Science as a Vocation

Science as a Vocation Max Weber

Scientific training, as we are held to practice it in accordance with the tradition of German universities, is the affair of an intellectual aristocracy. (image/png) Science cannot ever answer the question of whether something is worth being known.  (143)

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The individual must choose.  I’m fascinated by the enchanted world, whose waiting arms Weber suggests we may to with our “intellectual sacrifice,” in which being is immanent; taken on its own terms. In this case, we give up the duty of choice. But this is not really a choice. To make the intellectual sacrifice fully, in the implied sense of Abraham sacrificing his son, one would have to fully and irrevocably commit oneself to the point of not even recognizing other ways of seeing the world. Otherwise, one wakes up every morning and is faced anew with the choice of whether to stay the course. The old world, in which no choice was even apparent, is not there anymore. (Charles Taylor; A secular age.) “The general understanding of the human predicament before modernity placed us in an order where we were not at the top.” (18)  “These beings commanded our awe. There was no question of treating them as we treat the forces of nature we harness for energy.” (19) Abraham did not come up with the idea of making the sacrifice.