Is Science a Profession or a Vocation Today?

The article is devoted to Max Weber's famous lecture/essay "Science as a Vocation" in the context of today's assessment of science and technology. It is shown that the ideal type of scientist, drawn by Weber, remains in demand after a hundred years. On the one hand, Weber expresses a concrete historical cultural situation at the beginning of the 20th century in Germany. On the other hand, he occupies a universalist standpoint, based on abstract sociological models. Weber stresses the internal tension between the institutional (economic, political) conditions of the existence of science and the personal motivation of scientists. He believes that science and technology are responsible for the rationalization (disenchantment of the world), penetrating into all spheres of the theoretical and practical life of society. This rationalization leads to the fact that science loses its original transcendental mean-ing-knowable being, and turns into practical activity without an ultimate goal, guided by the institutionalized instrumental reason. Losing the transcendental meaning of their activities, scientists risk losing their vocation while maintaining a profession that becomes a function of the global bureaucracy. What, then, is the search for the meaning and value of science in the completely disenchanted world? This Weberian question is posed by social scientists today, which testifies rather against Weber's concept of rationalization. It is shown that Weber's pessimistic perspective concerning the dynamics of rationality is being revised today in the context of the so-called re-enchantment of the world. Re-enchantment does not mean that the irrational, or the metaphysical, is forced out into the marginal or private spheres of social life (as it should have happened if we follow the logic of Weber's concept). On the contrary, it occurs in our collective (everyday and academic) scientific and technical culture. This suggests that science remains not only a profession, but also a vocation.

Keywords

Authors

References