Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Max Weber: Methode, Auffassung von Realität (Neo-Kantianismus)

Kurzinhalt: According to him, reality is an infinite and meaningless sequence, or a chaos, of unique and infinitely divisible events, which in themselves are meaningless: all meaning, all articulation, originates in the activity of the knowing or evaluating subject.

Textausschnitt: 76a But let us hasten back from these awful depths to a superficiality which, while not exactly gay, promises at least a quiet sleep. Having come up to the surface again, we are welcomed by about six hundred large pages covered with the smallest possible number of sentences, as well as with the largest possible number of footnotes, and devoted to the methodology of the social sciences. Yet we notice very soon that we have not escaped trouble. For Weber's methodology is something different from what methodology usually is. All intelligent students of Weber's methodology have felt that it is philosophic. It is possible to articulate that feeling. Methodology, as reflection on the correct procedure of science, is necessarily reflection on the limitations of science. If science is indeed the highest form of human knowledge, it is reflection on the limitations of human knowledge. And if it is knowledge that constitutes the specific character of man among all earthly beings, methodology is reflection on the limitations of humanity or on the situation of man as man. Weber's methodology comes very close to meeting this demand. (Fs)

76b To remain somewhat nearer to what he himself thought of his methodology, we shall say that his notion of science, both natural and social, is based on a specific view of reality. For, according to him, scientific understanding consists in a peculiar transformation of reality. It is therefore impossible to clarify the meaning of science without a previous analysis of reality as it is in itself, i.e., prior to its transformation by science. Weber did not say much about this subject. He was less concerned with the character of reality than with the different ways in which reality is transformed by the different types of science. For his primary concern was with preserving the integrity of the historical or cultural sciences against two apparent dangers: against the attempt to shape these sciences on the pattern of the natural sciences and against the attempt to interpret the dualism of natural and historical-cultural sciences in terms of a metaphysical dualism ("body-mind" or "necessity-freedom"). But his methodological theses remain unintelligible, or at any rate irrelevant, if one does not translate them into theses regarding the character of reality. When he demanded, for example, that interpretive understanding be subservient to causal explanation, he was guided by the observation that the intelligible is frequently overpowered by what is no longer intelligible or that the lower is mostly stronger than the higher. In addition, his preoccupations left him time to indicate his view of what reality is prior to its transformation by science. According to him, reality is an infinite and meaningless sequence, or a chaos, of unique and infinitely divisible events, which in themselves are meaningless: all meaning, all articulation, originates in the activity of the knowing or evaluating subject. Very few people today will be satisfied with this view of reality, which Weber had taken over from neo-Kantianism and which he modified merely by adding one or two emotional touches. It is sufficient to remark that he himself was unable to adhere consistently to that view. He certainly could not deny that there is an articulation of reality that precedes all scientific articulation: that articulation, that wealth of meaning, which we have in mind when speaking of the world of common experience or of the natural understanding of the world.1 But he did not even attempt a coherent analysis of the social world as it is known to "common sense", or of social reality as it is known in social life or in action. The place of such an analysis is occupied in his work by definitions of ideal types, of artificial constructs which are not even meant to correspond to the intrinsic articulation of social reality and which, in addition, are meant to be of a strictly ephemeral character. Only a comprehensive analysis of social reality as we know it in actual life, and as men always have known it since there have been civil societies, would permit an adequate discussion of the possibility of an evaluating social science. Such an analysis would make intelligible the fundamental alternatives which essentially belong to social life and would therewith supply a basis for responsible judgment on whether the conflict between these alternatives is, in principle, susceptible of a solution. (Fs)