ABSTRACT
Positivism believed it could give the social sciences and humanities a foundation in ‘scientific morality’. The absurdity of the positivist project lies in its attempt to arrive at a ‘scientific’ morality by the exclusion of moral factors. For it separates from the total tasks of human cognition precisely those which are relative to the existence and values of men in general, disregarding all particular capabilities or peculiarities of race, class, or person. Doctrinally, Max Weber was entirely a pupil of H. Rickert, whose thesis he took over, without any profound criticism, that all conceptual thought simply aims at overcoming an intensively and extensively infinite multiplicity. The objective essential constitution of a subject area does not in itself contain anything like a value, idea, norm. In the essential order of being the spirit perceives a being and an order which pre-date the division into that which ‘is’ contingent, chance reality and that which it ‘ought’ to be and eventually become.
