Full text of DOI:10.1111/1467-954X.00202

Between sociology and theology: the spirit of
capitalism debate
Keith Tester
Abstract
This paper revisits the debate on the Spirit of Capitalism in order to show how this
well-known sociological theme might be revitalised through an encounter with
themes from theology. The paper seeks to offer some of the resources by which it
might be possible to think about the `moral texture' of the German tradition of
sociology. In so doing, it seeks to compare and contrast the general theme of the
Spirit of Capitalism in the work of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich with
debates raised in the neo-Kantian sociology of Georg Simmel and Max Weber.
Tillich's discussion of the Spirit of Capitalism is discussed in detail and it is used as
the basis for some concluding speculations about the relationship between the
disciplines of sociology and theology.
Introduction
The theme of the Spirit of Capitalism is a lodestone for the social theory which
locates itself by reference to the heritage of the sociological tradition. As Nisbet
notes, that tradition contains within itself a definite `moral texture' which
draws upon the commitment of founders such as Weber to affirm certain moral
aspirations and values despite the conflicts and processes of their times (Nisbet,
1970: 18). Yet there has been something of a flattening of that moral texture.
The debate about the Spirit of Capitalism has become largely identified as a
technical problem of economic history or sociological historiography (see for
example Campbell, 1987; Marshall, 1982).
However it is arguably the case that the debate about the Spirit of
Capitalism is more deeply and perhaps even overwhelmingly concerned to
understand the existential and moral implications for human being of the
constituted present, than it is concerned with the rather drier stuff of the
establishment of scientific categories or rigorous history. This is clear from
much of the tone and temper of Weber's work (Lowith, 1993; Turner, 1996). It
is a reflection of what is, perhaps, the central moral insight of the German
tradition (Levine, 1995) in sociology. That temper has been summarised by
Kieran Flanagan, drawing on the insight of Lepenies. The German tradition is
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Keith Tester
organised around the contention that: `The spirit of calculation and
predictability, the property of power of science, which sociology sought to
emulate, became a mechanism for the despiritualisation of culture and also
its dehumanisation'. Flanagan makes the apposite contention that: `In this
division, sociology was divided against itself, seeming to be implicated in the
advance of what it despised' (Flanagan, 1996: 105±106). The tension is clear in
Weber's famous `Vocation' essays (Weber, 1948). It is also a guiding principle
of Simmel's account of the tragedy of culture (Simmel, 1950). The work of both
sociologists can be interpreted as a sustained meditation upon the melancholy
realisation that the emancipation of humanity from the weight of superstition
and compulsion has only led to the domination of the abstraction and
calculation of rationality to such an extent that the philosopher's ideal of the
freedom of humanity has led, instead, to entrapment and diminution.
Typically, Weber said that the limitation of the individual to the abstract
and calculable demands of specialisation means, `a renunciation, a departure
from an age of full and beautiful humanity, which can no more be repeated in
the course of our cultural development than can the flower of the Athenian
culture of antiquity' (Weber, 1930: 181).
This distinctive theme and temper of the German tradition is almost certainly
a result of the debt that it owes to Kantian philosophy. The debt goes much
deeper than the fact that Weber or Simmel engaged in work that might be
labelled neo-Kantian (Turner, 1996). Rather, the German tradition is Kantian in
two more fundamental ways. First, it is Kantian at an epistemological level in
that it focuses upon the ideal types (Weber) or the forms (Simmel) which are
the basis of understanding and which are, moreover, the principle of the
organisation of empirical experiences (Milbank, 1990). The consequence of this
strand of Kantianism is that German sociology is always aware of the non-
rational which escapes ± or at least does not adequately fit with ± the rational
categories of the sociological understanding. Ultimately, German sociology
reveals aspects of the empirical which it cannot understand. For Weber, those
non-rational aspects were forced into the category of charisma and for Simmel
they were collapsed into the purportedly motivating principle of life. Second,
German sociology is Kantian at an ethical level. Kantian philosophy established
the ethical centrality of the freedom of humanity from external compulsion
(Kant, 1998). That freedom is reflected in the definition of Enlightenment as the
courage to use one's own understanding (Kant, 1991) and it is also reflected in
the non-naturalism of the epistemological position that experiences need to be
ordered and rendered intelligible through theoretical constructions. This strand
of the debt to Kant leads directly to the melancholy temper of the German
tradition and to its profound sense of the entrapment of humanity in abstraction
and calculation. The point is that the sociological concentration on ideal types or
forms necessarily led to a methodology which centralised the categories that
make humans who and what they are. But if those types or forms are put at the
centre of the sociological agenda, then they are likely to be lent an integrity of
their own, in such a way that they become the principles of explanation rather
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than the voluntaristic action of social actors. Consequently, those potential
actors become identified as the prisoners of the types or the forms. The types or
the forms which the sociologist constructs in order to interpret the empirical thus
become external to the empirical and they become obstacles in the way of human
freedom (this problem can be seen in Weber's typology of social action as well as
in Simmel's revelation of the formal regularity of dyadic and traidic relations;
Weber, 1968; Simmel, 1950). Human freedom becomes something which needs
to be emancipated and released from the prison that sociologists construct in the
attempt to interpret and to understand nothing other than human freedom.
It is the concern of this paper to outline an account of the Spirit of
Capitalism which has an ambivalent relationship to the sociological tradition.
That account is offered by the German theologian Paul Tillich. It is not the
contention of this paper that Tillich was causally influenced by Weber or
Simmel. Indeed it is noticeable that when Tillich discusses the Spirit of
Capitalism, references to Weber are absent and to Simmel are fleeting. Rather,
it is suggested that all three analysts share the moral insight that humanity has
become a prisoner in a world of rational abstraction and calculation. They
share the attitude of the German tradition of sociology rather than references
to one another. Yet Tillich wrote as a theologian rather than as a sociologist
and, thereby, unlike Weber and Simmel, he was able to point to a way out of
that entrapment.
The contextualisation of Tillich with Weber and Simmel is legitimate
because his intellectual horizons were deeply marked by a sociological
awareness. First, Tillich worked in an environment which was heavily marked
by the discipline of sociology. He taught at the University of Frankfurt until he
was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933 (for the relationship between Tillich and the
Frankfurt School, see Champion, 1986). He subsequently went into exile in the
United States, where he died in 1965. Second, it is possible to follow Erhard
Stolting and suggest that Tillich's work is, `situated at the borderline between
German Protestant theology and social theory' (Stolting, 1985: 181). In this
way, the case of Tillich might also be taken as casting an interesting sidelight
upon the issue of the relationship between social theory and theological
procedures of thought and analysis (a relationship which is dealt with rather
too easily perhaps in Milbank, 1990. Compare Milbank's discussion of the
emergence of social theory as an inversion and opposition to theology, with the
very different arguments of Bryan Turner and Kieran Flanagan according to
whom it is possible to detect the resonance or recollection of theological themes
in social theory; Turner, 1996; Flanagan, 1996, 1996a).
Definitions and concerns
When Weber confronted the problem of defining exactly what he meant by the
Spirit of Capitalism, he entered into something by way of a methodological
digression in the text of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
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Weber said that the meaning of the Spirit of Capitalism could only be
established as a general statement after all the relevant historical and empirical
material had been synthesised: `it must be gradually put together out of the
individual parts which are taken from historical reality to make it up. Thus the
final and definitive concept cannot stand at the beginning of the investigation,
but must come at the end' (Weber, 1930: 47).
It is more than a little questionable whether Weber did in fact carry out the
tacit promise of that methodological statement. Weber's text seems to be rather
too willing to use Benjamin Franklin as the representative of all the `individual
parts'. The text is more concerned with what seems to have really interested
Weber, the analysis of the specific personality formation which he took
Franklin to express most clearly. This was a kind of historically contingent
personality which was marked by a focus on: `the earning of more and more
money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment
of life'. Weber goes on to say that Franklin illustrates the subordination of
humanity to abstraction and calculation: `Man is dominated by the making of
money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition
is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his
material needs' (Weber, 1930: 53). As such, Weber takes the Spirit of
Capitalism to be one of the strands of the rationalisation of life and conduct. It
is an aspect of the process through which life and conduct is organised more
and more tightly, according to principles of rationality, even though the
ultimate values which justify that organisation are themselves non-rational
(Weber, 1930: 78).
Within Weber's definition it is possible to identify a narrative of the
bifurcation of the meaningfulness of the world. For Weber, the Spirit of
Capitalism is completely meaningful in its own this-worldly terms, but the basis
upon which that rational meaningfulness is established is itself non-rational.
Put simply, Weber is showing that there is no rational justification for the
principle that it is virtuous to work hard in order to make money other than the
justification which is offered by the principle itself.
With Tillich, it is possible to identify a similar recognition of bifurcation.
Weber sees the constitution of the modern world in terms of the processual
domination of rationalities. As such, he tends to identify the possibility of a
critique of that process with the non-rational impulses of the aesthetic or with
the aestheticisation of politics which is implied by the sociology of charisma.
But Tillich's recognition of the bifurcation of the world is rehearsed in a
different frame. He sees the Spirit of Capitalism in terms of the domination of
the temporal over the infinite.
Tillich's most precise and sociologically nuanced discussion of the Spirit of
Capitalism is developed in his book Die religiose Lage der Gegenwart. The
È
book was published in Germany in 1932 and issued in an English translation
by H. Richard Niebuhr under the title The Religious Situation in 1956. It is to
this text of Tillich that this paper will pay attention. What Tillich tries to do in
that book is develop and justify the thesis that, contrary to the then popular
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diagnoses of writers like Spengler, the West is not experiencing a period of
cultural dissolution but that, rather, the events of the time are signs of a
widespread revolt against capitalist society.
What writers like Spengler took as signs of decay and of portentous times
ahead, Tillich identified as signs of hope. It must be said, however, that Tillich
was not ignorant of his times and, therefore, he did not pretend that this revolt
of hope would be justified or come to pass in the immediate future. He
operated on a broader terrain that that. He believed that the signs of the
times substantiated a thesis about `the shaking of our time by eternity' (Tillich,
1956: 27). For Tillich, the revolt is fundamentally religious, and therefore a
significant part of his book consists in an attempt to examine the contemporary
situation of the churches and of the spiritual life outside of those institutions.
But in order to develop that analysis and examination, Tillich was first of all
required to establish the meaning of capitalism. This is where the concept of the
Spirit of Capitalism becomes important. The concept runs all the way through
the analysis that is developed in The Religious Situation although its clearest
statements are to be found in the initial pages. He conceptualises the Spirit of
Capitalism rather than capitalism more narrowly, because he wants to make
the point that the revolt that he identifies in the contemporary present is of a
general cultural order and significance (hence Tillich talks about art and
aesthetics) and not just simply economic or local. Tillich made this clear when
he wrote that:
the spirit of capitalist society, which occupies a central place in the following
discussion does not mean the spirit of individual men or of a class or a party.
It is rather a symbol for an ultimate, fundamental attitude toward the world.
It is, to be sure, a very real symbol and in our situation it is most concretely
visible in actual, capitalist society, whence it derives its name. But it means
something far wider than this society. (Tillich, 1956: 27)
The breadth of Tillich's appreciation of the definition and stakes of the theme
of the Spirit of Capitalism is made clear in passages like the following:
the fundamental virtues in the ethics of capitalist society are economic
efficiency, developed to the utmost degree of ruthless activity, on the part of
the leaders, submissive acceptance of their place in the great machine of the
whole economic life on the part of those led, obedient subjection on the part
of all to the conventions of bourgeois custom and, along with these,
impersonal charity for the support of the economically helpless. (Tillich,
1956: 44)
This is a passage which moves with some rapidity across concerns and, for that
matter, across areas which have emerged as sub-disciplines within the wider
enterprise of sociology. Tillich is saying that the Spirit of Capitalism certainly
shares an identity with the needs and exigencies of rational capitalist
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production. But he is also showing how the Spirit has a determining impact
upon relationships of power, authority and legitimacy as well as moral codes
and the organisation of such emotions as compassion (compare Tillich on the
Spirit of Capitalism and charity with the account of the relationship between
Protestantism and charity which is provided in Watt, 1957).
It has to be admitted that there is the ghost of a certain reductionism about
Tillich's account. Yet it is also clear that even if Tillich is prepared to argue that
the capitalist relationships of production are determining in the last instance,
he is actually more concerned with the broader social and cultural context.
For Tillich, the requirements and processes of capitalist production are only
interesting in relation to their moral and existential implications. That is to say,
for Tillich, the Spirit of Capitalism ought to be defined as a situation.
The situation of the spirit of capitalism
As William Nicholls notes, when Tillich refers to a situation he is concerned to do
much more than register simply empirical, temporal, phenomena. Indeed, it is in
the way that Tillich conceptualises the situation that the bifurcation he identifies
between the temporal and the infinite comes to the centre of the analytical frame.
When he analyses the situation, what Tillich is concerned to do is examine
how the temporal questions of existential meaning and value correlate (or in
fact fail to correlate) with the infinite and existentially overwhelmingly
meaningful truths of Revelation (Nicholls, 1969: 255±256). This bifurcation
becomes clear when Tillich specifies that any understanding of the religious
situation must have two sides. The first refers to `the temporal and human'. He
says that analysis in these terms, `will speak of tendencies in specifically
religious affairs, of churches, sects, theologies and all sorts of accompanying
religious movements' (Tillich, 1956: 36). Yet Tillich believes that such analysis
is not enough. This leads to the second side of his appreciation of the meaning
of situation. It can be illustrated if Tillich's case of religion is followed through.
He says that while the analysis of the `temporal and human' is valuable, `the
questionable element in this procedure is that attention is given to just those
things with which religion itself is not concerned ... while the real mean-
ing ... the eternal to which all things refer, is neglected' (Tillich, 1956: 36).
Thus, for Tillich, the concern of analysis is not just the temporal and human.
Rather, Tillich wants to relate what is temporal and human to the infinite. In
so doing, he wants to try to gain some understanding of the eternal significance
of that which is of the here and now. This typically Protestant dialectical thesis
leads Tillich to the methodological position that `Every spiritual phenomenon
of a period expresses its eternal content and one of the most important
characteristics of a time has been defined when we have discovered which of the
various aspects of culture is most expressive of its real meaning' (Tillich, 1956:
37). The procedure which Tillich therefore adopts is one which examines social
and cultural phenomena in order to try to understand what real meaning they
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express. That real meaning is itself not reduced to the temporal and human (to
the this-worldly here and now) but is instead referred to ultimate and eternal
meaningfulness. These are precisely the terms in which Tillich attempted to
understand the significance of the Spirit of Capitalism and, moreover, precisely
the terms through which he felt able to condemn it.
For Tillich, the religious situation typical of the situation of the Spirit of
Capitalism is one which is threatened by the abyss of meaninglessness (and in
these terms, the Nazism which Tillich saw on the very near horizon would be
identified as a product of meaninglessness). The Spirit of Capitalism has led to
meaninglessness because it has destroyed the possibility of the spiritual.
Consequently it has demolished the horizon of the eternal. Tillich says that: `to
live spiritually is to live in the presence of meaning and without an ultimate
meaning everything disappears into the abyss of meaninglessness'. This
ultimate meaning is `unconditioned' by the temporal. In fact, it underpins
the temporal. Tillich goes on to say that `To speak of an unconditioned
meaning is to speak of that which transcends the process of mere becoming, the
mere transition from past to future; it is to speak of that which supports the
times but is not subject to them. If any present has meaning it has eternity'
(Tillich, 1956: 35). By extension, if a present has no eternity it has no meaning.
It is an opening up to meaninglessness. It is in this context that Tillich launches
his condemnation of, `The spirit of a finitude which lives within itself [which] is,
for our time, the spirit of capitalist society' (Tillich, 1956: 105).
According to Tillich the Spirit of Capitalism implies meaninglessness precisely
because, as Weber would also propose, it is so closely entwined with processes of
rationalisation. With that rationalisation, Tillich believes, the horizon of the
eternal has been clouded or turned into something too trying. Instead, the
temporal orients itself to itself through a focus on calculation and abstractions
which are underpinned by nothing. This is the source of meaninglessness. The
unconditioned foundations of meaning are repudiated and value becomes
identical with consumption. For example, Tillich contends that the free market
is the principle which is most defining of the Spirit of Capitalism but that: `In
the free market economy the attitude toward material things comes to be
dominating, loveless, without the sense of community with them'. He continues
to argue that: `Things become wares ± objects whose meaning lies in the
production of profits in transactions of buying and selling, not in the enrichment
of personal life. They are acquired and disposed of by their masters, not by
beings who have some kind of community with them' (Tillich, 1956: 106). It
becomes impossible to have any full and existentially overwhelming relationship
with things become wares and with the entirely finite.
Tillich believes that this market rationality has serious existential implica-
tions for human being and, in particular, for the personality of individuals. Yet
he is not totally dismissive of it. He is quite open about the fact that, as a liberal
Protestant, he is happy to see the market eroding the pretence that things
themselves can possess sanctity (that is, Tillich is prepared cautiously to accept
that logic of the market which dissolves the Catholic position that the
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encounter with God is mediated in part through historical objects. The market
achieves this in so far as it attacks permanence and instead promotes
obsolescence). Tillich expresses his cautious embrace of the market when he
says that `It emancipates men from finite holy things which claim for
themselves the holiness of the eternal; it releases them from sanctified bondage
to things and exalts personality above the whole realm of things' (Tillich, 1956:
107). For Tillich, the way the market `exalts personality' is important. This is
because he identifies personality with conscience and it is precisely there, in the
personality of the individual, that Protestantism locates the encounter with
God. But Tillich finds it impossible to embrace completely the kind of
personality which is typical of the Spirit of Capitalism since market rationality,
`confines personality by pressing it into endless service in the rule over
impoverished things; thus personality itself is impoverished and devoted to the
world of the finite'. He announces that, `that is the effect of the capitalist spirit
in liberal economy' (Tillich, 1956: 107±108).
The consequences of the Spirit of Capitalism for personality formation
constitute one of the main areas of Tillich's concern. He says that because
market rationality deprives things of any infinite meaning, they are incapable of
bringing about any sense of satisfaction. As such, personality is fundamentally
dissatisfied: `Things which have lost their meaning do not satisfy; they drive men
on from one thing to another and there is no possibility of satisfaction.
Impoverished personality is left without a definitely directed love'. Tillich
speculates that this quest for a satisfaction which can never be attained is
exacerbated and exploited by advertising. As such he is suggesting that it is not
advertising and what Haug was later to call `commodity aesthetics' that creates
the obsessive personalities of consumerism. Rather it is the Spirit of Capitalism
that generates a personality type which commodity aesthetics subsequently
exploit and promise dishonestly to satisfy (Tillich, 1956: 108; Haug, 1986).
According to Tillich, this situation has far-reaching implications. At one
level, he almost seems to embrace the quest for satisfaction which the Spirit of
Capitalism introduces into personality formation. After all, it implies, `the
emancipation of man from an earthbound, unambitious dullness; it is the
civilizing release of personality from the bonds of animal existence and from
the merely fortuitous satisfaction of needs' (Tillich, 1956: 108). Dissatisfaction
gives individuals possessed of the personality of the Spirit of Capitalism
something to aspire towards which is beyond the present. This makes it seem
that Tillich is suggesting that the Spirit of Capitalism gestures towards the
infinite despite its closure of meanings and ambitions to within the confines of
the finite questions of rationality. However, he quickly recoils from such a
conclusion. Certainly, Tillich says, the quest for satisfaction `emancipates'
humans from the dull facts of existence and lends them horizons beyond the
here and now towards which to aim. But, `this emancipation implies coercion
to engage in unending, ever-increasing, life-consuming activity in the service of
unlimited wants' (this comment recalls Durkheim's account of anomie; see
Durkheim, 1952). Tillich continues: `It means the domination of the economic
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functions of life; its consequence is bondage to time and hence also the lack of
time for attention to the eternal ... It drives the spirit about within the
inescapable and unending circle of the finite' (Tillich, 1956: 108±109). The
consequence is, `a self-seeking, time-fettered existence' (Tillich, 1956: 50).
With these comments on personality formation, Tillich is once again
pointing towards the central bifurcation between the finite and the infinite.
Tillich understands the infinite in a normative way through the prism of a
theological consciousness. For him, the infinite is that which is beyond and
behind the temporal and human this-worldliness of the finite. It is known
through its overwhelming and engulfing existential meaningfulness. Moreover,
Tillich identifies the spiritual focus of the individual as being properly oriented
towards that unconditioned infinity. But, Tillich is proposing, the Spirit of
Capitalism locks the individual and all of her or his ambitions and desires into
a frame which is only oriented towards this world. Consequently the abyss of
meaninglessness opens up.
Furthermore the individual almost becomes incapable of grasping the
possibility of any realm of the unconditioned, of any realm of meaning beyond
the superficialities of the present, because she or he is too seduced by
advertising or, much more simply, perhaps, too busy thanks to time-discipline,
to be able to care and concentrate. All the individual is left with is her or his
own unsatisfied desires and an `impulse to seek one's own interests at the
expense of others'. Individuals turn inwards, upon their own finite existence
and desires. Conflict becomes dominant. Tillich writes that `The peculiarly
demonic element in the situation of capitalist society is this, that the conflict is
not the expression of individual arbitrariness or of chaotic anarchy but is
necessarily bound up with the maintenance of the capitalist economic system
and is the result of that system itself' (Tillich, 1956: 109. This contention links
to Tillich's interpretation of evil; see the discussion in Schwarz, 1995). Yet
despite everything it is possible to hope.
The disturbance of the spirit
For Tillich, the grounds for hope are substantiated by the questions which are
being put against the Spirit of Capitalism. These questions are represented in
two forms. First, in political attempts to release men and women from the `war
of all against all' which capitalist rationality and individualisation produces.
Second, in the struggle of cultural production to try to find some infinite
meaning from out of the finite meaninglessness of the present and its forms of
understanding. Tillich believes that these questionings are indicative of nothing
more than the irruption into the Spirit of Capitalism of the spirit of humanity
emancipated from the finite. In a long passage Tillich writes:
The self-sufficient this-worldliness of capitalist culture and religion is being
disturbed. Questions and doubts are arising on all sides; they point toward
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something beyond time and threaten the security of a present which has cut
itself loose from the eternal. Doubt is cast upon the complete rationality of
the three great powers, science, technique and capitalist economy; abysses
are opening on all sides and everywhere the souls of men are struggling for
fulfillments which must arise out of the deeper strata of life. (Tillich, 1956:
52)
With this passage, Tillich gestures towards the work of Simmel. There is no
doubt that Tillich himself was aware of the work of Georg Simmel. In The
Religious Situation he claims that Simmel had demonstrated an awareness of
`the irrationality of the existent'. According to Tillich, Simmel stands with
Nietzsche and Bergson in showing that there is a crucial distinction to be drawn
`between creative life and petrifying calculation' (Tillich, 1956: 58). That
distinction mirrors the one Tillich emphasises between the finite and the
infinite. Elsewhere, in a lecture delivered in 1919 entitled, `On the Idea of a
Theology of Culture', Tillich applauded Simmel for engaging in `cultural-
theological tasks' through his sociology of culture. This was despite the fact
that he also felt that it was appropriate to criticise Simmel's account of the
significance of Expressionist art. According to Tillich, Simmel was wrong to see
it as the mere destruction of bourgeois petrification. Tillich saw what he called,
`the cosmic sense of the guilt of sheer existence' in Expressionism (Tillich, 1987:
4546; see Simmel, 1971, 1997a).
What Tillich obviously took from Simmel was that latter's explicit and highly
developed sociological account of the conflict of modern culture. For Simmel,
the concept of culture refers to the processes whereby, `life produces certain
forms in which it expresses and realizes itself; works of art, religions, sciences,
technologies, laws, and innumerable others' (Simmel, 1971: 375). According to
Simmel, it is possible to identify a conflict in culture precisely because those
forms come to stand apart from life. They petrify and ossify and become
meaningless from the point of view of the expressive meaningfulness which is
understood in the concept of life. It should be clear that this conflict is a further
reflection of the temper of the German tradition in sociology. After all, Simmel is
suggesting that one of the defining traits of the contemporary present is the
tendency of humanly produced forms to come to stand over and above their
erstwhile creators. In other words, Simmel's sociology is temperamentally similar
to Weber's (and of course to Tillich's theology of culture) in that they share a
concern with the analysis of the prison that the world has become to humanity.
Indeed, there is also a similarity between Tillich's more general concerns in his
diagnosis of the religious situation and themes in Simmel's rather unjustly
neglected sociology of religion. As we have seen, Tillich saw the contemporary
situation as one of a revolt against the domination of abstraction, calculation
and rationality which he identified as synonymous with the Spirit of Capitalism.
What that thesis does not adequately spell out, however, is the source and the
motivation of that revolt. Tillich has to identify that source in some yearning or
desire to find meaning in the context of the trap of rationalised meaninglessness
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that the world has become. It might be said that for Tillich the revolt against the
Spirit of Capitalism is an expression of a human need for the transcendental and
ultimate.
If those conjectures are valid, they serve to connect Tillich to Simmel. In an
essay which was first published in 1911 ± that is, at more of less the time that
he was writing about Expressionism and therefore in a body of work that
Tillich knew ± Simmel spoke about: `the whole predicament in which an
enormous proportion of civilized humanity finds itself today: it is beset once
more by powerful needs'. Those are the needs for ultimate meaning and
meaningfulness, but Simmel believes that the sources which have historically
offered satisfaction have been undermined: `humanity ... sees the historical and
the sole existing means of fulfilling those needs as mere fantasy, and thus is left
with the needs themselves completely unanswered'. This is due in no small part
to the Enlightenment which, Simmel contends, criticised the content of religion
whilst leaving intact the almost anthropological needs that religion resolves.
For Simmel then, the Enlightenment has indeed released humanity from
aspects of the past, but without the humility to recognise that some aspects of
the past served important needs and, moreover, without being able to offer
anything in their stead (Simmel 1997b: 9). Indeed, Simmel went on in a way
which remarkably anticipates some of Tillich's contentions. He said that:
The real gravity of the current situation is that not only this or that particular
dogma but the object of transcendent faith per se is characterized as illusory.
What survives is no longer the form of transcendence seeking new fulfillment
but something more profound and more desperate: it is a yearning, once
fulfilled by the idea of transcendence, and now ± although it is a concrete
reality within the soul ± paralyzed by the withdrawal of the content of faith
and as if cut off from the path to its own life. (Simmel, 1997b: 9)
As Eugene Rochberg-Halton has noted, Simmel's approach can be labelled as
neo-Kantian: `Simmel, as a neo-Kantian formalist, saw life as a sensory
manifold, needing to be organized by something outside of itself (Rochberg-
Halton, 1989: 325). The recognition of the relationship between Simmel and
Kant takes on extra layers of resonance when it is recalled that Tillich too
embraced aspects of Kantianism and, in particular, the association of
Enlightenment with maturity. Strangely then, Tillich adopted a more one
dimensional embrace of the Enlightenment than Simmel. Tillich's debt to Kant
actually goes beyond the borrowing of the meaning of Enlightenment. It also
underpins his whole methodology. It is certainly reasonable to propose that
Tillich's central bifurcation of the temporal and petrified on the one hand and
the infinite and the spirit on the other can be read as a variation of the division
between the phenomenal and the noumenal, mediated through Dilthey (see in
particular, Dilthey, 1988).
Now, one of the major problems with Simmel's sociology of culture is that it
tends to see the conflict of culture in fairly ahistorical terms. He identifies a
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general process and pays relatively little attention to its temporality. He was
more interested in the forms of the understanding of the process. Tillich
overcomes this problem by connecting the analysis of disturbances to the finite
by the infinite to special historical moments of what he calls kairos. He takes
the inspiration for his concept of kairos from the New Testament and, in
particular from the Gospel of Mark where it refers to Christ's statement after
the arrest of John the Baptist that `The time is fulfilled' (Mark 1: 15, Revised
Standard Version). However, Turner and Factor have proposed that Tillich
derived the concept from Max Scheler (Turner and Factor, 1984: 112).
Unfortunately, they do not really substantiate this claim although it is worth
noting that in so far as sociology is a discipline of secular reason (Milbank,
1990), it is not surprising that sociologists will tend to identify the roots of
concepts in the secular rather than the theological.
Tillich defines kairos as: `fulfilled time, the moment of time which is invaded
by eternity' (Tillich 1956: 176). Or, as he put it immediately after the First World
War: `Kairos ... signifies a moment of time filled with unconditioned meaning
and demand'. He went on: `Kairos is the fulfilled moment of time in which the
present and the future, the holy that is given and the holy that is demanded meet,
and from whose concrete tensions the new creation proceeds in which sacred
import is realized in necessary form' (Tillich, 1987: 57). As such, kairos refers to a
historical moment in which there is a movement towards the transcendence of
the bifurcation between the finite and the infinite: `In a kairos, the on-going
dialectic is heightened and speeded up, so that society has the opportunity to
become significantly less estranged' (Nicholls, 1969: 271).
This might make it seem as if kairos is therefore the moment in which the
eternal becomes contained in the forms of this-world. But Tillich denies this
possibility. Instead, he once again confirms the extent to which he is able to
hope: `Kairos is not perfect completion in time. To act and wait in the sense of
Kairos means to wait upon the invasion of the eternal and to act accordingly,
not to wait and act as though the eternal were a fixed quantity which could be
introduced into time, as a social structure which represents the end and goal of
history for instance' (Tillich, 1956: 176. This passage clearly contains an attack
on messianic Marxism. Wallerstein has attempted to operationalise the concept
of kairos, although in a way that is not directly relevant to the concerns of this
paper; see Bulman, 1996).
For Tillich then, kairos is a moment when the eternal swamps the temporal.
Consequently, kairoi are not produced through voluntaristic social and cultural
action. Rather, moments of kairos happen when the time is ripe and it is the
obligation of the individual to remain ready to receive and accept them.
Moments of kairos require a personality on the part of the individual which is
oriented towards the infinite and not deluded into accepting that the temporal
and the finite is all that there can possibly be. Kairos is a moment in which the
eternal that no social and cultural forms can possibly contain overwhelms
those forms. That overwhelming validates not just opposition to the this-
worldly but, also, a more meaningful being in the world. Tillich was able to
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confirm his commitment to aspects of the Enlightenment when he interpreted it
in just this way: `There was the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
Everything ... was a preparation for the great Kairos, the great moment in
which mature reason is reached in mankind' (Tillich, 1987: 317). Tillich also
believed that the years immediately after the First World War were a moment
of kairos in Germany. He wrote about `the contemporary Kairos' in which it
was possible to confront the existent world in the name of something more (for
an attempt to relate Tillich's interpretation of the significance of the First
World War to his own experiences on the Western Front, see Stone, 1980).
The attempt to tie kairos to specific historical moments like the Enlight-
enment or the First World War makes the point that for Tillich it is not an
abstract concept. Rather, kairos instantiates very clear and definite ethical
obligations. In 1923, Tillich wrote: `the idea of Kairos ... does not lead to
rational utopianism or to the mystical negation of the world but, rather, to a new
and creative fulfillment of forms with an import borne by power and eros but
penetrated by obedience to unconditioned form' (Tillich, 1987: 64). Meanwhile,
towards the end of his life, Tillich spoke about the `basic kairos' which
establishes the `centre of history' and is the principle of the establishment of a,
`religious cultural group ... [in] an existential encounter with the central event' of
the `appearance of Jesus as Christ'. Kairos compels community (Tillich, 1963:
149, 150).
Conclusion
From a sociological perspective, Tillich's emphasis on kairos as the moment of
revolt against the Spirit of Capitalism is little more than mysticism. Moreover,
it would be sociologically illegitimate because it interprets social and cultural
action as due in some measure to extra-social compulsions. Weber would have
probably condemned Tillich as one of those who are unable to, `countenance
the stern seriousness of our fateful times' (Weber, 1948: 149). Simmel,
meanwhile, likely would have been better disposed towards Tillich's hope
although in the end he would have probably rejected it as an inappropriate
formalisation of that yearning which is beyond the categories of sociological
understanding.
Yet perhaps it is there, in the different attitudes towards these `fateful times'
that it is possible to identify what sociology and theology can offer to one
another. What sociology offers to theology is a commitment to understand and
to interpret the present as an inescapable social and cultural reality that
determines what humanity might or might not be able to desire and
accomplish. Sociology lends theology a substantive awareness of dehumanisa-
tion. By contrast, what theology offers to sociology is a faith in the ability of
humanity to revolt against dehumanisation and thus become the source of a
moral sense of community which will take individuals beyond the petty
and narrow personalities of abstraction and calculation. Theology can lend
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sociology a hope that might replace Weberian despair (and as recent sociology
has demonstrated, there is absolutely no necessary reason why that hope
should be tied to Protestantism; Flanagan, 1996).
But such an optimistic conclusion is only viable if it is presumed that sociology
and theology are disciplines which can talk to one another. The issue of hope
indicates that such a dialogue might be more difficult than it appears at a first
glance. The point is that when theology and sociology refer to hope they mean
different, and perhaps even incommensurable, conditions. When Tillich refers to
hope he wants indicate an openness to the possibility that the coming future will
witness the swamping of the abstract, calculable, temporal and rational by the
unconditioned infinite. Tillich's hope is one that operates on a historical and
possibly even millenarian canvas. Sociology understands hope quite differently.
For the sociology that builds upon Kantian foundations, hope is removed from
the terrain of the historical and, instead, it becomes an individualistic act (it
becomes a product of the personality). For Simmel and Weber then, hope is
something the individual feels and experiences rather than which history or the
times might substantiate. And once again, Weber's condemnation of those who
cannot stare these fateful times in the face comes to the fore.
However, simply because the dialogue with theology might be difficult, that
is no reason for sociology to turn away from it. Sociology has much to learn,
and much moral nourishment to receive, from a discipline which is at once so
near and so very far away. In particular, such a dialogue would serve to restore
the melancholy moral texture that Simmel and Weber represent so well. This is
because it would force sociologists to recommit themselves to the Kantian
promise of the freedom and dignity of humanity and thus once again transform
the world that is ordered by the categories of the sociological understanding
into the prison from which humanity needs to escape. Despair will be all that is
left to sociology and the sources of hope will be put where they belong; in the
realm of freedom and thus beyond sociological comprehension. Only the
theologians will be able to hope.
University of Portsmouth
Received 16 September 1998
Finally accepted 16 August 1999
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