Alfred Weber. the Sociological Concept of Culture (1912)

Cultural Sociology2015, Vol. 9(2) 256 270

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Alfred Weber, The Sociological Concept of Culture

Colin LoaderUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

AbstractAlfred Weber (18681958) was one of the early German formulators of cultural sociology. The address that he gave before the Second Congress of German Sociologists in 1912 was his first formal presentation of the discipline. He wrote that the task of cultural sociology was to examine the relationship of the unilinear, rational, utilitarian process of civilization and organic, vital configurations of culture. The latter attempted to establish meaning for the changes generated by the former. It is translated in its entirety.

Keywordscivilization, culture, life-feeling, sociology of culture, cultural sociology, Alfred Weber

Introduction

The essay that follows was Alfred Webers first formal presentation of his new disci-pline, the sociology of culture, before the Second Congress of German Sociologists in 1912 (2000 [1913]: 6082). It represented an early attempt by younger political econo-mists, including his brother Max and Werner Sombart, to counter the academic establish-ment and its symbiotic ties to the German imperial state. By the beginning of the 20th century that states self-depiction as the locus of the national spirit (Geist), or values, was challenged from several sides, ranging from reactionary traditionalists, to socialist revolutionaries, to liberal reformers such as the Webers. Most of these critics settled on culture as the alternative site for national meaning, which necessitated defining what exactly the cultural realm entailed (Lichtblau, 1996). That task provided the motivation for Alfred Webers development of a sociology of culture.

Corresponding author:Colin Loader, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, NV 89154-5020, USA. Email: [email protected]

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Weber and Loader 257

In 191112 Weber offered a course at the University of Heidelberg titled Cultural Problems in an Age of Capitalism, which included a conceptualization of the discipline and a sweeping survey of the history of culture. Only a set of student notes remains from the course (Weber, 2000 [191112]: 263314). His first concise discussion of the cul-tural problem came in a lecture that he gave in Prague in 1911 titled Religion and Culture. He believed that culture ideally established a unified sense of meaning for an era, and it must always have a readily located center from which that meaning ema-nated. Religion had served that purpose in preceding eras; however, it was better suited for times when change was gradual or stalled altogether. In the modern world, with its rapid changes and inner contradictions, other elements of culture would be required to create a coherent meaning (2000 [1912]: 31722). In this lecture, the influence of vital-ism (Lebensphilosophie), especially the writings of Henri Bergson, is apparent. Bergson recognized the success of positivistic methods in fields such as chemistry and physics, but he rejected the validity of that methodology in biology, claiming that it failed to comprehend the deeper life force that was accessible only to the faculty of intuition. Weber adopted this central vitalist notion and located life in the sphere of culture, which is both unified and manifold at the same time. Distinguishing between that sphere and the positivistic mastery of the material world became the central task of his new sociology of culture.

Weber organized his cultural sociology upon the dualism of civilization and culture. He depicted the civilizational process as essentially utilitarian, an instrumental develop-ment of the intellect in order to master the external world. This mastery called for rational analysis in which things are mechanistically related to one another. This process was akin to, if not identical with, the rationalization process, which Weber, like his brother Max, saw as most advanced in the Western world.

Change in culture is very different. Weber used a series of terms to describe it: ema-nation, aggregation, dynamic, appearance, and even process. Only after the war would he settle on movement. He was especially concerned with the relation of the individual personality, particularly the creative personality, to the larger cultural entity. Individuals engage in their own personal actions, but their cultural products, especially the creation of works of art and ideas, give concrete expression to the life-feeling of the supra-individual unity of culture. Weber tried to formulate the civilization-culture dual-ism in terms that were neither hierarchical nor successional, by making historical change multivalent rather than unilinear. The civilizational process represents the progressive, mechanistic change in areas such as economics, science, and technology. The cultural sphere represents change that is not progressive and allows individual creativity to be organically tied to communal values. This approach allowed for the existence of organic collective meaning and values and also for mechanistic progress, with neither sphere subordinated to the other.

Although Weber introduced some changes to this version of the sociology of culture, the basics remained the same. In 1920 he restored a third term from the earlier lecture course, the social process, which worked in conjunction with the civilizational process, but it would never achieve the importance of the other two categories (2012 [1920]: 16876). He also expanded the discussion of his methodology, especially in comparison with that of his brother Max (2000 [1927]: 3575). However, he never abandoned his


258 Cultural Sociology 9(2)

vitalistic organic approach to culture, which more than anything else has resulted in the poor reception of his cultural work, despite a flurry of interest by German scholars in the 1990s (Demm, 1990, 1999; Kruse, 1990; Blomert, 1999).

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

References

Blomert R (1999) Intellektuelle im Aufbruch: Karl Mannheim, Alfred Weber, Norbert Elias und die Heidelberger Sozialwissenschaften der Zwischenkriegszeit. Munich: Carl Hanser.

Demm E (1990) Ein Liberaler in Kaiserreich und Republik. Der politische Weg Alfred Webers bis 1920. Boppard: Harald Boldt.

Demm E (1999) Von der Weimarer Republik zur Bundesrepublik. Der politische Weg Alfred Webers 19201958. Dsseldorf: Droste.

Kruse V (1990) Soziologie und Gegenwartskrise: Die Zeitdiagnosen Franz Oppenheimers und Alfred Webers. Wiesbaden: DUV.

Lichtblau K (1996) Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Zur Genealogie der Kultursoziologie in Deutschland. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.

Weber A (2000 [191112]) Kulturprobleme im Zeitalter des Kapitalismus. In: Schriften zur Kultur- und Geschichtssoziologie, 19061958. Vol. 8. Marburg: Metropolis Verlag, pp. 263314.

Weber A (2000 [1913]) Der soziologische Kulturbegriff. In: Schriften zur Kultur- und Geschichtssoziologie, 19061958. Vol. 8. Marburg: Metropolis Verlag, pp. 6082.

Weber A (2012 [1920]) Prinzipelles zur Kultursoziologie (Gesellschaftsproze, Zivilisationsproze und Kulturbewegung). In: Loader C (ed.) Alfred Weber and the Crisis of Culture, 18901933. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 165204.

Weber A (2000 [1927]) Einleitung: Aufgaben und Methode. In: Schriften zur Kultur- und Geschichtssoziologie, 19061958. Vol. 8. Marburg: Metropolis Verlag, pp. 3559.

Weber A (2000) Schriften zur Kultur- und Geschichtssoziologie, 19061958. Vol. 8: Alfred-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, ed. Bru R. Marburg: Metropolis Verlag.

The Sociological Concept of Culture

There is a very simple way to articulate the unity of all that has transpired historically as well as the coherence of cultural happening with the remaining facts of life. To do so is to engage oneself in solving the problem of culture from the sociologically historical perspective: namely, to comprehend the whole of world history in all its parts as an evolutionary development of any principle and its gradual realization in the worlds occurrence. Basically it makes no difference whether one approaches history from a teleological (and thus necessarily more or less religious) way of thinking or from a causal (and therefore generally mechanistic) one. No difference whether one regards it like Augustine as the realization of the divine idea, as civitas dei in the natural world, or like Hegel as the divinely willed progress of freedom in consciousness, or like Saint-Simon and the positivists as the gradual release of human thinking from traditional religious and metaphysical forms, or like [cultural historian Karl] Lamprecht as the process of the setting free of the individual by degrees, or like the historical materialists



as the stage by stage evolution of human productive forces. One and the same thing always occurs. All the individual facts of history are suspended one after the other in a single ribbon of thought, whether this refers to a single cause or a single purpose, and they are placed in a very simple intrinsic relation. Thereby history, and accordingly the whole process of becoming of human life, is always comprehended as a unity in an exceedingly simple way.

However, I believe that something in our feeling revolts against this processing of historical life into such a simple product and against its intellectual condensation. Something in us resists seeing the individual facts of the life stripped of their own impor-tance in this way, against finding them perceived as lesser appendages, as partial mecha-nisms of an intellectually recognizable total entity that stands over them in terms of content. At the same time we feel their intrinsic value and their uniqueness quite clearly and can sense them only as manifoldness formed in a thousand ways, of an unconsciously endless stream, whose purpose and goal we never know and whose meaning and essence we are able to apprehend at most by surmise, but whose most beautiful endowment we recognize in just this endless inexhaustible multiplicity of gestalts. And further, in this context we feel that all these approaches in that they relate the individual phenomena of life and cultural life to a recognizable principle and simultaneously empty them from the inside rob them of their fullness and totality, their entire factual content, transform-ing them into either the evolutionary stages of the individuality, the development of consciousness, the mastery of the intellect or something else. And nothing is gained in the attempt to escape this simplicity by positing several streams developing simultane-ously in history instead of one principle. For we very clearly have the feeling that we diminish even the smallest individual phenomena of the life if we comprehend them not as pure individuality but as formed by some other yet more complicated generalities. And naturally this is even more the case in understanding the greatest phenomena, the great cultural deed and the great character.

When Hegel attempts to rescue the great individual action and the great particular phenomenon by making the passions of these people serve the historically developing World Spirit as the forces that drive history forward, and when he unfurls the magnifi-cent picture of how that which is new is created through the passions embodied in these great people, even if completely egoistic and in the normal sense vile, and how thereby they are the thoughts and forms of the World Spirits own evolution, the tools of God that are necessary for His own development, then we are fascinated for a moment by this picture, but again return to the knowledge that every procedure of this sort if it makes the great phenomenon into the mode of development of the World Consciousness or into the embodiment of whatever other more complicated principles always degrades it and robs it of its finest significance in so doing. In order to afford us a dynamic view of life that can make the cultural emanations comprehensible to our feel-ings, we must comprehend things (like the Platonic world of Ideas) in their unique beauty and purity and their lofty isolation from all other philosophy of the time and feel them growing out of the life in which they are situated. This comprehension must raise the David of Michelangelo in its incomparable delicacy, depth and strength above eve-rything kindred in its time as high as its replica now stands above the city in the Michelangelo Piazza. And it must allow the life roots that also nourished him and his



growth to be most clearly felt. In short, it must grasp the great in its uniqueness and be able to situate it in the contexts of life. That is what we require for a theory of culture to offer us complete satisfaction.

I want to raise this question: Can there be such a sociological approach to the theory of culture? What is its concept of culture and what significance does it have vis--vis the current sociological attempts at the standardization of historical and presumably also cultural happening?

We stand with our psyche in two totally different worlds: On the one hand in a cosmos of general objective actualities that indeed we are able to assimilate personally and prob-ably expand in their contents, but into which we can insert nothing of our person as such, since it is erected from nothing but the purely objective and impersonal, from nothing but content about which we can say yes and no, correct and incorrect, which we would dis-tort if we wanted to add something individual to it. And on the other hand we are spiritu-ally in a world in which everything that is present is so only in that it grows out of something completely individual in us, and that it is transmitted to us through something personal, the most personal in a world in which everything is personally shaded and nuanced and in which everything becomes so much more effective and real the stronger it is immersed in the personal. While everything in the one world has significance only because it is configured objectively, generally and apart from the entire life destiny of any person, conversely everything in the other world can have a significance only in so far as it reflects this life destiny, in so far as it is thereby something wholly concrete and particular. It can be something general only in a completely different sense, in the sym-bolic sense as part of a general significance.

Both worlds contain processings of our original raw material of experience, both rest in their development on the drive-work of our psyche, on our relationships of action and reaction with the environment. In the one world the stimulated action has considered the material of experience in its intellectually apprehensible general relationships, divided it into its general objective elements, and condensed it from these elements into psychic objects. In other words, it has brought everything into intellectual views, concepts, and forms of thought, and thereby has constructed an edifice from generalities (Kants theory of categories, Newtons law, etc.) that is completely alien to its destiny and in whose vaults each subjective sound fades. Conversely, in the other world everything remains in the hands of feeling. It not only grows out of the soil of feeling but also is condensed by it into psychic objects, configured by feeling in its content, essence and form. We stand in a general world of inescapabilities and necessities created by the intellect that stands over us so long as the technically abstract form of thinking dominates us. And we stand in a world filled with particularities and created by the feeling, in which there can never be something completely general but only something of greater or lesser significance, because each individual thing in it counts only as much as the meaning of the feeling that has created it.

And if we believe that, on the one hand, everything in our existence that is formed by us and our psyche possesses particularity and multiplicity and grows in some way out of the emotional sphere, then we also surmise that everything general and necessary set over us as a cosmos of objective inescapabilities by our spiritual achievement has sprung from the action of the intellect.



We apply this to history and the consideration of the successive processing of the stuff of life in it that the current theories of history treat. If the theory of history maintains that we are confined to the processing of the stuff of life and our historical destiny that emerges from it in objective inevitable series, if it seeks to show us a certain already discernible goal toward which we necessarily advance, if it wants to be a theory of evolu-tion in the currently familiar sense of the word cited above, then we will surmise that until now it has focused only on the intellectual development of the person and speaks only of it, i.e. of only one half of our spiritual existence.

And one actually sees this: all great evolutionary theories have been organized by the one fact of intellectualization. They are all paraphrases of the one fact that the person, in that he sets general and necessary spiritual objects apart from himself in the intellectual sphere, is regulated by the evolution of this sphere following necessary and inescapable laws. And in accordance with the basis of our intellectualization, they focus more on the development of consciousness or its forms and contents and pursue various avenues from this point of view. In this way the theories of Fichte and Hegel the ingenious and grand theories of the necessary progress of humanity in its consciousness to freedom, in its stages of development from the condition the instinctual unconsciousness up to the complete rational mastery of existence when brought into relief against their meta-physical background highlight nothing but the development of consciousness in its con-sequences for the innermost and the most personal condition of the ego, nothing but the great process of reflection that must lead us to the conscious internal elevation over that existence born of and bound to nature. That is the case for the teaching of St Simon and Comte, to choose another example that apparently occupies a completely opposite philo-sophical world view, according to which world history represents the transformation of the stuff of life that was religiously and metaphysically viewed and formed into some-thing mastered and configured by positive science. This is nothing other than the consid-eration of the same process of reflection in its application to the more external incorporation of the ego in the world. And when Marx, with reference to this, divides the total world process into the successive rational evolution of the forces of production, then that is simply the exclusive focusing upon the application of intellectualization for the mastery of the natural forces, the erection of that as the sole drive-work and, in an extremely one-sided interpretation, the deduction of the whole of world history from this one part of the intellectual process.

That is probably all totally clear. But it is also completely the same with [Herbert] Spencer. As is known, he sees the nomothetic and the necessary of the historical process in an increasing altruism, a passage of human society from a warlike to a mercantile type and a change of the person himself from a person of power to one of compassion. If we also feel therein the substantiation of a necessary and inescapable developmental series (and we will in fact feel something like this therein), I say that in so far as we feel some-thing of the sort therein, we will also discover it anew as the substantiation of an effect on us of our process of intellectualization.

Everything concerning the increase in altruism in human society and the individual person that springs from ideas, from world view, religion and ethical laws, all that, as firmly as it is there and constitutes such a powerful part of our inner being through the Christian morality of pity, we nevertheless perceive as something to which we are not



involuntarily subjected, something that we can shake off, something that the creators of new world views in our period even want to do away with. But neither a Nietzsche nor any other prophet can free us of a certain part of this process, the one that originates in the increasing reflectiveness in our external and internal conduct, in the cruelty from thought-lessness. The specific cruelty of the child as well as all primitive periods becomes impos-sible for us, because reflection illuminates increasing parts of our life and those of others. The suffering, which we did not feel previously because we did not know it, we now share as a fact working within us, and we allow it to be included in our life configuration.

The apprehension of new spheres of our existence through thinking, the raising of inborn instincts not of an egoistic nature in consciousness, the activation of these altruis-tic instincts in us and hence the emphasis on tenderness and consideration in our conduct, this here is also the process, whose consequences we in no way want to escape us, even if we might form our world view where and as we want. And so forth; if others say that the inherent principle of history is the gradual release of the individual from the objective spiritual powers external to him, to which he was subjected initially, then we will also perceive as necessary and inescapable therein that which relates to the destruction of actualities that are traditional, not tested and not objectified through reflection. However, we will be able to state a priori nothing at all about this, whether or not the development of history will precede this way, whether these old untested obligations are to be replaced perhaps by still stronger, consciously accepted obligations of the individual, whether the traditional is to be replaced by personally forged chains. We will also perceive here the transformation of an unconscious condition into a conscious one, the reshaping of our existence through internal processes of intellectualization as the necessary outcome of human development.

This has always been the case. If our intellect has at any time illuminated any sphere of our existence, if it has at any time pulled back the veil of its darkened backgrounds (to use the well-worn but understandable image), then we cannot act as if the darkness were never illuminated and as if we had seen nothing. What we have seen exists; it has entered into our life and become a part of our existence. And if at any time something or other is held up to the light of our consciousness, then our psyche brings it into the configurations of intellectual thinking and with it broadens and refines the cosmos of the actualities of our internal and external intellectual apparatus, and constructs a world of objectivations in us and around us that becomes our life reciprocally. And since the progress of our thinking, which the development of consciousness always propels into new areas, can no more be halted than the development of consciousness from childhood to adulthood, since this and the refinement and improvement of the intellectual mastery of the appre-hended takes place as an automatic process that we cannot stop, then we are just as much subjected to these serial processes of altruism and individualization, to the internal rationalization of our existence, as we are to the external mechanization and intellectual-istic covering of the apparatus. This is the positive content that we can take from the older theories, that which they offer for our view of history.

However, this is also their limitation. We have a good word, which we actually use (even if half-unconsciously) regarding all these processes of intellectualization: we speak of an external evolution of civilization when we observe the process of the progressive mastery of nature, which is nothing other than the process of the intellectualization and



rationalization of our life. And we speak of internal civilization, of being civilized in con-trast to barbarism, when we think about our internal intellectualization. We can no longer do certain things that the primitive person unconsciously does; we can no longer have the certain ferocity that he has; we can no longer be subjected to certain notions that have command over him. That which the prevailing theories in fact analyze and for which they have established their general series and rules, therefore, is actually nothing but the civili-zational process, about which we also readily possess the feeling of inescapability when we grasp it at any concrete place of history and raise it to consciousness. We feel clearly, for example, that the thorough reflection and altruism of late antiquity could be reversed through the influx of new persons over the centuries, that they could remain to a certain extent inaccessible for certain parts of the population during the life of antiquity itself. Viewed from the perspective of world history, however, they were always sustained in our sphere of civilization through all that. There was always something like a pressure from on high to allow the new masses of humanity, or parts of the population not previously touched by them, to lay hold of them (in this instance in the form of Christianity). And they always had to arise again in the new human material and in the transformed relation-ships on the same level or another higher one as formerly, and thereby on the whole always on a broader basis.

We feel that our instrumental apparatus, the external rationalization, could bring the evolution of history to a standstill; parts could fall into oblivion; it could even experience simplification because of social conditions. But the movement toward completion must always begin again; the later development must always logically take the parts on hand as its starting point and replace that which was lost with the same form or an adequate one. It must always reconstruct the cosmos, which was preformed in us to some extent before it emerged outwardly and was available to us, in the world. And it must always do this on a broader basis and in a better way. All that is life, which is to some extent existent in us and which we bring into deployment slowly, to be sure, but necessarily.

But the root and essence of this life that is deployed through the civilizational process is nothing more than a continuation of the biological developmental progression of humanity. It is that with regard to its roots. For indeed it rests simply on the biological progress of the thought process, the spread of the intellectual processing of psychic mate-rial, a process that is evidenced in the way it is created and furthered through the relation-ships of the person to the outside world that are furnished by nature. The biologist will readily notice that it is regulated by exactly the same principle of adaptation that regu-lates the development of every form of physical-psychic substance. It is a continuation of the biological development and taken in an expanded sense of this word is itself a biological process.

And this also applies to its content and effect. For just as the thought apparatus and the evolution of its undertaken processings grow from and are furthered by the necessi-ties of adaptation, so must the contents from such intellectual processings of the stuff of life, the product that they offer the person, be primarily nothing more than a better arma-ment of the person in the struggle for existence, a better adjustment to the environment, an expansion of the possibilities of life. Through thorough reflection, internal intellec-tualization and external rationalization of our existence, they are all primarily simply technical recasting of the material of life in such a way that one masters it inwardly and



outwardly in an easier form, a working out of our being through which we ascend from our purely animal biological actualities to specifically human biological actualities (even if we might threaten our existence at some point in so doing) and we create a tremendous expansion of our internal and external radius for mastery in life. But through this process we preserve and expand only our natural existence. And everything that up to now has been conveyed about the evolutionary context of history is in truth related solely to our biological evolution, to our evolution in a natural scientific manner, to our natural stream of life.

However, presently we feel that culture stands above all this, that we understand by cultural development something other than this or any such biological process, quite certainly something other than the expansion of our life possibilities and the formation and configuration of their necessities and utilities according to its view toward expedi-ency. We feel that culture is not contained in the developments of this natural stream; that we can never find it in nor understand it from them. Certainly it begins in a certain sense where these developments direct effects stop, where the configuration of our existence begins through objectives that are in the biological sense hyper-expedient or inexpedient, that cannot be derived from the perspectives of the continuation of existence and the bet-ter maintenance of our natural life, and that do not result from the biological adjustment of the person to the environment. We feel that it was one of the great insipidities of recent times that one did not perceive these facts, has confused culture and natural life and has spoken of cultural development when only the natural life has been improved: when one saved the boiler of a steam-engine, or one person instead of eight learned to tend a loom, when one began to fly through the air in internal combustion machines, when the visual limits established by the body were removed through X-rays and new victories were continually won in the war with life-threatening bacilli.

All of these are facts of tremendous importance, things and successes that rightly could intoxicate us, since they conquer a new world for us and place us in an old world with formerly never imagined forces, since they raise us from a small, short-lived and threatened species to a triumphant one standing above disease and danger in wide meas-ure. However, these are all facts that, in so far as they gave us a new life, still yielded nothing more than an existence that was new only naturalistically, that was still com-pletely unformed from within, not yet appended to any final principles and still in no way able to sublate itself from within. But only when that ensues, when life transcends its necessities and utilities to a formation situated above these, only then is there culture.

We feel that again today, I believe, and we comprehend that the less we find the objec-tives, those principles situated above this existence to which it is appended and the for-mation that is created from within in the objectives of the biological-natural life, the less we will also locate the forces that carry them in the psychological and biological drive-work that natural life constructed and whose intellectual reconfiguration the intellectual-istic theories of history have hitherto observed. Indeed, we will comprehend that we will not be able to find any of these forces in this visible world, in so far as we endeavor to grasp them with intellectualistic formulae and reduce them into nomothetic regularities generally produced from these formulae. For these formulae and laws are only the pre-cipitate of the rationally configured conceptual world, of one spiritual world in which we are situated and, like it, is limited to the mastery of the necessities and utilities of our



existence, to the spiritual apprehension of our purely biological existence. As we will see shortly, they will still not suffice for a deeper comprehension of these necessities and utilities. We must reach behind this world that we so behold with its apparent elements to something other than is transcendental in the purely intellectual sense, to a metaphysi-cal background, if we want to find what culture is and if we want to integrate it into the general occurrence of life.

It makes no real difference which of the different metaphysical constructions of thought we choose in order to find in that background the point from which our cultural action flows. Indeed, all metaphysical constructions serve only the intellectual clarifica-tion of something that one cannot really apprehend in its essence with thoughts and concepts, because it lies outside the perceptible world from which we construct these. It is only a method of analogy and clarification, a nonessential discussion of something essential that is not important in connection with method and form. But this is clear: that which we should conceptualize and certainly indicate if we want to understand culture and cultural action is the point from which we come to act in a certain sense trans-biologically, trans-expediently (in the natural sense), indeed counter-expediently. This is trans-expedient not only from the standpoint of the person and the preservation of his own existence, for this trans-expedient action through which we can sacrifice ourselves for the state or the class, as wonderful as it is, is certainly embedded in natural life itself. That behavior is present everywhere, certainly in biological occurrence, whereby bio-logical life ultimately maintains itself continually. This is its own metaphysical back-ground. We feel that something is the ultimate meaning of life, the reason life exists despite being inexpedient, a personal sacrifice and, as indicated, superfluous for the con-tinued existence of life. It is worth living as well as dying for an idea in whose implemen-tation perhaps life elevates itself. It is the same for a work of art that perhaps brings entire forms and principles of life into confusion, whose effect can be disintegrating and shat-tering, and yet whose existence we feel as superior to everything beneficial and vital that is destroyed by it.

I say that it makes no real difference which heuristic metaphysical construction we avail ourselves of to find the point to make that understandable. I am not speaking here as a follower of Schopenhauer, but purely for reasons of comfort with Schopenhauer. I speak accordingly of a root of our action, of the deepest root of our being, which lies behind the separation of the world into subject and object, a root of our being whether one calls it Will or something else for the reason that it lies behind this separation from the world, behind that rift that draws consciousness with the separation of subject and object through being [das Seiende], that, as the deepest ultimate driving force for our action, puts an aspiration in us to overcome that separation from the world, to break the principium individuationis in which we are confined, to spring the spatial and temporal limits of our person, and to create a synthesis of ourselves and the objective in which it submits itself to us and we to it. That is the point from which that personally trans-expedient biological action, the sacrifice of the individual for some kind of whole, i.e. the activity that bears life itself, is understandable in terms of the ultimate reason. And of course the natural scientist for his part indicates this when he says that the direct internal purpose of life is the preservation of the species. That is to say only that the forces that bear biological action lie behind its individualization, that they are a Will that compels



this individualization to dissolve itself in life. That is also the point from which we com-prehend our cultural action and what is essential in culture: when, namely, we think of this compulsion and will to synthesis as no longer operative only on the level of our solely vital existence, as no longer operative only between species and biological subject and only for the range of feelings and aspirations that comprise it, but rather on that higher level of our existence where world and spiritual person meet, i.e. the entire objec-tive content of an eras existence and our internal being, and when we think of the will to unity, then, as related to all those contents that, if these both meet, are comprised in them as totality. Culture and cultural performance is that which then emerges, that which cre-ates the will to unity of our metaphysical existence when it is directed toward the totality of our own internal being united with the totality of everything that faces it from outside and thus represents the synthesis of personality and world.

It is evident that it can only proceed through the involvement of the things in the center of our being, through the simultaneous submission of this center to the world through an action and configuring by which the objective world is submerged in us and in the resulting personal deed, and in the same process the person is submerged in the formed world without the ability of any expediencies to co-determine the deed. They disappear, because, in the compass of those things that thereby flow together as one, the preservation of any species somehow recedes and no longer has only itself as its purpose. It is readily evident that the process that it concerns can objectively discharge itself only in two directions and in two forms. Either the personality absorbs into itself the world to which it wants to sacrifice itself and sets it out in the form of freely configured products in which it has fused itself with that world in the gestalt of objectivations that are already configured and the work of art emerges. Or it forms, in that it includes the objective in itself, includes in itself an image of the world, a unity that is not yet externally present, that it realizes first in the world itself, according to which it must first configure life. The idea is that which then emerges and for which the personality must then sacrifice itself. There are no forms of materially, objectively discharged culture other than the work of art and the idea, and no other productive bearers of these than the artist and the prophet.

In doing so, however, the personality need not externally objectify into the material. It can do it also in itself. It can execute the synthesis, the unity that it seeks in itself, in its bare existence; it can simply live indifferent to whether it lives thereby a self-created unity or, like the great masses, the entire multitude of the people, it lives a foreign unity, the synthesis that the artist and the prophet create.

In both forms, however, is the center, in which we draw the world of the objective, the hearth on which we melt them down and transform them, the center of our feeling, that is, our life-feeling. In both cases the things that we create, whether they are placed exter-nally or ultimately remain within ourselves, are created by feeling, not only in that this is the ultimate motive force that lets them emerge while the intellect undertakes their for-mation, but also in that the creation and configuration, the condensation itself, ensue through feeling. In both cases it concerns objects of that other psychic world that we spoke of at the start. Through both, therefore, we replenish the world not with general but with concrete things. This also holds when we actualize lived experience not in a work of art, not in a subjective being, but in that which so often one incorrectly calls a thought, in the formation of an idea. If we shape these, we may work necessarily with the concepts



that the intellectual processing of the stuff of life offers us, and we can evidently place the idea really only in a garb of such contents. The idea is always what it is, and yet it is something different. It is always ultimately the daughter of our feeling and always grows from the topsoil of the total sentiment for life. Like everything else cultural, ideas are discharges of feelings, completely concrete things and not abstract general concepts. They are, one can say, those concrete things in life that have general significance not only as actualities (which is indeed the case for every great biological fact), but also because we feel them as a value. On account of them we love life and history, because they rep-resent that in life that is more than itself and by which we ourselves can become more than we are.

At present, the task of the sociological examination of culture is to explain the growth of these concrete things that we designate as culture and whose essence and conceptual relation to the remaining facts of life has been circumscribed up to now. Its task is to explain their dynamic growth out of life. And in so doing its essential core must be manifest in order to make clear the origin and dynamic significance of the life feeling, the wholly concrete soil from which all these things grow. Every sociological consid-eration of cultural theory will have to deal with this. We can no longer pursue this mate-rial task of cultural theory in connection with these conceptual disputes. That is all one can say. In any era this feeling allows the productive spirits of the era to emerge from however many various components it might construct itself. (It actually always con-structs itself from many old and new components.) One component of the same must always form the natural life to which it is directly related, in which it emerges and through which it is reciprocally created. And accordingly, it must always be continually new and different if life has changed. And so a new task must emerge for it and for every life confronting it, from which it newly arises and to which it refers the task of raising it from the unformed condition in which it has again found itself into another that is formed and cultural.

Thus life transforms itself. This is no doubt provided for by its biological nature, the impulse for expansion of the forces that work in it and bring forth a continual struggle of peoples, states and classes, of families and individuals. And it is also provided for by the above-discussed perpetually advancing process of intellectualization and civili-zation, which in its methods of rationalization continually gives this expansive impulse new forms and means of action, which continually displaces the conditions of the individual parts of life in their struggle and changes the actual arrangement and the power relationship among them, which continually displaces the general conditions of external existence and transforms the general external life view just as through its continual internal progress it transforms the internal world view (existence as it is viewed from within). This transformation occurs in the face of a new existence and a new substance that we are obliged to configure faster here and slower there, at some places of history and of the earth seemingly without stop, at others perhaps only at intervals of millennia (but even there it always resumes). There is an impulse to con-figure existence, which is still so complexly nourished in its sources and the coloration of these sources (apart from the existence itself that is directly experienced and viewed), to configure it out of the self-changing potential [Anlage] of people and out of the cultural, religious, metaphysical backgrounds that are situated in every era and



especially in their own. And in every new era, that impulse also has a new task because it was confronted with a new existence.

From this standpoint, one sees that the cultural process cannot be a developmental process in the ordinary sense, for it has no materially given ultimate content situated within itself, no ultimate goal established within itself by its content. It does not strive for a form of existence given for all times nor for an ultimate content of existence viewed in concreteness. Rather its task is set always anew and always in another form by the change and the progress of natural life itself. Its essence (at least so far as we humans can understand it in this passage) can only be to attempt to raise this life ever anew in the eternal stream of existence to an eternity and absoluteness that is felt by us to stand above it and yet to lie within it. It is an absoluteness, because our cultural feeling and doing rejects the relative and wants the eternal. But the sublime, the beau-tiful, the good, or whatever else we want to make into the truth, is nothing that is always materially given for all time. It is a diadem for which we grasp and that seeks to imprint itself in the mind in every era, but which not only shines on a completely different countenance every time but also is something different itself, and which is apprehended at different times with entirely different degrees of success. There is probably not progress there.

It has even been said that the conditions for this apprehension and the eternal transfor-mation of our life would always become worse. The tragedy of the cultural process is said to be that in seeking to produce ourselves in cultural formation we thereby establish objectivations in life that ultimately shatter us themselves, because they produce an autonomous existence to which we must submit instead of configuring it.

The largest part of the objectivations that are observed thereby state, law, economy, all other forms of social construction with which we are said to fulfill life in such a way are above all products of the civilizational process, purely biological formations. They are not objectivations of culture. They are created and preserved by the impulse for exist-ence, its expansion and its struggles. They receive their first real innermost and most necessary gestalt from this, from the means this makes use of for its realization, that is to say through intellectualization. They and the entire life-construction of society of this sort which are arbitrarily employed in existence where culture is indeed forming life also become an object upon which cultures configuration operates, perhaps the great-est and most important, at least a great object. Civilizational tendencies and cultural intent conflict in its demand and meet in it. Certainly, then, it is extremely fortunate for the configurational possibilities of an era if these social formations are not fixed thereby so strongly by the life impulse that created them that their recasting as cultural configura-tions is made more difficult. This was the fortune of all earlier eras, which possessed even weaker rationalization and thus to some extent unformed, more plastic civiliza-tional configurations.

We stand today faced with the problem that, in very important areas, in the economy and the state, the natural formations of this biological life assume forms that, because they are formed entirely rationalistically and develop into giant formations, are so fixed structurally that the personal consequence therein appears to be excluded. But the less the natural form is created by cultural wills, the less these objectivations have originated in the life-impulse itself, the less they are more than simple life that it is supposed to



configure sometime, then the less there is implied a tragedy of cultural development that invalidates itself. It is just the same as if we were displaced in our cultural configuration from a fruitful and rich environment provided by nature into a poor, rocky, arid, unman-ageable one, as if we were exiled from a well-disposed country into a resentful one. For us it means an increase in the demands upon us, an enlargement of the task we have to accomplish, nothing else.

However, the existence of culture and the cultural tasks in our time does not depend on it. It even implies perhaps a cultural aspiration and most surely an element that raises cultural feeling. For this person placed in the highly organized, rocky, arid, machine-filled country of todays existence is entirely like any other earlier subject, who not only aspires in a calculating way but also feels, like any other filled with the metaphysical impulse to recast this existence so that it becomes at one with his feeling. And the less this feeling finds comfortable material in todays forms of natural existence to surround itself, the more inflexible those confronting it are, the greater the force with which it will flood into the need for their cultural reshaping, the sharper the emphasis with which it must value everything cultural, and the greater the clarity with which it will again under-stand the specific nature of the same. We feel that everywhere today.

If, however, our inner being ultimately knows once more that it is facing the philis-tine civilizational idolization of intellectualism and its forms of existence for our feeling that culture creates, if it recognizes that the obliteration of this fact has been the real danger of the past and present eras, if it comprehends that through the confusion of our metaphysical feeling with the ratio or reason one holds the purely technical means of the life and their conceptual formation as its supreme content, and that thereby history for us has been forced to its knees before fetishes that are not alive but dead, then the danger that we will be strangled by these fetishes will also be overcome, because there-upon we will be able to effectively say to them that we have called forth: sweep it away! And just as we will experience then a new internal conceptual formation that fills us with concrete general meanings symbols of feeling in lieu of those rational general representations and concepts necessary for external life, so will we also experience from this formation for indeed every external form of the existence is always only the internal projected toward the outside, and our real weakness today exists in the fact that we still bear no supra-rational internal world of form within us I say, so will we also subdue culturally the external form, the world of the present mechanisms, with this new world of form.

If one so desires, the development of culture can be periodized. There was a pre-Cartesian era, in which (as surely as Scholasticism existed in it) nevertheless the cultur-ally configuring formation of concepts was still thoroughly concrete and rationally still intact, the internal life full of gestalts, and just as the language was full of images, so was the form that was filled internally and directed outwardly, as sanguine as each word of Shakespeare or each sculpture of Michelangelo still is. There followed a Cartesian era in which everything lost its color through internal rationalization and generalization, every internal image slowly evaporated and every external gestalt became a general form, until finally there remained a system of dead formulae internally and a world left with empty mechanisms externally. The rational era will be followed by a post-rational (post-Carte-sian) era and cultural period in which one probably will still know and use



these formulae and mechanisms further, but in which one will set over them a world of sanguine realities that are created in conjunction with the external but that are constructed internally from totally different principles, just as one himself will be filled internally by another such world. Each of us will one day experience just what Descartes experienced in his day as he understood that he had to demolish his old internal world and replace it with another as each begins to build this new world within himself.

Translator biography

Colin Loader is a professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has written primarily on the history of German sociology. He is the author of Alfred Weber and the Crisis of Culture, 18901933 and the author, co-author, or co-editor of four books about Karl Mannheim.


Alfred Weber. the Sociological Concept of Culture (1912)

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Transcript of Alfred Weber. the Sociological Concept of Culture (1912)