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PARTISAN REVIEW
and in numerous rereadings of that essay always caused me to stop,
was this :
In the world of realities, as a rule , we encounter the ever-renewed ex–
perience that the adherent of an ethic of ultimate ends suddenly turns
into a chiliastic prophet. Those, for example, who have just preached
'love against violence' now call for the use of force for the
last
violent
deed , which would then lead to a state of affairs in which
all
violence is
annihilated .. .. The proponent of an ethic of absolute ends cannot
stand up against the ethical irrationality of the world . He is a cosmic–
ethical 'rationalist.' Those of you who know Dostoievski will remember
the scene of the 'Grand Inquisitor,' where the problem is poignantly
unfolded .
If
one makes any concessions at all to the principle that the
end justifies the means, it is not possible to bring an ethic of ultimate
ends and an ethic of responsibility under one roof or to decree ethically
which end should justify which means.
Weber must have had someone in mind . Who?
Two anguished young men had been members of Weber's
Heidelberg circle during World War I , two men whose torments he
regarded with sympathy. Both had, from the same impulses, joined
revolutionary causes, and both, in their ways, suffered tragic fates.
One was Ernst Toller, the deeply emotional poet and play–
wright. Sensitive to the anti-Semitism in German universities, Tol–
ler had gone to study in Grenoble, but returned to Germany in
1914, voluntarily, to enlist in the army. Invalided at the front in
1916, he suffered a nervous breakdown and, discharged from the ar–
my, took up with righteous passion the cause of pacifism. At Weber's
Sunday afternoon open house sessions, in the winter of 1917-18, he
would read his poems aloud. His listeners, as Marianne Weber re–
ports, were "stirred by the breath of a pure soul that had faith in the
original goodness and solidarity of human beings . ... " Toller gath–
ered around him a group of young men devoted to pacifism and
asked Weber to sanction their cause. As Toller writes in his autobio–
graphy,
I Was a German :
. .. it was to Max Weber that most of the youth of the day turned , pro–
foundly attracted by his intellectual honesty. He loathed political ro–
manticism and bitterly attacked [Max] Maurenbrecher [a leading so–
cial reformer who proclaimed the mission of Germany to revitalize
Europe] and with him all those German scholars . .. .What is the use,
he would say, of finding one's own soul when the nation itself gropes in
outer darkness? The German State was an autocracy . .. .
