The Philosophy of Reenchantment

Michiel Meijer, Herbert De Vriese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000210170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

This book presents a philosophical study of the idea of reenchantment and its merits in the interrelated fields of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology. It features chapters from leading contributors to the debate about reenchantment, including Charles Taylor, John Cottingham, Akeel Bilgrami, and Jane Bennett.

The chapters examine neglected and contested notions such as enchantment, transcendence, interpretation, attention, resonance, and the sacred or reverence-worthy—notions that are crucial to human self-understanding but have no place in a scientific worldview. They also explore the significance of adopting a reenchanting perspective for debates on major concepts such as nature, naturalism, God, ontology, and disenchantment. Taken together, they demonstrate that there is much to be gained from working with a more substantial and affirmative concept of reenchantment, understood as a fundamental existential orientation towards what is seen as meaningful and of value.

The Philosophy of Reenchantment will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in philosophy—especially those working in moral philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, theology, religious studies, and sociology.

Part I
Reenchantment and (A)Theism

1What Is Reenchantment?

An Interview With Charles Taylor

Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor

The following interview took place in Berlin on 21 May 2019.

MICHIEL MEIJER (MM): Professor Taylor, I want to ask you mainly about your concept of “reenchantment,” as you employed it in the papers “Disenchantment-Reenchantment” and “Recovering the Sacred.”¹ So, I’ll take these papers as a starting point. In “Disenchantment-Reenchantment,” you argue for reenchantment by elaborating on the concept of strong evaluation. I have been reading “Recovering the Sacred” as a variation on the same theme, where you explain reenchantment in more theistic terms, as an aspiration to “save the sacred.” I think both approaches are intriguing and that there is a lot more to be said about them.

Now, as I understand your work as a whole, it can be seen in many ways as a project of reenchantment. One of your major efforts is to argue against reductionism in various fields, such as philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology. Reenchantment, then, seems a fitting term to describe the positive tenet of your anti-reductionist project. Yet you have made it clear in various writings that disenchantment is an irreversible process, and that the aspiration to re-enchant cannot be understood in terms of a simple return to the enchanted world of spirits and moral forces. So before discussing what is involved in seeking reenchantment, I want to ask how you understand “disenchantment” and the challenges it poses for us. Disenchantment is often seen as a sense that something is both gained and lost with the process of modernity. So my first question is: how do you understand these gains and losses?

CHARLES TAYLOR (CT): Well, I think that disenchantment has at least two meanings, and a third one which is very invalid in a way. Weber a little bit mixes the three. One meaning is immediately suggested by the word “Entzauberung,” that is, a conception of the world as filled with magic forces which emanate from objects (some of them are very dangerous, some have a sense of vulnerability, etc.), which you see in our premodern ancestors in Europe and in lots of parts of the world, even today. Here, disenchantment means “demagification,” undoing magic. Or, in a certain sense you could say that the Western concept of magic is a little bit formed from the practices that were expelled by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. So that’s one sense, and one that at least gives substance to the idea that the world of particles which are ultimately explicable in terms of Newtonian mechanics succeeds it. The second level I think is very important to modern disenchantment is a conception that people had, now in the elites more than the masses, in the early modern period or before, of cosmic order. A cosmic order which reflects of moral stages or statuses in the universe about the highest of the universe, the meaning of eternity, and what’s lower, the meaning of lesser beings, and so on, and very powerful notions of societies as somehow incrusted in that moral order. So, you get the notion of societies and orders (aristocracy, clergy, and so on) as being rightfully there because they reflect the shape of the universe.

These are two understandings – more than just “ideas” – two ways of understanding ourselves in terms of magical forces and cosmic order which I think have totally disappeared in what I call the “immanent frame” we now live in, where the natural world is understood through today’s best natural science, and the human world is understood as created by human beings. No regime reflects the order of things: regimes are set up by datable times and by identifiable people (fathers of the United States Constitution or whatever), and there is a human decision all the way down. So, I think there you have two meanings of disenchantment. A third meaning which Weber sometimes uses is a decline of religion, a decline of faith. This third meaning is – as Hans Joas is showing in his wonderful big book² he just produced – is definitely not coordinate with the first two, because, in a certain sense, it’s changes in the religious faith which helped drive the first two meanings of disenchantment.

But now, my point is that “reenchantment” is neither of those two conceptions of the world (magical and cosmic) coming back. [Laughing:] So what is it? One way of putting the issue is: can we just look on the physical universe surrounding us as a lot of matter which has its own internal laws for their own sake, so that otherwise there is no claim on us, not something we need to be somehow in contact with? I think that there is a very strong set of intuitions that this is not the case, that there is something more than that. So, there are two places to look at this in order to get an idea of what could be involved. Number one, and this is something I am working on now, the post-Romantic poetics seems to me to be a departure, in which great nostalgia for the age when the notion of cosmic order was there and you could touch it, on one hand, but also a sense that you can’t go back to that. A good example is Hamann. He uses one of the conceptions of an order plugged into the universe, which is to think of it as a script, as a language, a language of God, and we can’t quite get that. So what we do instead is, we translate it into speech. I think of this line about “Reden ist übersetzen,” and Walter Benjamin has built on this idea of “subtler language,” the notion that belief in these orders is no longer really available, so people are kind of inventing their orders, and he puts it in a much too subjectivist mode, I think, so that we invent them and live within them. Excellent examples are something like William Wordsworth (“Tintern Abbey”), but you could also get very good examples from German romantics (Novalis, and so on) and follow that through a whole lot of ways in which that is continued. What is being done here is that the sense of the importance of art is being expressed or realized, and these works of art, when we inhabit them, give us a very strong sense of connection with them. The conviction they carry is that there is some connection here; the conviction they fail to carry or couldn’t carry is that we have a right description of it. So there is a kind of distance, but there is something – we don’t know what, but there is a connection here.

The second great source of ideas about trying to get into this kind of reenchantment is probably premodern, even precivilizational, understandings about humans and the cosmos. You can go to any early society and you get some such idea which is central, the idea of certain places where humans can live because of some X, and then there is a long story told. Generally, in our disenchanted age, these understandings are considered as just some of the illusions, but I think that they are very interesting places to try to get a sense of the world we are living in. We are in a situation where we have all these different takes, the ones that are expressed by a piece of music or a poem or a painting, on the one hand, and those that you see worked out in earlier cultures, on the other hand, none of which we can consider as the last word, but perhaps we would begin to get an understanding of what our relation to the universe might be by considering them.

It’s very interesting that in the present political situation in Canada, there is an attempt to make up for the appalling way in which we treated the Aboriginals, the original inhabitants; that is, to make up for the total rejection of their worldview. The really big problem is getting a sense of confidence that the Aboriginals can run their own show. And that really is tremendously held back, the elements of the traditional culture that these involve, a sense of the world around us. A lot of people are now studying these issues; mainstream Canadians working together with people from those communities. So, there is here a kind of “searching” going on, which probably will never yield a kind of certainty about the nature of the cosmos which our ancestors enjoyed three or four centuries ago. It is going to be a continuing process of exploration, but the assumption underlying all this is that there is something here to explore. It’s not simply a case of subjective reactions.

MM: I see your point about getting back to earlier sources and cultures, but I wonder how this relates to the fact that we read these texts and sources as “buffered selves,” as you call it. So, for example, even medieval subjectivity would be something quite different from our own. So how do we gain access to these texts and worlds?

CT: Yes, well I think there is a human capacity which comes out at best in ethnography. It is an extraordinary human capacity when you think about it, if you really know that you don’t know or really understand that you don’t understand. Ethnographers are parachuted into some society where they just don’t really know how to go about it and how to relate to people, but they are unlike government house people saying, “Let’s make these data shape up in our way.” In order to do what they want to do, ethnographers have to really open themselves. Now, some of them have a reductive view about this. Ultimately, Malinowski [1884–1942, British anthropologist] must have had an idea that you could find a purely intrapsychic explanation for all this. But ethnographers are showing that you can overcome this view from totally outside, if you have the will to. However, the supposition I mentioned earlier, that there is something to explore here, has to precede that, but if it’s really there, and if you have this ethnographic capacity (which grows stronger and stronger as you have more and more contact, and so on), it rapidly becomes clear, as I tried to say in A Secular Age, that you can’t say these are different beliefs. That doesn’t get to it. It really is a different sensibility. I mean, “buffered self” is a fact of my sensibility, more than a belief I have.

MM: To get back to the paper “Disenchantment-Reenchantment,” you also write about this topic with regard to your doctrine of “strong evaluation,” which centers on the fact that we make qualitative distinctions between higher and lower worth. Could you explain some more how your account of strong evaluation relates to your idea of reenchantment? How does a proper understanding of strong evaluation help to show what’s wrong with total disenchantment?

CT: Yes, so let’s look from another angle what this “exploration” involves. This exploration always involves a certain personal search for a way of being, a way of being in contact. We could use a new sense of the word “spiritual” which I am playing with – but of course that has some of the overtones that may lead to misunderstanding – but there is a kind of “path” that people can be on in life, in which they think there is a “better” way of being: more loving, more concerned, more etc. And they have a sense of that, and have a sense that, if I think through the thoughts, go through the meditations, go through certain disciplines, that I can “become” that, or find a way to come closer to that. Now, this whole “sense” (I was going to say “judgment” at first) is powered by a sense of strong evaluation: there is a higher way of being. And it’s also something that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by what you, in the beginning, find as progress on this path or going farther on this path, or does not produce something which you now recognize as higher. Very generally, if you look at the great spiritual thinkers in the years of our history, they recognize “Well, I was partly motivated by being a striking figure for people and that was part of what was pushing me along before, and now I see that I have to set that aside.” So, it’s an interesting kind of strong evaluation, because the sense of moving forward on this path either confirms itself or doesn’t, and its shape therefore can change.

This whole kind of “path” is not understandable without some kind of concept that I try to describe by the term “strong evaluation.” Moving in a certain direction is not “better” in the sense that I think I will feel better; it is a better way to be. So, I think there is a kind of confirmation-disconfirmation here, which is utterly unlike what we have understood as empirical compositions. But there is a very powerful philosophical view – going back to the Vienna positivists but a lot of people hold this view today – which says that the only issues of truth of any interest at all are those of confirmation-disconfirmation of descriptive propositions, and there is a quite different logic to being on a search, and finding that you are becoming or not becoming a certain type of person.

MM: Related to strong evaluation, you also write about disenchantment as a process of inwardness: meanings are no longer placed in things but in the human mind, which you call a “mind-centered” or “human-centered” view, where all value and meaning is projected onto a neutral world. You argue against this ontologically neutral stance especially when it comes to moral meanings. So, what are the challenges, in your view, for those who reject projectivism in pursuit of a reenchanted ethics? If you are right that many have the intuition that this view of the world as completely meaningless is wrong, what, then, can be retrieved of this enchanted sensibility when we have obviously left behind the enchanted world in the original sense?

CT: I think everybody – and this is a very imperialistic claim – everybody has some sense of possibly being on a journey into a higher way of being, but they choose to misidentify. I mean, in moral philosophy, which is the area in which I have been cast simply by being in a philosophy department for a long time, one of the anti-positions to mine is one derived from Kantianism: the idea that reason alone can tell us that we ought to operate by universalizable maxims. In the views of Rawls, Habermas, and Korsgaard,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Varieties of Reenchantment in a Disenchanted World
• Part I Reenchantment and (A)Theism
• Part II Genealogies of Reenchantment
• Part III Working With Reenchantment
• List of Contributors
• Index