Weber diagnosed the ills of the modern university and prescribed the cure | Aeon Essays

Highlights:

Like most others who had withstood the rigours of Germany’s elite secondary schools and whose families strove to get their children through them, they regarded the university as the pinnacle of the nation’s intellectual and moral culture. They identified it with an intellectual life. The university also offered one of the few paths for aspiring intellectuals to make a living while doing what they enjoyed: reading, writing, talking.

The university was a modern-day patronage system. Intellectuals had long relied on the powerful and wealthy to provide for their material needs. In return, intellectuals advised princes and kept bureaucracies running efficiently. With the rise of the modern research university in 19th-century Germany, they assumed an even greater social role as members of a community that created knowledge for society at large.
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To the students’ question ‘Is intellectual work still possible as a vocation?’ Weber offered a response at once emphatic and oblique. Whether intellectual work – understood as a particular job such as a professor or writer – was sufficiently valued by any given institution or group of people was not an urgent concern. The more important and pressing concern was the saturation of spiritual work far beyond churches, monasteries or even universities. Under the cultural conditions of capitalism, the maintenance of ethical disciplines was no longer the dominion and responsibility of a cultural elite, be it Christian monks, turn-of-the-century literati or the captains of industries. When the ethos of capitalism loosened ultimate values from distinct forms of life and transformed values into commodities, everyone inherited that responsibility.
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The most urgent questions concerned the forms for conducting a life and the character, habits and virtues that might sustain them. Intellectual work was spiritual work. Anyone seeking to craft a meaningful life engages in it. It is a task for all those who live in a disenchanted world in which meaning is not something that inheres in the world itself or that a job can simply provide, but rather is something to be asserted and made (and contested) by and among humans themselves.
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With this liberation came a new form of intellectual and spiritual work. Adam and Eve’s disenchanted descendants work to produce not just food for their stomachs but also purpose for their souls. Intellectual and spiritual goods are no longer luxuries for an already liberal and unencumbered aristocracy; they are now needs for anyone hoping to realise the promise of freedom and not just suffer its discomfiting effects. Spiritual work is both burdensome and liberating.

Weber didn’t believe in the guarantee of human self-perfection. He rejected the unconstrained expectations of some liberals and more-radical socialists who held out hope that an embrace of human autonomy would make such perfection possible. His was a bleak, not a perfectionist, liberalism for which freedom was inextricable from duty and responsibility.

But it was a liberalism nonetheless, and so his final injunction to his audience in Munich was: ‘We should set to work and meet the demands of the day – of our life’s work – both professionally and personally.’ In these final lines, Weber ties the vocational to the human; the specialised, disciplined and constrained to the responsibility to lead a life. We have no other choice but to act as though such perfection is our potential future. In a disenchanted age, we all, not only the self-christened intellectuals, must go about the work of learning how to live. Whoever continues to look out over the horizon hoping for a prophet or history or reason to bring meaning avoids the work of becoming human.

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