Psychedelic science as cosmic play,psychedelic humanities as perennial polemics? Or why we are still fighting over Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation

Abstract

If it was indeed the fate of scientific work to become obsolete within 10–15 years, as Max Weber contended in Science as a Vocation, why does the Journal of Classical Sociology publish this article a century after publication of his famous lecture? Departing from anthropological fieldwork on the revival of psychedelic science since the 1990s, the author gives two answers. First, Weber provided a historically and culturally situated ideal type of vocational science with which we can compare and contrast the ethos of early twenty-first century scientists. The Swiss neuroscientist Franz X. Vollenweider, for example, defied the stern Protestantism of Weber’s vocational humanity and inferred from an amalgamation of psychedelic experiences and Hindu philosophemes a conception of science as play. Second, Weber not only contributed to the historical sociology of science an empirical description and conceptual analysis of turn-of-the-century scientific life in Germany and the United States but also unleashed a polemic against the confusion of facts and values. At a time when science studies and cognate fields of social research have formed a widespread consensus regarding the inseparability of description and prescription, Science as a Vocation has become a classic that offers orientation to opponents and supporters of value freedom alike. The article concludes with a plea to scholars in the nascent psychedelic humanities, which could easily be extended to anyone working between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities, to cultivate value freedom as part of an epistemic virtue ethics.

Keywords

Ideal type science science studies value freedom vocation

Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation confronts us with a stark but overly constrained choice: either we become vocational scientists or we are degraded to big children and false prophets. His preference for the ethos of vocational science was rooted in his belief that a “disenchantment of the world” characterized the fate of our times (Weber, 2004b: 13). Disenchantment he defined as the belief that there are no “mysterious, unpredictable forces, but that, on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation.” Pursuing science as a vocation required a commitment to this ontology. Studying a disenchanted world could not answer the question we care about most: “What should we do? How shall we live?” (Weber, 2004b: 17). The scholar who could not subject himself to this stern asceticism, who could not “endure the fate of the age like a man,” had only one choice:

He should return to the welcoming and merciful embrace of the old churches – simply, silently, and without any of the usual public bluster of the renegade. They will surely not make it hard for him. In the process, he will inevitably be forced to make a “sacrifice of the intellect,” one way or the other.

(Weber, 2004b: 30–31)

Modern knowledge workers appeared caught between a rock and a hard place.

Weber was a fatalist. He had no faith in the moderns’ ability to escape from their “iron cage” (Weber, 1992: 123).¹ Historian of science Lorraine Daston (2017: 175–176) interpreted Science as a Vocation as an expression of the melancholic mood that had befallen late-nineteenth century thinking about science. The swaggering optimism of the positivist Auguste Comte, who, in the 1830s, had still anticipated the history of science to come to a happy end, had given way to an acceptance that science would never reach its final destination and that the individual scientist could not hope for his efforts to be rewarded by triumphantly finding eternal truth. In the realm of science, Weber (2004b: 11) contended, “we all know that what we have achieved will be obsolete in ten, twenty, or fifty years. That is the fate, indeed, that is the very meaning of scientific work.” The soldiers on furlough from the First World War who, in 1917, had joined the left-leaning student group Freistudentischer Bund listening to Weber’s public speech in Munich must have recognized this ethic of stoic heroism in the face of the void. But was it actually necessary?

Even though Weber’s comprehensive German conception of Wissenschaft was not confined to the natural sciences and included his own work, the publication of this article is proof that, a century later, Weber’s oeuvre still has not become obsolete. Weber also erred in imagining that the only alternative to a vocational pursuit of science was an intellectually untenable return to religious faith. As an anthropologist of science, I would like to mine some of my ethnographic observations of the revival of psychedelic research since the 1990s for epistemological, ontological, and ethical orientations that escape from Weber’s vision of modern life.

Eventually, I want to turn to the question of Weber’s relevance today, especially for knowledge cultures emerging in the borderland between the sciences and humanities, from Actor-Network Theory and multispecies ethnography to sociobiological attempts to create consilience between the two great branches of learning (Carroll et al., 2016; Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010; Latour, 1993; Wilson, 1998). Weber not only contributed to the historical sociology of science an empirical description and conceptual analysis of scientific life in Germany and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. His speech was also a polemic against the confusion of facts and values. At a time when science studies and cognate fields of social research have formed a widespread consensus regarding the inseparability of description and prescription, Science as a Vocation has become a classic that offers orientation to both opponents and supporters of value freedom. The article concludes with a plea to scholars in the nascent psychedelic humanities, which could easily be extended to anyone working between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities, to cultivate value freedom as part of an epistemic virtue ethics.

Max in wonderland

Psychedelic science is a good place to look for escapes from a life increasingly rationalized by science and bureaucracy, which Weber had described as the iron cage of modernity. The countercultural rebellion, which had formed the historical context of the emergence of biomedical and natural scientific research on hallucinogenic drugs and contributed much to its downfall in the late 1960s, had defined itself against the background of Weber’s work. For example, the Stanford psychologist Richard Blum (1964: 283) found a commitment to the “world-denying love” of Weber’s ideal-typical mysticism in “the user” of LSD “who does move in the direction of contemplative mysticism” and for whom “there is a fleeing from the world and the re-establishment of the ethic of brotherhood, symbolized in becoming more loving” (see Bellah, 1999; Weber, 1958a). Considering the hubbub of working life not as a way to salvation, but as a soteriological obstacle, this ethos conflicted with the asceticism of the Protestant ethic. “Drug use signifies the total end of the Protestant ethic,” raved counterculture icon Jerry Rubin. “Screw work, we want to know ourselves. But of course the goal is to free oneself from American society’s sick notion of work, success, reward, and status and to find oneself through one’s own discipline, hard work, and introspection” (Jonnes, 1996: 239). This fusion of drug mysticism and the quest for self-knowledge amounted to a radical rejection of the Protestant spirit of capitalism (Davis and Munoz, 1968). Magic mushrooms and LSD, the “wonder drug” invented by Swiss industrial chemist Albert Hofmann (1993), served as potent antidotes to disenchantment. The psychedelic counterculture sought a way out of an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratized world populated by a modern vocational humanity (Berufsmenschentum), which Weber (1992: 192–193) had described and resigned to with a stiff upper lip both in The Protestant Ethic and Science as a Vocation.

The current revival of psychedelic research in neuropsychopharmacology and psychiatry has broken with the politics of the counterculture. Its protagonists have used both science and the bureaucracy of regulatory agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to bring psychedelic drugs into the mainstream of society (Langlitz, 2012: 24–52). Their goal is to reform, not to rebel against “the culture.” But did these modernist strategies facilitate a jailbreak from the iron cage of modernity?

Happy positivism

The two main organizations that have orchestrated the revival of psychedelic research, the Heffter Research Institute and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), pursue scientific and political agendas: they hope to clarify the basic mechanisms of psychedelic drug action, establish one or more medical applications, and thereby ease their regulatory status to facilitate further research and enable medical, spiritual, and maybe even hedonistic uses. The propagation of science-based re-enchantment cosmologies, which Abou Farman (2012) identified in technoscientific projects in Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology, and life extension, has not been part of this project. It might even be argued that especially the basic research conducted by Heffter has contributed to the disenchantment of “sacramental biochemicals like LSD” (Leary, 1970: 18) by reducing mystical experiences of cosmic unity and ontological security to psychopharmacological effects of 5-HT_2A serotonin receptor stimulation.

The Swiss brain researcher and professor of psychiatry Franz X. Vollenweider, head of a neuroimaging laboratory at the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich that had laid some of the groundwork for the revival of psychedelic research and that represented Heffter in Switzerland, had started out with the burning question of “whether these states open something up.”² Something akin to the “ultimate reality,” which the British writer Aldous Huxley (1954) and the American philosopher of religion Huston Smith (2000) imagined behind the “doors of perception” that psychedelic drugs could unlock. By preventing the brain from filtering out extra-sensory perceptions of a cosmic “Mind at Large,” these substances could reveal “the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence” (Huxley, 1954: 26). This perennial philosophy had informed the psychedelic movement like no other. It had even given rise to the word psychedelic, which means “mind-manifesting.” Initially, Vollenweider thought about his laboratory research as a way of shedding empirical light on these metaphysical questions. “What is real? What is not real?” he wondered.

Over the years, however, Vollenweider grew skeptical of the perennial philosophers’ ontological speculations. He wondered what kinds of evidence could be harnessed to support it and concluded: “This is purely subjective. It can’t be established in natural scientific terms. And even if you could translate it into natural scientific language, you still wouldn’t know if the brain didn’t simulate all this.” Yet, he learned another important lesson from his psychedelic experiences: “It’s not about the content of consciousness but about experiencing the playfulness of the world, how things fold and unfold, how they manifest and disappear.”

Thus, Vollenweider’s abandonment of the big metaphysical questions came with none of the pathos that had accompanied Weber’s own disenchantment. His was a happy positivism: “There was a time,” he recalled,

when questions concerning the reality of mystical experiences were extremely important to me. […] I thought: I experienced it myself – and yet the doubts lingered on. Today, I think that it’s a bit stupid that I was bothered by these questions. Maybe I’m just getting older. Now what’s important for me is that I’m enjoying myself.

Science as game, not calling

This enjoyment Vollenweider found in science. Although he read some philosophy and exchanged ideas with empirically oriented philosophers of mind such as Thomas Metzinger, he perceived their concept work as too austere while the perennial philosophy seemed too solemn (Langlitz, 2016). He liked the scientific life better because it allowed him to manipulate things, to tinker with data sets, to try out new software and instruments to render visible novel phenomena:

In research, it’s very small things. When I have an idea about how to do something, that’s a kick for me. Then I’m happy. That other thing, contemplating and immersing myself in transcendence, I can still do when I’m dead.

Vollenweider shared Weber’s recognition of the inability of science to answer first and last questions of life. But, having come of age in the years after 1968, he rejected the stern ethos of science as a vocation, which seemed as rooted in Protestantism as the spirit of capitalism. In the wake of a youthful rebellion against his mother’s doctrinaire Christian religiosity and her emphasis on a frugal way of life, Vollenweider had experienced his psychedelic experiences as liberating. He likened his transformation to the spiritual path of the Hindu yogi Maharishi:

He is suffering for twenty years until he realizes that suffering is no solution. Then he steers a middle course. He eats, has sex, and enjoys life. It’s simply as it is. He enters into the flux of reality. If you tense up in abstraction you become Jesus. [Laughs.] […] What I learned from hallucinogens is this playfulness.

If Vollenweider’s attitude toward science had any religious underpinnings, it did not draw from an unsmiling Christian asceticism but from the Hindu notion of līlā, the cosmic playfulness of the divine absolute to be joyfully embraced. This conception of the gods’ free and irresponsible frolics first blossomed in the fourth century at a time when Brahmanical dynasties rigorously brought to bear caste restriction (Hein, 1995; Hospital, 1995). More than one and a half millennia later, the countercultures of the 1960s imported this notion alongside many other Eastern philosophemes in their rebellion against the capitalist drivenness, technocratic overregulation, and stale moralism, which threatened to turn Western societies into iron cages. Psychedelic drugs had pointed Vollenweider to an exit from this existential conundrum as they inspired his ludic approach to science. For him, science was not a calling but a game.

Note that none of the practices implementing Vollenweider’s playfulness were any different from what his more vocational colleagues did in the laboratory: they also manipulated things, tinkered with data sets, and tried out new software and instruments. What differed was the ethos or what Weber (2004b: 12) called “the inner attitude of the scientist himself to his profession.” Since laboratory ethnographies and microhistories of science have focused our attention on epistemic practices and material cultures of knowledge production, rereading Science as a Vocation reminds us not to forget the different spirits in which scientists conduct their work.³

Taxonomy of scientific worldviews

Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation provided one ideal type of the inner conditions of the scientific life in the 1910s, against which we can compare a multitude of case studies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, many observers still recognize in their contemporary heirs the attitudes and inner struggles of the vocational scientists that Weber had described (Erickson, 2002). This continuity gives Weber’s text the air of a classic. Other observers have begun to historicize Weber’s account, marking the historical distance between a life in science then and now (Shapin, 2008). Such historicization is crucial: if we did not understand Vollenweider as a child of the sixties, we wouldn’t understand the alternative to vocational science that his ludic approach represents.

Yet, even in his own time, Weber’s opposition of the bleak asceticism of the manly scientist and the return of the fainthearted into the arms of the churches was too narrow and polemic an account of the space of possibilities. Weber fully recognized that many of his colleagues conducted their lives in science very differently. That is why he attacked those who used the lecture hall to promote antisemitism, pacifism, or the war. He also disapproved of his former patron Geheimrat Professor von Schmoller, the type of economist “that the ministers love” because he had developed “the ability of punctually recognizing the position those in ministerial office wished to express, and then promulgating this as the outcome of science” (Hennis, 1991: 32, 51).

There were more accepting accounts of the pluralist landscape of modern outlooks. The German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, who attended the Sunday soirées at the Heidelberg home of Max and Marianne Weber, shared Weber’s diagnosis of a disenchantment of the world. His Psychologie der Weltanschaungen (Weber, 1958b [1919]: v) was itself an exemplar of science as a vocation in its refusal to tell readers how to live.⁴ But it provided a broader and more systematic taxonomy of worldviews and attitudes, in which rationalism and mysticism were but two types, complemented by aesthetic, joyful, and playful ways of relating to the world. The playful attitude, corresponding most closely to Vollenweider’s, Jaspers (1919: 49–50) contrasted with the contemplative attitude: it was active and oriented toward reality, but less concerned with the content than with the form of experience. Peter Gordon (2012: 70) suggested that Jasper’s “shift – from social objectivistic description to individual psychological diagnosis – afforded Jaspers the theoretical space to imagine an emancipatory possibility that Weber’s fatalism disallowed.”

But do psychological or ethnographic case studies of individual scientists have any bearing on Weber’s diagnosis of the disenchantment of the world? After all, Weber defined this process as a withdrawal of the ultimate and most sublime values from public life – not from life in general. “It is no accident that our greatest art is intimate rather than monumental,” Weber (2004b: 30) noted in 1917. If ethnography is the analogue of miniature painting in the social sciences, my portrait of an idiosyncratic psychedelic researcher might only amount to a feeble anthropological veto, if not a confirmation of Weber’s not exactly diminutive historical diagnosis. Vollenweider’s ethos is probably not representative of a significant faction of contemporary scientists (but did Weber’s value freedom actually extend beyond his circle in 1917?). What matters, however, is not the demographics of the scientific field but a logical and ethical space of possibilities that opens up alternative ways of being a scientist.

Vollenweider’s psychedelic experiences aside, however, the resources from which he assembled his ethos as a scientist have been part of our public life for almost half a century. The cultural upheaval of the 1960s, including the turn away from organized religion to various shades of mysticism and other forms of unchurched spirituality, happened under the slogan that the personal was political. And, if we regarded disenchantment as a collective existential problem, why couldn’t there be different escape routes for different people?

There is another reason why my anthropological veto makes a stronger case against Weber’s account of science as a vocation: it doesn’t come alone. In my own book Neuropsychedelia, readers will encounter more scientists who – in ways very different from Vollenweider’s – refused to put up with the intellectual and spiritual limitations, which the vocational pursuit of science would have required them to accept (Langlitz, 2012). Steven Shapin’s (2008: 21–46) The Scientific Life revealed that most scientific research in the twentieth century was not done by academic scientists who pursued science as a vocation but by industrial scientists for whom it was an ordinary job. Giridhar Rao (1996: 520) suggested that in India most scientists were “virtually indistinguishable from their colleagues in other disciplines; indeed, difficult to distinguish from wage-earners in other walks of life: bank clerks, accountants, editors, etc.” – and this indistinguishability included the fact that they did not agonize over matters of science and religion.

The value of value freedom

Such case studies reveal that Weber only described the external and internal conditions under which a still recognizable but particular type of scientist worked in Germany and the United States during an equally particular historical period, even if this period is not entirely over yet. This qualification brings to the fore that Weber’s description of science was partial, both in the sense of incomplete and in the sense of biased. Weber (2004b: 20) played up a peculiar scientific ethos, namely his own, while denouncing competitors in the academic field who did not aspire to freedom from value judgments behind the lectern as “prophets” and “demagogues.”

As the focus of Science as a Vocation moves from the external conditions like hiring practices, career trajectories, income, and so on, to the internal conditions, the spirit, of the scientific life, the text shifts from sociological description to ethical prescription. The ideal type of vocational science, which he had constructed for the heuristic purpose of empirical comparisons with reality, gradually morphed into his own normatively charged ideal of science that fuelled a polemic. As he decided what was essential and what was accidental about science, Weber not only constructed an ideal type in a logical but also in a practical sense by determining what for him was the permanently valuable part of vocational science (Weber, 2012a: 331, 2012b: 129–130). Or, maybe we should simply speak of an ideal here? In any case, it served to differentiate the ethos of researchers Weber (1958b [1919]: 142) appreciated from types he despised like those “big children […] found in the natural sciences” who still believed “that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world.”

Weber (2012b: 130) must have been fully cognizant of the fact that his judgmental interpretation of science as a vocation was leaving the discourse of science, as he had defined it. But it would be a mistake to accuse him of not practicing what he preached. For Weber (2012a: 304) freely admitted that his response to the question of whether one should in academic teaching profess one’s practical valuations was itself a practical valuation and could therefore not be the subject matter of scientific discussion. But it could very well be the subject of public debate. It seems as if Weber had deliberately chosen a venue other than the lecture hall, the Kunstsaal Steinicke in Munich, to deliver Science as a Vocation. Not in an academic lecture but in a public speech did Weber (2012b: 105) fulfill “the practical duty of standing up for one’s own ideals” and promote the ethos of value freedom.

We can interpret this engagement in a historicist and ethnographic fashion. Depicting the world as a disenchanted place, Science as a Vocation represents an aggressive advance of epistemological and ontological naturalism into the largely Christian society of early twentieth-century Germany. It can also be read as rearguard action of a scholar defending the ideal of pure science at a time when applied science began to gain the upper hand (Shapin, 2008). This article certainly contributes to such historicization and culturalization by contrasting Weber’s scientific ethos with Vollenweider’s.

Classics structure polemics

If we revisit Science as a Vocation as a classic, however, the question is how, if at all, it continues to be relevant today. The Hungarian philosopher of science Gyorgy Markus (1987: 34–35) noted that, unlike the natural sciences, the humanities and social sciences came to be articulated in a “polemic-dissensive manner.” Different schools and traditions have been organized around theoretical alternatives, which can be traced back to texts considered classical because they provide a paradigmatic formulation to one or another of these alternatives. These alternatives are posited as perennially or at least epochally valid. I will leave it to historians of the sciences and the humanities to point to all the empirical cases that diverge Markus’ ideal-typical representation of the two cultures. In my argument, it serves a purely heuristic purpose and that is to suggest that Science as a Vocation has become a classic in Markus’ sense – a text that supports the polemic structure of contemporary science studies, broadly understood.

Many, maybe most science studies scholars who engage with Weber either reject his diagnosis of a disenchantment of the world (e.g. Fuller, 2006; Latour, 1993: 114–117; Law, 2004: 134). Or they dismiss the very possibility of establishing knowledge that is free of value judgments in the name of a radicalized postpositivist epistemology, which maintains the theory- and value-ladenness of observations and the inseparability of power and knowledge (e.g. Haraway, 1984; Latour, 1993; see also Zammito, 2004: 232–270).

In the face of such widespread agreement, the agonistic structure of the humanities has been maintained, for example, by the anthropologist Paul Rabinow. Not only did he examine ethnographically what became of a vocational understanding of science under the very different external conditions of the Californian biotech industry, but he also carried Weber’s normative project into the twenty-first century (Rabinow, 1996a: xiv, 1996b, 2003, 2011). The most interesting question that Rabinow (1996a) raised in the 1990s was what meaning value freedom and the whole ethos of science as a vocation might take on in an epistemic space emerging between C. P. Snow’s (1998 [1964]) “two cultures.”

While there has been no shortage of research programs populating this space, most of them can still be assigned to one side while being ignored or rejected by the other. Considering that the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities has changed but not disappeared, I wonder what Gyorgy Markus’ account of the two cultures implies for a vocational pursuit of the humanities. Does it require the cultivation of a polemic bent?

Paradoxically, the vitriol of Weber’s plea for freedom from value judgments might have contributed more to the lasting importance of Science as a Vocation than its professed soberness. To this day, the polemic quality of the text divides humanists and social scientists into Weberians and anti-Weberians, a dwindling minority committed to value freedom and a growing number of activist-scholars who take the assumed impossibility of separating values from facts as a license to promote their “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988) and “the primacy of the ethical” (Scheper-Hughes, 1995) in the classroom and beyond.

Weber’s fate as a contentious classic is not that paradoxical after all if we remind ourselves that – unlike objectivity – his value freedom was not meant to promote consensus. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007) showed how mid-nineteenth-century scientists came to value and cultivate mechanical objectivity to overcome their differences, which they attributed to subjective biases. For example, while individual sensory physiologists might have disagreed about how to describe a particular color, they could easily agree on an instrumental measurement of its wavelength. Value freedom, by contrast, brought into relief “the irreconcilable struggle to the death” between competing values – “as it were, between ‘God’ and the ‘Devil’” (Weber, 2012a: 314). It provided students with clarity about the means that would achieve conflicting ends. The lecturer only held back his own value judgments to sharpen those of his students. He laid out a map for subsequent polemics. On the map of the contemporary humanities, this attitude has made Weber a landmark.

Why are there no Weberians in the natural sciences?

In the natural sciences, the situation is very different. They do not have classics anymore, Markus (1987: 32) pointed out. The historian of science Derek de Solla Price (1970: 9) corroborated bibliometrically Weber’s (2004b: 11) estimate that the historical memory of scientists had shrunk to about five decades, showing that the number of citations per paper was halved every 20–30 years, as the knowledge got packed down and outmoded. In the metabolism of the sciences, Science as a Vocation would long have passed its half-life of obsolescence. Although significant parts of the text address the natural sciences, it never had a reception to speak of among physicists or life scientists (despite Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett’s [2012] spirited effort to get synthetic biologists to engage with Weber, Foucault, and other classics). Consequently, you won’t find any biomedical researchers or astrophysicists organizing workshops and publishing special issues to reassess the significance of Weber’s work in 2019.

The abandonment of classical texts also entails that no schools or intellectual traditions assemble around particular authors (except Darwin, maybe, but in evolutionary biology there are basically no alternatives to him – they are “all Darwinians now,” as Adam Kuper [1994: 1–18] put it⁵). In contrast to the humanities, Markus (1987: 36–37) argued, the natural sciences developed practices to contain dissent and establish a widely shared background understanding. Since the nineteenth century, the cultivation of objectivity has strongly informed these normalizing practices that make challenges to the conceptual and practical foundations of scientific research in open polemics and controversies the exception, not the norm. The kinds of conflicts that were constitutive of the humanities only erupted in times of scientific revolutions, Markus claimed, when what Thomas Kuhn (1962: 23–42) had called “normal science” was suspended.

The revival of psychedelic research deliberately followed the road of normal science (Langlitz, 2012: 236–241, 2015). After Timothy Leary’s (1983: 50) failed “neurological revolution” and the subsequent breakdown of almost all academic research on hallucinogenic drugs, psychedelic researchers would have been the last to overtly deviate from the conventions of neuroscience and psychopharmacology. The entire revival was based on mainstreaming, not on openly challenging the status quo. Especially the Heffter Research Institute cultivated a firm commitment to objectivity to win back credibility and acceptance.

Vollenweider’s playful attitude to science did not hamper this strategy. He pursued science as an end in itself, detached from moral and political goals. Beyond the lecture hall, science as play seeks to keep research out of what Weber (2004b: 22–24) described as eternal struggles between the gods that continued to ravage the disenchanted world, as these wrathful deities had been divested of their magic but reincarnated in the form of irreconcilable values.

Especially instrumental measurements made the facts established in Vollenweider’s laboratory relatable to political decision-making in the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health. In the 1990s, the government official in charge of regulating research with controlled substances had supported Vollenweider’s work because he appreciated its objectivity and was consequently willing to act upon the drug safety studies that Vollenweider’s lab had conducted – clearing the way for the revival of psychedelic research in Switzerland (Hasler et al., 1997; Langlitz, 2012: 60–64).

The counterculture had rebelled against such amalgamation of science and bureaucracy in technocratic forms of government (Roszak, 1968). Having broken with this insurrectionary spirit, the new generation of hallucinogen researchers no longer sought to escape from Weber’s iron cage. Instead of continuing to polemicize against it, they had successfully smuggled their wonder drugs into the prison of a largely rationalized and disenchanted modernity. Since the 1990s, objectivity has successfully cleansed psychedelic research of the exuberant worldviews of Timothy Leary and Richard Nixon – demonstrably a highly successful strategy to revive the natural scientific investigation of these curious drugs. Yet, like the hippies, Weber (2012a: 309) had been wary of both politicians and scientists who pretended to eliminate practical valuations by “letting the facts speak for themselves.”

Here, objectivity and value freedom parted ways. The deeper reason for why there are no Weberians in the natural sciences might well be that today the natural scientific life is primarily committed to objectivity. Freedom from value judgment has become an untimely ethos confined to a pocket of disengaged scholarship in the otherwise critical humanities.

Toward an epistemic virtue ethics for scientific and psychedelic humanities

In recent years, there has been much talk about the crisis of the humanities, which lose prestige, funding, and students. The days when C. P. Snow (1998 [1964]: 11) had to worry about the subordination of the sciences to traditional literary culture have long passed. As the often useful knowledge of natural scientists and engineers moves centerstage, the questions of why and to what end knowledge is produced becomes more pressing. From Weber we have learned that these are questions that no scientific method can answer. Many new scientific discoveries have implications for how we see ourselves as humans. Yet, they can be understood very differently. While many science writers and scientists, especially those Weber dismissed as big children, publish popular books about how to make sense of these findings, the growing field of humanistic engagements with the sciences develops alternative interpretations, informed by competing schools of thought.

The revival of psychedelic research in psychiatry and the neurosciences since the 1990s entailed the formation of the so-called psychedelic humanities in the 2000s. If only the War on Drugs no longer stifled intellectual inquiry, Thomas Roberts (2017: 102) hoped, psychedelic drugs and ideas would rescue the humanities from their “sorry state.” Especially LSD researcher Stanislav Grof’s transpersonal psychology would provide the necessary concepts to understand the history and the rhetoric of war, Sartre’s philosophy, cinema criticism, and interdisciplinary studies. The literary scholar Richard Doyle (2011) amalgamated the evolutionary theory of sexual selection and the study of rhetoric employed in the science and literature of psychedelic drugs to demonstrate that these substances can increase reproductive success of their users by making them more eloquent. Drawing from Terrence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and other psychedelic evangelists, Doyle recommended psychedelics – or “ecodelics,” as he called them – as a remedy for humankind’s egoic practices that have the power to persuade us of our interconnections with the ecosystem. His student Nese Devenot is writing a book on the literary history of psychedelic science, based on the assumption that quantitative, objectively verifiable measures do not suffice to communicate the unprecedented subjective experiences induced by psychedelic drugs and that literary analysis and poetic interpretation are as crucial as chemical analysis for generating data in psychedelic science (Devenot, 2017). Devenot (2013) proposed to model “psychedelic studies” on queer studies as a field of emancipatory scholarship. It served to counter the oppression of psychedelic identity and co-create and promote an alternative worldview, also inspired by McKenna and personal drug experiences. None of these scholars wants to pursue science or the humanities as a vocation, certainly not in Weber’s sense.

My own anthropological work on the resurgence of hallucinogen research, especially an article on whether there was a place for psychedelics in philosophy (Langlitz, 2016), has been attributed to the psychedelic humanities (Roberts, 2017). While that seems appropriate in substance, my work lacks the activist and prophetic impulses that pervade this literature. My humanist engagement with psychedelic science has been largely Weberian in spirit in that it neither advocates for more liberal drug policies nor does it recommend the use of psychedelics as psychospiritual panacea, and it refrains from engaging in an emancipatory psychedelic identity politics (Langlitz, 2012). Hence, its inclusion in the psychedelic humanities endows them with the polemic-dissensive structure that Markus declared the hallmark of any humanist field. A good thing, I venture to say, since an ethic of brotherhood might be foundational to mystical sects but not to a community of scholars committed to the exchange of agonistic arguments.

I would like to add one conciliatory qualification though, which applies to all research in the no man’s land between the two cultures. There is an obvious cost to the cultivation of antagonism: it can hinder exchange and collaboration. If we wanted to invent new norms and forms to bridge the gap (and there might be good reasons to keep it open), it would help to move from Weber’s focus on conflicting values to virtues that need to come in a well-balanced mix. Unlike values, virtues require a sense of proportion and turn into vices if exercised either deficiently or excessively. Daston and Galison (2007) have shown how nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists developed epistemic virtue ethics, using practical judgment to decide which virtues to exercise in any given situation. In humanistic engagements with the sciences, for example, value freedom and objectivity (or empathetic understanding) would not have to be engulfed in a struggle to the death but could be recognized as equally beneficial principles to be weighed against each other. Such a shift from value to virtue ethics would tone down the rather German sense of tragedy that Weber felt in the face of value pluralism. The fact that virtues always come in a multitude does not necessarily call for battle but for practical wisdom to decide which virtues and in what measure would enable an appropriate response to a particular problem. Considering the pronounced opposition to freedom from value judgment in engaged and critical scholarship this moderation of the Weberian ethos would hardly threaten to dissolve the antagonistic makeup of humanistic scholarship.

Conclusion

A century after its publication, the lasting importance of Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation is twofold. First, it presents an ideal type of science with which we can bring into relief alternative forms of the scientific life. In this article, I made the point by presenting the case of the neuroscientist Franz Vollenweider who practiced science as cosmic play. Second, vocational science represents a highly contested and now untimely ideal of science that values value freedom. I have argued that it is this polemogenic quality of Science as a Vocation, which has made it a classic in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The natural sciences, by contrast, are not organized around such polarizing classics. As we cast the distinction between the two cultures in these terms, the question arose how to reassemble their elements in crossover areas of knowledge production like the psychedelic humanities. I proposed a switch from value to virtue ethics because the latter allows to balance value freedom and other epistemic norms.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Nicolas Langlitz is an associate professor at The New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (2012) and Die Zeit der Psychoanalyse: Lacan und das Problem der Sitzungsdauer (2005). He has recently completed a project on the ‘‘chimpanzee culture wars’’ between Japanese and Euro-American field primatologists and comparative psychologists.

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