Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “vocation” as:

A strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation: not all of us have a vocation to be nurses or doctors.

As I would like to interpret it, to have a vocation is not simply to have a job, an occupation or career. Rather, the word “vocation” denotes more of a psychological sate than an external condition: having a vocation means your mind is set on something, you are passionate about it to the point where you feel compelled to do it. As long as this obtains, you have a vocation, regardless of whether or not you are also making a living on your vocation or have built a career around it. Not only should there be passion or strong interest, but also “a strong feeling of suitability”. The two indeed are not separable from one another, because how come one knows that she is suitable for a particular profession? Interest (i.e., enjoy doing it) and competence (i.e., doing it relatively better than others), in my view.

As a PhD in the making, I will very likely find myself in the academic profession after I graduate, working as a university professor, teaching and doing research in the domain of developmental and educational science. Whether or not I have passion about it and a strong sense of suitability is still not that clear even at this stage. Therefore, I decided to read Weber’s “Science as Vocation”, in the hopes of finding some insight.

The external conditions of science as vocation

In Science as a Vocation, Weber begins by analyzing the external conditions of sciences in the modern world, which entails a few things. First, he says that science has become a profession for the first time in the history. This means that a group of people (professional scientists) now make a living just by doing scientific research. The “science job” typically entails being a faculty member of a university undertaking two major tasks, teaching and researching. He referred to this as the “dual aspect of the academic profession”. Second, just like pretty much everything else, scientific activities are subject to capitalist operations, which will result in “the separation of the worker from the means of production”, and that the relationship between an institute director or department chair and an assistant/lecturer will increasingly resemble the relationship between a worker/employee and his boss in the factory.

Focusing on the “dual aspect of the academic profession”, Weber says:

Every young man who feels he has a vocation as a scholar must be aware that the task awaiting him has a dual aspect. He must be properly qualified not only as a scholar, but also as a teacher. And these two things are by no means identical. A man can be both an outstanding scholar and an execrable teacher.

Anyone who went to college can very well resonate with this point, as indeed many renowned scholars are really bad at teaching. Weber thinks that teaching ability is mostly a personal gift that is beyond one’s control, and yet unfortunately the performance of an academic is in part evaluated by his teaching (e.g., popularity among students). This, plus the early mentioned capitalistic-bureaucratic operations, renders the academic life “an utter gamble”, in that the academic profession is very much subject to luck or chance. Here’s what he says about how he views his own career success as partially due to luck:

I feel at liberty to make this claim since I personally owe it to a number of purely chance factors that I was appointed to a full professorship while still very young in a discipline in which people of my own age had undoubtedly achieved more than I. And it is this experience that encourages me to believe that I have developed a keen eye for the undeserved fate of the many whom chance has treated, and continues to treat, in the opposite way and who have failed, for all their abilities, to obtain a position that should rightfully be theirs through this selection process.

On the opposite side of luck or chance, there is one’s own ability and hard work. Weber’s point is that there is no guarantee that through one’s superior ability or talent and hard work, one will have career success, even if that just means advancing to a desirable positions and ensuring material comfort. This analysis serves not only to take away some hubris from those who are having a successful academic career, and humiliation from those who’ve experienced setbacks; more importantly, it pushes those (young people like me) who are interested in pursuing science as a vocation to ask themselves: if the academic profession is an utter gamble (e.g., you are likely to be poor, unpopular among students, and has little prospect of being a professor until you are too old), then why still do it? What makes it worthwhile? What is the meaning of doing science? Answers to these questions constitute what Weber means by the inner vocation for science.

The internal condition for science as vocation: What’s the meaning of science?

Weber maintains that the inner vocation for science is grounded in the apparent fact that science has been and will continue to be highly specialized, and thus that “a really definitive and valuable achievement is always the product of specialization”. Due to this, the scholar’s “experience of science” is such that his own work “will inevitably remain highly imperfect” and will likely be superseded by later research. This characteristic (specialization) renders the meaning of the scientific enterprise questionable:

What meaningful achievement can he hope for from activities that are always doomed to obsolescence? What can justify his readiness to harness himself to this specialized, never-ending enterprise?

Weber makes a comparison between scientific work and arts. Roughly, his point is that scientific work is “harnessed to the course of progress” and is bound to be “surpassed” or “obsolete in ten, twenty, or fifty years”, which he thinks is the very fate of science, whereas a work of art can truly achieve fulfillment or perfection so that the idea of infinite progress does not apply.

I often find myself asking the same question about the meaning of doing science. More generally speaking, scientific research is no longer concerned with attaining the ultimate or eternal truths (which is what philosophy is traditionally concerned with), and has confined itself to the accumulation of facts that can be so trivial that I sometimes can’t help but ask “Yes, but so what?” Weber implies that the meaning of scientific work is that it participates in a continuous course of progress, but I am not quite convinced here. For it does not seem that every individual piece of scientific research that is considered valuable or an “achievement”, whether in natural sciences or in social sciences (but certainly more so in the latter), is contributing to a linear course of progress, as there are so many debates, disagreements in the field of sciences and the resolving of them do not necessarily result in “progress” (could go backwards). Besides, not every piece of scientific research is valuable and making positive contribution to the field. Perhaps we need to specify what qualifies as a scientific work first? What are the parameters? Maybe people who work in the area of “hard science” do not have these complaints since the link between their scientific work and social utility is clearer. But it still seems that modern science is fundamentally instrumental, and is incapable of providing “correct” answers to questions involving values, purposes, rights and wrongs (e.g., “What should we do?”, “How shall we live?”), as it cannot even justify the meaning of itself.

Passion imbues meaning in one’s life

But although Weber raises this question, he is not really too much bothered by it. For Weber, days are gone when we assumed the existence of objective meaning; now we live in a time where the meaning of anything (including the meaning of life or death itself) is a subjective construction. What’s the meaning of doing science then? Weber says that science is meaningful only insofar as one has true passion for it, and tells those who do not have a genuine passion to keep away from engaging in science. In short, science is only meaningful to you if you enjoy it or have passion about it. The answer looks too simple to be serious, but from a subjective (internal) point of view, it is indeed the case that when one truly enjoys doing something, the activity already means the whole world to you, so that there is no need to be concerned about the objective meaning of the activity.

For Weber, those who have strong passion about science (and maybe many other activities including even politics) and are wholeheartedly devoted to it are particularly charming:

in the realm of science, the only person to have “personality” is the one who is wholly devoted to his subject. And this is true not just of science. We know of no great artist who has ever done anything other than devoted himself to his art and to that alone.

This came very close to the kind of modern personality or modern self we are familiar with: Who you are as a person, your authentic self, is defined by nothing else except your inner interests, desires, passions and what you truly care about; and there is genuine moral worth in living authentically, that is, devoting yourself wholeheartedly to a cause, a purpose, a calling or an activity. He mentions “great artists” again here; indeed the artist’s life is the prototype of the modern personality.

What should I say on this? I used to really appreciate this modern conception of self about which I learned a lot from Charles Taylor’s book Ethics of Authenticity, and have for quite a few years wanted to live in that way–which I believed necessarily involves some indifference to conventional thinking or worldly concerns. Now I am not so sure if I really have inner passion about anything to which I can devote my life. Yes, I am very interested in intellectual activities, but perhaps that is still not enough to qualify as a “passion”, or a calling or vocation. I’ve already settled down, and complied with the conventional ways of doing things; I mean, I’m married and soon will have a daughter. Just a few years ago I was still warning myself not to get married too soon, as I was taking very seriously the advice from Prince Andrei in Tolstoy’s War and Peace¹. But as I said in the beginning, whether one has a vocation or not, is defined by psychological state (e,g., inner passion) rather than external condition (e.g., having a family). So, it still remains to be seen whether or not I will have a “personality” and what kind of vocation I will be devoted to.

What makes a successful academic career?

While passion is important to science as vocation, as it provides the scholar with a strong internal drive to continuously engage in scientific work, Weber reminds us that passion alone does not guarantee success in the field of science. Inspiration is more directly related to success. And, though many may think the science is all about cold calculation, Weber admits that inspiration plays no smaller a role in science than other activities such as solving practical problems, creating arts and doing business. This is another element of chance or luck in science as a vocation, but Weber says that “normally, inspiration flourishes only on a foundation of very hard work”, “ideas come when they are least expected, rather than while you are racking your brains at your desk…they would not have made their appearance if we had not spent many hours pondering at our desks or brooding passionately over the problems facing us”. Thus, those who have passion and work hard are more likely to be hit by inspiration, and have a higher chance of success.

The fundamental fact of life

Near the end of this lecture, Weber makes a short list of “what can science achieve positively for our ’lives’ at a personal and practical level? These include: 1). science gives us knowledge of the techniques whereby we can control life; 2). provides methods of thought, the tools of the trade, and the training needed to make use of them; 3). provides clarity.

Regarding the third one, providing clarity, Weber argues that all practical stances (e.g., our values, political orientation, and our stance on concrete practical matters) are grounded in ultimate philosophical assumptions that are warring with each other:

We can and should tell you that the meaning of this or that practical stance can be inferred consistently, and hence also honestly, from this or that ultimate fundamental ideological position…To put it metaphorically, if you choose this particular standpoint, you will be serving this particular god and will give offense to every other god. For you will necessarily arrive at such-and-such ultimate, internally meaningful conclusions if you remain true to yourselves. The discipline of philosophy and the discussion of what are ultimately the philosophical bases of the individual disciplines all attempt to achieve this.

“Clarity” thus means not just having a clear understanding of the natural and social world, but also the clarification of “the ultimate meaning of his own actions”. Ok, then let me end this with the following words of wisdom from Weber:

as long as life is left to itself and is understood in its own terms, it knows only that the conflict between these gods is never-ending. Or, in nonfigurative language, life is about the incompatibility of ultimate possible attitudes and hence the inability ever to resolve the conflicts between them. Hence the necessity of deciding between them. Whether in these circumstances it is worth anyone’s while to choose science as a “vocation” and whether science itself has an objectively worthwhile “vocation” is itself a value judgment about which nothing useful can be said in the lecture room. This is because positively affirming the value of science is the precondition of all teaching. I personally answer this question in the affirmative through the very fact of my own work.