Aleksey Rutkevitch

Max Weber’s lecture “Science as a vocation and a profession” sums up a hundred years history of the German “Humboldtian” university. From the reflections on the academic career in Germany of his time he passes to the feeling of “inner vocation” and to the science as Weltanschauung. As a sociologist of religion Weber retraces the genealogy of the university professors: the worldly asceticism of the intellectuals has a source in the secularization of the religion of salvation. Humboldtian University was protestant by its spirit, science was experienced as a religious vocation by Lutherans, combining the progressivism of Enlightenment with philosophical speculation in the manner of Fichte or Hegel. This University is now dead and the question of inner “vocation” is even a more pressing issue for the scientific community than in times of Weber. Further secularization and democratization of the university eliminates the religious legitimization of the scientific research, rests the philosophical one: or Epicurean (“I love this job”), or Stoical (“do what you must”), or Platonic (contemplation of ideas, “the myth of the cave”). Now the choice of scientific research as a profession is a decision largely implying the experience of it as a vocation, since scientific activity is not associated with financial or social success.