Max Weber and "The Last of our Heroisms"

"The historical constitution of a certain type of self and the empowerment of its agency through a complex interplay with political, social, and economic conditions always remain close to the heart of Weber's research agenda. Throughout his vast unorganized opus, Weber appears to be occupied with a distinctive ontology and genealogy of the modern self, which he calls the 'Occidental self' in the essays on world religions, the 'charismatic individual' in the studies of economy and society, personality (Personlichkeit) in the methodological essays as in his later writings on politics and science, and the 'person of vocation' (Berufsmensch) in The Protestant Ethic. These ideal-typical individuals share such characteristics as asceticism, methodical self-discipline, a regimented way of life, and an instrumental stance toward this world (and even toward one's own self)--all culminating in a fanatic zeal for secular activism ... Weber contends with Thomas Carlyle that it is these types of individuals, 'raised in the hard school of life, simultaneously calculating and daring but above all dispassionate, steady, shrewd, devoted fully to their cause,' who have made it possible to generate 'the last of our heroisms'" (Kim, pp. 27-28).

Given Weber's later criticisms of the "iron cage" which, in his view, characterizes late modern rationality, one might suspect that he harbored deep anxieties about such a "dispassionate" type. Most liberals do. But Weber, to his credit, was not "most liberals"--in his case, anxiety proved an effective spur to constructive thought and action. Kim detects Weber's ambivalence about the role of "dispassionate rationality" even in his early work and argues that Weber, as an alternative, posited a sort of "middle way" type of character "that can bring subjective value and objective rationality together to form a systematic total personality (Gesamtpersonlichkeit) under the supremacy of will" (Kim, p. 30).

Readers of Walter Pater may recognize here a resemblance to the Paterian appropriation in "The School of Giorgione" of Matthew Arnold's "imaginative reason." In "Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment," Arnold declared that

"The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses and understanding; the poetry of medieval Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modern spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason" (see Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, OUP, new edition 2010, pp. 122, 179).

Kim argues that

"This willful combination of value and rationality ... enables the modern self to gain a moral, political, and economic agency in the form of worldly activism that is to revolutionize the subsequent course of modern history. In his Protestant ethic thesis, evidently, Weber wanted to isolate this paradoxical compound, a theme that kept on informing his critical evaluation of his contemporary politics and society as a degeneration of this early modern ideal" (Kim, p. 30).

It will be instructive to compare Weber's Gesamtpersonlichkeit with Pater's "Diaphaneite."