Max Weber, in his famous lecture "Politics as a Vocation," distinguishes two ethics that are prevalent in politics: the ethics of ultimate ends, focussed on purity of intention, and the ethics of responsibility, focussed on consequences.
Perhaps more than any other poet of his generation, with the exception of Velimir Khlebnikov, Mandelshtam was distinguished by a complete commitment to his vocation as a poet-prophet and poet-martyr.
By calling it a noble vocation, he addresses the challenge, that those who have already distinguished themselves have to find a way of also helping those down there deal with the challenges and problems they face.
As a boy he'd been the beloved baby of a large, well-off family, and as a man he was sustained by his wife, Katharine S. White, a distinguished editor whom other people found formidable but who doted on her husband's vocation.
Distinguished Authorities!
We live, too, with a sense of being called - and we do not limit the concept of vocation to one sacred caste, but rather we hear a collective charge to become "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Exodus 19 6) - which is to say, a people distinguished by meticulous attention to our ways.
It also distinguishes Bobby, a man of no specific talent or vocation who merely gets a job and rides it as far as he can, from Allen, whose lifelong artistic calling is itself a kind of love.
It was a badge of D.I.Y. pride, intended to distinguish them from their imagined foes, who treated hip-hop as a vocation rather than a calling.
But out in the field it is a vocation fraught with moral paradox, one in which it is not always possible to distinguish help from harm.
Most of Abramović's peers among the pioneers of what might be called "ordealism," to distinguish it from tamer or more cerebral forms of Conceptual and performance art, have long since retired from their harrowing vocation, and some died young.
