A Weberian Perspective on Home, Nature and Sport: Disenchantment and Salvation 9781040031957, 9781032151106, 9781032156491, 9781003245148

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A Weberian Perspective on Home, Nature and Sport

This book extends Max Weber’s theory of the value-spheres of modernity into wholly new areas, showing that the addition of home, nature and sport to Weber’s own list of five spheres (economic, scientific/intellectual, political/legal, erotic and aesthetic) yields original insights into these aspects of modernity and modernity itself. It shows how each of these new spheres is able to create its own ‘inner cosmos’ of salvation from rationalised senselessness, just as Weber’s ‘irrational’ spheres offer release from the grim reality of capitalism, the disenchanted universe and the bureaucratic state formed by the more ‘rationalised’ spheres. Drawing on a wide, cross-disciplinary range of sources, the author sheds light on the role of home in creating a sense of our enchanted past, of nature in helping to restore to the world a teleological meaning constructed from innocence and purity and of sport in imposing sense on the world, at least temporarily. A Weberian Perspective on Home, Nature and Sport: Disenchantment and Salvation will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory with interests in classical sociological theory and the analysis of modernity. Michael Symonds is Adjunct Fellow with the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Australia. He is the author of Max Weber’s Theory of Modernity and The Appeal of Art in Modernity.

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series Editor: Stjepan G. Mestrovic Texas A&M University, USA

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. Titles in this series Post-Philosophical Sociology Eliasian Perspectives on the Sociology of Knowledge Richard Kilminster Exploring Emotions in Social Life Michael Hviid Jacobsen Vilfredo Pareto’s Contributions to Modern Social Theory Christopher Adair-Toteff Norbert Elias and Sigmund Freud The Psychoanalytic Foundations of the Civilizing Process André Oliveira Costa A Weberian Perspective on Home, Nature and Sport Disenchantment and Salvation Michael Symonds For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/sociology/series/ASHSER1383

A Weberian Perspective on Home, Nature and Sport Disenchantment and Salvation

Michael Symonds

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Michael Symonds The right of Michael Symonds to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-15110-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-15649-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-24514-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003245148 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

1

List of abbreviations

vi

Introduction: an invitation

1

PART 1

The Weberian perspective

9

2

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity

11

3

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity

38

PART 2

The additional value-spheres

61

4

Home

63

5

Nature

97

6

Sport

136

Bibliography Index

176 183

Abbreviations

When specific page numbers from Weber’s works are referenced, the following abbreviations will be used: AI

AJ China ES GEH IEEWR

India IR Method PE PS PV SV

‘Author’s Introduction’ to GARS – the common acronym for the 1920/21 publication of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion) – but this ‘Author’s Introduction’ is usually found as the introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in English Ancient Judaism The Religion of China Economy and Society General Economic History ‘Introduction to the Economic Ethic of the World Religion’ (entitled the ‘Social Psychology of the World Religions’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (FMW), the collection edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills) The Religion of India ‘Intermediary Reflection’ (‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions’ in FMW) The Methodology of the Social Sciences The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ‘The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (in FMW) ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (in FMW) ‘Science as a Vocation’ (in FMW)

For page references to the original German texts, the following abbreviations will be used: WB WG Zw

‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Religiöse Gemeinschaften ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ in GARS (Intermediary Reflection)

See the Bibliography for more detail.

1

Introduction An invitation

Precis On the face of it, the title of this book invites two initial questions. How can Weberian theory help in the understanding of nature, home and sport, given the almost total silence of Weber himself on these topics? And how can the seemingly disparate areas of nature, home and sport be linked together as part of one argument? Both questions are answered through the development of Weber’s theory of what we have come to call ‘modernity’. The standard understanding of the Weberian perspective on modernity is one that will emphasise the grim, relentless processes of rationalisation that are exemplified in bureaucracy, disenchantment, instrumental rationality and the labour demands of capitalism. The one image that dominates this view of modern life is the ‘iron cage’, in which all who are born into this age are fated to abide. Both the power and limitations of Weberian theory are usually argued within the parameters of this set of ideas. However, Weber has bequeathed to us far more than this one picture of modern fate; he also surveys the landscape of modernity from the perspective of his sociology of religion and divides the terrain up into a series of rival value-spheres. Two elements feature in this value-sphere theory of modernity: these spheres form a pattern of meaning and meaninglessness, and they are all judged as unethical according to an ongoing ethic of Christian brotherly love. In essence, Weber’s own writing deals with five competing value-spheres: three of them – the economic, political and academic/scientific – together shape that familiar rationalised Weberian world of the capitalist economy, the bureaucratic state and the disenchanted universe; and the other two – the erotic and aesthetic spheres – provide salvation from the rationalised senselessness of the first three. The modern self must restlessly move between these spheres as it seeks meaning within the overall meaninglessness of a disenchanted world, and it must also suffer the guilt of necessarily acting against the presiding ideal of brotherliness. We will go into the details of Weber’s account here in the next two chapters. But, vitally, Weber also seems to invite the possibility of additions to this initial list of valuespheres; and this book, in effect, takes up his offer from just over a hundred years ago and will argue that nature, home and sport can also be considered to be valuespheres of modernity. DOI: 10.4324/9781003245148-1

2 Introduction Interpreting Weber Several points about the interpretation of Weber need to be made before the argument can be commenced. There is an apparent consensus amongst the Weber scholars that the older search for some overall unifying theme or key text that can account for the vast range of ideas covered in Weber’s extensive writings should be abandoned in favour of an understanding that there are multiple ‘Webers’ that cannot be reduced down to some single source of explanation.1 We will follow this common stance so that the interpretation to come is to be regarded as just one approach to only part of Weber’s immense body of work.2 However, it has to be admitted that the line of argument we will follow harks back to a trend in the commentary that has fallen out of favour. The value-sphere theory and the Weber text in which it is most explicitly expressed were prominent in several major works dating from the early 1980s to the early 2000s (Scaff, 1991; Brubaker, 1984; Turner, 1992; Gane, 2002) but have not featured much since. Indebted as the present study is to this line of thinking, some fundamental differences need to be noted before the argument is engaged in detail. A first difference lies in the method of making sense of Weber’s complex and often undeveloped theoretical formulations. The strong tendency in this scholarly tradition is to try to complete or recount Weber’s theory through employing three strategies, either separately or in some sort of combination: the use of external intellectual debates or other theorists, particularly from Weber’s time; the attempt to explain difficulties in Weber’s theory through reference to Weber’s biographical circumstances; and the introduction of modern values and concepts that are largely extraneous to the Weber texts in question (like freedom and, to a degree, subjectivity).3 Now, illuminating as these interpretations can be – and they often display an extraordinary level of intellectual virtuosity – it will be argued that they are flawed, at least in terms of the ability to develop Weber’s viewpoint on the value-spheres and modernity. In contrast then, this study will adopt the approach of explaining Weber’s theory by piecing together what Weber himself has said on the topic and will not introduce other theorists, the biographical background or values external to those Weber himself has used in his understanding of meaning, brotherliness and modernity. There is no doubt that the adoption of this method throws up some very large obstacles: Weber’s ideas and the relevant terms are scattered throughout his writings; arguments are densely interwoven and need to be teased out, often through the use of a number of different texts; and Weber’s position is incomplete at times and will need to be joined together with some measure of speculation. Yet, despite these very real problems, a surprisingly comprehensive, consistent theory of the value-spheres of modernity can be constructed from what Weber himself has written. A second difference to the earlier deployments of the value-sphere theory lies in how much more recognition will be given to the religious orientation of this Weberian stance on modernity. The texts in which the value-sphere theory is explicitly propounded lie in Weber’s sociology of religion; and the importance of meaning/

Introduction 3 meaninglessness and the persistence of the brotherly ethical judgement are what these texts bring to an understanding of rationalised modernity. And, as a final general point on the use of Weberian theory, because of our continued reliance on Weber (still standardly rated as the greatest of all social theorists), the relevant argument will be put, as far as possible, in Weber’s own words. Longer quotations than usual will therefore be given, and the reader will be able to more readily assess the worth of the surrounding, secondary claims.4 ‘Science as a Vocation’: subjectivity, the value-spheres and polytheism We might start to see how this understanding of Weber works through a relatively brief consideration of the famous ‘Science as a Vocation’ lecture. More detail follows in the next two chapters, but three different approaches to this much-read, multi-layered text can be initially discerned. Prominent in current readings is a stress on the ‘professional’ nature of the vocation or calling where the actual job of working as an academic in the German university system is to the fore. Another long-standing view centres on the subject in terms of the choices and decisions that Weber offers the audience of aspiring ‘scientists’. Examples of this subjective decision-making include what to do with religion under the fate of disenchantment, the demands and rewards of deciding on the vocational life, the appeal of the various, conflicting values and experiences that are now on offer. The third approach, however, is to place ‘Science as a Vocation’ within the conceptual framework of the value-sphere theory. Under this sociological focus, the ‘science’5 of the lecture title refers to the intellectual value-sphere in which disenchanted meaninglessness must be obeyed but where a sense of vocational meaning is also possible. And, not only this – the ethic of brotherliness can be sighted, if somewhat obscurely. But before fully laying out how meaning, meaninglessness and brotherliness inhabit ‘Science as a Vocation’ in the next chapters, let us focus here on how the value-sphere theory is embedded within a few well-known passages. In this process, we will find that the classical Greek setting of Weber’s arguments carries some vital implications for our coming argument. In these sections of ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber talks of the shattered, conflicting values and experiences of the modern world – the remnants of a more ancient ordered cosmos of divine meaning. Both the subjectivist and value-sphere readings are present in this discussion. Here, at length, is what Weber says on this matter: ‘Scientific’ pleading is meaningless in principle because the various’, value spheres of the world [Wertordnungen der Welt]6 stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other. The elder Mill, whose philosophy I will not praise otherwise, was on this point right when he said: If one proceeds from pure experience, one arrives at polytheism. This is shallow in formulation and sounds paradoxical, and yet there is truth in it. If anything,

4

Introduction we realize again today that something can be sacred not only in spite of its not being beautiful, but rather because and in so far as it is not beautiful. You will find this documented in the fifty-third chapter of the book of Isaiah and in the twenty-first Psalm. And, since Nietzsche, we realize that something can be beautiful, not only in spite of the aspect in which it is not good, but rather in that very aspect. You will find this expressed earlier in the Fleurs du mal, as Baudelaire named his volume of poems. It is commonplace to observe that something may be true although it is not beautiful and not holy and not good. Indeed it may be true in precisely those aspects. But all these are only the most elementary cases of the struggle that the gods of the various orders and values are engaged in. I do not know how one might wish to decide ‘scientifically’ the value of French and German culture; for here, too, different gods struggle with one another, now and for all times to come. We live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense. As Hellenic man at times sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo, and, above all, as everybody sacrificed to the gods of his city, so do we still nowadays, only the bearing of man has been disenchanted and denuded of its mythical but inwardly genuine plasticity. . . . What man will take upon himself the attempt to ‘refute scientifically’ the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount? For instance, the sentence, ‘resist no evil,’ or the image of turning the other cheek? And yet it is clear, in mundane perspective, that this is an ethic of undignified conduct; one has to choose between the religious dignity which this ethic confers and the dignity of manly conduct which preaches something quite different; ‘resist evil – lest you be co-responsible for an overpowering evil.’ According to our ultimate standpoint, the one is the devil and the other the God, and the individual has to decide which is God for him and which is the devil. And so it goes throughout all the orders of life. The grandiose rationalism of an ethical and methodical conduct of life which flows from every religious prophecy has dethroned this polytheism in favour of the ‘one thing that is needful.’ Faced with the realities of outer and inner life, Christianity has deemed it necessary to make those compromises and relative judgments, which we all know from its history. Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another. (SV: 147–9; translation slightly modified, emphasis added)

And previously on irrational experience: And finally, science as a way ‘to God’? Science, this specifically irreligious power? That science today is irreligious no one will doubt in his innermost

Introduction 5 being, even if he will not admit it to himself. Redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental presupposition of living in union with the divine. This, or something similar in meaning, is one of the fundamental watchwords one hears among German youth, whose feelings are attuned to religion or who crave religious experiences. They crave not only religious experience but experience as such. The only thing that is strange is the method that is now followed: the spheres of the irrational [Sphären des Irrationalen], the only spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched, are now raised into consciousness and put under its lens. For in practice this is where the modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism leads. (SV: 142–3, emphasis added) In this general account of various conflicting values and experiences that flourish in disenchanted modernity, Weber packs in a somewhat bewildering array of examples: beauty, truth and goodness all separated from each other; French versus German culture; the Sermon on the Mount opposed to a ‘manly’ ‘dignity’; irreligious science against religious experience and romantic ‘experience as such’. All of these examples are framed in subjectivist terms as a series of personal choices, and this is how they are standardly interpreted. After all, ‘Science as a Vocation’ was a lecture given to young, potential academics, and consequently Weber’s remarks on the professional and vocational make-up of ‘science’ are tailored accordingly into a set of decisions the students before him will soon have to make. However, they are also framed sociologically in terms of the value-spheres, as emphasised. And if we unpack these lines from this perspective, a rather extensive theory of modernity emerges.7 The value-spheres then can be considered impersonal forces comparable to the Hellenic gods: they are disenchanted but bring with them a level of religious meaning; we can ‘worship’ or take up different spheres (as the Greeks ‘at times sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo’); but we must all bow down to and accept the rule of some spheres (‘above all, as everybody sacrificed to the gods of his city, so do we still nowadays’). Weber is referring here to the enforced practice in the Greek city-state of performing rituals to the polis/city gods even as an unbeliever. As he says: The Hellenic state gave ample leeway to metaphysical and social-ethical speculations. The state merely demanded the observance of the cultic duties which were bequeathed, for neglect of them could bring misfortune to the polis. (China: 175)8 For us, the ruling spheres that demand obedience, if not belief, are the economic, political/legal and the intellectual/scientific. Weber also adds an understanding of the optional ‘gods’ of modernity as ‘irrational spheres’ that act as sites of escape from the dominant deities such as, in this case, science/intellectual reason. ‘Romantic irrationalism’ (though in its ‘modern

6

Introduction

intellectualist form’) is clearly cast against the reason of science, and the experience of the irrational spheres brings with it some measure of religious meaning (‘redemption’) or, at least, something approximate. Further, there is a religious Christian ethos seemingly still at large (‘the Sermon on the Mount’), even if it stands in conflict with other more ‘manly conduct’. We will come back to consider the religious ethic of brotherliness and its place in modernity, but a more general point might be made here: throughout these quotations, the ongoing religious nature of disenchanted modernity is apparent, even if now fragmented and so lacking the power of the divine cosmos. To top all this off, if we take a step back and consider ‘Science as a Vocation’ more generally again, we are reminded that, even if science might be rejected in favour of one of the irrational deities, there is still vocational meaning to be found within the sphere of science itself. All in all, meaning and meaninglessness are woven together into a complex pattern. The value-sphere perspective reveals this set of conflicting modern ‘gods’ in ‘Science as a Vocation’. And within this theory, subjectivity is reset: each subject must continue to enter and leave these spheres throughout their lives, and, in this pattern of participation, the modern self is, in part, formed. But finally, we come down to the idea that this set of value-spheres, like the gods of old, forms a polytheism. Weber does not explicitly mention it here, but one of the features of, at least, Classical or Hindu polytheistic belief is the ability to add to the pantheon of deities. The dominant order is left in place but it was common practice to recognise additional gods or divine forces of some kind. And in this lies the invitation that comes down to us from Weber – even if it is implicit rather than expressly countenanced: We can add to the pantheon of spheres that Weber has so far bequeathed to us. The most obvious example is to increase the spheres in which ‘romantic irrationalism’ is to be found, so alongside art and the erotic include the value-sphere of nature. The two others that we will take up are: home, an area Weber neglected; and sport, a sphere that was not yet developed. Clearly these three are not the only spheres that might be added,9 but they are more than enough to be going on with. Notes 1 See Scaff (2023) for an account. However, Ghosh (2014, 2019, 2023) would seem to counter this trend and holds that The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism contains the key to what is important in Weber. 2 A remark should also be made about the relatively recent completion of the collected works of Weber in German. Much scholarship has been and will be devoted to seeing what this resource can offer. However, the position to be argued here will be relying on some of the most well-known texts of Weber which the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe seems to have reproduced unproblematically. In consequence, there will not be any substantial engagement with this vast, comprehensive re-presentation of the primary material. Indeed, although the Gesamtausgabe will be used at times, there seems no need to stop referring to the original 1920–21 German publication of many of the prime works in the sociology of religion. It might also be noted that the publication of all Weber’s correspondence should be a rich resource for the understanding of Weber the man, but it holds dangers for the understanding of the theory itself (a point developed slightly below).

Introduction 7 3 See my much fuller account of these practices in Symonds (2015). 4 This practice will be extended to other major theorists and writers as the argument progresses. 5 Remembering that ‘Wissenschaft’ entails much more than the English ‘science’ and is more akin to ‘intellectual reason’ set within the Academy. 6 The original German will occasionally be provided when it is thought that the argument benefits from such inclusions. 7 The value-sphere theory, let it be noted, was developed by Weber well before ‘Science as a Vocation’ was delivered in 1917. It can be recognised as early as 1905 in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (following Ghosh, 2014: 271) and was fully articulated by 1915. Also, this is not to say that others have not stressed the value-sphere perspective here. But the theory propounded tends to be limited: as in the examples cited above; or, in the case of Habermas, by an Enlightenment rationalisation view that downplays the religious influences (Habermas, 1984); or with Ghosh through an overemphasis on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Ghosh, 2014: 283), although Ghosh, in contrast to most, does appreciate the setting of ‘meaning’. 8 Weber is here comparing Greek and Confucian intellectuals on this point. 9 Weber himself explicitly mentions but does not develop the sphere of religion or the ‘holy’ in contrast to the value-sphere of science: ‘the tension between the value-spheres [Wertsphäre] of “science” and the sphere of “the holy” is unbridgeable’ (SV: 154).

Part 1

The Weberian perspective

2

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity

Introduction After some general, preparatory comments, the bulk of this chapter will try to fill out Weber’s own theory of the value-sphere structure of modernity in terms of meaning, with the following chapter concentrated on brotherliness.1 As mentioned, the stress will be on what Weber himself wrote rather than relying on other theorists or biographical background. Meaning and meaninglessness

‘Meaning’ in Weber has a number of manifestations. Most notably, in the first pages of Economy and Society, ‘meaning’ is described as a universal dimension of human action that is essentially empty of content. In this sense, ‘meaning’ is part of a methodological starting point for any sociological endeavour for Weber (ES: 4f). However, Weber specifically separates this methodological subjective meaning from ‘meaning’ in the more usual but much grander ‘metaphysical sense’ (ES: 4), and it is this last sense of meaning that will be used here. Such meaning addresses the core questions of human existence, for example: What should one do in life? What is the meaning of death? How should we respond to suffering? Religion, in all its wondrous permutations, provided and still does provide enormously varied answers to such questions of life, death and suffering. However, famously for Weber, the logic of disenchantment (to be discussed below) entails that religion and the great problems of meaning have been pushed into the irrational boundaries of modernity. Consequently, in the fundamental sense of not being able to answer, or perhaps not even address, the large questions of meaning that were, in effect, the very content of religion, modernity is understood as basically meaningless for Weber. However, despite such axiomatic senselessness, it is also the case that meaning is present in multiple ways. Weber’s theory of modernity as a set of competing value-spheres attempts to show how such meaning still exists – in fact, how it must still exist – within the overall meaninglessness of the scientific universe. Or, to put it another way, the forces of Western disenchantment have undone the overarching divine cosmos in which humanity has a central, meaningful place, and in its stead fragments of meaning are to be found in a series of conflicting value-spheres. DOI: 10.4324/9781003245148-3

12 The Weberian perspective Two points lay the ground for Weber’s understanding of the way modernity is marked by such meaning within meaninglessness. Firstly, Weber can be said to assume a certain philosophical anthropology whereby humans are necessarily engaged in the search for meaning. For Weber, there are metaphysical needs of the human mind as it is driven to reflect on ethical and religious questions, driven not by material need but by an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take a stand towards it. (ES: 499) The various rationalised developments of religion, usually undertaken by the intellectual class, will order reality into some kind of cosmic unity in which humanity has a meaningful place. Many more varieties of belief have, of course, existed. Behind them always lies a stand towards something in the actual world which is experienced as specifically ‘senseless’. Thus, the demand has been implied: that the world order in its totality is, could, and should somehow be a meaningful ‘cosmos’. This quest, the core of genuine religious rationalism, has been borne precisely by strata of intellectuals. The avenues, the results, and the efficacy of this metaphysical need for a meaningful cosmos have varied widely. (IEEWR: 281; also IR: 353, ES: 506, SV: 153) The questions of meaning are, most basically, just what Weber voices through the words of Tolstoy in ‘Science as a Vocation’ – What shall we do and how shall we live? (SV: 143) However, the ordering of the cosmos to provide such meaning will tend to consider, in various ways and with different degrees of emphasis, the questions of death and unjust suffering in the world (the problem of theodicy) (see, especially, IEEWR: 275). Humans in modernity, on the basis of this philosophical anthropology, must also be engaged in the search for meaning but without being able to rely on the unambiguous assumption of an overall cosmic unity. How such meaning works is the question Weber directly confronts. This point can be made a little clearer if we consider how Weber sometimes expresses this constant need of humanity in terms of ‘ideal interests’ (see IEEWR: 270, 271, 277, 288; IR: 353).2 Beyond material interests (such as food and shelter), humans have to try to meet their ideal interests of meaning in some way. [A]ll religions have demanded as a specific presupposition that the course of the world be somehow meaningful, at least in so far as it touches upon the interests of men. (IR: 353, Weber’s emphasis) And to understand modernity as a set of conflicting value-spheres is to try to grasp the social order ideally rather than materially in this sense.

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 13 The second point that underpins Weber’s theory of modernity is his position on the continued influence of religion, particularly on the structures at the very heart of our disenchanted world: the economy, science/intellectual life and politics/law. That is, after the Enlightenment, religion has not simply been subtracted from the modern world but still vitally affects it, especially as ideal interests are necessarily pursued. And we can appreciate how Weber regards modernity from the perspective of religion when we briefly survey the terms and ideas that he uses in his depiction of modernity. Remarkably, when modernity in its most secular aspects is described by Weber, he employs concepts taken from his accounts of religion, especially Western religion.3 So discussions of sectors of the modern social order utilise expressions like ‘spirit’, ‘vocation’ (or ‘calling’), ‘salvation’, ‘redemption’, ‘fate’, ‘soul’, ‘cosmos’, ‘gods’, ‘daemon’ and, indeed, ‘meaning’ and ‘brotherliness’ (as well as images of death). The value-sphere model of our social order is constructed within this set of ideas. Using the texts

Perhaps the most obvious indication that the value-sphere theory of modernity is centrally related to religious meaning arises from the fact that the texts in which this theory can be found form part of Weber’s extensive sociology of religion. The most important and well-known of these texts is the Zwischenbetrachtung (which will here be translated as the ‘Intermediary Reflection’). This is a linking essay whose final version4 is to be found in the 1920 collection of Weber’s works on the sociology of religion (volume 1 of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie). The value-sphere theory also finds a briefer but still explicit place in the ‘Sociology of Religion’ section of Economy and Society. The ‘Intermediary Reflection’ incompletely puts forward the two dimensions of a value-sphere that we will discuss: meaning and brotherliness. Meaning explicitly comes in the discussion of the aesthetic and erotic spheres, and brotherliness runs through the majority of the text as Weber details how every value-sphere of modernity comes to deny this fundamental religious ethic. From the perspective of the ‘Intermediary Reflection’, other works of Weber can be viewed as filling out the value-sphere theory, even if such theory is not expressly mentioned in these other writings. In this vein, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism can be used to understand the economic value-sphere (as well as aspects of meaning in some other spheres), ‘Science as a Vocation’ the intellectual/ scientific sphere, and ‘Politics as a Vocation’ the realm of politics and the state. Vitally, this is not all these texts are doing and there have been very many substantial usages and interpretations of these works which will lay the stress elsewhere; or, in other words, the value-sphere perspective is one way into these texts and will only emphasise a fraction of the content that Weber puts up for display.5 Finally, it should be noted that the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ occupies an extraordinary position in Weber’s vast range of writings. In effect, it acts as a point of contact – a kind of interface – between two of the most significant parts of Weber’s work: his sociology of religion and his theory on the rationalisation processes that

14 The Weberian perspective have shaped our times. So, although the Zwischenbetrachtung covers only a small amount of Weber’s theoretical terrain, the fact that it tries to establish common ground between these sides of the Weber output perhaps gives this essay a certain privileged status. Meaning and the value-spheres Some general points

For the sake of establishing a grounding for later arguments, some points from the introductory chapter need to be restated here.6 Weber discusses five valuespheres: the economic, political, intellectual/scientific, erotic and aesthetic. The first three spheres in this list can be called the ‘rationalised’ spheres in that they are most determined by the great forces of Western rationalisation; whilst the erotic and aesthetic, following Weber, can be termed the ‘irrational’ (SV: 143) value-spheres7 since they are less subject to such rationalised determination and are, in fact, optional reactions that take up anti-rational positions against the rationalisation processes of the three dominant spheres. However, it should be stressed that this terminology indicates only a relative distinction between these two sets of value-spheres: the rationalised spheres are themselves prone to numerous irrational forces; and the irrational include internal intellectual/rational logics of their own. Again, as noted in the introductory chapter, in terms of modern meaninglessness, the three most highly rationalised spheres – the economic, political and scientific/intellectual – form the hard, senseless, grim view of our social existence that is so often described in the standard accounts of Weber. And Weber famously demonstrates how this works in terms of three elements that arise separately in each of these spheres: impersonal calculative capitalism, state bureaucracy and the disenchanted universe of science. All of us must bow down to this view of the world – these structural elements cannot be overturned and constitute our fate. In fact, we all must enter these spheres at some level and, in Weber’s terms, worship at the altars of these ‘gods of [the] city’ (as quoted, SV: 148) even if as vehement unbelievers. And this is one of the vital points about the value-sphere view of modernity: the modern self is imagined as moving between, and being formed by, the various value-spheres. Simply think of what it takes to work and succeed in the economy, or to participate in the political/legal realm at any level, or to be educated and then go on to teach in our academic institutions. Not to follow the values of these spheres results in failure and ejection from these dominant areas of existence. In terms of academic writing, even if I had wanted to, this very chapter must uphold accepted standards of rational discourse and cannot, for example, make an appeal to traditional sources of legitimation, especially to some religious/ sacred authority. But beyond the standard view of Weberian modernity, Weber also lays out the internal history and structure of the five value-spheres in order to show how each sphere can provide a specific kind of meaning within the overall meaninglessness

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 15 of modernity. To enter a sphere casually or briefly will not usually allow access to such possible meaning, for example, grocery shopping in the economic sphere, renewing a passport in the legal/political realm or an enforced school excursion to an art gallery within the aesthetic order. In contrast, Weber tends to concentrate his attention on those participants in the various spheres who can experience the maximum amount of meaning available: the elected politician in the field of politics; professional academics/scientists in the intellectual/scientific sphere; the artist or connoisseur in the aesthetic world; the romantic lover in the erotic value-sphere; and the money-making capitalist or entrepreneur in the economy (but with the economic realm offering relatively less meaning). So, in the following sections, each of the value-spheres will be examined in these terms. The calling

Before Weber’s value-spheres are discussed, we need to clarify the most important of the religious elements that have shaped the internal meaning of the rationalised spheres: the calling. The Protestant idea of the calling or vocation still has a meaningful presence at the very heart of the secular modern world. We are just taking Weber at his word here since the calling is the very ‘spirit’ of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and the two famous lectures on science and politics specify in their titles that vocation will be their concern.8 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism spends a good deal of time mapping out this notion (which, as with all of Weber’s ideas, is the subject of widespread critical commentary). There are two basic aspects to the Protestant calling which need careful delineation for the modern presence of Beruf to be more easily appreciated: firstly, the calling is a task set by God for worldly activity; and, secondly, the calling is rational, methodical labour for the glory of God. Weber will emphasise one of these aspects over the other in his discussion of each of the valuespheres of the economy, science and politics. However, Weber does us no favours in that he does not clearly delineate the two meanings of the vocation and we will have to fill in some of the gaps in Weber’s actual account in order to construct an overall argument on the nature of the calling. For this reason, it is easy to understand the hostile reception that this area of Weber’s theory has sometimes received from within the secondary literature. It should also be noted here that each part of the calling is manifested in the two common ways that vocation is understood and expressed in ordinary, modern life: the God-given task as the finding of one’s vocation in terms of a specific job which seems somehow to have been pre-ordained on an individual, internal level; and the value of hard, mundane work in the commonly termed ‘Protestant work ethic’. In a way, the following argument is merely an explanation of these two everyday notions (and whose current expression, it should also be noted, is almost certainly reflexively derived, in part, from Weberian theory itself). The fact that the vocation has this common understanding might help explain the relative lack of theoretical attention that Weber gives to this issue. In the vocation lectures especially, Weber

16 The Weberian perspective can assume the audience has this common knowledge so he has no need to say anything more about it. So, how does Weber theorise the concept of vocation? On the first aspect – the task given by God – Weber states: Now it is unmistakable that even in the German word Beruf, and perhaps still more clearly in the English calling, a religious conception, that of a task set by God, is at least suggested. The more emphasis is put upon the word in a concrete case, the more evident is the connotation. And if we trace the history of the word through the civilised languages, it appears that neither the predominantly Catholic peoples nor those of classical antiquity have possessed any expression of similar connotation for what we know as a calling (in the sense of a life-task, a definite field in which to work) . . . [and which] speedily took on its present meaning in the everyday speech of all Protestant peoples. (PE: 79, Weber’s emphasis) Here the religious origins of the German and English terms are emphasised as having an ongoing, everyday connotation. The central point that Weber goes on to stress about the calling as the God-given task is the Protestant shift to mundane, worldly activity as the way to achieve grace. Instead of prayer to saints, or monastic devotion separated from the world of ordinary human affairs, it is in this world itself that the most godly life should be lived. There had been different forms of the calling before the Reformation: But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume. This it was which inevitably gave every-day worldly activity a religious significance, and which first created the conception of a calling in this sense. The conception of the calling thus brings out that central dogma of all Protestant denominations which the Catholic division of ethical precepts into command and recommendation discards. The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling. (PE: 80, Weber’s emphasis) The first part of the calling – which is still with us – is the task given by God which can be fulfilled only in worldly activity. The second aspect of the calling emerges when, in order to reach the pertinent sense of the calling that will inform the spirit of capitalism, Weber moves on from this initial definition past Luther’s traditional understanding to Calvinist predestination and its emphasis on a particular form of labour in the world as an exhibition of one’s state of grace. What God demands is not labour in itself, but rational labour in a calling. In the Puritan concept of the calling the emphasis is always placed on this

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 17 methodical character of worldly asceticism, not, as with Luther, on the acceptance of the lot which God has irretrievably assigned to man. (PE: 161–2) Such methodical, rational labour must be self-monitored, life-long and is necessary for all who would show the certainty of their own salvation: On the other hand, though the means by which it was attained differed for different doctrines, it could not be guaranteed by any magical sacraments, by relief in the confession, nor by individual good works. That was only possible by proof in a specific type of conduct unmistakably different from the way of life of the natural man. From that followed for the individual an incentive methodically to supervise his own state of grace in his own conduct, and thus to penetrate it with asceticism. But, as we have seen, this ascetic conduct meant a rational planning of the whole of one’s life in accordance with God’s will. And this asceticism was no longer an opus supererogationis, but something which could be required of everyone who would be certain of salvation. The religious life of the saints, as distinguished from the natural life, was – the most important point – no longer lived outside the world in monastic communities, but within the world and its institutions. This rationalisation of conduct within this world, but for the sake of the world beyond, was the consequence of the concept of calling of ascetic Protestantism. Christian asceticism, at first fleeing from the world into solitude, had already ruled the world which it had renounced from the monastery and through the Church. But it had, on the whole, left the naturally spontaneous character of daily life in the world untouched. Now it strode into the marketplace of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world. (PE: 153–4, emphasis in original) Undertaken for other-worldly ends – ‘neither of nor for this world’ – this general imperative for an ascetic life is set wholly within the mundane ‘world and its institutions’. Dutiful, rationalised labour in the world beyond the monastery was a fulfilment of this strict, ascetic Christianity and tended to be set within the economy because the creation of wealth could, in fact, be understood as for the glory of God. Wealth was certainly a danger and capitalism a clear source of moral degradation but the gaining of wealth, if it was based on and did not alter this methodical duty, was a sign of being one of the Elect, and conversely, poverty a sign of potential damnation. Wealth is thus bad ethically only in so far as it is a temptation to idleness and sinful enjoyment of life, and its acquisition is bad only when it is with the purpose of later living merrily and without care. But as a performance of

18

The Weberian perspective duty in a calling it is not only morally permissible, but actually enjoined. The parable of the servant who was rejected because he did not increase the talent which was entrusted to him seemed to say so directly. To wish to be poor was, it was often argued, the same as wishing to be unhealthy; it is objectionable as a glorification of works and derogatory to the glory of God. (PE: 163; also PE: 118)

The calling that is stressed by Weber in his study of capitalism unsurprisingly concerns such devotion to economic labour. As part of a methodical, self-scrutinising life, money-making will be taken up, without its religious meaning, in a selection of maxims from Benjamin Franklin and will come to form the core of the ongoing ‘spirit of capitalism’. It is this sense of the calling that Weber is using when he so famously states that the ‘Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so’ (PE: 181), as will be discussed further in the next section. However, what is no longer explicitly present is the calling as the God-given task. Moreover, the now common notion of the Protestant work ethic is also is on display here. Calvinist vocation is not restricted to economic labour – it penetrated ‘the daily routine of life with its methodicalness’ (as quoted above). This second sense of the calling, although it does mark the fateful character of the economic order of capitalism, can be extended as a presence to the social order more widely: One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism, and not only of that but of all modern culture: rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling, was born – that is what this discussion has sought to demonstrate – from the spirit of Christian asceticism. (PE: 180; also PE: 19) The implications of this extension of the vocation into culture more generally will be shown as the pieces of Weber’s overall theory of meaning start to fall into place. The economic value-sphere

In this sphere, along with the intellectual/scientific realm, the meaning now present depends on each specific sphere’s history of the loss of meaning; that is, the overall meaninglessness of modernity – the disenchantment of the world – arises predominantly for Weber from the economic and intellectual areas of social life, and the current meaning on offer within these value-spheres can only be understood through a retelling of the stories that have such disenchanted senselessness as their ending. For the economic sphere, this is the tale contained in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Basically, following what has been said on the calling, we can begin with a version of the standard Protestant ethic thesis.9 The Protestant religion is important in the understanding of capitalism because Puritanism, especially in its Calvinist form, came to prescribe hard, routinised, calculative,

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 19 economic labour in the mundane world as the path to salvation from death, and such labour would be retained as the capitalist ethos or spirit. In this way, Weber traces out the much-discussed religious origins of the spirit of capitalism. However, this great religious meaning has of course disappeared from our everyday work and we have been left with the capitalist economic order wherein such labour has been institutionalised: to enter this sphere for paid labour is necessarily to be subject to the enforced values that the Puritan once chose to follow. That is, to get a job in the capitalist economy entails that the long routines of measured work must be obeyed. The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. (PE: 54–5) But what has happened to meaning? On the most important level meaning has been lost – there is no longer the promise or hope of salvation from death. However, on a lesser level, meaning is retained; here the means to salvation – labour in the mundane world – has become the end itself. In this movement of means and ends meaninglessness and meaning are intertwined; or, in other words, the sense of Puritan vocation – the ‘spirit’ of capitalism – has been minimally preserved within the overall senselessness of the capitalist economic value-sphere. Weber lays this out at the start of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with reference to the famous maxims of Benjamin Franklin (such as ‘time is money’).10 Weber emphasises how this ethos of hard work to make money, which was the means to Protestant salvation, has now become an end in itself. The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognised credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. (PE: 51; also PE: 53) The fervour of Franklin’s late 18th-century example of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ has tended to fade, says Weber, so that by his time (and ours, it might be said) such relentless work in the economy – with all its materialist measurements – has often been reduced to a kind of competitive game or sport. [T]he pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport. (PE: 182)

20 The Weberian perspective A minimal meaning is still present here even if radically lesser than both the calling’s original religious form as well as its non-religious expression of the means becoming the ends (with Franklin the exemplar). However, for many, the imperative to work is wholly determined by material interests, and, in the most repetitive, soul-destroying jobs in the capitalist economy any meaning would seem to be entirely absent. As Weber describes it: The impersonality of present-day labour, what, from the standpoint of the individual, is its joyless lack of meaning. (PE: 282n) But Weber would seem to suggest that the religious meaning of work can still be discerned even here. He indicates that such meaning, even if long dead, cannot be escaped: [T]he idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. (PE: 182) This unavoidable presence of meaning for all economic labour becomes clearer when some of the most famous lines from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism are reconsidered from the perspective of the value-sphere theory. Such meaning becomes, remarkably, one element that makes up the so-called ‘iron cage’. The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. (PE: 181, emphasis added) It can be argued that to be forced to enter the calling once chosen by the Puritan entails that not only do the relentless labour practices of the capitalist economic sphere have to be followed, but that the very meaning of the calling – however much diluted – is also inescapably present. The intrinsic worth of diligent, routinised labour is one of the prime values of the economic sphere. Perhaps such meaning might only be felt in the very practice of labour and then forgotten once the economic sphere is left at the end of the working day. But Weber’s demand that such work still be named ‘vocation’ and ‘spirit’ arguably suggests that he wants to retain some measure of the inherited Protestant past, tiny though such meaning might now be.11

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 21 Further, we need to remember that labour throughout capitalist culture cannot avoid this infusion of meaningful value since it applies to ‘not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition’. It follows that a ‘forced’ version of the wider Protestant work ethic might also be extracted from this famous quotation. On this reading of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a depiction of the economic value-sphere, the Puritan importance of mundane labour still lingers in the gradations of possible meaning that can accompany modern work in the economy: from a Franklin-like ethos of dedicated productive routine for its own sake; to a sense of competitive success; to a minimal enforced value that persists even in the most degrading forms of paid labour. Or, in other words, within meaningless capitalism a minimal sense of meaning, derived from its Protestant origins, can still be discerned. The scientific/intellectual value-sphere

In ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber addresses a group of potential academics and lays out what it takes to enter and find meaning in the sphere of science/intellectual reason.12 Again, we will only be emphasising one line of argument in this many-faceted, much-discussed lecture. For our purposes, Weber emphasises how the value structure of this sphere is based on the most direct and unforgiving form of modern meaninglessness. He explains this condition in a number of ways. Firstly, citing Tolstoy, Weber states that intellectual reason can no longer answer the most important questions of human existence because ‘for civilised man death has no meaning’ (SV: 141). And in a more fully developed version of a quotation already given: Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable. (SV: 143) Such questions were once the point of intellectual inquiry, most obviously in Judaic-Christian theology but also, for example, in classical philosophy. However, the very answers that the Western tradition gave to these ultimate questions of meaning resulted in the leaving behind of the questions themselves. We are left with a series of brilliant replies – the whole Western scientific enterprise, in fact – to questions that can no longer be put. Weber traces this process through the Greek discovery of the concept, which gave tremendous logical power and was pursued in the belief that it could provide the way to ‘eternal truth’, ‘true being’, ‘how to act rightly in life and, above all, how to act as a citizen of the state’ (SV: 141). Later Renaissance art and science provided the way to ‘true art’, ‘true nature’ and to ‘the meaning of life’ (SV: 142). And, in the hands of the Puritans and other Protestants, it could even ‘show the path to God’ (SV: 142). It is, therefore, in the search for meaning that science began to unfurl its potent display of analytic power.

22 The Weberian perspective Today, however: Who – aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences – still believes that the findings of [the natural sciences] could teach us anything about the meaning of the world? (SV: 142, Weber’s emphasis) To put this point more generally: the very pursuit of meaning in Western intellectual reason paradoxically resulted in utter meaninglessness. A process, it should be noted, that closely parallels the rational but paradoxical fulfilment of the Christian religion in Calvinism. Secondly, this paradoxical logic leads of course to the disenchantment of the world. One path to disenchantment lies within the Protestant rejection of Catholic magical practices; however, within such Puritan disenchantment, there is still a place for God, even if His plan is beyond any human access. But with science – the other route of disenchantment – no divine or magical content of any kind can be allowed. The process of disenchantment is radically completed. As Weber says: The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is God-ordained, and hence somehow [a] meaningfully and ethically orientated, cosmos. (IR: 350–1; also ES: 450–1) ‘Science as a Vocation’ lays considerable stress on how the academic sphere is shaped by ‘increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation’ so that there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. (SV: 139) Consequently, appeals to any sources of legitimation that contain anything less than this total disenchantment are forbidden. Thirdly, Weber brings a number of these points together in a discussion of the cultural consequences of this shift from a meaningful cosmos to a disenchanted universe. In every other culture, humanity has a place in the cosmos, and a pattern of life can be followed that is in harmony with the whole. Death in such circumstances can be understood as a fulfilment of ‘the organic cycle of life’, where ‘Abraham, or some peasant of the past’ could die ‘old and satiated with life’ (SV: 139–40). But this is not the case with the pursuit of the modern cultural values found in the intellectual and aesthetic spheres. Here the task is endless, with no possible satiation and so no place for meaningful death.

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 23 Whereas civilised man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become ‘tired of life’ but not ‘satiated with life’. He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilised life as such is meaningless; by its very ‘progressiveness’ it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness. (SV: 139–40; also IR: 356–7) And there is no path back. The never-ending, restless striving for originality in the academy and art can be regarded as attempts to regain the meaning of the past, but each new theory or artwork can only leave such cosmic meaning further and further behind. If the scientific/intellectual value-sphere contains this decisive, clear sense of disenchanted meaninglessness, then what meaning is still possible within the academic realm? Beyond the tempting re-association of intellectual reason with religious/spiritual beliefs – the ‘big child’ option so disparaged by Weber – two elements of vocational meaning can be identified in ‘Science as a Vocation’. First is the Protestant heritage of the calling. Weber does not explicitly mention the religious formation of ‘vocation’ in either of his famous vocation lectures (on science and politics), but it can safely be assumed that such a lineage is being invoked given what Weber has told us in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism about the ongoing influence and presence of such vocational meaning. And in the scientific/intellectual sphere, as opposed to the economic realm, both senses of Protestant vocation can be identified. So, although it is not mentioned in ‘Science as a Vocation’, a place for the calculated, productive labour view of vocation, with its Calvinist origins, might be taken for granted as part of the general Protestant work ethic that pervades all capitalist culture. But it is the calling as a task set by God – an ‘inward calling of science’ (SV: 134, Weber’s emphasis) – that is given the most emphasis in ‘Science as a Vocation’. It is this meaning that is being invoked when Weber talks of the vocation for science/intellectual life as being an ‘inner devotion to the task’ (SV: 137). The depth, emotional intensity and religiosity of such a calling are emphasised by Weber: [W]hoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science. He will never have what one may call the ‘personal experience’ of science. Without this strange intoxication, ridiculed by every outsider; without this passion . . . you have no calling for science and you should do something else. For nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion. (SV: 135, Weber’s emphasis)

24

The Weberian perspective

If the full Protestant range of vocational meaning has been identified here, it is given specific content from the history of Western intellectual disenchantment. Here is the second element that makes up the possible meaning available in the scientific value-sphere. In essence, contemporary disenchanted scientific/intellectual endeavour cannot escape its past sense of purpose: that it once was part of the human search for meaning within enchanted orders of existence. In this sense, there is, Weber states, an ongoing presumption that the intellectual task is of value – that it still has fundamental human worth; but the nature of this value cannot now be rationally stated or argued and has become merely the irrational precondition of the rational enterprise. That is, what was once the end of the rational task – the provision of some kind of meaning – has become, because of the disenchanted logic of Western intellectual rationalisation, a mere presupposition beyond the reach of scientific reason. Science further presupposes that what is yielded by scientific work is important in the sense that it is ‘worth being known’. In this, obviously, are contained all our problems. For this presupposition cannot be proved by scientific means. It can only be interpreted with reference to its ultimate meaning, which we must reject or accept according to our ultimate position towards life. (SV: 143, Weber’s emphasis) Such irrational presumptions will vary between the disciplines but are necessary if the rational task is not to produce mere ‘technical results’: This is the case not only because with such knowledge one can attain technical results but for its own sake, if the quest for such knowledge is to be a ‘vocation’. Yet this presupposition can by no means be proved. And still less can it be proved that the existence of the world which these sciences describe is worthwhile, that it has any ‘meaning’, or that it makes sense to live in such a world. Science does not ask for the answers to such questions. (SV: 143–4) In sum, vocational meaning in the intellectual sphere combines the Protestant lineage of the calling with the heritage of meaning that was once the very end of Western reason itself. To enter the intellectual realm as an academic certainly entails submission to the reigning values of disenchanted reason, but if there is also a sense of vocation – an ‘inner devotion to the task’ – then the overriding meaninglessness can be mitigated to some degree. The political value-sphere

As with the scientific/intellectual sphere, the Protestant heritage of the calling provides the base meaning for the elected politician in the political value-sphere. And ‘Politics as a Vocation’ repeats the formula given in ‘Science as a Vocation’: the

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 25 work ethic side of the vocation is assumed rather than expounded but the inner task of devotion is explicit, with all its irrational intensity. So Weber stresses the ‘passionate devotion’ (PV: 115) of the vocation of politics and that [t]o take a stand, to be passionate – ira et studium – is the politician’s element. (PV: 95; also PV: 127) In addition, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ seemingly shows how a new sense of vocational meaning is possible in the modern, democratic state. For the elected politician, the ‘cause’ that motivates each candidate into a life of public service can add to the Protestant heritage and provide a strong sense of purpose within the overall senselessness of modernity. Hence the politician nourishes his inner balance and self-feeling by the consciousness that his life has meaning in the service of a ‘cause’. (PV: 84, Weber’s emphasis) However, the necessities of the state – particularly violence, power, and, increasingly, bureaucracy – decisively influence the cause in contradictory ways: they are needed by the cause if it is to have any chance of being practically realised; and these forces will inevitably both reduce and compromise the cause to some degree. Perhaps such means might even wholly undermine the desired end. Every successful politician needs to understand that the cause will always be squeezed by this political machinery of means and ends. But, in the face of this unavoidable diminution of meaning, faith in the initial purpose must be maintained if some sense of vocation is to be preserved. The final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. . . . But because of this fact, the serving of a cause must not be absent if action is to have inner strength. Exactly what the cause, in the service of which the politician strives for power and uses power, looks like is a matter of faith . . . some kind of faith must always exist. (PV: 117) Just to mention one example of how this faith in the cause can be easily lost due to the necessities of the state, Weber is particularly critical of those politicians who have been seduced by power, where the means have finally become the ends: The sin against the lofty spirit of his vocation, however, begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal selfintoxication, instead of exclusively entering the service of ‘the cause’. . . . Although, or rather just because, power is the unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with

26 The Weberian perspective power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se. The mere ‘power politician’ may get strong effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless. (PV: 116) But if the politician can maintain devotion to the cause alongside an appreciation of all the necessary forces of the state that will both realise and undermine the cause, then vocational meaning might be found and such senselessness avoided. The aesthetic and erotic value-spheres

If the three spheres so far discussed contain the vocational meaning of different kinds, it needs to be remembered that the dominant disenchanted senselessness of modernity is, in fact, institutionalised by these very spheres; that is, as stated, these spheres constitute that familiar bleak Weberian outlook marked by the disenchanted universe, the capitalist economy and the bureaucratic state. And it is against this overall rationalised condition of modernity that the aesthetic and erotic spheres will be formed. Indeed, says Weber, it is the dry meaninglessness of science that will drive the young to seek ‘nature’ elsewhere. To repeat part of the previously given quotation: They crave not only religious experience but experience as such. The only thing that is strange is the method that is now followed: the spheres of the irrational, the only spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched. (As quoted, SV: 142–3) The meaning of this ‘experience as such’ that is on offer in the ‘spheres of the irrational’ is powerful. This is so much the case that Weber proclaims that, in this oppositional, dependent relationship with the dominant spheres, a religion-rivalling sense of meaning is possible. In order to explain this effect, three elements that are common to both the erotic and aesthetic spheres can be identified, before the specific value structure of each sphere is outlined. Firstly, Weber lays great stress on how the aesthetic and erotic spheres each form a new inner-worldly cosmos of meaning.13 Highly reduced versions of the older cosmos are reproduced by the irrational value-spheres within the overall disenchanted universe. Secondly, Weber will emphasise the redemptive, salvation quality of the erotic and aesthetic value-spheres. Such terminology indicates how the meaning on offer can, in fact, rival religion, but the question is: deliverance and salvation from what? Remarkably, it is from rationalised modernity, as manifested in the economic, scientific and political/legal spheres, that one can be redeemed and saved. These first two points are illustrated in the following quotes from the ‘Intermediary Reflection’. Art can be seen to be constituted as a value-sphere in this way: The development of intellectualism and the rationalisation of life change this situation [art and religion being tied together]. For under these conditions,

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 27 art becomes a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right. Art takes over the function of a thisworldly salvation, no matter how this may be interpreted. It provides a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism. (IR: 342, some emphasis added) In the case of the erotic value-sphere: The last accentuation of the erotical sphere occurred in terms of intellectualist cultures. It occurred where this sphere collided with the unavoidably ascetic trait of the vocational specialist type of man. . . . A tremendous value emphasis on the specific sensation of an inner-worldly salvation from rationalisation thus resulted. (IR: 346, emphasis added) Thirdly, so powerful is this oppositional stance to the intellectualised, routinised world that a new sense of salvation from ‘death’ can be ascertained in secular modernity. What emerges is, in fact, a pale, mock idea of ‘death’, and it is not explicitly called ‘death’ by Weber. However, the imagery used points to how ideal interests are at work to create a modern form of this ultimate problem of meaning. In ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber compares the ancient Platonic view of reason, which did provide meaning, with today. Well, who today views science in such a manner? Today youth feels rather the reverse: the intellectual constructions of science constitute an unreal realm of artificial abstractions, which with their bony hands seek to grasp the blood-and-the-sap of true life without ever catching up with it. (SV: 140–1)14 Also, in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’, there is this statement on the erotic experience: The lover realises himself to be rooted in the kernel of the truly living, which is eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavour. He knows himself to be freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine. (IR: 347)15 In these quotes, the impersonal, rationalised world constitutes a sort of death – the repeated image is of skeletal hands – as opposed to the kernel of life. So, the aesthetic and the erotic spheres each offers religion-rivalling meaning through the provision of a new cosmos where salvation might be found from the ‘death’ that results from rationalised routine. In other words, the level of worldly

28 The Weberian perspective meaning within meaninglessness achievable in these spheres is so high that religious meaning itself is challenged. As Weber says of art: Indeed, religion violently rejects as sinful the type of salvation within the world that art qua art claims to provide. (ES: 608) Beyond such common properties, these two irrational spheres have very specific kinds of value-formation. The history of each sphere can only be briefly stated here, and, indeed, Weber himself only gives some broad abbreviated statements on this topic. But perhaps the key elements in Weber’s depiction are: how these spheres develop only in modernity as a reaction to the dominant forms of rationalisation; how a constant comparison with religion reminds us that what is at stake is meaning; and how meaning might only be gained through obedience to the valuestructure of the internal order of each sphere. The aesthetic value-sphere achieves this internal structure and capacity for meaning ‘within the world’ based on a new set of four values: taste, the creative subject, form and originality. Firstly, judgement becomes based on taste as opposed to ethics. As a matter of fact, the refusal of modern men to assume responsibility for moral judgments tends to transform judgments of moral intent into judgments of taste (‘in poor taste’ instead of ‘reprehensible’). (IR: 342; also ES: 608) Secondly, the artist, and those who are aesthetically receptive, have an inner subjectivity – ‘subjectivist needs’ (IR: 342; also ES: 608) – that must reject all other norms as restrictive of their creative originality and sensitivities: To the creative artist, however, as well as to the aesthetically excited and receptive mind, the ethical norm as such may easily appear as a coercion of their genuine creativeness and innermost selves. (IR: 342; also ES: 608) Note that this ‘genuine creativeness’ and ‘innermost’ self are products of the aesthetic sphere. It is only by entering the realm of art that such subjectivity can gain this ultimate measure of self-recognition. Thirdly, within the value-sphere of art, form or style triumphs over content (with form having a long history of tension with religious meaning): The sublimation of the religious ethic and the quest for salvation, on the one hand, and the evolution of the inherent logic of art, on the other, have tended to form an increasingly tense relation. All sublimated religions of salvation have focused upon the meaning alone, not upon the form, of the things and actions relevant for salvation. Salvation religions have devalued form as contingent, as something creaturely and distracting from meaning. (IR: 341; also ES: 610)

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 29 This comparison with religion is indicative of the salvation value of art in modernity and the opposition here is between the ‘inherent logic’ of artistic form over the content of salvation religions. For religion, on the basis of this aesthetic ‘internal logic . . . [a]rt becomes an “idolatry”, a competing power, and a deceptive bedazzlement’ (IR: 342–3). Fourthly, as part of the endless nature of modern culture mentioned above, art must always be engaged in the production of the new: ‘for there is always a further step ahead’ (SV: 140). Originality is, perhaps, the prime aesthetic value. We can tie all these values together in the following way: the original artwork, especially as it advances form not content (so a new style that each artist must offer as their own) is given a legitimate place in the art world through the shared value of taste; and such a work of art is material, objective proof of the genuine, creative, inner subject. These ideas will be developed in the next section, but at this stage, we can appreciate that, set within Weber’s aesthetic value-sphere, the production of the artwork allows the artist to attain a religion-rivalling sense of salvation from the external, dominant orders of rationalisation. With the erotic sphere, the values that emerge centre around nature/the natural and the emotional state of religious salvation, and these ends are gained by the means of sexual activity of the romantic lovers. Indeed, it is within this sphere that the overall pattern of meaning in modernity is most clearly exemplified since, within the internal cosmos of the erotic, meaningful nature and even religion itself are said to have been regained. Firstly, on the value of the natural/nature (the ‘kernel of the truly living’, as we have seen above), Weber states that with ‘the universal rationalisation and intellectualisation of culture’ eroticism turns ‘away from the naive naturalism of sex’ that is associated with ‘the organic cycle of peasant life’ (IR: 345). The resultant erotic love appears ‘to be like a gate into the most irrational and thereby real kernel of life’ (IR, 345), a discovery of the ‘natural fountain of life’ (IR: 346) and a glorification of the ‘pure animality of the relation’ (IR: 347). And this erotic sense of the natural is only understandable, as we have seen, as a kind of ‘salvation from’ and ‘joyous triumph over’ (IR: 346) the rationalised orders of modernity. Notably this new erotic naturalism is itself the result of intellectualisation – it is a conscious affirmation of the irrational against the senseless logic of Western rationalisation. [T]his mature love of intellectualism reaffirms the natural quality of the sexual sphere, but it does so consciously, as an embodied creative power. (IR: 347) This value of nature/life is woven into a pattern of meaning in the erotic valuesphere with another value of the greatest possible meaning: religion itself. We have already discussed how both of the irrational value-spheres are cast in terms of religious meaning by Weber, as salvation and redemption from some sort of anti-life/‘death’. Also, it might be added here, within the value-sphere of art, the

30 The Weberian perspective aesthetic experience is often expressed in religious terms. However, Weber accords the erotic sphere a further explicit dimension of religiosity. [T]he erotic relation seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfillment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other . . . However, from the point of view of eroticism, this meaning, and with it the value-content of the relation itself, rests upon the possibility of a communion which is felt as a complete unification, as a fading of the ‘thou’. It is so overpowering that it is interpreted ‘symbolically’: as a sacrament. (IR: 347) The lovers’ erotic embrace takes on all the characteristics of religious meaning as ‘communion’ and ‘sacrament’. Further, the sexual experience of the lovers is ‘equivalent to the having of the mystic’ (IR: 347), says Weber. In this way, the irrationality of the erotic works as a form of salvation from ‘all functionality, rationality and generality’ (IR: 347). The erotic, then, forms itself as an internal cosmos of independent values against both religion and the rationalised spheres. Cocooned in the erotic value-sphere, a sense of religious meaning and meaningful nature, with their attendant emotional intensity, can be regained. However, the formation of these values has a paradoxical history: there is a sense of a meaning-imbued ‘nature’ that is the product of an intellectualised rejection of the natural; and there is an emotional sense of mystic salvation and religiosity that must be non-religious. Both nature and religion are gained, but in a diminished form within the sphere, and on the condition that ‘real’ meaningful nature and religion are themselves excluded from, or lost to, the rationalised structures of modernity beyond this sphere. Conclusion

From what Weber has told us about the value-spheres of modernity, a pattern is apparent that we will follow when the new spheres of home, nature and sport are considered. Two basic qualities are at work: the dominant, rationalised spheres – the economic, political and scientific/intellectual – combine to create the hard fate of modern senselessness, even though they also contain different degrees of meaning based on variations of the Protestant calling; while the optional irrational spheres – the aesthetic and erotic – each create an internal cosmos of specific values that can offer temporary salvation from the ruling spheres and their routines of rationalisation. Our primary task will be to fill out how the new irrational spheres follow this basic template. Adding to Weber: Meaning and enlightenment In order to build up an understanding of the ideal interests at work in the valuespheres, an additional layer will be added to the religiously oriented place of

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 31 meaning. Here, again, we will be moving beyond the explicit detail of Weber’s own writings, but will still be following the logic of his argument. What will be termed ‘Enlightenment’16 values – so concepts of freedom and equality (and even, for one sphere, ‘fraternity’) – were not part of Weber’s framing of the value-spheres within his sociology of religion but are elements that vitally affect the construction of the internal order of every sphere. This is of course not surprising for any structure of modernity. To place these Enlightenment values within the value-sphere perspective is to be able to regard them away from their usual sites of expression within the intellectual-political-legal-economic framework – it is to take them out of their established roles within the prosaic,17 rationalised realms, in fact. In consequence, it will become evident how meaning and Enlightenment values are entwined rather than cast into some kind of standard, oppositional confrontation. Or, to see it from another angle, as the modern subject moves between the various spheres it will be shown to be formed by its encounters with specific, value combinations of meaning and Enlightenment. As an example of this process, and to set the scene for later argument, we can add an additional layer of Enlightenment values to the aesthetic sphere. The order of aesthetic values that Weber proposes – taste, subjectivity, form and originality – constructs an internal cosmos of meaning in opposition to both religion and the dominant, rationalised spheres of modernity. However, these same values and same inner cosmos also bring with them a great sense of subjective freedom that can only be realised within the aesthetic value-sphere; although such freedom is necessarily accompanied by a strong degree of inequality. The artist is the centre of aesthetic meaning for Weber, and it is also the locus of maximum freedom. Romantic subjectivity includes the inherent equation of the artist and freedom, with the standard self-consciousness of this freedom based on an authentic, inner self which finds expression in the original artwork. The new sphere of the aesthetic depended on this model of the self and, despite many challenges, such subjectivity remains absolutely pivotal within the realm of contemporary art.18 So here the values of subjectivity and originality are, rather obviously, extended beyond meaning to include freedom. The power and appeal of this freedom relies on the ways the inner subject can find objective affirmation within the sphere of art. In the same way that we were able to capture the manner of aesthetic salvation, so the objective realisation of subjective freedom is manifest in the artwork itself (in fact, this is a serviceable definition of the ‘artwork’). Simply, the work of art is objective proof of freedom: an inner self has been found, released and materially expressed!19 However, a second objectification of the subject is also necessarily present. A social dimension is needed in which other people affirm that this material expression of the individual subject is ‘art’. And it is at this point that we encounter the value of ‘taste’. Again, Weber does not develop the internal social aspect of taste in the aesthetic realm, but help can be found with two thinkers present at the birth of the value-sphere of art: Kant and Rousseau. We will only discuss their ideas briefly here and will take them up again in the discussion on nature.

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The Weberian perspective

Kant shares a common range of aesthetic values with Weber. All that is really different is the absence in Weber of ‘beauty’ – the prevailing aesthetic value of the 18th century.20 Before we address the ultimate freedom of the artist, we must consider the lesser case of the viewer or audience. To lay out the logic of Kant’s argument for our own purposes, we find that, in this case, the subjective appreciation of beauty entails the cutting away of all other external interests in the object (so, e.g., in being ‘agreeable’ as in eating, or ‘good’ in practical or moral terms) as well as any purely private interests (Kant, 2000: 95ff). The judgement of ‘taste’ depends on such a subtraction of all other interests and, if achieved, here lies a degree of individual freedom but also a connection to other subjects. This definition of the beautiful can be deduced from the previous explanation of it as an object of satisfaction without any interest. For one cannot judge that about which he is aware that the satisfaction in it is without any interest in his own case in any way except that it must contain a ground of satisfaction for everyone. For since it is not grounded in any inclination of the subject (nor in any other underlying interest), but rather the person making the judgment feels himself completely free with regard to the satisfaction that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the satisfaction any private conditions, pertaining to his subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else; consequently he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone. (Kant, 2000: 96–7, emphasis added) For Kant, the achievement of aesthetic judgment allows the viewer ‘to feel . . . completely free’ and in so doing necessarily united with all others who can similarly shed all other interests. Further, this ‘subjective universal’ (Kant, 2000: 96ff) entails communication with these others about the art object and a community of taste results. It should further be remarked that, although the satisfaction in the beautiful . . . is not only clearly distinguished among the other aesthetic judgings by means of universal communicability, but also, by means of this property, acquires an interest in relation to society (in which it can be communicated). (Kant, 2000: 157, emphasis added) We can now turn to consider the artist. This social world of aesthetic appreciation is the necessary setting for the creators of art. For Kant, the artist as ‘genius’ is primarily distinguished by originality. He states: That genius [firstly] is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule, consequently that originality must be its primary characteristic. (Kant, 2000: 186)

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 33 However, originality is not enough. It must be tempered by ‘taste’. To be rich and original in ideas is not as necessary for the sake of beauty as is the suitability of the imagination in its freedom to the lawfulness of the understanding. For all the richness of the former produces, in its lawless freedom, nothing but nonsense; the power of judgment, however, is the faculty for bringing it in line with the understanding. Taste, like the power of judgment in general, is the discipline (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished. (Kant, 2000: 197, emphasis added) With these ideas, a sociology of the aesthetic sphere might be glimpsed in Kant’s ahistorical philosophy. On one level, this ‘corrective’ of taste might be read as just some kind of continuation of artistic traditions – however, ‘taste’ means much more than this. In effect, Kant shows us how the art object – the original creation of the artist/genius – has to conform to the external judgement of others. It must be an object that can be talked about by the audience/viewer as art; or, in other words, it has to be accepted as a work of art by the community of taste. Of course, there will be disputes within this community about the quality of the artwork but, at some level, for the created object to be ‘art’, it must be so judged by others as a matter of aesthetic taste. Put in these terms, this constraint of ‘taste’ sounds like a limit on the freedom of the artist – a partial denial of the expressive subject by others. But when we add to the mix Rousseau’s much cited understanding of the authentic subject, then freedom might be understood as utterly affirmed by the external social order of taste. Towards the end of the ‘2nd Discourse on Inequality’, Rousseau comments on the basic cause of the unfreedom endemic within his social world: [T]he social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him . . . in short, how, [we are] always asking others what we are, and never daring to ask ourselves. (Rousseau, 1923: 201–2) Only the ‘savage’, more natural man escapes this external determination, according to Rousseau. All society seems condemned by this analysis. One option to escape the ‘opinion of others’ is to go alone into nature (to be discussed in a later chapter). However, it is Kant who unintentionally shows how such a free self, as expressed in the romantic ideal, can be found in society itself, and not just in nature. Art provides a place where the self-consciousness of a Rousseau-like ideal of the authentic subject21 is, in fact, not only confirmed but fulfilled by ‘the opinion of others’! Of course, extra factors like vanity and ambition will be a compromising presence, but when the created material expression of the internal, romantic self has been accepted by the community of taste as a work of art, then ‘the opinion of others’

34

The Weberian perspective

has, in fact, proclaimed the freedom of the artist. Or, to see it the other way around, if the external opinion of others does not make this judgement then freedom is, in fact, denied – the equation of art and freedom is possible only within the community of taste. So, from the forced union of Rousseau and Kant comes an understanding how, in the aesthetic sphere alone, the opinion of others is a requirement of subjective freedom. However, in its particular achievement of Enlightenment-era freedom, the aesthetic sphere also denies the Enlightenment ideal of equality. Aesthetic freedom is only for the few. On this point, it is enough to introduce Bourdieu’s relentless critique of art in terms of class factors such as habitus and cultural capital – a critique which would still seem to dominate the sociology of art.22 Bourdieu would of course question the freedom that we have derived from Kant’s philosophy given that in Distinction Kant represents all that is wrong with art. But in this inclusion of Bourdieu alongside Kant, we are merely following Weber’s long-standing advice that an ideal or ‘spiritualistic’ approach must always stand with a more materialistic perspective. In Weberian terms, the internal cosmos of the aesthetic sphere offers the artist not only salvation from the ‘death’ of the prosaic world but also a sense of a free self that is probably unrivalled across the realms of modernity (if also accompanied by a radical degree of inequality). Meaning and freedom arise together as a result of the aesthetic combination of subjectivity, originality and taste. For our purposes, this addition of Enlightenment values will be looked for as an aid in the understanding of the workings of the value-spheres to come. Two final points might be made. The objective realisation of subjective freedom is a long-standing and much-desired goal of Enlightenment thinking, especially, of course, in the prosaic sphere of the state, and is plainly evident in, for example, the theories of Rousseau and Hegel. However, the horrendous empirical failures of this objective fulfilment of liberty in 20th-century history stand in contrast with its irrational attainment within the aesthetic sphere. And here lies part of art’s appeal in the modern world. The further point is simply that the combination of meaning and freedom within the domain of art showcases how the subject is formed by its travels through the various spheres of modernity. We will have to see how far this applies in the spheres of home, nature and sport. Notes 1 This chapter and the one to follow are only aiming to lay down a sufficient theoretical foundation for the later chapters on home, nature and sport. They substantially summarise and repeat prior, much more detailed arguments on Weber and modernity (see Symonds, 2015). 2 Sometimes termed ‘religious needs’ (IEEWR: 270); or as a ‘spiritualistic’ versus materialistic perspective (ES: 183). However, Weber cautions against any reduction of religion to a simple ‘function’ or ‘reflection’ of such interests: It is not our thesis that the specific nature of a religion is a simple ‘function’ of the social situation of the stratum which appears as its characteristic bearer, or that it represents the

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 35 stratum’s ‘ideology,’ or that it is a ‘reflection’ of a stratum’s material or ideal interestsituation. On the contrary, a more basic misunderstanding of the standpoint of these discussions would hardly be possible. (IEEWR: 269–70, emphasis added)

3

4 5

6 7

8 9

In other words, Weber is just as opposed to any one-sided idealist understanding as he is to Marxist, materialist reductionism – intellectual theorisation of religion cannot be restricted to explanations based only on ideal and/or material, interests (IEEWR: 268). Many factors have to be included, as his empirical studies exhibit (see AJ and China, in particular). The qualification should also be made that he will extend his use of the term ‘interest’ to include, for example, military, status and political interests. But the material/ideal conjunction does have a claim to some theoretical privilege in Weber’s work, particularly when the empirical studies are given some sense of an overview in the ‘Introduction to the Economic Ethic of the World Religions’ and in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’. Two qualifications should be made at this point. First, it needs to be noted that the following argument will place great emphasis on the dual dilemmas of death and suffering as they are manifested in the Christian, Western worldview, since this will be the content that will inform Weber’s views on meaning and modernity. However, the theological balance of these issues in the Christian West is of course far from universal and such a stress on, e.g., salvation from death, will not be found, for example, in the cases of Confucianism and Ancient Greek religion (e.g., China: 228, where Hellenic and Chinese beliefs are compared precisely on this point). Second, it should also be noted that most meaningful belief does not involve an ‘otherworldly’ salvation but is more concerned with the ordering of life in the ‘here and now’ with an emphasis on ‘health, a long life, and wealth’ (IEEWR: 277). Further, in all religious belief, it is the here and now of the psychological state that is crucial – from Puritan certainty of grace to the ecstasy of Dionysian orgies (IEEWR: 278). In other words, religious meaning for Weber should not just be associated with exceptional escapes from the world, but with a more everyday sense of meaning. But, as noted, a finished version was published in 1915. Following a point made in the introductory chapter, an example of the different stresses that Weber’s works invite might be found in recent translations of the titles of the Vocation lectures, where the profession or work of science and politics is emphasised over the religious sense of Beruf (Bruun and Whimster, 2012; Reitter and Wellmon, 2020). See Lechner (2018) for an argued advocacy of such a shift in emphasis. Note that in this exposition of Weber’s ideas, there will be almost no engagement with the many criticisms of his work. Brubaker (1984: 85) and Scaff (1991: 102ff) use the terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ spheres. But this is not Weber’s terminology here and, especially in the case of Scaff’s argument, the stress on subjectivity leads away from meaning and religion, and into the terminology of modernity. It should also be noted that ‘irrational’ has many meanings in Weber. Notably the irrational nature of the world refers to the problem of theodicy that only a few religious intellectualisations have consistently resolved (e.g., PV: 122–3). Again, it needs to be remembered that the professional side of Beruf sits alongside the Protestant heritage in these lectures. Although not relevant to the current argument, another tale of meaninglessness is apparent in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, although its conclusions are only apparent in later works like the ‘Intermediary Reflection’. For Weber, the tremendous consistency of Calvinism, especially in terms of predestination, leads to an inability to answer the basic religious questions of salvation and suffering. the paradox of the Puritan ethic of ‘vocation’. As a religion of virtuosos, Puritanism renounced the universalism of love, and rationally routinised all work in the world into

36

The Weberian perspective serving God’s will and testing one’s state of grace. God’s will in its ultimate meaning was quite incomprehensible, yet it was the only positive will that could be known. In this respect, Puritanism accepted the routinisation of the economic cosmos, which, with the whole world, it devalued as creatural and depraved. This state of affairs appeared as God-willed, and as material and given for fulfilling one’s duty. In the last resort, this meant in principle to renounce salvation as a goal attainable by man, that is, by everybody. It meant to renounce salvation in favour of the groundless and always particularised grace. In truth, this standpoint of unbrotherliness was no longer a genuine ‘religion of salvation’. (IR: 332–3, emphasis added)

10

11 12

13 14

15

The paradox of Puritanism outlined here seems to imply that Puritanism, ostensibly a Christian doctrine, has the most ‘unchristian’ consequences. Both brotherly love and the universality of salvation have been turned upside down in the Puritan, especially Calvinist, answer to the great religious questions. Other famous more general maxims include: ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise’ and ‘no gains without pains’. Importantly, this ethos of Franklin’s is not just about economic activity but advocates a whole life of ascetic duty – so it points towards the Protestant work ethic more generally. This wider view of the heritage of the calling can be witnessed in Mark Twain’s circa 1870 complaint about Franklin’s ascetic strictures that he was forced to follow as a boy (Twain, 1882). Although at the end of his General Economic History, Weber himself marks the decline of the calling in stronger terms: ‘The religious root of modern economic humanity is dead; today the concept of the calling is a caput mortuum in the world’ (GEH: 368–9). The scientific/intellectual sphere, compared with the other value-spheres, is not clearly differentiated by Weber. In the ‘Intermediary Reflection’, the intellectual realm is mixed in with other cultural factors, and ‘Science as a Vocation’ is seemingly only talking about the academic/university level of reason, which is far from a universal component of modernity. However, the compulsory nature of the intellectual/scientific sphere can be witnessed if we extend Weber’s concepts here. Even if it is the case that not everyone attends university, the compulsory educational system throughout modernity instils the legitimacy of disenchanted reason to all at some level; and the scientific assumptions of the university – both in terms of disenchanted reason and disenchanted reality – are inescapable in at least the other dominant rationalised valuespheres of the economy and the state/law. Or, to put it slightly differently, the notion of a legal-rational legitimation does not only refer to the state and law but relies on the assumptions of the scientific sphere. The whole of rationalised modernity is predicated on the values of the scientific realm. So we all do enter this sphere when we are educated, and its presence is inescapable in a great deal of our life within the other value realms of the modern world. Note that Weber will also apply the term ‘cosmos’ to the economic and intellectual/ scientific spheres, but without the emphasis on meaning apparent here. Ja, wer steht heute so zur Wissenschaft? Heute ist die Empfindung gerade der Jugend wohl eher die umgekehrte: Die Gedankengebilde der Wissenschaft sind ein hinterweltliches Reich von künstlichen Abstraktionen, die mit ihren dürren Händen Blut und Saft des wirklichen Lebens einzufangen trachten, ohne es doch je zu erhaschen (WB: 89). Note that ‘dürren’ might have been translated as scrawny, thin or scraggy, and the syntax is a little confusing. But the wider meaning is, in fact, better captured by the Gerth and Mills rendering of the German here. The following quote from the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ can be used as a clarification. ‘weiß sich der Liebende in den jedem rationalen Bemühen ewig unzugänglichen Kern des wahrhaft Lebendigen eingepflanzt, den kalten Skeletthänden rationaler Ordnungen ebenso völlig entronnen wie der Stumpfheit des Alltages’ (Zw: 561).

Meaning and the value-spheres of modernity 37 16 ‘Enlightenment’ will be used in a very general way to embrace both rational and irrational value formations. 17 The rationalised, compulsory value-spheres will sometimes be termed ‘prosaic’ following Hegel’s use of the expression to mark off the economic/political/philosophical world from the aesthetic realm (see Hegel, 1975 especially). 18 Accounts of romantic-aesthetic subjectivity might be found in, for example, Taylor (1989) and Seigel (2005) but most perceptively in the last sections of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics (Hegel, 1975). And for the various challenges to the centrality of the romantic subject in art, most notably by Duchamp, see Symonds (2020). 19 And this proof of freedom lies behind one of the greatest compliments that can be given in modernity: the praise of some product or achievement as being ‘a work of art’. 20 Beauty was increasingly aligned with nature rather than art as the 19th century unfurled, as we will discuss. 21 It should be noted that our critical appropriation of Kant and Rousseau here does not signal some agreement that there is a natural, authentic inner self to be found or released, but only that the self-consciousness of such an ideal subjectivity is very much alive and well in modernity and that, outside nature, art is arguably the purest site for the realisation of such self-belief. 22 For an account of the historical development of inequality in the aesthetic realm through the 19th century, especially in a British context, see Williams (1960).

3

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity

Introduction The ‘Intermediary Reflection’ is the fullest account of Weber’s value-sphere theory. However, the way that meaning and meaninglessness are present within this perspective is not the central theme of this crucial text.1 Rather, Weber’s primary concern it to show how every value-sphere of modernity is fundamentally hostile to the religious ethic of brotherliness or brotherly love. And, as a result, a sense of guilt is said to pervade the modern world. When we come to consider home, nature and sport as Weberian value-spheres, this basic ethical judgement must be part of our understanding. In the broadest terms, brotherliness is a response to suffering – it arises from the great religious dilemma of theodicy,2 rather than the problem of death (although these two fundamental issues are often intertwined theologically). The basic ethical imperative at work is that every sufferer should be cared for and loved as one would a brother. In its role as a pivot between Weber’s sociologies of religion and modernity, the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ describes and compares a number of religious manifestations of brotherliness and also tries to pinpoint the place of this ethic of suffering in modernity. Sense must be made of these dual strands in Weber’s account of brotherliness. In this chapter, then, we will first detail the forms of brotherly love in Weber’s sociology of religion before moving on to address the ethical fate of our times. First, however, the way Weber’s concept of brotherliness has been treated in the secondary literature has to be noted. On the whole, brotherliness is often mentioned in passing but not treated as worthy of theoretical elaboration. The one exception to this is a paper by the American Durkheimian Robert Bellah (Bellah, 1999).3 On one level, such a turning away is understandable: Weber certainly employs the term in all his major religious writings as well as in the Vocation lectures, but such use is relatively brief. And, following the method already outlined, in order to make sense of the concept, we will not only have to trace its presence throughout the Weber texts but will still have to add some speculative argument to join all the dots together. However, a remarkably consistent theory does emerge, and it remains the case that brotherliness is the major concept at work in the much lauded ‘Intermediary Reflection’. So something more would seem to be behind this surprising DOI: 10.4324/9781003245148-4

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 39 absence in the commentary, and the most likely cause would seem to be an overreliance on other theorists or external debates to fill out the many obscurities in Weber’s work.4 Now such recourse to other thinkers and surrounding intellectual disputes can pay great dividends but in this case it has proved a limitation. And the theorist whose influence must be challenged most strenuously with regard to this particular aspect of Weber is Nietzsche. There is no doubt that Nietzsche did affect Weber’s thinking in various ways, but in terms of suffering and its morality, Weber argues lengthily against Nietzsche and The Genealogy of Morals (IEEWR: 270ff; ES: 494; also ES: 934–5). Indeed, to place Weber within some sort of Nietzschean theoretical setting is to begin from a position which – perhaps more than any other – is unlikely to consider the importance of something like an ethic of brotherliness.5 So, against the standard lines of Weberian interpretation, let us focus our attention on the concept of brotherliness, try to unravel its complexities and go on to gauge its importance for the value-spheres of modernity. The forms of brotherly love in Weber’s sociology of religion The ideal-type of brotherliness

A complex typology of brotherly love emerges from Weber’s sociology of religion that allows Weber to trace the paradoxical fates of a number of different empirical forms of brotherliness within different cultural rationalisation processes. Specifically, it will be shown that four main types of brotherliness are identified by Weber: Puritan brotherliness, mystic brotherliness, medieval Christian brotherliness and charismatic communistic brotherliness.6 These different types of ‘brotherliness’ are contrasted with each other by Weber, as well as with a more general, ideal-typical form. We need to begin with this ideal-type of brotherly love. There is little doubt that Weber’s use of the term ‘brotherliness’, and the way the various usages are related to each other throughout his works, poses a serious but not insurmountable problem of consistency and opaqueness. However, greater clarity is obtained once Weber’s favoured methodological starting point of the ideal-type is assumed. The aim of outlining such an ideal-type is: They enable us to see if, in particular traits or in their total character, the phenomena approximate one of our constructions: to determine the degree of approximation of the historical phenomena to the theoretically constructed type. (IR: 324)7 For Weber, then, an ideal-type is a theoretical construction against which empirical examples can be compared; but it can also have a historical impact. Weber goes on to say: To this extent, the construction is merely a technical aid which facilitates a more lucid arrangement and terminology. Yet, under certain conditions, a

40 The Weberian perspective construction might mean more. For the rationality, in the sense of logical or teleological ‘consistency’, of an intellectual-theoretical or practical-ethical attitude has and always has had power over man, however limited and unstable this power is and always has been in the face of other forces of historical life. (IR: 324)8 In this instance, what Weber calls a ‘genuine ethic of brotherliness’9 (IR: 336) performs this dual function of being both a comparative theoretical tool and, also, a factor in the sociology of brotherliness itself in that it operates in everyday life as an ideal of goodness. However, it is certainly an odd kind of ideal-type in that, rather than being a theoretical construction ‘prepared with a rational consistency which is rarely found in reality’ (IR: 323), it is a combination of elements that tended to come together, according to Weber, at the beginning point of the historical life of this ethic. And the later social manifestations of brotherliness will become increasingly distant from this original ideal the more they are subject to the forces of rationalisation, either in terms of internal consistency or in terms of responding to the gathering rationalised forces of the social context. Weber never explains the precise nature of this model of brotherliness. However, based on his comments in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’, and through an examination of his religious sociology, it is possible to ascertain five important dimensions to this ideal-typical standard of historical measurement. Firstly, it is universal in scope – it applies to all human beings as sufferers. Secondly, it maintains a personal or ethical appreciation of the suffering of the other, emphasising the face-to-face nature of care. Thirdly, it is in tension with the orders of this world. As a consequence, fourthly, it rejects this world as imperfect, thus becoming to a great extent world-denying or acosmic. Under this acosmic orientation, the suffering of other human beings is deemed the most important concern in this world. Finally, as a consequence of these combined elements, it is uncompromising in its dealing with the world and must oppose any other value that threatens or lessens the absolute love of the sufferer. These dimensions of the ideal-typical model of brotherliness are identified by Weber in the early attempts of the main salvation religions to deal with human suffering. The major historical form of brotherliness at this stage is charismatic communism (to be discussed below) which stands closest to the ideal-type, although it is not an exact fit in terms of the dimension of universality. The universal, personal, acosmic and uncompromising aspects of the ideal-type, along with a reference to the first communist communities, are explicitly expressed in the following quotation: The principle that constituted the communal relations among the salvation prophecies was the suffering common to all believers. And this was the case whether the suffering actually existed or was a constant threat, whether it was external or internal. The more the imperatives that issued from the ethic of reciprocity among neighbours were raised, the more rational the conception of salvation became, and the more it was sublimated into an ethic of absolute ends. Externally, such commands rose to a communism of loving brethren;

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 41 internally they rose to the attitude of caritas, love for the sufferer per se, for one’s neighbour, for man, and finally for the enemy. . . . In religions of salvation, the profound and quiet bliss of all heroes of acosmic benevolence has always been fused with a charitable realisation of the natural imperfections of all human doings, including one’s own. The psychological tone as well as the rational, ethical interpretation of this inner attitude can vary widely. But its ethical demand has always lain in the direction of a universalist brotherhood [Brüderlichkeit],10 which goes beyond all barriers of societal associations, often including one’s own faith. (IR: 330)11 Within the origins of an ethic of brotherliness, we see the dimensions emphasised by Weber in his ideal-typical model of that ethic. From this common origin in religious attempts to solve the problem of ‘theodicy’ (e.g. IEEWR: 275), numerous historical forces have created empirical forms of brotherly love. The vital theme that we will see repeated throughout Weber’s work is the inability of these empirical forms of brotherliness to measure up to the ideal typical, ‘genuine ethic’ of brotherliness. Each of the four forms loses one or more of the crucial dimensions of the ideal-type – its universalism, ethical personalism, acosmism, tension with the world and refusal to compromise. We can now examine each of these empirical variations, and its relation with the ideal-type of brotherly love, in turn. Puritan brotherliness

The first example, Puritan brotherliness, has already been mentioned as part of the fateful paradox of Calvinist theological consistency. In breaking with four of the five conditions of the ‘genuine’ ethic of brotherliness, the Puritan form stands at the furthest remove from the ideal-type. Firstly, the ideal of universalism stands in stark contrast to the idea of ‘brotherhood’ found in sects of religious virtuosi such as those found in early Protestantism (particularly in America). As ‘The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’ demonstrates, a much more limited form of brotherly love was developed within Protestantism when the centrality of universal suffering was abandoned and boundaries for group membership were instead placed around proof of one’s state of grace. This Protestant form of brotherliness might be termed ‘sect brotherliness’, as it is usually based on a requirement of care only for those ‘brothers’ in the faith (PS: 308, 318–19; India: 201–2) as against the universalism of the ‘church’ (IEEWR: 288; ES: 1204).12 Secondly, following the Calvinist logic detailed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, with the injunction to vocational, mundane labour and the acceptance of ‘the routinisation of the economic cosmos’, the Puritans fulfilled their God-willed duty (IR: 332) in the economic sphere.13 There is, then, no tension with the world – quite the opposite, according to Weber. Thirdly, this same logic of turning away from the monasteries towards work in the world means that the Puritan ethic is world-affirming not acosmic.

42 The Weberian perspective But it is the radical violation of the condition of personal care – a fourth pillar of the ideal-type – that is of the most significance, and which needs some extended detail. The Puritan logic of abandonment of the personal, or ethical, aspect of the brotherly ethic of suffering brings forth the crucial question of what Weber precisely means by ‘the personal’. This will turn out to be a vitally important point for all of our understanding of brotherliness, and also for our understanding of Weber’s depiction of modernity more generally. In essence, ‘personal’ or ‘human’14 relations between people are regarded by Weber as the place where an ethical dimension is possible. For every purely personal relationship of man to man, of whatever sort and even including complete enslavement, may be subjected to ethical requirements, and ethically regulated. This is true because the structures of these relationships depend upon the individual wills of the participants, leaving room in such relations for manifestations of the virtue of charity. (ES: 585)15 The contrast is with impersonal relations which are deprived of this ethical aspect, especially in the most rationalised economies. This quotation goes on to state: But this is not the situation in the realm of economically rationalised relationships, where personal control is exercised in inverse ratio to the degree of rational differentiation of the economic structure. There is no possibility, in practice or even in principle, of any caritative regulation of relationships arising from the holder of a savings and loan bank mortgage and the mortgagee who has obtained the loan from the bank, or between a holder of federal bond and a citizen taxpayer. . . . The growing impersonality of the economy on the basis of the association in the market place follows its own rules, disobedience to which entails economic failure and, in the long run, economic ruin. (ES: 585, emphasis added; see also ES: 636, 1186; IR: 331) With this distinction between the personal and impersonal in mind, we can better understand Weber’s analysis of Puritan vocationalism as it examines how this religion encouraged its adherents to operate ‘without regard to the person’ – to relinquish, in effect, direct, personal love and care in the name of allegiance to God. Puritan brotherly love became impersonal as it was subsumed into the everyday labour of the calling: Brotherly love, since it may only be practised for the Glory of God and not in the service of the flesh, is expressed in the first place in the fulfilment of the daily tasks given by the lex naturae; and in the process this fulfilment assumes a peculiarly objective and impersonal character, that of service in the interest of the rational organisation of our social environment. (PE: 108–9, emphasis added, also PE: 235n6; and on Calvinist impersonality see also ES: 1200; and China: 236, 241, 245)

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 43 For Weber, this impersonality is a logical consequence of the Puritan conceptualisation of predestination (as we have already very briefly considered): God’s plan cannot be known or doubted; those in need should not be helped as this would seem to question God’s creation of the order of the world; those in need would seem to deserve their suffering since through labour there is always the opportunity to develop God’s bounty; and to be in needful suffering and not labouring in the world would indicate damnation, which no action on this earth can, nor should try to, alter (see ES: 588 on begging and almsgiving). If this is the case for those who were considered capable of labour, the same impersonal logic extends to those who could not work. Hence, the Puritan charitable institutions for cripples and orphans were developed along the following lines: Care for the poor was oriented to the goal of discouraging the slothful . . . charity itself became a rationalised ‘enterprise’, and its religious significance was therefore eliminated or even turned into the opposite significance. (ES: 589) There is no longer any regard for the person and their suffering; rather such charity is aimed at promoting labour and the market. In these ways, brotherliness has become impersonal, and, in one sense, loveless. Under Puritanism, the Elect would even consider ‘the sin of one’s neighbour’, not in terms of ‘sympathetic understanding’, but through ‘hatred and contempt for him as an enemy of God bearing the signs of eternal damnation’ (PE: 122, emphasis added). Such a reversal of the ethical ideal of brotherly love is demanded when the ethical concern with the suffering of every person is so completely replaced by the Elect’s dedication to vocational labour and certainty of grace. At least in the most extreme Protestant types, the impersonality of capitalism and the Elect’s impersonal denial of personal ethical relationships can come together without essential conflict and perhaps in fruitful harmony, as Weber’s famous thesis on Protestantism and capitalism argues, and as the quotes just given strongly suggest. All in all, the four-fold denial of the ideal-type of brotherliness leads to the one point of agreement: this is an absolute, uncompromising position. The doctrine of predestination underscores the demand that there can be no weakness if salvation is to be at least demonstrated. Labour in the vocational calling becomes the absolute standard of moral worth. For the Calvinist the whole cosmic order affirms this truth: the wonderfully purposeful organisation and arrangement of this cosmos is, according both to the revelation of the Bible and to natural intuition, evidently designed by God to serve the utility of the human race. This makes labour in the service of impersonal social usefulness appear to promote the glory of God and hence to be willed by Him. (PE: 109)

44 The Weberian perspective The Protestant logic leads, then, to an impersonal brotherliness within the world, where suffering and the ethics of the personal are superseded because those who do not adopt the Puritan discipline of labour are beyond help. This abandonment of both the universal and the personal in the drive to consistent ‘loveless clarity’ (IR: 359) is summarised in the following: ‘As a religion of virtuosos, Puritanism renounced the universalism of love, and rationally routinised all work in this world into serving God’s will and testing one’s state of grace’ (IR: 332). Mystic brotherliness

The second main form of empirical brotherliness examined by Weber is that of the mystic. Mystic forms of brotherly love maintain an acosmic, uncompromised universalism but, like the Puritan form, they tend towards the impersonal and can avoid tension with the economic and political world. Once again, intellectualised consistency is the reason for such impersonality and lack of tension. At its most logically consistent, the acosmism found in this ethic of brotherliness leads to a complete rejection of this world including, therefore, a rejection of other human beings as important entities. This seems to be the basis of the problems, from an ideal-typical point of view, of mystic brotherliness. Mysticism logically exaggerates brotherliness to such an extent that the world is escaped or denied so that anybody who happens to cross one’s path becomes the object of devotion and love (IR: 333, 336). ‘The postulate of brotherly love’ is therefore expanded to a ‘completely unselective generosity’ (ES: 589). Such love reaches a height of impersonality in that the actual person and their suffering are not of concern. the mystic’s ‘benevolence’ . . . does not at all enquire into the man to whom and for whom it sacrifices. Ultimately, mysticism is not interested in his person. Once and for all, the benevolent mystic gives his shirt when he is asked for his coat, by anybody who accidentally happens to come his way – and merely because he happens to come his way. Mysticism is a unique escape from this world in the form of an objectless devotion to anybody, not for the man’s sake but purely for devotion’s sake, or in Baudelaire’s words, for the sake of the ‘soul’s sacred prostitution’. (IR: 333; see also ES: 589; and IEEWR: 291) The motivating drive here is not personal brotherly love and the maintenance of the great problem of suffering but the salvation of the mystic. Mystic brotherly love involves, according to Weber, a search for individual salvation in the emotional state of love for love’s sake. All people are treated equally as merely a means towards this end. The logical consistency of mystic brotherliness lies in the fact that the world is so thoroughly denied that there cannot be any attachment to particular suffering so that each person is only regarded as an ‘anybody’ and benevolence dispensed without individualised or personalised love. For this reason, from the viewpoint of an ethic of brotherliness that maintains some sense of the personal

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 45 and the importance of the other and their suffering, it will be judged as essentially selfish.16 Further, such consistent withdrawal from all worldly attachments allows mysticism an obvious way of responding to the dominant spheres of the social world without tension, or compromise (IR: 333, 336; ES: 594). So that, in sum, the most consistent mystic forms of brotherliness are universal, world-denying and uncompromised, but impersonal and without tension with the economic and political realms. Organic brotherliness

The third major historical expression of brotherliness that Weber discusses is a form of organic social ethics, which is universal, personal and full of compromises and tensions with the world. Unlike the consistent acosmic direction of mystical love, this organic, less rationalised brotherly ethic is cosmic in orientation: Organic social ethics, where religiously sub-structured, stands on the soil of ‘brotherliness’, but, in contrast to mystic and acosmic love, is dominated by a cosmic, rational demand for brotherliness. Its point of departure is the experience of the inequality of religious charisma. The very fact that the holy should be accessible only to some and not to all is unbearable to organic social ethics. (IR: 338, emphasis added) Though he makes mention of the Lutheran vocational life, we will concentrate on Weber’s sustained discussion of the medieval, hierarchical ‘organic social ethic’ associated with Aquinas (IR: 338–9; ES: 597–601).17 Within this perspective, a conservative, God-ordained social world is imagined and instantiated wherein an order of Catholic vocational life is set out on the acceptance of the social inequality between humans, but not the inequality of suffering. Such an order holds reality to be relatively rational despite its wickedness, since there are at least traces of the divine plan in the world. Herein lies its cosmic, that is, world-affirming, orientation (IR: 338–9). Brotherliness exists within the socially unequal order of the world and can be understood as universal in a double-sense: love should be extended to all sufferers equally – as brothers; and all should follow this ethic of brotherly love. The possibility of this organic ethic rested on a certain period in the rationalisation of the Western economic and political spheres. In the medieval stage of Western social development, these value-spheres were not in the state of impersonality that they were to acquire in modernity. Weber therefore believes they were able to maintain a personal dimension to brotherliness: The medieval and Lutheran traditionalistic ethics of vocation actually rested on a general presupposition, one that is increasingly rare, which both share with the Confucian ethic: that power relationships in both the economic and political spheres have a purely personal character . . . these relationships

46 The Weberian perspective of domination had a character to which one may apply ethical requirements in the same way that one applies them to every other purely personal relationship. (ES: 600)18 However, because the personal, universal relations in which caritas could be cultivated were part of vocational life, this period of the Christian Church entered into ‘compromises and relativities’ with the worldly spheres (IR: 338). Such a cosmic orientation, such a compromising integration with the economy, must be judged harshly ‘as an accommodation to the privileged strata of this world’ from the viewpoint of ‘the radical mystical ethic of religious brotherliness’ (IR: 338). The tension with this manifestation of brotherliness and the world is acute. All these points – cosmic/acosmic, exclusive/universal, personal/impersonal, the tension with the world – are brought out in the following quotation where the contrasts between the cosmic brotherliness of organic ethics and exclusionary Puritanism, on the one hand, and acosmic mystical brotherliness, on the other, are made explicit: The organic pragmatism of salvation must consider the redemptory aristocracy of inner-worldly asceticism [as seen in Protestantism], with its rational depersonalisation of life orders, as the hardest form of lovelessness and lack of brotherliness. It must consider the redemptory pragmatism of mysticism as a sublimated and, in truth, unbrotherly indulgence of the mystic’s own charisma. The mystic’s unmethodical and planless acosmism of love is viewed as a mere selfish means in the search for the mystic’s own salvation. Both inner-worldly asceticism and mysticism ultimately condemn the social world to absolute meaninglessness, or at least they hold that God’s aims concerning the social world are utterly incomprehensible. The rationalism of organic doctrines of society cannot stand up under this idea; for it seeks to comprehend the world as an at least relatively rational cosmos in spite of all its wickedness. (IR: 338–9) In sum, Weber seems to argue that the organic social ethics of Medieval Christianity (and Lutheranism) maintained a universal, ethical brotherliness because a historical junction of social and ideational forms could allow the actual, if highly compromised, existence of such an ethic as part of the everyday, tension-filled, vocational world. Universal and tending to the impersonal, it had not yet developed in such a consistent way as to lose the ethical concern for the suffering of the other, nor had it yet been squashed under the weight of the autonomous cogs of the economic and political spheres. Charismatic–communistic brotherliness

A final form of empirical brotherliness mentioned by Weber is that of charismatic communism. Although this is the form of brotherliness closest to the ideal type, it

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 47 is the least discussed by Weber, mainly because it has no real historical significance for the problems of modernity. It is only obliquely referred to in the central arguments in the Intermediary Reflection and so should perhaps be seen as relatively less important than the other forms discussed. In the move from the neighbourhood ethics to the brotherly love of salvation religions, a world-denying brotherhood is commonly found which lives by the ethic of brotherliness in terms of a ‘charismatic communism’ (ES: 1187; also ES: 581, 1119–20). In the quotation given above from the ‘Intermediary Reflection’, Weber terms this early community a ‘communism of loving brethren’ (IR: 330). Although this might be seen in many religions, Weber particularly speaks of groups which came into being in the Middle East during the pre- and early Christian period. In the closing sections of Ancient Judaism,19 he comments on the Essenes, and suggests that although such groups lived with a personal ethic of brotherliness, they were acosmic and in necessary tension with the rest of the world. In the end, they were exclusionary. The Essenes, from the 2nd-century bc, rigorously segregated themselves from the less pure and shunned all economic possession beyond some bare necessities. ‘Correspondingly they pushed the old social commandment of brotherliness to the length of an unworldly love communism of consumption’ (AJ: 407). This ethic of the Essenes can be linked to original Christian practices in terms of a strict pacifism and love of enemies, and ‘the communism of acosmic love’ (AJ: 410). Unlike the Medieval and Lutheran vocational ethics which entered into an ethically flawed relationship with the forces of the economy and politics, these early, founding religious communities cut themselves off from the impure, impersonal structures of society and tried to live out an uncompromising ethic of brotherliness. This separation from the larger society meant that they did not succumb to the social–economic compromises of the cosmic, organic ethic. Further, these social organisations offered another variant of mystical brotherliness in apparently still being able to maintain a personal ethic and were, consequently, not so ‘selfishly’ concerned with salvation as the world-denying flight of more developed mysticism. In relation to the ideal-type, a certain aristocratic exclusivity of the brotherhood is apparent, especially in terms of purity/impurity, despite the fact that this particular pursuit of brotherliness was relatively untainted by economic social reality and did command ‘a love of enemies’ (AJ: 411). These early mystic communities were personal in their ethical relations, acosmic, in clear and uncompromised tension with the world they shunned, but lacked the universality of the ideal-typical brotherly ethic. Summary

All four types can be seen, then, to fall short of the ‘pure’ ethic outlined in Weber’s idea-typical brotherliness, with the Puritan form being the most distant from the ideal-type and the charismatic the closest.

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The Weberian perspective

Table 3.1 Types of brotherliness in Weber’s sociology of religion Type of brotherliness

Universal Personal/ Acosmic/ Tension with Uncompromising ethical worldthe world with the world denying (economic/ political spheres)

Ideal-type Puritan Mystic (e.g. Buddhist) Organic (e.g. Lutheran, Catholic medieval) Charismatic communities (e.g. Essenes)

Yes No Yes Yes

Yes No No Yes

Yes No Yes No

Yes No No Yes

Yes Yes Yes No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Importantly, an understanding of the ideal-type of brotherliness is strengthened when the arguments on these forms of brotherly love in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ are considered. Weber will often compare different forms with each other – the mystic versus the organic, the mystic and the Puritan, and the originating charismatic communities against all the other forms. By adopting these different religious perspectives, Weber is continually pointing to the ‘genuine’ ideal-typical form in the way each of the empirical/historical forms will possess certain elements that can be used to critically judge other exemplifications. When we tease out what these elements are we can build up a picture of the ideal-type of genuine brotherliness. So, the pure mystic is able to criticise the compromises with the world that come with the organic medieval form, and impersonal indifference is judged harshly from the communist and organic perspectives. However, in contrast, it is not the case that the elements of worldly compromise and impersonal love are used as standards of judgement. The fact that there is this selection of positive values that can be extracted from the pattern of empirical brotherliness indicates the presence of the ideal standard for Weber. What also becomes increasingly apparent is the way all the empirical examples must fail this ideal-typical standard in some way. It is an impossible ideal to put into historical practice, so that when one element is emphasised, another aspect is necessarily compromised. From this understanding of the religious forms of brotherliness, we can now turn to consider the place of brotherliness amidst the value-spheres of modernity. Brotherliness and modernity: The value-spheres, guilt and a Weberian sociology of ethics The value-spheres of the economy, politics and science/intellectual reason

The ethic of brotherliness is opposed to all the value-spheres of modernity, but this clash is at its height with the sphere of the economy. The tension between brotherly

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 49 religion and the economic world increases with the development of capitalism. This is because, as we have noted, the capitalist economy is marked by impersonality in an extreme form, in opposition to the personal dimension possible in medieval vocational life. The economic value-sphere in modernity is thus defined by its fated hostility to brotherliness. A rational economy is a functional organisation oriented to money-prices which originate in the interest-struggles of men in the market. Calculation is not possible without estimation in money prices and hence without market struggles. Money is the most abstract and ‘impersonal’ element that exists in human life. The more the world of the modern capitalist economy follows its own immanent laws, the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of brotherliness. The more rational, and thus impersonal, capitalism becomes, the more is this the case. In the past it was possible to regulate ethically the personal relations between master and slave precisely because they were personal relations. But it is not possible to regulate – at least not in the same sense or with the same success – the relations between the shifting holders of mortgages and the shifting debtors of the banks that issue these mortgages: for in this case, no personal bonds of any sort exist. (IR: 331, Weber’s emphasis) This is the strongest, clearest point about this value-sphere in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’: capitalism becomes increasingly ‘less accessible’ to brotherliness as impersonality is strengthened in capitalism’s own development. This economic rationalisation is bound into a complexity of reinforcing aspects, so it is in this sense that Weber emphasises how modern capitalism is founded on the rational, formal calculation of labour, book-keeping, technology, law and administration (AI: 21–6). The success of capitalism, and its ongoing expansion, relies on this process of rationalisation which must increasingly and systematically favour an impersonal worldview. And the link to the originating Calvinist form of brotherliness – the almost complete reversal of the ideal-type – is clear. The political sphere presents a slightly more complex relation to brotherliness than the economic. So, firstly, if the state is by definition the bearer of legitimate, inescapable violence then the political sphere must stand in clear tension with an ethic of brotherly love (IR: 334). This must be the case since, on an obvious level, the state, through violence, is the purveyor of the very suffering that brotherliness seeks to alleviate through personal love. But Weber considers that the necessity of bureaucracy in the modern state occasions an even greater threat to the brotherly ethic. In this second area of tension between politics and brotherliness, impersonality is again the key. The rationalised fulfilment of the economy in capitalism is clearly the greatest source of unethical impersonality. Politics, however, is not far behind. In the political sphere: The bureaucratic state apparatus, and the rational homo politicus integrated into the state, manage affairs, including the punishment of evil, when they

50

The Weberian perspective discharge business in the most ideal sense, according to the rational rules of the state order. In this, the political man acts just like the economic man, in a matter-of-fact manner, ‘without regard to the person’, sine ira et studio, without hate and therefore without love. By virtue of depersonalisation, the bureaucratic state, in important points is less accessible to substantive moralisation than were the patriarchal orders of the past. (IR: 334; also ES: 600–1, 975)

Again, the explicit opposition between the modern political sphere and brotherliness is clearly articulated, with the state here understood in terms of bureaucratic impersonality. The last of the rationalised spheres – science/intellectual reason – has a further loveless, unbrotherly character. The paradox of meaning – the plunge into senselessness – by the Western tradition of reason carries with it the denial of a place for brotherliness within the intellectual sphere in two senses: firstly, in the rational understanding of nature itself; and, secondly, within the social community of scientists. In the ‘Intermediary Reflection’, Weber does not accord ‘impersonality’ to the intellectual sphere, but in other places, he does and there is a strong sense that the natural world itself can be seen as becoming impersonal in its loss of ethical meaning. It is in this sense that we read in The Religion of India about the ‘pure factual rationalism of the West, which practically tries to discover the impersonal laws of the world’ (India: 342: also IEEWR: 281). Yet what does ‘impersonal’ mean here? Again we will have to extend Weber’s explicitly stated arguments to fill out this claim, and it can be discerned that two senses of the impersonal present themselves when the scientific ‘laws of the world’ are considered. Firstly, the loss of the ethical cosmos with the advance of disenchanting science means that nature in this rational guise has become cold and indifferent to suffering. Ethical religiosity has appealed to rational knowledge, which has followed its own autonomous and inner-worldly norms. It has fashioned a cosmos of truths which no longer had anything to do with the systematic postulates of a rational religious ethic; with the result that the world as a cosmos must satisfy the demands of a religious ethic or evince some ‘meaning’. On the contrary, rational knowledge has had to reject this claim in principle. The cosmos of natural causality and the postulated cosmos of ethical, compensatory causality have stood in irreconcilable opposition. (IR: 355) A parallel between the natural order itself and the impersonal social order of capitalism and bureaucracy can thus be drawn. In fact, it is necessarily a stronger kind of impersonality emanating from science in that the laws of nature allow no possibility of some concessional place for the personal/ethical within the vast, unfeeling structure of the universe; whereas, in contrast, the ideal-typical rules of impersonal relations in the economic and political spheres can, exceptionally, be broken and

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 51 allow the ethical/personal a space in the social structure of the world. The laws of nature, then, provide an ethically brutal complement to the economy and the state, so that the whole world – natural and social – takes on the garb of impersonality, to varying degrees. The other point to be made about impersonality in the intellectual sphere is that scientific laws of the world do not merely establish a dominant unethical, indifferent impersonal nature, but they are ideal-typically legitimated by rational values and methods that are also, necessarily, unemotional and without regard to persons. Suffering and brotherliness cannot be part of scientific procedure and discussion – it would be irrational to follow such an ethical concern. Impersonality then must be part of the scientific legitimation of the laws of nature within the intellectual sphere. The second argument in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ about science and brotherliness and, as opposed to the laws of nature and their rational legitimation, concerns the way intellectuals form ‘an unbrotherly aristocracy’. There are two movements in Weber’s argument here. Firstly, he is concerned with a purely intellectual aristocracy of mind; but, secondly, he goes beyond the purely intellectual and links the value-spheres of science and art with his notions of ‘cultural values’ and the Kulturmensch. This association between art and science is, in fact, Weber’s major, explicit argument on the intellectual sphere in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’. In the first part of this argument, the intellectual sphere is, sociologically, marked by an ‘unbrotherly aristocracy’ because of the inevitable intellectual pursuit of the cultural value of mind (IR: 354). Science has created this cosmos of natural causality and has seemed unable to answer with certainty the question of its own ultimate presuppositions. Nevertheless science, in the name of ‘intellectual integrity’, has come forward with the claim of representing the only possible form of a reasoned view of the world. The intellect, like all culture values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy. Worldly man has regarded this possession of culture as the highest good. In addition to the burden of ethical guilt, however, something has adhered to this cultural value which was bound to depreciate it with still greater finality, namely, senselessness – if this cultural value is to be judged in terms of its own standards. (IR: 355) We have already seen how the paradox of meaning in science contains the inability of science to answer the questions of its own value, which it must assume. What is being proclaimed is a monopoly on ‘a reasoned view of the world’ based on intellectual, cultural values, which are regarded ‘as the highest good’, but which are necessarily in opposition to brotherliness because they are ‘independent of all personal ethical qualities of man’. To pursue and exhibit these values of mind is to differentiate oneself from the uncultivated intellect and to promote a hierarchy – an aristocracy – of achievement

52

The Weberian perspective

that is (and here again we must extend Weber’s stated argument), at best, indifferent to suffering and its ethic. Indeed, such an intellectual perspective may well regard the ethical imperatives of brotherliness as a restriction on the attainment of these values. However, of course, from the perspective of the religious ethic of brotherliness, the pursuit of the values of mind – however, high the level of achievement in the intellectual hierarchy – is both senseless and unethical. In the second stage of this argument, beyond a consideration of the intellectual sphere, Weber ties this value of ‘mind’ to the value of ‘taste’, to form the couplet of cultural values. In doing so, he therefore forms an alliance between the intellectual and aesthetic spheres that we have met already when the paradox of the endlessness of cultural values was discussed. This points to the unethical ideal of the cultivated individual or ‘man of culture’ (Kulturmensch) (IR: 356, also SV: 140) who endlessly pursues both these values and so proves: to be bound to the charisma of the mind or of taste. Their cultivation has seemed inevitably to presuppose modes of existence which run counter to the demand for brotherliness. (IR: 354) Within the value-sphere structure model of modernity, Weber argues that the rational values of science/the intellectual (mind) and the irrational values of art (taste) can and do combine, and when they do, it is possible to gain the status of charismatic heights. That is, such cultivation comes from worshipping the dual gods of art and science in the modern polytheism and the resultant Kulturmensch will surely have achieved much in terms of the standards of the modern world. However, Weber reminds us again, to gain a place in this modern aristocracy of culture comes at the price of both senselessness and unbrotherliness – from the perspective of the religious ethic of brotherly love. The aesthetic and erotic value-spheres

The irrational spheres gain meaning as salvation from the dominant forces of rationalisation as we have seen, but at the expense of the ethic of brotherly love: ‘Above all, there is tension between the ethic of religious brotherliness and the spheres of aesthetic and erotic life’ (IR: 341). The aesthetic sphere stands in opposition to brotherliness as it plays its part in the cultural aristocracy of mind and taste, as just noted. However, Weber considers all the ruling values of the sphere of art must necessarily work against the brotherly ethic of suffering. Such is the case when the aesthetic sphere provides a new standard of judgement in modernity with its valorisation of ‘taste’. Aesthetic ‘taste’ is anti-ethical and necessarily opposed by religious brotherliness: With this claim to a redemptory function, art begins to compete directly with salvation religion. Every rational religious ethic must turn against this

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 53 inner-worldly, irrational salvation. For in religion’s eyes, such salvation is a realm of irresponsible indulgence and secret lovelessness. As a matter of fact, the refusal of modern men to assume responsibility for moral judgments tends to transform judgments of moral intent into judgments of taste (‘in poor taste’ instead of ‘reprehensible’). The inaccessibility of appeal from aesthetic judgments excludes discussion . . . In contrast with this ethical attitude, the escape from the necessity of taking a stand on rational, ethical grounds by resorting to aesthetic evaluations may very well be regarded by salvation religion as a very base form of unbrotherliness. (as partially quoted, IR: 342; also ES: 608) A similar exclusion of brotherliness can be witnessed with the value of artistic ‘subjectivist needs’ (as quoted, IR: 342) or ‘unappealable subjectivity’ (ES: 608). Indeed, an ethic like brotherly love is a threat to the very pursuit of the artistic self of creativity and reception, and blocks a ‘return to one’s own nature’ (SV: 142) and ‘experience as such’ (as quoted, SV: 143). Brotherliness is precisely the kind of ‘ethical norm’ that for the ‘creative artist’ will ‘easily appear as a coercion of their genuine creativeness and innermost selves’ (as quoted, IR: 342). In addition to taste and subjectivity, Weber mentions the pursuit of form as part of the separate value structure of the aesthetic. Form is the source of great tension between art and religion, even to the extent of ‘prohibition in devout Jewish and Puritan circles of uninhibited surrender to the distinctive form-producing values of art’ (ES: 610). The specific religious content of the ethic of suffering must be extraneous to the logic of form within the aesthetic sphere: On the part of art, however, the naive relation to the religious ethic of brotherliness can remain unbroken or can be repeatedly restored as long and as often as the conscious interest of the recipient of art is naively attached to the content and not to the form as such. (IR: 341) If form, or style, is valued over content, as is the case in the aesthetic value-sphere, then clearly the actual ethic concerned with suffering in the world must be at least subordinate to this empty, shifting category. Indeed, from the perspective of the aesthetic sphere, such an ethic must serve as an inhibitor to the development of form in the same way it does to creative subjectivity. Lastly, the endless pursuit of originality in modern culture stands in stark opposition to the ideal of brotherly love. This essential demand of art and science must always lead away from the basic ethical demand for a concern with suffering. The aesthetic realm stands against brotherliness in this stark fashion, but what of the sphere of the erotic where love and the personal would seem to be predominant? For Weber, the regained religiosity and naturalness of erotic love does indeed

54 The Weberian perspective ensure that this personal, ecstatic love is regarded as ethical – as goodness itself, in fact: The euphoria of the happy lover is felt to be ‘goodness’; it has the friendly urge to poeticise all the world with happy features or to bewitch all the world in a naive enthusiasm for the diffusion of happiness. (IR: 348) There is an internal belief in a return to a kind of enchanted, natural goodness which stems from the joy of personal love. However, for Weber, the opposite is the case: ‘A principled ethic of religious brotherhood (Brüderlichkeitsethik) is radically and antagonistically opposed to all this’ (IR: 347). Primarily, this is because: From the point of view of any religious ethic of brotherhood [Brüderlichkeitsethik], the erotic relation must remain attached, in a certain sophisticated measure, to brutality. The more sublimated it is, the more brutal. Unavoidably, it is considered to be a relation of conflict. This conflict is not only, or even predominantly, jealousy and the will to possession, excluding third ones. It is far more the most intimate coercion of the soul of the less brutal partner. This coercion exists because it is never noticed by the partners themselves. Pretending to be the most humane devotion [menschlichste Hingabe], it is a sophisticated enjoyment of oneself in the other. (IR: 348) Three points arise here. Firstly, with its jealous exclusion of third parties, this love is utterly exclusive and, consequently, distantly removed from the universal ideal of brotherliness. Secondly, erotic love is concerned with the gratification of the self, not the suffering of the other, from the viewpoint of the brotherly ethic. Despite all its intellectualised self-consciousness, the irrational basis of erotic love is, primarily, just sexual satisfaction. Lastly, even more unethically from the perspective of religious brotherliness, erotic love is, in fact, a cause of suffering in that it involves an element of coercion and even brutality. In the end, although there is the self-belief that this is the most ethical, human love – ‘pretending to be the most humane devotion’ – erotic love is exclusive, selfish and brutal. Indeed, Weber extends this point on exclusivity and selfishness. The talk of love, from the perspective of brotherliness, disguises the fact that the irrational experience of the erotic is for the self and nothing to do with the relation of the other in terms of what can be, and is, communicated between the lovers. This point is clarified when the selfish nature of this love is bluntly stressed by Weber. The most sublimated eroticism is the counter-pole of all religiously oriented brotherliness, in these aspects: it must necessarily be exclusive in its inner core; it must be subjective in the highest imaginable sense; and it must be absolutely incommunicable. (IR: 349)

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 55 Here erotic love, in utter contrast to brotherliness, is understood to be necessarily and primarily concerned with the exclusive subject; in fact, it is ‘subjective in the highest imaginable sense’. Simply, it stands as the opposite to a universal, ethical relation of love of the other person. Finally, for the religious ethic of brotherliness, it is not a personal love at all. Guilt

In this way, all the value-spheres of modernity in their own way are held to be culpable from the perspective of the ethic of brotherliness. But Weber adds another vital factor that has seemingly been consistently ignored in the commentary: guilt. The understanding of our age of value-spheres, as just related, in fact, assumes that the ‘genuine’ ideal-type of brotherliness is a presence in modernity as the ethical contrast to the polytheistic values of the spheres. The Western religious heritage of theodicy, despite its Puritan dissolution as a problem, is sustained beyond its religious formation as a kind of ethical judgement on modernity. One way that Weber indicates this presence is his allusion to the ‘guilt’ of the age. As the values of mind and taste achieve their status in modernity, the religious, ethical heritage is not able to be just surpassed as might be supposed from a modernist, Enlightenment perspective. Rather, to build on earlier quotations where modern values are said to carry this ‘burden of ethical guilt’ (IR: 355), Weber says: Thereupon the ethical rejection of the empirical world could be further intensified. For at this point onto the religious horizon could enter a train of thoughts of far greater significance than were the imperfection and futility of worldly things, because these ideas were fit to indict precisely the ‘cultural values’ which usually rank highest. These values have borne the stigma of a deadly sin, of an unavoidable and specific burden of guilt. They have proved to be bound to the charisma of the mind or of taste. Their cultivation has seemed inevitably to presuppose modes of existence which run counter to the demand for brotherliness and which could only be adapted to this demand by self-deception. The barriers of education and of aesthetic cultivation are the most intimate and the most insuperable of all status differences. Religious guilt could now appear not only as an occasional concomitant, but as an integral part of all culture, of all conduct in a civilised world, and finally, of all structured life in general. And thereby the ultimate values which this world offered have seemed burdened with the greatest guilt. (IR: 354, emphasis added) Yet, as this quotation indicates, it is not just the cultural values of mind and taste that are fated to carry this burden of guilt; in fact, all modern culture and ‘structured life in general’ are subject to this judgement that is maintained from the religious heritage of the West. By revisiting arguments he had already presented in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ on the nature of the value-spheres, Weber briefly captures how

56 The Weberian perspective each of the spheres is subject to such ethical assessment (IR: 355 for all the following quotations): with politics the inherent violence and brutal force of the state signifies the ‘absence of love’; and such ‘absence of love’ is again significant in the ‘routinised economic cosmos’ especially as the economy develops to the ‘rationally highest form of the provision of material goods’; with erotic love, there is the ‘veiled and sublimated brutality’ that is ‘hostile to brotherliness’; and with science there is the ‘irreconcilable opposition’ between the rational laws of natural causality and the cosmos of ethical, compensatory causality’. Only the aesthetic sphere is not directly referenced here, but there is no doubt that this realm of unbrotherly taste is subject to the same ethical critique as those that are listed. Weber is able to sum up the guilt of the age with the statement ‘All forms of activity in the structured world have appeared to be entangled in the same guilt’ (IR: 355). This is part of the fate of our times. Indeed, the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ is itself written from precisely this religious perspective in its account of modernity: brotherliness is assumed as an ideal against which the value-spheres must be judged. So here is another twist to the tale of brotherliness. It will be excluded by all the value-spheres but it is not entirely lost from modernity. The religious determination of the modern world is such that a fragment of brotherliness remains as the ethical judgment of the times. It is diminished in that it cannot take the religious forms of old but it is also thereby purified and finds the modern value-spheres guilty in terms of its own absolute standards. Importantly, Weber has provided us with a sociology of ethics20 at the very centre of his theorisations of modernity and religion. Weber seems to consider that brotherliness is the common, everyday assumption of what ideal goodness is in modernity (similar to the way vocational meaning is part of the modern worldview). That brotherliness has this status can, of course, be questioned but, prima facie, it would indeed seem to be the case that, at least in the modern West, the best individual who can be ideally imagined is one who dedicates themselves to the personal care of the suffering of others, without discrimination. Again, Weber’s sociology of religion argues that this ideal is not universal – it is the fate of the West. Such a position might be confirmed by two additional factors. It is at least arguable that Weber in the Vocation lectures is advocating that the ethic of brotherliness be followed.21 The term ‘brotherliness’ occurs in both lectures: it is plainly, if conditionally, recommended in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (PV: 128); and in ‘Science as a Vocation’, it is warmly accepted as a part of some contemporaneous religious groups and in personal/human relations beyond ‘public life’. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of the mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and human relations. (SV: 155) It makes considerable sense then to claim that Weber is prescribing the brotherly ethic in his famous statement (which follows very soon after his discussion of

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 57 ‘brotherliness’): We will set to work and meet the ‘demands of the day’ in human relations (menschlich) as well as in our vocation (beruflich) (SV: 156). The vocational side of this inclusive expectation is standardly discussed, but the human – menschlich – side almost never. But once placed within his broad sociology of ethics – with brotherliness at the centre – the personal/human might be given some considerable content. The second factor that affirms Weber’s emphasis on the importance of brotherliness as an ethic within modernity is the fact that it was part of his core beliefs, as least according to his wife. Marianne Weber wrote of her husband: He never lost his profound reverence for the gospel of brotherhood [Brüderlichkeit], and he accepted its demands relating to personal life. . . . [But] for him, the God of the Gospels did not have any claim to exclusive dominion over the soul. He had to share them with other ‘gods’, particularly the demands of the fatherland and of scientific truth. (Marianne Weber, 1975: 90)22 Concluding statement This sociology of ethics, centred as it is on the denial of brotherliness by all the value-spheres of meaning, completes the theoretical perspective we will take from Weber. We can now undertake the major task of finding out how far Weber’s theory can help explain the modern phenomena of home, nature and sport. Notes 1 It is explicit in Weber’s discussion of the irrational spheres of the erotic and aesthetic, but we have had to go to other Weber texts to explore further how meaning unfolds within the dominant realms of the economy, politics/law and science. 2 Theodicy is usually cast as the problem of evil, but Weber nearly always puts it in terms of suffering. 3 Radkau (2009) does briefly indicate the importance of brotherliness to Weber but his intellectual biography was not the place to develop the theoretical scope of this concept. 4 The weight of this tradition of interpretation can be witnessed in the following survey of works on Weber. For the favoured intellectual strategy of placing Weber’s texts within some academic debate, either of the time or soon after, see Lassman and Velody (1989), Mommsen and Osterhammel (1987), Schluchter (1996), Turner and Factor (1984), Scaff (1991) and C. Turner (1992); or within a wider, contemporary debate on modernity/ postmodernity, see C. Turner (1992) and Gane (2002). The theorists used in the further overlapping tactic of making sense of Weber’s position through another thinker include: Heidegger (Löwith, 1982; Turner and Factor, 1984); Marx (Löwith, 1982; Sayers, 1990; Turner, 1996; Kemple, 2022); Freud (Bologh, 1990); Foucault (Owen, 1994; Szakolczai, 1998; Kazi, 2017) and, especially, Nietzsche (e.g., Brubaker, 1984; Hennis, 1988; Stauth, 1992; Turner, 1993, 2011; Warren, 1994; Owen, 1994; Szakolczai 1998; and, as crucially important for the theme of meaning: Scaff, 1991; and Gane, 2002). 5 Weber substantially opposes Nietzsche’s famous denunciation of Christian ethics in The Genealogy of Morals as arising from the resentment of an inferior people. A stark contrast between Nietzsche’s philosophy and Weber’s wider sociological concern with brotherliness is made plain.

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6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14

The Weberian perspective In the vast commentary on Weber, even those who recognise Weber’s critique of Nietzsche and the importance of theodicy do not necessarily find a way to the full recognition of brotherliness. Bryan Turner (2011) in his nuanced overview of resentment recognises Weber’s explicit criticism of Nietzsche, but argues for a commonality between Nietzsche and Weber based upon the ‘profoundly ethical character of Weber’s social theory and its underpinning in a set of anthropological assumptions’ (Turner, 2011: 85); however, in this the ethical, anthropological importance of brotherliness in Weber is once again not mentioned. Adair-Totoff writes of the importance of the meaning of theodicy as suffering (Adair-Totoff, 2013 reprinted in 2016; also 2015) but then overlooks the religious ethic that Weber, in the ‘Intermediary Remarks’ at least, expressly and copiously associates with this elemental theological dilemma. Ghosh (2014) is one of the rare commentators who does take up brotherliness but he then limits its importance to the Puritan form as the only one appropriate for impersonal capitalism and modernity. And, based on one early remark by Weber, he also holds that Weber is in fact personally opposed to this ethic as too weak and not fit for modern purposes. The emphasis in Ghosh on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as the source of explanation for the rest of Weber leads to these conclusions. However, as we will see, this argument does not take into account not only important theoretical aspects of brotherliness, especially the concept of ‘guilt’ but also the explicit personal remarks of Weber’s wife that Weber maintained a reverence for the ethic of brotherliness and accepted its importance for his personal life. As often mentioned, Weber did not complete an account of the religion of Islam, with the result that Islamic brotherliness is a notable absence from this typology, despite some hints at something more substantial (e.g., ES: 570, 575, 581, 599, 623ff, 1188 esp.). In his methodological writings, Weber defines the ideal-type as a: ‘conceptual pattern [which] brings together certain relationships and events of historical life into a complex, is like a utopia which has been arrived at by the analytical accentuation of certain elements of reality’ (Method: 90, Weber’s emphasis). There is, of course, an enormous literature concerned with the ideal-type. This extra dimension to the ideal-type has nearly always been ignored by commentators in favour of a narrow methodological reading, despite the fact that, long ago, this additional aspect was stressed by Tenbruck (Tenbruck, 1980: 333). ‘der echten Brüderlichkeitsethik’ (Zw: 549). Brüderlichkeit or, more occasionally, Brüderlichkeitsethik are the terms Weber uses for this ethic of suffering. Gerth and Mills’s usual translation is ‘brotherliness’, but sometimes, they (and other translators) use the term ‘brotherhood’. ‘Brotherhood’ is not as accurate and has other connotations. Weber’s original German term has been included when more clarity is needed. And one’s family. The ethic of brotherliness created a community of believers who had to ‘stand closer to the saviour, the prophet . . . the brother in the faith than to the natural relations and to the matrimonial community’ (IR: 329; also ES: 580). Although not the dominant theme, Weber implies in his analysis of Chinese rationalisation (China: Ch. viii, 233, 236 especially) that the sib and ‘magical garden’ were never broken or challenged by a revolutionary salvation religion based on brotherliness. For this reason, Chinese cultural history was not subject to the same paradoxes of brotherliness as other cultures. This point becomes clarified if the explicit theme of brotherliness in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ is taken into account when The Religion of China is read. Although a certain universalist tendency is still necessarily apparent in any Christian doctrine. Weber also states the Puritan ethic can be reconciled with politics due to its acceptance of state violence (IR, 335–6). It will be assumed that ‘personal’ and ‘human’ (as, e.g., in ‘man to man’/‘person to person’) are basically interchangeable on this point in Weber’s writings. This assumption is supported when the specific quotations used throughout are considered and is further verified in the various eminent translations of his work into English.

Brotherly love and the guilt of modernity 59 15 Jede rein persönliche Beziehung von Mensch zu Mensch, wie immer sie sei, einschließlich der völligsten Versklavung, kann ethisch reglementiert, an sie können ethische Postulate gestellt werden, da ihre Gestaltung von dem individuellen Willen der Beteiligten abhängt, also der Entfaltung karitativer Tugend Raum gibt. (WG: 378–9) 16 These points apply to all mysticism but are particularly reinforced in Weber’s examination of the mystic brotherliness found in Buddhism, where an altruistic ethic of universal compassion is held to be but a stage on the road to enlightenment (see India, 208, 209, 213; ES 268). Buddhism (and Jainism) are compared to Puritanism on this issue: Buddhist caritas is characterised by the same impersonality and matter-of factness as Jainism, and in another manner, also that of Puritanism. The personal certitudo salutis, not the welfare of the neighbour is the issue. (India: 209; see also India: 201–2 on Jainism)

17

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19 20

21 22

Weber is here specifically referring to early forms of Buddhism and acknowledges the difference in later Mahayana Buddhism with its emphasis on the Bodhisattva delaying final salvation so as not to leave any sufferer behind (India: 246ff). Weber does not develop it but such a position would still appear to contain an impersonal compassion. The other organic social ethic, which is given much more substantial scrutiny by Weber than the Western medieval variant, is Hinduism. The karma/caste determination of the theodicy problem does not include an ethic of brotherliness, however, and so Hinduism will not be discussed further here. It should be stressed that the ethical dimension of the personal can include much more than the ethic of brotherliness. This was the case in the patriarchal, patrimonial and feudal relations (ES: 1006, 1013, 1025–6, 1028–31, 1070, 1083, 1105; IR: 331) of the premodern West. Also, under Confucianism social/political personal and ethical relations were exclusively tied to the family, and so did not involve the brotherly ethic which went beyond the ties of the sib (China: 236–7). Before coming to the ethical communities of the Essenes, there is a line of thinking on the forms and limitations of Jewish brotherliness that runs throughout Ancient Judaism (AJ: 64, 67, 114, 126, 165, 255ff, 260, 302–3, 342, 401). Probably the most well-known alternative sociology of ethics was proposed by Bauman in a number of books and articles (e.g. Bauman, 1989: Ch 7; Bauman, 2008: Ch 1 esp.). In brief, the late postmodern and ‘liquid’ Bauman argues against Weber as a model of the solid modernity of the past; and, in his proposed sociology of ethics, he stresses the personal face-to-face nature of the good and relies heavily on the philosophy of Levinas. In Weber’s sociology of ethics – centred around brotherliness and the value-spheres – such philosophising is given the substantial sociological context that is in fact missing in Bauman. Again, for a far more detailed rendition of this argument, see Symonds (2015) or Symonds and Pudsey (2006, 2007). This point has been introduced just to give a biographical confirmation of the theory, even though it stands against the stated position of not relying on factors taken from Weber’s personal life. Also Ghosh’s position on brotherliness (Ghosh, 2014; Ghosh, 2019) might be considered to be in some jeopardy in the face of this overall argument on Weber’s concept of brotherly love (see Note 5 above). Ghosh’s point that Puritan impersonal brotherliness is the only one that accords with capitalism remains sound; however, beyond this one point of agreement, not only does Weber himself appear to hold to this ethical ideal (even if this belief stands in contradiction to other convictions), but the ‘Intermediary Reflection’, far from being ‘limited by the fact that it takes the ethic of the salvation religions as its starting point and not that of the modern West’ (Ghosh, 2019: n36), in fact explicitly deals in the ethical fate of modernity, especially with the notion of ‘guilt’.

Part 2

The additional value-spheres

4

Home

Introduction The importance of home in modern social existence is immense. Every reader, with a moment’s reflection, will be able to reel off the names of multiple cultural works that have home as a central theme. And every reader will have had to engage practically with the ideal appeal of home in their own lives – from childhood memories, to the pursuit of their own material realisation of home, to the perhaps daily journey of ‘coming home’. Most of our lives seem to whirl around a fixed if malleable point of home in some sense. If this importance of home can be acknowledged, it is odd that the theory to account for such a vital condition of modernity is not particularly strong. There are substantial works on ‘home’ that have come from the various academic disciplines1 and some brief philosophical reference points2 are sometimes noted. However, the central appeal of home in modernity is not a topic that seems to easily fit this range of disciplinary settings. We will try to see if the Weberian value-sphere approach can do better. To understand home as a value-sphere at the broadest level is to start to appreciate the tremendous meaning that the space of home can offer. To enter this sphere – to come home – is, ideally,3 to gain access to an internal cosmos that provides a unique sense of salvation from the external order of rationalised senselessness. The general template of how to understand an irrational sphere, that Weber has bequeathed us, would again seem to be applicable. The details, however, are difficult and complex. As a preliminary step, we can consider the position of the value-sphere of home in relation to the other value-spheres. Like art and the erotic, home is an irrational value-sphere that is fundamentally opposed to the dominant rationalised world marked by the spheres of politics/law, science/the academy and the economy.4 To enter the sphere of home is to gain a strong sense of escape from this external order (even if, as with all the spheres, this boundary line does blur at times with commonly noted incursions into the home by, for example, work, and the economy more broadly). However, unlike art and the erotic spheres, home does not seem to be an optional site of experience in modernity but would appear to sit alongside the rationalised spheres as an unavoidable, compulsory place of disenchanted DOI: 10.4324/9781003245148-6

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meaning. All modern subjectivity is fated to be shaped by both the ideal and the specific lived reality of home, as it also must be determined by the dominant spheres against which home reacts. Further, it appears to be the case that even though home is an irrational sphere and so formed as a kind of salvation from the rationalised world, it is also itself a sphere whose routines and internal traditions can themselves be regarded as a kind of ‘living death’ from which the other spheres can provide salvation. In brief, the place of home in the modern disenchanted pantheon is as an irrational sphere formed against the ruling rationalised triumvirate of disenchanted deities, but which also shares two characteristics with these three oppositional ‘gods of the city’: it also must be obeyed at some level and the rituals of its internal order performed; and home, with its own compulsory obligations, might well induce flight to the salvation experiences of the other spheres. Before building on this broad depiction by investigating the values that form the internal cosmos of home, some remarks are needed to differentiate this concept of home from some other more favoured areas of sociological inquiry. Some conceptual demarcations Four points can be made to help clear the ground for the theory to come. Firstly, although the notion of ‘home’ overlaps with the concepts of the ‘private’ and the hugely studied ‘family’, there are plain differences. The private/public distinction does capture part of the sense of how the internal order of home is necessarily cast against the external rationalised social world, but is a too simple binary divide compared to the possibilities of the value-sphere pantheon, and it lacks the emotional charge that ‘home’ can engender. As for ‘family’, the way it is a determining value in almost all homes will be discussed below but, at one level, the ‘family’ is not a necessary condition of the ‘home’ – many make a home alone, or only with pets. Secondly, beyond the ideal interests of meaning with which this argument is concerned, the importance of home, more obviously, has also to be recognised in its ability to meet material interests. That is, ‘home’ is primarily the provider of shelter, food and rest. Third, the ‘home’ in discussion here does have an abstract quality and will not take into account the vast differences that arise from class and culture. We will be trying to pin down a common quality across modernity, and this certainly leaves the argument open to the potential criticism of leaving behind crucial qualities that arise only in homes within more specific class/cultural settings. Fourthly, to consider home as a value-sphere is, in part, to see the social world through the conceptual lens of space – a fairly common sociological perspective from the 1990s but which has somewhat fallen out of favour of late. Simply, the idea of the modern subject moving between the value-spheres usually has a strong spatial dimension: the aesthetic sphere involves entering the physical space of art galleries; the economic demands the workers’ presence in a variety of designated spaces of labour; and, most clearly, to enter the value-sphere of home is, almost always, to come through an actual door into a material space that marks off the

Home 65 outside world.5 This sense of space is actually an unsurprising consequence of disenchantment: the meaningful cosmic whole of the past – the divinely ordered space of the entire sweep of the cosmos – has been taken apart by the forces of disenchantment, and what is left are the shattered, fragmentary spaces of meaning contained within the value-spheres. The internal cosmos of home Home, perhaps more than anywhere else in modernity, enables the self to feel that it has a personally assigned place within a greater, beneficent, ordered whole. The ancient, enchanted cosmos where all humanity could find such a place has, remarkably, been maintained into modernity but is now reduced to the tiny space of the individualised, disenchanted home; and within each of these separate dwellings, the internal meaning available can be pursued by, at most, only a very few. How does this inner cosmos of home work? As usual with the value-sphere account, this irrational sphere must be contrasted with the rationalised spheres that it defiantly shuts out. Although there are breaches and compromises,6 the economy, science/the academy and politics/law (as well as the aesthetic in some cases) must, in the end, be arenas which are left behind once the refuge of home is entered. A different order of values comes into play. One way into understanding this oppositional structure of meaning is through an augmentation of Weber’s views on the personal and tradition. The personal meaning of home

Two senses of the personal come into play. First is the ethical sense of the personal that Weber stresses is largely absent within the impersonal rationalised spheres, as we have seen. The capitalist economy is the most brutal case, but the impersonal demands of politics/the law lie close behind. In contrast, to enter the home is, literally, to shut out this obligatory immorality and enter a moral order where direct person-to-person relationships are possible. Love between family members is the most obvious exhibition of the personal here, but when friends and strangers enter the home each one can be treated with unmediated ethical concern of some kind.7 However, such love and care is not, of course, another example of the ethic of brotherliness – the universal demand for all to be treated as brothers must be ignored by the ethic of home. It is only the love of the particular family member (or friend) that counts; it is the specified love of my brother or sister or mother or friend, as against anyone else, which limits the ethical reach of home.8 If home fails the test of the brotherly ideal (in keeping with every other value-sphere of modernity), nevertheless the personal quality at work ensures that the specific inner cosmos of home has an inherent quality of love and beneficence (even when practical realities betray this ideal). Secondly, each home is marked by an individualised, personal choice and ordering of its internal objects. Things, both displayed and hidden, are arranged as the person or persons who call this space ‘home’ see fit. Certainly

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this ordering might well be done in terms of efficiency, or as an adoption of prevailing commercial styles, or for the benefit of external guests who enter the home; but it also represents the construction of inner cosmos of meaning. At least in part, the personalised internal arrangement of the home is the externalisation of the self and constitutes an important instance of the subject realising itself objectively within an irrational value-sphere of modernity. Importantly, unlike the case of art, this creation of a material expression of the self is not understood as tapping into the ‘authentic’ inward self and a proof, therefore, of freedom – as we saw with the art object in the realm of aesthetic taste. Rather the personal construction of home, in so far that it does contain meaning, is aimed at achieving a desired place where one can feel ‘at home’. The connotations of this phrase are ones of being at ease in an untroubled space that makes sense, and against the pressures of the pursuit of the values of many of the other value-spheres, including the aesthetic. The contrast at work here might be seen in the way the ordered objects of home largely remain fixed and unchanging, as against the relentless production of the endless new within the spheres of the economy, science/the academy and, especially, art. That is, the making of home stands against that description by Weber, that we have already met, of the ‘continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems’, in which one ‘may become “tired of life” but not “satiated with life”’ (as quoted, SV: 139–40). Or, to put it slightly differently, to be settled in the comforts of being ‘at home’ seems utterly opposed to the journeys of discovery that the modern subject is enjoined to undertake in the name of experience and freedom; indeed, such journeys necessitate the leaving of home, as we will discuss below. How then can we start to explain this evident contrast between, on the one hand, the sphere of home and its attempt to make a personal, fixed order, and, on the other hand, the restless, everchanging creations of modern culture in the spheres beyond home? One way is to once again fall back on Weber’s conceptual framework and consider home as the invocation of a rare case of traditional legitimation in the modern world. Such a move will, eventually, allow us to follow the long formation of the meaning of home back to the ancient origins of the West. The traditional meaning of home

One of the most well-known elements of Weber’s sociology concerns legitimacy or legitimation. That is, on what basis can a particular dominant order maintain its rule as warranted or rightful, or, conversely, on what authority can a challenge to that order be held to be justified? The three kinds of legitimation are: charismatic, legal-rational and traditional. Charismatic legitimation is witnessed in the devotion and submission to a particular individual who is held to possess some kind of extraordinary gifts or powers and is not of prime concern for the current argument. Rational/legal authority resides in the acceptance of a legally established impersonal order and is the form of legitimation that dominates the modern world. Traditional legitimation rests ‘on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions

Home 67 and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them’ (Weber, 1978: 215). Such a traditional outlook, where the past is looked to as the source of authority in some way, is the standard in all pre-modern social orders. Weber stresses that a mixture of legitimation will be seen to be at work within each empirical example but that, nevertheless, an overall shift from traditional to rational-legal is the mark of modernity. And if we are looking for the clearest exemplification of the rational-legal form of legitimation – and the one Weber most famously emphasises – it is to be found in the modern bureaucracy, with all its gathering power. Let us now move on to make more sense of how this account of political/social domination is applicable to the value-sphere of home. If we first consider rationallegal legitimacy, two points are of particular importance: the personal/impersonal relation and disenchanted rationality. Rational-legal legitimation is fundamentally impersonal in a double sense: first, laws and officials are obeyed because of their formalised position and not because of a personal bond – that is, it is the enacted law and the power of the office that are accepted as legitimate and obeyed rather than following the authority of someone that you personally know in some way (like your mother or a friend); and, second, the laws and authorities are obeyed because they are held to apply to all impersonally, as in the notion of formal equality before the law (with its representation in the figure of blind justice). Bureaucracy exhibits both these qualities of impersonality: authority and rank are gained by attainment of formal qualifications and following the rules of the office not because of personal connections; and the administration of bureaucratic regulations applies to all equally and will not favour one claimant over the other because of personal elements. (Of course, this is the ideal-type and will not necessarily be followed in practice, as we all know.) Weber sums it up in the following: submission under legal authority is based upon an impersonal bond to the generally defined and functional ‘duty of office’. (IEEWR: 299, Weber’s emphasis) The rational side of this kind of legitimation is evident in a number of ways, but is most clear when understood in terms of disenchantment. The full extent of scientific disenchantment is assumed and no divine or magical authorities are consulted (again, this is the ideal type and there will be empirical exceptions).9 This flows right through the rationalised spheres where only disenchanted reason of various kinds will be accepted as legitimate. The most immediate example has already been mentioned: the present argument of this very book, as part of the academic realm, can only make the case in terms of a rationality shorn of all support that emanates from, for example, the religious authority of a sacred text. Similarly, arguments in board rooms, courts and parliaments (ideal-typically) are only accepted as legitimate if put in disenchanted terms. However, the further point to be made here is that the most rationalised forms of this legitimation also tend to downplay any irrational, especially emotive aspects; so that bureaucratic procedure is, on these

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grounds, a purer example than, for example, a political speech in which emotional appeals are accepted and, in fact, expected (see, e.g., PV: 95). In contrast to these rational-legal traits, traditional legitimation is based on personal relations that gain their legitimacy from the past; authority arises from tradition. As Weber says: In the case of traditional authority, obedience is owed to the person of the chief who occupies the traditionally sanctioned position of authority and who is (within its sphere) bound by tradition. But here the obligation of obedience is a matter of personal loyalty within the area of accustomed obligations. (ES: 215–6) Such customary personal loyalty is dominant (but not exclusive) in all pre-modern social structures (with charismatic legitimation intermittently taking centre stage for short, sometimes revolutionary, periods). Importantly, traditional forms of legitimation will almost always be tied to an enchanted, divine understanding of the world; in other words, the customary practices must be upheld because they maintain or are sanctioned by some kind of enchanted cosmic order. Obvious examples range from indigenous totemic worldviews, to European feudal monarchies embedded in some variant of the Christian cosmos. How do these contrasting forms of legitimation help us to understand the value-sphere of home? Simply, if the reigning rationalised spheres are themselves dominated by rational-legal legitimation, then the major kind of legitimation in the home is, remarkably, and in high differentiation, one of a much more traditional kind.10 Vitally, those personal relations that are paramount in the home (as discussed above) are sustained through such traditional legitimacy. However, this traditional order of the home is, as part of modernity, disenchanted, despite some deep ties to an originating, enchanted past (as we will see). We can understand this traditional ordering of home in a number of ways, with the common denominator being how they will all, in their own way, orientate the home backwards in time – the past is sought as the ground for the present. Each of the following examples by itself might not be sufficient to make this case, but when all are put together the accumulated evidence should be enough to support the idea that home is that rare place in the modern world where tradition still rules. Firstly, even when a home is freshly made by an individual or individual family, aspects of their former homes are taken into the new domestic realm as ongoing traditions. The amount of such transference of meaning varies enormously of course: in material terms, from living in the same family house, to keeping and displaying objects of personal historical value, to storing the family history in rarely opened boxes; and in less obviously material terms, from the maintenance of ancient religious ceremonies, to birthday parties, to food recipes, to table manners. In other words, to some degree, the home is tied to the past and seeks its rightful place in the world by unavoidably looking backwards; or, to put it slightly differently, the home does not just arise from the old but seeks to preserve, to some degree, what has been as its own.

Home 69 Secondly, the sphere of home creates its own traditions. The special way birthdays or holidays are celebrated might be repeated ritually year after year – very often with the home as the highly circumscribed space of such repetition. The home accumulates great personal meaning through the specific ways these ceremonies are re-enacted; and such repetition is undertaken – is legitimated – only because it is the way it has been done in the past. It is not rational but traditional. Certainly, the first-time enactment of this special way of doing things is, obviously, in fact, new (as with any traditional custom), but in this personal traditional setting, such novelty aims at being fixed and so stands in opposition to the everchanging liquid form of the rest of modern culture. The internal repetitions of home also exist on a far more mundane level. The daily or weekly routines, and the specific way these are undertaken, also help create the value-sphere of home. Often these routines are shaped around the very material layout of the home: how groceries are arranged in the kitchen; who sits where at dinner or watching TV; the way the daily shave or shower is undertaken in the bathroom. Unlike religious customs, these disenchanted rituals of the home can be easily changed, but such a pattern of personal, familiar routine still creates a traditional sense of meaning: an internal, cosmic order, which stands against the rationalised forces beyond the home, is constantly being reinforced by this multitude of repetitions. Of course, sometimes these minor, everyday practices will have been shaped, to some degree, by practical, rational concerns, but over time, they will be done just because this is the way it has always been so. Traditions, however small, have been created.11 Third, cleanliness. Beyond the rational demands of hygiene, the levels of cleanliness that modern homes aspire to suggest that there is more involved than just the provision of a healthy place to live. One determining factor behind this heightened standard of housekeeping is, almost certainly, the external consumer advertising for new technology that is pictured as producing a glossy, impossible model of home cleanliness; but from the Weberian perspective, an explanation, or part of an explanation, once again arises in terms of the how ideal interests of meaning are met. Two aspects might be identified: the routines of housework add to the ritual repetitions that help form the inner cosmos of home; and, more importantly, the internal order is being cleansed of the dirt of the external social order. To develop this second point: the filth of the outside world can be seen as a possible corruption of an internal purity, and the constant cleaning is an attempt to stop the defilement of the ethical space of home. On this basis, the cleaning of the home does not aim at some basic sanitary standard but will try to achieve whatever level of cleanliness is possible. It is a never-ending struggle for the ‘soul’ of the home. This might sound an exaggeration. However, such an account in terms of meaning might help understand the long-standing sociological paradox of the relation between technology and housework: the great, labour-saving advances in housework technology (e.g. dishwashers, washing machines, floor cleaners) have, it has been argued, not resulted in a reduction in the time spent on housework (see Vanek, 1974; Bereano et al., 1985; Bittman et al., 2004; Hester and Srnicek, 2023). Cleaning is not the only kind of labour involved in the

70 The additional value-spheres ‘housework’ data, but this empirical evidence suggests that housework is not just about making the house clean and tidy but is the repeated attempt to make the home as clean and ordered as the time will allow. A shift to the Weberian perspective of meaning offers one way of understanding this behaviour: if the ‘house’ is regarded as the value-sphere of home, in which the preservation of the personal ethical space of love and care against the impersonal, immoral external social order is of primary concern, and cleanliness is taken as an indicator of this internal purity, then housework can be understood as being more about the endless pursuit of meaning than the meeting of a measurable level of hygiene. And, in this way, more sense might be made of the paradox of housework and technology. Notably, then, cleanliness adds another dimension to the traditional make-up of home: it is a repeated duty of preservation of the inner cosmos against external forces that threaten its internal integrity.12 Four, childhood. This ethical space of home can be given more content when the place of childhood is recognised. The so-called ‘invention’ of childhood in modernity gives emphasis, in part, to an innocent, natural goodness which should be allowed expression in protected spaces built on love and trust.13 Such sheltered spaces of play and fantasy might include nature but must include home, at least ideally. If a particular home includes such childhood/s, then the personal and traditional aspects of the inner order are clearly enhanced: with childhood comes personal family bonds of love that create important traditions which must be preserved against external threats to the home. Even if a home does not have children, its inner, personal cosmos will, almost certainly, be partly built on childhood memories (or, at least, idealised versions of these memories) of the individuals who make the home. It might also be added here that pets can also create a similarly ordered ethical space of the personal and traditional. The childhood home is also one of the very rare sites in modernity where a traditional sense of enchantment is allowed to be present. As part of the preservation of the innocence of childhood, utterly anti-rational fantasies and beliefs are encouraged and flourish – from reading fairy-tales, to leaving food out for Santa Claus. Again, the home is not the only possible site for such enchanted experience, but within that fiercely protected inner world, a traditionally enchanted past is most easily made real for the wondering child. However, remarkably, it is not only that an enchanted world can be made within the home but, as the child grows up, it also must be unmade; the rational reality must eventually be imposed and such magical realms disenchanted. A particular history of disenchantment is contained in every childhood. It follows that not only does the memory of enchanted childhood help make up the traditional inner cosmos of the sphere of home, but we are all fated to carry within us our own personal history of disenchantment throughout our lives. Lastly, the value-sphere of home provides a place for death. Simply, a common plea at the end of life is to be allowed to die at home. Family and friends might be important, but if gathered around a hospital bed, where impersonal rationalisation must be a pervasive force, something of great meaning – the home – is absent. How can we explain this link between home and death? A partial answer might be given if we add up what has been said so far.

Home 71 Within the home, each self can become unified with a cosmic order that they, and perhaps those close to them, have, in fact, created. It consists of the basic material structure of the house or apartment, but which is then filled with routines, objects, occasions, childhoods and a vast array of memories. Personal and traditional, this space of home stands opposed to the other spheres of modernity which are marked, in differing degrees, by an impersonal lovelessness and a constant demand for the new. It is in the relatively fixed order of home, then, that you can feel part of a greater ethical whole in which a small cycle of individual existence – from childhood to death – can be played out; and a faint impression of the divine cosmic unities of the past might be recognised as still being present. There is a minimal sense that, to repeat Weber’s depictions of lost cosmic meaning, ‘the world is Godordained, and hence somehow [a] meaningfully and ethically orientated, cosmos’ (as quoted, IR: 350–1) and that death in such circumstances can be understood as a fulfilment of ‘the organic cycle of life’, where one could die ‘old and satiated with life’ (as quoted, SV: 139–40). Or, to put it slightly differently, in the other value-spheres, following Weber, the endlessness of modern culture within a disenchanted universe renders death senseless; but within the traditional, personal sphere of home, to go beyond Weber, a measure of satiation is possible – there is nothing more to be done – and death might be accepted more easily. In this way, within the overall meaninglessness, death can be accorded a tiny, but highly significant, degree of meaning. Salvation

In the Weberian schema, the irrational value-spheres possess a meaning that can be religion-rivalling, although it is always to be remembered that we are still only talking about fragments of meaning that are set within the overall disenchanted senselessness that defines modernity. If art and the erotic can offer a sense of salvation from the ‘death’ of the hyper-rationalised world, what meaning is possible in the value-sphere of home? On one level, the meaning of home is substantially different from the ecstatic pleasures of the romantic lover or the artist. However, in the ordinary, everyday mundanity of the routines of home a sense of salvation from the rationalised spheres can still be appreciated. In fact, from what we have said so far, home offers salvation from three of the elements that make up the meaninglessness of modernity on Weber’s account: in contrast to the vast emptiness of the fully disenchanted universe, an internal cosmos is constructed that gives an objective affirmation of the self in modernity – the tiny space of home still offers a sense of being part of a greater, beneficent whole; the everchanging newness of modern culture – its endlessness – is halted by the relatively fixed, traditional order of the domestic realm; and the meaninglessness of death in modern culture is, however slightly, abated because the traditional order of the cosmos of home allows a possible cycle of existence from childhood to death – akin to the cosmic orders of the past. Beyond these three colours of meaning, there is a fourth that stands out strongly from the rest: the great problem of suffering finds a kind of answer in the home.14

72 The additional value-spheres Simply, the ethical imperatives of suffering are partly met by the value-sphere of home; or, to put it slightly differently, the highly personal ethic that lies at the heart of the home acknowledges suffering as a central fact of existence that has to be faced with care and love. All the other spheres, Weber tells us, are unethical and brutal, especially when impersonality has taken charge. This fact is easily demonstrated when the dominant value in each of the value-spheres beyond home is recalled: money-making in the economic sphere, power in the political, disenchanted reason in the academic/scientific, taste in the aesthetic, and naturalised romantic love in the sphere of the erotic. In this context, to shut the door of the home against this range of competing spheres is to gain salvation from the sins that indelibly mark the rest of the social world. However, as we have seen, the ethic of brotherliness is still not being followed in the home: only a very particular personal love is extended to those who can be counted as members of the home; the rest of humanity is thereby excluded and the universal imperative of brotherliness shut down at the very doorstep of this realm of meaning. On this basis, despite a sense of salvation from the sinful treatment of suffering in the outside world, the sphere of home is still infused with the overall guilt of modernity. Examples – from Dutch painting, and Dickens

Empirical evidence concerning this depiction of home is hard to find in the academic literature, so the reader will need to rely on their own experience to assess whether the argument so far does actually match up with some measure of reality. However, confirmation might be found in literature and painting. The domestic, interior paintings of the 17th-century ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch art, with the most famous examples by Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, provide a vivid representation of the value-sphere of home in an early incarnation. An internal, private space is shown in an ideal form as clean, ordered and peaceful in its domestic routines, such as pouring milk, playing music, reading a letter or lacemaking. A contrast with the contemporaneous paintings of an external world of commerce, seafaring and nature is starkly apparent. Hegel, a perceptive enthusiast of this period of art and ‘its utterly living absorption in the world and its daily life’ (Hegel, 1975: 884), says this: This sensitive and artistically endowed people wishes now in painting too to delight in this existence which is as powerful as just, satisfying, and comfortable; in its pictures it wishes to enjoy once again in every possible situation the neatness of its cities, houses, and furnishings, as well as its domestic peace, its wealth, the respectable dress of wives and children, the brilliance of its civil and political festivals, the boldness of its seamen, the fame of its commerce and the ships that ride the oceans of the world. (Hegel, 1975: 886) This list of topics accords with the developing spheres of modernity; with each area matched with a different ethos. So the ‘neatness of its cities, houses and

Home 73 furnishings’ and ‘the respectable dress of wives and children’ can be compared with the ‘brilliance’, ‘boldness’ ‘fame’ and ‘wealth’ of the commercial, political world. The paintings of the daily life of this era depict this series of separate realms, with the specific qualities of home glowingly revealed. If we accept the standard assessment of this time in Amsterdam as combining the new disenchanted science, political liberty, early commercial capitalism and a recognition of individualised subjectivity – so, modernity in the making – then the concurrent artistic emphasis on the domestic interior is striking. The appeal and importance of this intimate order would appear to find a possible beginning in the 17th century; or, in other words, these paintings of the everyday, internal world of Dutch houses speak directly to us because they are able to capture an ideal version of the value-sphere of home. In literature, the works of Charles Dickens provide some especially powerful portrayals of the ideal of home. Dickens’ style of exaggeration – of standing just outside the real – allows an insightful perspective, and, in both Great Expectations and David Copperfield, we can find an enticing depiction of a particular home that would seem to bear out the Weberian understanding. (It should be admitted here that readers will no doubt know of other examples from literature that can match or outdo these two excerpts from Dickens.) In Great Expectations, the hero, Pip, visits the home of Mr Wemmick, the clerk of Pip’s guardian Mr Jaggers. At first sight, the house is described in this way: Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns. ‘My own doing’, said Wemmick. ‘Looks pretty; don’t it?’ I highly commended it, I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a gothic door almost too small to get in at. ‘That’s a real flagstaff, you see’, said Wemmick, ‘and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up – so – and cut off the communication’. The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and not merely mechanically. ‘At nine o’clock every night, Greenwich time’, said Wemmick, ‘the gun fires’. (Dickens, 1898: 239) Four points can be made about Wemmick’s home. Firstly, a very strong contrast with the outside world is stressed. This can be seen in the idiosyncratic castle design with a miniature moat and drawbridge. It is also evident when Pip sees the very look of Wemmick changing from the person at home to the one who must work as the hard-hearted clerk. As they walk back to the office:

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The additional value-spheres By degrees, Wemmick got dryer and harder as we went along, and his mouth tightened into a post office again. (Dickens, 1898: 243)

Also, Wemmick tells Pip explicitly that: the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the castle behind me, and when I come into the castle, I leave the office behind me. (Dickens, 1898: 241) Secondly, Wemmick’s home is deeply personal in the two senses already discussed: all the design, making and ordering of his home is his alone; and in his home lives his father (‘the Aged’ or ‘aged parent’) who is loved and cared for devotedly – the ethical dimension of the personal is absolutely central. It is worth noting that the father–son relation is the one on display here and not a standard feminine ideal. (We will come back to investigate the complexities of the female association with home.) Thirdly, traditions are created. There is a looking back with the castle design, but a fixed order is made and maintained by constant work and attention. Routine is paramount: Wemmick comes home at a set time, and the cannon is fired every night at nine. It is vital that this last ritual is always completed because of the intense happiness it brings to the ‘aged parent’: he is deaf and the cannon-shot is the only thing he can hear. Lastly, with the aged parent, there is at least the suggestion that this home is the rightful place for his death. Although made by his son, the order of the home is designed around ‘the Aged’ and provides a benevolent cosmos in which a cycle of existence can be followed with nothing more expected. Shut off from the endless, impersonal strivings of modern culture, a satiation is possible and death, as a result, made more bearable. As a final point on Great Expectations, an illuminating contrast can be drawn between this ideal home of Mr Wemmick and the abode of his employer, the lawyer Jaggers. Here all is dark, gloomy, and: There was a bookcase in the room; I saw from the backs of the books, that they were about evidence, criminal law, criminal biography, trials, acts of Parliament, and such things. The furniture was all very solid and good, like his watch-chain. It had an official look, however, and there was nothing merely ornamental to be seen. In a corner was a little table of papers with a shaded lamp: so that he seemed to bring the office home with him in that respect too, and to wheel it out of an evening and fall to work. (Dickens, 1898: 245–6) Note the stress on the absence of anything personal, and the lack of a clear distinction between work and home. In fact, the economic sphere with all its impersonal

Home 75 brutality is not shut out, as was so clearly the case with Wemmick’s ‘castle’, but is allowed to be the dominant presence by Mr Jaggers. Although clearly just a tiny fragment of the whole novel, these portrayals of an ideal home and its opposite in Great Expectations do provide us with some confirmatory material to back up the value-sphere theory of home. And more can be found in David Copperfield. The relevant home in this novel belongs to Betsey Trotwood, the great-aunt of David Copperfield. David flees to this house in Dover in order to escape the horrors inflicted on him by his new stepfather and his sister (the Murdstones), which included being sent to work in a wine-bottling factory and living within the slums of London. By the time his great-aunt finally takes him in, the journey from London had left the young boy dirty, hungry and completely impoverished. A few words need to be said about David’s formidable and idiosyncratic aunt. She vehemently disapproves of marriage and, with no close family of her own, the only other resident of her home is Mr Dick who struggles to cope with the everyday world and was effectively rescued by Aunt Betsey. And she is fixated on trying to keep the donkeys, who are hired out on the beach below, from invading a little piece of green in front of her house. As the first-person narrator of the novel, David Copperfield recalls his first impression of his aunt’s home: The room was as neat as Janet [the maid] or my aunt. As I laid down my pen, a moment since, to think of it, the air from the sea came blowing in again, mixed with the perfume of the flowers; and I saw the old-fashioned furniture brightly rubbed and polished, my aunt’s inviolable chair and table by the round green fan in the bow-window, the drugget-covered carpet, the cat, the kettle-holder, the two canaries, the old china, the punchbowl full of dried rose-leaves, the tall press guarding all sorts of bottles and pots, and, wonderfully out of keeping with the rest, my dusty self upon the sofa, taking note of everything. (Dickens, 1850: 139) A list of points similar to the one concerning Wemmick’s home can be made again here. First, the outside world is clearly differentiated from a fiercely defended interior of home. This can be witnessed in several instances. Most graphically in this quotation the dusty, dirty boy on the sofa is contrasted with the clean ordered front room, and, it transpires, the first thing to be done with the runaway (on Mr Dick’s advice) was to wash him. Further, Aunt Betsey obsessively charges out of the house to keep her lawn clear of the hired donkeys and their handlers, and Mr Dick’s reason, which has been cruelly disparaged on the outside, is respected within – it is his guidance which is sought first and invariably followed. Aunt Betsey makes this last distinction plain when she says of Mr Dick: ‘It’s not a business-like way of speaking, . . . nor a worldly way. I am aware of that’ (Dickens, 1850: 147).

76 The additional value-spheres Second, this internal world again exhibits the double sense of the personal. The order of the objects of the home takes on a complex pattern of the practical and decorative, as the quotation above shows, and is wholly dependent on the personal choices of the aunt. In fact, Dickens brings out the character of Betsey Trotwood through his description of the personal order of her home. Beyond this objective realisation of the person in the home, the ethical side of the personal is also highly stressed. It comes with the welcome and adoption of David, but is most keenly expressed in the fact that this is also the home of Mr Dick. Only in this place with this woman has Mr Dick found care and respect. Importantly the relation between the two is not familial but one of companionship. Thirdly, traditions are made and followed. Routines of cleaning are especially stressed. As David relates it: My aunt, without appearing to take much heed of me, put on a coarse apron with a bib, which she took out of the press; washed up the teacups with her own hands; and, when everything was washed and set in the tray again, and the cloth folded and put on the top of the whole, rang for Janet to remove it. She next swept up the crumbs with a little broom (putting on a pair of gloves first), until there did not appear to be one microscopic speck left on the carpet; next dusted and arranged the room, which was dusted and arranged to a hair’s breadth already. When all these tasks were performed to her satisfaction, she took off the gloves and apron, folded them up, put them in the particular corner of the press from which they had been taken, brought out her work-box to her own table in the open window, and sat down, with the green fan between her and the light, to work. (Dickens, 1850: 144) We can see here how the order of the home is ritually cleaned and maintained in order for it to remain as it is – to be fixed and not changed or challenged. Also Mr Dick has his own routine of work that is followed dutifully. If the Trotwood home (like Mr Wemmick’s) has this ideal, uncorrupted internal cosmos, a counter example to this model of purity (as we saw with the residence of Mr Jaggers) is also to be found in David Copperfield. The home of the benign lawyer Mr Wickfield and his loving daughter Agnes is one that welcomes David and has all the traits of the ideal form – a personal, traditional interior of cleanliness and care is apparent. However, it has not completely shut out the external world and has been corrupted: Mr Wickfield drinks to excess, and on the ground floor is the business office where the evil genius of Uriah Heep is at work carefully undermining the world above. How does this use of Dickens help the argument on the home as a value-sphere? It is not clear how much sociological weight can be given to these literary examples. However, at a minimum, the Weberian perspective on home is provided with a set of particular, detailed descriptions, even if imaginary, that helps clarify and give content to the bare reason of the argument. On top of this, it might be argued that Dickens, with his exaggerated realism, is able to depict all that is so appealing

Home 77 in the home. A kind of ideal-type which can never exist in such a pure state in reality is actually able to be exemplified as fiction. Or, in other words, because Weberian theory can explain how these pivotal parts of such great and enduring novels actually work, then this theory can be regarded as having been confirmed to some degree. And, even though such confirmation is through these idealised, unrealisable examples in a fictional reality, there is something substantial that comes with these works that cannot easily be dismissed. The way that Dickens substantiates our argument can be summarised as follows. Internal versus External. The powerful threats from the outside world must be shut out for the ideal-type of home to be possible. We see this at work most plainly in Wemmick’s castle construction, with moat and drawbridge, but also with Betsey Trotwood’s amusing but obsessive battle against the ever-intruding donkeys. Personal and Traditional. Once the immoral, mainly economic corruptions have been effectively denied, then the personal, traditional order of the inner cosmos of home can be made. ‘Personal’ has the double meaning of home as the unique objectification of a particular individual, and as ethical relations of love and care; ‘traditional’ involves looking to the past, but especially the creation of a fixed order of things to be maintained and routines to be followed. We have seen that these are the very qualities that are stressed by Dickens as characteristic of both the Wemmick and Trotwood homes. Beyond the Family. These examples undo the usual reliance on the concepts of family or on a female notion of care. We are shown that it is not just about the family – Mr Dick is a beloved friend and companion but not related to Aunt Betsey, who is herself fiercely opposed to the standard marriage imperatives of the time; and nor is it only about traditional, female-centred care – it is the son, Mr Wemmick, who looks after his father. Of course, in most homes, family and traditional female determinations are standardly present, but in the inner cosmos of the value-sphere neither necessary nor definitional. The Space of Home. Only within the physical dwelling can this inner world exist. The value-sphere of home, in fact, consists of multitudinous, tiny spaces of personal traditional order that are all different from each other. Fortunately, Dickens has gifted us the homes of Mr Wemmick and Betsey Trotwood as memorable, if unreal representations from this vast realm of individualised differentiation. Salvation. When these points are added together, we can start to appreciate the quality of meaning that can be found in the sphere of home. All the elements of salvation listed above are in evidence. To enter these two fictional homes is to find an internal, traditionally ordered cosmos which affirms the self in a cycle of existence in which death and suffering are morally recognised. Leaving and return The personal and traditional values that constitute the inner cosmos of meaning explain why the sphere of home is both so immensely attractive and so intensely repellent. The fixed order and routines, coupled with the dominant ethic of care

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and love, offer salvation from the impersonal endlessness of the external spheres. But this traditional value structure can so constrict the inner self that the sphere of home can itself be experienced as a kind of living ‘death’. Salvation is to be found, therefore, not only in entering the value-sphere of home but also in escaping this ‘death’ by boredom and selflessness. As all modern subjects must construct some version of the ideal home, so must they all feel the compulsion to leave the home behind in order to experience the other spheres of the modern social order. An Enlightenment concept of freedom is attached to such meaning. All the other spheres – rationalised and irrational – stand in opposition to this valuesphere of tradition. And the leaving of home is standardly understood as a condition of freedom – as a necessary stage in the formation of the modern subject. There are many levels to this oppositional relation between freedom and home. But the very act of leaving, even to go to a joyless, almost meaningless job of enforced labour in the economy, can be regarded as a liberation from the stifling conditions of life at home. Versions of this tale of freedom and salvation are told across the cultural landscape. However, the pull of home is irresistible and the journeys through the other spheres of modernity must end in coming home. This too appears to be constitutive of the modern self. Teary tales of homecoming are at least as frequently narrated as those that celebrate the experience of leaving. In consequence, the sphere of home can be understood as a space of repeated leaving and return – from the departure and then remaking of the family home by the young, to the regular, perhaps daily, exits and re-entries of ordinary homelife. It is here, with home as the focal point, that we can map a great deal of the fated movement of the subject as it restlessly moves between the value-spheres in search of meaning. Home and the origins of disenchantment It is to be hoped that the arguments so far have started to demonstrate the value of regarding home as one of Weber’s value-spheres. However, these same arguments beg some very substantial questions, which a journey back to the classical origins of Western disenchantment can help answer. This shift in direction can be explained when, at the risk of repetition, we gather together some important implications and conclusions from what has so far been discussed. The value-sphere of home has great power. We have seen how it lines up with the rationalised spheres, and at variance with the other irrational spheres, as one of the disenchanted gods of modernity that must be worshipped. Its values have to be repetitively followed. The sphere of home is opposed to all the other value-spheres in terms of fundamental meaning. So, we have seen how home is a space of salvation from every other sphere of meaning in modernity and that every other sphere of meaning in modernity provides salvation from home. This salvation duality lies in the qualitatively different order of values in the home compared to all the other spheres. In brief, in contrast to the rest, the internal cosmos of home is traditional, personal and ethical and offers a place for death.

Home 79 Lastly, we have even speculated that the leaving of home, in effect, represents the subject’s break from the strictures of the historical past and entrance into the freedom and experience of modernity itself. Or, as we have put it already, not to leave home casts doubt on one’s credentials as a fully modern subject. In sum, our argument so far has demonstrated that home has this extraordinary power and these extraordinary qualities. This helps fill out the Weberian perspective, but we have been left with the question of why the home comes to possess these exceptional characteristics. In order to tap into this deeper significance, we will step back and consider the formation of home within the Greek origins of the West. A dangerous and difficult task, but we are aided by some famous philosophical discussions of two foundational tales of classical Greece: Homer’s Odyssey and Sophocles’Antigone. Hegel on Antigone

As a beginning, Sophocles’ famous telling of this myth from the 5th-century bc needs to be recalled. Antigone is one of the four children of Oedipus and Jocasta. Her two brothers, Polyneices and Eteocles, kill each other on a battlefield outside the polis of Thebes. Creon, the king of Thebes, decrees that the body of Polyneices cannot be buried or honoured since he had been fighting against the Thebans and anyone who performs the burial rites was under penalty of death. Antigone defies the city law in the name of the gods, nature and family and is walled up in a cave where she kills herself. The blind soothsayer, Tiresias, predicts doom and condemns Creon. Creon does eventually change his mind, bowing down to the signs of an older divinity, but it is too late: Creon’s son, Antigone’s fiancé, finds the body and kills himself while Creon’s wife, Eurydice, has also committed suicide. In the end, Creon admits his guilt and Antigone’s cause is proclaimed as right. Hegel discusses Antigone in the beginning of his move to Geist (Spirit), in The Phenomenology of Spirit. It is famously difficult to give an account of Geist, but a few remarks are needed. Geist is the great Hegelian shift to history beyond Reason (where Reason can be seen particularly in abstract philosophical solutions, e.g. at its highest level with Kant). History has an essential telos, with philosophy needed as the ultimate self-consciousness of this dialectical progress of history as Spirit. Spirit, proclaims Hegel, is the progress of ‘the living ethical world’ – it is ‘the ethical essence that has an actual existence’ (Hegel, 1977: 265). Its understanding gives the meaning of history; and this meaning is the movement towards the final resolutions of freedom and philosophy. Antigone, as the beginning point of Spirit, illustrates the most basic dialectical contradiction. Hegel describes it as the conflict between the human and divine laws. The human law is of course represented by Creon and the polis; and Antigone represents the divine order, family and nature. These two laws are seen by Hegel to be in balance. The whole is a stable equilibrium of all the parts, and each part is a Spirit at home in the whole, a Spirit which does not seek its satisfaction outside of itself but finds it within itself, because it is itself in this equilibrium with the whole. (Hegel, 1977: 277)

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And each knows the other. On the one side is the state as the realm of the universal, and, for Hegel, of course, the future. It is the site of the gathering subject – of freedom and self-consciousness. This is the place of the human law. On the other side is the sphere of Antigone’s law, the divine, which has its legitimation in the ‘nether’ world – that is, with the gods, but especially with death. For the commands of government have a universal, public meaning open to the light of day; the will of the other law, however, is locked up in the darkness of the nether regions. (Hegel, 1977: 280) It points to existence beyond the human achievements of the city. It is also said to be natural. We can interpret this as indicating the non-polis terrain of nature, where the gods and tradition must still rule. Polyneices’ body lies outside the polis walls, and Antigone has to bring it into its place in enchanted nature by means of the burial rites. Antigone represents the enchanted cosmos which gives death a meaningful place. Thus, by performing the rites, she ‘weds the blood relation to the bosom of the earth’ (Hegel, 1977: 271). Because death and suffering have this meaning Antigone deliberately seeks them, and embraces them, as her destiny. It is her end and her fulfilment. Antigone says: I will bury my brother; and if I die for it, what happiness! . . . There is no punishment can rob me of honourable death. (Sophocles, 1947: 128–9) Antigone’s sphere is also one of the particular, says Hegel. Here Hegel is indicating how the universal law of Creon (which will be developed by Western reason) applies to all citizens of Thebes impersonally, including Antigone. It is this law which is denied by Antigone in the name of her own dead brother, since he is a member of her family and the object of her personal, particular love. Convicted of reverence – I shall be content to lie beside the brother whom I love. We have only a little time to please the living, but all eternity to love the dead. (Sophocles, 1947: 128) Note how the particular of Antigone has a universality itself with the divine order. But it is a universal based on the family and which can include the particularity of personal love as opposed to the necessary impersonality of polis reason (it should be stressed that it is this realm of Antigone that Hegel wants to deny but, in the end, regain for himself, see below). An easy extension of this element in Hegel can see Antigone’s seeking of suffering and death in the name of family and love as exhibiting an ethic of self-sacrifice. Duty to her brother, not herself, is paramount.

Home 81 The balance between these known, interdependent but contradictory laws will necessarily be upset, says Hegel, because of the deed. What there appears as order and harmony of its two essences, each of which authenticates and completes the other, becomes through the deed a transition of opposites in which each proves itself to be the nonreality, rather than the authentication, of itself and the other. (Hegel, 1977: 279) That is, with Polyneices’ death, the balanced, complementing spheres cannot be maintained. They are doomed to crack. Knowingly flouting the human law, Antigone performs the funeral rites and welcomes death. At this stage of Spirit – the very beginning, with the state so young – Creon must finally accept the law of the enchanted cosmos. The state is overwhelmed by the ethical space of the divine order. Creon is the nascent subject of the West. He acts and reasons within the mundane polis and is not trying to avoid any preordained fate (as with Oedipus) or escape ancient magical beings (as did Odysseus). His deeds and reasons are his alone, possible only within the polis limits, with no divine intervention or advice. He alone bears responsibility for the terrible outcome when he admits his error and goes back to the divine law. But in this, he reveals his subjectivity in being able to change, even if it is in denying the realm of the possible subject. Antigone, by contrast, is all constancy and filled by outside forces. She is at one with a natural, enchanted order which is made meaningful through the inclusion of the realm beyond human life.15 For Hegel, the state as the sphere of free subjectivity will triumph and he thinks the household Gods will be brought into its determination. Human law in its universal existence . . . is, moves and maintains itself by consuming and absorbing into itself the separatism of the Penates, or the separation into independent families presided over by womankind. (Hegel, 1977: 287–8) There will be a final resolution, not in Antigone’s favour, but in the end of Spirit’s development, with Creon. The state itself will come to be considered as God-given by Hegel. It is the telos of history that Antigone’s sphere will come to the free subject, as part of the state. At least, this is the movement which Hegel sets up as the absolute end of history. However, Hegel has to admit that the family, women and their particularity are always a concern even at the end of the state’s historical triumph.16 Womankind – the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community – changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the Family. (Hegel, 1977: 288)

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So even on his own philosophical terrain, Hegel cannot make the final absolutist achievement work. Given this serious admission by Hegel himself, and the standard necessary rejection of any idea of some great final, idealist totality, it is arguable that the dialectic of Antigone is still with us. The state is very much more developed, of course, and its current leaders will certainly not bow down to some itinerant soothsayer. Also, the other side is no longer the divine law of the family – the enchanted realm has been lost in the state/reason’s vast development; the gains of the subject, of the state and freedom, are at the cost of the ancient whole as a place for meaningful death. But there is still a sphere of love, duty and self-sacrifice; and death and suffering maintain a trace of meaning here. It is the space of the particular still, but without the universal provided by the gods of the underworld. Hegel regards this ineradicable legacy from the past as ‘womankind’, but we, on the other hand, have learned to call this small space – a remnant of Antigone’s enchanted sphere – ‘home’. (We shall return to confront the female determinations of home, with a special mention of Hegel.) Let us now translate this Hegelian schema into Weberian terminology. The balance of the two laws – the human and divine for Hegel – has been reversed by the long history of Western disenchantment. The rationalised spheres of politics/the law and science are now dominant and the great divine order of Antigone reduced to the value-sphere of home. But, crucially, as Hegel emphasised in his own terms, although the home is now disenchanted and stripped of most of its power and meaning, it cannot be finally engulfed and obliterated by the forces of rationalisation – it has a necessary presence in disenchanted modernity. Further, not only have these two competing laws proved to be ‘everlasting’, but both have to be obeyed, even if the balance of power has shifted to such a degree that the rationalised forces that include the bureaucratic state hold at least as much power as did the ancient gods of Antigone’s cosmos. From this interpretation of Antigone, we can more keenly discern the stark difference between these two laws in terms of the deeply traditional home as opposed to the non-traditional legitimations of the other spheres. The very values that make up the sphere of home do appear to take up an Antigonean lineage. In fact, we can list the common defining qualities of Antigone’s cosmos and the sphere of home. Both are: personal; ethical; stably ordered; offer an external objective affirmation of the self; and provide a meaningful place for death – even if the amount of such meaning ends up being radically and qualitatively reduced. Vitally these traditionally set values are directly ranged against the legitimations of the rational state – then and now. And if home can be regarded as the much reduced heir of the great cosmos of Antigone in this regard, then the polis of Creon can be seen as the tiny point of departure for the commanding, modern structures of law, politics and reason. In this sense, Creon’s ‘human’ law can be put in Weberian terms as reliant on a disenchanted, rational-legal mode of legitimation, as against the traditional legitimation of the ancient gods so fiercely upheld by Antigone. Of course, Creon’s kingship relies on a traditional order of succession, as he acknowledges (Sophocles, 1947: 131); and

Home 83 he makes some obligatory references to the gods (Sophocles, 1947: 131, 134). However, the substance of his defence of his actions, especially to Haemon, concerns: the impersonal application of polis law (Sophocles, 1947: 139, 144); the need for law to be followed to avoid anarchy and external destruction (Sophocles, 1947: 131, 144); how a good leader does not to bow to popular opinion (Sophocles, 1947: 146); and how other views and actions are likely to be corrupted by money (Sophocles, 1947: 134). There are no references to enchanted traditions, and a rational-legal legitimation, if not exclusively employed, is paramount. More starkly, Creon initially rejects the advice of Tiresias, who as a soothsayer was directly reliant on enchanted omens and was famous for the accurate guidance that Creon had, in fact, previously adopted. Again Creon uses the prosaic claim that Tiresias was in it for the money (Sophocles, 1947: 153–4) – traditional enchantment is thus most clearly opposed. Here in Antigone, then, we are witness to the interdependent origins of both disenchantment and the rational-legal legitimation of the state. Two final lessons arise from Antigone and its utilisation by Hegel. First, these two, unavoidable laws cannot be maintained in some sort of harmonious balance. And when we realise what is at stake in these different realms, we can more fully appreciate why the constant, present-day attempts to ‘balance’ work (or some other pursuits of the subject) and home so often, perhaps always, end in failure. But, second, despite this repetition of failure, we have no choice but to try, once again, to reconcile these conflicting forces of legitimation and meaning. If, with Antigone, the formation of the values of home and its oppositional spheres can be witnessed within the Greek origins of Western disenchantment, there is still more to be gained from this return to the classical worldview. Adorno on the Odyssey

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno17 adopts a clearly Weberian concept of disenchantment when the Greek myths are under scrutiny; and he also, remarkably if briefly, ties these classical origins of disenchantment to the final development of ‘home’ in modernity. His arguments here are thus closely aligned with ours. The difference lies chiefly in the fact that Adorno does not adopt, or even show that he is aware of, the theory of the value-spheres; so that it is on this point that we must add to his argument.18 For Adorno, Western subjectivity is formed through disenchantment. This process can first be discerned in Homer. In the Iliad: But no work bears more eloquent witness to the intertwinement of enlightenment and myth than that of Homer, the basic text of European civilisation. In Homer, epic and myth, form and subject matter do not simply diverge; they conduct an argument. The aesthetic dualism of the work gives evidence of the historical-philosophical tendency. . . . Myths are precipitated in the different strata of Homer’s subject matter; but at the same rime the reporting of them, the unity imposed on the diffuse legends, traces the path of the

84 The additional value-spheres subject’s flight from the mythical powers. This is already true, in a profound sense, of the Iliad. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 37; emphasis added) But, more graphically in the Odyssey: The same development is still more vividly present in the Odyssey, since it is closer in form to the picaresque novel. The contrast between the single surviving ego and the multiplicity of fate reflects the antithesis between enlightenment and myth. The hero’s peregrinations from Troy to Ithaca trace the path of the self through myths, a self infinitely weak in comparison to the force of nature and still in the process of formation as self-consciousness. The primeval world is secularised as the space he measures out; the old demons populate only the distant margins and islands of the civilised Mediterranean, retreating into the forms of rock and cave from which they had originally sprung in the face of primal dread. The adventures bestow names on each of these places, and the names give rise to a rational overview of space. The shipwrecked, tremulous navigator anticipates the work of the compass. His powerlessness, leaving no part of the sea unknown, aims to undermine the ruling powers. But, in the eyes of the man who has thus come of age, the plain untruth of the myths, the fact that sea and earth are not actually populated by demons but are a magic delusion propagated by traditional popular religion, becomes something merely ‘aberrant’ in contrast to his unambiguous purpose of self-preservation, of returning to his homeland [Heimat] and fixed property. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 38; emphasis added) In the Homeric tales, there are only the first hints of the subjectivity to come; the self at this first stage is ‘infinitely weak in comparison to the force of nature and still in the process of formation as self-consciousness’. The key to its formation lies in leaving the primeval world – a ‘flight from mythic powers’ – which is achieved through the ‘rational overview of space’ which reveals ‘the plain untruths of the myths’ as ‘magic delusion’. Or, in other words, the subject is formed by using reason to disenchant the ancient, magical cosmos. However, crucially, this is less important than two other factors of the Odyssean journey – self-preservation and the return home. So what Adorno brings together in the Greek origins of the West are: disenchanting reason, the formation of subjectivity, the value of self-preservation and home. We need to make sense of this combination of factors in terms of Weberian meaning, but Adorno shows his more materialistic concern with a stress on the ‘fixed property’ of home or homeland. Here, despite the Weberian turn to disenchantment, the Marxist, economistic side of Critical Theory would seem to be apparent. Adorno, in this treatment of the Odyssey, emphasises the importance of the economic stages that the Odyssey presents, with the fixed property of Ithaca serving as the culmination of this materialist development.

Home 85 The first stage comes with the land of the Lotus-eaters, a place where the ‘bliss of satiety’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 50) indicates a very primitive economy: [T]he stage of gathering the fruits of the earth and the sea, older than agriculture, cattle-rearing, or even hunting – older, in short, than any production. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 50) Then comes the territory of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who compared to the Lotus-eaters . . . represent a later, truly barbaric age, one of hunters and shepherds. For Homer, the definition of barbarism coincides with that of a state in which no systematic agriculture, and therefore no systematic, time-managing organization of work and society, has yet been achieved. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 50) Alongside such economic ‘barbarism’ where ‘systematic agriculture’ is lacking, Adorno also emphasises the ‘stupidity and lawlessness’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 50) of the Cyclops, as opposed to the cunning reason of Odysseus. Within this economic view of Homer’s tale, Odysseus’ fixation on returning home to his property of Ithaca shows him to be a proto-bourgeois ‘entrepreneur’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 48). And the emergent Enlightenment subjectivity and reason of the Odyssey is tied in its foundations to the endpoint of capitalism. However, a less materialistic, more ‘idealist’ view of home is also apparent in Adorno’s interpretation. This is evident in the two following quotations, which open a door to Weber’s theory of meaning. On the Odyssean development of the Western subject, Adorno says: It is a promise of the way home [Heimat]. It is homesickness [Heimweh] that gives rise to the adventures through which subjectivity (whose fundamental history is presented in The Odyssey) escapes the prehistoric world. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979: 78)19 As it ‘escapes the primeval world’, the subject becomes ‘homesick’ and becomes strengthened in its subjectivity through the adventures it experiences in the journey homewards. Adorno goes on: If the fixed order of property implicit in settlement is the source of human alienation, in which all homesickness [Heimweh] and longing spring from a lost primal state, at the same time it is toward settlement and fixed property, on which alone, the concept of home/homeland [Heimat] is based, that all longing and homesickness are directed. Novalis’s definition according to which all philosophy is homesickness20 holds good only if this longing is not dissipated in the phantasm of a lost original state, but home/homeland, and nature itself, are pictured as something that have had first to be wrested from myth. Home/homeland is a state of having escaped. For this reason the

86 The additional value-spheres criticism that the Homeric legends ‘withdraw from the earth’ is a warranty of their truth. They ‘turn to men’.21 (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 60–1; translation amended) We can see how the emphasis here (as it is throughout the discussion on Odysseus) is on settled property and an incipient bourgeois subjectivity; however, the basic theme of disenchantment is always integral to this materialistic account. The vital point is how homesickness cannot be ‘dissipated in the phantasm of a lost original state’, as merely a futile longing for the past; but rather how it comes with the assertion of the free subject against the restrictions of the world of myth – ‘home is the state of having escaped’. Homesickness occurs because the ancient, enchanted realm is left behind; to attain autonomous subjectivity entails escaping a world that will always be sought as ‘home’. Let us develop this idea. If this condition of ‘homesickness’ is an incurable condition of the Western subject, then the materialist or even political sense of ‘home’ appears inadequate. A more ‘idealist’ reading of the Odyssean myth will see the return to ‘home’ not just in terms of economic conditions of ownership or fascist propaganda, but in terms of the fateful loss and attempted recovery of meaning. In this Weberian sense, the yearning to return to the ancient cosmos, which Odysseus starts to disenchant, cannot be cured; the subject seeks a way back but will always be sailing away from this starting point – homewards. Or, in other words, the very acts of disenchantment that enhance the reasoning, self-preserving subject must also serve as the means to recover the lost meaning – myth and Enlightenment are fatefully entwined within Western subjectivity. But how can such meaning be regained when the magical cosmos is being left further and further behind by the journey of the rational, disenchanting self? The Odyssey, on Adorno’s reading, presents an answer: the Odyssean self pursues the only meaning now available – it desperately seeks to go home. This journey’s end cannot, however, regain the past unity; and it will be unsatisfying and frustrating for the newly liberated self. In fact, it will mark the denial of subjectivity (‘I am nothing’ says Creon at the end, when his realm of the ‘human’ law has been renounced in favour of the divine). Such conditions mean that the subject will have to leave home to realise itself. But, of course, the self will again be trying to regain the magical unity lost in the very production of its subjectivity and will fervently seek to return home. With this pattern of leaving and return, Adorno’s diagnosis of incurable homesickness is repeatedly confirmed. The point of this part of Adorno’s ‘excursus’ back to Homer is to reveal the deep forces at work behind the appeal of home/homeland in our current age. These insights are easily translated into the Weberian understanding of home so that, for our purposes, Adorno has helped establish how the value-sphere structure begins in the origins of Western disenchantment. From this analysis, we can further understand the importance and seemingly unshakeable presence of home as such a radically different sphere to all the others. This general picture can be given in more detail. The character of the spheres beyond and against home can be built up with the aid of Adorno’s depiction of

Home 87 Odysseus; and Adorno’s economistic view of the ‘lost primal state’ can be sharply enhanced with the addition of the content of Antigone’s divine realm. First, Odysseus. Within the Ancient Greek worldview, Odysseus was considered the cleverest of all men: it was he who devised the Trojan horse strategy to end the long siege of Troy; and, in the Odyssey, Zeus himself proclaims that he ‘excels all men in wisdom’22 (Homer, 2002: Line 79). However, this cleverness was also selfserving: the famous first line of the Odyssey (according to Fagles) states that he is ‘the man of twists and turns’ (Homer, 2002: line 1); and he was treacherous and vengeful, as witnessed, for example, in his ‘framing’ of Palamedes as a traitor.23 Adorno takes him up in this double sense of rationality and ‘cunning’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 39ff). The disenchantment of the magical forces aligned against Odysseus is achieved by this combination of sheer rational power and trickery. Disenchanting reason is not then entirely innocent in its understanding, a point made more plain with Adorno’s emphasis on Odysseus’ dominant value of ‘selfpreservation’. At all costs, the self must be preserved in its dangerous journey home. Other beings, magical and human, are all to be regarded in terms of achieving this end: enchanted beings are tricked, harmed, and even effaced from the ancient divine order when their cycle of bewitchment is broken24; and Odysseus’ fellow sailors are used in order that he both survive and flourish. In fact, all other human beings . . . appear . . . only in estranged forms, as enemies or allies, but always as instruments, things. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 49) Three episodes illustrate this instrumental relationship between Odysseus and his men. In the path between Scylla and Charybdis, half the crew are sacrificed; to overcome the Sirens, the ears of the rowers are filled with wax so that Odysseus alone can hear and have his subjectivity enriched; and, in the land of Lotus-eaters, the pleasure of the sailors is ended because, in Adorno’s words: ‘self-preserving reason cannot permit such an idyll’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 49, emphasis added).25 The necessary association of disenchanting reason and self-preservation yields this foundational immorality. And all journeys home – bourgeois or not – demand this equation of reason, self-preservation and the unethical. Further, the rational use of others as instruments for the developing, homesick self results in a radical isolation of the subject. Again Adorno puts it in class terms as an incipient bourgeois economic position, but the general point for our argument is that, in effect, Odysseus is always alone. Not only does he end up on the shores of Ithaca utterly by himself, but he is alone even when he is with his men, or in the embrace of Circe or Calypso. This is so because he must treat these other beings as mere things that can either help or hinder him, and not as persons in their own right. From the very start then, here in Homer, the interests of the Western subject – both material and ideal – can be seen to entail being alone, a condition which Adorno considers has continued into the atomistic individualism of modernity. As Adorno states it: Odysseus’26 ‘total isolation from all other human beings’ portends

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the ‘radical alienation’ and ‘absolute loneliness which at the end of the bourgeois era is becoming overt’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 49). How can these factors help us understand home and the other value-spheres of modernity? Simply, we have learnt from Adorno that the journey away from the magical past and towards home is indeed where the Western subject is formed in terms of reason and experience, but such development is necessarily accompanied by a self-preserving immorality and loneliness. This pattern is repeated by the modern subject whose journey through the rationalised value-spheres, and perhaps the realms of the aesthetic and erotic, is also marked by the instrumental perspective of self-preservation and the ultimate isolation of the self. The pursuit of meaning and freedom in all the spheres that lie outside the inner cosmos of home asserts the subject as the prime value and, it follows, these Odyssean consequences cannot be avoided; in this matter, the Greek origins have revealed our fate. Antigone and Odysseus

It takes but a small extension of Adorno’s ideas (in fact, to include, more explicitly, Weberian ideas on meaning) in order to see this homeward journey of the Western subject as an exhibition of the human and divine laws Hegel describes at the beginning of Spirit. These interpretations of Antigone and The Odyssey add to each other in two ways. First, the unity with enchanted nature which Odysseus must sacrifice as he pursues his subjectivity is the same meaningful order which Antigone can call her own. Odysseus’ reason begins to propel him away from a world of magical beings but this is also the cosmos where the underworld can have a place in the overall scheme of things. That is, the enchanted cosmos that must be left by the Odyssean subject as it journeys home is given wonderful, specific content as the divine order that Antigone dies to uphold. And, as argued, beyond the ‘fixed property’, materialist view of home in Adorno, the value-sphere of home itself can be regarded as not only a pale, but still meaningful reflection of Antigone’s divine realm but also a traditional space that is still starkly opposed to the spheres of rational and subjectivist legitimation. Second, Odysseus can be placed with Creon in representing another side of the human law in an early, contradictory opposition to the divine, at least in terms of Adorno’s interpretation. We saw how Creon can be linked to the future strength of the rationalised spheres of politics and reason, and now Odysseus can be regarded as not just representing disenchanting reason but also the first stirrings of the bourgeois economic order, and the subject’s first irrational experiences of art. For Adorno, an initiation into the aesthetic comes with Odysseus’ overcoming of the Sirens: Odysseus alone can hear the ‘beauty’ of the Sirens’ song as ‘their lure is neutralised as a mere object of contemplation, as art’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 27; also 25). Further, if we consider the way that Odysseus fills himself with various experiences in his long journey home (especially in terms of his erotic encounters with Calypso and Circe), then an early model of modern subjectivity more generally might be seen to be present. Creon and Odysseus when combined

Home 89 in this way provide a rather full picture of what is to come; indeed, it is arguable that both the rationalised spheres and the spheres of the erotic and aesthetic find a foothold in these first tales of Western disenchantment. Lessons from the Greeks?

Sociologists might well be suspicious of this plainly German philosophical stratagem of seeking answers in an assumed classical foundation of the West. However, Hegel and Adorno’s views on Antigone and the Odyssey, once placed under a Weberian perspective, have yielded an explanation for the extraordinary qualities of the value-sphere of home. Simply, ‘home’ has been indelibly inscribed into the West from the start; and it is only by going back to the origins of Western disenchantment that this presence can be recognised. The break from the divine cosmos in terms of disenchanting reason and developing subjectivity can be identified in the great Greek tales, as Hegel and Adorno both show. With the addition of Weber, the incurable condition of ‘homesickness’ which marks the modern self might be explained: it is the attempt to return to the meaning of the past that, once disenchanted, cannot be regained, so the only direction that the subject can take is away from the entirety of the ancient cosmos and towards the miniaturised, internal cosmos of home. This foundational, enduring dialectic of disenchantment arguably demonstrates why the value-sphere of home has such remarkable properties. We can start to understand: its ethical, traditional qualities; how it is one of the value-spheres that must be obeyed; its stark contrast with the other spheres of modernity; and how the subject must leave home in order to realise itself but is then fated to return. Women and home We need to confront the long-term identification of women with the home. Hegel’s depiction of how Antigone fits into the ancient Greek worldview offers us a way into this topic. Hegel makes the fundamental patriarchal error of equating the divine law as female and the human law as male, so that for him, the tragedy of Antigone reveals a basic dialectic of the female and male laws that cannot finally be resolved. As a result, we are confronted with the somewhat infamous ‘everlasting irony’ of ‘womankind’ (as given above). The quotation is worth consideration in full: Human Law in its universal existence is the community, in its activity in general is the manhood of the community, in its real and effective activity is the government. It is, moves, and maintains itself by consuming and absorbing into itself the separatism of the Penates, or the separation into independent families presided over by womankind, and by keeping them dissolved in the fluid continuity of its own nature. But the Family is, at the same time, in general its element, the individual consciousness the basis of its general activity. Since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving

90 The additional value-spheres [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy-womankind in general. Womankind – the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community – changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the Family. Woman in this way turns to ridicule the earnest wisdom of mature age which, indifferent to purely private pleasures and enjoyments, as well as to playing an active part, only thinks of and cares for the universal. (Hegel, 1977: 287–8) Human Law/community/government/manhood works to absorb the ‘Penates’, the family, but thereby creates an ‘internal enemy – womankind in general’. ‘Womankind’ perverts and ridicules the ‘universal end of government’ by making it private and particular – ‘the universal property of the state’ becomes ‘a possession and ornament of the family’. In other words, beyond the ancient Greek worldview, the steadfast personal love and duty against the dictates of the state that Antigone exemplified is still very much with us. The first basic point to be made against Hegel is that, despite the vast weight of empirical, historical evidence that women do make up a private, familial realm which is opposed to the ‘manhood’ of the state, this accumulation of fact does not constitute a necessary divide along gender lines. This is not to deny that there are indeed two separate ‘laws’, but only that these two laws are not definitionally ‘female’ and ‘male’. The most obvious refutation of Hegel’s position here can be made by extending Hegel’s own argument in his philosophy of history on the universal ends of the state and freedom. Simply, this universal aspect of the ‘telos’ of history has been confirmed in a way not anticipated by Hegel: women have won full rights within the political realm, as well as formally equal participation in all areas beyond their traditional position within the social order. And, on the other hand, men have entered into the traditional dominions of women (although the numbers on this side of the divide are commonly acknowledged to be substantially less – a point to be addressed below). In other words, the ‘human’ law is no longer the exclusive male province of Creon and Odysseus; and the ‘divine’ law need not be represented only by female family members like Antigone. Beyond this general point, if Hegel’s account of the divine law is examined in more detail a much fuller picture of what is at stake can be built up. Hegel might be fundamentally flawed in his equation of the divine law as female, but the richness of his account is still rewarding. Initially, Hegel provides an intriguing account of how the primary application of the divine law is to the dead. He pinpoints how there is an ethical duty of the ‘family’ to the dead (note that is not just the fallen in war that is being discussed, but any death) whereby rites must be performed to ensure that the dead individual is more than just a purely physical and vulnerable body. Hegel says it like this:

Home 91 The Family keeps away from the dead this dishonouring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place, and weds the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable individuality. The Family thereby makes him a member of a community which prevails over and holds under control the forces of particular material elements and the lower forms of life, which sought to unloose themselves against him and to destroy him. This last duty thus constitutes the perfect divine law, or the positive ethical action towards the individual. (Hegel, 1977: 271, partially quoted above) This duty of the family as the pivotal act of the divine law is still heavily present in our own culture: the family must still bury the dead, even if now commonly no longer set within a greater enchanted cosmos. So, within our disenchanted world, we may no longer be able to wed ‘the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth’ as Antigone could, but Hegel, rather perceptively, pinpoints the ongoing need to assert an ethical personal bond with the dead in order to at least challenge the inevitability of corporeal decay. So here is one aspect of Antigone’s ethical duty which has persisted. However, in this case, it is all about the family and not directly about home. A second useful consideration derived from Antigone concerns the competing ethical demands of war. As was the case with Antigone and her brother Polyneices, in times of war, there persists a personal, female attachment with brothers, sons and husbands that sits in opposition to the impersonal commands of the state. In this instance, there is then some validity for Hegel’s claim that womankind . . . transforms [the government’s] universal activity into a work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the Family. (As quoted above) Again, the error of Hegel is to think that this conflict is necessarily between males and females. However, his point here is still empirically correct to a large extent simply because the vast number of those who go to war and die in war are still male. Unlike female participation in all the dominant spheres, in this part of the state – in war – the gender balance seems weighted in such a way that the Antigonean legacy is, to a degree, as Hegel tells it. Notably, for our argument, this ethical position against the state at war cannot just be understood in terms of the ‘Family’, and especially its female members – the sphere of home is also important. War has its own powerful meaning,27 but what those who go to war leave behind and what is then so desperately desired is not only family, but home. We can see the strength of this attraction at the very start of the West: Odysseus is returning home from war and his condition of homesickness can be granted this extra layer of meaning. And still today the soldier’s return home – to that internal order of love and care – produces, perhaps, one of the greatest of

92 The additional value-spheres all the possible salvations that are offered across the value-spheres of modernity. Indeed, the image of the soldier returning home is an ongoing staple of modern popular culture. A third dimension of the female relation with home can be best understood in terms of space. With his focus so fixed on the female and male natures of the two laws, Hegel effectively loses contact with the divine space of Antigone’s realm and its disenchanted manifestation in the homes of modernity. That is, ‘womankind’ reduces all of the Antigonean heritage to a simple problem of gender and nothing more. Bearing in mind the long lineage from Antigone, the determination of the space of home in terms of gender exists on at least three different levels. First, there is the site of changes to the position of women in terms of law. Here basic female inequalities in terms of, for example, property rights, financial management, and, especially, physical assault have been changed. The ‘personal is political’ slogan from the 1960s represents this incursion of the law into the home and family. Second, there is the slow but significant shift in the amount of male housework undertaken. Most surveys show a stubborn degree of persistent inequality but a change is demonstrable even if sometimes still at the level of rhetoric rather than actual labour.28 However, there is a third area where the rate of female participation seems to have remained very high. This is to do with the personal care of members of the home – with children but especially with the elderly. Although there is of course no necessary connection between women and such care (the case of Mr Wemmick and his father shows that – at least fictionally), the value structure of the sphere of home does work against a more equal division of this area of home life. Why is this the case? Beyond strong, specific, cultural factors that bind women to such care,29 and also beyond debates on the ties of motherhood and infant care,30 the meaning of home must, at some point, remain resistant to the dominant values of the external rationalised spheres. As we have seen, the unremovable value-sphere of home, in direct opposition to the other spheres, is traditional, personal, ethical and offers a unique space for death. The traditional aspect obviously works against change; the personal/ethical values of care and love stand opposed to the brutal impersonality of calculative reason and rationallegal legitimation; and the self-creation of an ordered realm where a cycle of life and death can be played out is the most graphic of the links that lead back to the Antigonean origins of home. In other words, this traditionally set order that has always been associated with women is perhaps more difficult to alter than other more dynamic parts of modernity (including more dynamic parts of the sphere of home itself); and, to enact these values of home is not only to follow some of the highest ethical imperatives of our time but also to gain a sense of being part of a beneficent whole, however small. Simply, a remarkably high level of meaning in a meaningless world can be achieved. Conversely, not to follow these values in favour of the subjectivist ends of the other spheres, or even to compromise what was for Antigone an absolute duty, is necessarily to act unethically (with the possibility of associated guilt) and

Home 93 break with a rare internal order of objectified meaning. On these grounds, we can perhaps understand at least part of the reason why the degree of female care of others in the home is still so disproportionately high, especially as compared with other areas of home life where law and calculation are applicable and changes have been made. Or, to put it more philosophically, the two laws described by Hegel remain in conflict and, at least in this one sense, the once divine law of Antigone is still sustained by women. Conclusion With this understanding of home, we have taken up Weber’s (at least implied) invitation and tried to add another deity to the pantheon of value-spheres. We have seen how the internal structure of values works; how this sphere of home relates to the other value-spheres; and how the rare personal ethic that is practised in the home still stands opposed to the ideal of brotherly love. We have also started to appreciate how the modern self, from this Weberian perspective, is constituted by movement between the value-spheres. Home must be left and subjectivity sought in the other value-spheres, but then there is the inevitable return home. This repetition is a symptom of the homesickness which afflicts all modern subjects – a condition for which we have no cure. This understanding of the importance of home was partly gained through the consideration of the classical origins of disenchantment. And in this, we also came to appreciate how a lineage of meaning can be traced from the divine cosmos of Antigone to the internal order of the sphere of home. A connection to Antigone in terms of personal, ethical duty, especially to the dead and dying, was, arguably, established; and the association of women and the home was able to be considered in this context. Notes 1 There are examples that might roughly be allocated to the following disciplinary categories: cultural geography (Blunt and Dowling, 2022), histories of architecture and building styles (Rybczynski, 1986; Flanders, 2014), cultural/ethnographic studies (Chambers, 2020; Hurdley, 2013), sociology (Mallett, 2004; Kasinitz, 2013) and in a more cross-disciplinary mode (Chapman and Hockey, 1999; Cieraad, 1999; Somerville, 1997). 2 Heidegger’s ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (Heidegger, 1977) and Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (Bachelard, 1969: 17 esp.) are standardly mentioned (see, e.g., Blunt and Dowling, 2022: Ch 1; Kennedy, 2011). 3 This is of course not to dispute the fact that the empirical experience of home for many will be far from this ideal-type (see Mallett, 2004: 70ff for contestations of the home as haven ideal). But despite such empirical reality, the ideal-type of ‘home’ has a powerful sociological presence that deserves theoretical attention. 4 But, it has to be noted again, this is only a relative not absolute difference. 5 The spatial dimension varies across the value-spheres: from the erotic where it is least apparent, to home where it is pre-eminent. 6 Working from home is an obvious case where the boundary of the value-sphere is breached. And some kinds of work even determine the internal spatial order of the home, e.g., with a study used for academic work, or a studio for the artist. However, even with

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The additional value-spheres such specific oppositional spaces, a different set of values will still be paramount in the value-sphere taken as a whole. Of course, this is an ideal-typical depiction and specific examples may well not follow such an account. However, the difference between the overarching ethical possibilities of the personal home and, for example, the impersonal economy might be safely assumed. As noted, strangers and guests should receive personal care within the ethical space of the home; it does not apply just to the family. So there is a certain universalist moral imperative that does accompany entry to the home. However, there is a hierarchy of love – the personal care of the stranger does not match the love of the sister/brother. Also the spatial limits of this personal ethic undermine the universalist aspect: anyone might be welcomed into the home but this ethos does not go beyond the front door into the other spheres; and the welcome might be refused and the door shut against another human, however, in need. See Casanova (1980, 2007) for cases of religiously informed political domination in modernity. Importantly the internal cosmos of the irrational value-sphere of the home maintains its meaningful order through a traditional sense of legitimacy that stands not just against the rational-legal legitimation of the dominant rationalised spheres, but also against the other irrational spheres, where tradition is also fundamentally opposed. The value-sphere of art is the most obvious example: originality is a necessity of the art object. There are links to Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ here that could be explored. In addition, the Weberian notion of the Protestant work ethic, that runs through all capitalist culture, gives a further, if slight, reason why labour time will not be reduced. There is considerable literature on this extending from the late 18th and especially into 19th centuries, when home and childhood formed together. One much cited source from the very beginning is Rousseau’s Emile (from 1762) in which an education is prescribed that would protect the natural, playful goodness of the (male) child against the everpresent danger of corruption from wider, especially urban, society. The theology of the theodicy dilemma is not of course resolved, or even needs to be addressed, in this disenchanted sphere where religion no longer sets the agenda. All that can be said is that home is founded on an ethic devoted to the overcoming of personal pain and sorrow – the problem of suffering is addressed and answered in this way. Steiner (1984) stresses a contrasting interpretation where it is a conflict between two divine orders. But this hardly makes sense of Hegel’s stress on the human law and the whole thrust of the Phenomenology. Note also how the common interpretation of Antigone’s action as an example of individualism against the state, and even as exhibiting some strong sense of subjectivity, works against Hegel’s entire project of unfolding the history of the West as the development of such freedom. Interpretations like these illegitimately import the endpoint back to the beginning, from a Hegelian perspective. Other important, contrasting interpretations of Hegel on Antigone have been expounded by Derrida (1986) and Hyppolite (1974). Note also that Lacan (1992) disagrees with Hegel’s use of Antigone. But the most significant recent contributions have come from a feminist perspective, see Söderbäck (2010). This point is made again in The Philosophy of Right (Hegel, 1967: 114ff). It is commonly assumed that Adorno alone is responsible for these sections of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. As with our treatment of Weber, Adorno’s ideas will be put, as far as possible, in his own words. What Adorno will go on to discuss is the fascist ‘homeland’, as well as bourgeois property ownership. However, the addition of the value-sphere of ‘home’ still makes great sense in the context of the overall argument on disenchantment, as will be discussed.

Home 95 19 Note that for this one section, the earlier translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment has been preferred. The later translation of this section is: It promises a passage to the homeland. It is a yearning for the homeland which sets in motion the adventures by which subjectivity, the prehistory of which is narrated in the Odyssey, escapes the primeval world. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 60)

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21 22 23 24 25

Here Heimat and Heimweh are translated as ‘homeland’ and ‘yearning for the homeland,’ instead, of ‘home’ and ‘homesickness’. This does capture the more political, fascist connotations that Adorno does reference immediately, but such a politicised translation loses the general notion of home and homesickness which the next sections of the text employ, and which the current argument will assume. No bare English translation would seem to be able to meet this problem of meaning. Within this context, the later translation will again be used from now on, but with this extra meaning flagged. This quote from Novalis reads: ‘Philosophy is actually homesickness – the urge to be everywhere at home’ (Novalis’, 1997: 135 ADD; Novalis’ emphasis). This is an undeveloped fragment that stands on its own with no additional comments at all and so is open to different interpretations. We will follow Adorno’s usage and regard homesickness as a condition of modern subjectivity itself. From Hölderlin’s poem ‘Autumn’. It is then immediately added by Zeus that Odysseus also excels ‘in offerings . . . he gives the immortal gods who rule the vaulting skies?’ (Homer, 2002: lines 79–80) – perhaps reinforcing the first point. Palamedes was killed as a traitor after Odysseus planted a letter and money that purportedly came from the Trojans. For more on the importance of Palamedes, see the Defence of Palamedes by the sophist Gorgias. For example, the Sirens seem to lose their power after Odysseus passes them by; and the Sphinx, when her riddle is finally answered by Oedipus at the gates of Thebes, kills herself. Here we should again remember that for Adorno class, relationships are at work. Inequality between these humans is the factor stressed, especially in the account of Odysseus’ treatment of his men – he is, after all, their ruler. However, there is also the underlying theme that it is Western subjectivity itself that is being formed in the sense that the loss and pursuit of the meaning invoked by Homer’s tale is common to all humans – at least this is what we can take from this text once the ‘bourgeois’ narrative is downplayed. Of course, this is not to say that the materialist side is wrong; following basic Weberian principles, all that is being attempted is to balance, once again, the materialist with a more idealist or ‘spiritualistic’ version. As Weber emphasised at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: But it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally possible, but each, if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth. (PE: 183)

26 Adorno aligns Odysseus with Robinson Crusoe in this section. 27 With war, the political sphere, and the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, offer an unambiguous, non-paradoxical meaning to death and suffering. War is a direct rival to religion in this regard because soldiers on the battlefield can experience a meaningful death and do form a brotherly bond in the face of suffering (IR: 335ff). 28 In Australia, a recent national census bears this out. See Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022) for a summary.

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29 This qualification refers specifically to daughters in some migrant cultures, e.g., Middle Eastern groups in Western Sydney, who will participate in all levels of education and jobs in the economic sphere, but would never countenance not devoting themselves to the homecare of their elderly family members. Their brothers’ level of care is, in comparison, spasmodic at best. However, this claim arises only from my own personal experience of teaching these women for nearly 30 years. 30 Especially psychoanalytic positions such as those of Lacan. This is not to dismiss such debates but merely to put them aside for the purposes of the present argument.

5

Nature

Introduction Nature as a value-sphere

Alongside ‘home’, ‘nature’ can be considered a worthy addition to the pantheon of Weberian value-spheres. But which one of the many ‘natures’1 that inhabit the modern worldview fits the value-sphere template? The rather obvious answer is that it is the ‘nature’ of romantic origin which acts as an escape or refuge from the enforced routines of the more prosaic spheres, and where experiences such as serenity, beauty and awe can be expected. This sphere has many levels of engagement: from hiking in the wilderness to walks in the park; from gardening in the backyard to orchid hunting in rainforests; from walking a dog to jungle safari expeditions. And its appeal can be experienced even from a distance, for example, with television nature documentaries, or merely views of nature from a window at home or even from a city office-block. We can list the ways that nature fits into the Weberian model. It possesses both an internally ordered cosmos of values that mark it off from the other spheres of modernity, as well as a dependent, reactive relationship to the dominant rationalised spheres – from the start this sphere of nature was a direct, irrational negation of calculative science, impersonal capitalism, and bureaucratic law and politics. It is also opposed to the other irrational spheres, though in more qualified overlapping ways: the home often has elements of nature within its boundaries (gardens, plants and pets); art and nature were once intertwined but have since separated (as we will see); and the erotic sphere has its own sense of naturalness (as we have seen). This value of nature at work in the erotic sphere is instructive; as Weber narrated, the historical formation of the ‘natural’ element of erotic love within intellectualised, urban cultures so we will be able to trace the formation of the value-sphere of nature amidst the rationalised structures of modernity. Also it should be noted how this sphere, like all the others is one that is repeatedly entered and then exited – it is not the unified totality of the cosmos of old and provides only temporary relief. And, like the irrational sphere of home and unlike art and the erotic, the value-sphere of nature appears to have universal appeal. All would seem DOI: 10.4324/9781003245148-7

98 The additional value-spheres to be so affected by its attractions that the desirability of entering this sphere in some way is simply assumed without question. As Adorno put it (although with some qualification): The song of birds is found beautiful by everyone; no feeling person in whom something of the European tradition survives fails to be moved by the sound of a robin after a rain shower. (Adorno, 2002: 66) Further, not only can every modern subject be expected to enter and appreciate this sphere, but the quality of this experience is remarkably egalitarian. Unlike the barriers of ‘distinction’ that shut out the vast majority from full participation in the aesthetic sphere (as Bourdieu and his followers tirelessly maintain), the fullest, deepest responses to nature would seem to be available to anyone. We will consider in much more detail below how, in its formation, the value-sphere of nature became both compulsory and egalitarian. However, the inevitable qualification must be made that this internal order built up against the rationalised spheres is not only dependent on these very spheres in a negative sense (they provide the content that must be opposed) but is substantially enabled by the rationalised forces that ‘nature’ exists to reject. So even with the extremes of the wilderness, entry is made possible through maps, vehicles to get there, and clothing and equipment to survive; and as the kinds of ‘nature’ become less desolate, the more they depend on the benign curation of rationalised management (e.g. with parks, bushwalks, even beaches). This complex, enabling relation of rationalisation and irrational reaction can result in the unintended defilement of the natural sphere (e.g. with a poorly positioned amenities block, or simply overuse). As we have seen, all the irrational spheres face this constant threat of being undone by the rationalised world without. More broadly, the Weberian logic of meaning – of disenchantment and salvation – can be seen to apply to this newly added value-sphere. The basic model of salvation from the ‘death’ of rationalised routine still seems to be at work even though, as with the other irrational spheres, the degree of salvation experience varies tremendously – from a glimpse of a beautiful tree through a train window, to an ocean swim alone at sunrise. However, the relationship between nature and disenchantment requires more consideration and we will return to this topic at the end of the chapter. The structure of this chapter on nature needs to be outlined. In order to explain the inner cosmos of the value-sphere of nature, we will begin with a consideration of its very early formation, including the ways it separated from the other developing spheres of modernity. The present order of values within the sphere of nature is really only made understandable through such an examination of its origins. But before we can move onto the substance of the chapter and explore in more detail the history and internal order of this sphere, the sociological literature on this area needs to be surveyed.

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The sociology of nature reviewed

There is no detailed sociological examination of the aspects of nature we have conceptualised as constituting a value-sphere. Raymond Williams offers some useful ideas, which we will come to, but within the sociology of nature that came after him there has been nothing substantial. There are a number of reasons for this lacuna. In the 1990s and 2000s, there was a burst of publications on the ‘sociology of nature’ that sought to redress what was commonly regarded as a serious omission within the discipline of sociology as a whole (see Murphy, 1997/2018; Franklin, 2002; Carter and Charles, 2009; Macnaughten and Urry, 1995, 1999; Newton, 2007; Goldman and Schurman, 2000). A recurring reason to explain this gap in the history of sociology was that ‘nature’ was long regarded as simply an inappropriate topic for sociology which of course should study ‘society’; and a basic institutionalised disciplinary division in the academy was the result (see, e.g., Murphy, 1997/2018: Ch 1; Macnaughten and Urry, 1995: 203f). This fervent advocacy for the sociological study of nature was a response to the wave of environmental/ ecological movements and theories that were coming to prominence at that time. The result has been a rise in interest in the sociology of nature over the last decade and a half. However, understandably, the environmental aspects of nature have dominated the research, and there has been very little on the ‘nature’ of our current argument2 beyond a brief acknowledgement that this is one of the many ‘natures’ that exist in modernity (e.g. in Soper, 1995: 213ff; Macnaughten and Urry, 1999: 22; Murphy, 1997/2018: 102) and a seemingly obligatory summary of the historical romantic, rural formation of this experience of nature (e.g. Macnaughten and Urry, 1999: 12ff; Soper, 1995: Ch 7). From a Weberian perspective, this whole saga of the sociology of nature is, at times, perplexing: Weber himself discusses ‘nature’ frequently and in many different ways but has been completely ignored by the major positions in the current academic debates. Although not directly pertinent to our argument, a few brief points can be made. If the history of sociology has been marked by a ‘society’/‘nature’ division, and Weber’s methodological starting points, especially in Economy and Society, can certainly be regarded as one of the sources of such academic borders, it is also the case that many of Weber’s substantial works and concepts do not assume such an elementary partition.3 An obvious cause of this lack of disciplinary narrowness is that Weber comes before the establishment of sociology (as one of the so-called ‘founding fathers’) and held academic positions and wrote major works in the field of economics, and a crossover with economics is obviously apparent in what were to become his foundational sociological writings after 1905. This economic slant perhaps explains the ways that nature was present in, for example, Weber’s sociology of religion. Notably in Ancient Judaism and the Religion of China, geography, climate and natural resources4 are included as determinants of religious belief. Further, in the lecture series General Economic History, despite the obvious ‘economic’ disciplinary emphasis, factors of nature are included in what is a sociological as much as an economic history.

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Foster and Holleman (2012) have provided us with a detailed account of this materialistic side of Weber’s work, but, more importantly, they have also shown how Weber was directly engaged with an ecological view of nature. The famous line on ‘the last ton of fossilized fuel’ from the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is an indication of Weber’s line of thinking in this area. And Weber, in fact, participated in various ecological debates of the time as well as making important comments on environmental issues. Somewhat bewilderingly, Weber has been accorded little recognition in the burgeoning field of the sociology of nature that has focussed on the environment. For Foster and Holleman ‘Weber . . . attained an enigmatic, even paradoxical, status within environmental sociology’ (Foster and Holleman, 2012: 1628). They show how, especially as compared to Marx and Durkheim, he was generally considered to offer nothing of substance or detail. Such neglect of Weber’s actual arguments on ecological issues is apparent even in environmental sociologists who adopted a neo-Weberian perspective (such as Murphy, 1997/2018, 2002). However, beyond the recognition of the importance of nature for sociology in terms of materialist and environmental factors, the most significant way that nature features in Weber’s later sociological work is via the concepts deployed at the centre of our entire argument: disenchantment and salvation. Initially, we have the obvious, overall, dominant view of nature witnessed in natural science and the disenchanted universe. The knowable truth cannot contain any divine, magical forces and, in the academy, all argument must assume that this is the case. But then there are two examples of modern views of nature that stand against the dominant scientific vision. First, as narrated above, is the erotic value of naturalness, in opposition to the naive natural sexuality of the peasant worldview. Weber’s account of the development of this sphere includes the way the peasant view of nature/sex was opposed by an intellectualised culture that created a new erotic naturalism as a key value in the salvation quality of erotic love in modernity (IR: 344ff). And the second case that opposes the reigning view of nature is youth’s broad reaction against calculating science: And today? ‘Science as the way to nature’ would sound like blasphemy to youth. Today, youth proclaims the opposite: redemption from the intellectualism of science in order to return to one’s own nature and therewith to nature in general. (SV: 142; emphasis added)5 Here we find the nature that we will take up as a value-sphere. Two natures are, in fact, on display: the nature of modern academic science that it is to be rejected and the nature of importance to us, which is being advocated as redemption from the blasphemy of the academy. This reactive anti-scientific nature has two dimensions. There is ‘one’s own nature’ – so the authentic inward subject that has its romantic history stretching uninterrupted from at least Rousseau to today. And, as a consequence of this nature of the inner subject, there is ‘nature in general’ which

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is immediately identified by Weber as where the religiously attuned youth of his times could satisfy their craving for experience. Notably, for our argument, this last ‘nature in general’ (with its attendant subjective form) would, as we have seen, also seem to be identified by Weber in this section with ‘romantic irrationalism’ and ‘the spheres of the irrational’ (SV: 143, as quoted above). In other words, although more implied than explicit, an irrational sphere of nature has a discernible and inviting presence in Weber’s arguments on the shifting meanings of nature in modernity. Overall, then, Weber would seem to have had a lot to offer the ‘sociology of nature’. The neglect of this heritage is perhaps understandable given the facts that, firstly, ‘nature’ is an absence within the broad history of sociology up until the 1990s, and, secondly, the overriding concern within recent sociology of nature has been with the environment and not these kinds of ‘nature’.6 But now, beyond what Weber actually wrote about nature, let us try to understand romantic, irrational ‘nature in general’ as a value-sphere. The formation of the value-sphere of nature The wild: the paradox of the separation of humans and nature

Raymond Williams provides us with a considered account of the European origins of an ideal of nature that will come to form its very own value-sphere of modernity (although Williams does not of course use this Weberian term). From 17thcentury Dutch landscapes and the long history of creating ‘pleasing prospects’, where landlords removed any labouring humans to gain ‘unspoilt nature’ (Williams, 1973/2011: 125), there emerges the romantic vision of Wordsworth in the Lake District. Here is to be found nature as principle of creation, of which the creative mind is part, and from which we may learn the truths of our sympathetic nature. (Williams, 1973/2011: 127) Indeed, by the beginning of the 19th century, Wordsworth’s ‘awe of wild places’ had become a conventional view7 (Williams, 1973/2011: 127). This romantic view of nature is of course accompanied by the model of Enlightenment reason built from the laws of science. In Keywords Williams sums it up: Each of these conceptions of Nature was significantly static: a set of laws – the constitution of the world, or an inherent, universal, primary but also recurrent force – evident in the ‘beauties of nature’ and in the ‘hearts of men’, teaching a singular goodness. Each of these concepts, but especially the latter, has retained currency. Indeed one of the most powerful uses of nature, since 1C18,8 has been in this selective sense of goodness and innocence. Nature has meant the ‘countryside’, the ‘unspoiled places’, plants and creatures other than man. The use is especially current in contrasts between town and country: nature is what man has not made, though if he made it long

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enough ago – a hedgerow or a desert – it will usually be included as natural. Nature-lover and nature poetry date from this phase. (Williams, 1976/83: 223) And in Williams’ ‘Ideas of Nature’, the dominant economic use of nature by ‘the improvers’ is stressed as the major point of contrast: Nature in any other sense than that of the improvers indeed fled to the margins: to the remote, the inaccessible, the relatively barren areas. Nature was where industry was not, and then in that real but limited sense had very little to say about the operations on nature that were proceeding elsewhere. Very little to say. But in another sense it had a great deal to say. New feelings for landscape: a new and more particular nature poetry; the green vision of Constable; the green language of Wordsworth and Clare. Thomson in The Seasons, like Cobbett on his rural rides, saw beauty in cultivated land. But as early as Thomson, and then with increasing power in Wordsworth and beyond him, there came the sense of nature as a refuge, a refuge from man; a place of healing, a solace, a retreat. (Williams, 1980: 80) The contrasts build up between: town and country, science and beauty, innocence and corruption, industry and poetry. In the ‘margins’, the nature that is sought is without people – a basic separation of humans and nature takes place. Here is nature idealised as wilderness; and there emerges an extraordinary paradox of the wild: the ideal nature for humanity is one with not only humanity absent but with every trace of humankind removed. The usual narrative of the wild shifts from English romanticism to 19th-century America, where nature increasingly takes on the form of a Weberian value-sphere. The great national parks, enacted by Congress, are perhaps the most obvious indication that the sphere of nature was becoming institutionalised in modernity. Its appeal was now so pervasive that the dominant rationalised spheres – from which the wild, in fact, offered refuge – became the means to enable and secure this realm of irrational subjectivity. And the paradox of the wild was plain: by law, animals were kept in and humans – including both miners and native Americans – kept out, except as temporary visitors in search of the promised balms of the dehumanised ideal of nature. We can even see this ideal captured in the early photographic records which were dedicated to showing a vast landscape where nature is pure because humans are absent (Schama, 1995: 7ff). And the importance of this sphere was famously voiced by Henry David Thoreau who proclaimed that: At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. (Thoreau, 1854/2004: 235)

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Today, the benefits of going to nature constitute an undeniable, universal assumption of the age. As mentioned, the sphere of nature has many levels of engagement but there is a common ideal at work behind every gradation of experience. And this ideal of nature remains substantially the same as it was for Wordsworth – the 1800 invention of the wild ‘has retained currency’ (as Williams put it). However, it is no longer at ‘the margins’. Across the spaces of modernity nature as a value-sphere has been, to vastly different degrees, materially both created and preserved – from indoor plants to national parks. We might even consider the fact of its abundant marketing by capitalism as a kind of proof of its ubiquity. Beyond this enormous material manifestation of the sphere of nature, more fundamentally, in terms of ideal interests, it is simply now a basic ingredient of the sensibility of modernity, and functions as a powerful form of meaning in a meaningless world. Of course, the sphere of nature is not usually, if ever, encountered in its pure ideal form, but even in the briefest, most compromised experience some measure of meaning is possible and so, gratefully pursued. At this stage, the paradox of the wild might be put in terms of the value-sphere theory. People can enter this sphere through a huge variety of entrances that will lead to different levels of meaning, but entrance to the ultimate meaning of the wild is gained only by total submission to the values of this internal cosmos. And this radically entails denying the values of every other sphere of social existence! In many cases, to enter the sphere of nature (such as the sea or a mountain-range) is to literally turn your back on every facet of the social and historical manifestations of humanity. In this ideal form of the sphere of nature, renewal can only take place when all indications of all the other spheres have been removed – or, better, believed to have been removed. In other words, the world must be seen to be scrubbed clean of humanity in order to create this space of salvation for humanity. We will discuss the implications of this internal logic of the sphere of nature below. Subjectivity

The sphere of nature cannot be understood without an appreciation of its entwinement with subjectivity; the two have developed symbiotically since the late 18th century (as indicated above by Weber and Williams). To make sense of the origins of this relationship, we will concentrate on some works by Rousseau and Wordsworth.9 In Rousseau’s famous autobiographical writings, we witness the self-achieving of its still unchallenged position of absolute centrality. One of these writings – the unfinished Reveries of a Solitary Walker (written 1776–8, published 1782) – contains a deal of bitter remonstration against his many enemies but, in the ‘Fifth Walk’, also includes perhaps the first depiction of subjective experience within the value-sphere of nature. Rousseau spent two months on the Île de St Pierre in the middle of the Lac de Bienne. There was only one house on the island and very few people, so Rousseau could spend most of the day alone. Some extended quotations reveal Rousseau’s intense attraction to this place.

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What is initially evident is a stress on wildness, being alone and losing oneself in nature: The shores of the Lac de Bienne are wilder and more romantic than those of Lake Geneva because the rocks and woods are closer to the water’s edge; but they are no less pleasing on the eye. There may be fewer cultivated fields and vineyards and fewer towns and houses, but there is also more natural greenery, there are more meadows and shaded woodland hideaways, and more frequent contrasts and sudden changes in the landscape. Since there are no major roads suitable for carriages on these happy shores, the area is little visited by travellers; but how affecting it is for solitary contemplatives who love to lose themselves altogether in the charms of nature and to meditate in a silence unbroken by any sound other than that of the cry of eagles, occasional birdsong, and the rumbling of streams cascading down the mountains. (Rousseau, 2011: 49) Idleness was pursued and allowed an irrational, pleasure-filled immersion in nature. I would slip away and get in a boat all alone, which I would row out to the middle of the lake when it was calm, and there, stretching out full-length in the boat, my eyes looking up to the sky, I would let myself float and drift slowly wherever the water took me, sometimes for several hours at a time, plunged in a thousand vague but delightful reveries, which, although they did not have any clear or constant subject, I always found a hundred times preferable to all the sweetest things I had enjoyed in what are known as the pleasures of life. (Rousseau, 2011: 52–3) The subject is thereby completed and fulfilled. So much so, in fact, that the self reaches a state that can be likened to God! But it is temporary – this experience of nature cannot last: [S]ufficient, perfect, and full happiness, which leaves in the soul no void needing to be filled. Such is the state in which I often found myself on the Île de St Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether I was lying in my boat as it drifted wherever the water took it, or sitting on the banks of the choppy lake, or elsewhere beside a beautiful river or a stream gurgling over the stones. What does one enjoy in such a situation? Nothing external to the self, nothing but oneself and one’s own existence: as long as this state lasts, one is self-sufficient like God. (Rousseau, 2011: 55–6) So here we have the ideal of the sphere of nature laid out in terms that have now become standard. Vitally, Rousseau thought that not only had no wanderer yet discovered this island but that he was perhaps the first person to experience the world in this manner.

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No traveller, as far as I know, has ever mentioned it. And yet it is very pleasant and wonderfully situated for the happiness of a man who likes to live within defined limits; for, although I am perhaps the only person in the world to whom destiny has decreed that he should live in this way, I cannot believe that I am the only person to have such a natural inclination for it, although I have so far not come across it in anyone else. (Rousseau, 2011: 49) So in the mid-late 18th century, we are faced with the possibility that the state of nature was, in a sense, ‘invented’ by Rousseau. Even given Rousseau’s hyperbolic self-assessments, the fact that he could make such a claim at that time, in contrast to the sheer commonality of such sentiments today, shows us something new was underway that has since passed into ‘natural’, common sense. Where Rousseau could speculate that he was ‘the only person in the world to whom destiny decreed that he should live in this way’ and that he ‘so far had not come across [this natural inclination] in anyone else’, we are faced with the opposite proposition with which we started: it is hard to imagine anyone within the worldview of modernity who has not experienced nature in this way or, at least, does not have the ‘inclination’ to do so. It is easy enough to see this turn to nature in biographical terms as simply a personal reaction to the harshness of the public treatment meted out to Rousseau (and, indeed, in the ‘Fifth Walk’ Rousseau states that he ‘took refuge’ on the island after his house in Môtiers had been stoned; Rousseau, 2011: 50). However, more substantially, there is a path that can be traced through Rousseau’s maze of social theory that leads to the invention of the value-sphere of nature. This path is to be found in the famous 2nd Discourse on Inequality – which has been briefly used already with regard to freedom in the aesthetic sphere. There Rousseau’s argument aims to reveal the overall decline rather than the progress of human history. It begins with an original state of nature before any human society, where humans are solitary, without language, without culture and wholly self-sufficient. Let us conclude then that man in a state of nature, wandering up and down the forests, without industry, without speech, and without home, an equal stranger to war and to all ties, neither standing in need of his fellow-creatures nor having any desire to hurt them, and perhaps even not distinguishing them one from another; let us conclude that, being self-sufficient and subject to so few passions, he could have no feelings or knowledge but such as befitted his situation; that he felt only his actual necessities, and disregarded everything he did not think himself immediately concerned to notice, and that his understanding made no greater progress than his vanity. (Rousseau, 1923: 203) As communities are formed, there is a just or golden mean between the isolated self-sufficiency of the original state of nature and later society.

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Thus, though men had become less patient, and their natural compassion had already suffered some diminution, this period of expansion of the human faculties, keeping a just mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our egoism, must have been the happiest and most stable of epochs. . . . The example of savages, most of whom have been found in this state, seems to prove that men were meant to remain in it, that it is the real youth of the world, and that all subsequent advances have been apparently so many steps towards the perfection of the individual, but in reality towards the decrepitude of the species. (Rousseau, 1923: 214) Hereafter, then, is a tale of descent. Two elements are specifically identified as major factors in the degeneration of humanity. First was the growing dependence on technology. ‘Conveniences’ are invented that lessen ‘both body and mind’, and which soon lose their capacity to promote happiness. For, besides continuing thus to enervate both body and mind, these conveniences lost with use almost all their power to please, and even degenerated into real needs, till the want of them became far more disagreeable than the possession of them had been pleasant. Men would have been unhappy at the loss of them, though the possession did not make them happy. (Rousseau, 1923: 211) And secondly, there was the comparison with others. Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus a value came to be attached to public esteem. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be of most consideration; and this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice. From these first distinctions arose on the one side vanity and contempt and on the other shame and envy: and the fermentation caused by these new leavens ended by producing combinations fatal to innocence and happiness. (Rousseau, 1923: 212–3) The overall decline is attributable to the manifestation of property, with its resultant dependence and inequality. [F]rom the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops. (Rousseau, 1923: 215)

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Hypocrisy and deceit – to appear what you are not – followed: It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things; and from this distinction sprang insolent pomp and cheating trickery, with all the numerous vices that go in their train. (Rousseau, 1923: 218) In the end, if the reader has followed Rousseau’s path ‘from the state of nature to the state of society’, the full extent of human deprivation is presented. Again, a lengthy quotation is needed to reveal the extent of Rousseau’s position. [S]ociety offers to us only an assembly of artificial men and factitious passions, which are the work of all these new relations, and without any real foundation in nature . . . The savage and the civilised man differ so much in the bottom of their hearts and in their inclinations, that what constitutes the supreme happiness of one would reduce the other to despair. The former breathes only peace and liberty; he desires only to live and be free from labour. . . Civilised man, on the other hand, is always moving, sweating, toiling and racking his brains to find still more laborious occupations: he goes on in drudgery to his last moment, and even seeks death to put himself in a position to live, or renounces life to acquire immortality. He pays his court to men in power, whom he hates, and to the wealthy, whom he despises; he stops at nothing to have the honour of serving them; he is not ashamed to value himself on his own meanness and their protection; and, proud of his slavery, . . . In reality, the source of all these differences is, that the savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him. . . [W]e have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is sufficient that I have proved that this is not by any means the original state of man, but that it is merely the spirit of society, and the inequality which society produces, that thus transform and alter all our natural inclinations. (Rousseau, 1923: 237) How do these famous words help our argument? Three factors emerge from the 2nd Discourse: first, all human society and all its material objects (as technology or sources of comparison) are condemned; secondly, there is the remainder of a self – a subject – that possibly persists beyond all this ‘deceitful appearance’ (who ‘lives in the opinion of others’)10; and, thirdly, we are witness to the concept of ‘nature’ or ‘natural’ coming to stand for what was, and what still is, good.11 What then can be done? It is not clear in the 2nd Discourse itself, and there are several options that can be found in different parts of Rousseau’s works. But

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one obvious romantic line runs from the end of the Discourse on Inequality to the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Simply, the state of nature, or the life of the ‘savage’ cannot be regained by the modern self, but a subjective remainder of the natural past might be uncovered if all social, historical and cultural associations of humanity are scraped away. Perhaps the only way that this might be achieved in modern times is to be alone in the wild of nature.12 And, remarkably, we can see how a pale reflection of the original state of nature is possible: self-sufficiency is regained; and there is, in fact, no need for any communication or the production of any lasting culture. If other people are included, then the sanctuary of nature is only preserved if they do not bring with them any of the judgements or comparisons that have undone the self-sufficient subject throughout human history. In other words, the self alone is the ideal but if there are others then a risk-laden community like the golden mean might be achievable. So we have one of the most illustrious rational arguments of the Enlightenment leading to the irrational experience of nature.13 These writings of Rousseau can themselves be placed within a Weberian sociological setting. In this time of emerging modernity, with the spheres solidifying and separating, Rousseau provides a disenchanted rational argument on the origins of the modern world with the concept of ‘nature’ serving as the pivotal ideal around which the social order should be judged. In addition, there is the biographical telling of the actual experience of the meaningful pleasure of nature as a separate sphere, with its basic conditions of anti-social isolation and, in fact, anti-humanity fully appreciated. These two writings feed into each other to demonstrate how Rousseau was at the very forefront of the intellectual and experiential recognition of the nascent value-sphere of nature. Within this prescient understanding of nature, the importance of subjectivity is clear. What can we learn about the modern subject from these two Rousseau texts? A natural, free self is a faint but potentially potent presence at the end of the 2nd Discourse. But the autobiographical works are the more obvious exhibition of an inward subjectivity, where the ‘I’ achieves its position of absolute centrality (which it has never surrendered). The ‘Fifth Walk’ in particular points to a more developed romantic self and, vitally, to the necessary association with nature. Here the authentic subject is attuned to a nature that is attuned to it. That is, as discussed, nature is empty of all humanity but waiting, seemingly made, for humanity in terms of beauty and the sublime.14 On entering this nature, the self is enriched and, for a time, feels radically complete (like God, according to Rousseau). Such subjectivity is plainly here early on in Rousseau, but much more fully realised with English romanticism and especially in the poetry of Wordsworth. It is enough to quote some of Wordsworth’s most well-known poems from around 1800 to see how the self is transformed by the wild of nature. Again lengthy quotations are needed to bring out the extent of this worldview. From Tintern (written 1798): For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes

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The still, sad music of humanity, Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. (Wordsworth, 2000: 235f) The last lines especially show how the self gains purity and purpose from nature. In lines from the very beginning of The Prelude (written 1798–9) the ‘I’ and nature are united. O there is blessing in this gentle breeze, A visitant that while it fans my cheek Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. Whate’er its mission, the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me; escaped From the vast city, where I long had pined A discontented sojourner: now free, Free as a bird to settle where I will. What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream Shall with its murmur lull me into rest? The earth is all before me. With a heart Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, I look about; and should the chosen guide Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!

110 The additional value-spheres Trances of thought and mountings of the mind Come fast upon me: it is shaken off, That burthen of my own unnatural self, The heavy weight of many a weary day Not mine, and such as were not made for me. Long months of peace (if such bold word accord With any promises of human life), Long months of ease and undisturbed delight Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn, By road or pathway, or through trackless field, Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing Upon the river point me out my course? (Wordsworth, 2000: 305) Here is a depiction of one summer’s entry – alone – into the sphere of nature. Against ‘the vast city’ and his ‘unnatural self’, nature provides freedom and fulfilment through total submission. In the following lines of The Prelude, the external ‘breath of heaven’ conjures ‘within a correspondent breeze’. Happiness and great meaning flow from this harmonious unity between wild nature and the internal self. Dear Liberty! Yet what would it avail But for a gift that consecrates the joy? For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A correspondent breeze, that gently moved With quickening virtue, but is now become A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation. Thanks to both, And their congenial powers, that, while they join In breaking up a long-continued frost, Bring with them vernal promises, the hope Of active days urged on by flying hours, – Days of sweet leisure . . . (Wordsworth, 2000: 306) Such exaltation of the self in nature in terms of purity, goodness, unity, joy and freedom has continued and is even more widespread today than in 1800. There is simply a plethora of articles, books and advertisements that proclaim the unqualified worth of this connection. To take just one recent example from Australia, Phosphorescence – a best-selling book by Julia Baird – is, essentially, an autobiographical paean to the healing powers of nature. Baird talks of her holiday experiences at the beach: ‘The beach was untamed, unspoiled, brimming with wildlife’, and to dive into a phosphorescent sea is captured by terms such as ‘joy’ ‘abandon’ and ‘magical’ (Baird, 2020: 120). A vital

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element to overcome dark times was to ‘seek awe and nature daily’ (Baird, 2020: 15–16); and her morning ocean swims not only allowed her to cope with the rest of the day but made her morally better (Baird, 2020: 28). This desire to ‘bathe in nature’ arises because ‘a love of nature is coiled within our bones, laced in our marrow, steeped in our blood’ (Baird, 2020: 31). In the end, the depth of meaning is stated simply: Baird finds God in the ‘the sea, the stones, the silence’ (Baird, 2020: 195). The account of subject and nature is at one with Rousseau and Wordsworth. An ideal of the isolated wild is still pervasive; and although the wilderness is pursued and experienced, far more common are regular – even daily – immersions in nature in less ideal situations. The beach at which she swims is in an urban setting, but once her back is turned on the buildings and carparks, the sphere of nature can still be entered and its benefits bestowed. Also, these morning swims are not done alone – there can be hundreds of other swimmers. However, Baird stresses that all jobs, ages and sexes are included, and, vitally, the only talk is of the sea conditions (Baird, 2020: 25). So the comparative opinion of others is, at least on this account, kept out of this shared experience of nature; and it is, then, more like Rousseau’s just or golden mean of society rather than the later state of inequality, unfreedom and the decrepitude of humanity. But the essential point is that, if we can witness the invention of the valuesphere of nature in Rousseau’s Reveries, today it is so fully established that most modern subjects regularly enter and leave a level of this sphere as part of everyday life. This is so much the case that it might be claimed that subjectivity and nature have become inseparably tied together – to enter the value-sphere of nature is no longer just an option in modernity, it is now a requirement. Separation from the other spheres

In the 18th century, the emerging value-sphere of nature was still bound to both science and art. However, two 18th-century theorists, in fact, reveal how nature would break off these linkages – Kant with art and Rousseau, again, with science. The sympathetic relation between romantic nature and science can initially be witnessed in the German tradition of the late 18th–early 19th centuries. Several examples stand out. The vast breadth of Goethe’s work famously covers many forms of nature – from romantic poetry to scientific treatises.15 Humboldt’s journals of exploration (Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent 1799–1804) slip easily between rational calculation and the appreciation of the beauty before him. And in Friedrich Schlegel’s brief romantic stage of philosophy, a continuum between scientific and poetic nature is claimed. Amidst the aphoristic clamour of ideas contained in the works between 1795 and 1800, Schlegel advocated a new ‘idealist realism’ where physics and poetry were united (see, e.g., Schlegel, 1982: 98ff) and considered that rational nature could be extended to regain something ‘mysterious’ – scientific nature, properly understood, allowed romantic, subjective poetry the possibility of ‘re-enchantment’ (Stone, 2018: 41–2; also Stone, 2005).16

112 The additional value-spheres However, we must again turn to Rousseau for the fullest appreciation of these connections. In the ‘Fifth Walk’ of the Reveries, there is not only a first depiction of the irrational pleasures of romantic nature, but Rousseau also recounts how: I decided to compose a Flora petrinsularis and to describe all the plants on the island, not leaving a single one out, in sufficient detail to keep me busy for the rest of my days. It is said that a German once wrote a book about a lemon rind; I could have written one on every grass in the meadows, on every moss in the woods, and on every lichen covering the rocks; in short, I wanted every single blade of grass and atom of a plant to be fully described. In order to carry out this fine plan, every morning after breakfast, which we all took together, I would set off, magnifying glass in hand and my copy of Systema naturae17 under my arm, to visit a particular area of the island, which I had divided into small squares for this very purpose, intending to visit them all one after the other in every season. Nothing could be more extraordinary than the great joy and ecstasy I felt every time I observed something about the structure and organization of plants and about the role of the sexual parts in the process of fertilization, which was at that time completely new to me. (Rousseau, 2011: 51–2) So, mornings were spent scientifically engaged in the calculated observation of nature, and, in the afternoon, he would idle the time away drinking in the beauty of nature while, perhaps, drifting aimlessly on the lake in a boat. The ‘Seventh Walk’ elaborates on this pastime of ‘botanising’. Again the autobiographical character of the text needs to be stressed; Rousseau is so misanthropically obsessed with the hurts that the world has heaped upon him that he concludes that he has suffered the ‘most miserable fate ever endured by a mortal’ (Rousseau, 2011: 82). But some solace was possible in the botanical world of wild nature. Here, alone, with only a knife and a magnifying glass to hand, one could experience a ‘harmony’ and a spectacle full of life, interest, and charm, the only spectacle in the world of which his eyes and heart never tire. The more sensitive the observer’s soul, the more he delights in the ecstasy aroused in him by this harmony. On such occasions, a sweet and deep reverie takes hold of his senses, and he loses himself with delicious intoxication in the immensity of this beautiful system with which he feels at one. (Rousseau, 2011: 71) And where: Sweet smells, bright colours, and the most elegant of shapes seem to vie for the right to seize our attention. One has only to love pleasure to yield to such delightful sensations. (Rousseau, 2011: 72)

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So, it is in the botanical study of nature, and not just with more romantic experience, that one can lose oneself and ‘yield’ to such intoxicating, harmonious beauty. Rousseau goes on to argue that such ‘ecstasy’ cannot be gained if botanising is undertaken merely as a means to another end, for example, to gain medicinal plant remedies. He also rules out other parts of nature such as animals or minerals because, as opposed to the idle study of plants, they involve too much hard work (chasing the animals and digging up the rocks). He sums up his approach to botany as: Attracted by the charming things that surround me, I look at them, consider them closely, compare them, and eventually learn to classify them, and all of a sudden, I am as much a botanist as anyone needs to be who wants to study nature with the sole aim of continually finding new reasons for loving it. (Rousseau, 2011: 77) But the full extent of Rousseau’s insights needs and deserves another lengthy quotation. Here the joy of botanising is threatened by a range of social forces criticised in the 2nd Discourse. Botany is what an idle and lazy solitary studies: a blade and a magnifying glass are all the equipment he needs to observe plants. He walks along, wanders freely from one thing to the next, considers each flower with interest and curiosity, and as soon as he starts to grasp the laws of their structure, he finds in observing them an effortless pleasure which is as intense as if it had required of him a great deal of effort. There is in this idle occupation a charm which is only felt when the passions are completely calm, but which is then enough on its own to make life happy and pleasant; but as soon as we add an element of self-interest or vanity, either to achieve a certain position or to write books, and as soon as we only want to learn in order to teach and we only botanize in order to become an author or a professor, this sweet charm vanishes entirely: we now see plants simply as the instruments of our passions, we no longer take any real pleasure in studying them, we no longer want to know but to show that we know, and in the woods, the world becomes but a stage for us, on which we want to be admired; or else, limiting ourselves to botany in the study or, at most, in the garden, instead of studying plants in nature, we concern ourselves only with systems and methods, a subject of endless dispute which does not reveal a single new plant or cast any real light on natural history or the plant kingdom. This leads to the hatred and jealousy that rivalry for fame arouses in authors of botanical works just as much as, and more than, in other scholars. By changing the nature of this agreeable study, they transplant it into the middle of towns and academies, where it degenerates no less than exotic plants do in the gardens of collectors. (Rousseau, 2011: 78–9) We can make sense of these statements through the theory of the value-spheres. Rousseau depicts his own very personal but scientific experience of nature, which

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can arouse as much pleasure as the more romantic interludes. And from these autobiographical accounts of botanising, we can again witness how nature has become a self-enclosed world in which the subject, alone, can be immersed. The dangers to this time of pure escape lie not in science itself but in intrusions of the social world with all its vanity and deceits. Most graphically Rousseau points to the academy as the prime site of such inevitable corruption. That is, in Weberian terms, the internal harmony of the sphere of nature is threatened by the external values of the valuesphere of science as it is increasingly institutionalised. The amateur scientist ideal that Rousseau depicts here is a favourite theme well into the 19th century, but Rousseau already anticipates its demise. This particular entry point into the sphere of nature becomes increasingly difficult to access, and, correspondingly, the more romantic entrance remains the only one open. In other words, the spheres of science and nature become increasingly separated. However, it has to be acknowledged that perhaps some rare individuals still do botanise as Rousseau did, even though the domination of professional specialisation would seem to be complete. And perhaps there is still one group – the birdwatchers – who maintain a scientific, Rousseau-like position within the value-sphere of nature. With only binoculars around their necks, alone and absorbed, they would appear to be fully engaged within the separate realm of nature. However, the competitive, comparative imperatives to be the first to see a particular species of bird, or to complete and post a set of sightings, might well be enough to expel them from the pure cosmos that Rousseau so craved. However, as a qualification, we will consider below how some forms of science and the sphere of nature still stand in a mutually beneficial relationship with each other. A faint echo of Rousseau’s ideal of ‘botanising’ persists. If we now turn to art, overall we can say that the spheres of nature and art have become increasingly distinct after a time of intimate interconnectedness. There are no necessary ties between the two spheres; at the very start, in Rousseau’s Fifth and Seventh Walks, we can witness how subject and nature are emotionally interlinked without the need for an aesthetic dimension. However, the 18th century is dominated by an understanding of a new ‘aesthetics’ where the two areas are treated together, and, in the 1790s, during the most famous romantic period of all, art and nature are assumed to be fundamentally unified. This is plain to see in Wordsworth where his poetry acts as a kind of fulfilment of the subject’s immersion in nature, so that, to repeat Williams, for Wordsworth, ‘nature is the principle of creation, of which the creative mind is part, and from which we may learn the truths of our sympathetic nature’ (as quoted, Williams, 1973/2011: 127). Or it is again apparent in Schlegel’s romantic philosophy where aestheticised, creative nature lies at the heart of his new idealist realism. This romantic unity of art and nature has had a tremendous, lasting effect but was inherently unstable. The causes of this instability – the deep tensions between art and nature that will lead to the development of quite separate value-spheres – can be identified through a return to Kant’s philosophy of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgement (published 1790). The basic conflict between art and nature can first be seen when we consider the value of ‘beauty’ – the central value of aesthetics in the Kantian era. For Kant

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and the romantic perspective, natural beauty is the ideal and is dependent on the absence of any traces of humanity. A major problem for art is that, at that time, it almost always represented humanity in some way – in the human figure itself or man-made objects. The pure, aesthetic value of beauty is therefore necessarily compromised in the very content of the work of art, and Kant therefore awards the beauty of art the second class grade of ‘adherent’ as opposed to the first class status of natural beauty (Kant, 2000: 114–6). Kant’s conception of ‘taste’ further reveals how the human element applies much more to art than to nature. For Kant, as described above, the aesthetic appreciation of a work of art cannot be restricted to a purely subjective response but demands a ‘subjective universality’ (Kant, 2000: 96–7) where all other free subjects are assumed to share the subjective aesthetic judgement.18 This universal extension of the subject includes a dimension of ‘communicability’ (Kant, 2000: 103) whereby the subject will, in effect, talk with other subjects to convince them or demonstrate to them the truth of their aesthetic response; and this necessarily entails discussing the work of art conceptually – as if the work of art itself had objective characteristics that elicit the ‘universal’ judgement of taste (Kant, 2000: 93, 183ff). However, this ‘subjective universal communicability’ does not seem to apply nearly as easily to nature as it does to art. Kant himself admits, at times, that solitude is right for nature, especially with the experience of the sublime (Kant, 2000: 157; also 178), so that these social demands of art go missing in the ‘wild’ (which, it should be noted, is not a term used by Kant in this sense at least). Kant’s ‘taste’ also applies to the production of art in a way that is radically different to nature. At the most obvious, definitional level, the making of works by artists carries with it a human dimension that is absent in the purely natural world. But Kant adds a further aspect. As we have seen, for Kant, the ‘genius’ artist has a natural ability but their originality must be constrained by the prevailing aesthetic climate of ‘taste’ (Kant, 2000: 197). Or, in other words, the art object is, in fact, made for the judgement of taste – for other people to proclaim that it is art; it cannot exist outside the social realm of human judgement. Again, a basic social determination of art is apparent that stands in contrast to nature. In sum, Kant’s aesthetic philosophy tried to account for the beauty of art and nature and managed to demonstrate how radically natural beauty differs from that created by art. And that difference lies in the multiple ways that human/social factors apply to the subjective experience of art and not to nature. To use the case of Wordsworth: the poems exist as part of a social community of taste; Wordsworth, the original, genius poet, is part of a restraining artistic tradition of poetry; and the content of the poems is not nature but his subjective experience of nature. The poems might even be seen as putting up a barrier against nature because they exist in a quite different social realm to nature – the sphere of art, in fact, as opposed to the sphere of nature. This basic division would become starker as the 19th century unfurled until, as Kant’s theory anticipates, the form would replace both beauty and representation in art, and nature alone would be left as the only site of pure beauty. Finally, two qualifications have to be added. Even though the romantic art/nature combination will be disassembled, nature and its beauty can still of course be the

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content of later art, but only as one of any number of subjective content choices of the artist. Also, more significantly as the spheres develop, the memory of the romantic synthesis will linger in art, even in its most ugly, conceptual forms. Following Adorno, a link with the ideal of natural beauty cannot be broken (Adorno, 2002: 47–8, 53, 273); a standard is always present that art must in some way react to, even if the result is the total rejection of such beauty. Participation

As it became more differentiated from the other spheres, there was a shift in perception concerning who could enter the sphere of nature: participation by an exclusive few gave way to participation by all. The curated wildernesses of the 18th-century private estates were, of course, rigorously exclusive. The slightly later, but overlapping natural wild was in principle available to anyone, but in practice was highly limited. This was so not just because of the material inequalities of class, where a lack of money and time would rule out most of the population from a Wordsworth-like sojourn in the countryside, but, more importantly, there was an inequality of subjectivity. Rousseau could realistically imagine that he was the first to possess the right capacity of the inner self to engage in such experience; and the Romantic poets, despite some universalist sentiments in that revolutionary age, could not escape their self-definition as artists possessed of a superior sensibility. Williams’ depiction of Wordsworth and Shelley is helpful in this regard. In his 1800 ‘Preface’ to Lyric Ballads, Wordsworth asserts both the ‘I’ of the poet against all others and a basic commonality with the rest of humanity (Williams, 1960: 50). The underlying dilemma here might be understood in terms of Wordsworth’s engagement with rural nature, and especially with his sympathetic affinity with the ‘humble’ characters of the countryside (Williams, 1973/2011: 130f). The following quotation from the ‘Preface’ graphically displays the layers of contradiction produced by his aesthetic utilisation of the natural. The principal object then which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that situation the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. The language too of these men

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is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly such a language arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings is a more permanent and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation. (Wordsworth, 1909–14/2001: 5) ‘Low and rustic’ life was chosen as the provider of the content and language/style of the poems. This simple existence could serve this aesthetic function because it was: ‘plainer’, ‘elementary’, ‘durable’, ‘unelaborated’ and ‘permanent’. The contrast is with the dominant poetic form of the day that is appraised as ‘arbitrary’, ‘capricious’ and made for ‘fickle tastes and fickle appetites’. And in the ordinariness of rural life, ‘the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’. We can appreciate Wordsworth’s understanding from the perspective of the theory of the value-spheres. The emerging spheres of art and nature are integrated: the rural life is identified with the forms of natural beauty and this elementary sphere of nature is taken up as the source of a new artistic style. The seemingly egalitarian sympathy, in fact, reveals a strict hierarchy between those who permanently dwell in the sphere of nature and the poet, who has the subjective sensibility to enter and appreciate the aesthetic beauties of the rural realm and who can then leave. In fact, the poet must leave – the new subject of modernity is forever moving between the different spheres. The basic difference, then, lies in the possession of inner subjectivity. These people of rural nature are not subjects of modernity and become, in fact, only the content for the subjective use of the artist. Even more strongly, at times, these people who must forever dwell in the sphere of nature are not just part of a traditional and fading anti-urban culture but become, for Wordsworth, part of nature itself. We can see this briefly indicated in the quote from the ‘Preface’ above, but consider this depiction of the ‘leech gatherer’ from ‘Resolution and Independence’: Now, whether it were by peculiar grace, A leading from above, a something given, Yet it befell that, in this lonely place, When I with these untoward thoughts had striven, Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven I saw a Man before me unawares: The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.

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As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie Couched on the bald top of an eminence; Wonder to all who do the same espy, By what means it could thither come, and whence; So that it seems a thing endued with sense: Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself . . . (Wordsworth, 2000: 282) The poet and this old man are linked in both being alone, but are radically differentiated in the way they relate to nature. Here, not only is it a question of the presence or absence of inner subjectivity, but the leech gatherer can scarcely be physically distinguished from the natural world in whose rhythms he is so completely bound. In a sense, then, the seeming sympathy for the people of the sphere of nature is, in fact, an act of dehumanisation – such folks are lauded only because they are part of the very nature that only the poet can intuit and aesthetically reveal. This is not surprising if we remember the basic lessons of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, where the logic of artistic taste must discount the standard array of human interests and move as far as possible towards the ideal of dehumanised natural beauty. Or, to put it another way, these rustic, ordinary people did not constitute a threat to Wordsworth’s oft-stated ideal of being alone in nature because they could be considered to be part of nature itself. However, the aesthetic sense of exceptionalism soon tends to forego these ‘egalitarian’ ties to the rural non-subjects of romantic poetry. So extreme is this selfunderstanding of aesthetic superiority that in Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ (written 1821, published posthumously 1840), it is proposed that the supremacy of the poet/ artist is so great that they should be granted political power. (Again, we see how the spheres of modernity are still taking shape, with the aesthetic and political spheres ludicrously imagined as unifiable.) As Williams notes: [T]he last pages of Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ are painful to read. The bearers of a high imaginative skill become suddenly the ‘legislators’, at the very moment when they were being forced into practical exile. (Williams, 1960: 52) A restrictive view of who can and should enter the sphere of nature persisted through the 19th century, but the appeal of nature, was clearly broadening. The later Wordsworth was fearful that the new middle classes (the ‘Philistines’ of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy) would invade his cherished Cotswolds countryside which had to be defended as the ‘preserve of the soulful few’ (Soper, 1995: 239). But such a threat by so many perhaps indicates that the pursuit of the ideal of nature was becoming standardised across the social order. By 1917 and the time of Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’, such sentiment still has limits and is held to be most apparent in the young with their rejection of the ‘skeletal hands’ of science and: ‘whose feelings are attuned to religion or who

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crave religious experiences’ (SV: 143). However, such distinctions are starting to become much more a matter of degree rather than absolute difference, and, in this lecture (and elsewhere), there is the seeming assumption that the irrational spheres have a universal attraction. So today there is, as stated, that common assumption that everyone can and should participate in the sphere of nature. The sociological conditions for this universality depend on the firm separation of the spheres, especially between art and nature. The ‘wild’ ideal, where all humanity and society can be imagined as absent, invites universal inclusion in the sense that social comparisons and marks of difference can be left behind. (But, of course, this is only the ideal and qualifications can be made in terms of clothing, gear, body image and possible costs of access and travel.) The values at work in the sphere of nature We are now in a position to piece together how the values of the sphere of nature form an inner cosmos of meaning and freedom. Nature

We cannot escape the obvious conditional value of the entire sphere: nature as the ideal of the wild, where all traces of human history and society have been removed as far as possible. (Or are in place only to allow entry into the sphere of nature, like walking tracks, or ocean pools cut into the rockface, and which can be forgotten once the experience of nature is allowed to take over.) Isolation

The logic that arises from this prime value of nature brings with it the value of being alone. We saw how Rousseau in the Reveries . . . was perhaps the first to proclaim that the pleasures and meaning of this newly made sphere of nature were most fully available when the subject was able to feel isolated from all other humans – at least for a while. Since Rousseau, there has been a continuous line of autobiographical accounts of all kinds where the lonely subject joyously experiences the sphere of nature. Two preconditions that emphasise the historical specificity of this kind of experience need to be emphasised: the state of Western subjectivity, so vividly illustrated by Rousseau and Wordsworth at the start; and the disenchantment of nature – to which we now turn. Disenchantment

Although disenchantment is one of the prevailing conditions of modernity itself, the specific place of disenchantment within the value-sphere of nature requires attention. Three elements can be identified.

120 The additional value-spheres Firstly, the most basic condition for the development of this sphere from the 17th to the early 19th centuries was the way magical and divine forces were stripped from nature so thoroughly that it was made completely safe for the subject to experience. There might be fear in the face of the might of nature but this only added the ‘sublime’ to the range of possible experience. And certainly the magical past might still be sensed or a divine presence freshly felt (as with the Romantics or, today, with Baird as just one example), but both the lingering of what had been disenchanted and an awakened awareness of a created natural order serve only to enhance the available subjective meaning. Vitally, no enchanted forces were now able to control or threaten the subject – that danger was past. The most cursory consideration of what the experience of nature was, and is like in a magical cosmos, even one which has gone a long way down the rationalised route of disenchantment, reveals the basic difference at stake. For within such an enchanted order, the external magical forces have to be taken into account not least because they have power that is, of course, not necessarily benign; whereas within the modern sphere of nature, such basic concerns have been able to be forgotten. Secondly, there is no possible way that ‘nature’ can replicate the entire divine cosmos of old in any truly meaningful sense. Or, in other words, Weber’s understanding of disenchantment throughout his works concerns the complete loss of any kind of divinely ordered worldview – this is the fundamental difference between modernity and the rest of human history and it is a difference that the sphere of nature strongly confirms not contests. This position is supported when three points are remembered: in the modern polytheism of value-spheres, nature is only one deity in a pantheon where the dominant, rationalised spheres are clearly and fatefully disenchanted; like all the irrational spheres, nature has historically formed only as a counter to the rule of the rationalised realms on which it relies and cannot challenge; and its scope is, in fact, relatively small, especially in terms of time spent within its boundaries. As a result, any ‘divine’ meaning that the experience of nature might well engender (as will be discussed below) is still fundamentally disenchanted – in fact, such meaning simply corroborates the central Weberian point that disenchantment is a definitional characteristic of the worldview of modernity. So, in sum, like home, art and the erotic, the sphere of nature is irrational but disenchanted. Thirdly, the disenchanted status of the sphere of nature is revealed repeatedly in its companionable relationship with at least parts of science. There is a continuum at work between science and this irrational experience that both validates and shapes nature as a value-sphere. The early Rousseau affinity with the science of botany is not entirely lost. An easy way to understanding this relationship is via a much-viewed, very famous television documentary series. David Attenborough’s (1979) ‘Life on Earth’ had a scientific grounding – the first program basically explained Darwinian evolution. However, although the scientific basis was never left, there was also an ongoing appreciation of the wonder, grandeur and beauty of nature. Vitally, the imagery was a constant one of Attenborough alone but at ease in various natural environments, with any traces of social or historical human elements almost always absent (until the last episode,

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where humans are introduced as part of the evolution of life on earth). In usually hushed tones, the narration of scientific explanation was mixed with an obviously irrational appeal of being in nature. It was pleasure and an appreciation of all the values that we will see make up nature as a value-sphere. Perhaps the most famous incident takes place in the late episode on primates where Attenborough comes to interact with a band of mountain gorillas. In one scene, a youngish gorilla is even shown playfully lying on top of the now silent but smiling human. In a later documentary, Attenborough described that experience in one word: ‘bliss’. A number of points can be made. The one that initially stands out is that although nature as a value-sphere is irrational and must be differentiated from all scientific reason on one level, there is a clear, sympathetic alignment between this value-sphere and some science in terms of common subject matter. As the many Attenborough series show, not only biology and botany are the most obvious candidates here but also geology and palaeontology help set up a theoretical setting for the switch to the experience of the pleasures of nature. However, perhaps more important is the way that science has provided the dimensions of this anti-rational realm: the earth itself constitutes the domain of the value-sphere of nature. The names of Attenborough’s many nature documentaries nearly always contain reference to planet earth, and we can see how the science allows this to be the case. Through the geographic and geological sciences, the basic time and space dimensions of the planet are made understandable, and Darwinian theory brings all planetary life into a comprehensive whole – the ‘planet’ of Attenborough’s documentaries relies on this knowledge. Importantly, humans are given a fixed place within this planetary understanding – conceptually as part of evolution but also in terms of the immense age of the geology and biology of Earth. Attenborough uses the following analogy to enable such understanding: Such vast periods of time baffle the imagination, but we can form some idea of the relative duration of the major phases of the history of life if we compare the entire span, from these first beginnings until today, with one year. Since we are unlikely yet to have discovered the oldest fossils of all, we can reckon that life started well before 3000 million years ago and as a rough guide, it will serve to let one day represent ten million years. On such a calendar, the Gunflint fossils of algae-like organisms, which seemed so extremely ancient when they were first discovered, are seen to be quite late-comers in the history of life, not appearing until the second week of August. In the Grand Canyon, the oldest worm trails were burrowed through the mud in the second week of November and the first fish appeared in the limestone seas a week later. The little lizard will have scuttled across the beach during the middle of December and man did not appear until the evening of 31 December. (Attenborough, 1979: 20)19

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Science then is instrumental in the creation of the irrational value-sphere of nature. Its dimensions and content are provided by science for salvation from science; or, seen from another angle, science paradoxically provides rational legitimation for the anti-rational sphere of nature: this is the rightful, rationally ordered place for humans to experience sensually as they search for and partially recover the meaning that science itself has left behind. And the opportunities for such experience on this planet are simply infinite. To put it more bluntly in Weberian terms: we can now more fully appreciate how the whole world has been thoroughly disenchanted. Science has cleared away all that stood in the way of the pleasurable escape from the rationalised world itself – it has opened the door to the realm of nature. Or to put it more precisely, science has, in fact, constructed the order of nature on earth which can be experienced both rationally and irrationally – as two separate, opposed value-spheres. From within the dominant scientific realm, the laws of nature are formed and legitimated only in terms of disenchanted, senseless reason; but this very understanding of the world is also constitutive of the highly dependent value-sphere of nature where the ruling values to be followed are not rational and, in fact, provide some measure of meaning against the scientific sphere itself. If nature has this double life in science and as its own irrational realm, it is remarkably easy to pass from one sphere to the other. They can be imagined as sitting side by side so that you can walk out of one and into the other in a trice; or it can be understood as just the subject easily shifting perspective from a viewpoint in one sphere to the viewpoint of the other. We can see it in Attenborough’s narrations – only seconds separate a lecture on Darwinian theory from an immersive bodily experience of beauty and wonder; and the cosmonauts looking back on earth saw not just the planet as a rational category for lift-off and re-entry, but the beauty and fragility of their ‘home’. However, this sympathy between science and the sphere of nature is deceptive. Other parts of science, especially astrophysics and cosmology, take on the universe as a whole, and the place of earth and humanity is quite literally displaced from its position of central importance to being very peripheral, at best. This scale of time and space is unimaginable and really knowable only through the pure abstraction of mathematics – no human-sized metaphor can cope. The benevolent view of earth from space, and the notion that this allows a connection to the universe (see Baird, 2020: 62ff, especially on Carl Sagan’s proclamations) is, from the actual science of the universe, shown to be simply mythological. The severe meaninglessness of disenchanted reason comes into play here most forcefully.20 In sum, with disenchantment comes not only this chilling meaninglessness of the scientific universe but also a scientific pathway to salvation in the value-sphere of nature. Beauty and the ‘sublime’

Beauty is the prime value of the sphere of nature. And, as we have seen, at least since Kant in the late 18th century, this great, ancient value is to be found, ideally,

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as natural beauty.21 Again it is useful to remind ourselves of what Kant, in a confirmation of Rousseau, argued in the Third Critique: the purest beauty was possible only when all human interests were removed; beauty resides, for Kant, beyond all the means and ends – the purposes – that make up all of the rest of human life (Kant, 2000: 95–6 esp.). This unique value, then, could only be fully realised in nature – beyond the social-historical world. Or better, speaking sociologically, it could only be fully realised in the then nascent value-sphere of nature as it formed in opposition to the other developing spheres of modernity. The values of the dominant rationalised spheres of politics/ law, the economy and science/the academy were the ones that were most obviously, explicitly and initially contrasted with the beauty of the natural wild. However, as recounted, the inherent conflict between the beauty to be found in nature and the beauty to be found in art, that Kant, in fact, identifies in his aesthetic theory, took longer to take on the sociological shape of two oppositional valuespheres. Eventually the 18th- and early 19th-century associations of beauty and art did founder as the logic of the aesthetic value-sphere hardened in terms of taste, form and subjectivity. Beauty as a primary value was shed from the sphere of art and became merely a matter of personal style for the individual artist; but it was retained and heightened in the value-sphere of nature. And its prime position in the sphere of nature gave beauty an additional quality over its former place in art. For as art became an internal sphere increasingly cut off from the rest of society, with its borders jealously guarded, nature, as discussed, became increasingly universalised, with its resident value of beauty assumed to appeal to all. In this way, Kant’s notion of beauty as the ‘subjective universal’ became sociologically actualised: the highly subjective pleasure and meaning of natural beauty – which, ideally, can be experienced alone – becomes something that everyone can, should and does enjoy.22 Kant’s account of beauty still proves insightful today, but his views on the other great value of nature from the 18th century – the ‘sublime’ – have fared less well. A few brief points need to be made on this value of nature. Firstly, in some crucial senses, what Kant (and others) described as the sublime still does have a strong presence in the sphere of nature. The sheer magnitude and power of nature that might be witnessed in oceans, mountains and volcanoes serve to produce a highly desirable subjective state of fear. And Kant’s understanding of this ‘dynamically sublime’ remains plausible: Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc., make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power. But the sight of them only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a

124 The additional value-spheres capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature. (Kant, 2000: 144–5) On Kant’s explanation here, in the face of such might the self feels fearful but safe (in the sense that it is not about to helplessly die), yet is also challenged to resist and test its strength against the ‘apparent all-powerfulness of nature’. Many encounters of this kind are still pursued in nature – from mountaineering (which started to take off in Kant’s time) to big-wave surfing. But, secondly, if this is all there is then it does not qualify as a value in the sphere of nature. The kind of experience Kant depicts has often been reduced to the physiological notion of the ‘adrenalin rush’; and it seems to be more like a competitive sport in the sense of who surfs the biggest wave or climbs the higher peak. Further, if it is only the hit of adrenalin that is sought then it can be found in places other than nature – parachuting off a building or an extreme ride at a fun fair serves the same purpose. Simply, the fact that such deeds are so commonly pursued in nature needs more explanation than Kant can provide. So, thirdly, what more is needed? As we will start to see more clearly below, the subject must also feel part of nature – must gain a sense of unity and reconciliation – for the fear to acquire meaning. To put it very vaguely but in one word, a feeling of ‘awe’ is needed (and now often used). Or, in slightly different terms, for the ‘sublime’ to be regarded as a value in the sphere of nature, the sheer magnitude and power of nature must be understood to provoke a sense of welcome and wholeness for the subject – not just fear. As part of this sense of unification, the immensity of nature has to be fit for human experience – it cannot be completely overwhelming. Here the Attenborough planet-sized view of nature – with its scientific legitimation – becomes the model; the human subject can make sense of and feel comfortable with that sort of size (as opposed to the genuinely unimaginable disenchanted universe of physics). So, following Kant, sheer size and force do matter. However, for the term ‘sublime’ to find a place within the Weberian value-sphere of nature its meaning needs to be expanded beyond the subjectivist limits of the Third Critique. Morality

Beyond the immense subjective pleasure of natural beauty, some presence of moral goodness can be detected in nearly every depiction of the sphere of nature, no matter the time it was written. However, this personal experience of the good in nature does, in fact, serve to cover up the inherent immorality of this value-sphere in terms of the ethical standard of brotherliness. A series of examples that display this moral dimension of nature can easily be given. But note that the reader might well find other examples than the ones listed here. With Kant, despite the initial denial of any links between beauty and the human interests of morality, there are many statements in the Critique of Judgement that

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indicate the opposite: an aesthetic appreciation of nature, especially of natural beauty, is indicative of goodness. First, it has to be noted that Kant quite explicitly denies a moral dimension to art. In this vein, he admits that an interest in the aesthetic is readily and reasonably understood to be divergent from an interest in the moral when one is confronted by the virtuosi of taste, who are not only often but even usually vain, obstinate, and given to corrupting passions, could perhaps even less than others lay claim to the merit of devotion to moral principles; and so it appears that the feeling for the beautiful is not only specifically different from the moral feeling (as it actually is), but also that the interest that can be combined with it can be united with the moral interest with difficulty, and by no means through an inner affinity. (Kant, 2000: 178) But Kant seeks to overcome this ‘difficulty’ of the stereotypical immorality of the ‘virtuosi of taste’, and the Third Critique offers a number of ways that a relationship can be said to exist between nature and the ethical. In this light, even though there are other hints and suggestions to be found, the following explicit connections can be listed: the feeling for the sublime in nature is ‘similar to the moral disposition’ (Kant, 2000: 151) and represents the moral good (Kant, 2000: 153); an interest in natural beauty is in such ‘agreement’ (Kant, 2000: 179), and holds such an ‘affinity’ (Kant, 2000: 180) with morality, that this aesthetic sensibility shows not only a ‘disposition . . . favourable to the moral feeling’ (Kant, 2000: 178), but must have been ‘established [in an] interest in the morally good’ (Kant, 2000: 180); and beauty more generally is taken as ‘a symbol of morality’ (Kant, 2000: 225ff).23 In other words, Kant exhibits both the anti-moral makeup of aesthetic taste and also the appealing presumption that to enter nature is to display a measure of goodness. However, Kant goes even further and suggests that the degree of goodness involved, in fact, indicates an ultimate human capacity for morality. If a man who has enough taste to judge about products of beautiful art with the greatest correctness and refinement gladly leaves the room in which are to be found those beauties that sustain vanity and at best social joys and turns to the beautiful in nature, in order as it were to find here an ecstasy for his spirit in a line of thought that he can never fully develop, then we would consider this choice of his with esteem and presuppose in him a beautiful soul [eine schöne Seele], to which no connoisseur and lover of art can lay claim on account of the interest that he takes in his objects. (Kant, 2000: 179) A moral divide between an appreciation of the objects of art and the beautiful in nature is proclaimed. To be able to experience the ‘ecstasy’ of the sphere of nature demonstrates at least a moral ‘disposition’ or ‘affinity’, and, perhaps, more

126 The additional value-spheres strongly, a ‘beautiful soul’. But the question we will have to answer is: what is it about nature that allows this moral connection to be presumed? Before addressing this question, some more examples should be cited. So, in this vein, Wordsworth, most notably in Tintern Abbey, sets out a moral dimension of nature. These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration: – feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. ... In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being . . . (Wordsworth, 2000: 237) The ‘pleasure’ of ‘beauteous forms’ have helped form later goodness – ‘acts of kindness and of love’; and nature acts as the ‘anchor’ of the ‘soul of all my moral being’. It would seem that the romantic experience of nature, in large part, has made and sustains goodness. Emerson in 1836 sees a basic ethical dimension in every part of nature, although his explicit reliance on the divine makes this more understandable: The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us (Emerson, 1836: 53). In all the ways that humans deal with nature – from miners to fishermen – moral lessons are learnt since this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, and grows in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. (Emerson, 1836: 53) In all the spheres that deal with nature, even in the economic trades as referenced here, a moral dimension is present. But in the pursuit of beauty within the value-sphere of

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nature itself – alone and away from the city – an extra dimension is possible. Here there is a kind of direct contact with divine goodness, where a childlike innocence is regained (Emerson, 1836: 11–13), and ‘the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man’ (Emerson, 1836: 16). It is a path to God and the cosmic unity of values: Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. (Emerson, 1836: 30) Thoreau talks of the ‘sweet and beneficent society in Nature’ (Thoreau, 2004: 99). It is as if nature itself is good, since: There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. (Thoreau, 2004: 97, also 103f) In his morning bathe at Walden, benign nature provided innocence, happiness and even religion: Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. (Thoreau, 2004: 67) In Walden, there is the simple assumption that the sphere of nature makes humans better. As Thoreau puts it at the end: ‘We need the tonic of wildness’ (Thoreau, 2004: 235–6). Moving into the 20th century, amidst the dialectical qualifications of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, natural beauty is granted the ethical, utopian aspect of lying beyond the domination of nature: That the experience of natural beauty, at least according to its subjective consciousness, is entirely distinct from the domination of nature, as if the experience were at one with the primordial origin, marks out both the strength and the weakness of the experience: its strength, because it recollects a world without domination, one that probably never existed; its weakness, because through this recollection it dissolves back into that amorphousness out of which genius once arose and for the first time became conscious of the idea of freedom that could be realised in a world free from domination. (Adorno, 2002: 66) Especially in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno argues that since its origins in Ancient Greece, the West has been marked by the domination of nature. Enormous

128 The additional value-spheres personal and historical harm has arisen, in part, from this fundamentally immoral relation with the natural world. Natural beauty offers something different, and a semblance, perhaps, of an historical alternative.24 The point for us here is merely that Adorno in this move joins the long list of those who have seen some measure of ethical worth in the sphere of nature. In this case, it can be regarded in its ‘subjective consciousness’ as a realm not only free from the domination that has destructively ruled the current age, but which possesses its own positive goodness of some kind. Much more recent than Adorno and with a very different audience in mind, Baird stresses the beneficent effects of the state of nature on mental health – as a way of coping with dark times. Like Thoreau a ritual morning ‘bathe’ in nature is taken – in the Sydney ocean rather than the pond at Walden – and it provides a total contrast with all that will happen during the rest of the day when, in Weberian terms, the other spheres of modernity are compulsorily visited. For Baird, not only is nature a space of physical and mental recovery, but the ‘awe’ of nature has a moral dimension. It makes us kinder and more aware of the needs of the community around us as we realise that we are ‘part of universe unfathomably larger than ourselves’ (Baird, 2020: 18), and because nature in this way makes us ‘small’, we become more content and ‘better at living alongside and caring for others’(Baird, 2020: 28). The astronaut view of earth also shows our smallness but also a connectedness to the mystery and beauty of the ‘universe’, and thereby instils a caring ethos for the fragile planet as well as its inhabitants (Baird, 2020: 62ff).25 In these accounts of the moral dimension of nature, there is no clear understanding that emerges – all are brief and vague. But the common assumption of the moral worth of nature that is on display throughout does point to a likely explanation. The simple but remarkable answer is that nature itself creates a moral relationship with the subject; and the theory of how this is possible lies in Weber’s sociology of ethics. When put in Weberian terms, two movements in this creation of a moral nature can be identified. First is the stripping away of immorality in the sense that the beauty and the sublime of nature can be considered an escape from the guilt that pervades all the other value-spheres of modernity, including the sphere of the aesthetic. As we have noted, the ethic of brotherliness with its appreciation of suffering is necessarily denied by the value-spheres, but continues into modernity to preside in moral judgement on the age. However, in nature, with its pure, formal, non-human beauty, an innocence might be experienced, not guilt. So many descriptions of the sphere of nature stress such child-like innocence, and we can appreciate how the basic isolation from all traces of society and history, that marks the internal order of nature as a value-sphere, allows such self-belief in moral purification. Indeed the ideal of being alone in nature permits the avoidance of any ethical duty to other humans. Or, in other words, the essential person-to-person relationship of the brotherly ideal and its concomitant guilt have effectively been left behind as the wholly separate subject joyously enters the promise of nature. Second, in this state of innocence, the modern self is open to receive the care, even ‘love’, of nature itself. Instead of feeling the weight of ethical duty to others,

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the isolated subject is itself deemed the person to be suffering and in need. Again, commentators of all kinds stress that it is insufficient to talk of the ‘pleasures’ of natural beauty; nature, if allowed, can envelop the subject in a benign, beneficial, soothing embrace where all other cares are forgotten. It is there to look after you, to make you feel better, to treat each person – alone in this special world – as welcome and worthy of receiving all the wonderful gifts that nature can bestow. And it is all-giving, asking nothing in return. Nature might therefore be said to display a universal, unqualified ethic that comes very close to being an exact imitation of the ideal of brotherly love! Perhaps, within the value-sphere structure of modernity, it is only in this non-human form that such an ideal can be so closely approximated. We can perhaps make more sense of this idea by considering one of the more telling phrases that Kant offers in support of a moral link with natural beauty. Kant says: ‘The beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest’ (Kant, 2000: 151). But if we break with Kant’s subjectivism and take up the sociology of the value-spheres, this sentence can be turned on its head to read: ‘The beautiful prepares us to be loved by nature, without interest’. The formation of the sphere of nature might be encapsulated in this shift from the subject’s love of nature to nature’s love of the subject. In sum, in the value-sphere of nature, the moral guilt of any human can be washed away, and an ideal moral relationship can be experienced. No wonder, then, that engagement with the wild is so often regarded as a way that a kind of human goodness can springboard into the immoral realms beyond nature. However, finally, we need to turn all of this on its head. For, as was the case with the naturalised religiosity of love in the erotic value-sphere, such self-belief in goodness is an illusion. In the end, the highly pleasurable experiences of the sphere of nature (as with the sphere of erotic love) are utterly subjective and must stand condemned by the presiding ethic of brotherly love. The sociological reason for such immense moral meaning and appeal of nature lies in the pursuit of salvation from not only the unbrotherly impersonality of the dominant spheres but also the inherent guilt of the age. Simply, in the sphere of nature we can, for a brief time, deceive ourselves and believe that in the subjective pleasures of the dehumanised wild, we are actually innocent. We will return to these ideas and briefly develop them in the next section. Religion

In keeping with our Weberian stance, where the rationalisations of modernity are theorised from the viewpoint of the sociology of religion, we are now in a position to consider the religious determinations of the value-sphere of nature. We will start with some persistent features of the Christian heritage already discussed. Two elements common to all the irrational spheres can again be identified in the sphere of nature: salvation from the dominant rationalised forces and the formation of an internal cosmos of meaning. However, when we come to the ethic of brotherliness, matters veer sharply from the standard model.

130 The additional value-spheres As we have just seen, a paradoxical relation with brotherliness holds with regard to the sphere of nature. On the one hand, its emphasis on the pleasures of the isolated subject is just one more example of a value-sphere at odds with the absolute ethic of care and personal love of the sufferer – the basic ethical relationship between persons (Mensch zu Mensch) being obviously absent. But, on the other hand, this internal order of nature in its ideal form becomes so radically cut off from the social/historical settings of unbrotherly immorality that a moral dimension can emerge in which the self on its own can form an ethical bond with nature itself. Nature exhibits an ethic of care and love for all those who need its help in their time of suffering – it is always available and no-one will be turned away. The ethic of brotherliness is manifested in this remarkable fashion. Or to put it another way, in all the authors previously discussed a basic goodness of nature was assumed, but with scarcely any rational articulation. Weber’s sociology of ethics can fill this void and provide the needed theorisation of this common belief in the moral value of the wild. We can now move onto some less familiar traces of religion that appear in the sphere of nature. Four areas might be recognised. Firstly, and most obviously, let us consider the extreme emphasis on purity in the state of nature. The repeated references to water, and especially to the total immersion of bathing and swimming in ponds or seas, suggest a process of cleansing of the whole self – of body and soul – that can be likened to baptism. More strongly, it cannot be overlooked that the removal of all other humans and traces of society (as far as possible) is suggestive of a return to the first garden – to Eden itself. Indeed, the very relation of self and nature appears prelapsarian. In the appreciation of natural beauty, the long history of the human domination of nature (following Adorno) is absent, which appears, it has to be said, far more suggestive of an idealised religious past than a post-capitalist utopia. Or, with Rousseau, at the birth of the sphere of nature, the stress is on not working on nature, on not ‘always moving, sweating, toiling and racking his brains to find still more laborious occupations’ (Rousseau, 1923: 237) but just floating aimlessly in a boat, enjoying ‘precious far niente’ (Rousseau, 2011: 51). In Weberian terms, as the ancient divine cosmos is broken apart by the forces of modernity, fragments of its makeup such as these are preserved in the developing valuespheres of irrational meaning. Secondly, the inner cosmos of the value-sphere of nature takes on many of the attributes of the divine cosmic order. A number of elements can be identified here. Nature acquires a teleology – a full embrace of the wild entails an acceptance that its vastness and beauty have the purpose of providing pleasure and meaning to the human supplicant. As a value-sphere, it provides salvation from the hostile indifference of the scientific universe and in so doing appears to be waiting to be entered and enjoyed. Yes, part of the sense of wilderness is the absence of all things human and its frightening, destructive power seems in its own way highly hostile but, as the history of the value-sphere of nature since the 18th century has repeatedly affirmed, these are the very characteristics that, paradoxically, help create an inner cosmos of meaning in which the human subject can flourish.

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Also the unity of values that once helped define a divinely benign cosmos is retrieved in the sphere of the wild; beauty, truth and goodness are interwoven with each other to help create an internal cosmic order of nature. Beauty and goodness have been discussed already, but there can be no doubting the truth of the experience of nature once the sphere is entered and its values obeyed. Emerson asserted this unification of the values explicitly, as we have seen. And the early romantic understanding of nature tended to assume that such subjective experiential truth did indeed lie beyond the laws of science – there was a reality that could be reached only through, for example, the poetic sensibility. We saw this in some of Schlegel’s aphorisms and it runs through Wordsworth’s early poetry; but perhaps the most ecstatic assertion of the divine, empirical truth can be found in William Blake’s unique romantic vision: ‘What!’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!’ I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it. (Blake, 1972: 617) Further, as a consequence of these two attributes of the internal cosmos of nature, an ethical universe is regained. Very different to home, within this value-sphere and for a very short time, all the world attains a benign structure in which humans have an important place. In fact, it can seem that the whole order of things, once again, has humanity at its centre. Fleeting and against the understanding of every other sphere, the subject feels part of a sympathetic cosmic whole. Thirdly, the experience of the self within the value-sphere of nature tends to reproduce a kind of much older Christian subjectivity. The inner self that is suggestively present in Rousseau’s 2nd Discourse will seek out nature to gain freedom from the ‘opinion of others’. This freedom is preserved because no other person is present to judge. However, for this liberating experience of nature to be possible, the subject must submit to the greater external whole of the natural cosmos. It is not too far-fetched to say that the subject must obey the commands of nature. This path of internal freedom to a greater power which one freely obeys and to which one gladly, joyously submits, possesses many hallmarks of a kind of Christian subjectivity (e.g. see Taylor, 1989). (And such a state of loving obedience again reminds us of a possible association between the sphere of nature and the Garden of Eden.) Fourthly, the religious elements so far described produce a sense of transcendence. The benign teleology of nature would seem to lead to the existence of some higher, creative power. For some, this is simply a confirmation of God. Baird comes to this conclusion, and Emerson’s belief in the transcendental divine is explicit.26 For others, the transcendent experience of nature should be regarded as a path back to a Christian belief in God – if you are looking for proof of God there is no need to look any further (e.g. Taylor, 2007). Perhaps some kind of looser pantheistic belief will ensue, or perhaps a passing sense of transcendence will

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simply be explored no further and forgotten once the sphere of nature is exited. But, of course, in Weberian terms, the value of transcendence in the sphere of nature is sociologically explained as further evidence of the continued presence of our shattered religious heritage within the value-sphere order of the modern world. Whatever transcendent being might be thought present in nature, it is only a tiny fraction of the originating Christian God. It is to be remembered that within the overall disenchanted meaninglessness of modernity, this one small, fleetingly visited sphere allows only salvation from the dominant, rationalised spheres and not salvation from death itself. Simply, if there is a ‘god’ in nature, then it is wholly ruled by capitalism, bureaucracy and science. But in the pursuit of meaning in a meaningless world, we will all, in various ways, seek the divine in the value-sphere of nature and, once found, revel in the experience. This too is part of our disenchanted fate. Subjective freedom and equality

The Enlightenment values of freedom and equality need to be added to the sphere of nature. They have been present in the discussion already but need more explicit recognition. As we have witnessed, the centrality of the subject in modernity is a precondition for the state of nature. It can be seen in the autobiographical perspective that marks most accounts of the wild – from Rousseau, Wordsworth and Thoreau through to Baird; and in the philosophical texts where nature starts to be recognised, notably with Kant and Schlegel, subjectivity is paramount if much debated. What accompanies the subject in nature is an Enlightenment logic of freedom and equality. And the sphere of nature comes to be a site where both these values reach an ultimate degree of resolution, as opposed to the more rationalised, prosaic spheres of politics and the economy where such values have progressed but only within severe limitations. In terms of equality, despite some qualifications, we have seen how the sphere of nature not only became increasingly open to everyone but how everyone would, in fact, enter it in some way or other – it became one of the gods of modernity that had to be worshipped. In terms of freedom, following the Rousseau model at the very start, the ideal of the wild arguably offers a freedom more pure than anywhere else in modernity simply because ‘the opinion of others’ is absent. Vitally, in addition, the sphere of nature also offers the resolution of this universal freedom within a greater whole – the free, inward individual finds fulfilment in an external entity. The deep Western desire for such a consummation of freedom that runs through the theories, most notably of Rousseau and Hegel, as well as through the ‘slaughter bench’ of 20th-century history, is realised not in the rationalised realm of the state but in the irrational value-sphere of nature. A comparison with the sphere of art is telling: as mentioned, subjective freedom in its specifically aesthetic form is also objectified within a greater social whole, but only at the heavy cost of the egalitarian ideal. Anti-social nature, in contrast, provides a completion for freedom and equality.

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Conclusion It is to be hoped that the tremendous appeal and significance of nature in modernity has become more comprehensible through the application of Weber’s theory of the value-spheres. Two concluding points might be made. First, freedom and meaning are found tied together in the sphere of nature. The unification of the free subject with the internal cosmos of nature effectively interweaves the Enlightenment with religion, and it is on the basis of this combination of forces that an ecstatic mix of salvation and liberty can be achieved. Again, this point is merely following the basic Weberian theme, which first emerges in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which elements of the Western religious heritage are regarded as vitally determinate of the makeup of modernity. Second, the modern subject, despite the self-consciousness of an interior, individualised autonomy, is formed and realised only within the various value-spheres which it must constantly move between. In its relatively brief but usually frequent visits to the value-sphere of nature, the self can gain a powerful, anti-social, ideal form; and such a model of the subject serves as a redemption from the shapes of subjectivity that must be adopted when other spheres are fatefully inhabited. Notes 1 See, e.g., Macnaghten and Urry (1995, 1999) for an emphasis on this plurality of ‘natures’. We will see that the value-sphere theory also reveals multiple natures in modernity. 2 Franklin (2002) lays out a number of experiences that could be included in the valuesphere of nature, but sometimes is forced to rely on less than convincing theory to account for such experience. 3 Weber himself tried and failed to include a naturalist sociology in The German Sociological Society (Murphy, 2002: 75). 4 These clear natural/materialist determinants in Weber have been noted of course (e.g., West, 1985: 216); and this materialist side to Weber forms part of the reason why, for example, Murphy takes on a critical neo-Weberian perspective at times in his ecological sociology (Murphy, 1997/2018, 2002). 5 Die Wissenschaft als der Weg zur Natur« – das würde der Jugend klingen wie eine Blasphemie. Nein, umgekehrt: Erlösung vom Intellektualismus der Wissenschaft, um zur eigenen Natur und damit zur Natur überhaupt zurückzukommen! (WB: 90) 6 However, such neglect is perhaps less excusable in those sociology of nature texts that deliberately reached beyond a strictly environmental approach and tried to embrace the manifold of ‘natures’ in modernity. The multitudinous theories taken up in these works were nearly all very recent at the time – so with Weber almost wholly overlooked (Macnaghten and Urry, 1999; Franklin, 2002). It is unfortunate that, instead of looking to what was new, these sociologists of nature did not return to, arguably, the greatest of all the classical sources. 7 However, alongside the poetic wild of Wordsworth, the older, curated ‘wilderness’ continued. For example, in Pride and Prejudice (set in 1812 published in 1813) are the well-known lines that Lady Catherine de Bourgh directs to Elizabeth Bennet: ‘Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favour me with your company’ (Austen, 1892: 234).

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8 ‘lC’ refers to the last period (third) of a century, in Williams’ system of abbreviations. 9 Again, this is not to agree philosophically with this particular form of romantic subjectivity. It is emphasised only because of its long and continued presence as a seemingly unmovable touchstone of modernity – sociologically it remains pervasive. There is an abundance of criticism that can be cited, but already in the 1790s, the romantic irony of Friedrich Schlegel in particular would target this sense of a natural, subjective, inner truth and a quite different kind of romantic subjectivity is proclaimed. However, it is beyond the scope of the present argument to develop this further. 10 Although it is possible to interpret the end of the 2nd Discourse more pessimistically, with all traces of natural goodness completely and irrevocably erased from the modern subject by the surrounding social evils. 11 At the end of Chapter 2, the aesthetic possibilities of Rousseau’s conclusions here were explored through an engagement with Kant. 12 Rousseau also speculates that he would have been happy in the isolation of the Bastille (Rousseau, 2011: 57) but surely the intrusions of humanity would have been plentiful in such a place. 13 Again, a deep paradox at work in all this is clearly apparent: ‘nature’ in a number of senses in Rousseau is a culturally produced invention of the mid-18th century which denies its own cultural, historical determination. 14 It is obviously present in Kant’s Third Critique as well, but not expressed as notably as in Wordsworth. Again what Kant does show us is a tension between art and nature that translates into quite different subjective experiences – an indication of the coming formation of quite separate value-spheres (as we will develop later). 15 Goethe published works on colour theory and biology, developed an original theory of evolution, and put together an immense collection of minerals. 16 Although Stone’s argument for re-enchantment here is doubtful. Disenchantment still rules over something like Schlegel’s ‘mysterious’ extension of the scientific reality, even if it is no longer calculable. 17 By Linnaeus, published in 1735. 18 So to like a work of art is different to liking a certain food, which can be purely subjective. With food, simply to say ‘It is what I like’, is usually enough and no justification or expectation beyond this personal expression of taste is required. However, it should be noted that in our stage of modernity, food and eating sometimes tries to be art in this very sense that the taste of food is assumed to carry with it some objective aspect that all should respect. Every TV cooking competition makes this aesthetic expectation explicit – the food is talked about and graded objectively. And, it might be noted, in these shows, the highest possible praise for a dish is to call it ‘a work of art’. 19 Similarly the Australian Museum in Sydney used to have a large room dedicated to showing the timeline of Earth. It was represented as a very thin path running up and down the floor many, many times, with periods marked, and in the last fraction of an inch, just before the exit, there was the word ‘man’ (as it was inevitably then called). Space travel has also given us all those famous images of the earth which further enable and fix the planetary dimensions of nature. Here is the visual proof of so much science and a rational observation of the realm of irrational natural experience. 20 On this point, in contrast to the Earth series by Attenborough, see the Universe documentaries by the physicist Brian Cox. In these shows, the question of human meaning is sometimes put and is shown not to be able to be answered (see, e.g., Cox and Cohen, 2014: 226; Cox, 2021: Episode 5). Or, to put it even more graphically, in Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the second book of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series), the ultimate punishment was to be placed in ‘The Total Perspective Vortex’ which ‘can annihilate a man’s soul’ (Adams, 1980: 61). The book explains: The Total Perspective Vortex is the most savage psychic torture a sentient being can undergo. When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse

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of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says ‘You are here’. (Adams, 1980: 72) 21 Although not by all of course: Hegel, for one, rejects the primacy of natural beauty. 22 The qualification needs to be repeated that, certainly there might well be material inequalities of access to some sites of natural beauty, but the basic universality of wild beauty’s deeply personal allure is not thereby undermined. 23 Although some of these claims are based on a distinction Kant wants to make between an ‘immediate,’ ‘intellectual’ interest in beauty and the judgement of taste (Kant, 2000: 178ff). Also, note there is a plainly evident strain or tension in Kant’s attempt to reestablish a relationship between morality and the aesthetic, as witnessed in his use of such terms as ‘similar disposition,’ ‘represents,’ ‘agreement’, ‘affinity,’ and ‘symbol.’ 24 Unfortunately Adorno seeks to reassociate natural beauty with art as a way of imagining the faint possibility of an escape from the historical conditions that enabled Auschwitz. 25 Note that Baird is basically mistaken in her account here. She is still describing the Attenborough earth-sized view of the ‘universe’ in complete opposition to the universe of the big-bang. An astronaut or space-ship view of earth has obviously not left the earth perspective of space behind – the distance from earth being used here is of absolutely no consequence when measured within the distances of the universe itself. 26 In fact, Emerson was a follower of Transcendentalism and a founding member of the Transcendental Club in 1836. For this movement, the divine was an everyday presence within the pure beneficence of nature.

6

Sport

‘It is not a tragedy I lost, it is sport.’

Rafael Nadal, Wimbledon, 25 June 2013

‘I’ll tell you what pressure is. Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse. Playing cricket is not.’ Keith Miller, Australian test cricketer and WWII air force pilot

Introduction Sport is the clear-cut favourite for consideration as a value-sphere. Its sharp differentiation from ordinary life offers a commonly held promise of escape and refuge, especially in its most momentous manifestations. Whether as a fan or player, to enter a sports stadium filled to capacity, with a major title on the line, is to utterly cut oneself off from the outside world and be part of an internal order of ecstatic solidarity. To the winner, the pleasure is absolute, but even for the loser, especially if the game is close, there is a keen sense of total inclusion within this extraordinary world of perpetual hope – we were in it until the final play, the very last minute; and then there is always next season. The sphere of sport has multiple layers of participation and points of entry beyond this ultimate example, but the basic, general Weberian elements can again be seen to apply across the spectrum of sport experience. In essence, salvation from the other spheres of modernity, especially the most rationalised, is gained within an internally structured cosmos of meaning. To substantiate the idea of sport as a value-sphere, two interwoven qualities will become important. Firstly, like any other value-sphere, sport can be considered as separate from the surrounding value-spheres of modernity. However, the separateness, or internal integrity, of every value-sphere (especially the set of irrational realms) is, of course, always compromised and continually challenged, and this turns out to be particularly the case with sport. For this reason, the quality of being ‘separate’ will come to be a focal point of the coming argument. Secondly, how salvation is specifically achieved in sport is a question we must address, and it can start to be answered through consideration of a remarkable and much stated quality of sport – its sheer triviality. Simply, as the Nadal quote above illustrates, it is only DOI: 10.4324/9781003245148-8

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sport and is standardly judged as less important than events beyond the playing of the game. However, within the world of sport, such wins and losses, of course, matter enormously. As one empirical demonstration of these qualities of being separate and trivial, consider the sports pages of a newspaper. They come at the back, after and divided off from all the other more important news. However, within this detached, independent state of relative unimportance, there is a complexity of internal, endless discussion – pre- and post-match – which clearly matters but only within this disconnected and oppositional domain. More specifically, if the front and back pages are compared, the front page headlines might tell of war, while at the back, but in the same large font size, might be a story about a salary cap breach or the appointment of a new team manager. This condition of sport – of being separate and trivial but then still mattering greatly – is captured by The Times sports journalist Simon Barnes who writes that ‘perhaps sport matters because it doesn’t matter’ (Barnes, 2006: 11). Barnes confesses that he loves many sports but considers sport ‘a monstrous triviality’ (Barnes, 2006: 16). He sums it up in the following way: Sport is everything: sport is nothing. Sport is important: sport is trivial. Sport is packed with meaning: sport means nothing . . . people care deeply about sport/people know sport means nothing. (Barnes, 2006: 362) For our purposes, this set of counterposed elements can be understood in terms of the theory of the value-spheres, and we will develop how this works in detail below. However, first, we must confront the academic literature on sport that, on the whole, challenges this proclaimed trivial, separate status of sport. There are two broad positions here. The first consists of a long list of various non-trivial effects of sport; and the second, far more seriously, contains multiple arguments on why sport is not separate from the dominant rationalised spheres but is, in fact, part of the economic, bureaucratic reality of modernity. First, then, the non-trivial effects of sport can be considered beneficial or malign. The list of good qualities that sport is held to promote includes: fitness; mental and physical health; ethical qualities of fair play; learning to lose; learning teamwork; encountering others; fostering communities (e.g. in working-class areas or small country towns); and, more grandly, the peace and inclusive brotherhood of the Olympic Games ideal. And the list of bad effects includes the promotion of: competitiveness; submissiveness; conformity; a general training for capitalist labour; militarism; social divisions of race, class and gender; a distraction from the social causes of oppression; nationalism; and imperialism. Now all these points are arguable, but even if these consequences are real, they do not necessarily conflict with the basic condition of the game itself as separate and trivial. Or, in other words, to concentrate on these qualities that are produced by sport and which are certainly very much more important than sport, leaves us without an understanding of the

138 The additional value-spheres makeup of sport itself. Or, from another angle, yes these effects of the internal world of sport might lead to the condemnation or praise of sport, but they still beg, on the whole, the fundamental question of why sport is so appealing in so many ways to so many. And an answer to that question lies with the coming consideration of the trivial, separate nature of sport as a value-sphere. The second set of arguments, and the one that tends to dominate the academic literature, questions the separate status of sport. More careful attention is demanded here. However, it needs to be noted that unlike the relatively small and manageable amount of theory devoted to the spheres of home and nature, sport has been the focus of a vast and expanding array of sociological study. This being the case, the topic of sport demands a lengthy assessment of the literature. Readers who have no interest in these discussions would be well advised to skip this section and take up the argument again at the start of part 3: Sport as a value-sphere. Other theories on sport and modernity For the purposes of our argument, we will concentrate on the major tendencies within the sociology of sport that lead away from an appreciation of the trivial/ separate qualities that underlie the meaning of sport. To put this the other way around, simply and understandably, sociology has concentrated its attention on how sport is part of the dominant forces of modernity, which from the perspectives inspired by Marx and Weber has meant that sport has been theorised, in the main, in terms of class/capitalism and rationalisation. Let us start with Weberian-oriented theory. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens is one of the foundational texts for the study of sport and, even though Weber is not mentioned, it sets the scene for later accounts. For Huizinga, a philosophical anthropology is at work where play is regarded as a constant of all previous human society; however, sport in modernity marks a sharp break with all that has gone before: Ever since the last quarter of the 19th century games, in the guise of sport, have been taken more and more seriously. The rules have become increasingly strict and elaborate. Records are established at a higher, or faster, or longer level than was ever conceivable before. Everybody knows the delightful prints from the first half of the 19th century, showing the cricketers in top hats. This speaks for itself. Now, with the increasing systematization and regimentation of sport, something of the pure play-quality is inevitably lost . . . This view will probably run counter to the popular feeling of today, according to which sport is the apotheosis of the play element in our civilization. Nevertheless popular feeling is wrong. By way of emphasizing the fatal shift towards over-seriousness we would point out that it has also infected the non-athletic games where calculation is everything, such as chess and some card-games. (Huizinga, 1949: 197f; emphasis added)

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Modern civilisation generally has lost this ‘play’ quality, but Huizinga here lays stress on certain qualities of sport that mark it off from the ‘organic’ and ‘sacred’ past and which will feed a Weberian view of sport as part of the dominant structures of modernity. These are: calculation, systemisation, regimentation and the making of strict and elaborate rules. (But note that we will come back to consider other aspects of this quotation that, in fact, lead into Weber’s value-sphere perspective.) Although perhaps not fully recognising his debt to Huizinga, Guttmann, now specifically referencing Weber, cites seven defining characteristics of sport: secularism, equality of opportunity to compete, specialisation of roles, rationalisation, bureaucratic organisation, quantification and the quest for records (Guttmann, 1978/2005: 16). Sport, then, is understood as part of the overall rationalisation and bureaucratisation of modernity, as Weber tells it. Although it should be noted, Guttmann does stress that it will be applied differently within specific cultural settings. (Again we will return to pick up some isolated points of Guttmann that help a further different Weberian analysis.) This basic Weberian understanding – where sport is simply another aspect of bureaucratic, rationalised modernity – is, most graphically, repeated by Ingham. Specifically referencing Weber, Ingham especially stresses the ‘dark’ side of sport as enclosed in the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic ‘subjugation’ (Ingham, 2004: 22). From Weber we learn that: In the modern period, then, there is no ‘natural athlete’. We do not participate just as we are. We perform within boundaries set by others and by selected traditions. If there is a new god it is that created by scientific, technological, and administrative rationality as significations of progress. In combination, they seem like an anonymous and diffuse force superior to individuals. . . . United as an abstract and diffuse force, they render us complicit in our own exploitation. (Ingham, 2004: 23) Giulianotti (2005/2016)1 restates the rationalisation/bureaucracy view of sport in a chapter on Weber as part of a theoretical overview of the sociology of sport. Guttman’s arguments are assessed and qualified, but substantially sustained (Giulianotti, 2005: 19ff); and Ritzer’s extension of Weber’s rationalisation/bureaucratisation thesis as ‘McDonaldisation’ is critically discussed in relation to sport (Giulianotti, 2005: 24ff). ‘Disenchantment’ is mentioned but not developed. Besides the general affirmation of the rationalisation/sport link, Guilianotti also discusses meaning in relation to Weber. Predictably and understandably the ‘meaning’ that is taken up is from the methodological side of Weber, particularly evident in the first pages of Economy and Society, that relates only to the subjective meaning attached to an individual’s actions and which is accessible via verstehende, interpretative, microsociological techniques. This has been the staple view of Weberian meaning in sociology, and so is reasonably repeated here. But the problems with this understanding of Weber are threefold: this is not the only use of ‘meaning’ in Weber as we have seen; such an individualistic methodological starting point leads

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to an ahistoricism so that any subjective view in any cultural setting is comparable (this is exemplified with Guilianotti favourably citing Geertz’s famous anthropological study of Balinese cockfighting); and, lastly, the referencing of Weber in this interpretative sociology context repeats a common but unacknowledged problem for sociology’s use of Weber – Weber’s great theoretical works do not follow his own formal methodology for sociology.2 What is important for our argument here is that Guilianotti’s statement of the usual sociological position regarding meaning and Weber helps explain why meaning in the more metaphysical sense has not been a presence in the sociology of sport.3 However, a much more pervasive sociological theorisation of sport arises from Marxist origins – even if somewhat obliquely. Here sport is understood as part of the dominant materialist forces of modernity, so in terms of class and the capitalist demands of commodification and consumption. The breadth of this approach is impressive. Veblen famously associated sport with the display of ‘leisure class’ superiority over the working classes (Veblen, 1918: 259, 397); and Bourdieu would develop this thesis in terms of upper-class habitus, with specific reference to the origins of sport in the English boarding school system (Bourdieu, 1978: 823f). However, sport becomes increasingly integrated into capitalism as it becomes professional, and as it becomes commodified as a mass spectacle (Bourdieu, 1978: 829f). Bourdieu sums it up: [S]port as an elite practice reserved for amateurs became sport as a spectacle produced by professionals for consumption by the masses. (Bourdieu, 1978: 830) This overwhelming of sport by the forces of capitalism is a much repeated theme across the study of sport and would appear an inescapable fact, given the entanglement of sport in advertising, television rights, television ratings, gambling, corruption at the highest levels of sports administration, escalating elite player salaries and club ownership. The topic of the football ‘fan’ within the sociology of sport (see Cleland and Giulianotti, 2023 for an overview) has provided a focus for this debate; and a range of arguments has emerged: from the early claims of a resistant subculture (e.g. Taylor, 1970, 1971 on ‘soccer hooliganism’); to the notion of ‘post-fandom’ (Redhead, 1997) largely caused by commodification; to the categorisation of football spectators in terms of ‘hypercommodification’ (Giulianotti, 2002); to views on what an ‘authentic’ fan is and should do in an age of extreme football commercialisation (e.g. Davis, 2015 for an overview). What is the point of this rough summary of the sociology of sport’s dealing with Weber and more Marxist-inspired ‘materialist’ theory? Overall, the sociology of sport has displayed a tendency to understand sport as integrated into rationalised, capitalist modernity – simply, sport must basically be like this because it is a modern social phenomenon. Now, of course, at one level this is so, but from the perspective of the value-sphere theory of modernity an important feature – perhaps the most important feature – has been, at best, sidelined.

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This is not to say that the meaning of sport and its trivial/separate aspect have been wholly absent. A deep fissure runs through the theory of sport that indicates that something is missing. First, we will note its uneasy presence in some much referenced accounts of sport and then will survey a range of ways that deal with ‘the something more’ of sport. So, firstly, this undercurrent of the separate/trivial nature of sport is present in three of the foundational texts in the theorisations of sport – from Veblen, Huizinga and Bourdieu. Let us disrupt the chronological order and start with Huizinga. The serious, rule-governed, calculative systems of modern sport, in fact, produce a separate sphere on Huizinga’s analysis. As both professionals and amateurs lose the play quality of the past: Between them they push sport further and further away from the play-sphere proper until it becomes a thing sui generis: neither play nor earnest. In modern social life sport occupies a place alongside and apart from the cultural process. The great competitions in archaic cultures had always formed part of the sacred festivals and were indispensable as health and happiness-bringing activities. This ritual tie has now been completely severed; sport has become profane, ‘unholy’ in every way and has no organic connection whatever with the structure of society, least of all when prescribed by the government. The ability of modern social techniques to stage mass demonstrations with the maximum of outward show in the field of athletics does not alter the fact that neither the Olympiads nor the organized sports of American Universities nor the loudly trumpeted international contests have, in the smallest degree, raised sport to the level of a culture-creating activity. However important it may be for the players or spectators, it remains sterile. The old play-factor has undergone almost complete atrophy. (Huizinga, 1949: 197f; emphasis added) For Huizinga, sport is ‘sterile’ when compared to the ways ‘play’ enacted sacred rituals as part of an organic social whole. However, what is being claimed here is not just that sport has lost the play element but that it has: separated itself from the cultural and political processes; is ‘sui generis’ – uniquely its own creation; no longer has religious meaning; and is important for players and spectators. Huizinga is, in this way, describing the birth of the value-sphere of sport. However, it is so negatively cast and disparaged as merely something where the ‘old play-factor has undergone almost complete atrophy’ that its unique qualities are held to be scarcely worth further attention. Veblen criticises sport for being, among other things, ‘predatory’ (Veblen, 1918: 41, 262, 297) and militaristic (Veblen, 1918: 273) but, for the leisure class, its prime quality is its futility. Veblen states: [P]urposeless physical exertion is tedious and distasteful beyond tolerance. As has been noticed in another connection, recourse is in such a case to some form of activity which shall at least afford a colourable pretence of

142 The additional value-spheres purpose, even if the object assigned be only a make-believe. Sports satisfy these requirements of substantial futility together with a colourable makebelieve of purpose. In addition to this they afford scope for emulation, and are attractive also on that account. In order to be decorous, an employment must conform to the leisure-class canon of reputable waste; at the same time all activity, in order to be persisted in as an habitual, even if only partial, expression of life, must conform to the generically human canon of efficiency for some serviceable objective end. The leisure-class canon demands strict and comprehensive futility; the instinct of workmanship demands purposeful action. (Veblen, 1918: 259; emphasis added) For Veblen in the 1890s, sport fits his leisure class criteria of futility and a ‘makebelieve’ purpose, as opposed to the efficiency of purposeful work ‘for some serviceable objective end’. Veblen then has identified a kind of triviality as the key characteristic in sport in comparison to the world of work, but the immense take up of sport across the classes makes the leisure class thesis seem, at best, overly narrow. Bourdieu does something similar. Sport, as it originated in the ‘great boarding schools’ (Bourdieu, 1978: 824), is characterised as activities which are ends in themselves, a sort of physical art for art’s sake, governed by specific rules, increasingly irreducible to any functional necessity, and inserted into a specific calendar. (Bourdieu, 1978: 823) In this ‘retreat from the world and real practice’, the elites display the propensity for activity with no purpose . . . [and] pride themselves on disinterestedness and define themselves by an elective distance – manifest in art and sports – from material interest. (Bourdieu, 1978: 824) Bourdieu will go on to mark off sport of the dominant classes from sport of the lower classes. The posture of disinterested purposelessness, with its association with the habitus of art, is distinguished from the pursuit of material ends that arises with the professionalism, ‘spectacle’ and general commodification of workingclass sports. Further class differentiation between sports in terms of habitus, especially the use of the body, are described: the easy, upright, clean comportment of golf or tennis, for example, is set against the masculine, dirty and violent experience of rugby and boxing. However, this understanding of sport has some underlying flaws. Three points can be made. Firstly, ‘distinction’ operates differently in art and sport. Perhaps, following Veblen, in its origins, the functionless internal logic of sport did provide a parade

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of upper-class differentiation from the material ends of the working classes, but, as with Veblen, such trivial anti-materialist ends were soon pursued across the classes, and especially by the working classes themselves. In art, on the other hand, we can agree with Bourdieu that the internal logics of the aesthetic fields seem to have maintained strong exclusionary borders – entry to the artworld might still be said to be heavily dependent on class fractions. Secondly, and following on from the above points, given the apparent definitional quality of the trivial, functionless nature of sport, a sociological explanation cannot be contained within a class, habitus, capital framework. Something else must also be at work to explain the attraction of sport across the classes (unless a wholesale commodification and/or hegemonic argument is pursued without qualification – an option that Bourdieu at times would seem to suggest). Finally, it has to be noted that Bourdieu is not interested in pursuing the more ‘idealist’ concepts of someone like Weber4 for two, highly contestable reasons. Such theory is rejected on epistemological grounds as unscientific and so not suitable for his sociological science of the ‘field5; and it is also rejected because its assumed universalising, naturalising and ahistorical tendencies are held to be, effectively, ideological.6 In the end, it has to be said that these imposed restrictions on what theory is permissible simply rely on a dogmatic absolutism that should be challenged. The foundational work of Huizinga, Veblen and Bourdieu all include some explicit and perceptive sense of the separate, trivial nature of sport. But such traits are theorised only in terms of the dominant structures of the modern world, and some basic questions seem to go begging: how can sport, with this quite extraordinary rule-governed purposelessness, engender such enormous appeal and emotional commitment; and how can sport be such a thoroughly modern phenomenon – only arising in modernity – yet seem, through these very qualities, to stand against the rest of the modern world. It would appear that, beyond being merely an indication of the decline of the West in comparison with the meaningful play of the organic past, and beyond class and commodification, there must be something more. We can now turn our attention to the wide range of theorists who take up the ‘something more’ of sport in some way or other. Only a necessarily brief survey can be given here. As a start, it can be seen in Guttman’s Weberian analysis. Amidst the rationalised qualities of rules, administration and calculation, there is also the ‘equality of opportunity to compete’. This might be an unrealisable ideal but its presence, more than the other listed qualities, sets sport apart from the rest of rationalised modernity. Guttman also recognises that sport offers an example of the means having a direct and realisable end. What sets the rules of modern sports aside from those of primitive peoples is less the number of rules than their nature. The origin and status of the rules are different. Modern games are rationalized in Max Weber’s sense of Zweckrationalität, i.e., there is a logical relationship between means and

144 The additional value-spheres ends. In order to do this, we have to do that. The rules of the game are perceived by us as means to an end. (Guttmann, 1978/2004: 40) Such a means/end relation stands in opposition to the more bureaucratically oriented rationalisation that, correctly, informs Guttmann’s overall characterisation of sport. Again, while Guttman’s analysis sets out the differences between modern sport and the past in Weberian terms, there is an underlying but untheorised assumption that sport should also be qualitatively differentiated from the dominant forces of modernity. The something more of sport can further be seen in those theories which lament the loss of what sport once was. For example, in the tellingly titled chapter ‘The Degradation of Sport’, Lasch states, in a critique of Veblen, that the ‘futility’ of play, and nothing else, explains its appeal – its artificiality, the arbitrary obstacles it sets up for no other purpose than to challenge the players to surmount them, the absence of any utilitarian or uplifting object. (Lasch, 1978: 100) Lasch further rejects standard left critiques where sport has been reduced to sexism, racism, authoritarianism, militarism or just business (Lasch, 1978: 114). There is something more to sport but Lasch, in the end, provides no clear theory of what this is. As another example, even Adorno,7 amidst his ferocious attacks on sport, concedes: In so far as mass culture reflects the totality of life as a complete system of open or covert sportive competitive struggles, it enthrones sport as life itself and even eliminates the tension between sport on the Sunday day off and the wretchedness of the working week, a tension in which the better part of sport used to consist. (Adorno, 1991b: 90–1; emphasis added) More generally, the debate on football fans assumes that there is something to fight for and maintain, even if that ‘something’ has been lost or, perhaps, always was chimerical. Or, to put it another way, even if the fans can be classified as consumers and the clubs and players are too often determined by immense amounts of money, there is the ongoing implication that, at a minimum, this was not all there used to be and resistance is possible (again see Cleland and Giulianotti, 2023 for an overview). Another group of numerous accounts looks to religion as explanation (see Shilling and Mellor, 2014: 350ff for an overview; and Hoffman, 1992 for a variety of perspectives). Mandelbaum focusses on American sports but makes some brief but perceptive comments in his general introduction. Like religion, sport is not concerned with material interests:

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Sports and organised religion share several important features. Both address the needs of the spirit and the psyche rather than those of the flesh. Neither bears directly on what is necessary for physical survival: food and shelter. Both stand outside the working world. And team sports provide three satisfactions of life to twenty-first-century Americans that, before the modern age, only religion offered: a welcome diversion from the routines of daily life; a model of coherence and clarity; and heroic examples to admire and emulate. (Mandelbaum, 2004: 4) He develops the point here on coherence: [T]eam sports . . . offer entertainment to the masses, and a principal reason for this is that they are supremely coherent. They do not, of course, explain the mysteries or clarify the uncertainties that pervade modern life. Instead, baseball, football, and basketball provide a haven from them. While they do not furnish a coherent picture of the world as a whole, they do at least offer a coherent picture of something. Each game is a model of coherence for two reasons. Each is transparent: spectators can see for themselves what is happening and why. And each is definitive. At the end of each game, the spectators and the participants know which side has won. While the news section of the daily newspaper may report the baffling and the unintelligible, the sports section features succinct histories that everyone can understand, with a clear-cut beginning, middle, and end. (Mandelbaum, 2004: 7–8) This enclosed coherence of the game and the certainty of the result are qualities that we will come back to when we try to piece together the internal structure of the value-sphere of sport. Much stronger than this comparison with religion, Novak makes the claim that ‘sport is, somehow, a religion’ (Novak, 1976: xi; emphasis added), and, in fact, part of his religion. And he develops arguments on why sport can be said to be, in his terms, a ‘natural religion’ (Novak, 1976: 18–34). Novak of course understands that sport is secular, but in his valiant attempt to capture the ‘more of sport’ beyond just entertainment and commodification, it would seem that the only option is that it must be some form of religion. And in this, he draws on the existence, especially in America, of a purported ‘sacred’ tradition of ‘secular religion, civil religions’ (Novak, 1976: 18). From a Weberian perspective, the equation of religion and sport (and Novak is not the only one to go down this path) simply misunderstands the disenchanted fate of modernity. The limits of such an equation can be seen, as one point amongst many, via an illustrative example: simply, sport stadiums are called ‘our cathedrals’8 (Novak, 1976: 126). On one level, this is right – sports stadiums are internally ordered spaces of meaning within the internal cosmic order of the valuesphere of sport, as will be discussed. But it is still fundamentally wrong: cathedrals

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were integrated into, and, in fact, represented, an enchanted unity of all reality in which death, life and suffering were given meaning; and such a cosmic order is the opposite of the disenchanted world in which sport has its place. In other words, intellectual rationality, sport and its venues, and even religion are all part of our disenchanted reality – not to begin here, but to start with religion itself, is for Novak to try, like so many others, to avoid the ‘fate of our times’. However, despite these overall theoretical misgivings, Novak does provide useful insights into the separate, ‘sacred’ time and space of sport (which we will employ below). Inevitably Durkheim has been looked to for some connection between religion and sport (for overviews, see Giulianotti, 2005/2016: Ch 1; and Hartmann, 2017). The functionalist tendency within the scholarly tradition arising from Durkheim leads to universal concepts of ritual, the sacred, and, indeed, religion; and the questions we are asking will not usually be found within this particular spectrum of sociological thinking. However, there has been some attention given to the idea of Bellah’s ‘civil religion’ as a way of understanding sport’s special appeal in the modern world, especially by American theorists (see Novak above; Mathisen, 1992; Butterworth, 2008; Giulianotti, 2005/2016: 3ff). This is a troubling idea from the Weberian perspective of disenchantment, but it is also problematic within the Durkheimian school itself especially given Bellah’s ambivalent relationship to his own notion of ‘civil religion’ (e.g. Bellah, 1967, 1975). Of more interest to our argument is Shilling and Mellor’s attempt to wed the contrary views of Durkheim and Weber. They are concerned with trying to explain the more of sport: Sport has long been seen as more than leisure, representing for individuals and groups an activity and spectacle possessed of extraordinary dimensions. (Shilling and Mellor, 2014: 367) Four ‘sacred’ dimensions or ‘modalities’ of sport are identified. Two are Durkheimian, two inspired by Weber, with the most Weberian being ‘The Transcendent Sporting Sacred’. The transcendent sacred also has a strong sense of sport’s other-worldly capacities, but, in contrast to the socioreligious sacred, recognizes sport exists within a secular sphere characterized by significant levels of socially [sic] differentiation in which religion’s reach is limited. Sport can provide a potential route to otherworldly experience, but its transcendent aspects are contingent; manifesting themselves when people’s engagement in secular sports happens to ‘lift them’ out of mundane life. While this Weberian conception of the transcendent sporting sacred contains contingency at its centre, it illuminates important features of one major valuation of sport’s status. (Shilling and Mellor, 2014: 359) A strong sense of many of the characteristics pertaining to a value-sphere is clearly present. However, the development of the ‘transcendent’ leads only to Eastern and

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Christian religious content, and how this realm might work beyond religious meaning goes missing. Another modality – ‘The Biopolitical Sporting Sacred’ – also has some Weberian inspiration. Here the bleak forces of rationalisation and the ‘iron cage’ are seen to spread to sport with, for example, the commercialisation and control of athletes’ bodies. A largely Foucauldian picture is painted in this modality. This attempted compact between Weber and Durkheim appears laudable but, in the end, cannot work. The Weber that emerges is one that is attached to the concept of the ‘sacred’ so strongly that any sense of disenchantment (a concept effectively missing from this analysis) is lost. All is understood from the perspective of religion that is held to be the only way to explain the extraordinary attraction of sport. One example can be seen in the following, where Durkheim’s notion of the ‘sacred’ is compared to the approach of Weber who adopts a comparable approach by exploring ‘the sacred’, and using associated terms including “enchantment” and “charisma,” to indicate distance between the extraordinary and ordinary. (Shilling and Mellor, 2014: 354) This is simply a misrepresentation of the texts9 in question in order to allow a fit with Durkheim. However, Shilling and Mellor do indicate what has to be done in that they directly take up our question on the meaning of sport and they do think that Weber might have an answer to it. How Weber could, in fact, provide such an answer was, unfortunately, not allowed to flourish as it might have due to the constraints imposed by the presence of Durkheim. Another category of theory which tries to address the appeal and significance of sport is concerned with art and the aesthetic. The beauty, grace and form of sport, especially of the human body, are what is important (see Zilcosky, 2019: 5ff for an overview of recent debates). An early article by Best (1995)10 tries to clear away some of the confusions: sport is not art; however, there are ‘aesthetic’ qualities that can be appreciated in almost any sport; some sports have a clearly high aesthetic content, like figure skating or gymnastics; but such aesthetic qualities can only be connected to the means of achieving the end of sport (winning) and cannot constitute the end itself (see Edgar, 2015 for overview of debate on Best). On the other hand, Gumbrecht (2006, 2019) has reasserted the fundamental connection between art and sport: an elitist perspective on sport has prevented the appreciation of its inherent aesthetic quality; sport like art can be understood in Kantian terms as disinterested, lacking clear objective criteria and its appreciation is not just one of personal taste; and beauty is taken up as the prime value.11 The aesthetic quality, with qualifications, is, in the end, sport’s most important quality: Only since the mid-nineteenth century have team sports begun to occupy the international centre stage of athletic events, and I believe that at the core of the attention they provoke is less the winning or the losing of the two

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opposing teams (or those short moments that seem to ‘count’, such as goals, touchdowns, or baskets) and more the beauty of individual plays. (Gumbrecht, 2019: 41; emphasis added) Two problem areas exist with this debate from a social theory, Weberian viewpoint. Firstly, and most importantly, these philosophical arguments of all kinds on the associations between art and the aesthetic are radically subsumed by the sociological differences between art and sport. This can be seen most clearly with consideration of the value of ‘beauty’. As we saw with the value-sphere of nature, beauty needs to be understood as part of the overall internal, cosmic order of meaning. The assumption that there is something ‘beautiful’ beyond such social conditions, or that the beauty of art or nature, is somehow transferable beyond the bounds of its sphere of meaning, seems to be a common one but must be sociologically questioned. Secondly, Kant’s aesthetic philosophy on the whole does not point to a commonality between sport and art but to a deep dichotomy. The ‘purposelessness without purpose’ of art (cited by Gumbrecht) does find a place in the means/ends relations of sport, as we will see. However, the utter subjectivity of art for Kant, despite the looking outwards to others that can be found in the ‘subjective universal’, would seem to sit in contradiction to Gumbrecht’s arguments on the ritualistic collectivity of the sport stadium and indeed appears to have no place anywhere in sport. Indeed, aesthetic ‘beauty’ in Kant is, in fact, lessened, even cancelled, when attached to human ends of any kind – even, it must be imagined, with sport; and art has a defining characteristic of originality – of the new – that aligns with modern culture more generally but is not present in sport (and, indeed, such anti-originality turns out to be one of sport’s most fundamental values). Of course, there has been extensive further philosophical discussion of sport, but topics of interest to our argument have not featured strongly (see the complementary edited collections of McNamee and Morgan, 2015; Torres, 2014). However, Feezell (2013) does draw on the history of philosophy to explore how sport might give some kind of answer to the very question of the meaning of life itself; and there have been a number of existentialist, and specifically Heideggerian, arguments on the meaning and significance of sport (Gumbrecht, 2019; Farred, 2019; Breivik, 2022; see Aggerholm, 2015 for an overview). But in all these works, the universalist, ahistorical, philosophical tendency takes these studies well away from the Weberian outlook. However, there is one philosophical study that leads directly to a Weberian conclusion, even if it is not intended and with Weber wholly absent from the rich range of theorists that are, in fact, used. Morgan (1994) battles against the prevailing ‘leftist’ theories that seek to envelop sport in class concepts of ideology and hegemony. He expressly lays out his task as an understanding of the paradoxical ability of sport: [T]o cloak itself in an aura of unreality despite its obvious, and increasingly conspicuous, ties to larger society. The contradictory cultural status of sport

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is further underscored by the peculiar way in which the rules that are supposed to separate sport from social reality plunge it ever more deeply into the prevailing logic of that social reality, and by the utter seriousness given in sport to tasks that are devoid of any apparent social utility. (Morgan, 1994: 63–4) So sport is somehow both separate and part of the social whole and is seriously important but seemingly has no point. For answers, Morgan looks to the internal, ‘gratuitous’ logic and ‘constitutive rules’ of sport. So, for example: Contrary to labour . . . sport is at bottom an unproductive activity that cleaves to a gratuitous, as opposed to an instrumental, brand of rationality. (Morgan, 1994: 34) And, as opposed to the rest of ordinary life: There is at least one other good and compelling reason that explains the complexion and attraction of modern sport that is rooted in the logic of sport itself. I am referring here to the gratuitous manner of sport, to the way in which it contrives challenging situations by introducing unnecessary obstacles to the achievement of an end. (Morgan, 1994: 44–5) For Morgan, we will seek out sport to see and enact this extraordinary contrast to the rest of our lives. Also Morgan points to an internal morality at work: there is an ethos in adhering to these internal rules; and an ethical component can be witnessed in ‘sporting practice communities’ (Morgan, 1994: 210ff). In order to theorise this, separate internal logic Morgan understands sport as a ‘sphere’ (see, e.g., Morgan, 1994: 208ff, 257ff). He wrests this concept from and against ‘liberal’ American political philosophy and struggles to ward off potential attacks from the left. However, he also mentions and seems to advocate the need for a sociological approach to this question and directly references Simmel as a possible source of aid (Morgan, 1994: 83 esp.). This use of ‘sphere’ for sport invites, of course, the idea of a plurality of spheres in society more widely and the subsequent question of how they relate to each other. Sport, for Morgan, is not immune from influences from outside its boundaries, but the great danger, which we have seen emphasised through all of the philosophy and sociology of sport, is that such intrusion can corrupt and destroy. Morgan, perhaps more directly than any other, has tried to identify what it is that is being so menacingly threatened.12 Within the philosophy of sport, a debate about ‘internalism’ has tried to address many of these issues.13 However, we cannot help but wish we could have tapped Morgan on the shoulder and whispered the name ‘Weber’ in his ear. All that he seeks to articulate within philosophy and against a ‘leftist’ materialism could indeed have been better understood sociologically, but not through

150 The additional value-spheres the important but undeveloped ideas that Simmel has left us on this issue.14 How sport is so gratuitous and so important; is both separated from and part of the social whole – these questions can be fully addressed in Weber’s value-sphere theory of modernity. Morgan then leads us to the consideration of sport as a Weberian value-sphere, and to that understanding we can now finally turn. Sport as a value-sphere The basic ingredients of the Weberian recipe might be recalled. In every social order except modernity, the overall human need for meaning has been met, to varying degrees, by some kind of enchanted cosmos; humans have a place within the world as a whole – they are given a part in the drama of the divine universe. The basic effect of Western disenchantment as it has been followed through to its logical endpoint is that this overall meaning – usually articulated in religion – is lost. This now utterly banal statement of the fate of our times has enormous sociological consequences for Weber: meaning in these meaningless circumstances is fragmentary, and when the modern social order is theorised such meaning can be understood, beyond the familiar categories of sociology, as a set of conflicting value-spheres. The spheres that Weber himself considers do not of course include ‘sport’, but his polytheism or pantheon of spheres does invite the possible admission of additional deities. And, along with home and nature, sport deserves to receive such an invitation. A long list of distinctive qualities and values reveals the working of the internal cosmos of sport. It should be stressed that many of these aspects will be repeating points scattered across the literature, and which are noted above. This is as it should be. The difference lies only in the Weberian theoretical setting. Sense and senselessness

If, following Weber, we accept the overall senselessness of modernity, then the primary contrast with sport becomes apparent. A reminder of Weber’s understanding of this inherent meaninglessness might be useful and a list of its qualities can be reeled off. With the effective absence of religion, meaning has been drained from the world and the great paradox of Western rationalisation has been fulfilled – in the very pursuit of meaning, meaning has been lost. This process is evident in the dominant, rationalised spheres which all are fated to inhabit in some measure. So in science/the academy, the great questions of life, death and suffering which reason once answered cannot now even be addressed, and the disenchanted universe – the great triumph of science – holds no sensible place for humanity. In the economy, dedicated labour and money-making, once indications of salvation, are senselessly pursued for their own sake. And in politics/law, bureaucratic reason, always determinant, often rules. In other words, as revealed in multifarious, and very common ways, deep uncertainties and doubts are a feature of ordinary, prosaic life – not always, of course, but in times of

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reflection such darkness is hard to avoid. A simple question is emblematic of our age: What is the point? But the opposite is the case with sport. There everything makes sense. The whole rules-based, calculated order is designed to provide a certain result – at least ideally. No-one has any doubt what the point is. There are winners and losers, competitions are completed and then organised to start again next season. All competitors know exactly what that they have to do to win. Players in teams are allocated positions and tactics for a purpose or point they can fully understand. Fans know what their place is, and they also know the rules and tactics; and they will, on the whole, accept the final result. Of course, there will be disputes on referees’ decisions but the internal logic of rationalisation in sport aims to overcome any doubts, with video replays the most obvious example of how technology can help provide certainty. The experience of this world of sense can be of the highest emotional intensity – of ecstasy and despair. Weber, as we have seen, offers an explanation for how this could occur: the fervour of emotion for the winners and for the losers is a kind of salvation from the dominant external modes of rationalisation. For a relatively brief time, an entire internal realm of sense can be experienced that will induce religion-rivalling meaning because the living ‘death’ of senseless routine within a senseless world has been overcome. Or, to put it more generally, what Weber’s theory offers is a partial explanation of how something like sport could arise only in modernity. Yes, material causes are at work, as the sociological literature has long affirmed, but ‘ideal’ factors are also present: sport is an irrational value-sphere that provides meaning in a meaningless world. And this thesis offers a way of understanding how sport can be both so trivial and so important. Why, for example, can so slight and seemingly pointless an action like putting a ball over a line or into a net have such enormous significance? An answer must comprise both the inside and the outside of sport – something the theory of the value-spheres can provide. Following on from what has already been said on this topic, the value-sphere of sport, like any of the optional irrational spheres, is formed in direct opposition to, and in contrast with the dominant, rationalised spheres (as well as against the irrational but mandatory ‘god’ of home). In terms of sense and senselessness, these unavoidable spheres beyond sport are the sites of what is important – work, family, politics, war. Matters of life and death, in fact. But with such importance, in this modern age, comes senselessness as Weber tells it (indeed, the very way that the world is divided into these separate spheres that the subject must enter, obey and leave speaks to this condition of overall meaninglessness). So, with sport a whole internal alternative world is made against this ruling life of importance and senselessness; a much desired order is constructed that does make perfect, indubitable sense but it can only be made up of what is most inconsequential. Or, in other words, when what is most important has been rendered ultimately senseless, then sense might be created only in the most ridiculously trivial and that is why it becomes so important.

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Means and ends

We can build on how this internal world of sport comes to make such sense by addressing some of the fundamental ways that Weber, and some who he influenced, understand the dilemmas of modernity. Again, in order to understand the valuesphere of sport, we need to identify what sport specifically opposes in the external, dominant realms. In Western modernity, rationalisation has been unleashed in new ways which are dependent on the combination of disenchantment and the breaking of the dominance of traditional legitimation throughout the social order. The power of capitalism and science is the obvious result. But what is the problem? A main way of understanding why rationalisation in the modern West is both so impressive and so flawed for Weber is to think in terms of means and ends. Here we will be summarising points already recounted. The great paradox of the West for Weber – where the very pursuit of meaning results in its actual loss – is perhaps best encapsulated in the multiple ways that the means have been severed from the end, sometimes becoming the end itself. Here we can rerun the three-part picture of meaninglessness in terms of means and ends: with one part from Protestantism, one in academic reason/science and one in administration. First is the famous Protestant Ethic thesis. Mundane profitable labour becomes for the first time a religious virtue: here lies the path to God rather than the retreat behind monastery walls. Capitalism, with its institutionalised, calculative labour demands arises, in part, as the unintended result of this Protestant intention to gain salvation through dedicated hard work especially in the economy; with profits spent not on leisure and pleasure but simply on more economic production. The Protestant means to gain the end of salvation from death helps produce an economic and order where the means survives and flourishes but the end is lost. But this is not all. It is arguable that such mundane dedicated labour – once the means to salvation – has become an end in itself throughout capitalistic culture beyond the economy. It is an ethos – the Protestant work ethic, in fact. Second is the paradox of intellectual reason/science. As we have seen, in one small part of ‘Science as a Vocation’ is the tale of Western reason – from the Greeks to modern science – where the great questions of meaning that were once asked led to the brilliant answers that would leave the very questions of meaning behind. Simply and crudely, reason in its most developed, lauded forms can ask questions and give sophisticated answers about the makeup of the disenchanted universe, but struggles to address how we should live and die. Indeed, such manifestly powerful reason even struggles to answer the basic question of why we should try to understand this universe in the first place – why send another expensive telescope into space? This is a familiar intellectual narrative, but the unsettling sociological implications for academic reason are laid bare by Weber. Any worth or justification for intellectual reason (beyond any purely technical disciplines or uses) has become an irrational presumption since such judgments rely on ultimate worldviews that now lie beyond the scope of rational argument.

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Or, in other words, the former meaningful point of reason now lies outside disenchanted argument as an unarguable, psychologically comforting starting position, with the result that, without any clear ends, disenchanted rationality itself becomes the point. Third, the administrative form of the means and ends dilemma for Weber resides, of course, in bureaucracy. Bureaucracy represents only the means to achieve ends which must come from without. However, as commonly stated, the bureaucracy itself can gain such size and power that the administrative means themselves become the ends or, more usually, the ends are almost wholly shaped to fit administrative demands. The modern political state is Weber’s primary, understandable concern, as we have seen, but anyone working in a large university knows this bureaucratic means/ends dynamic. And, more generally, the bureaucratic means/ends relation can be regarded as a threat across modernity.15 From this brief overview, we might recognise the various ways that the dominant, rationalised value-spheres of the academy/science, politics/law and the economy all, in different ways, exhibit the triumph of the means over the ends. However, the Frankfurt School’s concept of ‘instrumental reason’ can be added to this Weberian picture. Clearly and explicitly building on Weber’s ideas, the Frankfurt School argues that one way of understanding how the great Western project of the Enlightenment could have resulted in the absolute horror of Auschwitz is with the concept of instrumental reason. Instead of reason as philosophy being tied to the realisation of the human end of freedom, reason, especially as science, in fact, becomes separated from any end or value. Max Horkheimer’s argument here is that reason has become subjective, where once it was tied to some objective ends. The Enlightenment itself is a kind of tipping point between the two: The philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked religion in the name of reason; in the end what they killed was not the church but metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself, the source of power of their own efforts. Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete. Speculation is synonymous with metaphysics, and metaphysics with mythology and superstition. We might say that the history of reason or enlightenment from its beginnings in Greece down to the present has led to a state of affairs in which even the word reason is suspected of connoting some mythological entity. Reason has liquidated itself as an agency of ethical, moral, and religious insight. (Horkheimer, 1947: 17–18) The basic, hopeful equation of the Enlightenment – that freedom, equality and reason were bound together – proved to be mythical. Reason can be used for any end at all – it becomes instrumentalised – so that it could even be turned against the universal ends of the Enlightenment itself, and be employed, in the extreme,

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to solve such problems as the ‘Jewish question’. As Max Horkheimer puts it in Eclipse of Reason: No wonder that whole nations, and Germany is not alone in this, seem to have awakened one morning only to discover that their most cherished ideals were merely bubbles. (Horkheimer, 1947: 34; also, 21ff on instrumental reason more specifically) Horkheimer’s analysis here of Enlightenment reason is useful to us in that the ‘objective’ reason that has been lost is tied to the religious, metaphysical past; and it can be wedded to Weber’s own account of how such objective meaning has been paradoxically relinquished. From Weber and Horkheimer, then, we can build up the external world of means and ends that sport opposes. But how is sport’s internal order constructed in contrast? Three basic elements apply. Firstly, there is no attempt to return to the objective orders of the past legitimated by tradition and enchantment. Rather, as the secondary literature, in fact, reveals, sport is formed through the employment of thoroughly modern forces of rationalisation and even capitalism itself. Sport is undeniably part of modernity in this sense. But, secondly, it is also thoroughly part of modernity in the Weberian sense as a separate value-sphere which has been created by these forces of modernity as a refuge from these very forces. In contrast with the senseless, means-without-ends world of the dominant, mandatory realms, all the powers of modernity have been used to make, within the borderlands of sport, an objective world of stable, common, shared and in fact unquestionable ends. Once the sphere of sport is entered and its values obeyed, there is a reigning certainty that these ends will not change. Thirdly, to regard this objective world in a little more detail, the re-establishment of the means–end relationship can be seen to occur on three levels. The most important, the site of meaning, is of course the game, or match or competition itself where the final end – winning – is formalised in terms of set, prescribed rules. All participants know exactly the means needed to achieve the end; that is, to win you simply must score more goals, run faster, etc. (‘Winning’, it should be noted, can include not just this final result but also a series of smaller ‘wins’ within the game itself, such as scoring a single goal in football or basketball, or winning a point, game or set in tennis.) Another layer that sits just behind the game is the training and coaching of the competitors; and here again this means has a clear view of the end of winning (or at least being competitive). The last layer is the most distant from the game itself but is easily the most extensive: the administration of the game or competition. Here the great powers of modern bureaucracy and money-making are the necessary means to make the game a material reality. This is its clear, unambiguous end. Now, of course, the means–end relation of every level can be disrupted. The examples are numerous and obvious – from drugtaking and cheating in the first

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and second levels to bribery and corruption in the third. But all we can do here is describe the ideal-type of the means–end makeup of sport, remembering that the ideal-type: is a rationally purified model of the social reality; will have an effect on that reality as a utopian ideal of what should be; but will only be realised imperfectly as the social reality. However, having made this qualification, it is worth noting how strong the means/end structure of sport is and how hard to break. Two examples make the point. In the Qatar 2022 World Cup, the ruling football body acted corruptly in awarding the hosting rights, and, within the host nation, there were not only documented human rights abuses but also many deaths of temporary, migrant workers building the stadiums; yet once the football started, as many commentators predicted, only the game counted and all these other factors were forgotten. The end of the game had been achieved and the administrative means had, in fact, done its job. Or with modern sports arenas, the music, advertising and other entertainment distractions might well not be to everyone’s taste, but they cannot finally disrupt the game itself. The philosopher David Papineau, in a working stint in New York, ended up supporting the Mets over the Yankees because of how much he disliked all the distracting entertainments in Yankee Stadium. But, as he says: ‘the only time the cacophony stopped was during actual play which was the one time we wanted to watch not talk’ (Papineau, 2017: Postscript to Ch. 7). The ‘cacophony’ (and his talk) had to stop for the actual game – this is the non-negotiable end of sport, and the means of Yankee stadium still delivered. It could not but do so. The endless new

Another way of matching the senselessness of the external world against the internal meaning of sport is through a re-consideration of Weber’s ideas on the cultural endlessness of modernity and the satiated cycles of past existence. Again, only a summary is needed here. It will be remembered that across the spheres of the modern world, with the traditional outlook replaced by rational-legal legitimation, what counts is the new. A constant striving for something better, different or original besets not just the many demands of capitalism but is the first and necessary quality of art and science/intellectual reason. This very book and the ever-expanding lists of academic publications serve as an instant confirmation of this point. For Weber, in terms of meaning, modern culture is, in this way, endlessly trying to grasp something that will always be just out of reach. The contrast is with the organic cycles that constituted more traditional cosmic unities. In these enchanted wholes, death could be regarded as the completion of a cycle of existence; a satiation was possible that is seemingly forbidden if originality is the first concern. Simply, there was nothing more to be done – humanity had a place in the order of the whole world that allowed completion. The value-sphere of sport is remarkable because it too – uniquely in modernity, it would seem – can offer cycles of satiation and completeness. Of course, there is no meaning for death – it is still only meaning within meaninglessness. But with

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the end of the race, there is nothing more to be done; and especially at the end of the season, with the competition finished, that year’s cycle of sport is complete. With the final whistle of the final game, a satiation is possible. Vitally, the ends of sport, with their strict rules, are not constantly changing or trying to change. Yes, modifications will be made and new types of sport emerge, but the basic ends and regulations of the major sports remain unchanged so that they can be built on year after year. New champions will arise, records will be set – but the order must remain unchanged if those changing details are, in fact, to make sense.16 In sport as a value-sphere, there is an internal cosmic unity in which the modern self can find its place within a cycle of satiated existence. Again, this is not a return to a traditional realm of enchantment; the small internal cosmos of sport is thoroughly modern both in its construction and what it is constructed to escape. Time and space

Time and space are altered within the sphere of sport, with a contrast to the external world again, determinate. Two complementary aspects might be identified. Firstly, every value-sphere creates its own internal order of time and space as witnessed in some obvious cases: working days in a factory or office within the economic sphere; the visit to an art gallery; the routines of home. However, the space and time of sport appear qualitatively different: the areas and durations of competition are explicitly laid out in the rules of the game; and the very point of the competition – winning – utterly depends on this rational order of space and time. Whether a play is ruled in or out, the stopwatch and the final buzzer are what is ultimately decisive. All of time and space in sport is bent around the clear end of the competition; and it is not too far-fetched to say that to enter the sports arena, or any site of sport competition, is to inhabit, however briefly, an alternative reality. And with this additional factor in mind, we might further understand how sport is able to create such a radically differentiated internal cosmos that can offer, in the emotional intensity of winning and losing, a religion-rivalling sense of salvation from the external world. Secondly, the time and space of sport have been extended to the very limits of human comprehension. The concept of a world record or world champion, at least with some sports, embraces all humanity in terms of time and space. The idea, for example, that a race is the fastest that has ever been run captures all human time; and the concept of a world champion encompasses all humanity on earth at the present time. Sport in this sense gains a universal meaning. Arguably, a teleology can be seen to accompany sport in this universality – we can read back from this point to understand this new record as an end, a purpose, of all humanity. But perhaps most importantly, this reach of the time and space of sport to the limits of global humanity displays the full extent of possible meaning that can be mustered against the utter senselessness of the unfathomable time and space of the disenchanted universe. As we saw with the sphere of nature and the planetary earth sciences, this universal but earth-bound extent of sport is as big as meaning can be. It shows, on

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the one hand, the greatness and importance of the meaning of sport, and, on the other hand, how small such meaning is within the overall senselessness of modernity as a whole. Enlightenment values

Meaning and the values of the Enlightenment are intertwined across the spheres. Sport contains the reigning values of equality and even fraternity, but liberty has largely been excluded. In addition, a place is established for the Enlightenment expectation of progress. Firstly, on equality, although social inequalities will be decisive at times, especially in some sports, nevertheless sport generally aspires to be an egalitarian meritocracy of participation. That is, anyone can try to compete and the winner will simply be the best competitor on the day. Sports such as athletics and football (soccer), with their more universal, cross-cultural appeal and relative cheapness, are standardly cited as closest to this egalitarian ideal.17 Also, an egalitarian value runs through competitions and leagues. Usually they are designed so that all teams in a particular competition are, in fact, competitive and could possibly win. Teams at the bottom of the table might face relegation; salary caps might be enforced; bottom teams might get the first draft picks. The very end of sport – the winner – cannot be a certainty or there is no point playing and no meaning generated. So, regulations must be systematically and rationally implemented whereby some overall equality between competitors is instituted. Of course, it often fails and, for example, the same European and British football teams win the overall league championships year after year. However, even in these leagues, the bottom teams are nearly always capable of winning or drawing a match on the day. The possibility of the upset makes it sport. However, arguably, the egalitarian feature that most distinguishes the internal order of sport from the more prosaic spheres concerns justice. The law of sport enables a realisation of justice that is unachievable elsewhere. As a first point, the ideal of all being equal before the law is rigorously upheld as it applies to players within the competition. But, more importantly, this prime Enlightenment value might also be witnessed in the manner that the laws of sport obey Weberian rationalisation. In following Weber’s arguments, we can again see how sport is both part of, and opposed to, the great forces and logics of modernity. On law, Weber sees increased formalisation overcoming more traditional legal practices. In consequence of both juridical rationalism and modern intellectual scepticism in general, the axioms of natural law have lost all capacity to provide the fundamental basis of a legal system. . . . Consequently, legal positivism has, at least for the time being, advanced irresistibly. (ES: 874–5)18

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This process of legal rationalisation and professionalisation develops to a state of systematic elaboration of law and professionalised administration of justice by persons who have received their legal training in a learned and formally logical manner . . . [and an] increasingly logical sublimation and deductive rigor and . . . an increasingly rational technique in procedure. (ES: 882–3) And it becomes more systematised: We refer to ‘systematization’, which has never appeared but in late stages of legal modes of thought. To a youthful law, it is unknown. According to present modes of thought it represents an integration of all analytically derived legal propositions in such a way that they constitute a logically clear, internally consistent, and, at least in theory, gapless system of rules, under which, it is implied, all conceivable fact situations must be capable of being logically subsumed. (ES: 656) Now nearly all this applies to the rules, or laws, of sport. They have become increasingly rationalised and attempts made to eliminate any ‘gaps’ where the application of the law is uncertain. The use of technology to assess the decisions of referees and umpires is the obvious, ubiquitous and ever-developing technique in this regard. However, for Weber, such rationalisation of law is not at all necessarily tied to Enlightenment equality, but it is so in sport because of the differences between justice in sport and the external prosaic. Weber can be used to show us what these dissimilarities are. The major difference between law in and outside sport is that the modern justice system depends on trained legal professionals who alone can understand and administer the law, as Weber states in the quote just given. Indeed, Weber predicted that as law becomes more rationalised, the gap between lay and professional understanding must only increase: Whatever form law and legal practice may come to assume under the impact of these various influences, it will be inevitable that, as a result of technical and economic developments, the legal ignorance of the layman will increase. The use of jurors and similar lay judges will not suffice to stop the continuous growth of the technical elements in the law and hence of its character as a specialists’ domain. (ES: 895) But this is not the case with sport. Spectators, commentators, coaches and players all can know the rules, however rationalised, just as well as the professional referees themselves. There is no specialist class intervening and a quite radical egalitarian legal system is thus in evidence.

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Further, again as Weber shows us, the rational formalisation of law depends on the ‘facts of the case’ being ‘unambiguous’: Law, however, is ‘formal’ to the extent that, in both substantive and procedural matters, only unambiguous general characteristics of the facts of the case are taken into account.19 It is possible that the legally relevant characteristics are of a tangible nature, i.e., that they are perceptible as sense data. This adherence to external characteristics of the facts, for instance, the utterance of certain words, the execution of a signature, or the performance of a certain symbolic act with a fixed meaning, represents the most rigorous type of legal formalism. (ES: 656–7) In sport, the facts of the case are indeed ‘perceptible as sense data’. And, vitally, all are gathered to see these facts play out within the competition, with technology both allowing many more to be observers and allowing the disputed decisions to be seen in forensic detail. As with any rational ideal-type of this kind, some ‘facts’ might never be fully ‘unambiguous’, but such a tangible, sense dependent, formalisation of the rules is completely inherent to the actual practice of sport on a mass democratic level. Sport cannot completely close the gap between law and justice, but without the exclusivity of specialised professionalisation, these egalitarian qualities do form a highly accessible bridge across this divide. Simply, because the laws of sport can be generally known, and are able to be physically witnessed in operation, they are commonly trusted to deliver a just outcome. An egalitarian strand therefore runs through sport as a value-sphere of modernity, but a quite different scenario plays out for the other great Enlightenment ideal of liberty. Freedom, and the kinds of subjectivity associated with this value, have only a small presence in sport. Innovations of players and coaches are dwarfed by the necessity of obedience to the external rules of the game; and spectators, to varying degrees, strive for unification with other supporters – it is the common team colours that count not individual difference. On the basis of these obvious but nevertheless inescapable facts, to enter the irrational, optional realm of sport, as opposed to the spheres of art and nature, is not to try to realise the freedom of the inner subject.20 But if freedom is not an end of sport, it is still significantly determinate. Freedom is the prime value of modernity and its relative absence in sport can easily lead to negative judgements of sport as inherently inferior. But from the value-sphere perspective, it is possible to regard the demands of freedom itself as problematic, with sport offering salvation from this heavy and inescapable burden of modern subjectivity. Across the spheres of modernity the value of freedom, in its many forms, must be obeyed – from formalised legal rights to aesthetic expression. The understanding of freedom as an immensely difficult imperative for the subject to follow is written into its theorisation from the start. Recall how for Rousseau an authentic, inner, more natural self should stand against the opinion of others,

160 The additional value-spheres which, on one reading, would seem to entail a life virtually alone in nature, but at the very least demanded a confrontation with all the social conventions that surround any self desirous of liberation. More recently, in Sartre’s existentialism, the waiter in Being and Nothingness cannot escape the fate that, in perhaps Sartre’s most memorable phrase, ‘man is condemned to be free’. We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. (Sartre, 1956: 295) Or with Adorno, the inner authenticity of Rousseau and Sartre is denied, but a ‘for itself’ of subjective freedom has become increasingly present. A little detail is needed to make sense of Adorno’s position. We live, says Adorno, under ‘the spell of subjectivity’: the hopes of the Enlightenment have become so crushed beneath the historical horrors of the 20th century that we must turn into the individual, and against the objective external forces that have failed us, in order to avoid despair.21 However, such individual subjectivity no longer exists. Under the ‘individualistic veil’: A candid look at the predominance of the universal does all but unbearable psychological harm to the narcissism of all individuals and to that of a democratically organised society. To see through selfhood as nonexistent, as an illusion, would easily turn all men’s objective despair into a subjective one. It would rob them of the faith implanted in them by individualistic society: that they, the individuals, are the substance. For the functionally determined individual interest to find any kind of satisfaction under existing forms, it must become primary in its own eyes. (Adorno, 1973: 312) The result is that the individual recognises itself as a kind of autonomous subject that has already been eliminated by the very forces of history that have themselves created the need for such a subject to exist. Such subjectivity, in Hegelian terms is, therefore, for-itself but not in-itself: Nevertheless, considerations which start from the subject remain false to the same extent that life has become appearance. For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself [das für sich noch ist, aber nicht mehr an sich]. The subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself. (Adorno, 2005: 15–16)

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This self-understanding (self-consciousness, in a loose sense) of an idealised inner subjectivity – for-itself, but no longer in-itself – might best be expressed in Adorno’s understanding of ‘pseudo-individuality’ in the culture industry. Here there is a sense of individual autonomy in the minute choices within cultural offerings that are basically the same. It is not only the standardised mode of production of the culture industry which makes the individual illusory in its products. Individuals are tolerated only as far as their wholehearted identity with the universal is beyond question. From the standardised improvisation in jazz to the original film personality who must have a lock of hair straying over her eyes so that she can be recognised as such, pseudo-individuality reigns. The individual trait is reduced to the ability of the universal so completely to mould the accidental that it can be recognised as accidental. The sulky taciturnity or the elegant walk of the individual who happens to be on show is serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimetre. The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly commodity misrepresented as natural. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 124–5) The Yale lock differentiation of pseudo-individuality is, perhaps, the most widespread manifestation of a subjectivity that is for-itself but not in-itself; the culture industry, for Adorno, casts the most potent of all the spells of subjectivity. Or, to put it slightly differently, the historical demand for this lost subjectivity is met by a mass market selling freedom. However, there is a final twist to this for-itself of subjective freedom – the consumer sees through the advertising process: That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognise as false. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 136) So in the end, there is a sense that the free subjectivity on offer in the culture industry is recognised as grossly limited, but, within historical conditions of objective despair and loss of the actual subject, it is still taken up because there seems no alternative. And, it should be added, the fact that Adorno himself sees the semblance of an alternative only in art merely serves to underscore this general dilemma of the free self in modernity. These three analyses of freedom are not compatible; they are presented merely to highlight ways that freedom can be considered a burden and a part of the external order that sport seeks to escape. Freedom, then, might be largely absent from, but is still a determinant of, the value-sphere of sport. And if the question is asked how sport is able to shun the mighty value that rules the rest of modernity, the answer should be easy: it is only sport – the base triviality of this optional sphere

162 The additional value-spheres of salvation means that it does not matter that freedom, which is so important everywhere else, goes missing here. However, the relative absence of subjective freedom in sport is important for another reason: it allows for the lost ideal of fraternity. The great Enlightenment value of fraternity, which has largely been excluded from every other sphere of modernity, finds a place in sport. In contradistinction to liberty and equality, fraternity has two qualities that contribute to its overall demise: the personal, irrational nature of fraternal bonds stands against the impersonality which allows liberty and equality their rationalised, formalised quantification within the prosaic realms, especially within the laws of the state; and there is a commonly stated unresolvable inner tension in the very concept of fraternity – how can everyone be treated as your own brother? The universal is in conflict with the specific, as against the untroubled logic of universality inherent in freedom and equality.22 The value of fraternity can be witnessed in sport most explicitly in at least some of the early formulations of the modern Olympic ideals, but is expressed in everyday competition by fair play, sportsmanship and even the practice of shaking hands with the opposition before and after the match. And it is rewarded with specific honours for ‘sportsmanship’ or ‘best and fairest’. In all these cases, a personal relationship is established between competitors that sit uncomfortably with the impersonal, formalised rules of how to win. Winning and fraternity are distinct and potentially contradictory values, and this conflict of values is much discussed at every level of sports analysis. But the question for the present argument is how was this value of fraternity able to find its place in sport when it is excluded from the rest of modernity, and even though it is opposed to the dominant value of sport itself? First, a few clarifying points. ‘Fraternity’ has been postulated here as a significant value within the sphere of sport simply because it seems the most likely candidate to explain the various practices that are extolled in sport beyond just winning. Again, this is not to doubt how troublesome the concept of ‘fraternity’ is: it is self-contradictory, gendered and liable to appalling masculinist distortions. However, it was one of the moral imperatives of the Enlightenment and, even as it faded, it remained a sustaining if often highly compromised ideal of modernity. Philosophically a mess, largely unable to be realised in practice, rejected by the rationalisations of the dominant spheres, it nevertheless comes to sport precisely because it sits so uncomfortably with the rest of modernity. Sport is itself structured by those same highly rationalised, impersonal formalisations that spat out the personal ends of fraternity, so how then is this inner realm more amenable to fraternity than the external, dominant world? Again, there is a necessary and unresolvable conflict between the formalised value of winning and the personal ethos of fraternity; however, the difference between sport and the outside world that allows fraternity its place is the relative absence of the value of freedom and its attendant subjectivities. The demands of freedom and its inner subject militate against any bonds of personal concern with the other. This might be highlighted by the conceptualisation of

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freedom and subjectivity in Rousseau, Sartre and Adorno (as displayed in his use of Odysseus), where the emphasis falls so severely on being alone. Or, at its most extreme, the value-sphere of art is the site of probably the greatest display of the free expression of the inner subject, as well as being the site where, as Weber has it, the value of taste rules over any values of ethical care. But if sport has indeed displaced freedom and its subjectivities from their usual dominating position, then there is space for manifestations of the value of fraternity to flourish, even as they remain in battle with the value of winning. One last quality of the Enlightenment, beyond liberty, equality and fraternity, needs to be considered – progress. Although highly contested, the high hopes for the historical achievement of the values of the Enlightenment, based on a radical break with stultifying traditions, are a standard, formative factor in any understanding of modernity. However, again following Adorno on this (and with the Habermasian, liberal critique duly acknowledged), the historical horrors of the 20th century undermined such hopes; and objective despair, with a resultant turn towards subjectivity, followed. How is this huge historical conceptualisation reflected in sport? Simply, objective progress over time, or at least the hope of progress, is built into most sports. This can clearly be recognised in the continual breaking of individual records in, for example, athletics, swimming and weightlifting. But in other sports, the accumulation and quality of titles won, and, especially, a vast range of statistical individual accomplishments (such as number of goals scored, matches played or batting averages) provide objective measures of advancement. Even if some statistical achievements last a very long time and might never be broken (e.g. Bradman’s batting average in cricket or Sotomayor’s men’s high jump record), this does not cancel the expectation for the new young challenger. Or, seen in another sense, even when a team fails year after year, the true fan still backs them and has some hope for progress at the start of every season. Generally, in sport, there is hope not despair of progress, and often there are objective records of continual gain. The internal subject is therefore not needed as solace for objective despair, following Adorno’s analysis. The relative lack of subjectivity in sport might, in this way, be partially explained by such an overwhelming presence of objective betterment. However, a brief qualification is needed. If there is this trivial sense of continual Enlightenment progress in sport, how does this fit with the organic cycles of cosmic completion that sport also seems to offer? In the external, historical world, these two orders of historical time – modern progress as against the traditional cosmos – are indeed in conflict. In sport, on the other hand, they can be reconciled. The overall pattern of the value-sphere of sport might well be one of seasonal cycles of completion, and even each match or game has a beginning and end that will be repeated, but within this cosmos of satiation scope, can be afforded to objective progress. Winning the match or competition is still the main end, but records are easily incorporated as a complementary and important value. The inclusion of progress reveals another entwinement of meaning and Enlightenment in an irrational value-sphere. And the combination of traditional cycles of

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completion with Enlightenment hope is yet a further example of how this alternative inner world accomplishes what the external order cannot. ‘Progress’ might then be added to the list of Enlightenment factors that have determined the nature of sport, but the basic triad of values – liberty, equality and fraternity – should still be recognised as more important. Sport maintains a unique balance between these three heralded Enlightenment ideals, with the scales tipping heavily in favour of equality and, especially, fraternity, and away from liberty. The internal cosmos starts to become more coherent on this account, but what is again highlighted is how the base triviality of sport allowed this radically separate sphere to be formed in this way. The relative unimportance of what happens in sport enables: a uniquely egalitarian justice; various manifestations of fraternity that could have developed nowhere else; and refuge from the usually uncontestable reign of freedom. However, the manifestations of fraternity in sport possess a clear ethical dimension that demands more attention. The good

Despite the extensive philosophical debates on ethics in sport, we will situate sport within Weber’s sociology of ethics. Like all the value-spheres of modernity sport stands opposed to the ethic of brotherly love – the ruling moral standard of modernity for Weber. This would seem to be obviously the case. However, sport contains elements of goodness that make it, in fact, the best of spheres in terms of this Weberian moral reality. In essence, sport does very palely reflect the ethic of brotherliness, but, more significantly, sport manages to avoid following unbrotherly practices, and so is partially saved from the overall guilt that haunts the other spheres of modernity. Three points can be made. Firstly, fraternity, and its expressions in sport in terms of fair play and sportsmanship, clearly owe a debt to the ethic of brotherly love.23 A personal, caring, universal ideal runs from the foundational Christian response to theodicy, through the more political Enlightenment value of fraternal solidarity and brotherhood, and on to how all others should be treated within the competitions of sport. However, in the process of these ethical transcriptions, the original content is so diluted, so thinned out, that only the barest semblance is left. In fact, it is a moral outrage to consider the beginning and the end as somehow equivalent. This has already been illustrated in the quote by Rafael Nadal that began this chapter: ‘It is not a tragedy I lost, it is sport’. Horror and all the evils of the world are what brotherliness deals in; but such actual tragedy has been shut out of the internal order of sport. In its utter triviality, sport has lost contact with suffering, the basic content of the ethic of brotherly love. However, once we do set sport within Weber’s sociological moral terrain of modernity, fair play and sportsmanship can be recognised as good precisely because they have a lineage that can be traced back to the reigning ethic of brotherliness; and a faint simulation of our religiously derived moral standard can be said to be present in sport. Secondly, however, the actual game and the end of winning – the centre of sport – can be regarded as good from the perspective of the ruling ethic of brotherliness.

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Simply, as compared to every other sphere there is a lack of unbrotherly conduct in sport. Weber lists the unethical practices of all the spheres: the economic sphere must deal with impersonal calculation; power and especially violence are unavoidable values in the political realm; even in the academy, impersonal reason, not love, rules for an individually ambitious ‘unbrotherly aristocracy’; for the artist, taste and the demands of inner subjectivity vanquish the ethical; and in the erotic sphere, a selfish brutality abides in sensual love. We could add that even within the ethical domain of home, an anti-universalist harshness is apparent; and in the sphere of nature, we find the demands of the inner self, as in art, hostile to ethical love. Now in sport, the ethic of brotherliness is of course not followed; however, the competition itself, unlike all these other spheres, is not unethical. The winner merely follows the rules like everyone else, and, ideally, does treat the other competitors with some measure of personal, universal care. At least, this judgment of sportsmanship and fair play is a constant ethical presence for the good. And the egalitarian, transparent application of the rules means that everyone can see how the winner has won. In all the other spheres, success comes at the cost of being unethical in terms of the ethic of brotherly love. Think what it almost certainly has taken to have gained immense wealth in capitalism, or to be a successful politician, academic or artist. At a minimum, obedience to the values of the other spheres is ethically doubtful; success everywhere except in sport comes with this price attached. Or, in other words, the winner in sport can be celebrated with unrivalled joy because, unlike those who triumph in every other sphere, they are not suspected of acting badly. Even more strongly it might be claimed that, in the clear sight of all, the winner is cleansed of any wrongdoing – winning might be regarded as an act of purification. Here lies a fundamental ethical contrast with the other spheres of modernity.24 Thirdly, another way of looking at this is to make the claim that sport is one of the very rare spheres not to bear the ‘guilt’ of the age, as Weber saw it. Again, sport of course does not embody the ethic of brotherly love – far from it. But not only does the winner not enact unbrotherly conduct, the lack of real tragedy and suffering in sport means that this ethical judgment simply does not apply. Indeed, sport gains, in this way, an unusual state of innocence. The innocence of sport can itself be regarded from two angles. There is the much discussed element of play in sport that, beyond the anthropological claims of Huizinga and his followers, establishes an association between sport and childhood. The innocence of the play of childhood – so stressed in modernity – can be carried into the realm of sport as long as the important matters of the outside ‘adult’ world are held at bay. The other side to innocence perhaps seems more unlikely, but sport, along with the sphere of nature, might also be understood as prelapsarian. As with the first garden, in sport, the tragedies and sufferings of human life after the fall are not present. It might even be said that in the strict enforcement and following of the rules of competition, obedience is the ruling value. Disobedience, at least for the most serious offences, again means being cast out. Although such religious association

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appears far-fetched, following Weber, we should always be on the lookout for possible religious influences on the meanings of modernity. Truth

There is a fundamental, inescapable epistemology demanded by sport: we have to know who has won and lost. And, building on the discussion of ‘justice’, this knowledge is almost wholly based on what can be seen; basic sense data is not only necessary but almost completely sufficient. The questions to be answered in sport are only: Is it in or out? Who has reached the finishing line first? Has a required physical task been completed? It might take knowledge of some complex rules to be able to fully answer some of the questions that winning throws up in different sports, but, overall, in the most popular sports, an egalitarian epistemology is in place. What has happened must be plain to almost anyone, even the most casual observer. There are qualifications of course. It is accepted that there are biased, supporter views, and so more objective, trained referees and umpires make the decisions. And it is further accepted that these more objective decisions themselves can be wrong so that there has been enormous technological innovation to correct these human errors. Beyond the calculative precision of timing devices, most of this technology has been focussed on providing more and more detailed vision or visual simulations of what has happened – sense data is still primary but increasingly objectified; and the spectators must still be able to see this technologically enhanced image of the sporting moment. Examples are numerous and obvious: slow-motion replays; photo-finishes; VAR offside lines in football; in/out ball simulations in tennis; LBW simulations in cricket. And, it should be noted here, the highly rationalised nature of sport is again in evidence with this reliance on ever-improving technology. Even if still imperfect and open to dispute at times, the overall logic of sport is moving towards more and more certainty. Or, in other words, there is a remarkably strong sense of truth in sport. Almost always when the name is finally inscribed on the trophy, there is the confidence that it is based on the objective, empirically verified truth of what happened. In fact, usually it is the case that many, perhaps millions of people have seen it happen with their own eyes (even if technologically enhanced). Philosophically such a reliance on ‘sense-certainty’ is full of problems, and anthropologically the notion of such a pure sense-based epistemology is wholly suspect – that is, culture ultimately informs all human perception. Nevertheless, ‘truth’ becomes a vital element in the makeup of the internal cosmos of sport in contrast to all the other spheres of modernity. Sport can gain the value of truth because it does not succumb to two other features that prevail elsewhere: inward subjectivity and reason. In the other irrational spheres, notably art, the erotic and nature, some variant of the inner subject is foundational. Any notion of objective truth is thereby precluded from the start, as Kant’s arguments in the Third Critique attest. Any truth bears an

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individual stamp – it is first and foremost true for me. Much of the romantic sensibility revolves around this notion. However, in the dominant rationalised spheres where reason is a ruling value, whatever truths are on offer will be more objective but, unlike sport, they are always contested – uncertainty rules. Here we must return to the problem of reason. We have seen how instrumental reason can be understood in terms of means and ends; and how sport avoids this trap of modernity. In Horkheimer’s reading of this problem, the move to enhanced subjectivity with the Enlightenment broke the objective, metaphysical conditions in which reason could escape instrumentality. Such an account helps explain the rise of instrumental reason but tends to cover up a more fundamental dilemma of reason itself. This dilemma famously marks the West from its very beginning in classical Athens. Socrates, through Plato, repeatedly asserts the position that reason can reach objective truth, but he does so through a series of confrontations with the sophists. The sophist view is that reason is, in fact, instrumental and can be used to argue just about anything at all. It is needed to achieve the good in a democracy but, as the famous sophist Gorgias concedes, yes, of course, it can be used to justify the bad.25 But, further, reason is just one tool among many that can and should be used to win arguments. And how to win an argument is what the sophists were paid to teach the young citizens of Athens. This great tension in reason – between a Platonic and sophist position – is still in place today. In everyday arguments throughout the social order – from chats between family and friends to public political debates – there is a tendency for the following pattern to occur: we begin in a Socratic mood, where calm rational argument is exchanged on the expectation of some objective, agreed truth being reached – as nearly always happened in the Platonic dialogues; however, we usually end in a much more sophistic stance, where almost anything goes and agreement is out of reach. The modern adversarial legal system recognises and reflects this dilemma precisely: the overseeing figures of both the statue of blind justice, with her sword and scales, and the presiding courtroom judge represent an objectivist truth; the legal battle itself, however, does not concern the question of truth but how to win the case, with a jury trial widening the choice of sophistic tools considerably. But, beyond the law, even with the most objective scientific reason, despite much agreement at times, nothing is settled; the original Greek dilemma is still, in fact, in place. A scientific paper sets out to convince its audience of the objective truth of its claims, even though it also knows that this truth will not only be contested but, even if there is some affirmation, eventually surpassed.26 To repeat the Weberian point on this: science, like art, bears the hallmark of cultural endlessness – originality is the primary value. In other words, even at its most seemingly objective and powerful, the truths of science are necessarily also endangered and contested. All the tricks of the sophists might not have a place in a scientific paper, but the Platonic ideal that reason can lead to some kind of lasting, agreed truth27 is both present and necessarily undermined at the same time. Here is the reigning dilemma that runs through this age of legal/rational legitimation. Disenchanted reason is a constant that dangles objective, certain truth

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before the modern self as its greatest reward and then snatches it away at the last moment – always. But not in sport. The basic sense-based truth of, for example, a ball being in or out is not open to contestation by reason. It is not a perfect system of course, but there can be an agreed certainty of what has objectively happened because this truth only relies on what is seen and not on reasoned argument. Rationalised technology within sport is, in fact, dedicated to enhancing and ensuring this empirical foundation to truth and, at the same time, avoiding reason. In this way, the makeup of sport’s internal cosmos is again given more detail. And with the provision of such truth in an uncertain world, the salvation quality of sport is made even more understandable. Beauty

We cannot ignore the importance of beauty in sport. For some, this is its supreme value; and football – the most universal of all team sports – commonly describes itself as ‘the beautiful game’, with noted football coaches deliberately pursuing a style of play that lives up to this slogan of self-promotion. Two qualities of sporting beauty should be initially stated. Firstly, winning is a condition of beauty. In sport, beauty is a secondary value that can only arise when some end of the competition is realised – either winning the whole event, or, more usually, when a smaller win is achieved as part of the competition as a whole, as in scoring a goal in football, or winning a point in tennis, or a single dive in a diving competition. But if the win is not achieved, there is no beauty – winning is always the prime value of sport. A consequence of this fact is that there must be some knowledge of a competition’s rules for this beauty to be appreciated – the win only makes sense within the game. And it also follows that there is no ‘meta’ beauty beyond the game and its specific rules for winning. Secondly, for a win to be beautiful, it must display the highest level of human achievement possible within the particular rules of a competition. Maximum degrees of training and skill are called upon to achieve the most difficult end of the game. There can be no luck involved, nor reliance on opposition error. And the opponents should be worthy ones, so that the level of difficulty is extreme. Examples include, especially at the highest level: a long-range shot, or a passing movement in football to score a goal; a sustained rally of faultless quality in tennis; or the perfectly scored dive or gymnastic routine. But how, then, can this achievement be called ‘beautiful’? A number of steps have to be followed to build up an answer. A first component of the beautiful in sport can be identified via Kant. Despite the realisation of the end of winning, the base triviality of sport ensures that the purposes or interests of the outside spheres are absent within the competition itself. There is a strong sense that sport can thus be said to fit Kant’s definition of aesthetic beauty as being ‘without interest’ and possessing a ‘purposiveness without purpose’. In fact, it is Bourdieu who precisely identifies such a commonality in terms

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of Kantian aesthetic theory, although this is, of course, part of Bourdieu’s ideology, class critique of the supposed uselessness of both art and sport. A second component – the unity of values – can be recognised through comparison with beauty in the value-sphere of nature. But to make sense of this claim, ‘the unity of values’ needs some further explanation and we need to return to the overall logic of disenchantment. The ancient divine cosmos allowed a unity of values, where truth, goodness and beauty were necessarily combined – beauty was a part of the enchanted order of the world. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus is standardly credited with providing an early account of what amounts to the association of beauty with God. But with the disenchantment of the world, this unity of values was shattered, so that by the 18th century, Kant, as discussed, would define beauty as a quite distinct, isolated, subjective value which he would then struggle to re-unite with some kind of moral sensibility. And by the beginning of the 20th century, if we focus on part of a quotation already given, Weber would conclude: And, since Nietzsche, we realize that something can be beautiful, not only in spite of the aspect in which it is not good, but rather in that very aspect. You will find this expressed earlier in the Fleurs du mal, as Baudelaire named his volume of poems. It is commonplace to observe that something may be true although it is not beautiful and not holy and not good. (As quoted, SV: 148) Beauty, truth and goodness are split apart and exist in a sometimes hostile state of independence from each other. This is an aspect of the usual tale of disenchantment – the loss of the divinely ordered cosmos where the unity of values could be enshrined, and the subsequent differentiation of these values in modernity.28 However, if we follow the conceptualisation of the value-spheres adopted in the present argument, we find that, beyond Weber, the additional, irrational spheres of nature and sport each provides an internal cosmos in which re-unification is possible. We might begin to understand beauty, once again, through its relation to truth and goodness. We have already mapped this out in the sphere of nature. The romantic heritage has been the main provider of a deep, inward, irrational truth of nature, alongside at least the sense of an innocence and moral worth. The overarching judgement of the brotherly ethic must still find such inward concerns essentially selfish, but in the stripping out of all traces of humanity including, as far as possible other people, the sphere of nature can avoid the worst excesses of guilt that pervade the necessarily immoral practices of the other spheres. The experience of beauty as the prime value of the natural sphere depends on this internal certainty and moral cleansing. However, it is more than this. With this re-unification of beauty, truth and goodness, the internal cosmos of the realm of nature at least gestures towards the divine meaning of the past. A sense of teleology and transcendence arises from submission by the subject to the beauty of the greater whole.

170 The additional value-spheres What then of beauty in sport? Some basic differences between the two spheres must first be listed. Beauty in sport is not the prime value as it is in nature, but subservient to winning. Sport is played by humans and watched by humans, as opposed to the anti-human ideal of nature. Sport is tied to the dominant forces of modernity in that it is highly rationalised and even perhaps dependent on capitalist investment, as opposed to the romantic reactions still embedded in nature that are aimed precisely against rationalisation in technology, science and capitalism. And, finally, these differences can be summed up in the fact that sport actually imposes a rationalised, humanised order of space and time onto nature. However, despite the starkness of these differences sport, like nature, recombines truth and goodness with beauty – even if the truth and goodness formed within each separate sphere are, in fact, themselves somewhat dissimilar. So, with truth: the objectified, technologically sympathetic sense-certainty of truth in sport stands in high contrast to the subjective truths of nature. And with goodness: like nature, sport achieves a cleansing innocence that manages to avoid the guilt and unbrotherly consequences of the other spheres; but in addition, and in contrast to nature, sport embraces a pale reflection of the brotherly ethos in its advocacy of the fraternal ends of fair play and sportsmanship – a code that is not reconcilable with the inwardness and isolation of the ideal subject of nature. Beauty in sport, like nature, relies on this cleansing goodness and objective (not subjective) certainty. The winning play cannot be considered beautiful unless all compromises and doubts, both moral and epistemological, have been removed. This is particularly the case with regard to ethics: if a winning competitor is found to have cheated by, for example, taking banned drugs then whatever beauty the play might have possessed is summarily nullified. The third component that makes up beauty in sport is more difficult to articulate. The content of beauty in modernity is, in part, a specific expression of an irrational sphere’s internal cosmos of values as it stands against the external, dominating orders of the world. Where the sphere of nature looks back to the divine orders of meaning, the sphere of sport, on the other hand, is fully modern and might speculatively be understood as the remarkable, if trivial realisation of an Enlightenment vision for humanity. Dual aspects can be identified here, and they add to what has already been stated on the value of progress in sport. A beautiful win in sport can be considered the demonstration of the greatness of human agency. That is, humanity has itself made a new world of sport; it has invented competitions in which the most difficult goals can be reached only by enormous skill and dedication. And when they are gained through pure human ability, an ultimate agency of humankind has been demonstrated. It is at this point that the sporting achievement can be called beautiful. The contrast with the progress of external history is stark. There have, of course, been considerable gains in the rationalised spheres, but Enlightenment human agency could never fulfil the early dreams of a better world. The opposite is the case with sport. Within the value-sphere of sport is a human-made, rationalised world in which agency is constantly affirmed. It should also be remembered that, in

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contrast to the achievements in the external, prosaic spheres, such beautiful sporting triumphs are visibly true, uncorrupted, uncompromised and universal. In other words where history has failed, or at least not lived up to its Enlightenment promise, sport has succeeded. Another value of Enlightenment progress, besides agency, is human perfectibility. Again, sport offers a realisation of this end that is denied to actual history itself. The beautiful winning shot or routine can be judged as perfect – it could not have been done better. In fact, on occasions, scoring systems have had to be altered because of too many perfect scores. Further, it might even be the case that the human sporting body is itself being ever perfected, if only in terms of what the competitive body has had to become to reach these heights of a beautiful win.29 In some sports, there is a quite blatant display of this perfectibility of corporeal humanity: in swimming, boxing and gymnastics, the body is in plain sight; and even in football when the goal scorer, after a ‘beautiful’ move or shot tears off their jersey, there is (although vanity might well also play a part) the public exhibition of perfection. These are not bodies made only in the gym (so mocked by the ancient Greeks) but the body perfected to enable sporting success. In sum, human agency and perfectibility help make up beauty in sport. The contrast with the outside, dominant spheres lies not only in the way that these Enlightenment ideals are actually fulfilled but also in the truth, goodness and ultimate purposelessness of the beautiful sporting moment. Conclusion

This account of the internal order of the sporting value-sphere might help explain how sport is: both so trivial and so important; and both separate from and part of the dominant forces of modernity. The basic Weberian model of the irrational value-sphere offering salvation from meaninglessness is confirmed, with meaning and Enlightenment once again intertwined. Remarkably, the highly rationalised competitions of sport provide an ecstatic release from external rationalisation by going beyond both reason and subjective freedom. Some qualifications must be added. Of course, as with any Weberian account, this is only a partial explanation and does not discount the array of other sociological perspectives, especially class, race and gender. Also, this is an ideal version of sport which is repeatedly undermined by the empirical reality. Obvious examples (some of which have been much studied) include: angry parents on the sidelines of junior competitions; the partisan aggression of drunken, male fans; the seemingly ubiquitous presence of inducements to gamble; excessive interference by the economic and political spheres more generally; and the demands of the media, especially for increased audiences. Notes 1 Specific references will be to the 2005 first edition, but the 2016 second edition does not make any changes of substance to these parts of the book.

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2 This is an old point in Weberian scholarship. In 1980, Tenbruck wrote: ‘it is often doubted whether Weber’s substantive research conforms with his own methodology’ (Tenbruck, 1980: 317). 3 There are other ways that sport and Weber have been combined. Guttman makes a somewhat bizarre attempt to apply the arguments of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to sport rather than capitalism (Guttman, 1978/2004: 80ff). Overman uses lessons from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to account for generally destructive, Calvinist-inspired developments in American sports (Overman, 2011). To his credit, Overman gives a stress to the separate if permeable realm of sport (Overman, 2011: 331); however, his authority is lessened by the very limited number of Weber texts cited, and the fact that the actual citation of these texts is incorrect (Overman, 2011: 359). Beamish (2010) uses Weber to try to provide an ethics of sport but the claims he wants to make for goal-rational and value-rational action seem distant from Weber’s actual theories of modernity and religion, and, again, would seem to repeat the problem of mixing together the methodology with the empirical theory. 4 The relation between Weber and Bourdieu is complex. Bourdieu frequently praises Weber (e.g. Bourdieu, 1990: 46); and, as he does here with sport, will recognise the power of Weberian rationalisation and the development of rules, calculability and predictability (Bourdieu, 1978: 824). The concept of ‘field’ comes from a reading of Weber’s ‘Sociology of Religion’ in Economy and Society; however, only the power relations described there are taken up and the acknowledged religious interests left behind (Bourdieu, 1987b: 123–4 esp.). And Bourdieu seems to accept that Weber’s philosophical anthropology does throw up legitimate problems of meaning (Bourdieu et al., 2011: 120), but it is not considered a topic for his science of sociology. 5 See, e.g., on sport, Bourdieu (1987a: 157), Bourdieu (1978: 822); and against ‘social philosophy’ more generally, Bourdieu (1990: 41–2). 6 For example, see Bourdieu (1984: 63, 493, 500) for his critique of not only Kant but effectively all philosophy. 7 A note is needed on the recognition of Adorno in the sociology of sport. Usually, in social and cultural theory, Adorno needs to be defended against a standard, one-dimensional critique which sees his work as simply elitist – as a total condemnation of popular culture combined with a defence of high modernist art. Extraordinarily the opposite is the case within the sociology of sport. There are of course exceptions which sustain the common criticism, but, although Adorno’s severe attacks on sport are acknowledged, Adorno is portrayed as also having a nuanced view which asserts certain positive features of sport (Morgan, 1988; Giulianotti, 2005: 34ff; Inglis, 2004). Unfortunately, this more generous reading of Adorno on sport is not sustainable. Within this pro-Adorno camp, it is argued: that sport is related to ‘play’ and said to offer an alternative to ‘instrumental rationality’ and the ‘domination of nature’; that sport can be compared to art in terms of being an ‘end in itself’; and the more positive aspects that Adorno concedes do exist in mass culture can be extended to include sport. There are a number of problems here. Adorno specifically distances himself from an association of sport and play (Adorno, 1991a: 57; Adorno, 1991b: 89; Adorno, 1981a: 55); he explicitly regards sport, following Veblen, as both socially and individually harmful rather than an ‘end in itself’ (Adorno, 1981b: 80–1); sport is directly compared to jazz and against art (Adorno, 1981c: 131; Adorno, 1991b: 86); in Dialectic of Enlightenment, sport is likened to Sade’s ‘Juliette’ as a defining exemplification of the very problem of instrumental rationality (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 69–70); and sport is in fact differentiated from, if overlapping with, ‘mass culture’ (Adorno, 1991b: 89ff). In other words, all the praise for Adorno’s supposedly affirmative view on sport seems entirely misplaced. How could this have arisen? The adoption by Adorno of a hyperbolic, ironic style on sport is suggested by Inglis (Inglis, 2004) and such positive conclusions might be a case of, as Morgan puts it, trying to ‘turn Adorno against Adorno’ (Morgan, 1988:

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830). But it would appear that the basic problem lies in a doubtful use of the primary texts to make the association between sport and play (see esp. Morgan, 1988: 824, 837, where the two references to Aesthetic Theory and Prisms do not support the play/sport link being claimed). (And it also has to be noted here that this issue is compounded when Inglis’ argument relies on a section from Minima Moralia which is given a bracketed meaning concerning instrumental rationality that is not in the original (Inglis, 2004: 92).) This being said, Adorno will provide insights that will help our understanding of sport. See also Magdalinski and Chandler (2002). Indeed, it appears that any large, internally enclosed, modern structure seems able to be understood in this way, as witnessed in Ritzer’s description of the shopping mall as our ‘cathedral’ of consumption. Despite Ritzer’s Weberian stance, the criticism that can be made of Novak on the use of this term, equally applies to him. There is a problem with the citations to Weber given in this quotation and surrounding statements. Economy and Society is clearly referenced, but then the citations do not match the bibliography, making it difficult to assess the argument. Originally published in 1978. It should be noted that Gumbrecht offers other arguments, for example: on the religious, ritualistic function of stadiums; and a Heideggerian ontological argument. These are weaker parts of his case; the link to religion lacks any theoretical authority and has already been discussed, while the existentialist point will be taken up briefly below. In a later article, Morgan seeks to explain the enormous importance of sport, beyond its ‘triviality’. He sees sport as having ‘final ends’ which are cared deeply about and which give ‘meaning and value in life’ (Morgan, 2007: 9). The philosophical theory he starts with is criticised as too subjectivist, but he wishes to avoid the trap of the ‘panrationalist’, a priori alternative; rather, the specific context of distinctive meanings and values is advocated. A tricky path through the philosophical thicket is negotiated to try to gain this conclusion. But another road could have been taken – outside the terrain of philosophy – that also leads to the theorisation of the immense meaning of sport beyond subjectivism and the a priori universal. See Simon (2015) and Morgan (2015) for a taste of these philosophical debates. An intellectual trajectory is immediately apparent that leads away from the concerns of the present Weberian argument. The Simmel section referred to by Morgan, following Gruneau (Gruneau, 1983: 171), comes from Simmel’s ‘Fundamental Problems of Sociology (Individual and Society)’ (Simmel, 1950: 40ff). Simmel discusses the ‘autonomisation’ of art, nature and play, but does not appear to mention ‘sport’ directly as Morgan suggests (Morgan, 1994: 83). See, for example, Ritzer and his ‘McDonaldization’ take on this theme (Ritzer, 1993/2013) and Bauman on the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989/2000). Guttmann makes the opposite claim and compares what he takes as the ever-changing rules of sport with the sacred traditions of, for example, Mayan-Aztec ball games (Guttmann, 1978/2004: 40). Such a comparison might have some validity, but the rules of sport still do not follow the logic of originality that marks the rest of modern culture – a comparison Guttmann overlooks. As discussed, a great deal of the academic literature is devoted to the opposite side of this claim – how sport is unequal in terms of, most obviously, gender, race and class. The distortions of money in professional sport are another much-covered topic. However, here we must again fall back on the concept of an ideal-type of equality in sport – it is a rational construct with which the flawed empirical reality can be compared, and it is also a substantive, influential goal of sport. Indeed, as has been argued, nearly all the literature on the inequalities of sport includes an assumption of the ‘more’ of sport, which seems to include the egalitarian ideal-type in both of these senses. It should also be added here that the primary emphasis on the winner or champion is, of course, inherently inegalitarian. But the legitimation of claims to sporting success,

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especially as world champions in some sense, depends on the egalitarian principle that a possibly superior opponent has not been excluded from participation. A basic logic of universal equality is at work behind winning in sport, especially as the sport aspires to some sort of global dimension. But, again, the empirical reality always falls far below this ideal-typical model. There is of course a rich debate in jurisprudence on Weber’s account of law. Weber himself gives many cases where natural law still prevails over legal positivism, but was seemingly wrong in his predictions about the inevitable incursion of rationalisation into English law. On sport, the dominant arguments on law and justice seem to run counter to the legal positivist view (see Russell, 2011, 2015, 2019). But it is doubtful if these philosophical arguments are in fact counter to Weber’s sociology of law. Not only does Weber’s account include many examples and arguments on why the pure rationalisation process is not realised but, more generally, it has a basically different theoretical orientation that is concerned with the overall place of law in modernity as opposed to other worldviews. Weber goes on to list another means of achieving such unambiguous facts of the case that have not been mentioned here. The internal world of sport must also be in conflict with the pursuit of the external, prosaic goals of economic or political freedom. Again, this is not to say that participation in sport by individuals or even nations will not be affected by political and/or economic conditions of freedom nor that the actual playing of sport might not affect political and economic freedom (as with the Springbok boycotts). But in all these cases, a difference between the ends of sport and those of the dominant, ruling realms of modernity is still sustained. Again, Habermas and many others despair of this ‘despair’ and stress Enlightenment gains and progresses. A third problem exists with the clearly gendered concept of ‘fraternity’. Like the ethic of ‘brotherliness’, it would appear to exclude all women. However, beyond the historical male bias and frequent masculinist abuses of the term, what is fundamentally at stake is the sentiment that all others should be treated with personal care and even love. So, as a model, you should treat and regard others as you would your brother. But there is no reason why ‘brother’ could not be replaced with ‘sister’ – the same principle of a personal relationship applies. It would be simpler to make the claim that the personal, universal caring qualities of sport are directly derived from the ethic of brotherliness, and so avoid the extra step of ‘fraternity’. Perhaps this is partly the case, but the distance between sport and the ethic of brotherly love is so great that a more indirect route seems likely. The Enlightenment and modernity are so intertwined that the value of fraternity emerges as a probable link between sport and the religious ethic. Across cultures, this ethical judgement on sport and the other spheres will vary. In Australia, for example, it is quite blatant in what is termed the ‘tall-poppy syndrome’. There is a popular, if also much criticised, ethos that all who succeed in every field but sport are doubted and an attempt made to cut them down to size. In America, with its famed meritocracy and celebration of success, perhaps this is less apparent. See the exchange between Socrates and Gorgias at the start of Plato’s Gorgias. In ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber underlines this condition of science: In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense, as compared with other spheres of culture for which in general the same holds. Every scientific ‘fulfillment’ raises new ‘questions’; it asks to be ‘surpassed’ and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact. Scientific works certainly can last as ‘gratifications’ because of their artistic quality, or they may remain important as a means

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of training. Yet they will be surpassed scientifically – let that be repeated – for it is our common fate and, more, our common goal. We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. In principle, this progress goes on endlessly. (SV: 138, Weber’s emphasis) 27 As a qualification, Socrates does sometimes admit to the limits of his conclusions and invites better answers. 28 Indeed, in ‘Science as a Vocation’, the polytheistic value-spheres that arise out of the disenchantment of the unified orders of the divine are almost equated with these three distinct qualities that the dismemberment of the unity of values has produced. As discussed in the early chapters, ‘Science as a Vocation’ offers various, inconsistent options on how to understand the polytheistic value-spheres. The ‘Intermediary Reflection’ is needed for clarity. However, this apparent equation of the now separated ideals of beauty, truth and goodness with the value-spheres of modernity has been pursued as a theoretical option, with Habermas probably the leading example. 29 And within the highly rationalised realm of sport, innovations in technology and science, it should be noted, have been instrumental in the pursuit of this goal of perfection.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W.: aesthetic theory 127–128; attacks on sport 144, 172–173n7; Dialectic of Enlightenment 83–89, 127; Enlightenment values 160–161; on nature 116; on the Odyssey 83–89 aesthetic value-sphere 1, 14–15, 26–30, 31, 34, 52–55, 63, 111, 114–116 Ancient Greeks 5, 35n3, 83–89 Antigone 79–83 Attenborough, David 120–121 authentic inner self 37n21 Baird, Julia 110–111, 120, 128, 131, 132, 135n25 Barnes, Simon 137 beauty 32, 114–116, 122–124, 129, 168–171 Bellah, Robert 38 Best, David 147 Blake, William 131 Bourdieu, Pierre 34, 140, 142–143 brotherliness: aesthetic value-sphere 52–55; charismatic–communistic 46–47, 48; economic value-sphere 49; erotic valuesphere 53–55; ethic 38, 58n11, 59n18, 129–130, 174n22, 174n23; forms 39– 48; guilt 55–57; ideal-type 39–41, 46, 47–48, 49; intellectual/scientific valuesphere 50–52; Jewish 59n19; mystic 44–45, 46, 48; organic 45–46, 48; political value-sphere 49–50; Puritan 41–44, 48, 59n22; sport 164–166 Buddhism 59n16 bureaucracy 1, 14, 49–50, 97 calling 3, 13, 15–18, 20, 23–24, 30, 36n10, 36n11, 42, 43, 45–46, 57 Calvinism 16, 18, 22, 35–36n9, 35n9, 41, 49, 172n3

capitalism 1, 14, 16, 17–21, 49, 50, 57–58n5, 73, 85, 97, 103, 132, 138, 140, 152, 154, 155, 165, 170, 172n3 charismatic–communistic brotherliness 46–47, 48 charismatic legitimation 66 childhood 70 Chinese rationalisation 58n11 communist communities 40–41 Confucianism 35n3, 59n18 de Hooch, Pieter 72 Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield 73, 75–77; Great Expectations 73–75; home value-sphere 73–77 disenchantment: home value-sphere 63–64, 65, 67–72, 73, 78–89, 91, 92, 93, 94n14, 94n18; intellectual/scientific value-sphere 3–4, 14, 36n12, 50; meaning 11; meaninglessness 1, 18, 26; nature 124; nature value-sphere 98, 100, 108, 119–122, 132; religion 5–6, 13, 22–24, 175n28; sport value-sphere 145–147, 150, 152–153, 156, 167, 169 divine law 89–93 Durkheim, Émile 100, 146, 147 Dutch art 72–73, 101 economic value-sphere 1, 5, 13, 14–15, 18–21, 49 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 126–127 enchantment 70 Enlightenment: equality 132, 153; fraternity 174n23; freedom 78, 132–133, 153; meaning 30–34; myth 83–84, 85, 86; nature 101, 108, 132; reason 153–154; religion 7n7, 13, 55, 153; value formations 37n16; values 157–171

184

Index

equality 31, 34, 67, 106, 132, 139, 143, 153, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 173–174n17 erotic value-sphere 1, 14–15, 26–30, 53–55, 63, 71, 100 Essenes 47, 59n19 ethics: brotherliness 1, 3, 6, 38–57, 57–58n5, 58n11, 59n18, 59n20, 59n22, 65, 72, 124, 128–130, 164–166, 174n22, 174n23; calling 25, 35–36n9; demands of war 91; nature 126, 127–128; Nietzsche’s denunciation 57–58n5; organic 45–46, 48, 59n17; play 137; Protestant work ethic 15–17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 36n10, 94n12, 152; religion 4, 13, 22, 28; sociology of 59n20; space of divine order 81, 90; space of home 65, 69–71, 78, 82, 92, 93; sport 149, 164–166, 172n3, 174n24 family 90–93 Foster, John Bellamy 100 Franklin, Benjamin 19, 21 fraternity 31, 157, 162–163, 164, 174n22, 174n23 freedom: aesthetic value-sphere 31–34, 37n19, 66, 105; home value-sphere 66, 78, 79–80, 82, 88, 90; nature value-sphere 110, 119, 127, 131–132; reason 153; sport value-sphere 159–163, 164, 171, 174n20; subjective 31, 34, 132–133, 161, 162, 171 Geertz, Clifford 140 Geist (Spirit) 79 Giulianotti, Richard 139, 140 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 111 guilt 1, 38, 51, 55–57, 57–58n5, 59n22, 72, 79, 128–129, 164, 165, 169, 170 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 147–148 Guttmann, Allen 139, 143–144 Hegel, Georg W. F.: aesthetic philosophy 72; on Antigone 79–83, 89; divine law 89–93; Phenomenology of Spirit, The 79; subjective freedom 34, 81 Hinduism 6, 59n17 Holleman, Hannah 100 Homer: Iliad 83–84; Odyssey 84–89 homesickness 86 home value-sphere: concept 63–65; disenchantment 78–89; Dutch art 72–73; ethical space 94n8; ideal-type 93n3,

94n7; internal cosmos 65–77, 94n10; leaving/return 77–78; personal meaning 65–66; salvation 71–72; traditional meaning 66–71; women 89–93; works of Charles Dickens 73–77 Horkheimer, Max 153–154 housekeeping 69–70 Huizinga, Johan 138–139, 141, 143, 165 Humboldt, Alexander von 111 ideal-type brotherliness 39–41, 46, 47 impersonality 20, 42–43, 44, 45, 49–51, 59n16, 67, 72, 80, 92, 129, 162 inequality 31, 34, 37n22, 45, 92, 95n25, 106, 107, 111, 116 Ingham, Geoffrey 139 intellectual/scientific value-sphere 1, 5, 14–15, 21–24, 36n12, 50–52, 100–101, 113–114 iron cage 1, 20, 139, 147 irrational experience 4–6, 24, 26, 35n7 Islam 58n6 Kant, Immanuel: aesthetic philosophy 31–34, 111, 114–116, 118, 122–126, 129, 148, 166, 168–169; Critique of Judgement 114, 124 labour 1, 15, 16–21, 23, 41, 42–44, 49, 64, 69, 78, 92, 94n12, 101, 137, 149, 150, 152 Lasch, Christopher 144 legitimation 66–68 Luther, Martin 16 Mandelbaum, Michael 144–145 Marx, Karl 100 meaning 11–34, 139–140, 150, 155, 163 meaninglessness 11–14, 18, 155 Mellor, Philip A. 146 morality 124–129 Morgan, William J. 148–150 mystic brotherliness 44–45, 48, 103 mysticism 59n16 Nadal, Rafael 136, 164 nature: aesthetic value-sphere 114–116; beauty 114–116, 122–124; conditional value 119; disenchantment 119–122; Enlightenment 101, 108; equality 132; erotic value-sphere 100; intellectual/ scientific value-sphere 50–51, 100–101, 113–114; isolation 119; morality

Index 124–129; participation 116–119; religion 129–132; separation 111–116; sociology of 99–101; subjective freedom 132–133; subjectivity 103–111; sublime 122–124; values at work 119–132; value-sphere 97–98, 101–119; wild 101–103, 130–131 Nietzsche, Friedrich W.: beauty 4, `69; denunciation of Christian ethics 57–58n5; Genealogy of Morals, The 39, 57–58n5, 57n5 Novak, Michael 145–147 organic brotherliness 45–46, 48 Plato 167 play 138–139, 165 political value-sphere 1, 5, 14–15, 24–26, 49–50 polytheism 3–4, 6, 52, 120, 150, 175n28 predestination 16, 35n9, 43 Protestantism 21–24, 35–36n9, 41–44 Protestant work ethic 15–17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 36n10, 94n12, 152 Puritan brotherliness 41–44, 48, 59n22 Puritanism 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 35–36n9, 44, 46, 55, 59n16 rational-legal legitimation 66–68 reason: bureaucratic 150; calculative 92; disenchanted 36n12, 67, 72, 84, 86–89, 122, 167–168; Hegelian view 79–82; impersonal 165; instrumental 1, 167; Platonic view 27, 167; science/ intellectual 5–6, 21–24, 50–51, 121, 152–154, 155; truth 166 religion 4–6, 13, 22–24, 28–29, 34–35n2, 38, 45–46, 50, 52, 55, 131–132, 145–147, 150; see also Buddhism; Calvinism; Confucianism; Hinduism; Protestantism; Protestant work ethic; Puritan brotherliness; Puritanism romantic-aesthetic subjectivity 31, 37n18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 2nd Discourse on Inequality 105–108, 113–114, 131; aesthetic value-sphere 31, 33–34; authentic inward subject 100; inner authenticity 160; Reveries of a Solitary Walker 103–105, 108, 111, 112–113, 119 salvation: aesthetic value-sphere 1, 28–29, 31, 34, 52–53; erotic value-sphere 1, 26–30, 100; home value-sphere 63–64,

185

71–78, 92; labour 17, 19, 43; mystic brotherliness 44; nature value-sphere 98, 100, 122, 130, 132; religion 28–29, 35–36n9, 35n3, 40–41, 43, 46–47, 53, 58n11, 59n16, 59n22, 129; social order 13; sport value-sphere 136, 150–152, 156, 159, 162, 168, 171 Sartre, Jean-Paul 160 Schlegel, Friedrich 111 science 3–6, 14, 21–24, 97, 100, 113–114, 122, 174–175n26; see also intellectual/ scientific value-sphere sense 150–151, 156 senselessness 150–151 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 118 Shilling, Chris 145–147 Socrates 167 space 156–157 sport: aesthetic qualities 147–148; beauty 168–171; brotherliness 164–166; characteristics 139; concept 136–138; endless new 155–156; Enlightenment values 157–164; ethical judgement 174n24; freedom 159–163, 164, 171, 174n20; futility 141–142; means/ end relation 143–144, 152–155; play 138–139, 165; pursuit of wealth 19; rationalisation/bureaucracy view 139–140; religion 145–147; sense 150–151; senselessness 150–151; separate/trivial nature 141, 143; space 156–157; spectacle 140; theories 138–150; time 156–157; truth 166–168; value-sphere 149–171 subjectivity: aesthetic value-sphere 34, 53, 148; free 81; home value-sphere 64, 83–89, 93, 95n20, 95n25; individualised 73; inner 28, 37n21, 108; nature 103–111, 116, 117–118, 119, 123, 131, 132, 134n9; resetting 6; romantic-aesthetic 31, 37n18; sport 159–161, 163 sublime 122–124 suffering: brotherliness 38, 39, 40, 41–46, 49, 50–54, 56, 58n10, 95n27; disenchantment 150; home value-sphere 71–72, 77, 80, 82; meaning 11, 12; nature value-sphere 128–129, 130; religion 35n3, 35n9, 146; sport value-sphere 164, 165; theodicy 57–58n5, 57n2, 94n14 taste 31, 32, 33, 115 theodicy 12, 35n7, 38, 41, 55, 57–58n5, 57n2, 94n14, 164 Thoreau, Henry David 102, 127

186

Index

time 156–157 Tolstoy, Leo 21 traditional legitimation 66–71 value-spheres: aesthetic 1, 14–15, 26–30, 31, 34, 52–55, 63, 111, 114–116; economic 1, 5, 13, 14–15, 18–21, 49; erotic 1, 14–15, 26–30, 53–55, 63, 71, 100; home value-sphere 63–93; intellectual/scientific 1, 5, 14–15, 21–24, 36n12, 50–52, 100–101, 113–114; irrational 1, 14–15, 97; nature 97–98, 101–119; political 1, 5, 14–15, 24–26, 49–50; rational 1, 14–15; sport 149–171 Veblen, Thorstein 140, 141–142, 143 Vermeer, Johannes 72 vocation see calling wealth 17–18, 19, 35n3, 35n10, 72–73, 107, 165

Weber, Marianne 57 Weber, Max: Economy and Society 139; ‘Intermediary Reflection’ 13–14, 26–30, 35–36n9, 36n12, 38–41, 47, 48, 49–51, 55–56, 59n22, 175n28; interpretation 2–3; ‘Politics as a Vocation’ 56; Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The 13, 15–21, 41–44, 95n25, 100, 133; Religion of India, The 50; ‘Science as a Vocation’ 3–5, 21–24, 56, 152 Williams, Raymond 99, 103, 114, 116, 118, 134n8; ‘Ideas of Nature’ 102; Keywords 101–102 women 89–93 Wordsworth, William: Lyric Ballads 116; ‘Preface’ 116–117; Prelude, The 109–110; ‘Resolution and Independence’ 117–118; romantic vision 101; Tintern Abbey 108–109, 126