This is inspired by - and largely an account of - Chad Wellmon's piece about Max Weber on Aeon.
Max Weber wrote about the 'disenchantment' of the modern, secular world. 'De-magicking' might be a better translation as it avoids the negative associations of 'disenchantment'. What he was saying was that instead of looking to God or prophet, shaman or guru for meaning and value, people had to find it themselves. Unfortunately, some found it through ideologues and charismatic leaders in the early twentieth century, but that's not Weber's fault.
In this modern world, the 'magic' isn't out there in omens and visions, examples of divinity and religious messages, it's unearthed through world and exploration. Motivations are turned around: inspiration isn't out there telling you to work and strive, instead you work and strive and through that process discover wonder and inspiration in your ability to create, resolve, make sense of the world and affect change. Meaning is not ready-made in the world; it is something to be achieved.
So Weber saw 'disenchantment' not as a burden, or a change in world-view to regret, but an opportunity for true freedom and individual empowerment.
He was interested in spiritual discipline in religious community - the way in which following a discipline order could transform mind, body and soul and make right action habitual. This aligns with my interest in Virtue Ethics: the more you act well, according to a guide for good behaviour, the more it becomes the natural course for you, and, over time, your character is molded by the process. He saw the spiritual discipline of the Benedictine Order, for example, as creating meaning for the clergy by virtue of their engagement in following the rules. This is transferable to a secular life, in that by virtue of embracing a structure of discipline - through work - one would attune to the reality of the world, finding value in that commitment to the 'matter of factness' of the world.
Rules and discipline can make people rigid and mechanised, limiting their activity and responses - Weber recognised that danger. And that's why he wanted people to be committed to the search for truth, to align their activity with reality (see here, here and here for how finitude offers us a route into 'matter of factness': a perspective also attained by Gerard Manley Hopkins' appreciation of the 'uniqueness' of things, see here and here) rather than the precepts of the 'order'. It's facing up to the 'demands of the day' rather than the abstract code of the rule which allows a genuine search for and attainment of value.
His contribution, as I see it, is that meaning doesn't come from spiritual or cultural elites: it's as present for the farmer as for the philosopher, for the postman as for the poet. We all have to go about the task of learning how to live, because no one can (nor has the right to) tell us. He's saying then that through work we can all find value. The problem with this is that under capitalism, values are commodified. Wage labour creates value and consumer goods instantiate value. This is what is so terribly wrong with the system: we end up having to 'buy the right' to have meaning.
The value of our lives ends up being the value of our wage labour and/or the size of our bank balance and contents of our homes. The search for any meaning beyond this demands leisure time that only the privileged can afford. But these problems are not inherent in the world as it is, they are manufactured by the distorting lens of capitalism. And this is precisely the point made by Martin Hägglund in This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free. This is also why I felt the need to defend my search for meaning against claims of elitism.
Weber's claim that re-enchantment, as it were, is attainable through discipline and labour, is valid, entirely valid - and, I'd argue, right. But it takes the removal of the distorting lens of the capitalist world-view to see it, and a move away from that system to universalise it. As Hägglund says, what's required now is a re-evaluation of value.
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