Abstract
This paper seeks to make two distinctive sets of contributions through a supplementary reinterpretation of Max Weber in the light of Charles Taylor’s expressivist-hermeneutical theory of human agency. First, it offers a reinterpretation of Weber’s work. Focussing on the concept of stance, the paper highlights that Weber’s theorising on values and their relation to cognition, action and identity is less underpinned by subjectivism, representationalism, emotivism and decisionism than is typically thought. Instead, Weber sets values within a non-naturalist dimension where agents find their bearings and are constituted as such. In this dimension, orientation to meaning takes place; identity, action and thought are constituted; and normative experiences (such as freedom, or responsibility) are made possible. Weber recognised that this non-naturalist dimension has variegated modes, but seemingly studied them in their purest and most logical form (the ‘ideal type’), hence his focus on explicit belief systems and world-images. Second, there is a prospective supplementation of Weber’s theory through Taylor’s notion of expression. For Taylor, we take a stance and orient ourselves expressively through the domain of strongly valued meanings. The notions of strong evaluation and articulation prove central to understanding embodied, symbolic and representational meaning-orientation in the non-naturalist dimensions of values. This supplementary reading places Weber as a central figure in current American, British and French debates about, respectively, the normative nature of human agency; the question of culture, meaning and their different forms and modes of operation; and the question of how to examine identity-formation.
Introduction
Recent developments in sociological theory intersect in the relationship between culture, meaning and action. American sociology has increasingly focussed on the relation of culture to action with an emphasis on culture’s ‘autonomy’ or ‘independent effects’ prior to or outside any strategic considerations (see Alexander and Smith, 2003; Swidler, 1986). A central theme in the discussion concerns the modes of operation of culture. Meanings operate practically, habitually, through implicit understandings, schemas and skills that orient agents through a world of meanings (Lizardo, 2004, 2021; Strand and Lizardo, 2015). Meanings also operate at the level of explicit beliefs and representations of the world that allow for more ‘reflexive’, problem-solving forms of agency (Swidler, 2001: 181–213). Finally, meanings operate aesthetically through codes, scripts, rituals and performances (Alexander, 2011: 1–81). These modes of operation entail different modes of cognition (DiMaggio, 1997; Lizardo and Strand, 2010). Implicit, practical understandings allow for more flexible, less ‘logical’ forms of cognition, while explicit beliefs require a logic that is not always possible in social settings with high levels of contingency. Aesthetic modes of operation stand somewhere in the middle, allowing for ritualistic sense-making by performatively convincing audiences. The sociological question concerns meaning and its forms.
British sociology, for its part, has seen a longstanding debate over habits and routines, against reflexivity and evaluation as the constitutive feature of human agency (Archer, 2010, 2012: 47–86; Elder-Vass, 2007; Piiroinen, 2014; Sayer, 2010). The question of how we orient ourselves in the world is tied to questions of identity-formation under different contextual conditions or situational logics (see, e.g. Baert et al., 2022, for an ‘existentialist’ version; Giddens, 1991, for the ‘practice-based’ option; Archer, 2012, for the ‘critical realist’ option based on reflexivity and internal conversations). Meanings that orient actions, either habitually or reflexively, are strongly valued and move the agent both situationally and biographically. Orientation to meaning is intertwined with motivation and (ethical and normative) aspirations. The anthropological question concerns the relation between modes of meaning-orientation and identity-formation (Archer, 2000: 19–52; 2003: 14; see also Chernilo, 2017: 181–205).
Spawning from the French MAUSS (Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales), Vandenberghe (2017, 2018; see also Caillé and Vandenberghe, 2016) has advocated for a ‘normative sociology of action that consciously continues the venerable traditions of practical and moral philosophy’. This sociological quarter explicitly prioritises the ‘normative’ over the ‘empirical’ (and even the ‘political’). Interestingly, their project draws on a theory of agency that centres on non-strategic, non-utilitarian modes of action. The question of orientation to strongly valued meanings, goods and norms is vital for this project. This theoretical concern ties with Chernilo’s (2017) project of better understanding the ‘normative’ by way of the anthropological (and agential) traits of human beings (for an account of the ‘normative turn’ in contemporary social theory, see Raza, 2020). The key point of both Chernilo and Vandenberghe is that agential properties (habits, reflexivity, self-transcendence, adaptation, intentionality, etc.) configure the different modes of orienting towards the world and are the source of a normative fundus that is distinctly human, which sociology attempts to describe. The normative question is about the distinctive orientation to strongly valued meanings displayed in human agency.
My argument is that a supplementary reinterpretation of Weber’s work in the light of Charles Taylor’s expressive-hermeneutical theory of agency situates him as an important conversational partner for these three projects. Weber declared not only that the central problem of sociology is action and that the kernel of action is an orientation towards meaning on the part of the actor, but also that meaning-orientation is constitutive of cognition and crucial for identity-formation. My interpretation reveals that, for Weber, value-orientation is an anthropological fact determining the normative fundus of action, that culture orients action and cognition in different ways, and that identity-formation is a process through which agents modulate values.
The relation of the three aforementioned sociological factions to Weber is somewhat ambivalent. The American faction finds in Weber an ally for the explanatory purposes of a science of action. However, it sets him as the source of ‘representationalist’, ‘intellectualist’ models of action that the turn to habit and practice aims at surpassing on explanatory grounds (see Lizardo, 2021; Strand and Lizardo, 2015). Furthermore, Weber’s pivotal quote on material and ideal interests has been the subject of many controversies and re-appropriations (see Lizardo and Stoltz, 2018; Swidler, 1986). The MAUSS-inspired faction, represented by Vandenberghe (2017; see also Vandenberghe, 2018: 78–79), and the critical realist tradition in British sociology (Sayer, 2017), find in Weber’s axiological neutrality thesis the source of wrongheaded anormative tendencies.
Moreover, Weber’s alleged value decisionism and representationalism are seen as stumbling blocks to construing other modes of action (emotional, traditional or habitual) as unfolding in a normative-laden field of practical reason. Chernilo (2014, 2017: 2–7), on his part, finds in Löwith’s reading of Weber the inspiration for his normative-oriented ‘philosophical sociology’. This reading of Weber relativises the more absolutist readings of the thesis of axiological neutrality, which have been correctly criticised by S Turner (2020: 588–590). Also, it dovetails with Hennis’s (1988: esp. 59) interpretation, endorsed as well by Turner (1992: 5–42), according to which Weber’s central concern was to straddle – based on an anthropology of cultural beings – a theory of normative life orders (i.e. value spheres) and a theory of personality, with the intent of evaluating as much as describing social orders.
This paper suspends the debate about axiological neutrality to dig into another aspect of Weberian sociology that has been hitherto occluded. Focussing on what Weber can teach us about the normative role of the scientific observer of the social world has occluded the question of the role of normativity in the life of the participant qua active, self-oriented being. Hence, this paper considers what Weber can teach us about the normative in the social world, and how his theory of action can provide blueprints for a contemporary normative theory of agency that takes meaning-orientation qua value-orientation as the critical aspect of identity-formation and world-engagement, and that recognises the different forms of intending meaning in non-reductive terms.
That said, I acknowledge that Weber alone cannot provide a sufficient basis for a contemporary normative theory of action. To that end, I propose supplementing and reinterpreting his theory of action with the insights of Charles Taylor’s theory of meaning and agency. In other words, my paper aims at tailoring Weber’s value and action theories to the contemporary scene as described above. The focus on Taylor is not arbitrary. The two thinkers share many substantive interests, such as Protestantism, secularism and the disenchantment of the modern world, and a general diagnosis of modernity (see McKenzie, 2017: 69–103; Reckling, 2001; see also Taylor, 2011: 287–303), as well as an interest in the logic of the social sciences and the normative nature of human agency. There are also other implicit resonances, points of tension and dialogue that I aim to exploit productively. My aim is twofold: first, to show the importance of re-embedding Weber in his cultural, literary and philosophical context to better interpret his theory of values and action, cognition and identity-formation; and second, to showcase the prospects of a Taylor-ed Weber for the contemporary sociological debates mentioned above.
The first section examines the concept of ‘stance’ in Weber’s work and argues that it can serve to reconnect his theory of action and value with a broader post-Kantian theme. What distinguishes the actions and judgements of cultural beings from the responses of other creatures is that we are in some distinctive sense responsible for them. They express some sort of commitment of ours, which we can grasp, and to which we recognise some form of authority. The correlate of this view is that the human agent does not inhabit a physical space, an ‘environment’, but a ‘world’, a space of meanings that cannot be equated to the naturalist space of causes, which Weber conceptualises in terms of ‘culture’. Against some of the more subjectivist and mentalistic interpretations, these insights allow me to argue that, for Weber, norms, meanings and values operate in a non-naturalist dimension. Consequently, the concept of ‘stance’ signals that the essence of human action resides in its responsiveness to norms and strongly valued meanings, and that there are many modalities of this responsiveness.
The second section presents Taylor’s notion of stance based on his philosophical anthropology of linguistic beings and shows the point of contact with Weber’s philosophical anthropology of cultural beings. I argue that Taylor’s idea of strong evaluations and articulation supplements Weber’s thinking by offering answers to the question of human responsibility outside of decisionism and subjectivism. Taylor specifically focuses on responsiveness and articulations rather than decisions as the constitutive factor of our value commitments and the source of responsibility. I show that his view is closer to Weber than we might initially think. Through his notions of articulation and expression, Taylor also offers a more complex view of what it means to be responsive to and responsible for normative commitments.
The third section analyses what it means ‘to take a stance’, that is, to enter the non-naturalist realm of values and meaning. Writing parallel to Husserl and before any sort of phenomenological, hermeneutical or linguistic turn, it is easy to dismiss Weber’s theory of meaning and values as ensnared in representationalism and intellectualism. These views reduce beliefs, cognition and meaning-orientation to explicit propositional forms and mental representations of the actors imputed by the researcher. I argue that while there is enough textual evidence to ground such a reading, which parallels his typology of action, one can also find passages suggesting that Weber considers symbols and bodily enactment as crucial elements that bring the actor to operate in the realm of values and meaning, that lift the human agent from its physical environment to the world of ‘culture’. At this juncture, Taylor’s expressivist hermeneutics prove crucial to supplement Weber’s theory of meaning in directions that are non-reductive and fruitful for the contemporary sociological landscape.
The ‘stance’: Weber’s philosophical anthropology of cultural beings
Sociological discourse has overlooked Weber’s concept of ‘stance’. The reconstruction of his view on action, culture and values has canonised him as the founder of a scientific conversation about human action instead of continuing a broader conversation about the nature of the human agent. 1 Weber employs the notion of ‘stance’ in his treatment of the relationship among beliefs, values, meaning, cognition and action in the social world in both his methodological texts and more substantive texts on religion. As I will demonstrate, it is the keystone of his anthropological account of cultural beings. Along with its conceptual content, I want to argue that the notion of ‘stance’ is a master image to re-embed Weber in his cultural and literary context. The notion of ‘stance’ points towards a fundamental issue of the German post-Kantian philosophical discourse, namely that human beings do not operate in the space of causes, but that of meaning, where fundamental human experiences like thought, rationality and identity-formation, alongside normative experiences of freedom and responsibility, are constituted.
The standard sociological interpretation of Weber’s account of the relation between meaning and action starts from one of the oft-cited passages of his ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’: redemption attained a specific significance only where it expressed a systematic and rationalized ‘image of the world’ and represented a stand [Stellungnahme] in the face of the world. For the meaning as well as intended and actual psychological quality of redemption has depended upon such a world image and such a stand. Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. (Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 280, my emphasis)
Interpretative disputes focus on the ‘switchmen’ metaphor and hold that culture establishes the ends of action (cf. Swidler, 1986, 2001: 77–84), as well as on the issue of culturally and symbolically constituted interests (cf. Lizardo and Stoltz, 2018). Values are thus conceived as quasi-gravitational or symbolic forces that direct cultural beings towards some ends. These reinterpretations aim at taking issue with Parsons (1937: 697–726; 1951: 11–12), for whom values and norms are a set of shared standards of preferences performing pattern-maintenance and integrative functions. These interpretations miss and distort the critical point that emerges when we focus on the notion of Stellungnahme, and how it contrasts with the idea of a (rationalised) image of the world. In the following page, Weber reiterates the crucial point that behind ‘the many more varieties of belief’ ‘always lies a stand [Stellungnahme]’ (Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 281).
The concept of Stellungnahme shows that values and meanings are not projections of a subject’s representations. A ‘stance’ can be rationalised in a world image, but even if not, it remains operative. Behind a belief, there is a stance. Explicit beliefs are articulations or rationalisations of our stance towards the world. A stance is an acquired sensitivity that opens us to a meaningful cosmos (cf. Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 281). We are responsive to these meanings in a way that differs from how non-cultural beings respond to their environments. Values do not provide mere standards for the orientation of action in discrete situations, nor are they constitutive of symbolic goods that set in motion the dynamic of interests. More importantly, they are constitutive of a non-gravitational bent for the whole conduct of life. This orienting character of strongly valued meanings is constitutive of thought and cognition, action and practices and selfhood and identity.
Surprisingly, the concept of Stellungnahme has been systematically overlooked. It appears not once but three times in the passage that has been so central in interpreting Weber’s thinking on action, value and culture. One reason for this neglect might be that it has been unsystematically translated across his texts: ‘stand’, ‘attitude’, ‘position’ or simply ‘viewpoint’. For the sake of simplicity, I will employ the notion of ‘stance’. Further, this notion allows Weber to intertwine culture with ‘thought’ and ‘cognition’, not just with action and ends. He develops this argument about values and cognition in a sub-argument of the ‘Objectivity’ essay (Weber, 2012 [1904]: 108–135; see also Weber, 2012 [1906]: 174), and argues that strongly valued meanings and normatively loaded presuppositions guide the perception and cognitive interests of social actors, and these often operate as unexamined and perhaps unexaminable presuppositions. In his ‘Roscher and Knies’ essay, Weber proffers a definition of value that makes explicit its main elements: we describe something as a ‘value’ precisely if, and only if, it is capable of becoming the content of a stand [Stellungnahme] – that is to say: an articulate and conscious positive or negative ‘judgement’,
This passage confirms two crucial elements that contradict most interpretations of Weber’s thinking on value. First, values approach us, exist outside us, solicit our responses, and are not the product of our choices (decisionism) or our subjective representational projections (subjectivism). Second, a value is something we must accept, reject or modulate in judgements, and not just an emotional response (emotivism). Values incline without compelling us. At the same time, they configure the content of judgements, the aboutness of our intentional representational acts, and their determinacy (or determinability) in judgements is what ‘lifts’ them from what is merely ‘felt’ into the realm of ‘thought’.
That values can be elevated to ‘thought’ does not mean that they need to be, or that rational scientific thought will settle questions of value. Value constitutes thought, not the other way around. In ‘Science as Vocation’, Weber (2012 [1919]: 352) argues that value commitments involve an element of ‘faith’: ‘presuppositions themselves lie beyond what is “scientific” [. . .] They do not constitute “knowledge” in the usual sense; they are something one “has” [ein Haben]’. In fact, ‘this belief is found in manifold nuances in the mind of each individual, partly intellectually well thought, partly vaguely felt, [and] partly passively accepted’ (Weber, 2012 [1904]: 130). There is no self-possession or self-transparency when it comes to value commitments. It is a stance we can modulate without ever fully controlling, orienting us towards what we consider significant for action and thought. The idea of something one has that opens us to a world of significance and meanings, that calls to be modulated and interpreted but which itself can never be fully known, that moves us in one (ethical) direction, has clear resonances with the Goethean idea of the daimon (see Wetters, 2014), a reference that Weber himself espouses (and to which I will return later in this section).
By foregrounding the concept of stance, it becomes clearer that, for Weber, meanings and values are not mentalistic projections. A stance is a posture one has, a sensitivity, responsiveness to issues that matter to us. They can remain at the level of tacit understandings or reach forms of articulacy. However, this applies to social scientists and cultural beings alike, to allegedly neutral observers as much as to active participants. Culture, and our relation to values, allows us to focus, gather attention and gain a specific mode of awareness, grasp and knowledge of the world (see Weber, 2012 [1904]: 114, 119).
2
Thus: the transcendental precondition of every cultural science is [. . .] that we are cultural beings, endowed with the capacity and the will to adopt a deliberate position with respect to the world [zur Welt Stellung zu nehmen], and to bestow meaning upon it. Whatever this meaning may be, it will become the basis on which we are, in our life, led to judge certain phenomena of human existence in common and to adopt a (positive or negative) position [Stellungnahme] with respect to them because we regard them as significant. No matter what this position [Stellungnahme] may be, these phenomena possess cultural significance for us, and it is upon this significance alone that their scientific interest rests. (Weber, 2012 [1904]: 119]
In the ‘Roscher and Knies’ essay, Weber (2012 [1903–06]: 46–59) discusses the work of German Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, from whom he borrows the concept of Stellungnahme. Although he criticises Münsterberg, Weber retains the idea of the ‘subject taking a stance’ [stellungnehmendes Subjekt] to suggest that cultural beings move in these sui generis dimensions opened by values, which are irreducible to external, material, considerations. In a letter to Friedrich Gottl, Weber (2012 [1906]: 388) confides that ‘under all circumstances, “valuation” takes us into another world (that of the “subject taking a stand”, as Münsterberg terms it)’, and thus one must ‘not accept that “value” stands on the same level as “interest” or “importance’’’.
This last sentence contradicts readings of Weber that take values to be gravitational forces that symbolically constitute interests, ends or goods, the action-dynamic and motivational aspects of which could be studied in terms of strategies and economies, of wants and needs (cf. Weber, 2012 [1908]: 242–251; 2012 [1904]: 124). The concept of stance is key to understanding that orientation to strongly valued meanings does not move us in materialistic or physical terms. ‘Rationality, in the sense of logical or teleological “consistency” [of means and ends]’ – Weber (1946 [1915]: 324; see also 323–362) argues – entails ‘the “power” or command [Gewalt]’ that an ‘intellectual-theoretical or practical-ethical attitude [Stellungnahme]’ has over cultural agents, ‘however limited and unstable this power is and always has been in the face of other forces of historical life’.
Orientation to strongly valued meanings, even rational orientation towards them, which can be construed in terms of means and ends, is not a gravitational force pulling and pushing agents in some direction but involves consenting to authority. Hence, it makes the agent distinctively responsible for it. It is a normative directionality rather than a causal directionality. Even in the face of the most pressing or immediate interests or needs, the cultural being takes a stance, commits herself to specific values that she recognises as qualitatively higher. This means inhabiting ‘another world’, where interests or needs are lifted to an irreducible dimension of actions and judgements that are strategically efficient only after being normatively valid (cf. Weber, 1978: 1402). 3
A stance is not only constitutive of action and thought, but also of identity. The uniquely human self-relation is at stake in this non-naturalist realm. Developing a self-relation implies a stable inner relationship with values and their translation in a conduct of life, in practices that are at once expressive of values and ourselves. Our actions and judgements are the result of commitments that (1) are expressive of who we are, (2) to which we recognise some form of authority and (3) that we experience as free the more conscious we are of our assent to them. In Weber’s (2012 [1903–06]: 85; see also Weber, 2012 [1904]: 103; 2012 [1917]: 307, 315) words: The more ‘freely’ [. . .] the person ‘acts’ – that is to say: the less the action has the character of a ‘natural occurrence’, the greater the effect will be [. . .] of a concept of ‘personality’ whose ‘essence’ is to be found in a constant inner relationship to certain ultimate ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of life – ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ that in the actions of the ‘personality’ are translated into goals, and are thereby converted into teleological-rational action.
Weber speaks rhetorically about this relation between values and identity-formation. As is known, his preferred imagery is, on the one hand, that of an agent who chooses her values, who decides to devote her soul to one set of values. On the other hand, he uses the imagery of a battle of gods demanding obedience, of daimons holding the threads of her life, guiding her through value realms they have opened her to. I would like to briefly comment on this ambivalent rhetoric. If the interpreter takes the first imagery, she casts Weber into the Nietzschean shadows of value subjectivism, emotivism and decisionism. According to this interpretation, values are projections created by human decisions that fail to meet any rational standard (see MacIntyre, 1981: 26–27, 109–120). This interpretation is at the basis of Strauss’ (1974: 35–80) critique, according to which Weber’s thinking paradoxically presupposes at the same time the rationality of knowledge and the irrationality of values. In the light of this dominant and widespread interpretation, it is easy to dismiss Weber as a contributor for a normative theory of agency. According to this view, Weber’s ‘well known pathetic statements’ connect his ‘heroic, manly and lonely stand on values to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and his flippant appeal to the Overman in Zarathustra’. This renders any appeal to ‘practical reason, moral justification and normative foundation [. . .] suspicious’ and ends up in the ‘expulsion of values from reason’ (Vandenberghe, 2017: 418–419).
While I acknowledge the textual and contextual evidence, I want to propose a more productive interpretation to reclaim Weber for a normative theory of agency. It consists of taking the first imagery as purely rhetorical. I counterintuitively want to claim that these Nietzschean aphorisms serve Weber to underscore a Kantian idea. Cultural, as opposed to natural, beings are in a distinctive sense responsible for their judgements, identity and actions. Culture does not operate like gravity directing actors blindly to some range of meanings, but actors have the responsibility to grasp that to which they are responsive. Granting the notion of responsibility a central role in Weberian thought on value, action and identity-formation can help us make sense of other parts of his work that remain unintelligible within the Nietzschean interpretation.
First, it allows for an understanding of the sources of Weber’s methodological writings on the possibility of causal accounts of human action, which, as Stephen Turner (2020: 584–589; see also Turner and Factor, 1981) points out, build upon Von Kries’s jurisprudential models centred on responsibility rather than guilt to develop the notions of causality adequate to meaning and ‘objective possibility’. His concept of unintended consequences of action must be understood in this context and not as the key to invoking an ‘economy’ with emergent or aggregate effects of mutually referred actions. Second, the emphasis on responsibility allows us to bridge Weber’s thinking on values, cognition, action and identity-formation, with his remarks on political personality at the end of ‘Politics as Vocation’, which are rarely taken to have sociological significance (for a brilliant exception which has influenced my own reading, see Turner, 1992: 105–121). Modernity, for Weber, is characterised by a mosaic of irreconcilable normative fields of action, and having an identity via a ‘constant inner relationship’ to values and meanings that are translated into a mode of conducting life. The freer the agent, the more this relation is rationally articulated. However, Weber wants to recognise the conflict of values, the tragical aspects of value-orientation, and the dangers of totalising normative stances. For these reasons, the conditions of value-orientation in a modern society demand passion, responsibility and a sense of proportion. As Charles Turner (1992: 116–119) points out, what underlies this threefold characteristic is the idea that the human agent cultivates not only the capacity to listen and attend to the demands of the day, but also that of distancing herself from her beliefs, from her daimon. A rational inner relation to values demands at once to be possessed by one’s daimon and to maintain some degree of self-possession. Such is the challenge of cultural beings in modernity. Her integrity as an agent lies in the fragile balance between taking her (finite) perspective and normative commitments to be the centre of her world and in the ability to decentre herself, to be open to the world, to take the normative perspective of others upon herself and the world, etc.
Furthermore, Weber perceives the most dangerous totalising tendency in the Appeal to Reason, and here he departs from, or rather radicalises, Kant. Central to Kant’s view was the notion that we can ground our normative allegiances and commitments on reason alone, that agents do not need anything non-human to truly open themselves to normative realms. Weber’s rejection of this crucial idea emerges if we focus on the second set of imagery. In the last instance, our normative commitments are predicated on gods (in secular and immanent, and sacred and transcendent forms), opening us to their normative realms, guiding us in our practical reasoning. Here we no longer have the image of a lonely, isolated subject opening worlds of value on her decisions alone, a world in principle transparent to herself, but rather one of an actor able to listen to a call (Beruf) and attend the normative demands of a realm of action.
The reference to the ‘daimon’ clarifies this point (Weber, 2012 [1919]: 353; 2012 [1917]: 306). One does not ‘choose’ a daimon. Instead, one finds it; one is called upon to the demands of the day by it. As González García (1995) brilliantly observes, the reference to this Goethean notion entails that the agent is possessed somehow by normative commitments that are expressive of herself. Yet, she is somehow aware of and responsible for letting herself be possessed. The reference to daimons implies that there are crucial elements of our normative commitments that the lumen naturale cannot reveal and that revealed meanings do not appear in complete clarity. The opacity of meanings is the source of unintended consequences of action, of the tragic features of culture, since agents cannot, even at their most rational levels, eliminate the many-forged directions our action might take us. 4 Instrumental, strategic orientation might minimise unexcepted outcomes or organise means in more efficient ways, but can never eliminate the whole gamut of uncertainties, tragedies, and unintended directions or consequences of action. At this point, the sense of proportion, matter-of-factness and responsibility play a significant role. This idea suggests that each responsible actor needs to modulate, translate, or articulate the call of the daimon that holds the fibres of her life. The human agent must make sense practically and theoretically of the demonic revelations.
An uncharitable reading would suggest that, for Weber, ‘the battle of Gods cannot be moderated by Man’ (Vandenberghe, 2017: 419). However, this displaces any notion of responsibility, which is central to Weber’s thought. In his ‘Roscher and Knies’ essay, Weber (2012 [1903–06]: 85) further dispels any form of emotivism or irrationalism with Romantic roots. Conceiving identity-formation as a matter of conducting life by one’s ‘own “deliberations”’ and less as a ‘natural occurrence’ driven by ‘“external” concerns or irresistible “affects”’ implies a fading away of the romantic naturalistic version of the idea of ‘personality’, which seeks the real inner sanctum of the personal in the opposite direction: in the vague, indistinct, vegetative ‘underground’ of personal life, that is to say: in an ‘irrationality’ based on a tangled infinity of psychophysical conditions for the development of temperaments and moods – an ‘irrationality’ that the ‘person’ in actual fact completely shares with the animal.
At the core of our value commitments are not immediate desires or brute emotional reactions, but rather mediations that are within our ken. We do not inhabit the space of meanings like ‘animals’, but as cultural beings. This space does not resemble a physical environment where we succumb to causes, sensations and the chasing of experiences [Erlebnis] (cf. Weber, 2012 [1919]: 340), but a non-naturalist world of meanings where our orientation is co-constituted by our more absorbed and also more detached engagements in the demands of the day.
Yet, the question remains: What are we to make of Weber’s claim of the irrationality of values, an irrationality that the ‘person’ does not share with the ‘animal’? One cannot appeal to Reason alone for grounding value commitments, let alone to a form of Reason that grounds everything on Knowledge of Reality. Weber’s invocation of the ‘irrationality’ of values must be seen more as an ‘anti-foundationalist’ argument than the ‘expulsion of values from reason’. Let me quote at length a vital passage of the ‘Objectivity’ essay: the innermost elements of our ‘personality’ – the highest and most fundamental value judgements that determine our action[s] and endow our life with meaning and significance – are experienced by us as something ‘objectively’ valuable: we can only espouse them if we regard them as valid, as stemming from the highest values that guide our life, and if they are further developed in the struggle against the difficulties of daily life [. . .] Nevertheless: to judge the validity of such values is a matter of belief, possibly also a task for speculative observations and interpretations of the meaning of life and of the world, but certainly not the object of the [. . .] science of empirical experience. (Weber, 2012 [1904]: 103)
Weber does not reject reason tout court. He rejects the idea that value controversies can be ultimately resolved in (Empirical and Instrumental) Reason, that Reason alone can open and mediate the normative realms in which the human operates. His worries are the delegation of responsibility and the possible normative totalisation that emerges from the appeal to empirical reality as the ultimate grounds for our value commitments. At the same time, he argues that we can’t derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ and that nonetheless we experience values as something ‘objectively’ valid. Weber is hence also reluctant to claim that values are confined to the ‘underground’ faculties of human life, to our emotional life and faith alone, to the lower faculties over which agents have no ‘deliberative’ hold. Rather, value commitments are ‘a matter of belief’ and ‘possibly also a task for speculative observations and interpretations of the meaning of life and of the world’.
I take Weber to be pointing to a non-reductive, anti-foundationalist view of practical reason, which encompasses the non-closure of meaning and values, and the tragic aspects of culture. This is the source of ‘irrationality’. For it does not attempt to obtain presuppositionless or empirical certainty and accepts the need for further and novel articulations of normative meanings in the light of contingent historical development (see Weber, 2012 [1904]: 121, 137–138). ‘Man’ has a role in moderating ‘the battle of Gods’; he has responsibility in how value domains are opened and how he moves within these domains, but this role and responsibility cannot be reduced to the faculty of Reason. Turner (2020: 287–288) has recently advanced a similar anti-foundationalist reading of Weber, according to which our value articulations are ultimately ‘ungroundable’. This groundlessness does not entail that ‘reasoning about values and clarifying both them and the consequences of pursuing them was impossible’. Sometimes, such a clarification process can find ‘middle courses’ or a temporary consistency between value commitments. So construed, Weber’s thinking of values is no longer trapped in the contradiction between a subjectivist account of value realms regarding the relationship between identity formation, action and value, and a non-subjectivist account of the relation between value judgements and cognition. 5
The ‘expressive’ stance: Taylor’s philosophical anthropology of linguistic beings and its supplements to Weber’s ‘stance’
Many familiar with Charles Taylor might have noticed that I started Taylor-ing Weber silently from within his writings. I have tried to find traces that point to a supplementary reinterpretation through Taylor’s expressivist-hermeneutical theory of human agency. I have claimed that the concept of stance constitutes the critical node through which we can interpret Weber’s thinking on values. In this reading, the Weberian value realms are not underpinned by mentalism, representationalism, subjectivism or decisionism. Behind a rationalised image of the world and any form of explicit belief always lies a ‘stance’, that is responsiveness to a certain range of normative questions. Once we dispel emotivism and the other -isms typically attributed to Weber, we end up with the question of how to attribute responsibility for something that depends more on agents being receptive to norms than creators of value commitments entirely of their own (rational) making.
The notion of ‘stance’ unveils a pressing concern that Weber shared with many embedded in German thought’s long cultural and scientific conversation. From philosophical anthropology to Neo-Kantianism, (post-)Heideggerianism, and beyond, this conversation takes with utmost seriousness the idea that human agents inhabit not only a physical environment of causes but a normative world of meaning. 6 This world cannot be a subjectivist projection, nor can it be construed in naturalist terms. In this world, our humanity is at stake: thought, action and identity are therein constituted. The way we move around this world exhibits aspects irreducible to naturalistic accounts: expression, recognition, morality, symbolism, language, consent, responsibility, freedom. Meaning orients us not as ‘objects among objects’ through quasi-gravitational forces and dynamics. Part and parcel of this theme is the extent to which human agents need the world to be opened (or disclosed) to them and the extent to which they can produce openings in it: the extent to which to belong to this world we must be receptive to it and the extent to which we can shape it in the light of our expressions. 7
My account of Weberian thought centred on the notion of ‘stance’ aims at foregrounding his engagement with this larger conversation but also acknowledges that he never provided a conceptually developed position. I propose to reinterpret his account with insights drawn from Taylor’s expressive-hermeneutical theory of human agency. Choosing Taylor for this supplementary reinterpretation is not arbitrary. He has delved into the German tradition as an outsider and elaborated a refined view that balances the focus on both expressive and receptive aspects of human agency, which I take to be encapsulated in his notions of strong evaluation, self-interpretation and articulation. For Taylor, it is language that makes us both responsive to issues of intrinsic rightness and capable of expressive activities. Weber’s ambivalent reference both to the need of gods and daimons, and to human responsibility, seems to put his solution somehow in the middle, in a view on agency that balances receptivity and expression.
Towards the end of The Language Animal, Taylor (2016: 335–339) turns to the anthropological consequences of his investigations into language.
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He employs the term ‘flexibility’ to characterise the beings that deal linguistically with the world. This flexibility allows for some sort of distance that is constitutive of questions of worth. In gaining flexibility, human agents become responsive, in another dimension, to goods and questions of strong value. This normative dimension in which things gain meaning is constitutive of ends and purposes that display ‘intrinsic rightness’ (Taylor, 2016: 3–4, 25–28; see also Taylor, 1995: 84). In his words, new meanings arise in the new space of questions which language opens. Human ecological action has to deal with a whole range of new questions, on top of those we share with other animals. The step to language involves far more than providing effective means to the perennial ends of survival, prosperity, effective combination, avoidance of mutual destruction. But these new ends and new meanings are hard to grasp in the no-non-sense terminology of instrumental efficacy [. . .]. They seem strange and mysterious, hard to get a handle on, and threaten to involve us in moral and aesthetic issues. (Taylor, 2016: 117)
For Taylor, since the human agent inhabits the world linguistically, she is responsive on a new axis to normative questions, distinguishing her actions and judgements from those of other non-linguistic creatures. Language is the source of a ‘sensitivity’ to issues of strong value (Taylor, 2016: 7). Taylor refers to Plessner’s concept of ‘eccentric positionality’ to formulate these insights: The mode common to all animals, and to humans a good deal of the time, is that in which the agent is the centre of its environment, and things show up in their meaning or relevance to the action which the situation calls for. But in addition to this stance, humans are also capable of an ‘eccentric’ one; they are capable [of] making this ordinary stance the object of a more reflexive one, to see it from outside, from another point of view, or in the eyes of another. This is what Plessner calls our ‘eccentric positionality’, something only humans share. (Taylor, 2016: 341–342)
In a symposium on his book, Taylor (2017: 732) argues that to understand our different ways of entering the space of meaning, ‘we need a concept of stance, a way of “inhabiting” expressively the physical world’. Expression is the crucial anthropological feature that makes us sensitive to strong rightness and allows us to distance ourselves from the world. Taylor’s expressivist notion of stance offers us supplementary elements to Weber’s. It encapsulates conceptually the possibility of being both absorbed in our world of strong values and the possibility of taking distance from it. In his theory of human agency, this sensitivity to issues of intrinsic rightness is conceived in terms of ‘strong evaluations’. 9
In his Hegel, Taylor (1975: 564) anticipates the contours of the concept of strong evaluations. He argues that any concept of human agency that takes the possibility of human freedom into account must include the notion of a bent in our situation which we can either endorse or reject, reinterpret or distort. This not only must be distinguished from what we ordinarily call desire. But it is hard to see how a bent of this kind could be accounted for in mechanistic terms, not to speak of its relation to our desires.
The anthropological feature of meaning-orientation makes human beings distinctively responsible for their actions and judgements and opens them up to the possibility of freedom. For Taylor, our ‘strong evaluations’ not only orient our actions but also define our identity. 10 Finding orientation in the moral space is to answer the question of who we are (see Taylor, 1989: 25–49). Responsibility, identity, freedom and action are the human experiences that the concept of strong evaluation is set to grasp. Taylor (1985a) opens ‘What is Human Agency?’ with the question of the distinctive type of responsibility we can attribute to human agents; and ends in a similar position to the one I attributed to Weber: it is our value commitments, expressed in judgements and existential modulations that make us responsible. Writing after phenomenology, Taylor has conceptually clarified something that Weber could only intimate through images. Many of our evaluations are not even formulated as beliefs. They show up in the way we do things and carry on with the demands of the day. These provide a precondition for acting and thinking. We feel, think and act in this context of significance that was not of our choosing. And yet, we somehow are distinctively responsible for our moves in the context, albeit not entirely (cf. Taylor, 2007: 387). I will restrict myself to three observations on Taylor’s key concept to supplement Weber’s theory of action.
First, strong evaluations necessarily refer to a non-subjectivist dimension insofar as distinctions of worth that orient us ‘are not rendered valid by our desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged’ (Taylor, 1989: 4). But then the question emerges as to what responsibility can be attributed to a human agent who finds herself moved by standards that are not of her own (rational) making. More importantly, some of these standards might not even find intellectual formulation or foundations. They might remain as something one simply has. We are first and foremost moved and the recipients of moral claims demanding validity, but they do not compel us to accept them. Instead, we reply to them expressively through ‘articulations’ that attempt to get the moral claims right.
In this sense, Taylor provides a philosophically sound solution to the question of responsibility outside any vocabulary of ‘radical choice’ or moral subjectivism. Taylor (1985a: 28–30) argues that values are not the product of subjective projections. At this juncture, Taylor takes issue with understanding our responsibility in terms of Sartrean choices, something some interpreters might be keen to project into Weber. But I have argued that Weber employs this choice imagery rhetorically to emphasise the agent’s responsibility, without any intent to decisionism. In this sense, Taylor’s criticism serves more as a supplement to than a displacement of Weber’s theory of values.
Taylor argues that the vocabulary of choice ultimately contradicts the idea of human agents as oriented by strongly valued meanings: ‘a radical choice between strong evaluations is quite conceivable, but not a radical choice of such evaluations’ (Taylor, 1985a: 29). Alternatively, in Weberian terms: a choice between daimons is quite conceivable, but not a choice of such daimons. Daimons are discovered rather than made out of whole cloth. Before choosing between values, the actor must be sensitive to their different validity claims. We are responsible for endorsing a value, and we do so expressively.
We experience normative bents in terms of claims laid upon us, in terms of calls and solicitations, and not forces pulling and pushing us around. Weber often employs the language of obedience to emphasise that we endorse specific normative commitments, but this obscures the fact that the endorsement or assent to one value commitment consists in both existential modulations and judgements. In endorsing a value, we modulate a conduct of life [Lebensführung] (to use one of Weber’s terms); we do not just passively surrender to them. Taylor’s preferred term for these value modulations and judgements is ‘articulation’. Articulations are expressive interpretations that partly shape our moral orientation and understanding. Through articulations, we gain some clarity as to the normative claims orienting us. We are responsible for our articulations (see Taylor, 1985a: 35–42). Agents are responsible not only for their expressive interpretations of the world, but also for their (in)capacity to maintain openness to different experiences and normative claims, and to take a distance from their self-descriptions, for having, in Weberian terms, distance, a sense of proportion and matter-of-factness. This capacity to maintain or regain openness is rooted in the anthropological feature of strong evaluations, in our being able to attend to the world in terms we are solicited to, to have a sense of wonder, awe and humility towards the world (cf. Taylor, 2011: 297–298). We can take (and not only accept) a ‘stance’ upon the world through articulations. We expressively take a stance upon the world. This is Taylor’s non-trivial supplementation to the Weberian concept of stance.
Second, like Weber, Taylor has been criticised for allegedly overintellectualising the human agent. For critics, orientation to strongly valued meaning seems to imply that the agent is constantly involved in active evaluation. 11 According to them, focussing on this dimension displaces dispositions, emotions, or habits, favouring more ‘reflective’ and detached features of human agency. Their argument implies that once we focus on these other ‘underground’ levels, orientation towards strongly valued meanings is no longer the essential feature of human agency. However, these criticisms have completely mistaken Taylor’s point. He does not argue that agents can orient their actions normatively because they are capable of reflective distance. Rather the opposite: ‘strong evaluation is a condition of articulacy [. . .] to be a strong evaluator is thus to be capable of a reflection which is more articulate. But it is also in an important sense deeper’ and ‘without it an agent would lack a kind of depth we consider essential to humanity, without which we should find communication impossible’ (Taylor, 1985a: 24–25, 28). Because we are moved by something that is not a physical force, and we have a sense of what this movement is about, we strive to express it and put it into words or symbols.
In my understanding, the concept of strong evaluation serves to underscore the fact that a central feature of any aspect of human agency is its sensitivity to external normative claims, its openness to being affected by the world, rather than its free-floating, detached nature (cf. Taylor, 1989, 2; see also Smith, 2001). In simple terms, it underscores that human agency is more world-oriented than self-possessed. A sensitivity to dimensions of irreducible rightness is constitutive of it. Strong evaluations point to the fact that, whether conscious or not, explicit or not, articulate or not, a sense that some desires, motivations and modes of life are qualitatively higher than others is central to every aspect of human agency. 12
An implicit assumption lies behind this family of challenges and misunderstandings that associate strong evaluation with ‘reflexivity’. According to it, the lower-end elements of agency (habits, dispositions, emotions, etc.) cannot display any sort of normative orientation of which the agent has some sort of grasp. They allegedly function according to another set of considerations found in the ‘objective dynamics’ of the situation or field. Habits or emotions orient us in ways that are more primordial, mechanistic, or perhaps even unrelated to values and more to interests. They put us not in the non-naturalist realm of human meanings, but somewhere else. The lower-end dimensions supposedly situate the agent in a complex and dynamic space of causes, by positing the body as a (dynamic) object among objects that can be explained naturalistically in a field over which agents have no control. There is a distinctive directedness orienting human agency in this version, but it operates in the register of forces and tensions rather than of interpretations and norms we modulate through our existence. They cannot be rejected, accepted or distorted by an agent’s understanding of them. The orienting bent in this sense is derivatively normative and primarily functional as a dynamic tendency of the system of which actions are contingent events. We are entering the Bourdieusian territory that cognitivist cultural sociologists are now reclaiming in the American scene (Lizardo, 2004, 2007, 2021; see also Lizardo et al., 2020; Strand and Lizardo, 2015).
For Taylor, the turn to habit and practices does not entail the naturalisation of the directedness of human agency. In ‘To Follow a Rule’, Taylor (1995) argues explicitly against the representational, intellectualist view of rule-sensitive behaviour. However, he does not want to jump to the conclusion that practices are oriented anormatively and blindly. For Taylor, the body is not merely ‘the executant of the goals we frame, nor just the locus of causal factors’. On the contrary, it ‘can encode components of our understanding of self and world’ and display ‘patterns of appropriate action, which conform to a sense of what is fitting and right’; and thus ‘actions are responsive throughout to this sense of rightness, but the “norms” may be quite unformulated, or only in fragmentary fashion’ (Taylor, 1995: 170–171). Taylor convincingly argues that the retrieval of the body, and habits, in a theory of human agency need not amount to its denormativisation. The same is true for emotions (see Taylor, 1985a: 45–76). Emotions are affective modes of awareness of the strongly valued meanings that orient us in the space of meanings. They contain an understanding, however inchoate or partial, of self and world, that we are called to further articulate, and this is what makes us self-interpreting animals (see Taylor, 1985: 65).
All aspects of human agency open us to a world of meaning that demands further interpretation that is carried out through different expressive activities. Embodied practices, habits and emotions project (in Heidegger’s technical sense) the agent to a world of meaning and significance. Because strongly valued meanings are not the result of subjective projections, they never appear in total clarity to the agent. This is where emotivism and decisionism finally succumb. If the values that orient our action were the product of our conscious choices, they would appear to the agent transparently so that she can act in a mode of complete self-possession and self-consciousness. Were they irrational projections of our emotional responses, there would be no space for us to make sense of them, no possibility of getting them right.
Taylor’s point is subtle yet powerful and can help us to retrieve a crucial aspect of Weber’s theory of action. As Turner (1981, 2019) has argued, it is possible to find a ‘sociology of fate’ embedded in Weber’s theory of action. By this he means that Weber posits the principle that agents are not fully aware of the consequences, entailments or the meanings orienting their actions. Turner argues that this principle must be studied in the light of an economic theory of action in which instrumental orientation is incapable of reducing ‘uncertainty’ and ‘risk’, and that a fully fleshed out Weberian theory of action must extend this principle somehow to habituation (but – it must be added – also to other modes of meaningfully oriented action). However, it is difficult to see how an ‘economic’ sociology of fate can incorporate emotions and habits in a coherent way. An expressivist-hermeneutical sociology of fate provides a better solution. The fateful aspect of any action, that is, its unintended consequences, is rooted in an ineliminable opacity of the meanings orienting action. Meanings can be emotionally, habitually, symbolically or rationally intended, and nonetheless have an excess of meaning that gives rise to novel interpretations, articulations or re-expressions. We never fully know where our daimon leads us, but we are in the constant process of making sense of the path, its traces and its multi-sided tracks. Because our emotions or embodied practices open us to a world of meanings with normative purchase, the space of meanings never appears transparently to us. Instead, we have a sense of what is important for us, of the goods and values orienting our bearings in the world. Moreover, because this sense is always partial, and inchoate, poorly formulated, or confused, we are invited to re-express it, figure it out through symbols, modulate it differently in our conduct of life, or reformulate it conceptually.
Re-expression entails opening our world differently. These re-expressive articulations are non-trivial. This kind of formulation ‘does not leave its object unchanged’. For, ‘to give a certain articulation is to shape our sense of what we desire or what we hold important in a certain way’, so that ‘in the fact of shaping, it makes it accessible and/or inaccessible in new ways’ (Taylor, 1985a: 36, 38). Through various expressive capacities, human agents can spin, modify, reinforce, misdirect, or give a different thrust to the normative bent orienting their actions. This is the crucial theoretical insight of Taylor’s concept of strong evaluation as a central feature of human agency: its responsiveness and sensitivity to something external that nonetheless is not ‘intransitive’. By intransitive (for lack of a better word), I mean that the orienting power of this ‘bent’ is not immune, as gravity is, to how agents interpret or re-express it.
Emotions, rituals, embodied practices, explicit beliefs constitute the different mediums in which culture comes to expression. In each of them, the agent gains awareness of, and sensitivity to, the meanings orienting her actions and life. In gaining a symbolic, embodied or conceptual sense of them, agents are invited to further articulate them: to existentially modulate explicit beliefs in their practices, to reformulate conceptually what they understand bodily or symbolically, or to figure out symbolically what is moving them bodily. This is the second supplementation, to which I will return, that Taylor’s expressive-hermeneutical view provides to Weber’s thinking. We find orientation to meaning in different mediums that correspond roughly with different types of action and different modes of awareness (or modes of intentionality, to use a more technical term). For now, Taylor, writing after the phenomenological and hermeneutical movement, can provide an account of agency where normative orientation goes all the way down and is the fundamental anthropological feature that enables more distant, reflective or symbolic ways of cognition of meanings.
This leads me to the third contribution of this supplementary reading. I argued that Weber did not aim at the expulsion of values from the realm of reason. Weber aimed to deny that Reason oriented to empirical knowledge of Reality can settle value conflicts; that the validity of value judgements is intrinsically different from the validity of scientific judgements. But Weber struggled to formulate what is really at stake in taking a stance, in making a value judgement. It is a matter of belief and something (perhaps a daimon) one has more un-self-reflectively. He also claims that it can perhaps involve speculative observations and interpretations of the meanings of world and self. Taylor’s notion of strong evaluations, from which articulations and self-interpretations emerge, provides an answer that fits with Weber’s anti-foundationalist statements. For Taylor, ‘reason in this domain [of human meanings] must take a largely hermeneutical turn; and this brings with it a certain endlessness, a resistance to completion, the impossibility of resting in some supposedly “final” and unimprovable conclusion’ (Taylor, 2016: 338).
Much of Taylor’s (2016: 177–265) The Language Animal is devoted to showing how this hermeneutical reason operates through bodily enactments, symbolic figurations, and conceptual descriptions of different ranges of meanings. He claims that this type of reason cannot appeal to ultimate grounds for its validity, and that there is always some opacity and excess of meaning that can give rise to further enactments, symbolisation or descriptive accounts of the meanings we live by. 13 Taylor certainly holds a less tragic view of culture and values than Weber expresses in his most tragic statements, yet they are not incompatible. Sometimes Weber exaggerates that there is no space for relativisation or compromise, but rather a sort of death struggle between values. 14 I take these to be rhetorical elements as they appear primarily in the 1917 paper where he is concerned with the danger of ‘single-purpose’ organisations and totalising normative stances and urges his contemporaries to not fall into them (see Weber, 2012 [1917]: 314–320, 333–334). In his earlier methodological writings, it is possible to distill yet another view that is perhaps less tragic. It still acknowledges the inevitability of value conflict. However, it affirms that concrete value relations and historical boundaries amongst normative domains are fluid and contingent, assuming new colourings and forms, and that conflict is everchanging in the light of historical experience (see Weber, 2012 [1904]: 121, 137–138). Taylor (1989: 89) is also wary of ‘single-term’ moralities that unify the moral domain around a ‘basic reason’ and occlude value conflicts, but he argues that our articulations can give a partial, contingent, local solution to some value conflicts. 15 Our existential modulations, symbolic figurations or conceptual reformulations can open us to a mode of life in which some of these demands could be contingently reconciled. This does not preclude further and novel value conflicts, or the possibility of the return of a previous conflict that our articulations had managed to resolve but in a way that is no longer valid. Part of our nature as expressive beings is to open ourselves to new normative ways of exploring the world and seeing things differently. This presupposes both value conflict and the possibility of partial compromises or relativisations.
The mode of reasoning about human values is expressive and hermeneutical and can never find an ultimate ground, be it in Reality or Reason. Our articulations of human meaning, our value judgements, follow an expressive-constitutive ‘semantic logic’, as opposed to the ‘descriptive semantic logic’ of independent domains of objects (for a fuller account of these two ‘logics’, see Taylor, 2016: 187–260). Hence, the conditions of validity and verification are indeed different. The former involves speculative observation, enactment, symbolisation and conceptual reformulation that strive to be faithful to something. But what they strive to be faithful to is not an independent object with a fixed degree and manner of evidence, but rather a largely inarticulate sense of what is of decisive importance. An articulation of this ‘object’ tends to make it something different from what it was before. And by the same token a new articulation does not leave its ‘object’ evident or obscure to us in the same manner or degree as before (Taylor, 1985a: 38).
The concept of ‘expressive stance’ encapsulates the twofold features of articulation and strong evaluation: human agents are oriented to issues of strongly valued meanings with which they can take issue. Taking issue with it does not entail rejecting or strategising, but rather involves a range of moral, cultural and linguistic capacities ranging from criticism to justification. Interestingly, both Weber’s idea of an ‘inner stable relationship to value’ and Taylor’s idea of articulate strong evaluation means that we can only cast our actions or plans in the language of ‘choice’, ‘means’, or ‘ends’, only after a more expressive relation to values is achieved. 16 Prior to any strategy of action, there must be a recognition and modulation of the range of goods that motivate and constitute one’s action, life-project and identity. Identity-formation and biographical disruptions relate to these crucial articulations of what matters to us. 17
The lessons of the supplementary reading are the following. We are responsible for our articulations of the meanings that call upon us. We expressively take a stance. A stance can find expression in embodied practices, habits, emotions and beliefs that we are invited to re-express. This act of re-expression aims at getting our normative calls right, but the conditions of validity are different from those of describing an independent object, for the act of re-expression involves enactments, interpretations, speculative observations and symbolisation. Our reasoning in the domain of meanings is thus hermeneutical and anti-foundationalist.
To expressively take a stance: Meaning and its forms
In this section, I want to address the question of what it means to take a stance, once we supplement Weber’s account of meaning through Taylor’s notion of expression. This refers to the different mediums in which culture finds expression: the modes in which strongly valued meanings orient action and constitute modes of cognition. However, Weber’s theory of meaning is somewhat outdated and needs to be supplemented, given that he was writing before the peak of the phenomenological movement and its hermeneutical ramifications. This does not entail that Weber was unaware of expressivist themes that go back to Herder, Schlegel, Humboldt, Hamman, Schleiermacher and Hegel, such as the debates around the (un)translatability of the poem and the symbol, the (ir)reducibility of non-linguistic (e.g. pictorial art, symbols, gestures, etc.) to linguistic expressions, and how language (or culture) bounds and constitutes thought (see Forster, 2010, 2011). Therefore, it is legitimate to ask what Weber’s implicit position regarding these topics is. I want to argue that Weber holds at most an unrefined and narrow expressivism, which suffers compared to Taylor’s broad expressivism that includes, in a non-reductive manner, the whole range of symbolic forms.
How do agents inhabit the space of meanings? What makes our movements in this space operate on the plane of values? The first obstacle in Weber’s writings is his coarse typology of action. Tradition, emotions, conviction (value-rationality) and purposive rationality constitute the four modes in which an action can be oriented towards meaning, but Weber suggests that the former two are on the border with behaviour ‘unrelated’ to meaning-orientation (Weber, 2019: 79). After phenomenology and hermeneutics, a sociological theory that builds its explanatory system upon such premises looks unacceptable. Emotions and habits are nowadays at the centre of theories of agency, making Weber’s typology seem obsolete. However, to Weber’s credit, he acknowledged that emotions and tradition are modes of oriented action, albeit perhaps deficient ones. However, in his substantive writings, Weber went well beyond his coarse distinction of Economy and Society to take on board sociologically habitual and bodily dispositions [Einstellungen] to strongly valued meanings (cf. Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 277–278; see also Camic, 1986: 1057–1066; Hennis, 1988: 30–39, 70; Schluchter, 1979: 98).
Furthermore, not just habits and beliefs but symbols too are crucial for the particular meaning-oriented character of human agency. ‘Symbolic activity’, Weber (1978: 404–406) argues, displaces the ‘direct manipulation of forces’ and allows us the flexibility to take a stance and be responsive and sensitive to novel elements, since ‘a realm of souls, demons, and gods’ is such that ‘cannot be grasped or perceived in any concrete sense but possess[es] a kind of transcendental existence which is normally accessible only through the mediation of symbols and meaning [. . .] by instrumentalities that “mean” something, i.e. symbols’. 18 Moreover, Weber claims, ‘all areas of human activities were drawn into this circle of magical symbolism’, thus having ‘incalculable importance for the substantive evolution of culture’.
My point is that there is an ambivalence in Weber’s writings regarding the role of symbols, habits and explicit beliefs. Turner (1992: 56) goes so far as to claim that, for Weber, through the ‘symbolic forms’ opening us to a range of meanings, ‘life is lifted out of the immediacy of drives’. I agree, but it is difficult to discern a theory of symbolic forms from Weber’s writings. Methodologically, Weber poses another problem that points in a similar direction. He suggests that values operate mainly in terms of explicit beliefs and their semantic core (in terms of reference and predication, significance and meaning, etc.), and that a sociological description must treat them accordingly even if they do not appear in this form. Rationally oriented action constitutes the preferred object of sociological description because it fits its abstraction, generalisation and causal imputation methods. The ‘ideal type’ analytically approaches the multimedia space of meanings (the conduct of life and lifeworld of early Protestantism) in the model of a space of concepts (Calvin’s doctrine of predestination) in which beliefs and actions follow relations of logical inference (see Weber, 2012 [1904]: 124–126, 129, 132; 2019: 99–108). The ideal-typical reduction analytically presents these spaces of meanings in their purest form: a logical space of inferences, propositions and entailments, distorting its quality as a space of expressions.
Nevertheless, Weber remains ambivalent on this score. Meaning-orientedness is configured by a stance and a world image, practical and theoretical modes of referring to meanings. As Schluchter (1987: 98; cf. Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 277–278, 286–287, 293) has noted, this is critical to understanding how Weber speaks of rationalisation. This should be understood as a process by which different sets of meanings find rational existential modulations and theoretical clarifications, which are in principle different.
Culture is constitutive of thought and action. This is an expressivist thesis that we find in Weber. Culture operates in the form of ‘explicit beliefs’ and ‘means-ends’ practical schemas, but also in the form of embodied practices, traditions and symbols, which for him can be reduced (at least analytically) to the former. We can study all symbolic forms according to the ideal-typical model that organises them in a pure, rational manner of logical relations of practical or theoretical inferences of explicit beliefs. This is somehow a narrow expressivist thesis that would reduce the meaning of non-linguistic artworks (or symbols and gestures) to linguistic articulations, of habits to explicit beliefs. Implicitly, Weber argues that to study the space of meanings sociologically, we ought to model it in ideal-typical terms, as a logical space of concepts, explicit beliefs and means-ends practical schemas. Acknowledging differences and yet reductively explaining all forms of meaning in terms of a supposedly pure model of ideal types is unrefined narrow expressivism. 19
Taylor’s broad expressivism offers a way to differentiate between forms of meaning and study them in non-reductive ways. 20 This consists of construing the space of meanings as a multimedia space of expressions and accepting that non-standard linguistic uses and non-linguistic expressions cannot be reduced to standard linguistic expressions. Each mode of expression allows for different forms of intending or referring to meaning, and we must account for the intentional structure and type of cognition relative to each. This supplements Weber’s theory with Taylor’s philosophy of meaning and language.
In Taylor’s view, bodily attitudes enact meaning without signifying relation, giving rise to modes of non-representational, non-predicative, non-propositional intentionality; symbols portray meaning; and concepts describe meanings (Taylor, 2016: 177–319, 332–334, 337–338). Explicit rule-following, rituals, myths, practices, habits – all are different and mixed ways in which a cultural being takes a stance towards the world. Taylor’s broad expressivist argument is twofold. On the one hand, expression ‘reveals a new way of inhabiting the world, and the new significances which this way responds to’ (Taylor, 2016: 29–30). On the other hand, expressions involve distinctive cognitive elements. Each medium of expression gives rise to a particular mode of cognition. Thought, the mode of cognition that allows for representation and more deliberative, focussed and detached modes of orientation, is constituted by literal speech and its as-structure (Taylor, 2016: 16; see also 1995: 88). In this sense, linguistic beings ‘are conscious of the things they experience in a fuller way’, they are ‘more reflectively aware’ (Taylor, 1985b: 228). In this strong sense, ‘expression makes possible its content; [. . .] language opens us out to the domain of meaning it encodes’ (Taylor, 2016: 90).
Nevertheless, language, or better said our linguisticality, contains a whole ‘family of modes of intrinsic rightness, which cannot simply be modelled on descriptive rightness [the as-structure] as their paradigm’. Descriptive adequacy can only emerge ‘against a rich background of other modes of rightness’ (Taylor, 2016: 47, see also 98–102). We are capable of the sort of reflective distance of speech, because we are embedded in the prefigured world of practical, embodied, understanding and in the figurative world of symbolic representations. Taylor calls this his ‘maximal claim’, which entails recognising that non-standard linguistic (and non-linguistic) expressions have ‘validity conditions’, and that these could be misleadingly construed in the light of the as-structure of conceptual, representational intentionality. More radically, he argues ‘that the standard depictions wouldn’t be possible for a being who didn’t have the nonstandard uses in its repertoire’. The notion that culture and meanings can be expressed in different mediums, which allow for different modes of consciousness and orientation, is a Cassirean theme (see Matherne, 2021: 115–150, 229–236) that Taylor silently and implicitly appropriates. This advances a holism of expressive mediums, or, as Taylor sometimes puts it, the ‘whole range of ‘symbolic forms’’ (see inter alia Taylor, 1985b: 216; Taylor, 2005: 440–441; and especially Taylor, 2016: 99, 260–263).
This maximal claim allows to grant greater degrees of clarity and reflectiveness to the mode of cognition enabled by speech and at the same time to deny that it renders the space of meanings transparent to the agent. Agents cannot traffic in a self-possessed manner. There is no ‘resistanceless medium’ in which Thought is in its element and self-consciousness comes to presence in language. 21 For, even our modes of descriptive speech are embedded in our practical understanding, to being-in-the-world and contingent symbolism (Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 83). Hence, Taylor is effectively inverting what Forster (2011) conceives of as refined narrow expressivism, that is, the view that non-standard expressions are parasitic, translatable and derivative of standard linguistic expressions. For Taylor, there is neither parasitism, translatability, nor derivativeness amongst expressions: their relationship is one of articulation, interpretative re-expression and expressive interpretations. The relation between beliefs, representations and practices (and their modes of cognition) is not logical but hermeneutical, and our analytical models need to account for this.
The focus on expression, which Taylor shares with Cassirer and Merleau-Ponty, constitutes the cornerstone of his whole theoretical edifice that allows him to hold together more ‘practical’ and more ‘aesthetic’ philosophical anthropologies, more receptive and more expressive views of agency. 22 For ‘expressions manifest things, and hence essentially refer us to subjects for whom these things can be made manifest [. . .] If we make expression fundamental, it seems impossible to explain it in terms of something else’ (Taylor, 1985b: 221, my emphasis). If we take speech and symbols as expressions, they cannot be explained in terms of the fore-structure of practical understanding. The embodied world of meanings, in turn, neither can be explained in terms of explicit webs of beliefs, vocabularies, or symbolic representations.
The symbol, the body and the concept are mutually irreducible; each allows for different forms of cognition and agent-integration in the space of meanings. Motor intentionality cannot be reduced to (or fully explain) representational intentionality or the double intentionality of the symbol, and all these mediums are present in our grasp of spheres of meaning. 23 The grasp of the social space of meanings (or culture) could be better defined as ‘multimedia’. Not only ready-to-handness, or world images and vocabularies, or symbols and metaphors, but a ‘multimedia understanding’ that would include the whole range of expressive forms (see Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 46, 116–126).
I want to briefly examine the mode of cognition (or ‘consciousness’) and agent-integration of the three mediums of expression that Taylor (2016) studies: enaction, portrayal and description. Enaction is the level of embodied practices. In sociological theory, Bourdieu reigns in this realm. Taylor (2016: 42–43, 76, 224–227, 273–274; Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 116–117) approvingly turns to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. This reference could be misleading. Bourdieu’s habitus is the crucial premise that allows him to model the space of bodily expression as a space of dynamic and contingent causes. For him, practical understanding embeds the agent in a field of dynamic forces, in an economy of practices. 24 For Taylor, the notion of the habitus advances the view of a normatively oriented human agent that operates not with a (conceptual) representation, but rather with a practical sense of rightness. Practical understanding does not render representations superfluous, nor is it the disguised underside of symbolic realities or economies. Quite the opposite: ‘the habitus demands symbols and formulations in declarative speech’ (Taylor, 2001: 76).
Self-interpretation alters our understanding of the world. In Taylor’s words, agents ‘learn to embody the point [of their practices]; or to enact it bodily. But this doesn’t mean that articulating this point makes no difference. On the contrary, to bring the value, or good or norm, to speech makes it exist for us in a new way. It comes into focus for us. It acquires clarity for us’ (Taylor, 2016: 43–44). Linguistic articulation allows practices to self-correct normatively and the agent to access the space of meanings in different ways (Taylor, 1995: 175–178). More radically, theoretical descriptions can bring new objects to bear on our practices and understanding. To explain this process, Taylor employs a crucial Kantian notion that puts him at odds with the Heideggerian ontologisation of the pre-reflective practical ‘fore-structure’ of understanding: ‘theory is schematized in the dense sphere of common practice’ (Taylor, 2007: 176, my emphasis). Theory is not another derivative mode of interpretation that can be reduced to the ‘fore-structure’ of embodied understanding, but rather an irreducible expressive medium through which agents access and orient themselves differently in the space of meaning.
A posture, a gesture, a bodily style constitutes the genetically primordial medium of integration and cognition. For Taylor (2016: 76), bodily enactments do not refer to something else; they enact what they intend. This lack of representational intent means that the body is ‘at grips’ with an unthematised world replete with significances orienting the agent. The correlative mode of cognition is called ‘motor intentionality’: ‘the first word conveys that the know-how lies in our ability to make our way around; the second emphasises that this constitutes a way of grasping the world surrounding us. This is not explicit knowledge of an independent object, but it is nevertheless “about” something; it is an understanding of the world’ (Taylor, 2016: 149). The intended world in enaction is not made up of objects or facts to be described or characterised, but significances that solicit the right responses. Enactment involves being rightly ‘attuned’ or ‘geared’ to significances, rather than describing objects (cf. Taylor, 2016: 61). Yet, we are in a domain of rightness, not of causal relations (see Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 50–55). Agents can ‘get a better grip’ of the situation and its points of relevance, but this is not akin to an instrumental-pragmatic reorganisation of its parts in terms of means and ends. Instead, it implies finding a sort of ‘balance’ or ‘equilibrium’ within the normative requirements of the situation that are bodily lived through (Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 48–50).
Taylor’s non-reductivist, broad expressivism allows him to accept the enactivist and phenomenological corrections without their reductive intents that deflate symbolic and reflective ‘consciousness’ to embodied understanding. At the end of this path, we encounter the crux of the contemporary junction between the sociology of culture and the cognitive sciences (see, for instance, Lizardo, 2004, 2007, 2021; Lizardo et al., 2020; Strand and Lizardo, 2015), which the Taylorian view intelligently avoids – I will return to this in the conclusion. For now, it suffices to say that Taylor does not take the embodiment thesis as an argument for a materialist reduction, but for an expressivist hermeneutical expansion of the world of meanings.
Bodily schemes open agents to proto-interpretations, to a space of prefigured meanings and significances that can be symbolically or conceptually interpreted. Bodily intended meanings are prefigured in Gestalt forms, which is the source of their opacity, excess of meaning, and need for further interpretation (Taylor and Ayer, 1959: 95; see also Kullman and Taylor, 1958: 115–116). They present a ‘penumbra’ of meanings and fuzzy referents prefigured in interconnected but ever-extending wholes (Taylor, 2016: 148; see also 70–71; see also Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 69, 74, 77). Verbal articulations can never fully exhaust or redeem the non-conceptual background, its opacity zones and its excesses of meaning (cf. Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 34, Kullman and Taylor, 1958: 119). This medium provides a mode of access to an irreducible reality that brings its structure and form, which coexists with other modes of understanding. Only in this sense it is legitimate to talk about an enactive mode of awareness and access to meanings in non-reductive terms (cf. Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 18).
Portrayals involve the realms of metaphor, artwork and figurative speech. If the body is the primary ‘vehicle’ in enaction, symbols are the key aspects of portrayals. Symbols ‘point’ to their referent through something else that they embody or present. They display a paradoxical kind of ‘reference’ that vouchsafes, or portrays, the meaning it is oriented to. As expressions, they figure what is prefigured in our practical sense. In this sense, the intentional relation carries a figuring element that is the source of the symbol’s ‘polysemy’, which is constituted by ‘the uncertainty of the reference’ (Taylor, 2016: 72–74, see also 129–176). If Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are the references for the enactive and prefigurative aspects of the body and its motor intentionality, Taylor refers here to Ricoeur’s account of the symbol’s double intentionality and Lakoff’s work on metaphors, but it can also extend to Blumenberg’s work on non-conceptuality.
The symbol has an intrinsic ‘double intentionality’ (Ricoeur, 2007: 289–290): ‘the first, literal, patent meaning analogically [i.e. metaphorically] intends a second meaning which is not given otherwise than in the first’. In this sense, symbols do not aim to describe a space of meanings but to present it in terms of something else (see Taylor, 2016: 79, 169, 235–236). Symbolic consciousness bears the mark of this double intentionality. It refers to two domains of meaning at once. It emerges in the tension of a transfer of meanings and ‘thoughts’ from one domain to another, and this carries a surplus of meaning, polysemy and opacity (Ricoeur, 2007: 237). They make prefigured, unfamiliar, enigmatic domains of meaning appear, in a broader horizon, through another, more familiar domain. The meanings that come to light are constituted in the tension of getting access to A (target domain) through B (source domain) (see Taylor, 2016: 229–231).
Symbols transport a set of properties or understandings of a domain to another. This foreign reference unpredictably contributes to a qualitative leap of significances and objects of intuition in the intended, target domain. The symbol possesses thus a centrifugal force that expands the horizons of non-modalised givenness of our primary embodied understanding (cf. Blumenberg, 2020 [1979]: 243; 2020 [1975]: 292). Given this sort of ‘reference’, signifier and signified cannot be fully separated, nor their relation be ‘arbitrary’ or ‘unmotivated’ (see Taylor, 2016: 129–176; see also Ricoeur, 2007: 319). Hence, symbolic understanding is always open to conflicts of interpretations that are incapable of resolving the many zones of uncertainty, non-representational excess and sources of opacity. We can focus on what symbols conceal, and bring to thought the possible disanalogies between source and target domain, and denounce symbols as blinding or disguising. But the reverse is also true: we can bring the metaphor to thought and theorise the domain from within. Hence, Ricoeur’s (2007: 296–310) maxim, which Taylor (2016: 168) adopts, ‘the symbol gives rise to thought’.
We are neither in the phenomenological world of embodied significances nor in the conceptual world of representation (see Blumenberg, 2020 [1979]: 241, 254). Like concepts, symbols allow for a type of detachment from what is at hand. In intending a domain-at-hand, symbols refer to distant domains of meaning to introduce more than what is already contained in what is ready-to-hand. Hence, through symbols, we are not in an attitude of absorbed engaged coping, but something akin to the action at a distance that is enabled by conceptual speech but which lacks the clarity needed for proper deliberation (cf. Blumenberg, 2020 [1975]: 263–270). Symbols attempt to figure rather than describe what they intend. This is a different distance or attitude than what in sociology is associated with ‘reflexivity’, and is however central to social life. The figurative distance is an ‘aesthetic’ attitude or operation for knowing, seeing and telling things that ultimately resists our knowledge, vision or words. It intends meanings that in no way permit direct access or rational or instrumental control. It relates to what perhaps remains deeply unsaid and implicit, but also crucial, in our social life, as is the case of evil and the sacred, just to mention two of Ricoeur’s predilect themes. 25
Unlike concepts, the symbolic distance is not ‘reflective’ or ‘instrumental’, perhaps not even ‘performative’, because what is intended somehow escapes control or ‘objectivisation’. Language, however, makes possible another mode of awareness: ‘reflection’. Agents are not trapped in symbols but can engage in a new form of discourse in which they describe or make assertions about their symbols and practices. However, the ‘objects of reflection’ do not result from immediate, transparent intuitions. Reflection is a process by which understanding moves from trafficking with symbols and gestures to trafficking with thoughts starting from symbols and gestures.
Only at this level of description do we reach what is often regarded as the universal character of all mediums of expression, that is the arbitrary sign structure. This is the realm of the ‘instituted’ sign concatenated to ideas, properties or referents; of codes and speech acts that can be performed in different pragmatic contexts. The world surrounding us is taken as an independent object (signified) available for descriptions (signifier), and to be known in terms of (causal) explanation, (historical) understanding, etc. This is the realm of representational intentionality, of explicit beliefs and world images, which allow for more reflective, detached, meta-pragmatic modes of agent-integration into the field of meanings.
Speech indeed allows a more clarifying distance from the world, but it relies on a background of vocabularies, practices and symbols, from which it cannot break free (Taylor, 1985b: 231; see also Taylor, 2016: 256). The signature of Taylor’s broad expressivism is to embrace these various expressive mediums in a non-reductive manner. In each medium, ‘consciousness’ has a different relationship with its objects. In other words, in each medium, agents are oriented to meaning and normativity in different modes. ‘Understanding’ is ‘carried in a plurality of media’. Any frontier among them is ‘porous’ and ‘fuzzy’, since ‘any particular understanding of our situation blends explicit knowledge and unarticulated [non-conceptual] know-how’ (Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 45–46). Thus, the world of culture is ‘multimedia’, and ‘understandings are multimedia events’. The relation amongst our different expressive capacities is interpretative, but these expressive mediums operate on different planes and axes. The human world results from the various expressive activities that open and integrate us to the space of meanings. Taylor seems to suggest that the hermeneutical circle is more of a sphere where different expressive mediums rotate around a subject matter in non-reductive ways. 26
Taylor (2016: 224–257) construes the relation among the three expressive mediums in terms of rungs on a ladder of articulacy, where enactment is at the bottom and description at the top. The imagery of a ladder can be nonetheless misleading. We are tempted to think that they stand in parallel; or, worse, that once we reach the higher viewpoint of description, the other media are inoperative or superfluous. Nevertheless, Taylor’s point is precisely the opposite: ‘our ordinary grasp of meaning draws on all three rungs’. The ladder image should only be taken to show that the relation between rungs is ‘of the nature of an interpretation’, or ‘hermeneutical, that is, the higher rungs interpret and clarify the lower’. Thus, ‘the relation of the higher level to the lower is one of expression, trying to render something in a clearer medium’: ‘each successive articulation allows us to take a freer stance to, and hence get a clearer articulation of, the meanings involved. What we live unreflectingly on the level of enactment can be set out before us as something we can enjoy and contemplate in a work of art, and then made an object of description and possible analysis in prose’. However, ‘this ranking can also be reversed. It is possible to hold that certain meanings cannot be adequately captured at a freer, more analytical level’ (Taylor, 2016: 225, 251–252; emphasis added).
Taking a stance, articulating a world image, mastering beliefs theoretically, modulating conducts of life: all must be seen as part and parcel of the process by which agents are differently oriented to strongly valued meanings through different expressive mediums. Thus, ‘rational’, ‘detached’ agency brings along an excess and opacity of meaning which translates into the impossibility of agents having a complete understanding of the entailments of their actions and commitments. Put differently, it implies that, even at its most ‘rational’ levels, human action inevitably an element of fate, because it is oriented by meanings that agents never transparently understand, and with consequences that can spill over their purview, life, context of action and, ultimately, intended normative domain (or value sphere). This understanding and incorporation of ‘fate’ into Weber’s theory of action in hermeneutical and expressive, instead of economic (cf. Turner, 1981, 2019), grounds comes to view only through the supplementary re-interpretation of his theory in the light of Taylor’s expressive-hermeneutical view of the human agent.
Recently, Malczewski (2019) has interpreted Weberian sociology as offering an ‘analytic of thought’ that points in a similar direction as my interpretation, since both of us argue that, for Weber, values and meaning are constitutive of thought as much as action. However, the broad expressivist view cannot agree with his distinction between ‘value stand’, ‘presuppositions of thought’ and ‘structuring logics’. This seems to assume that ‘thought’ exists independently from culture. Also, Terpe’s (2020) recent interpretation of Weber could be seen as compatible with mine. At first sight, prioritising the concept of ‘stance’ chimes with her ‘actor-centred’ approach to value spheres. Her reference to Joasian notion of articulation resonates with Taylor’s work. Nevertheless, I do not think my focus on stances and expression sustains an ‘actor-centred’ approach. Value spheres do not exist in people’s minds, as her premise goes, but in expressive mediums. Articulation is not of a static world-image but of the necessary excess of meaning and zones of opacity in each expressive medium. My interpretation points in a radically different direction from that of Terpe and allows to hold more elements of Weberian thought together, such as his emphasis on responsibility and fate as inevitable aspects of human action. Moreover, while her interpretation takes Weber happily down the representationalist view, my focus on stance and its supplement with Taylor’s notions of expression and articulation, aims at giving a theoretically sound way of understanding the different modes in which meaning can orient action, as well as the different modes of cognition and belief that are possible for cultural beings.
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper was to offer a supplementary reading of Weber through the expressivist hermeneutics of Charles Taylor. This supplementary reinterpretation allowed me to posit two very different sets of contributions to sociological scholarship. The first is to Weberian scholarship. No major interpretation of Weber has focussed on the notion of ‘stance’, despite it featuring in methodological, substantive and theoretical writings. The concept of stance highlights that Weber’s account of values is less mentalistic or subjectivist than hitherto supposed. Our relation to values involves a posture, a mode of comporting oneself, alongside a world image. Since the concept of stance features in arguments that relate values to action, as well as to cognition and identity, I have argued that it is not possible to sustain a subjectivist, emotivist and decisionist theory of values when it comes to action and identity, and one that posits them in a non-naturalist, intersubjective dimension when it comes to cognition. My interpretation has shown that Weber’s choice of vocabulary and imagery, as well as his constant emphasis on the subjective relation to values, is grounded on the Kantian theme that the actions and judgements of cultural beings, unlike those of other non-discursive, non-cultural creatures, involve a particular type of responsibility since they are related to some commitments that are expressive of who we are and in which we recognise some form of authority.
Against Kant, however, Weber thinks that grounding our normative commitments on Reason alone, constitutes another way for humans avoid to taking responsibility. More so in a context in which Reason was identified with empirical knowledge of the world. In this sense, I have argued, Weber does not expel values from the realm of reason to cast them to the underground dimensions of the human soul. Quite the opposite, I have shown that he rejects what he calls ‘romantic-naturalism’ and the chasing after experiences and sensations as elements configuring our relation to values. His point is that belief, and possibly speculative observation and the interpretation of the meanings of life and world, are at stake in articulations of value commitments.
Nevertheless, humans do not create values by themselves or by their own choices. Values approach us in a non-naturalist dimension. Gods and daimons inhabit the space of meaning in their secularised or sacred forms and call us to modulate and articulate their demands. Our status as human agents is constituted in our responses to the normative solicitations of the world. Taylor’s supplementation provides a solid account of how to understand the nature of human agency better if we take meaning-orientation to entail some sort of responsibility. The fact that Weber mentions gods and daimons fighting for our obedience shows that he did not want to argue that our choices create the values orienting us; instead, we are solicited by the world to act in a certain way or another; nonetheless, we are responsible in some way for them (see also Davison-Vecchione, 2021: 121). Finally, my supplementary reading has brought the concept of stance and the notion of taking a stance to discussions of the different ways in which culture and meaning find expression in the social world. While I argue that Weber already recognised different modes of being oriented to meaning (symbols, habits and beliefs), I have tried to supplement this with Taylor’s broad expressivism to provide a sounder cultural and normative theory of action that allows for a notion of practical reason along hermeneutical lines.
My second set of contributions have a more prospective element. The question is not what we can learn about Max Weber that we did not know, but how this version of Weber renders him a better conversational partner in current sociological debates about human agency, identity-formation and culture and its relation to action and cognition. First, concerning the project of a normative theory of agency, I have argued that a supplementary reading of Weber through Taylor allows for a twofold contribution. As I argued in the first part, Weber is less of an emotivist, subjectivist and decisionist; and perhaps the first sociologically relevant anti-foundationalist providing the blueprint for a sociological theory of agency. This also does not mean that ‘Man’ has no role in moderating the ‘Battle of Gods’. Instead, it implies that the distinctive human responsibility for how values orient our lives cannot be grounded on Reason alone, let alone a construal of reason that centres on empirical knowledge. Reason in this domain must be otherwise, possibly including speculative observation and interpretation (in Weber’s terms) or hermeneutical (in Taylor’s). A normative theory of agency needs to offer an account of reason along these lines, and to propose concepts to study them empirically, which I have found in the notions of ‘stance’, ‘strong evaluation’, ‘expression’, ‘expressive medium’ and ‘articulations’.
Once we accept this, it is possible to realise that value-orientation should be seen as the central anthropological feature in Weber’s account of human action. This anthropological feature is constitutive of the normative fundus of social life. Valuation takes agents to the dimensions in which human freedom and responsibility are possible. These dimensions constitute the objects of sociology, and sociology must take this normative fundus into account when describing them. This by no means breaks the thesis of axiological neutrality. We do not aim to infer value judgements from scientific inquiry but to evaluate the humanness of different life orders, life trajectories or experiences. Some of them can be more liberating or imprisoning; more guided by ‘impersonal’ norms that do not provide sources of meaning to agents, or some can allow agents to live less alienating, more authentic lives.
Concerning the debate around culture and its forms and themes in American cultural sociology, my supplementary interpretation offers an expressivist alternative to the problem and study of the different forms of meaning. To take meaning beyond the belief-as-representation model entails the retrieval of the body, emotions and habits. In the American scene, the move beyond representationalist models of culture embeds the agent in the space of causes (cf. Lizardo, 2021; Strand and Lizardo, 2015). The body supposedly places the human as an ‘object among objects’ involved in multilevel processes (economy, culture, reproduction, etc.) that appear in their field of experience in terms of somewhat flexible lines of forces to which they are endowed to respond to because of some acquired tacit scheme. In this account, the habit model provides solid observational grounds for sociology to generate better causal explanations of action and interact with the neurosciences (cf. Lizardo, 2007, 2021; Lizardo et al., 2020). Habit and embodied practices supposedly provide an ‘empirically plausible way of making understanding synonymous with explanation’ (Strand and Lizardo, 2015: 65). In other words, the turn to habit is meant to explain the space of meanings naturalistically in terms of forces and dynamics that do not refer to any ‘subject’. Meaning and culture are thus set on a naturalist plane that can be studied through science’s objectivising (yet not deterministic) methods. The habit-cognitivist model is hence opposed to representationalist models based on, for instance, performances (e.g. Alexander, 2011); or treated as complementary to it according to different situational logics (see, e.g. Vaisey, 2009).
My supplementary interpretation provides an alternative to this retrieval of the body framed on explanatory grounds and leading to the naturalisation of culture and meanings. My claim is that the thesis of embodiment, which American cultural cognitivists yield against representationalism and intellectualism, must take the notion of expression seriously, and doing so goes against any naturalistic tendency. It also challenges their ‘explanation alone’ purpose because an expression always entails self-referring properties, and hence understanding is unavoidable. Taylor’s retrieval of the body aims at placing it in the human realm of expressions (where freedom, responsibility and justification are possible) rather than as an object among objects in dynamic fields of forces and tensions. In this he follows Merleau-Ponty closer than cogntivist or Bourdieusian sociologists. For, Merleau-Ponty (2012: 152), who coined the term motor intentionality and ‘discovered’ the unselfconscious and un-self-referring mode of intending meanings argues that ‘the body cannot be compared to the physical object, but rather to the work of art’. The body does not operate in a field of quasi-gravitational forces but expressively through ‘existential modulations’ akin to poems. Taylor allows us to break free of the illusion, spurred by explanatory delusions, that the retrieval of the body and habits inevitably puts us on track to dispel interpretative aspects of human agency and focus solely on explanation. The thesis of embodied cognition, beliefs and values should not be taken to entail that meaning and sense-making are dynamic processes embedded in a space of (multilevel and dynamic) causes.
The project of seeing culture in expessivist terms provides indeed a more complex view than the explanatory models in American sociology. Each expressive medium (enactment, portrayal and description) allows for different types of modulations of meaning and different ways of sense-making and agent-integration. Sociological studies must not conflate (or reduce) the figurative aspects of the symbol, nor the reflective aspects of explicit beliefs, nor the enactive aspects of gestures. Taylor signals to us to an expressivist turn in the way that we study culture that here I have retrospectively connected with Weber via the notion of taking a stance. This expressivist turn retrieves the body and habits and connects them hermeneutically and expressively to more representational, detached modes of agency and belief, without any naturalistic explanatory intention. Representation and embodiment do not constitute an explanatory either/or; neither two modes corresponding to problematic and unproblematic pragmatic situations or social conditions. They are two crucial modes of expression of culture. The third one is the symbolic. The question is not about the social conditions of one or another form of intentionality but about how a set of values or norms finds figuration, representation or enactment in different realms of the social world.
When it comes to identity-formation and biographical research, my interpretation of Weber highlights a crucial aspect. Biographies are not constituted by strategical choices we take in ‘fateful moment’. A truly ‘fateful moment’ would be constituted by a novel articulation that retrospectively makes sense of a life differently, allowing us to ‘see the light’. Life is not constituted by ‘existential milestones’ that we somehow organise, given our differential life-chances, into ‘existential ladders’ that can be dismantled or from which we can fall down because of objective events. Our relationship to norms is not that of adherence or non-adherence, nor that of having the resources or privileges to attain a more or less ambitious version of them, but instead of expressive modulations that are constantly challenged in the light of new experiences. Any strategic orientation relies on this expressive modulation and its development throughout one’s life’s course.
Social change and biographical transitions result from such articulations of meaning. A human life is about the stances we take, how we articulate values and goods differently in the light of new events, and how we articulate our transitions between articulations of meaning. In short, it is about how we narrate our life. In this way, we make sense of how we got from stance A to stance B when Event 1 showed us that we were wrong. These transitions are not like transitions between paradigms, because they do not refer to an independent domain of objects that are known to us. They necessarily involve a reference to how we see reality. In this sense, stance B contains an account of how we got from A to B, of how this move has been clarifying, liberating, etc. Seen from B, A appears blinding or distorting, or incapable of accounting or seeing things. Stances A and B are not incommensurable, but they make sense of each other from within. An existential gain occurs in moving from A to B (see Taylor, 1995: 34–60; 2016: 292–319). Life is a narration of happenings integrated into a story of articulations, existential modulations and value commitments. To focus on ‘existential milestones’ or ‘fateful moments’ is to remain trapped in models of agency that conceive it as a matter of more or less instrumental, pragmatic, strategic orientation without expressive, self-interpretative, hermeneutical elements. What my interpretation offers is a move from a resource-based to a normative-hermeneutical view of biographical research.
Similarly, the critical realist notion ‘modes of reflexivity’, despite offering a model that is more compatible with mine (see, e.g. Archer, 2000: 83, 195, 231–242; 2007: 25, 133–155; 2012: 22–3; Sayer, 2011), focuses the inquire mainly on the conditions of possibility of different modes of orientation and their possibility of success in different ‘situational logics’ without inquiring into the expressive-hermeneutical dimensions of identity-formation. For critical realists, identity-formation can be accounted for in terms of the autonomous, communicative, meta-reflexive, fractured modes of navigating different ‘situational logics’ that emerge from different structural and cultural conditions. There is no insight into the importance of the expressive, articulative elements, of how we modulate, reject, distort, reinterpret our commitments and where those commitments come from. What is missing in this account is that ‘fracture reflexives’, the kind of agents that are impeded to develop ultimate concerns and keep the internal conversation going, are perhaps the result of a society where sources of meaning have effectively been depleted, where there are no longer possibilities of resonance, of finding a world (or daimon) that talks back to us in a meaningful way.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers at the JCS. Their incisive comments and criticisms helped me to clarify and polish my arguments. Filipe Carreira da Silva and Patrick Baert read and commented earlier versions of this paper. Their insights were helpful and encouraging. I would like to thank also Charles Turner, whose teachings and informal conversations at Warwick heavily influenced my take on Max Weber.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación of the Republic of Ecuador.
