The Sublimeness of the Rational: Approaches to Weber’s Thesis of the Disenchantment of the World (A Commentary on Johannes Weiss’s Article)
The Sublimeness of the Rational: Approaches to Weber’s Thesis of the Disenchantment of the World (A Commentary on Johannes Weiss’s Article)

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses approaches to Weber’s thesis of the disenchantment of the world by following the reflexive strategy that Weber calls a “critique” (in the Kantian sense) of concepts which opens them up to their historically changing diagnostic potential. The analysis is focused on the in-depth archaeology of Weber’s thesis proposed by Johannes Weiss, which explicates the antagonisms between the rationalism of modern science, the ethical rationalism of the religions of salvation, and the magical image of the world, thereby elucidating junctions between properly Weberian and Nietzschean motifs and problematizing “the future of religion”. In the spirit of the privative definition of modernity as a “godless and prophetless time”, outlined by Weiss, this commentary is driven by an interest in the antinomies of modern disenchantment seen as a demoralization of the world, which became a condition of possibility for modernity’s naturalistic projects; but also by an interest in operative sociological concepts such as “image of the world”, “attitude towards the world”, and “religious habitus” which are relevant to the thesis of disenchantment but are not clarified explicitly by Weber.

• Details
• Contents