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Bad Conscience For a Nietzschean Age: Weber's Calling For Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Robert Eden
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Extract

… if all of us who come from Nietzscheism, from nihilism, or from historical materialism, said in public that we were wrong and that there are moral values and that in the future we shall do what is necessary to establish and illustrate them, don't you believe this would be the beginning of a hope?

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , July 1983 , pp. 366 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1983

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References

1 All numbers in parentheses are page references to “Science as a Vocation,” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. Gerth, Hans H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946)Google Scholar.

Runciman, W. G., A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 33, 37–41, 47–48, 92–93Google Scholar. Bruun, Compare H. H., Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber's Methodology (Copenhagen, 1971), pp. 78–144Google Scholar. Weber's essay on “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” From Max Weber, pp. 323–59, provides an example of value-relevant science. Weber's own bias ran contrary to world rejection or the evaluation, “the world is base and stupid” (From Max Weber, p. 127); his studies sharpen the choice between world affirmation and world-rejection without determining that choice.

2 Consider Morgenthau, Hans, “Fragment of an Intellectual Biography: 1904–1932,” Truth and Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau, eds. Thompson, Kenneth and Myers, Robert J. (Washington, D.C., 1977), p. 6Google Scholar. Hughes, H. Stuart, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (New York, 1975), pp. 30–32, 75–80, 100–117, 261–64Google Scholar.

3 Bendix, Reinhard and Roth, Guenther, “Max Webers Einfluss auf die amerikanische Soziologie,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 11, no. 1 (1959), 38–53Google Scholar.

4 Bendix, Reinhard and Roth, Guenther, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 22–24, 57Google Scholar. Celebration of Weber's “uncompromising insistence upon rigid moral and intellectual standards” is of course familiar to most students of Weber from Bendix, Reinhard, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York, 1962), p. 8Google Scholar.

5 Wolin, Sheldon S., “Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,” Political Theory, 9 (08 1981), 401–424CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See pp. 405, 411.

6 Rosen, Stanley, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven, 1969), pp. 94–139Google Scholar. Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche, 2 vols. (Pfullingen, 1961)Google Scholar.

7 Bendix, Max Weber, p. 494.

8 Wolin, “Max Weber,” pp. 403, 418, 420, 421.

9 Ibid., pp. 401–404, 407–408, 421.

10 Ibid., pp. 403, 419–20. Compare Baier, Horst, “Die Gesellschaft—ein langer Schatten des toten Gottes. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Entstehung der Soziologie,” Nietzsche-Studien, 10/11 (1982), 6–22Google Scholar.

11 Wolin, “Max Weber,” pp. 417, 419, 422. Wolin's remarks on meaninglessness as power without right (pp. 405, 422) will be discussed below. For Nietzsche, one test of the height of one's will to power is whether one can create right. Meaning as the unification of power and right can be created.

12 Ibid., pp. 409–410, 414, 417, 419.

13 Wolin argues that Weber failed to realize “the politics of theory” in the fullest sense. Ibid., pp. 405, 422.

14 Cf. Ibid., pp. 402, 407, 418 (“strife-encompassed”). Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” —Birth of Tragedy, nos. 2–3; Twilight of the Idols, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” no. 5: “Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems … that joy which included even joy in destroying.”

15 Wolin does not accept “the fundamental article of faith on which rested the entire decisionist framework of Weber's politics of the soul,” the existence of the fact/value distinction. “Max Weber,” p. 414.

16 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), pp. 35–80Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., p. 48.

18 Ibid., pp. 48–49. The themes of amor fati (love of fate) and “becoming what one is” are Nietzsche's themes.

19 The comic dimension of Strauss's chapter on Weber is highlighted by Kennington, Richard, “Strauss's Natural Right and History,” Review of Metaphysics, 35 (09 1981), 57–86, at 68–70Google Scholar.

20 Hence Strauss's critique of Weber was an entr'acte in Strauss's inquiry, and Heidegger was the more significant figure, as Kennington makes clear (Ibid., p. 66 f.). See also Strauss, Natural Right, pp. 77–79.

21 On Wolin as Nietzschean or Dionysian man, see Ashcraft's, Richard introduction to Sheldon S. Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (Los Angeles, 1970)Google Scholar.

22 “No one since Weber has devoted a comparable amount of intelligence, assiduity, and almost fanatical devotion to the basic problem of the social sciences” (Strauss, Natural Right, p. 135).

23 For a more extended account of Weber's indirection, encompassing his lectures on both politics and science as vocations, see chapters 5–6 of Eden, Robert, Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche (Gainesville: University of Florida Presses, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

24 Nietzsche, , On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1969)Google Scholar, Preface, no. 7.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1966), no. 186Google Scholar.

28 Nietzsche, , The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1974), no. 345Google Scholar. Cf. The Will To Power, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1966), no. 263Google Scholar.

29 Gay Science, nos. 108, 110, 124, 125.

30 Genealogy, First Essay, nos. 11–12.

31 Gay Science, no. 345; Genealogy, First Essay, note to no. 17. Compare René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Articles 153, 156, 159, 161; Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, bk. 3, chap. 31; see also Gay Science nos. 283, 291, 293.

32 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, nos. 1, 9, 23, 45. See Valéry, Paul, “A Conquest by Method,” in Valéry, History and Politics, trans. Folloit, D. and Mathews, J. (New York, 1962), pp. 52, 64–66Google Scholar. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, nos. XC–XCVIII; Caton, Hiram, The Origin of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes (New Haven, 1973), pp. 40–66Google Scholar. Compare Rousseau's irony in imitating the academic essay questions in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Preface and Note J. Translated by Masters, Roger D., in The First and Second Discourses (New York: St. Martin's, 1964)Google Scholar.

33 Beyond Good and Evil, nos. 1, 6, 186, 229–231; Gay Science nos. 109–114.

34 Beyond Good and Evil, no. 6.

35 Genealogy, Third Essay, no. 27; Will to Power, no. 674. Beyond Good and Evil, no. 186; Gay Science, nos. 7, 346.

36 From Max Weber, p. 270.

37 Ibid. See Simmel, Georg, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (Leipzig, 1907)Google Scholar. Weber's copy may be consulted in the archive of the Max Weber Institute of the University of Munich.

38 The “Introduction” is translated in From Max Weber, pp. 267–301 with minor alterations from the original. Weber criticizes the theory of ressentiment at pp. 270, 276–77.

39 “But that the evaluation of suffering in religious ethics has been subject to a typical change is beyond doubt. If properly understood, this change carries a certain justification for the theory first worked out by Nietzsche” (Ibid., p. 270). The discussion which then unfolds should be compared with The Genealogy, beginning with Second Essay, nos. 6–7, and Third Essay, no. 28. Weber addresses himself to the typification of master morality in speaking of the theodicy of good fortune, p. 271, and again on p. 276 bottom. Both Weber and Nietzsche use the notions of ascetic ideals and religious needs (pp. 270, 273–74, 276; compare Gay Science, no. 1). See Strong, Tracy Burr, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 239, 329, note 34Google Scholar.

40 See Shapiro, William, “The Nietzschean Roots of Max Weber's Social Science” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1978), pp. 81–114Google Scholar. Fleischmann, Eugene, “De Weber a Nietzsche,” Archives europeennes sociologiques, 5 (1964), 190–238CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 From Max Weber, pp. 25, 61–2; Bendix and Roth, Scholarship and Partisanship, pp. 22–25, 272–81; Mitzman, Arthur, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York, 1969), pp. 181–296Google Scholar.

42 Löwith, Karl, “Die Entzauberung der Welt durch Wissenschaft,” Merkur, 18 (06 1964), 501–519Google Scholar.

43 From Max Weber, p. 25.

44 See Rohrmoser, Günter, “Nietzsches Kritik der Moral,” Nietzsche-Studien, 10/11 (1982), 331Google Scholar. “If one follows the origin and development of Nietzsche's thought, his work presents itself as perhaps the most radical attempt to think consistently to the end the demands laid in the nature and principle of the modern world.”

45 Nietzsche's new individualism is a theme of Simmel's work, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, which was evidently of great interest to Weber. Weber's portrait of the “disillusioned and pessimistically inclined individualism” promoted by Calvinism was almost certainly on Simmel's mind in these lectures; compare The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, Talcott (New York, 1958), p. 105 ff., with Simmel, pp. 20, 201–203Google Scholar.

46 See Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism, chap. 4.

47 Goethe, , Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Beutler, Ernst, 24 vols. (Zurich, 1948–1954), 10:841Google Scholar.

48 Beyond Good and Evil, no. 230. Compare Simmel: “Nietzsche seems not to sense the unspeakable tragedy inherent.… in this logical necessity, to let the social interest be destroyed through the interest of mankind; to bind the height of the individual to the distance in which he stands over others, commanding, climbing over, and using them” (Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, p. 229).

49 Nietzsche, , Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Colli, Giorgio and Montinari, M. (Berlin), vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 42–43Google Scholar: “Liberation of selfishness, of evil, of the individual. The new good (‘I will’) and the old good (‘I ought’) … through all this liberation the excitation of life grows. Its inmost negation, the moralistic negation, is pushed aside. — Therewith the beginning of decline. The necessity of barbarism, to which, for example, religion belongs. … Not the longest possible culture, but rather the highest and shortest possible. … What defines the height of heights in the history of culture? The moment, where the stimulus is greatest, measured thus: that the mightiest thought is endured, indeed loved.”

50 Beyond Good and Evil, no. 9.

51 Ibid., no. 212.

52 Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny,” nos. 1–8.

53 From Max Weber, p. 152.

54 See Caton, Hiram, “World in Decay: Critiques of the Historiography of Progress,” Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory, 1983 (in press), for a devastating analysis of Weber's historiographyGoogle Scholar.

55 Mommsen, Wolfgang J., Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, 1890–1920, 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 1974), pp. 289, 345Google Scholar. On the problem of dating “Science as a Vocation” see Schluchter's excursus in Roth, Guenther and Schluchter, Wolfgang, Max Weber's Vision of History: Ethics and Methods (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 113–116Google Scholar.

56 See Factor, Regis A. and Turner, Stephen P., “Weber's Influence in Weimar Germany,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 18 (1982), 147–1563.0.CO;2-A>CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 From Max Weber, pp. 74, 92–3, 176, 179, 268–69, 280–81, 353, 414–44, and the indirect reference to Nietzsche at p. 347. In this spirit is the polemic of Weber's disciple Salz, Arthur, For Science: Against the Literati (Gebildeten) among her Contemners (Munich, 1921)Google Scholar. See pp. 56, 58, 60.

58 From Max Weber, p. 137. Weber, , The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Shils, E. A. and Finch, H. A. (New York, 1949), pp. 3, 5Google Scholar.

59 From Max Weber, pp. 371–73.

60 See Eden, Robert, “Nietzsche and Weber on the Politics of Progress”(Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,Denver, Colorado,2–5 September 1982)Google Scholar.

61 Troeltsch, Ernst, “Die Revolution in der Wissenschaft,” Schmollers Jahrbuch, 45 (1921), p. 68ffGoogle Scholar. Ringer, Fritz, Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 336–340Google Scholar. Ringer ignores Nietzsche and thus gives an erroneous account of Rickert's argument. Rickert, Heinrich, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit. (Tübingen, 1922)Google Scholar. For Rickert, Nietzsche is among “the thinkers, who are distinctive for the ‘life philosophy’ of the most recent time. Nietzsche is to be named here above all” (pp. 18–19). “For with extraordinary rhetorical power he did more than anyone to give the word Life the radiance which it has today for many” (p. 19). “Most of all, the emphasis on Life in our time was stimulated by Nietzsche's poem, Thus Spake Zarathustra” (p. 20).

62 See Sontheimer, Kurt, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (München, 1968)Google Scholar. Nietzsche was Mann's model of the “unpolitical German,” prior to the twenties.

63 Baumgarten, Eduard, ed., Max Weber: Werk und Person (Tübingen, 1964), pp. 554–555Google Scholar.

64 Löwith, Karl, “Max Weber und Karl Marx,” in Gesammelte Abhandlungen: Zur Kritik der geschichtlichen Existenz (Stuttgart, 1960), pp. 1–67Google Scholar. Weber. Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 182.

65 Löwith, “Max Weber und Karl Marx,” pp. 18, 30–37.

66 From Max Weber, pp. 77–114; Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, p. 67.

67 From Max Weber, pp. 114–17.

68 From Max Weber, pp. 117–27.

69 From Max Weber, pp. 127–28.

70 Compare From Max Weber, p. 115; Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 3, 5; Roth and Schluchter, Weber's Vision of History, pp. 65–76.

71 Beyond Good and Evil, no. 211.

72 Methodology of the Social Sciences, p. 68.

73 Factor and Turner, “Weber's Influence in Weimar Germany.”

74 On the problem of the modern discovery of individuality, see Kennington, “Strauss's Natural Right and History,” and Eden, “Nietzsche and Weber on the Politics of Progress,” section 3. Weber, , The Religion of China, trans. Gerth, H. H. (New York, 1951), p. 119Google Scholar.

75 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, nos. 211, 9, 22, 36, 56; Mil to Power, no. 1067; Gay Science, no. 343.

76 Compare From Max Weber, pp. 119–20, 122, 125, 128.

77 Nietzsche, Gay Science, no. 12; Beyond Good and Evil, no. 23, hence the rhetorical character of the Genealogy, emphasized in Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books”: “The Genealogy of Morals.”

78 From Max Weber, p. 115.

79 Beyond Good and Evil, Preface. See Maurer, Reinhart Klemens, “Das antiplatonisches Experiment Nietzsches: Zum Problem einer konsequenten Ideologiekritik,” Nietzsche-Studien, 8 (1979): 104–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 See Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay, pp. 94–101.

81 Plato Apology of Socrates 38a5–6.

82 From Max Weber, pp. 141, 152–53. Consider Rickert's remarks, above, note 61.

83 See Karl Löwith, “Karl Marx und Max Weber,” pp. 30–37; Weber, , Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen, 1924), p. 420Google Scholar.

84 Nevertheless, Weber left no record of any inquiry into the “practical ethics” of the founders of modern science, or into their political philosophy.

85 Machiavelli is mentioned in the vicinity of Weber's remarks on how good and evil are intertwined wherever power is in question, From Max Weber, pp. 123–24. Yet Weber never asked what Bacon or the other early modern founders of science who equated knowledge with the generation of power thought about this insight.

86 Consider Weber's attempt to attain critical distance on all those forms of “rationalization” which “revolutionize from without.” Weber, , Economy and Society, trans. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus (New York, 1968), p. 1116Google Scholar.

87 I have shown that it does collapse in chapter 5, Political Leadership and Nihilism.

88 Wolin, “Max Weber,” pp. 405–406, 414.

89 Ibid., p. 422.

90 Wolin tries to combine a Nietzschean conception of theory as politics with a democratic program, but as yet this unlikely synthesis remains the object of a leap of faith. Is the meaning of democracy power for those who have the intellectual creativity to create right through an ontological politics?

91 See Heidegger's remarks on Nietzsche and justice, in Nietzsche, Volume 1: 632–638; and on physis in An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mannheim, Ralph (New York, 1961), pp. 90–91, 122–29Google Scholar. Strauss, , Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion (New York, 1965), pp. 9–10, 12, 15Google Scholar.

92 See Strauss, , What Is Political Philosophy and Other Studies (New York, 1959), pp. 54–55Google Scholar, and the Preface cited in the previous note.

93 Strauss, , Thoughts on Machiavelli (Seattle, 1969), p. 13Google Scholar. See Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr., “Machiavelli's Political Science,” American Political Science Review, 75 (06 1981), 293, 305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.