THE SOCIOLOGY OF EXISTENTIALISM
295
an inviolable necessity, a highest directive for action and beyond
this a guarantee of success. It was Max Weber-in the combination
of a lofty ethic with relentless perspicuity of vision a spiritual kinsman
of Thucydides- who, at the beginning of this century, first demon–
strated the impossibility of such constructions, and, in the wake of
Luigi Brentano, sharply divided the scientific investigation of social
facts from all value interpretations.
Thus the traditional identification of being and value became
untenable, after their confusion for thousands of years. The natural
sciences no longer needed the personalizing analogies; the social sci–
ences investigated, by the empirical-critical method, their archetypes,
the structures of society. This knowledge had, to be sure, its price:
the insight into the indifference to value of the cosmic process and
into the impossibility of a scientific justification of our ultimate values.
IV
When in 1919, before the students of Munich, Max Weber
developed these views in his famous address "Science as Vocation,"
he produced downright consternation. The most important repre–
sentatives of the philosophy oriented to the cultural disciplines–
Theodor Litt, Max Scheler, E. Spranger-then took issue with the
radical theses of Weber's position, without however being able to
weaken
it
in its decisive points. The best insight into the ideological
atmosphere of these discussions, however, is provided not by their
contributions, but by the monograph of Erich von Kahler: "The
Vocation of Science." Here all the wishes and yearnings are revealed
and enunciated without regard to the rules of demonstration. The
plaint is raised that "the old science is shattered in its human signif–
icance" and that it ought to be replaced by a "new, contemplating
and not merely thinking science," which "must be a knowing in the
unique, age-old magical meaning, which can embrace its own destiny,
and not an aggregate of bits of learning."
Thus the generation which came home from the First WorId
War stood under the shattering impression at once of the theoretical
invalidity of value metaphysics and of the indemonstrability of ulti–
mate values by objective science. Add to this: in actual life the disso–
lution of the social order with its collective value patterns, and above