|
|
|
 |
These are a few paragraphs from the essay "The scholar's vocation" by Chad Wellmon, published in the Aeon Magazine and accessible at here.
These group of paragraphs trace the idea of vocation in the modern sense of the term to its roots. Those roots provide guidance on to relook at what we call work today.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Weber described the daily disciplines of Benedictine, Jesuit and Cistercian monks as rules for living. These liturgies imbued a monk's day with a rhythm and reasons for conducting himself in a particular way. The Benedictine Rule's division of each day into set periods of ora and labora, for example, is often counted with the ringing of the bells.
The Rules gives form not only to an individual monk's day but also to the community and common projects that could stretch for years and unto death, such as copying manuscripts in the Scriptorium. The work of a monk is not paid by the hour. For the Benedictine, work, like liturgical prayer or leisure, has its own internal goods - for example, the joy of discovering an irreverent image in the margins of a manuscript - and is an act of worship. Spiritual disciplines transform a monk's body, mind and soul; they help make right action habitual; and they orient him to Christ.
Monastic communities, observed Weber, considered a well-lived life a well-ordered one. Even with its transcedent orientation, the Benedictine Rule, for example, is mundane. Its existential realism is based on the recognition that 'inertia of disobedience', as the Rule reads, erodes attention. Discipline links a person to reality, making it possible to listen, see and be in the here and now. Weber claimed to see how in various forms of 16th-century Protestanism such disciplined ways of living had escaped the walls of churches and monasteries and become imperative for all (Protestant) Christians. The ascetic, who 'works' tirelessly on his own life according to a discipline or method, hopes for transformation.
In 'The Scholar's Work', Weber addresses the meaning of an intellectual vocation by adapting the idea of a 'religious regulation of life' and, in particular, the concept of Beruf, the word that appears in the title of his Munich lecture and means 'calling', 'vocation' -- or 'work', in modern times. In order to articulate the paradoxical notion of a true calling in a time when the gods who might issue it have left, fallen silent or been drowned out by modernity's rational structures, Weber draws on an analysis of Calvinism that he had presented more than a decade earlier in The Protestant Ethic and returned to as part of his studies of world religions. What forms of human agency were possible in a world of bureaucratic constraints, the erosion of traditional forms of authority, and the proliferation of often conflicting values?
For Weber, vocation had two meanings: a traditionally religious one, as in a calling from God, and a professional one, as one's job or employment. Vocation referred to both an individual form of specialisation and a social category of organisation. To fulfil's one's calling was to act on an individual belief (that one had, in fact, been called to do and serve something in particlar) but also to fit into an extra-individual, specialised and rational organisation of the social world. Weber thought this distinctly Western conception of vocation emerged as a possible solution to the problem of meaning by tying together the need to earn money and the need to conceive of one's life as a coherent whole. Under capitalism, vocation and work had become the primary forms of discipline for modern life.
Yet, all disciplines can form as well as deform the live they are purported to guide. They can fail and harm not because disciplines and rules are necessarily oppressive, but rather because historically they have often developed into what Weber in the Protestant Ethic called 'shells as hard as steel'. Instead of helping people shoulder intellectual or moral burdens, disciplines and rules can become fixed and obviate the possibility of judgement and exceptions. The automation of physical labour has an analogue in the formalisation of intellectual and moral activity: the hardening of habits into mechanicalness. When disciplines and rules become recalcitrant and rigid, reflection on why a given rule or discipline exists at all can become impossible.
Weber thought that, in contrast to the transcendent aspirations of monastic asceticisms, modern asceticisms aimed for human self-perfection in this world. Common to each of these modern disciplined ways of living was a commitment to truth, to facing up to the demands of the day, or what he termed a 'matter-of-factness'. In order to claim a life as one's own, one must be able to give an account of oneself in light of one's present moment and the conditions in which one lives.
| |
|