically, equips the politician with ‘a cool sense of proportion’, the ability to approach politics ‘with the head’, and an appropriate ‘distance’ from ‘things and people’ (2009: 115). It spares the politician from both egoistic and collective ‘dangers’ by anchoring intellectual judgment in the Sache. This anchoring makes it possible for the politician or the prophet to draw charisma from the only true charismatic sources: his or her political or theological fascinations, passions and ideas. Every consideration as to the social impact of political efforts endangers the politician’s contact with these ‘inner charismatic qualities’. Now, it is of course naïve to think that politics does not involve a moment of calculated self-presentation and so-called ‘spin’, but it is just as naïve – or cynical – to ‘critically’ reduce politics to these elements. ¹⁸ If the politician was not in a very concrete sense ‘seized’ by his or her ideas, he or she would hardly be able to attract – and be even less able to retain – followers or admirers. The leader ‘lives for his cause’ [Lebt seiner sache] and ‘strives for his work’ (2009: 79). It is the factual or intellectual content of the ‘cause’ that lights the fire in the eye, that makes for captivating oratory and compelling appearance. Authenticity cannot be ‘produced’ by any ‘media’, but neither does it simply emerge out of the ‘inner’ self or the ‘personality’ of the born leader or scholar. It comes from stepping back behind the Sache, from the ability to be spoken by it and to make ‘responsibility’ to it ‘the guiding star of action’ (2009: 115). Only then does the collective charging of a persona begin. A first-hand experience of Weber’s own charismatic appearance as a speaker is illustrative of this double nature of charisma:

[L]ogical sharpness and representational qualities together reflected the intellectual process: the inflow of idea from all four corners of the earth, and the way in which they were then tightly grasped and skilfully brought into logical relationship with one another. His hands repeatedly stretch out as he labours to draw all the new material together. ¹⁹ (Radkau, 2009: 107)

Weber is indeed close to the object. ²⁰ And even though he must necessarily systemize and discipline his speech (or writing) – a task at which he admitted he only moderately succeeded – he can only speak inspiringly because he is himself inspired, attached, interested and absorbed.

The puritan revisited

If we take a step back, we may attach some considerations to the historical development of this form of passionate matter-of-factness. In this respect, Weber’s own account is again illustrative.

In his sociology of religion, Weber stresses how, historically, individual creativity as tied to intellectual rationality emerges in tandem with the receding of mysticism, ritual and collectivism. ²¹ In other words, ‘outer’ charisma becomes ever more dependent on ‘inner’ charisma. ‘[P]rophets as well as priestly religions […] stood in intimate relation with rational intellectualism’ (2009: 352), Weber writes; yet it is the personal and creative moment of the intellectual enterprise that distinguishes the prophet from the priest, and this explains why the prophet, in contrast to the priest, must be alone. In contrast to priests, prophets have access to a special form of attachment to the world: individualized intellectual creativity. Again we note that true prophets attract followers because of the prophets’ personal creative gifts – at least in the beginning.

We find the same structure in Weber’s (1988) depiction of the Jewish prophet: indeed, the Jewish prophet did not adhere to any ‘school’ or communion (p. 313); correspondingly, ‘prophetic charisma [is] first and foremost the gift to rationally understand Jahwe’ (1988: 311). The increasing distance from God, the rejection of the ‘irrational’ unio mystica and the absence of an institutionalized community thus correspond to increasing individualization and intellectual rationalization. In fact, the Jewish prophet is to be understood as a somewhat early precursor of the Puritan ascetic. ²²

However, this is where Weber’s depiction becomes complex. Since he remains focused on the emergence of capitalism, he tends to ignore the more intellectual and ‘contemplative’ side to the Puritan calling and to ‘exaggerate’, as Arnold Eisen (1991) puts it, ‘the ascetic side’, that is, the dimension of purposive action (p. 101). Again, Weber’s dualism between action and contemplation – between Luther and Calvin – causes problems. Nevertheless, if we adjust Weber’s account a tiny bit – attenuating this violent dichotomy – we find exactly the same conceptual constellation in Weber’s account of the Puritan as we did in his accounts of the scientist, the politician and the prophet. Thus, in his loyal critique of Weber’s description of the Puritan, Eisen (1991) remarks that, in the Puritan context,

[e]ven religious beliefs were scrutinized and understood, not merely accepted. Nothing, even dogma, was permitted to reside in the mind without its conscious responsible consent. [The historical leader of the Puritan movement, William] Perkins insists that every person must have a faith of his own and cannot merely assent to the beliefs of his church. It was yet another way of escaping uncertainty and securing proof of salvation, available in the knowledge that one did firmly believe in the doctrine one had been taught to understand as well as to value. (p. 104)

The historical Puritan did not simply impose a methodological and regulated conduct on his or her life from above; rather, it emerged out of actual earthly dealings with objects intellectual and practical alike. Regardless of whether Calvinist predestination turns the individual towards a practical ‘mastering’ of his worldly surroundings or towards a reaffirmation of faith through lone work on the scripture, the rationalization of behaviour is anchored in the concrete matter at hand. Even though Weber (2003) insists that ‘[t]he God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system’ (p. 117), this unification does not rule out concrete motivations, impulses or directions surfacing from the actual objects of thought or action, nor does it exclude enthusiasm, creativity and passion in practical or intellectual life. Rather, these qualities are enhanced: As in the case of the scientist, the politician and the prophet, (Calvinist) anti-traditionalism, intellectualism and individualism turn the individual toward the objects – not toward the self. Puritan ascetics – intellectual or practical – do not separate us from the world, but move us closer into it. Whereas the young (and depressed) Weber feared that the very emotional and intellectual content, founding vocational ‘duty’, would disappear with capitalism, leaving only the abstract imposition of discipline upon intellectual and practical existence from above, the mature (and less depressed) Weber unequivocally recognized the persistence of charismatic inspiration and creativity in all practical and intellectual matters.

Conclusion

The prevailing reduction of the idea of the calling to the notion of duty or to mere ‘ascetic’ regulation or discipline does justice neither to the Anti-Kantian and anti-dualist layers in Weber’s writings, nor to the full picture of his thought on modern existence and agency. The notion of the calling entails a decentring of action – a creative and non-purposive being ‘seized’ by the ‘work’ or the ‘task’ at hand – which has no place in Weber’s theory of action. And yet, it is to be found in an increasing number of areas in modern culture and working life. Creative behaviour is indeed, to appropriate an expression of Weber’s (2003) cited in the introduction to this article, inherent to the very ‘spirit of modern culture’ (p. 180). Of course, I cannot provide an adequately complex discussion of the nature of the calling in working life in late Western capitalism here. However, it should be granted that the so-called ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999) contains a moment of hypocrisy: indeed, the contemporary lingo of ‘self-realization’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘creativity’ has a strong ideological flavour. Nevertheless, it is not too much to say – limiting the perspective to the late-modern Western ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’ society – that a fairly large part of the population in this context lives the life of the Weberian intellectual virtuoso. The necessary specialization inherent to modern professional life, and the rationalization and regulation imposed on proper professional conduct, should not be reduced to the picture of an iron cage holding the individual captured. We should also stress new possibilities of creative self-abandonment to the eigengesetzlichkeiten of the sphere, or, better, the liberation of intellectually and practically rewarding forms of devotion to concrete and exciting worldly and personal practices and interests, the ‘inherent laws’ of which must be listened to. The modern ‘personality’ does not merely have to ‘choose’ among demons. She or he rather has to ‘find’ the demon, and, then, ‘obey’ the demon (2012: 353). This obedience does not simply weigh down upon life from above, crippling the ‘Faustian’ drives of man; vocational specialization is also the gateway to individual intellectual and creative riches.

We are constantly being ‘seized’ by the world or by intellectual matters. This is how we live: ‘always-already in the world’. We find ample evidence of this primordial relation to the objects around us in Weber’s (late) concept of personality, and in his reflections on inspirational charisma and in his account of the calling of science or politics. Weber’s writings contain the rudiments of a theory that emphasizes our pre-reflective and pre-personal seizure by material or immaterial objects around us. Nowhere in the theoretical sociological canon do we find a theory which to such an extent emphasizes self-abandonment and self-surrender. And nowhere in the sociological canon do we find non-purposive impulses so apt to overcome the usual dualisms haunting European thought.

Yet, Weber was prevented from fully articulating this register of being in the world because of these same dualisms. They assert themselves violently in his early methodological writings and in his ‘official’ account of Verstehen and action. Perhaps it is time to develop a more complex and more positive picture.

Weber is indiscriminate when he reduces the notion of rationalization to abstract, ‘formal’ rationality and to forms of instrumental and impersonal behaviour that presumably permeate modern forms of organization and economic behaviour. He is on the mark when he emphasizes that rationalization entails – regardless of the sphere in question – new forms of intellectual self-abandonment and that creative and passionate absorption is an indispensable precondition for the development of a true personality and a true life under modern conditions. Weber is flat out wrong when he claims that the notion of the calling has degraded into ‘mere duty’ – or into narrow utilitarianism or empty aestheticism for that matter; he is right in assessing that the calling, once torn from its religious context, emerges in a number of different institutional, everyday and professional settings, and that these new forms of calling also involve new forms of listening.