"One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed"
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There is a scold hiding inside Weber's bureaucratic calm. "With impunity" is the tell: this isn't just practical advice about tools, it's a warning about consequences - moral, intellectual, even civic. He frames thinking as a "task" you can try to outsource, and the phrase "mechanical assistants" lands with a double edge. It evokes calculators and clerks, but also the larger machinery of modern life: routines, procedures, institutions that promise to do the hard parts for you. Weber, the chronicler of rationalization, is allergic to the fantasy that automation (or administration) can replace judgment.
The sentence is built like a trap. It grants the appeal of delegation - who wouldn't want a machine to "figure something"? - then undercuts it with a humiliating admission: the "final result is often small indeed". That's not modesty; it's discipline. Real thinking yields incremental gains, not fireworks, and that's precisely why people are tempted to hand it off. Weber suggests that the habit of outsourcing isn't just laziness; it's a refusal to endure the unglamorous grind of reasoning where most insight actually comes from.
The context is a modernity increasingly enchanted by technique. Weber is asking what gets lost when we let systems and tools do our cognitive labor: not accuracy, necessarily, but agency. You can use mechanical help, he implies, but if you "transfer" the task entirely, you don't just risk errors - you risk becoming the kind of person (or society) that no longer knows how to think without a machine's permission.
The sentence is built like a trap. It grants the appeal of delegation - who wouldn't want a machine to "figure something"? - then undercuts it with a humiliating admission: the "final result is often small indeed". That's not modesty; it's discipline. Real thinking yields incremental gains, not fireworks, and that's precisely why people are tempted to hand it off. Weber suggests that the habit of outsourcing isn't just laziness; it's a refusal to endure the unglamorous grind of reasoning where most insight actually comes from.
The context is a modernity increasingly enchanted by technique. Weber is asking what gets lost when we let systems and tools do our cognitive labor: not accuracy, necessarily, but agency. You can use mechanical help, he implies, but if you "transfer" the task entirely, you don't just risk errors - you risk becoming the kind of person (or society) that no longer knows how to think without a machine's permission.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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