Psychedelic science as cosmic play, psychedelic humanities as perennial polemics? Or why we are still fighting over Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation

Max Weber's claim that scientific work becomes obsolete within 10–15 years is challenged by the enduring relevance of his lecture "Science as a Vocation" a century later. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork on the revival of psychedelic science since the 1990s, the author argues that Weber's ideal type of vocational science offers a comparative tool for understanding contemporary scientists, such as Swiss neuroscientist Franz X. Vollenweider, who blends psychedelic experiences with Hindu philosophy to view science as play. Weber also contributed to the historical sociology of science by describing scientific life in Germany and the U.S. and by arguing for the separation of facts and values.

Study at a glance

Abstract

If it was indeed the fate of scientific work to become obsolete within 10–15 years, as Max Weber contended in Science as a Vocation, why does the Journal of Classical Sociology publish this article a century after publication of his famous lecture? Departing from anthropological fieldwork on the revival of psychedelic science since the 1990s, the author gives two answers. First, Weber provided a historically and culturally situated ideal type of vocational science with which we can compare and contrast the ethos of early twenty-first century scientists. The Swiss neuroscientist Franz X. Vollenweider, for example, defied the stern Protestantism of Weber’s vocational humanity and inferred from an amalgamation of psychedelic experiences and Hindu philosophemes a conception of science as play. Second, Weber not only contributed to the historical sociology of science an empirical description and conceptual analysis of turn-of-the-century scientific life in Germany and the United States but also unleashed a polemic against the confusion of facts and values. At a time when science studies and cognate fields of social research have formed a widespread consensus regarding the inseparability of description and prescription, Science as a Vocation has become a classic that offers orientation to opponents and supporters of value freedom alike. The article concludes with a plea to scholars in the nascent psychedelic humanities, which could easily be extended to anyone working between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities, to cultivate value freedom as part of an epistemic virtue ethics.