Here, ladies and gentlemen, I am touching on a problem that I realize is extremely important to many of you, and it may be best to say a few words about it towards the beginning of the lecture course. For the question you come up against here – the idea that thought must be licensed by its utility – is a very serious one. It is not something that can just summarily be decided with an expression of academic arrogance: ‘For God’s sake, all we are talking about is applied knowledge, and that has nothing to do with truly autonomous and binding knowledge.’ What we have here is a genuine contradiction, and I think it is best for you to recognize this contradiction precisely as a theoretical and philosophical contradiction. If you really do recognize it and comprehend its necessity, this may help you to avoid the idea that this contradiction can simply be removed or abolished by science itself. If you are seriously committed to your studies, I believe you will see that the idea that the specific discipline with which you are engaged is capable of eliminating for you the contradictions which actually give it life and spirit is an illusion or daydream that you must be prepared to renounce; as is the idea that the realm of science or research could offer you any existence, or even any consciousness, that would be free of contradiction. For that would in fact assume that the world can be captured without remainder in terms of consciousness itself or any features of consciousness. It would be to ignore or forget something essential – that our consciousness is ultimately only a rather inadequate and tentative way of dealing with reality itself and that nothing simply guarantees or assures us that reality is not itself contradictory. What I am trying to say is this: you yourselves as knowing subjects, all of us as knowing subjects, always already oriented in some way towards the whole, the absolute, the truth – in other words, every thought,7 however unassuming it may be, simply by presenting itself as a claim, even an unassuming claim, to be right already harbours a kind of internal dynamic, already bears something like a concept of objective truth or objective rightness within itself. And thought feels itself somehow stalled or cheated if its claim is not honoured – in other words, if it is not actually given what it believes it may rightly expect from reality. On the other hand, the way the world is arranged means that we actually risk ruin if we fail to adapt sufficiently to it. Hence the pertinent saying: ‘Primum vivere, deinde philsophari’.8 In other words, we must first earn a living for ourselves before we can start thinking at all, and the idea of free, disinterested and emphatic truth already presupposes the kind of life we can secure only through a certain kind of accommodation to realistic ends and interests. Thus we can actually live and then perhaps think in an emphatic sense only if we perform what is often described as ‘socially productive labour’. All intellectual labour, and thus all academic and scientific labour, is also part of this socially productive labour.
As individuals engaged in scientific or scholarly disciplines, and specifically as sociologists who have to deal with a particularly sensitive and contested field, we are compelled to do certain things that allow us to earn a living, in other words, to function within the existing order; and this remains the case even if we do not restrict our thinking to the immanent demands of the system in which we find ourselves but reflect critically upon that system as philosophy enjoins us to do. On the other hand, we thereby find that our soul is deprived of ‘its God-given right’, as Hölderlin puts it,9 that the innermost dynamic of thought is somehow stifled or cut off. Now it often happens that students, and perhaps many of you here, especially if you have been thinking long and hard about these things, feel like coming up and reproaching us, your academic teachers, as follows: ‘Well, what on earth are we supposed to do then? On the one hand, as sociologists, we must try and find some role or function to perform within the whole existing set-up; at the same time we must not only entertain a distinctively critical attitude to this set-up but also know that these roles and functions we are meant to take up actually run counter to a range of insights that we have specifically acquired by understanding the mechanisms of society – and it is you pernicious sociologists who are responsible for this! – look what the Lorelei has done with her singing.10 You have tempted us with the prospect of some kind of free and undiminished truth; and now we find we cannot actually live with this truth, and when we go out and earn a living, we cannot fail to have a bad conscience about it, although in the world as it is in today you can hardly expect us to go hungry!’ Now this objection does indeed capture the predicament in which social thought inevitably finds itself today, although I think it is rather unjust to reproach sociology itself with this, or even to claim, as I have occasionally heard it said, that you have merely been drawn into a kind of sociological schizophrenia. It is unjust because the contradiction that I pointed out for you is not one that is produced by thinking, by the discipline of sociology, but is actually the contradiction inherent in society – a society whose understanding of reason, of ratio, has been shaped by the concept of a binding and comprehensive idea of truth, but one where reason is also always tied and limited in a particularistic way to merely instrumental rationality. When you find yourselves in this situation, the gravity of which I certainly do not underestimate, and then complain to us, your teachers, who must pursue knowledge, you are acting as if someone who tries to diagnose a difficult situation must actually be held responsible for the fact that the situation in question exists – and this is a kind of psychological mechanism that is indeed extraordinarily common. In this connection I like to cite the remark of Helvétius that the truth never hurt anyone except the one who told it.11 I would advise you, therefore, to respond in a different way before you throw in the towel – in other words, before you just say: ‘Ah well, what’s the point of all this sociological reflection? I’ll just learn the required skills and techniques and get a decent job at the end of it. This damn sociological theory can only lead me astray – to the devil with it!’ So before you go down this road you would be better off, I believe, if you at least try and understand this contradiction, under which you and I can assure you all of us suffer, as an objectively grounded contradiction, and reflect upon it as such. My own view, if I may introduce this here, is that you will actually get further in your knowledge of facts, of the relations and connections involved in society, if you take on board these uncomfortable theoretical reflections than you will by just focusing relentlessly on the functional connections of society. For it is a rather remarkable paradox that when we simply try and perform our functional roles within society, when we reduce our own knowledge to this merely functional level, we generally find we actually no longer know or understand anything at all, or that our knowledge is extraordinarily impoverished as a result. In other words, to put this in logical terms, if you completely reduce the practice of thought to the mechanisms of social adaptation, if you allow thought no other possibility beyond that of unreserved accommodation, then thought ends up as nothing but tautology. It ends up with what empirical research likes to call ‘the preparation of the facts’, where you basically have no more than what you have already. Any judgements you come up with are all really nothing more than ‘analytical judgements’, mere repetitions or classifications of what is already there anyway. Yet I would suggest that the spirit of science, if we are still using the word ‘science’ in all seriousness and are not merely referring to various techniques and procedures, surely consists precisely in bringing us further, in giving us more, allowing us to see or understand more, than the orderly and efficient repetition of what we already hold in our hands.
Now the objection against imagination in favour of observation, which I talked about earlier, naturally has a certain plausibility. There is no doubt that the notion that mysterious forces are at work in society, things beyond the world of observable fact, can easily lead to all kinds of wild speculations and mythological explanations. If you consider Plato’s doctrine of the state from this perspective today, for example, and try and picture the essential character of a human society that is supposed to follow from assuming the reality of pure forms or essences or supposing that the soul essentially consists of a rational, a spirited and a desirous element,12 what you will find is an extremely arbitrary and highly stylized expression of the actual society of the time. On the other hand, it has to be said that it is only the imagination, only the element in sociology which goes beyond the recording and collation of connections, that is able to bring such facts into any meaningful connection with one another – and this is a central problem which I hope