German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

Weber to Heidegger

Julian Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315409795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The course of German philosophy in the twentieth century is one of the most exciting, diverse and controversial periods in the history of human thought. It is widely studied and its legacy hotly contested.

In this outstanding introduction, Julian Young explains and assesses the two dominant traditions in modern German philosophy – critical theory and phenomenology – by examining the following key thinkers and topics:

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• Max Weber's setting the agenda for modern German philosophy: the 'rationalization' and 'disenchantment' of modernity resulting in 'loss of freedom' and 'loss of meaning'
• Horkheimer and Adorno: rationalization and the 'culture industry'
• Habermas' defence of Enlightenment rationalization, the 'unfinished project of modernity'
• Marcuse: a Freud-based vision of a repression-free utopia
• Husserl: overcoming the 'crisis of humanity' through phenomenology
• Early Heidegger's existential phenomenology: 'authenticity' as loyalty to 'heritage'
• Gadamer and 'fusion of horizons'
• Arendt: the human condition
• Later Heidegger: the re-enchantment of reality.

German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Weber to Heidegger is essential reading for students of German philosophy, phenomenology and critical theory, and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as literature, religious studies, and political theory.

Part I

Frankfurt

1 Weber

Rationalization, disenchantment and charisma

Max Weber (1864–1920) wore many hats. Principally he is remembered as a sociologist, as, indeed, one of the founders of sociology as an academic discipline. In business schools he is remembered as a founder of ‘management science’. But he was also deeply engaged with nineteenth-century German philosophy, above all with Nietzsche. And he represents an appropriate starting point for this book in virtue of having, at the beginning of the twentieth century, articulated, with memorable force, the problems that would come to be the central concern of each of the philosophers to be discussed in the chapters that follow. The most accessible of the texts in which he does this is a lecture delivered towards the end of his life to students at Munich University on 7 November 1917, entitled ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ (‘Science as a Vocation’, or ‘Science as a Calling’).

On the surface, the lecture looks to be something like a commencement address, an address to the Munich students engaged, as they already were, in ‘science’: ‘science (Wissenschaft)’, that is, in the broad German sense in which any disciplined intellectual activity counts as ‘science’, the ‘human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften)’ such as Literaturwissenschaft just as much as the ‘natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften)’. Unexpectedly, however, the lecture is far from a celebration of science as a ‘vocation’. One reason for this, one can hypothesize, is the fact that the First World War, still in progress, had deployed the fruits of modern science to kill people on a hitherto unimaginable scale (38 million in total).¹ (‘No one born after 1914’, Bertrand Russell once remarked, ‘is capable of happiness’.) Whatever the original intention that led to the delivery of the lecture, in the event, its central force is to place a serious question mark against the value of science, against, indeed the entire post-Enlightenment development of the West. Since Weber had devoted his entire life to science, this gives the lecture something of the character of a self-critique.

In the lecture, Weber identifies ‘rationalization’ (sometimes ‘intellectualization’), which he defines as ‘control [or “mastery”] (beherrschen)] through calculation’, as the defining characteristic of Western modernity. Since the control in question is ‘created by science and science-based technology’ (FMW 139), the ‘calculation’ in question is scientific theory.

The two areas of rationalization are ‘external objects’ and ‘man’s activities’ (FMW 150), nature and society. Weber has no concerns about the rationalization of nature. (Had he lived in the age of climate change one doubts that he would have exhibited such equanimity.) What concerns him is the rationalization of society, the application of the methodology of natural science to social phenomena. The rationalization of society is, says Weber, an historical phenomenon – unique to the West, he thinks – that has been slowly developing for thousands of years (FMW 138). What is distinctive of modernity, however, is that the process has become so rigorous and so all-encompassing as to generate – here I follow Habermas’ presentation of Weber’s discussion – two ‘pathological’ consequences: ‘loss of freedom’ and ‘loss of meaning’ (TCA I 244).

Bureaucratization

The rationalization of social phenomena consists in the extension of the ‘scientific point of view’ from nature to humanity (PE 36, FMW 139). Weber is never very specific as to his conception of scientific method, but since he says that the progress of natural science consists in the ‘transformation of nature into a causal mechanism’ (FMW 350), it can be assumed that he understands it in terms of the standard ‘covering law’ model: explanation and prediction of events consist in their subsumption under causal laws, their control in the manipulation of the antecedents of such laws. The rationalization of a social phenomena thus consists in the development of ‘technolog[ies] of control’ (FMW 150) on the basis of the relevant causal (or at least statistical) laws. The principal manifestation of the rationalization of society is what Weber calls ‘bureaucratization’.

Bureaucracies are social organizations that are designed to produce a given result as efficiently and reliably as possible. They are characterized by the division of labour into specific tasks within a hierarchy of command and control (Foucault speaks here of the ‘military dream of society’), where the tasks to be performed at each level are defined by rigid (and hence often stupid and inhuman) rules and procedures (FMW 196). Weber’s key insight is that bureaucracies are technological devices, kinds of machines. Bureaucratization, he sees, is ‘mechaniz[ation]’ (PE 124): the point of the rigidity and inflexibility of bureaucratic procedures is to discipline the human components of the bureaucratic machine into the reliable efficiency of machine parts.

Familiarity, and the fading of the memory of a not-yet-totally-bureaucratized social order, dulls our awareness of the extent to which modern life is controlled and disciplined by the bureaucratic state.² As David Graeber points out, a graph of the number of times the word ‘bureaucracy’ appears in books written in English peaks during the 1970s and rapidly declines thereafter.³ But whether it is a question of health, education, work, or travel, the modern state assigns us a unique identifying number that enables it to regiment our lives into, as Richard Wagner was already observing in 1849, a ‘red-tape uniformity’ undreamt of in pre-modern times.⁴ Max Horkheimer tries to raise our consciousness of this regimentation by contrasting the multiplicity of rules governing the driving of a car on the highway with the freedom of riding a horse over the medieval countryside (p. 33 below).

There are, of course, many bureaucracies that we need to deal with other than those of the state. Booking an airline ticket, struggling to understand one’s hospital bill or one’s publisher’s royalty statements, satisfying the accreditation requirements of one’s university, applying for university entrance or a research grant, reviewing an article for a scholarly journal, all require tedious, usually exhausting, and obscurely offensive submission to inflexible bureaucratic procedures. Apart from the state bureaucracy, which he calls ‘bureaucratic authority’, however, Weber’s focus is on the bureaucratization of the workplace which he calls ‘management’ (FMW 196).

‘Management’, he says, is the science of the ‘rational organization of (formally) free labour’ (PE xxxiv). It aims at the ‘calculability of the productivity of labour’ (ES 150), at, that is, the use of scientific calculation to increase productivity.

What Weber calls ‘management’ began with the Industrial Revolution. It is discussed already in Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations. Its essence is the move from the craft economy of the workshop in which the craftsman made a whole product – a chair, a bowl or, in Smith’s example, a pin⁵ – to the economy of the factory in which the individual worker is responsible for only a small part of the productive process.

In discussing management, Weber sometimes defers to the work of his American contemporary, Frederick Taylor (1856–1915) (ES 150), whose Principles of Management Science (1911) was the first textbook of management science. ‘Taylorism’ is the theoretical foundation of ‘Fordism’, assembly-line manufacture. Taylor saw that by eliminating the time-consuming movement of the worker from one work station to another, and by eliminating the expensive and time-consuming training necessary to produce a worker capable of a skilled task, assembly-line manufacture greatly increased productivity and profitability. His own contribution was the ‘time and motion study’ which analyses the micro-tasks on the assembly line into the smallest number of bodily movements necessary to their completion. It is worth noting that Fordism was responsible not only for the unprecedented availability of consumer products of all kinds in the 1950s but also for the overwhelming advantage in weaponry that the United States eventually acquired during the Second World War.

Loss of freedom

The industrial division of labour should not be confused with specialization.⁶ The medieval sculptor produced the statues, the painter the paintings, each of these specialized tasks being necessary to the completion of the medieval cathedral. As Arendt observes, however (p. 215 below), while each of these specialized tasks produced a satisfying ‘end in itself’, Fordism reduces work to the mechanical, meaningless drudgery memorably satirized in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). This was already noted by Adam Smith: the repetitive tedium of work in the pin factory, he observes, infects all aspects of the worker’s life with a ‘torpor of mind’ that makes him ‘as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become’.⁷ (Since the industrial division of labour reduced the worker to low-paid, dazed, ‘stupidity’, Taylorism predicts and requires the burgeoning of hierarchical levels of corporate management where ‘stupidity’ decreases and synoptic understanding increases as one ascends the hierarchy.)

The worker is, of course, free to decline to engage in industrial labour. But since the consequence is unemployment and starvation, such freedom is merely, as Weber puts it ‘formal’ (p. 9 above).⁸ In reality, most of us in the modern economy have no option but to engage in meaningless drudgery, if not in the factory then in the office of some corporate bureaucracy. Whereas the pre-modern economy offered the possibility of, in Marx’s language, un-‘alienated’ labour – the kind of work one can imagine pursuing as a hobby – the industrial division of labour offers only ‘alienated’ labour.

This is Weber’s ‘loss of freedom’ thesis. Most of us have no option but to become work-units in a rationalized, bureaucratized workplace in which we are condemned to spend the majority of our waking lives in mind-numbing, robotic drudgery, drudgery which, though meaningless, is highly disciplined. Required to perform with the reliability of machine parts, we are reduced, as Weber puts it in a famous passage at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, to a condition of (an oddly mixed metaphor) ‘mechanized petrifaction (mechanisierteVersteinerung)’. This means that the modern workplace has become an ‘iron cage (stahlhartesGehäuse)’,⁹ a cage in which we are denied the freedom to live creative, happy, human lives. Weber’s word for this unfree cog-in-the-machine is Berufsmensch: although the literal translation is ‘man of vocation’, his ironic use of the term¹⁰ requires its translation into something like ‘salary man’, Arendt’s ‘jobholder’ (p. 201 below), Horkheimer’s ‘cell of functional response’ (p. 33 below), or simply ‘robot’.

Life in the iron cage

The ‘iron cage’ passage ends with an apocalyptic vision of a dehumanized future that will soon arrive unless there is a radical disruption of current trends. (I shall attend later to the question of the possible agents of such disruption.) In this future, the life of the Berufsmensch is

embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the ‘last man (letzter Mensch)’ of this cultural development, it might well be truly said [in Goethe’s words]: ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity never before achieved’.

(PE 124 translation modified)

(The ‘last man’, here, is the ‘last man’ of the prologue to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose Hegelian ‘self-importance’, whose blindness to his own condition, is so complete that – laying aside his opium pipe for a moment – he says ‘we have invented happiness’.)

The ‘specialist without spirit’ is, of course, the auto worker or check-out clerk who performs his or her task ‘without spirit’ (in Adam Smith’s phrase, in a ‘dull torpor of mind’) on account of the ‘alienated’ nature of their task.¹¹ By ‘sensualism without heart’ Weber means sensation without emotion: sex without love or danger without purpose (as in bungee jumping), for instance. It consists in the quest for ‘personal experiences (Erlebnisse)’ which, in the modern age, amount to nothing more than more or less intense ‘sensations’ (FMW 137). Given the torpor and exhaustion produced by mindless drudgery, all the alienated worker is capable of in his so-called free time is the experience of crude ‘sensations’. Already in 1849 Richard Wagner was explaining the decay of nineteenth-century opera in these terms:

when a prince leaves a heavy dinner, the banker a fatiguing financial operation, the working man a weary day of toil and go to the theatre, what they ask for is rest, distraction, and amusement, and are in no mood for renewed effort and fresh expenditure of energy.¹²

All they demand from opera – all they are capable of receiving – are lush tunes for easy listening.

Loss of meaning

The second of Weber’s pathologies of modernity is, in Habermas’ phrase, ‘loss of meaning’.

As might be expected from a sociologist, Weber is an ethical relativist. The various ‘value spheres’ of different cultures are, he says, grounded in ‘worldviews’ that are in irreconcilable conflict with each other (FMW 117). Figuratively speaking, ‘the gods struggle with one another now and for ever’ (FMW 148). (Weber alludes here to the traditional role of the gods as both paradigms and guardians of their respective ‘value spheres’: Hera of home and hearth, Zeus of ‘manly’ power, Eros of love, and Jesus of a different kind of love.) Plato’s belief that in addition to ‘instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität)’ there is also ‘value-rationality (Wertrationalität)’ (ES 24), that reason – ‘science’ – can establish a single, objectively true morality, is an illusion (FMW 141). On the one hand there is the Sermon on the Mount telling us to turn the other cheek; on the other the morality of antiquity which sees such behaviour as ‘an offence against the dignity of manly conduct’ (FMW 148). (Weber’s debt to Nietzsche’s discussion of ‘slave’ versus ‘master’ morality in the Genealogy of Morals is obvious.¹³)

Although there is no rational adjudication between different moralities, it can happen – ‘fate’ can bring it about – that one system, one ‘god’, achieves dominion over the others. This happened in the history of the West during the time in which Christianity ‘blinded’ us to the truth of value relativism by dethroning ‘polytheism’ and establishing Christian morality as the single ‘godhead’. It did this through ‘the compromises and relative judgments which we all know from its history’ (FMW 148–9): through, I take this to mean, incorporating paganism into itself by reinterpreting pagan myths and festivals in Christian terms, reinterpreting the myth of Dionysus, for instance, as the myth of the Crucifixion.

Now, however, history has moved on once more, and this ‘godhead’ has lost its power. The ethical mainstream of our culture has become de-Christianized:

the ultimate and most sublime values [of Christian ethics] have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.

(FMW 155)

One important mark of this emigration of formerly unifying values from the public to the private sphere is the retreat of art from the ‘monumental’ to the ‘intimate’ (the retreat Hegel refers to as ‘the death of art’). Formerly the – as Wagner called it – Gesamtkunstwerk (collective artwork), the Greek tragic festival or the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: Frankfurt
• PART II: Freiburg
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index