Suffering Between Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment in Max Weber and Beyond

Suffering and theodicy are two interconnected concepts: while the former indicates the embodied personal experience of pain, the latter represents the theological effort to explain the existence of suffering and evil by reconciling them with the idea of a world created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely good God. From a sociological perspective, the first scholar to address the problematic relationship between these two concepts was Max Weber. The problem of suffering in Weber was linked, first of all, to the process of social rationalization, that is, to the growing predominance of formal rationality in Western social life, the ultimate outcome of which he famously described through the metaphor of the “iron cage” as the existential suffering of modern Western humanity. Subsequently, in his Sociology of Religion, he adopted the concept of “disenchantment” to refer to the cultural rationalization of worldviews as a process characterizing most Asian religions within a broader universal perspective. According to Weber’s comparative investigation, at the origin of all attempts at religious rationalization lies the same universal problem of theodicy, namely the search for an explanation capable of justifying the unequal distribution of the goods of happiness among human beings and the resulting suffering, perceived as unjust. For Weber, the paradox of theodicy consists in the fact that the rationalization of thought (worldviews) and action (conducts of life), in an attempt to confer meaning on and alleviate suffering on the basis of one of the two conceptions of salvation (rebirth or redemption), instead produces the unintended consequence of making the human condition even more vulnerable to the experience of suffering, since it comes to be regarded as morally more outrageous and intellectually more unacceptable. Later, the founders of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno, essentially took up and expanded the Weberian thesis of the paradox of theodicy by showing that the second disenchantment brought about by modernity affected the rationalization of metaphysical–religious worldviews through the return of the irrational mythical–magical forces that had once been subjugated and turned into myth by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, the loss of individual freedom, reduced to a mere functional response within modern political and economic bureaucratic systems, comes to coincide with the loss of meaning of any autonomous cultural framework rationally grounded in value orientations. Habermas further developed Weber’s thesis of the loss of freedom by situating the process of social rationalization within a broader paradox that illustrates the contemporary inability of colonized lifeworlds, now completely bureaucratized and technicized, to confer meaning on the subjective experience of suffering. More recently, in the so-called Anthropocene, a non-linear and non-unidirectional dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment has emerged, in which the two coexist as constitutive processes of modernity, allowing the paradox of theodicy and suffering to be reconsidered in terms of a new anthropodicy.