Das palavras à vida: o prazer em Max Weber

Abstract

The thesis has as its goal the discussion over the pleasure as an intellectual and personal subject for Max Weber. The main references are The Sociology of Religion, Science as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation, Bureaucracy, The sense of "Axiological Neutrality" in Social and Economic Sciences. Many authors were researched for information about his life, with a highlight to the biography written by his wife Marianne Weber, for its great number of excerpts from letters and informal conversations. The subject "pleasure" was developed by taking into consideration the complexity of this phenomenon which happens in an ambivalent and multiple ways. In order to do that, we started from the paradigm of the complexity according to Edgar Morin's view, Georges Bataille's discussions on erotism and the antinomic comprehension of Lepegneur and Onfray, who define pleasure as a phenomenon with ambiguities, and the historical references of Peter Gay, Nobert Elias, Wolf Lepenies. In Max Weber, pleasure presents, also, this ambiguity, as his scientific approach is registering the absence of pleasure for the rise of a protestant ethic and, besides that, to support with a process of disenchantment of the world which leads us to a meaningless life. Weber goes through great changes in the last years of his life. In this period he includes in his comments the subjects "erotism" and "arts" with the possibility of escaping from modem everyday routine that affects the individual's existential freedom. However, his ambiguous position about these possibilities take him to consider that a situation o f personal confrontation, considered heroical, once, in his opinion, each one accepts the consequences o f their acts and builds their values to give a meaning to their own existence. The pleasure in Weber is, above ali aspects, intellectual and existential: side by side with the routine, bureaucracy and disenchantment ofthe world was the possibility of charisma, vocation and passion. However, always he related these characteristics to the discomfort that the modem world presented to men, he, as a scientist, was ethical. This is the main argument ofthis thesis