Max Weber, Contemporary Life Conduct and Existential Cultures Barbara Thériault
Abstract
The concept of life style appears in Max Weber’s writings under the guise of Lebensführung, or life conduct. It is closely linked to the spirit of capitalism and to a religious work ethic Weber traces in life maxims influencing daily practices. Weber is concerned with individual meaning in a world characterized by objective forces. He offers a social diagnosis typical of the beginning of the 20th century, one centered on the fate of the individual in an increasingly objectified, rationalized, and disenchanted world. Although still pervasive in social theories, this diagnosis framed in terms of loss is at odds with today’s world. While challenging Weber’s diagnosis, this chapter argues that his approach—his notion of life conduct with his attention to life maxims and their carriers—is still inspiring to sound out what Lois Lee calls “existential cultures.” Drawing on Weber’s insights, this chapter maps out life conduct and existential cultures in an East German town.
Keywords
Weber; life conduct; existential cultures; sociology of religion; East Germany Introduction
The concept of life style appears in Max Weber’s writings under the guise of Lebensführung, or life conduct. It is closely linked to the spirit of capitalism and to a religious work ethic Weber tracks in life maxims influencing daily practices. Not unlike Simmel’s style of life in the Philosophy of Money, Weber’s concept is concerned with individual meaning in a world characterized by objective forces.1 Both authors offer a social diagnosis typical of the beginning of the 20th century, one centered on the fate of the individual in an increasingly objectified, rationalized, and disenchanted world. Although still pervasive in social theories, this diagnosis framed in terms of loss is at odds with the contemporary world; indeed, most of today’s readers do not share the angst so characteristic of the atmosphere surrounding the first and second generations of sociologically-informed intellectuals.
While challenging this diagnosis of loss and void, this chapter argues that Max Weber’s approach is still inspiring today. His notion of life conduct, and the specific attention he pays to life maxims underlying action and to their carriers, is fruitful for a sociology of religion concerned with the influence of religious or “existential” ideas on daily life conducts. Indeed, the program bodes well with recent attempts to map out what Lois Lee calls “existential cultures,”2 a concept that will be introduced further in this chapter after a brief return to Weber’s notion of life conduct. Offering a reflection on methodological imagination and the manner in which to grasp it empirically, this chapter then presents an example drawn from an East German town, one involving imaginary tattoos.
Max Weber’s approach
In the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber sets himself to sound out ideas that “stand in some sort of adequate relationship” with modern capitalism and, more generally, modern culture.3 More specifically, Weber was concerned with methodical life conduct (Lebensführung) and organizations resonating with these ideas.
The thesis of the Protestant Ethic is well known and does not need to be explained in any more details. What has been less reflected upon is the way Weber goes about studying the “spirit” (the “subjective culture,” in Simmel’s words). In his famous essay, he is attentive to maxims—life maxims that guide action and influence practice (maxims such as “time is money” or “honesty is the best policy”). Such maxims represent, for the observers, external traces that enable them to delineate the motives underlying actions. Incidentally, delineating motives, and the ideas behind them, is what Weber’s interpretative sociology—as put forth in the Protestant Ethic—is all about; as such, Weber’s endeavor is reminiscent of the work of a detective uncovering motives based on evidence, clues.4
Two points should be stressed with regard to such clues: first, Weber does not observe them in theological treatises, but in widely-read books, tracts of advice, such as Benjamin Franklin’s Advice to a Young Tradesman.5 The use of such documents constitutes a methodological innovation, something comparable to the study of etiquette books by Norbert Elias or blockbuster movies by Siegfried Kracauer.6 Second, Weber is also attentive to the bearers or carriers of a particular ethos and their social characteristics; in the case of the Protestant Ethic, members of the middle classes.
It has often been noted that Weber’s concepts and methods—the ideal type—have greatly influenced sociology as a discipline; indeed, they have generated a great deal of commentaries and stimulated the imagination, as the myriad of intertextual nods bears witness to.7 Yet, his general approach, attentive to individual meaning and its lived dimensions, has rarely informed empirical studies—and when it has, those studies were neither claimed nor readily considered as bearing a Weberian heritage. The sociology of religion, which has long been indebted to a “Weberian” secularization thesis—derived more from the reception of Weber’s work than from the actual approach informing it—is no exception.
This apparent oversight is what makes the publication of a recent book, Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular, especially noteworthy. Although Lois Lee, its author, does not explicitly refer to Weber,8 she seems to pick up his line of inquiry. In outlining “existential cultures,” she is thinking along Weber’s fundamental concern: meaning-giving ideas and their practical dimensions or, in today’s wording, their “lived” dimensions. She thus links her endeavor to trends that have been prevailing in the discipline for the past twenty years and that stress the study of the everyday dimensions and materiality of religion. This perspective puts the question of meaning in what could be called a post-Weberian context, one largely dominated by an often-challenged secularization paradigm.
Contemporary Existential Cultures
Although they leave open the question of a resurgence of meaning—through prophets or great individuals, for instance—Weber and his contemporaries offer a diagnosis of modernity framed in terms of loss, one which has durably influenced the way in which we think about contemporary culture. Commentators have noted this pessimistic imprint or birth mark of European sociology that portrays the secular world as a place largely devoid of meaning.9
This take has long been commonplace in German sociology; the second generation of social theorists was largely imbued with the idea. Perusing through the
literary, social sciences and journalistic writings, Georg Lukács’ metaphor of a world “spiritually homelessness” (transzendentale Obdachlosigkeit)10 appears as a sign of those times. It finds expressions in a “metaphysical suffering,” an “alienation from the absolute,” a “fear of emptiness,” reminiscent of an ambiance, a Stimmung, characteristic of the literary landscape of the time: Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Broch’s Sleepwalkers, Mann’s Buddenbrooks. This diagnosis is accompanied by a longing for meaning, for a homeland of the soul (Seelenheimat). Siegfried Kracauer, to take but one example, extensively uses the term “shelter” (Asyl) to refer to a substitute for a system of absolutes, be it religious, philosophical, or aesthetical. An intellectual class lived in angst while the salaried masses—or so these same intellectuals assumed—were fleeing reality through consumption and popular distractions (cinema, dance, travel).11 The reception of Weber’s work has contributed to these two components—the anguish, and the class that is said to have borne it. Engrossed in these somber considerations, sociologists have, for a long time, been blind to the religious vibrancy of the world,12 but also to the possible vibrancy of the secular. This is what the notion of “existential culture” attempts to remedy.
In her book, Lois Lee challenges this still prevalent pessimistic view of reality. Instead of seeing secularity strictly in the negative light that most researches have so far cast on it (presenting secularity itself as something residual to religion, the secular as a space bereft of meaning, secularization as loss, or the seculars as “nones”), she grasps it as something that is—at least in part—substantial, full of meanings, and tensions. She calls the substantial modes of secularity the “non-religious.”13 While the term itself is not devoid of ambiguity, it still aims to reject the binary opposition usually stressed between religion and the secular (and atheism) as well as between intellectuals and the “masses.” Lee’s approach is open to elements that actually link the two, and to the individuals’ will to purposely distance themselves from organized religions without completely rejecting them (for individuals who identify, say, as “non-practicing Catholics,” “non-Muslim Muslims,” “non-religious, but not atheists,” or “spiritual, but not religious”).14
This shift towards the substantial dimension of the secular represents a major turn in the sociology of religion and the study of the “secular moderns.” After all, the non-religious represent the largest segment of the population in contemporary Western societies.15 Lee is not alone in her endeavor, but—unlike most—she has developed an approach that aims to go beyond organized groups, such as atheists or humanists, and an intellectual stratum. In studying the “non-religious,” Lee enjoins us to dive into the heart of society to investigate those who are so numerous that they often remain unseen.
In addition to her significant conceptual contribution to the field, Lee also attempts to make an empirical one, tracing the contours of what she called “existential cultures.”
Existential cultures incarnate ideas about the origins of life and human consciousness and about how both are transformed or expire after death—what has been called “ultimate questions” in the literature before now. These existential beliefs are bound up with the distinctive notion of meaning and purpose of life, as well as with epistemological theories about how it is that humans are able to take a stance on existential matters. Finally, these existential positions are manifest in particular ethical practices—not the unspecified ethics imagined when people speak of “religion and ethics,” but ethics that can be identified concretely as
anchored in existential principles and cultures and distinct from other ethical forms.16
Although they need not be based on religion, the existential cultures do borrow from the religious, the spiritual, and the non-religious. Like Weber’s “spirit,” the existential cultures manifest themselves in ethical principles and commitments as well as in practices—such as secular rituals, forms of sociality and communities—pertaining to the “existential.”17 They are not always acknowledged as such specific cultures by their carriers; it is the sociologist who frames what often remains not-institutionalized and unnamed. In other words, existential cultures require sociologists to think across conceptual categories and recast them.18
To achieve this, Lee compellingly advocates for a qualitative approach. Non-religion or existential cultures should, she argues, be approached ethnographically—that is, in their lived dimensions and materiality, as embodied practices and as new forms of belief, ethical conviction, and aesthetic expression. As convincing as her conceptual exposition is, her empirical analysis—a study among young educated men and women in Cambridge and the greater London area, often loosely attending atheist activities—tends to associate non-religion with atheism or humanism and, most importantly, is reduced to a few illustrations and gets buried under her formidable conceptual apparatus. Lee seems to anticipate criticism when she enjoins readers to methodological creativity,19 stresses that non-religion is not restricted to atheism—although atheists are at the center of most of the literature20—and encourages us to think together existential cultures and class identities or, in Weber’s words, to pay attention to the carriers of ideas and their characteristics.
Weber’s question, but also his methodological insights, can prove useful in studying non-religion and individual meaning in conjunction with life conducts of the middle class. Without being exhaustive, the following section undertakes a Weberian-inspired attempt to study empirically non-religion.
An East German Town and Imaginary Tattoos
Since 2014, a study is being conducted among a small group of parents living in a mid-size town of what used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR).21 Most of them are employees, civil servants, and pedagogues, aged between 40 and 55, representatives of a class / strata that defines itself as middle class and is busy with family and work as well as with sport or artistic activities. Since East Germany is known as one of the most secular regions in the world, it will not come as a surprise that most of the participants do not identify as religious. Still, it would be misleading to describe them as atheists. When asked to describe themselves, they often hesitate. As he talks about his family, one participant typically mentions that they are Catholics, though “his wife is an athe…, eh not affiliated with a church I mean.” Later, his wife described/s? herself as a spiritual and religiously interested person.
All parents were interviewed. Also, and in addition to ethnographic observations in town, the researcher accompanied them in their daily life and attended special occasions such as rituals and family celebrations. In an attempt to grasp forms of belief, ethical conviction, and aesthetic expression, a small experiment was undertaken: the participants were asked what they would write if they had a tattoo made.
Because they are indelible, and because they are worn directly on one’s skin, tattoos usually involve much reflection. Tattoos are—beyond their signification as individual ornaments—meaningful objects.22 When observing town people bearing real tattoos, one can glance at inscriptions like “All that you have is your soul,” “All you need is love” or simply “Love”; these mostly attempt to reduce life—or the individual’s take on it—to one basic principle. At the heart of the researcher’s experiment was an intuition: today’s tattoos could well be a contemporary’s equivalent of Weber’s material, life maxims encompassing a kind of guiding principle or ethos. Likewise, then, imaginary tattoos could be read as signposts, expressions of what the participants say they are, of what they aspire to, and what they value.23
Although tattoos are very widespread in the East German town at the center of this / the study, most of the people interviewed did not have any. While insisting that they would never get one, they nevertheless engaged in what turned out to be a thought experiment about “imaginary tattoos.”
Gelassenheit: “to be able to let go,” “to be able to relax,” “to be spontaneous.”24 This is what Marlene immediately said, when asked what inscription she would like to have as a tattoo. Claudia said something similar. She would have tattooed a quotation from a bestseller: “It is as it is and it comes as it comes.”25 Given the hectic pace of their everyday life, the two women—as well as many others interviewed who mentioned expressions such as carpe diem as possible inscriptions—, wished they could be more relaxed. At once admonition and encouragement, their tattoos would be reminders; a counterweight to the numerous social obligations and expectations characteristic of their active life conduct. As such, life conduct and maxims seem to mirror each other, if only negatively: the latter enables us to delineate, by contrast, the former.26
Sources / Ideas
If you walk through the town and raise your head, you can see many inscriptions. A building in the main street also has a tattoo. Like people, not all buildings are tattooed, but this one (anno 1898) has one, even two—on each side. These are also life maxims, admonitions, encouragements or diagnosis: Ohn’ Gottes Gunst all Bauen umsunst (“Without God’s favor no building is worthwhile”) and Durch Müh’ und Fleiß kommt Nutz und Preis (“Through effort and hard work come benefits joy and price”).
While the rhyming inscriptions on houses echo Bible quotations and bourgeois maxims of a medieval merchant town, today’s inspiration for such inscriptions—tattoos, real or imaginary—derive from a mix of self-help literature (not unlike Franklin’s tracts of advice) and oriental philosophy mediated through pop culture: songs, bestsellers, and TV series. Part of Claudia’s chosen quotation, “It is as it is,” is also the new TV-John Watson’s favorite saying. Those inscriptions, in turn, also resonate in pop culture, to which they stand in a dialectical relation: they mirror individuals, and individuals copy them while revealing their desire, the way they want to see themselves.
Tattoos echo prescriptive maxims, principles, “worldly wisdom,”27 but they do not hold the same level of psychological or ethical sanctions and are not as socially effective as Weber’s Protestant work ethic—nor are they as reliable to understand and explain the action’s motives. Yet, they might well represent a first step toward an empirical inquiry into today’s non-religion and link them, in this particular case, with the life conduct of busy, middle-class people.
Non-religious Conceptual Repertoire /Vocabulary
Tattoos can also represent a methodological asset to the sociologist in that they are significantly easier to broach than direct considerations about meaning or (non-)religious identification. When it comes to meaning, we often notice a lack of concepts, both on the side of research participants and on the side of those who study them.28 As Lee notes, there is “... an appetite for some codification and circulation of non-religious cultural resources.”29 If people like to chitchat about tattoos, the subject also opens a door towards deeper conversations and reflections.
My participants answered strikingly quickly to the tattoo-question. They had a linguistic arsenal for attitudes (Haltungen) that conferred sense and meaning to their lives. Yet, they sometimes felt uneasy: it was as though their repertoire lacked the depth of meaning or the kind of luster that an institutional and sanctioned religious language may more easily confer. This is probably the reason why tattoos in a foreign language, ornamental writings, abstract symbols and arabesques seem somewhat more meaningful and appropriate: their very ambiguity leaves place for multiple interpretations and helps avoid the awkwardness that can derive from more straightforward maxims or phrases.
Marlene, the woman who would consider having the word Gelassenheit as a tattoo, liked the idea, but not the word itself; not in German in any case. It sounds, she said, outdated, old-fashioned. She thought it might sound more mysterious, enigmatic, in a foreign language. Often, tattoos were or ought, it was said, to be in English. As the conversation moved on, attempts were thus made to find an English or French word for Gelassenheit—but an expression like: “to be chill about things” somehow did not seem to suit a 42-year-old civil servant with three children. The endeavor was soon abandoned and no attempts were even made to find a French translation.
A similar type of hesitation was palpable in formal speeches or addresses at coming-of-age ceremonies, the Jugendweihe, a civil consecration ceremony for 14-year-olds that Communists (re)introduced in 1954 in the GDR as a state atheist competing ceremony for the Protestant and Catholic confirmation. With a humanist touch, minus the militant state atheism, the Jugendweihe has survived the fall of the regime with great success.30 As Lee mentions on several occasions in her book, life-cycle rituals are possible loci to observe non-religion; they present forms of sociality and communities one cannot observe through the tattoos experiment, and could very well complement it. A Glimpse at some Rituals
Jugendweihe ceremonies splendidly highlight the overall difficulty with which questions of meaning are tackled: in one observed instance, the main speaker ventured into the meaning of life, but quickly renounced and went on to talk about life in general. At a different ceremony, the speaker, facing a similar challenge, used for his part humor to talk about life and its meaning. Interestingly enough, humanism, as an organized set of beliefs, does not seem to hold an important role in the ceremonies, nor to provide a helpful conceptual repertoire.
If one listened to them with the tattoo question in mind, though, the speakers at ceremonies seemed to have lexical tools; indeed, they could give examples of good behaviors and stress: “This is strength, a good attitude![”] (Das ist Haltung!),[”] but it did not seem to be legitimate, to enjoy the necessary aura. Another ritual, the Lebenswende—
a ceremony the Catholic church designed for youth with no religious affiliation and that takes place in the Cathedral—did not have such a problem. The lay speakers presiding at the ceremony could draw on liturgy, light, the history of the building.
The question of vocabulary is not the only thing one can observe at such ceremonies; they also instruct us on the members of the group and their aesthetic preferences too. Up in the balconies, at one of the Jugendweihe-ceremonies, a father, a mother, or a friend had simply thrown a jacket over everyday clothes. One could see, worn as ornaments, a number of tattoos. The interviews unveiled some light criticism regarding the Jugendweihe, one reminiscent of the attitudes towards tattoos. In spite of its popularity, the slightly low-middle class aesthetics of the Jugendweihe seems to put off some study participants, more so than its Communist heritage. In contrast, the Lebenswende seemed to enjoy a good reputation among the participants. For Jens, a father whose daughter took part in the ritual, such a ceremony is better suited to his identity—as a non-confessional individual from a Catholic background—than would be the Jugendweihe and the sacrament of confirmation. Andreas and Claudia are not affiliated to any confession—–they call themselves, as would most sociological observers, konfessionslos, or “confession-less”—, and while their oldest daughter had taken part in the Jugendweihe, their twin daughters for their part participated in the Lebenswende. When commenting on this choice, they talked about a parents’ meeting in the Cathedral, the church bells, and the city tradition. In their choice transpires a desire to belong to a good society, one associated with the religious and local past, and the children’s future.
The Lebenswende and the Jugendweihe can be seen as manifestations of non-religion. More than forms of belief and ethical conviction, they point to identification, aesthetic attitudes, and forms of sociability. Talking about them with interviewees reveals what is dearest and most meaningful to the study participants, their children.
The “Tattoo-less:” A Specific Segment of the Middle Class
Do the study participants, the tattoo-less fragment of society, have no style, carry no life maxim? On the contrary. As we know from non-religion, “nothing” needs not mean meaningless. Tattoos seem so widespread these days that those who do not have any sometimes see themselves as “dissidents.” After openly condemning graffiti, one of the participants compared—in a quite colorful language—some tattooed people to advertising pillars. Without wanting to offend them, most of the tattoo-less distance themselves from those who do have one—or many—and their aesthetic taste. In so doing —and without saying it or even thinking about it—they express a specific attitude: “I am both self-confident und reserved, and that is good.”31
The untattooed segment of society can be related to a specific life conduct: one of activities, obligations and duties—participants talk to the researcher in part because they feel obligated to. The effects of this life conduct stand in a dynamic relation with an attitude (Haltung) calling for Gelassenheit (letting go). Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology hinted at such a dynamic between a need of recognition (Geltungsdrang,
Ausdrucksdrang) and reserve (Verhaltenheit, Schamgefühl). What the author describes as a human psyche is indeed more a characteristic of the middle classes or bourgeois—a label the study participants reject—segment of society.32
Conclusion
In making a critical assessment of Weber’s diagnosis and presenting Lee’s notion of existential culture, this chapter draws the contours of what a Weberian informed sociology of a (non-)religion world might look like. Investigating the interplay between life conducts and meaning—forms of belief, ethical conviction, and aesthetic expression —it enjoins to an investigation of a fragment of the middle class, with methodological creativity based on classical sociology, minus the pathos.
Not unlike Lee, Kracauer outlined in his 1930 text “Those Who Wait” ideal-typical intellectual positions, existential answers to the shared “spiritual homelessness,” approaches leading to new “homelands of the soul.” Next to the old doctrines and religions, he saw a kind of polytheism at play: anthroposophy, communism and mysticism.33 As serious alternatives, he considered the “hesitant openness” of those who waited and the “skepticism as a matter of principle” which he saw represented in Weber’s position as an “intellectual desperado” rejecting new gods, but whose sociology, it might be added, nonetheless clung to subjective meaning and its interpretation.34
With her concept of non-religion, Lee has shown that a different diagnosis is possible. She has not set herself an easy task: The East German example shows it is difficult to find a new language and pin down ideas; the tattoo question is an attempt at sounding out meaning, non-religious maxims. Henrietta, the 16-year-old daughter of two study participants, got money for a tattoo on her birthday. Engraved under her breast, where it cannot be seen by all, it will bear the inscription “still waters run deep” (Stille Wasser sind tief), as if she was inviting us to find original ways to trace meaning-giving ideas and their impact on daily life.
1 Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber’s Central Question, tr. K. Tribe (Newbury: Threshold Press, 2000). 2 Lois Lee, Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
3 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. T. Parsons [PESC] (London: Routledge, 2007 [1930]), 27; Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, ed. W. Schluchter. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 2016), Part I, vol. 18, 185. Parsons also translates Lebensführung as “manner of life,” “life,” or “standard of life.”
4 Weber’s very definition of sociology involves a police or detective word, ermitteln: “it is the task of the sociologist to be aware of this motivational situation and to describe and analyse it (diesen [Motiv]Zusammenhang zu ermitteln und deutend festzustellen”): Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 9-10; Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], xxxx), Part I, vol 22-x, xxx).
5 Weber, PESC, 14-16; MWG I/18, 151-55.
6 Cf. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982 [1939]); Siegfried Kracauer, “On the Task of the Film Critic,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Kaes, Anton, Jay, Martin and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 634-635 / or?
“Über die Aufgabe des Filmkritikers,” in Werke, vol. 6.3. Kleine Schriften zum Film 1932-1961, ed. I. Mülder-Bach (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2004 [1932]), 61-63, and “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” The Mass Ornament (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995 [1925]), 291-304. /or? “Die kleinen Ladenmädchen gehen ins Kino,” in Werke, vol. 6.1. Kleine Schriften zum Film
1921-1927, ed. I. Mülder-Bach (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2004 [1927]), 308-322.
7 See Laurence McFalls, Augustin Simard and Barbara Thériault, “Conclusion: The ‘Objectivist’ Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Science,” in Max Weber’s “?‘Objectivity’”? Reconsidered, ed. L. McFalls (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 351-73; cf. other articles in this volume.
8 Lee quotes Weber’s sociology of religion in Economy and Society, where she refrains from defining religion at the outset and rather chooses to look at the “conditions and effects of a particular type of social behavior [BT: Gemeinschaftshandeln]”: Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 23.
9 Johannes Weiß, “Negative Soziologie. Grundlagenprobleme einer Wissenschaft,” Ethik und
Sozialwissenschaft 6.2 (1995), 241-246; see also Klaus Lichtblau, Kulturkrise und Kultursoziologie um die Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1996).
10 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, tr. A. Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971 [1916/1920]).
11 One finds the expression “shelter for the homeless” (Asyl für Obdachlose) with regard to overarching systems of ideas (Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses. Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany ((London: Verso, 1998 [1929/1930])), 88); and the search for comfort in, for example, activities like gambling (“Glück und Schicksal,” Straßen in Berlin und anderswo (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2013 [1964]), 89) or by retreating to luxurious life styles (“Riviera-Napoli-Express,” Berliner Nebeneinander. Ausgewählte Feuilletons 1930-33, ed. Andreas Volk [Zürich: Epoca, 1996 [1931]), 283-285); or to places like steam baths and bars (Joseph Roth, “Im Dampfbad bei Nacht,” Trübsal einer Straßenbahn ((Salzburg and Wien: Jung und Jung, 2013 [1921])), 94-97, and “Asyle der Heimatlosen,” ibid., 125).
12 See The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L. Berger (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1999).
13 Surveys on religion often reduce the “others” or “seculars” to one undifferentiated residual category contrasting the various religious categories. The Census in England and Wales includes, next to the religious and none/no religion categories, the possibility to abstain from answering. This option turned out, both in the 2001 and the 2011 Census, to be the third most favored one: see Lee, Recognizing, 153.
resistance”: Lee, Recognizing, 143. 15 Lee, Recognizing, 142.
16 Lee, Recognizing, 159-160.
17 Lee aims to go further than the study of great transcendence and middle-range transcendences as investigated by Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Uta Karstein and Thomas Schmidt-Lux in Forcierte Säkularität: Religiöser Wandel und Generationendynamik im Osten Deutschlands (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2009). Based on interviews and discourses, their analysis follows Thomas Luckmann’s approach while challenging it; for them, middle-range transcendences are not considered “religious.”
18 Lee identifies five types of existential culture: humanist, agnostic, theist, subjectivist, and anti-existential. In so doing, she goes beyond the idea of “religion à la carte,” that is, to assemble oneself a religion—without consideration of more general patterns and the characteristic of their carriers. 19 Lee, Recognizing, 186.
20 See Eccles, J. and Rebecca Catto. “The Significance of Secular Sacred Space in the Formation of British Atheist Identities,” in Materiality and the Study of Religion. The Stuff of the Sacred, ed. Timothy Hutchings and Joanne McKenzie (London: Routledge, 2017), 151-165; Roberto Cipriani and Franco Garelli, eds., Sociology of Atheism (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Matthew Engelke, “Humanist Ceremonies: The Case of Non-Religious Funerals in England,” in The Wiley Blackwell Handbook on Humanism, ed. Andrew Copson and A.C. Grayling (Oxford: Wiley, 2015).
21 The core sample includes 22 persons, both women and men.
22 Sometimes, tattoos are not thought to mean anything, if only that one’s body is a means of expression.
23 If Frank had a tattoo, it would read: “confidence, passion, trust, self-confidence.” Nicole, a high school ethic teacher, mentioned something she sometimes used while teaching: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult” (“?Nicht, weil es schwer ist, wagen wir es nicht, sondern, weil wir es nicht wagen, ist es schwer”?).
24 It was later pointed out to the researcher that, with regards to Amish studies, Gelassenheit can also mean a submission to God’s will.
25 “[…] ist wie es ist, und es kommt, wie es kommt,” in Jonas Jonasson, Der Hundertjährige, der aus das Fenster stieg und verschwand (München: carl’s books, 2011); English language edition as The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, tr. R. Bradbury (New York: Hyperion, 2012).
26 For an account of contemporary German middle class, without references to issues of meaning, see Cornelia Koppetsch, Die Wiederkehr der Konformität. Streifzüge durch die gefährdete Mitte (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2013).
27 Weber, PESC, 145; MWG I/18, xxx [Do you mean "worldly respectability" (weltliche Ehrbarkeit; I find that phrase in PE, but not "worldly wisdom" (weltliche Weisheit, or Weltklugheit)?]
28 Although in a minority position, church representatives are still continuously asked to publicly comment on ethical issues.
29 Lee, Recognizing, 125.
30 Most children of the East German town at the center of the study take part in the Jugendweihe, among them some Christians youths too.
31 For this reason, Plessner’s writings, as well as those from Simmel whom he drew upon, remind us today of etiquette books: Helmuth Plessner, Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5: Macht und Menschliche Natur, ed. Günter Dux, Odo Marquard and Elisabeth Ströker (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981 [1924]), 7-133; see also Gregor Fitzi, Grenzen des Konsenses: Rekonstruktion einer Theorie “transnormativer Vergesellschaftung” (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2015).
32 This attitude is not unlike the one of down-to-earth John Watson, the counterpart to the unconventional Sherlock Holmes.
34 Siegfried Kracauer, “Those Who Wait,” The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, tr. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995 [1930]), 138 [original German in?].
