On the flag issue – Max Weber (1864-1920)

In my last post I mentioned that we would consider the flag issue from the point of view of another sociological giant, Max Weber who was a close friend of Georg Simmel, whose ideas were the subject of my last post.

Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany on April 21, 1864.  He was the eldest of 7 children of Max Weber senior, and his wife Helene Fallenstein.  Weber’s early life appeared to be comfortable and secure, but in fact as we will see there were deep tensions in his parents’ marriage.  The repercussions of these early family problems would affect Weber deeply for the rest of his life.

His father, Max Weber senior was an ambitious, upwardly mobile bureaucrat with political connections but without strong intellectual interests.  His attitude toward life, especially as his son saw it, was that of a self-interested bourgeois who believed that idealism and concerns with larger social issues had very little place in the real world.

Weber’s mother, in contrast, was much more cultured and intellectual than her husband.  She came from a long line of teachers and her father had himself been an academic and a translator.  Weber’s mother was thus particularly interested in fostering her children’s intellectual development.  This was especially the case with Max Weber junior, who displayed unusual gifts at an early age. and benefitted from his mother’s attention.  Weber was often ill as a child and spent a great deal of time at home, but at the age of 14 he was already writing letters, filled with references to the early philosophers Homer, Virgil, and Cicero.  Before he entered university, he had become familiar with the works of great European thinkers such as Kant, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer.

In 1889, at the age of 25, Weber completed his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin.  In addition, Weber trained to be a lawyer and practiced law during the early part of his life.  The combination of part-time lecturing at the University of Berlin, continuing his academic writing, and his law practice required him to submit to a rigorous schedule – yet he appeared to manage all of these challenges with relative ease.  As well, there was the promise of future happiness when in 1893 he married Marianne Schnitger, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a physician who was a cousin on his father’s side.  At that time he was also appointed to a chair in economics at the University Freiburg.

As is so often the case when we consider the lives of others from the outside, there was in Max Weber’s situation a disconnect between appearance and reality.  As has already been indicated, the profound tensions in his parents’ marriage would soon resurface in a way which would cause Weber life-long torment.  In July of 1897 Weber’s parents visited his home at Heidelberg where he was then living with his wife, Marianne.  His father Max Weber senior, had insisted upon accompanying his mother on this trip, although she had made it known that she preferred to travel without him.  Max Weber junior took his mother’s side in a violent family dispute which ended with the son demanding that his father leave the house.  Very soon after, Weber’s father suffered a stroke and he died about a month later.  This resulted in a crisis of conscience from which Max Weber junior would never completely recover.

The breakdown he suffered after his father’s death, in many ways, seemed to have ruined Weber’s plans for the future.  Yet a close reader of his work would see that perhaps the opposite was true.  This tragedy, for which Weber in fact bore little or no responsibility, may have set him on a new path – one which was deeper and more painful than his previous journey, but nevertheless richer in insight and meaning.

From the time of his father’s death in 1897 until 1903, Weber withdrew from the outside world, communicating with very few people, except his mother and his wife Marianne.  He abandoned all his intellectual and professional work, unable to concentrate on anything beyond staring out the window and fashioning the occasional ashtray, which may have come in handy since he was a heavy smoker.  Short trips appeared to lift his spirits temporarily, but there was very little money for this type of “therapy”.  He spent some time in a sanitarium and was treated by the most prominent specialists of the day, but it seemed that nothing would help him.  Then quite unexpectedly in 1903, he began to recover.  In 1904 he was able to deliver a public lecture for the first time in six and half years, and although he was never able to resume teaching on a full-time basis, this was a crucial step for him.  Later in 1904, he embarked on a three-month trip to America.  His observations about American society became the basis for one of his most famous works, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1904-1905.

For the remainder of his life, Weber continued writing almost compulsively.  He himself admitted that this work was necessary in order for him to stay grounded and avoid another breakdown.  His mental health improved greatly, although he never completely recovered.  Intellectually, he functioned at an astonishingly high level, producing works of great merit such as Economy and Society, and many essays, including Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation.  It would be impossible to do justice to the breadth and depth of Weber’s work here.  His emotional life, on the other hand was a different matter, and he remained vulnerable in many ways: dependent on sleeping pills, liquor, and cigarettes in order to numb his psychic pain.  His death in 1920 at the young age of 56 from lung cancer was undoubtedly the result of the negative effects of these “coping” mechanisms on both his body and his psyche.

As has been mentioned, Weber’s work is rich in social-psychological insights, some of which can be traced back to his attempts to come to terms with his own sorrows.  One of the most important of these centers around his recognition of the perspectival nature of truth.  What did Weber mean by this, and how can this idea be connected to the flag issue?

We have already seen that Weber was deeply influenced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).  A full discussion of Kant’s intellectual/philosophical project is beyond the scope of this post, but it is important to say a few words about his ideas on the nature of truth.  Kant argued that it is impossible to speak of truth in absolute terms because our perception of reality changes as we move through space and time.  We can never experience the world exactly as it is at any given moment – we can only experience what we perceive it to be from our particular perspective or vantage point, which changes as we ourselves change, and as we receive new information which alters our understanding of the situation at hand.

To further illustrate this, let’s consider that we can never see our own face in its entirety, we can only see it it from various angles.  We assume that we know ourselves well, and we recognize our own reflection in a mirror or a photograph, but we’ve only seen facets of ourselves.  This same insight can be applied to our knowledge of the world and of interpersonal relationships.  What we believe about our country, our community., the action of our leaders, and many other aspects of the functioning of the political realm often depends on the information we have – how accurate is it, how complete is it?  Furthermore, we also have to ask whose interests are being served when information is disseminated in a particular way.

Following Kant, Weber came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that in fact, truth and reality are perspectival in nature.  For Weber the social world is so rich, dense, and multi-faceted that we can never grasp all of it.  What we consider to be important and meaningful for us therefore is a function of where we stand in relation to a given event and that may change over time.  The flag debate is an excellent illustration of Weber’s emphasis on the perspectival nature of truth.  Whether one chooses to hoist and to identify with the yellow or red flag (or with both flags), cannot be justified in objective terms which deal with truth and falsity.  Ultimately it is a question of how we see things, not how they really are (because once again, for Weber there are an infinite number of realities).  When we choose one flag over the other we are also choosing one reality over another, and one form of self-identification.  It is a visceral (that is deeply emotional) choice, but as both Kant and Weber would remind us, it does not absolve us of our responsibility to understand the perspectives of others, and to respect their choices.

Thus, we cannot react solely on an emotional level and insist that others embrace our flag, or else.  Rather we must seek to understand what is going on when we make these choices – why do we self-identify the way we do.  This for Weber is central to the understanding of the meaning of social action.  It is often comforting to be able to say my country right or wrong, my flag is the only true flag, the actions of my group are not open to question, and therefore I must be right.  However, such an attitude is often so rigid that it precludes a better understanding of both oneself and others.