Academic life is a mad hazard
by Alex
When I was a graduate student one of the other graduate students had stuck the following quote from Max Weber on the door of their office in big black letters:
Academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief?
But recently I looked up the full, unexpurgated version, and it reads quite a bit differently:
Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation, the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says, _give up any hope_. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.”‘ Yet, I have found that only a few persons could endure this situation without coming to grief. This much I deem necessary to say about the external conditions of the academic man’s vocation. But I believe that actually you wish to hear of something else, namely, of the inward calling for science…
It’s sort of a telling difference, don’t you think?
It reads even better if you leave the the phrase from Dante (“lasciate ogni speranza”) untranslated. Weber was nothing if not chock full o’ cultural capital, and liberally dropped quotes into his work (Shakespeare, in particular, but also Scripture).
“It’s sort of a telling difference, don’t you think?”
Yes. Even more when transferred on the millions of excerpts and quotes that have traveled through time being (academically) reproduced to an uncountable extend. Now add an estimated percentage of humanologists that do not dive into the original sources but refer to textbooks and sourcebooks in the first place (for their writing and for their teaching) and figure “knowledge” anew.
The first time I ve come along the phenomenon of (academically) transformed (academic) information was when researching for a paper on Heinrich von Treitschke and what is called the (first) “Berliner Antisemitismus Streit”. The sources in their entire length showed well, that von Treitschke actually has been a normal liberalist of his time–which again says a lot on 19th century german liberalism.