ABSTRACT
As Ferenc Feher (1991: 351) has suggested, ‘In analyzing modernity all roads start from and lead to Max Weber’. We might add that these roads lead back therefore to what Weber saw as the dominant principle characterizing modernity: namely, that of ‘means-ends,’ ‘purposive’ or ‘instrumental rationality’ (Weber, 1978: 24). As Lawrence Scaff (2000: 104) puts it, ‘Weber’s most distinctive and original contribution to an understanding of modernity,’ the rationalization thesis, maintains ‘that the essential driving mechanism of purposive or instrumental rationality is “intellectualization” or the increasing dominance of abstract cognitive processes.’ Allied with the growth of ‘instrumental rationality’ is the process of
‘disenchantment.’ Weber held that Western rationalism had created the conditions for greater mastery over nature (e.g., modern science and technology) but had simultaneously robbed humans of the capacity to give meaning and significance to their existence. He says in ‘Science as Vocation,’ that the disenchantment of the world ‘means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’ (Weber, 1948b: 139). Weber (1948b: 139) adds that modern man no longer has ‘recourse to magic means in order to master and implore the spirits’; he only has at his disposal ‘Technical means and calculations [to] perform the service.’ So what kind of culture does this reliance on ‘technical means’ and
‘calculation’ breed? And, how satisfying is it to either create works of art or contemplate them in an age where ‘mysterious powers’ have been vanquished? On the positive side of the balance sheet, we find the kind of simultaneous flowering of art and science during the Renaissance that rationalism seemed to spawn. Weber (1948b: 141) suggests ‘the great innovators in art’ of the period elevated ‘the experiment to a principle of research,’ the best examples of which were ‘Leonardo and … above all, the sixteenth century experimenters in music with their experimental pianos.’ Presumably Weber is referring here to the keyboard instruments that were a precursor to the piano. The modern piano did not emerge until the early eighteenth century, as Michael Chanan (1994: 195) tells us, when a ‘Paduan instrument-maker, Bartolomeo Cristofori, in response to a request from his
patron, a prince of the Medici, for an instrument to “improve” on the harpsichord … successfully constructed such an instrument, in which the strings were struck from below by hammers activated by the keys, and the sound was dampened when the key was released.’ In the 1920 introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capit-
alism, he adds to the list cultural products associated with rationalism: the ‘pointed arch and cross-arched vault’ in Gothic architecture; the ‘rational utilization of linear and aerial perspective’ in Renaissance painting and architecture; and, in the case of music, a list of developments including the use of ‘rational tone intervals’ and the organization of the Western symphonic ‘orchestra, with its string quartet as a nucleus’ (Weber, 1976: 14). On the negative side of the balance sheet, Weber (1976: 14) notes that ‘[t]he musical ear of other peoples has probably been more sensitively developed than our own.’ In the famous conclusion to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he also sounds a more general warning about the cultural and artistic consequences of rationalism:
No one knows who will live in this [iron] cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or whether there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals … of this cultural development, it might truly be said: ‘Specialists without spirit; sensualists without heart.’
