Max Weber
Max Weber
Wilber's View
Weber supplies Wilber with two specific analytic tools rather than a broad worldview to argue with. First, a typology of rationality: Wilber borrows Weber's distinction between purposive-rationality (scientific-technological knowledge), formal rationality (mathematics), and intersubjective or practical rationality (morality and communication) — a three-way split that anticipates Wilber's own insistence that "rational" is not one thing but tracks onto the it, we, and I domains of the Big Three. Second, and more load-bearing, Wilber (via Habermas's quotation of Weber) adopts Weber's account of modernity's "dignity" as the differentiation of the value spheres — science, morality, and art each pursuing "validity" on its own terms (truth, justice, taste) rather than being fused under one authority, usually religion. That formulation becomes one of the central structural claims of the second half of SES: the differentiation Weber identifies is real progress, but when the three spheres go on to dissociate from each other entirely rather than staying integrated, the result is flatland — the reduction of we and I to it. Weber is also named, briefly, as one link in the older Dilthey/Weber/ Heidegger hermeneutic lineage Wilber draws on for reading meaning "from within" a culture's practices, and as one of the "doctors of modernity" (with Hegel, Marx, Schiller, Freud, Heidegger) who tried to heal the fragmentation modernity produced.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
The word rational is an impossible label; it means a million things to a million people… Weber, for example, differentiated between purposive-rationality (such as scientific-technological knowledge), formal rationality (such as mathematics), and intersubjective or practical rationality (as displayed in morality and communication).
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature"
We have seen that one of the great defining marks of modernity—what has been called its genuine dignity—was the clear differentiation of the Big Three, the differentiation of science (it), morals (we), and art (I)… "Cultural modernity's specific dignity is constituted by what Max Weber called the differentiation of the value spheres in accord with their own logics."… But if the dignity of modernity was the differentiation of the Big Three, the disaster of modernity would be that it had not yet found a way to integrate them. Indeed, with no unifying center, the Big Three had already begun to move into dissociation—to exist as radically separate, "hyper-autonomous" realms, with nothing to say to each other, bound only by a thoroughgoing and often mutual disdain.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12, "The Collapse of the Kosmos"
To understand and articulate this in a sociological fashion… I must look into the whole network of shared social practices and the "background unconscious" of linguistically… structured meanings… (That is a short summary of the hermeneutic program from Wilhelm Dilthey and Weber and Heidegger down to today with Paul Ricoeur and Hans Gadamer and Geertz and Taylor.)
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within"
