Science as vocation

Science as a Vocation

Max Weber

This famous addressing to the university students opens with the comparison of German vs. American university system focusing on how they affected young scholars contemplating academic careers. In American, the scholar begins with a position "assistant" with fixed salary, and is required to teach a large crowd of students, while the German counterpart has to earn the right to teach. Though the German scholars have no salary to begin with, they have to be independently wealthy, which is accounts for a "plutocratic" element in the recruitment of German university faculty. German system has bee Americanized.

Still it is matter of fate that individual ability cannot really control;-
The selective procedure involves plurality of corporate organizations, and the young scholar is expected to be both good teacher and scholar.

Science as vocation, one must have P132
- Suitable external condition, as above mentioned
- inward calling, passionate desire
- power of idea, scientific inspiration depends upon destinies, like a “gift”
- commitment

The difference the work of art and work of science.p137
- work of art may reach to some degree of perfection and is genuine fulfillment is never surpassed, one may have difference on appreciation, but the work of art will never be outstripped by another work.
- Scientific works are in the chain of progress, each work of science is to be surpassed and outdated. The gratification comes from the “knowledge”, maybe outdated, yet remains important as a means of training. Ad infinuitum.

Therefore, one engages in science for science’s sake and not merely because others, by exploiting science, bring about commercial or technical success and can be better feed. ..Scientific progress is a fraction, as the process being, the disenchantment of the world also starts.

But, no one nowadays believes that the sciences can teach us anything about the meaning of world. Modern science has become he enemy of religion.

Science does not answer the meaning of the world, the worthwhile of life and how a person can and should live his life because science is not “free presupposition”.
- consider medicine
- aesthetic
- jurisprudence
- historical and cultural science
- sociology, history, economic and political science

Duty of a teacher:
- academic and intellectual integrity
- serve students with his knowledge and scientific experience and not to imprint upon them his personal political views, eliminating personal sympathies
- -teach his students to recognize the inconvenient facts
- provide the necessary choices.

Disenchanted world:

What does Weber mean when he speaks about “disenchanted world”?

Human destines to struggles, to crave leader rather than teacher. What modern man gains from the ongoing process of intellectualization and rationalization, is just the conviction the he could understand the conditions of his life if he wanted to.


What science can do:- p150

1. positively contribute practical and personal life for technology controls and changes life
2. provide the method of thinking, the tools, and training for thought,
3. gain clarity, i.e. use scientific experience as means in order to carry out one’s conviction practically. “ as soon as truly ultimate problems are at stake for us, we come to the aim of clarity, and we come to the limits of science.” P151

Practical stand can be derived with inner consistency hence comprised the integrity. “You serve this god and offend another”

Science is a vocation organized in special disciplines in service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts, is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelation, not does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe. P152

But “whether science is a worth while vocation for somebody and whether science itself has an objectively valuable vocation” are value judgments which nothing can be said in lecture room.

Is Theology a science? Is science anti religious?
What’s Weber personal religious view?

I am of the view that he was troubled by apparently “anti-religious” scientific rationalization and intellectualization in his time, and he was moaning the need to address “meaning of life” and meaning of universe in scientific manner, however, he felt helpless when encountered so called “intellectual sacrifice”
Is that really a sacrifice?

“Reason and faith walk side by side, when reach the end of seashore, reason stops but faith continues on..”