The Philosophy of Reenchantment (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy) 9780367418144, 9780367823443, 0367418142

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
1 What Is Reenchantment? An Interview With Charles Taylor
2 Religion Without Magic: Responding to the Natural World
3 Might There Be Secular Enchantment?
Part II Genealogies of Reenchantment
4 Did Disenchantment Ever Happen? Retrieving the Forgotten Story of Transcendence
5 Theorizing Reenchantment Across Different Value Spheres
6 Reenchantment as Resonance
Part III Working With Reenchantment
7 The Eyes of a Child
8 Nature, Enchantment, and God
9 Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification: On Taking Morality (Too) Seriously
10 Detachment and Attention
11 Moral Absolutes and Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism
Epilogue: On the Call From Outside
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Philosophy of Reenchantment

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, strong evaluation, transcendence, resonance, perceptual experience, religious meaning, moral experience, interpretation, attention, 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 disenchantment, realism, nature, and God. In this way, this volume seeks to put the concept of reenchantment firmly on the contemporary philosophical agenda by showing the extent to which it connects with central questions about agency, value, metaphysics, and religion. 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, and social theory), theology, religious studies, and sociology. Michiel Meijer is Postdoctoral Researcher of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp. He is the author of Charles Taylor’s Doctrine of Strong Evaluation (2017) and has published widely on subjects such as moral value, human agency, moral epistemology, moral ontology, moral phenomenology, and moral psychology in the fields of metaethics, normative ethics, and social theory. Herbert De Vriese is Assistant Professor at the Center for European Philosophy of the University of Antwerp. His work focuses on secularization, critique of religion, and disenchantment in general, and the role of philosophical theory and critique in historical and sociological debates on (the end of) classical secularization theory, postsecularism, and classical narratives of disenchantment in particular.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

Microaggressions and Philosophy Edited by Lauren Freeman and Jeanine Weekes Schroer Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy A Constructive-Engagement Account Bo Mou Perception and the Inhuman Gaze Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences Edited by Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, and Dermot Moran Logics of Genocide The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World Edited by Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith A Philosophical Account Nathaniel Goldberg and Chris Gavaler The Indexical Point of View On Cognitive Significance and Cognitive Dynamics Vojislav Bozickovic Toleration and the Challenges of Liberalism Edited by Johannes Drerup and Gottfried Schweiger The Philosophy of Reenchantment Edited by Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720

The Philosophy of Reenchantment Edited by Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-41814-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-82344-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii

Introduction: Varieties of Reenchantment in a Disenchanted World

1

MICHIEL MEIJER AND HERBERT DE VRIESE

PART I

Reenchantment and (A)Theism15   1 What Is Reenchantment? An Interview With Charles Taylor

17

MICHIEL MEIJER AND CHARLES TAYLOR

  2 Religion Without Magic: Responding to the Natural World

38

JOHN COTTINGHAM

  3 Might There Be Secular Enchantment?

54

AKEEL BILGRAMI

PART II

Genealogies of Reenchantment79   4 Did Disenchantment Ever Happen? Retrieving the Forgotten Story of Transcendence

81

GUIDO VANHEESWIJCK

  5 Theorizing Reenchantment Across Different Value Spheres HERBERT DE VRIESE

105

vi  Contents   6 Reenchantment as Resonance

132

PAOLO COSTA

PART III

Working With Reenchantment159   7 The Eyes of a Child

161

SOPHIE-GRACE CHAPPELL

  8 Nature, Enchantment, and God

178

FIONA ELLIS

  9 Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification: On Taking Morality (Too) Seriously

195

MICHIEL MEIJER

10 Detachment and Attention

220

ROB COMPAIJEN

11 Moral Absolutes and Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism

239

DAVID MCPHERSON



Epilogue: On the Call From Outside

260

JANE BENNETT AND AKEEL BILGRAMI

List of Contributors271 Index275

Acknowledgments

The interview in Chapter 1 has previously been published as Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor, “Fellow Travellers on Different Paths: A Conversation with Charles Taylor,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, online first article (August 2019): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453719866233. The discussion between Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami in the e­ pilogue was first published on the website The Immanent Frame: S­ ecularism, Religion and the Public Sphere. We thank both authors for the permission to reprint their blog posts. See Jane Bennett, “On the Call from Outside,” The Immanent Frame, August 18, 2010. https://tif.ssrc.org/2010/08/18/onthe-call-from-outside/; Akeel Bilgrami, “Understanding Disenchantment,” The Immanent Frame, September 6, 2010. https://tif.ssrc.org/2010/09/06/ disenchantment/.

Introduction Varieties of Reenchantment in a Disenchanted World Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese

Preliminaries The Philosophy of Reenchantment goes back to a conference held at the University of Antwerp on 6 and 7 December 2018. The conference theme, “Varieties of Reenchantment in a Disenchanted World,” stemmed from the recognition that the current philosophical debate over reenchantment is far from being a coherent and well-organized discussion, as it allows for a wide range of conceptions and applications across distinct philosophical domains and approaches. The aim of the conference was to bring clarity to this debate by bringing together a variety of scholars from different philosophical traditions (most of whom appear in the present volume) on the basis of a shared agenda for something called “reenchantment” in going against the grain of the dominant scientistic trend in philosophy. In a crucial attempt to achieve that aim, the present book develops and integrates a number of key ideas from the recent work of the contributors so as to offer the first integral account of what is involved in understanding reenchantment as a distinctive approach to philosophy. The background to the volume is (quite obviously) the major influence of the well-known Weberian claim that the modern world is a “disenchanted” one, that is, to borrow a phrase from Jane Bennett, the image of modernity as either “a place of dearth and alienation (when compared to a golden age of community and cosmological coherency) or a place of reason, freedom, and control (when compared to a dark and confused premodernity).”1 Our concern here is not whether disenchantment is a laudable or a regrettable historical development. Rather, the assumption is that “disenchantment” is a fairly recognizable condition in which experience and understanding in present-day liberal society takes place, and as such provides the implicit background of the more explicit beliefs and sensibilities of the majority of its members. The narrative of disenchantment emerges here as what Charles Taylor calls a “context of understanding,” a lived condition which includes both matters that are explicitly acknowledged by almost everyone (such as that there are no

2  Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese spirits and demons whose forces impinge on human beings) and some which form the implicit, largely unfocussed background of contemporary thought and experience.2 There is no doubt, however, that starting from an intuitive sense of disenchantment as a factual condition of life within Western liberal societies raises some major questions, such as whether there ever was a condition called “enchantment,” whether or not we lost it, and whether or not it needs to be retrieved. Rather than engaging with such heavily debated questions, the present volume picks up on trends that are already happening against the backdrop of the classical debate on disenchantment. In recent years, a growing number of historians and sociologists have begun to challenge Weber’s classical thesis of the disenchantment of the world by identifying sources and countermovements of reenchantment within the cultural matrix of Western modernity. On the philosophical front, too, some scholars explicitly argue for the possibility of reenchantment within the prevailing disenchanted worldview. However, the cultural developments that gave Weber’s term such wide currency seem to leave little room for a meaningful notion of reenchantment. What is the appeal to reenchantment, so the objection goes, if not a kind of nostalgic longing for a bygone age? The essays in this volume all respond to this worry by showing, each in their own way, how the very characterization of the world as disenchanted ignores and distorts fundamental human experiences and responses, while also demonstrating that the concept of reenchantment is in fact a helpful tool in clarifying such basic human responsiveness. The central aim of this volume is, therefore, to present a philosophical study – at times a defense – of the idea of reenchantment. At a first glance, recent historical scholarship on the origins and legacies of modernity seems to provide a good starting point for elaborating on a meaningful conception of reenchantment. However, the appeal to reenchantment in historical studies generally serves to counter Weber’s classical narrative of disenchantment in ways that leave crucial misleading dichotomies of this narrative intact, such as naturalism versus supernaturalism, immanence versus transcendence, and secularism versus religion. Within this (still quite Weberian) framework, the term reenchantment is mainly connected with notions such as magic, angels, spirits, mysticism, and superstition (e.g., in the work of Ronald Asch, Peter Marshall, Alexandra Walsham, Christopher Partridge, and Jason Josephson-Storm).3 Current philosophical appeals to reenchantment, then, are typically reduced to a theoretical model for rethinking a specific discourse, such as in the “reenchantment of political theory” or the “reenchantment of science,” often with the connotation of its impoverishment as a consequence of disenchanting modernity (as, for example, in the writings of Morris Berman, David Ray Griffin, and Alister McGrath).4 The present volume seeks to demonstrate that there is much to be gained from working with a

Introduction  3 far more inclusive and affirmative concept of reenchantment, understood as a fundamental existential orientation towards what is seen as meaningful and of value. In the wake of the current scientistic philosophical climate, it should not be surprising that the term “reenchantment” is often viewed with suspicion because it is seen as being unclear, mysterious, or nostalgic. This impression is partly justified to the extent that the philosophical debate on reenchantment is currently still at an initial stage. At the same time, doctrines combining “naturalism” with some kind of qualification or extension – non-reductive, soft, naive, liberal, humanized – have been growing in recent years (e.g., in the work of John McDowell, Barry Stroud, Jennifer Hornsby, Mario De Caro, and David Macarthur).5 These views typically reject scientistic approaches to philosophy for being incomplete and present themselves as escape routes from the problems of such approaches in defense of a broad conception of naturalism. The ambition is to present a view of the natural world which allows for the breadth and depth of human life, and it is here that the combination of naturalism and a suitable qualification  – a view acknowledging that the natural world is “our” world or the “human” world – is indeed an attractive one. Yet since most qualified naturalisms assume that this debate must remain resolutely secular to avoid all reference to the “supernatural,” these views largely remain within the bounds set by the classical disenchantment paradigm. Moreover, the discussion often turns to the issue of how to define “naturalism” rather than to investigate the nature of the phenomena that gave rise to this debate in the first place. The present volume (although of kindred spirit) takes a distance from these broad naturalisms mainly because their proponents tend to overstate the contemporary sense of disenchantment by insisting on being a “naturalist” of some kind. Instead, the essays collected here set out to explore the multiple modes of reenchantment – either secular or theistic or yet others – from within the context of a disenchanted world yet without being held captive by this context of understanding. The first strand of the volume (Chapters 1–3) responds to a concern that many have had about reenchantment, namely that this notion makes sense only from within a certain theistic perspective, and that its advocates must therefore be considered as niche players whose views have no bearing (or only a limited bearing) on the major debates of the more or less atheistic intellectual orientation most philosophers share today. The point here is that while reenchantment can be interpreted in theistic terms, it need not be, to the extent that not just religious but all human beings share an enchanted kind of sensibility in encountering the world through irreducibly normative experiences such as wonder, horror, delight, and agony. The idea that a theistic interpretation of reenchantment fulfills but one of its many potentialities is further anticipated by the second strand of the

4  Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese book (Chapters 4–6), which involves a cultural and historical analysis of the contemporary significance of reenchantment which radically departs from the classical disenchantment paradigm. The key insight here is that Weber’s disenchantment thesis itself needs disenchanting, not in the naive sense that the world never really was disenchanted but in the more genealogical sense of showing how we came to take a disenchanted world for granted, that is, to convince us that our history might not necessarily be the linear process of subtraction and of disenchantment so many think it is. From this perspective, reenchantment is best understood as emerging from meaningful experiences within contemporary life – experiences that blur the distinctions between theoretical and practical domains as they seem to cut across the boundaries between different value spheres. The upshot is that the notion of reenchantment is extended beyond the sphere of religion, thus providing the resources for a conception of reenchantment that breaks new ground in the current philosophical climate by questioning an over-rigid opposition between secular and theistic forms of commitment. The third strand of the volume (Chapters  7–11) involves an examination of the distinctive modes of philosophical argumentation made possible by this more inclusive concept. The chapters on this theme demonstrate the merit of having recourse to reenchantment in such diverse fields as political theory, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology, metaethics, existential ethics, and virtue ethics, and the authors clarify the relevance of their conclusions to the issue of how to understand reenchantment. Taken together, the contributors examine neglected and contested notions which are crucial to human self-understanding but have no place in a scientific worldview, such as enchantment, strong evaluation, transcendence, resonance, perceptual experience, religious meaning, moral experience, interpretation, attention, and the sacred or reverence-worthy. They also explore the significance of adopting a reenchanting perspective for debates on major concepts such as disenchantment, realism, nature, and God. In this way, this volume seeks to put the concept of reenchantment firmly on the contemporary philosophical agenda by showing the extent to which it connects with central questions about agency, value, metaphysics, and religion.

The Chapters The chapters, all of which were specially commissioned for this volume, are divided into three main parts. The first part sets the stage in terms of a debate between three major scholars who consistently have recourse to (re)enchantment in elaborating on their views. The subtle differences and similarities between the theistic approaches of Charles Taylor and

Introduction  5 John Cottingham, on the one hand, and the secular approach of Akeel Bilgrami, on the other, paint a distinctive picture of reenchantment as being part of a project which pushes beyond the limits set by the familiar opposition between theism and atheism. The second part provides three genealogical analyses of the origin and meaning of the concept of reenchantment in terms of the classical debate on Weber’s notorious disenchantment narrative. The third part covers recent theories of reenchantment in the interrelated fields of political philosophy, philosophy of perception, philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology, and ethics. The book concludes with a discussion between Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami on their shared interest in the notion of a “call from outside,” and the resulting implications for the question of what is involved in understanding reenchantment as a distinctive approach to philosophy. The volume begins with Charles Taylor’s approach to reenchantment as elaborated in an interview with Michiel Meijer: “What Is Reenchantment? An Interview with Charles Taylor” (Chapter  1). The interview focuses especially on the status of Taylor’s central doctrine of strong evaluation and the ontological commitment in the background of his reenchantment project more generally. Taylor rearticulates his concern for reenchantment in terms of the universally human sense of being on a moral or spiritual “path,” in which people (implicitly or explicitly) aspire to what they see as a better way of being (more loving, more concerned, etc.). A key issue that is discussed is the way in which Taylor connects his theistic affirmation of reenchantment with questions about moral motivation. Although he withdraws from his earlier view that nontheistic outlooks might be less adequate than theistic ones for the affirmation of human beings as worthy of solidarity and benevolence, he warns that any society which is not nourishing the moral sources underpinning its core values might fail to live up to the moral demands it seeks to sustain. In the end, Taylor’s quest for what kind of reenchantment makes sense in a secular age remains fundamentally open to the emergence of both religious and non-religious motivation. The result is a radically pluralistic conception of reenchantment which creates new possibilities as well as cross pressures that make any fixed view on the big ontological questions rather hard to sustain. John Cottingham develops some of these themes in his chapter “Religion Without Magic: Responding to the Natural World” (Chapter 2) by asking what it might mean to recover a reenchanted understanding of the world in a way that salvages the objective status of value and meaning in human experience. Cottingham criticizes the idea that objective value and meaning can be constructed or invented, as opposed to being discovered or responded to, in defense of a theistic position according to which the world is already enchanted with objective beauty and goodness. In elaborating on this position, he examines three possible interpretations of disenchantment (“demagicking,” “flattening,” and “bleaching out”) while

6  Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese also proposing three corresponding attempts at reenchantment. Rather than buying into the idea of a “halfway house,” where we can resist theism but preserve genuine objective value, Cottingham recommends instead to orient ourselves towards the normative requirements that are already there. The challenge, then, becomes one of making sense of the reality and objectivity of goodness as an active power, which is independent and authoritative as well as capable of transforming our lives. This is a huge challenge, Cottingham concludes, and a theistic worldview meets it superbly. Cottingham is quite clear on the question of how best to philosophize about reenchantment, for his view is that reenchantment is best expressed in theistic terms. However, it is precisely the aim of Akeel Bilgrami’s chapter “Might There Be Secular Enchantment?” (Chapter 3) to challenge this assumption. In his view, a great deal of thinking influenced by Weber’s disenchantment narrative has failed to take into account the possibility of exclusively secular forms of enchantment. Starting from a genealogical analysis in order to make explicit the illicit extrapolation from desacralization to disenchantment at the root of the problem, Bilgrami continues to develop an argument for what he calls “secular enchantment.” His view seeks to establish the link between agency and value by showing that our engaged practical agency is intelligible only if the world contains value properties which make normative demands on us that prompt such agency. Bilgrami’s secular version of enchantment has important implications for how we comprehend the origin and meaning of reenchantment – a theme which is developed in more detail in the subsequent three papers. In his chapter “Did Disenchantment Ever Happen? Retrieving the Forgotten Story of Transcendence” (Chapter 4), Guido Vanheeswijck builds further on the central issue whether reenchantment is best expressed in either theistic or secular terms. In so doing, he challenges the idea, common to many contemporary debates, that the transition from a premodern order to the modern world can be seen as part of a univocal and progressive disenchantment of Western culture whereby religion simply falls away, to be replaced by science and rationality. Instead, Vanheeswijck reconstructs the complex debate between historians, sociologists, and philosophers on the genesis of the secular world. Against the background of this debate, he turns to the genealogical link between the religious search for transcendence and the process of disenchantment. Building on the discussion between Taylor and Bilgrami, Vanheeswijck concludes not only that the Christian notion of agapeic transcendence has been too quickly abandoned in the process of disenchantment, but that the retrieval of this notion is essential to understanding the very meaning of reenchantment in a disenchanted world. Herbert De Vriese does not aim to attack or defend any particular conception of reenchantment. Rather, his chapter “Theorizing Reenchantment

Introduction  7 Across Different Value Spheres” (Chapter  5) starts by identifying an inherent tension in Weber’s disenchantment narrative between a negative appraisal of disenchantment, on the one hand, and a positive appraisal, on the other. De Vriese then uses these two conflicting meanings to argue – against the common conception – that Weber deliberately used the term “Entzauberung” as an inclusive and holistic concept. For De Vriese, the various attempts to explain Weber’s disenchantment thesis by breaking it down into several, theoretically more manageable theses are doomed to fail because such attempts ultimately block out the central concept of disenchantment from which they originate. To make this point, he argues that much scholarship on disenchantment lacks a critical engagement with the thesis of “functional differentiation” in classical sociological theory, according to which modern societies develop different domains of life (such as science, art, and religion) with their own distinctive societal functions. However, the result of De Vriese’s analysis is in the end a positive one, namely, the prospect of a full-blown account of reenchantment which cuts across the boundaries between different value spheres. Paolo Costa’s chapter “Reenchantment as Resonance” (Chapter  6) tracks currents and modes of reenchantment that are not just happening now, but since the beginnings of the modern age. Starting from a first-person description of the experience of enchantment, Costa gradually develops the idea that a reenchanted world is best understood as a world that “resonates” with human beings. Drawing on Alfred Schutz’s notion of multiple realities and Hans Joas’ critique of Weber’s classical disenchantment thesis, Costa continues to unpack the different claims assembled under his guiding notion of reenchantment as resonance by having recourse to the metaphor of “religious unmusicality” and Hartmut Rosa’s critical social theory of resonance. Of particular interest to Costa is to reclaim a conception of reenchantment which is plausible within a world that is also partly disenchanted. He ultimately identifies reenchantment as consisting in the human capability to be responsive to the “musicality” of the world, then also more particularly in the essentially reciprocal relationship human beings have with their surroundings. The upshot is that the notion of reenchantment is reclaimed in a way that bridges the gap which allegedly separates secular from religious forms of commitment. On the whole, the genealogies put forward by Vanheeswijck, De Vriese, and Costa reveal not only how a need for reenchantment gradually evolved from subtle changes in the ways in which our experience of the world became disenchanted but also what that need means for the self-understanding we live by, both of those who are still religious and of those who consider themselves secular. The final six contributions tackle in more detail some general philosophical issues concerning the relation between self and world in the background of these genealogical

8  Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese perspectives and the overall debate between theistic and secular proponents of reenchantment. As noted, Bilgrami preserves the notion of reenchantment in a secular version by arguing that human practical agency consists in being responsive to the normative demands we perceive in orienting ourselves in an evaluatively enchanted world. One major implication to be drawn from Bilgrami’s view is that ethics is best understood as a perceptual discipline. Sophie-Grace Chappell’s chapter “The Eyes of a Child” (Chapter 7) gives this picture tangible substance by asking what is needed in order to retain our everyday perceptually and agentively responsive relations to a world suffused with value properties. In Chappell’s view, this involves defending a position which is less about reenchanting the world than about “disdisenchanting” ourselves. Taking her cue from the implicit philosophical anthropology (or moral psychology) underlying the political theory of John Rawls – which she rejects – Chappell makes room for the idea that a realistic philosophical anthropology must begin somewhere else, namely, where any human individual begins: the baby or human child. Learning to see with the eyes of a child, she continues to show, is precisely what dis-disenchanting ourselves amounts to. What we need, then, is to clear our eyes of certain preconceptions and to see the world not as inherently neutral but as inherently good in the sense of possessing and instantiating value properties to which our strongly evaluative attitudes of awe, wonder, curiosity, and attention (etc.) are responses. Chappell examines how this evaluative kind of perception involves a commitment to a “phenomenal socialism” in the philosophy of perception which shows how we experience value directly rather than on the basis of some intermediate mental representation. On this basis, she develops a case for “enchanted realism.” While Chappell’s enchanted realism refers to neither theistic nor secular perspectives, Fiona Ellis explicitly defends the idea of “divine enchantment” in her chapter “Nature, Enchantment, and God” (Chapter 8). She develops her view in crucial reference to the supposedly secular conception of enchantment endorsed by John McDowell. Ellis initially agrees with McDowell’s anti-scientistic claim that nature must be comprehended in at least “partially enchanted” terms to accommodate the evaluative meanings to which we are responsive as human beings. However, she rejects the idea that God can be removed from enchantment at no cost to the reality of a world which is enchanting in McDowell’s value-involving sense. This discussion, Ellis continues to argue, depends entirely on one’s preferred definitions of the terms “nature,” “enchantment,” and “God,” and she addresses some well-known Nietzschean worries in defending the claim that the value-involving natural world is in fact God-involving. The idea underlying Ellis’s plea for divine enchantment is that there are good and bad ways of reenchanting the world. Michiel Meijer makes a similar claim with regard to metaethical debates in analytic philosophy

Introduction  9 in his chapter “Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification: On Taking Morality (Too) Seriously” (Chapter 9). Meijer starts from a fundamental theme we already encountered in some of the other contributions by invoking the experience that the world contains value properties to which we feel that we ought to respond. Connecting insights from critical social theory (Honneth), the philosophy of religion (Cottingham), and hermeneutics (Taylor), he aims to show that adopting a “metaperspective” on ethics comes at a certain price, and that we need a different approach to understanding value because this price is too high. Building on Honneth’s conception of “reification,” Meijer argues that the narrow metaethical focus on moral judgments tends to ignore the fact that we owe our explicit moral judgments to an antecedent stance of practical moral engagement. To substantiate this point, he discusses in more detail the position of “robust realists” in metaethics. Although robust realism prima facie appears to be a plausible candidate for reenchantment in ethics as it purports to take moral experience at face value, Meijer shows how robust realists are held captive by a disenchanted framework to such an extent that they ultimately lose the experience of normativity and objectivity from which they began. As an alternative to robust realism, he draws attention to a general trend towards a more “humane” approach to ethics which, in Meijer’s view, offers a more fitting model for understanding reenchantment. In his chapter “Detachment and Attention” (Chapter 10), Rob Compaijen develops a conception of reenchantment from the perspective of existential ethics in terms of the notions of disenchantment, detachment, and attention. His account starts with the identification of disenchantment as an existential kind of experience which results from looking at the world from a strongly objective point of view  – as opposed to ­ontological conceptions that see disenchantment as a process that results from an increased awareness of the “real” world. Drawing on the notion of moral perception (which, as we saw, is also central to the contributions of Bilgrami and Chappell), Compaijen proposes to conceive of reenchantment as an evaluative kind of perception that he calls “detached engagement.” On the one hand, this notion builds further on Bilgrami’s view that human agency is best understood in terms of the perception of value properties to which we respond as engaged practical agents. On the other hand, Compaijen also challenges Bilgrami’s suggestion that adopting a detached stance makes value increasingly difficult to discern. He does so by showing that in some cases it is precisely by taking a distance from our everyday, practical ways of relating to the world that it becomes possible to discern certain value properties and, moreover, to be moved by them to certain emotional responses. Compaijen then turns to Iris Murdoch’s views on attention as an illustration of the mode of detached engagement. He finally concludes that detached engagement as attention is in fact a genuine form of reenchantment, to the extent that it

10  Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese reveals what was there all along but was removed from sight under the influence of the radically detached point of view. David McPherson’s chapter “Moral Absolutes and Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism” (Chapter  11) argues for a form of reenchantment within the context of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. His reference point is Elizabeth Anscombe’s “disenchanting” suggestion that secular philosophers should best abandon such notions as objective value or unconditional moral demands, given that the “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force of such notions no longer makes sense without a divine law framework. Against the background of this suggestion, McPherson’s concern is that Anscombe simultaneously seeks to uphold at least some kind of moral objectivity by claiming that we can still derive an ought from what is in a more ordinary sense of “ought.” He aims to show that Anscombe’s focus on what a human being “ordinarily” needs in order to flourish qua human being fails to adequately ground the absoluteness of moral prohibitions that she seeks to defend against consequentialist views. McPherson’s discussion connects in an interesting way to a range of issues raised in the foregoing chapters. For one thing, his critique of “disenchanted” versions of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics mirrors the thrust of Meijer’s chapter, for McPherson’s target is the same “quasi-scientific” framework it is Meijer’s purpose to transcend in criticizing metaethical robust realism. Furthermore, it bears similarities with Bilgrami’s, Chappell’s, and Compaijen’s perceptual arguments in stressing the need for a distinctive kind of moral perception that can appropriately support absolute moral prohibitions. There is also close affinity with the theistic perspectives of Cottingham and Ellis, for McPherson’s view is not only that the relevant kind of perception must include a sense of the sacred or the reverenceworthy, but also that a theistic worldview makes sense of moral absolutes in a way that has no clear secular counterpart. Additionally, Taylor’s view is acknowledged as well, when McPherson asserts that any ethic which is centered on a disenchanted account of human flourishing seems to be committed to a “moral ontology” that does not fit well with the “moral phenomenology” of the sacred in human life. Last but not least, McPherson’s emphasis on Anscombe’s later endorsement of a kind of “religious” attitude of “respect before the mystery of human life” that is readily available to theists and nontheists alike resonates strongly with the spirit of this volume as a whole.

The Call From Outside The idea that one does not have to be a theist to have a sense of respect, wonder, or admiration for the world and its inhabitants is explored further in the concluding chapter, “Epilogue: On the Call From Outside.” In a final effort to render some wider implications of the appeal to reenchantment, this chapter gives an account of the discussion between Jane

Introduction  11 Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami on how to understand the  – unabashedly enchanting – notion of a “call from outside” when working from within an exclusively secular conception of enchantment. It starts with Bennett’s commentary of Bilgrami’s chapter “What Is Enchantment?”6 and ends with Bilgrami’s reply. There is no doubt that Bennett’s and Bilgrami’s conceptions of enchantment have much in common: they both understand the world (nature, matter) in a non-mechanized, enchanted way by defending the idea that there is an external source of value to which we are responsive, and they also share a nontheistic notion of enchantment that explicitly avoids reference to a transcendent creator-God. However, they give quite different answers to three central questions: How to conceive of nature and matter? Is there a need to re-enchant the secular world? What are the implications of enchantment for our understanding of agency and ethics? This debate, although somewhat sketchy and undeveloped,7 clearly shows how transformations of the concept of nature and the world we inhabit have serious implications for the ways in which we relate to our environment more generally. Against this background, the accounts of reenchantment collected in this volume resurface as part of a distinctive ontological imaginary replete with ethical and political implications. Clearly, this is not to say that the chapters are best understood as explicit ontological affirmations. Rather, they cultivate a kind of perceptual openness to the idea that human beings are placed in the world in a way which calls on them to relate to it. We use the word “imaginary” to stress that what is involved here is something utterly different from a theory, namely, a way of interpreting the world that is more like an imaginative picture than a daring philosophical “thesis.” Perhaps this is just more grist to the mill of those who feel confirmed in their rejection of the philosophy of reenchantment as an exercise in nostalgia or make-believe. But it is perhaps no coincidence that both Taylor and Bennett make a point of defending the notion of an imaginary as the proper term to capture what is at stake here. Those who are familiar with Taylor’s work will already have been reminded of his insistence on the human capacity for imagining the world, as opposed to theorizing it, in elaborating on his concept of a “social imaginary.” Taylor makes it quite clear that social imaginaries can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines as they cover a wider grasp which escapes full theoretical expression: What I’m calling the social imaginary extends beyond the immediate background understanding which makes sense of our particular practices. This is not an arbitrary extension of the concept, because just as the practice without the understanding wouldn’t make sense for us, and thus wouldn’t be possible, so this understanding supposes, if it is to make sense, a wider grasp of our whole predicament,

12  Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese how we stand to each other, how we got to where we are, how we relate to other groups, etc.8 In an analogy with Epicurean materialism, Bennett describes her own version of a “metaphysical imaginary” by presenting her enchanted materialism empathetically not as an ontological theory but as “a (meta)physics more than a physics, as an imaginative picture more than an empirical claim or even an ontological position.”9 She strategically puts the “meta” in parentheses not only to bracket the problematic “over” or “above and beyond” connotations of meta, but also to make room for the etymological meaning of the word meta as “that which bridges” or “the relational transition point” – in which case, (meta)physics could describe a system of relations between (rather than beyond) the constitutive elements that make up our world.10 In fact, this is precisely the thrust of Taylor’s own (Aristotelian) understanding of “metaphysics” as a major effort of “putting together” the different insights of individual sciences such as physics, ethics, and politics – which, in Taylor’s view, cannot but involve “invoking things which aren’t dealt with in any existing modern terms of physics (psychology, sociology, etc.).”11 The upshot of these considerations is that they broaden the sense of metaphysical inquiry beyond the confines of mere theorizing, that is, to see it as an ultimate attempt to “engage one’s environment” in the most general sense. Moreover, the characterization of metaphysics as invoking a holistic and symbiotical kind of relationship between elements that are partly expressed in theoretical terms and partly carried by inarticulate images and practices prepares us for the idea that ontological imaginaries are always engaged in broader ethical and political interpretations. This is perhaps the major point that can be read between the lines of this volume as a whole. Our concern here is twofold. There is no doubt that contemporary individuals engage their environment in a way that precludes any going “back.” This is what we meant at the beginning by presenting disenchantment as a “condition” of liberal social life to anticipate a quick dismissal of reenchantment as resulting from a false nostalgia for an unrecoverable past. But concentration on this insight alone also diminishes any potential we might possess to make sense of the ways in which we are (and always have been) living in a world that speaks to us, moves us, disturbs us, and enchants us. Being open to this experience is indispensable to even perceive the strong values and evaluations by which we live our lives – let alone to participate in them at the level of the more political framework where policies are shaped. In this respect, it is worth noting that a reenchanted imaginary (which, as we saw, functions as a fundamental interpretation rather than an apodictic account) is displayed for an expressly normative purpose: it allows our ethical and political concerns and affirmations to appear in full

Introduction  13 force.12 The idea of (re)enchantment, then, which entails the experience of the world as making a call, has the potential of playing a key role in ethical and political theorizing. The ethico-political significance alluded to here is that a reenchanted ontological imaginary provides a more congenial setting for normative affirmations than does a disenchanted discourse, as only the former fosters a feeling of being connected in an affirmative way to the world that surrounds us. Even if these concluding remarks are somewhat premature given the early stage of the “philosophy of reenchantment,” this volume still makes an important step towards a more matured approach by making reenchantment more available as a philosophical strategy. If anything, it shows that an imaginary of this kind is far from being an exercise in nostalgia or make-believe, because the critical resources on which it draws are derived from the moral and political frameworks in which we live today.

Notes 1. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life. Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3. 2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2. 3. See Ronald Ash, Sacral Kingship between Disenchantment and Reenchantment (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014); Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, eds., Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Christopher Partridge, The Reenchantment of the West, 2 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2004, 2005); and Jason JosephsonStorm, The Myth of Disenchantment. Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 4. See Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (London: Cornell University Press, 1981); David Ray Griffin, ed., The Reenchantment of Science (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988); and Alister McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis (New York: Doubleday, 2002). 5. See John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Barry Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism,” in Naturalism in Question, eds. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 231–51; Jennifer Hornsby, Simple Mindedness. In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Mario De Caro, “Two Forms of Non-Reductive Naturalism,” Phenomenology and Mind no. 7 (2014): 72–83; and David Macarthur, “Liberal Naturalism and the Scientific Image of the World,” Inquiry 62, no. 5 (2018): 1–21. 6. Akeel Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, eds. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 145–65. 7. That is, in the sense of being worthy of further debate. For Bilgrami’s most recent response to Bennett’s comments on his views, see the appendix to Bilgrami’s chapter “Might There Be Secular Enchantment?” in this volume 73–74.

14  Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese 8. Taylor, A Secular Age, 172–73. 9. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 89. 10. Ibid. 11. Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor, “What Is Reenchantment? An Interview with Charles Taylor,” in The Philosophy of Reenchantment, eds. Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese (New York: Routledge, 2020), 28. 12. As Bennett notes, ontological imaginaries have the remarkable capacity to “enhance the aesthetic and rhetorical, hence persuasive, power of a theory,” a feature which is rendered more manifest by considering, for example, “how the onto-story of the disenchantment of modernity supported the political agendas of Weberians and Marxists” (The Enchantment of Modern Life, 161).

Bibliography Asch, Ronald. Sacral Kingship between Disenchantment and Reenchantment. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life. Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. London: Cornell University Press, 1981. Bilgrami, Akeel. “What Is Enchantment?” In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, 145–65. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. De Caro, Mario. “Two Forms of Non-Reductive Naturalism.” Phenomenology and Mind no. 7 (2014): 72–83. Griffin, David Ray, ed. The Reenchantment of Science. New York: State University of New York Press, 1988. Hornsby, Jennifer. Simple Mindedness. In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Josephson-Storm, Jason. The Myth of Disenchantment. Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Macarthur, David. “Liberal Naturalism and the Scientific Image of the World.” Inquiry 62, no. 5 (2018): 1–21. Marshall, Peter, and Alexandra Walsham, eds. Angels in the Early Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. McDowell, John. Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. ———. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. McGrath, Alister. The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Partridge, Christopher. The Reenchantment of the West. 2 vols. London: Bloomsbury, 2004, 2005. Stroud, Barry. “The Charm of Naturalism.” In Naturalism in Question, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, 231–51. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Part I

Reenchantment and (A)Theism

1 What 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 “DisenchantmentReenchantment,” 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 reenchant 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

18  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor 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

What Is Reenchantment?  19 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

20  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor 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

What Is Reenchantment?  21 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, it’s reason which is dictating this, but I think that even that is a kind of misreading of Kant. If we recall Kant’s phrase “the starry sky above and the moral law within,”

22  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor the resonance of these expressions just shows that there is something else, something drawing us, very strongly. So, I  think what we have is a universal human experience, but which can be wrongly understood, in a distorted way. The issue here is hermeneutic, right? And the distorted way prevents it from growing in a certain fashion, which it can do if we look at it in the perspective of being on a path, a search, moving in this or that direction. And the confirmation from that perspective is, if you like, “hermeneutic”: “I  now understand better, I  have thought about it and maybe I was totally wrong in this respect but right in that respect,” and so on. So, the “epistemological” issue is: are there some human understandings and human changes arriving at more valid conclusions, which only can be captured with interpretations, where the issue is “Is this interpretation really correct or not?” [Laughing:] This battle of interpretations is going to go on for a great deal of time. It’s impossible for us to knock them off their perch because they really have armored themselves against that. MM: To focus on more metaethical issues concerning strong evaluation, you argue that strong evaluations “track some reality and can be criticized for misapprehending this reality”; that “underlying strong evaluations there is supposed to be a truth to the matter”; and that it lies in the nature of strong evaluations “to claim truth, reality or objective rightness.”3 Now, these are claims that are quite familiar in recent metaethical discussions. However, concepts such as self-understanding and interpretation are completely absent from those discussions. In mainstream terms, your claims about strong evaluation suggest a kind of moral realism, but at the same time you seem to have been reluctant to describe your view in moral realist terms. CT:  No, the thing is: I believe in moral realism but not in there being a “knockdown” argument. If we disagreed on the nature of particles of physics, then ultimately, we would hope, there would be a point that you would show that I  was wrong, and we would just agree. I could not hold out any longer, right? So, it’s a notion of moral realism without that kind of “clinching” argument, whereas, to get back to our example earlier of the Kantian influence, there is a notion of moral correctness (cognitivism, whatever the word is) but it’s grounded on – and thought to be unthinkable unless grounded on – one of these supposedly totally tight arguments. Korsgaard argues that since everybody has a life plan, we are somehow logically bound that I respect your life plan and you respect mine, etc., and we get the notion of human rights deriving from this. Whereas I think that what is really powerful here is that this intuition of the universality of the human being, coming in development in the Axial period, becomes very, very powerful in human life, and people find an interpretation,

What Is Reenchantment?  23 a religious interpretation or a non-religious interpretation, which seems to them to move them forward. So, it’s a moral realism without a kind of “clinching” answer that this is the right view. And it does leave us in a little bit puzzling situation, because there are people with totally different spiritual traditions from my own (they are Christian or Buddhist, etc.), something very, very impressing but how that all fits together, I don’t know. So, there is a certain amount of agnosticism here, if we use the word in the right spirit. There is something here that escapes us – as opposed to there being some final, clear interpretation, which my Kantian friends think they have – something that will probably always escape us. I  think this is a very common view today, though some of the people who hold this view might be talked into thinking that they are really subjectivists. This is because the meta-epistemology or metatheory that they have been fed is so powerful, which leads them to believe that if you don’t agree with these meta-theories, then you must be subjectivist. But I think there is another path here, which is truer to the experience, but also, in a puzzling fashion, one that never reaches the point where we say “this is the way to do it” and all these other ones are partial or wrong. MM:  Related to this issue of realism is that you explicitly seek to retrieve a non-anthropocentric perspective on ethics by employing the concept of strong evaluation. You argue against projectivism and neoKantian views such as Korsgaard’s that value emanates not just from ourselves, but from the world. In this respect, you have often praised Iris Murdoch’s conception of the good beyond the self. How do you conceive of Murdoch’s “reenchanted” ethics, and what it has to say to us today? CT:  Murdoch is very interesting because she has in some ways combined very Christian reference points with having a more Buddhist type of position. So, she is one of these very interesting writers who is moving around in between two different perspectives. You get from her novels a very strong sense that there are paths that are really important, but a kind of looseness of fitting into these paths. In that respect, I think she reflects an important feature which is worth reflecting on, namely, that there is a new kind of ecumenicism growing. When I was much younger and starting, the point was back then “let’s stop fighting each other, there is something to respect here; above all, let’s get together and be friends.” I think the ecumenicism which emerges from what I am trying to articulate as an outlook is stronger than that, because there is a notion that although you are very different from me, I have a sense that I can learn something from you. And also, that we can accompany each other, encourage each other in our paths, even though we are on quite different paths. The background assumption where all this makes sense is the kind of

24  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor strange position I am trying to elaborate. In one sense, we can obviously go some serious distance on our different paths, but we can’t in the end clearly say which is best. We are a little bit in the dark about that, and out of that understanding arises the sense that maybe we can learn from each other and encourage each other, and that’s what I call “the ecumenicism of friendship.” Now, of course, in all the established bodies of religious doctrine and practice, there are people who are horrified by that and want to close the ranks, not allowing any change. So, there is a fight within these different religious/spiritual communities between people who respond to the new ecumenicism and people who think of it as a moral danger. And that is a very troubling situation. I  think it’s becoming hard, our Western spiritual situation. It’s the more troubling sometimes because the mainstream very often gets into old kinds of religious war mentalities like Christianity and Islam today, right? I get on very well with certain people from West Africa; we really have that kind of experience of the ecumenicism of friendship when we talk. But the “Muslim” world and the so-called Christian or ex-Christian world, these are forces that kind of drive us into jihad, on that side, and fighting against Islamism, on the other side. For example, in The Netherlands, with Geert Wilders and people like that, and we have (not quite as bad but) people of that kind in Québec. So, it’s a very strange situation that you have these very different understandings of what it is to exist and coexist, different spiritual paths, and that a lot rides on who wins out in each civilization. MM:  When it comes to defending this extra-human or non-anthropocentric perspective, there is another fundamental issue; the issue of what kind of ontology is needed for reenchantment. And as I have been reading your work, one of your major inspirations here seems to be Heidegger. So how do you see the importance of Heidegger for understanding strong evaluation and strong value, especially with regard to this ontological question? CT:  Well, the more I read Rilke, the more I think that Heidegger took a great deal from him. I mean, even the word “things.” When you read Rilke’s use of the word “das Ding,” it is obvious that Heidegger drew on that. Now, I think what Heidegger is pointing to in this respect, is the way in which, outside our being able to grasp certain things, to use objects and instrumentalize them, there is our “repressed” sense of them as having meaning for us. And I think he is on to something here, but I  think that you could go much farther than he does in trying to find it if you go to Rilke, with the proviso that Rilke is not giving us a definitive story about the meaning things have for us, whereas Heidegger still seems to be writing as a philosopher. That is, he is giving us a definitive story (which is interesting because it’s different from the story of Sein and Zeit) but I  don’t think he has

What Is Reenchantment?  25 thought out enough the pluralism that belongs to his discovery, that there is not a kind of definitive way of characterizing it. The question about technology shows that there are important consequences for how we act, but again, the point is that the horizon of meaning around these objects that we are using, which takes us beyond a technological sense, is plural. And it’s that which is troubling to philosophers. So, the hints are there in Heidegger (“dichten” and “denken” are really closely intertwined with each other), but I think there is a further step to take. MM: As you said earlier about the limitations of meta-theory, do you also think that Heidegger’s commitment to philosophy is holding him captive in a way that does not affect Rilke’s poems? CT: Yes, that’s right. Heidegger is right to argue that there is another way of living in the world than living with these objects or what Rilke calls “things,” but there is a plurality of ways of living in the world, beyond this technological stance. There are other ways. In this regard, I think there is a little bit of a self-generated mystique in Heidegger (“nur ein Gott kan uns retten . . .”), which is, well, [laughing] a bit irritating. MM:  So, in your view, what is it exactly about philosophical practice that resists or takes us away from the phenomena that we are trying to understand about strong evaluation? CT:  The practice that resists our sense of strong evaluation is the practice of seeing the world as a set of objects that we can get objective knowledge of (which is useful for using them) and that that is all there is. This is a kind of epistemological blockage. “Epistemological blockage” of course, itself has ethical bases: what is admired is the disenchanted human being who can control his own environment and can stand up and remake the world and do a lot of good. It is that kind of satisfied sense of the power that human beings have, which I think underlies the whole Cartesian view, which is a kind of ethic, a way of being involved in the world. MM:  But then it is only a particular kind of philosophical practice that is keeping us away from understanding strong evaluation. CT:  Yes, exactly. The whole hermeneutic dimension is considered to be taboo; I  mean, it’s seen as muffling around, only a way of feeling. [Laughing:] “Get that out of the Philosophy Department and send it off to the Literature Department and we can get on with more serious stuff.” MM:  Are there any other philosophical exemplars that should be mentioned here, which have inspired your views on strong evaluation? CT:  Yes, Paul Ricoeur has been a very important figure for me over the years. What I really admire about him is that he didn’t have one of these views that is so common either in Paris or in New York, where the one view rejects the other for saying totally useless things. He

26  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor took the trouble to read all this stuff and he moved back and forth between Chicago and Paris. He was somebody who defended in a very interesting way this kind of hermeneutic view, and he said some interesting things about the symbol which connects up with my view on the use of that term in German Romanticism. MM:  I want to turn now to your own ontological vocabulary. I think it is interesting that in your work, as part of your effort of reenchantment, you have employed the concept of ontology as an attack on a disenchanted, naturalist-inspired metaphysics. For example, in your paper “Ethics and Ontology,” you ask what we are committed to “ontologically” by our ethical views and in A Secular Age you repeat this question of what “ontology” can underpin our moral commitments.4 Now, part of your answer is that we should respond at least to the following challenge: either we correct our naturalist ontology or we must revise our moral phenomenology, that is, our understanding of moral experience in terms of strong value and higher worth. Your conclusion in “Ethics and Ontology” is that we must suffer one of two things: the pain of “resisting the phenomenology” or the pain of “challenging the ontology.”5 So, with regard to this tension between moral phenomenology and naturalist ontology: do you think there is a way of overcoming this tension? And if not, how should we deal with it; that is, in an increasingly naturalizing climate? CT:  Well, I think it’s always going to be a running against this dream of a naturalizing project, to the extent that I don’t see any near end of this very powerful naturalistic climate, which really means that the methods of natural science are the ultimate way of understanding the world and human beings. So, it will always be running upstream, against that idea. Now, one of the weaknesses of a naturalist ontology is that it can’t say in very clear terms what is involved in strong evaluation, because it involves a very complex story: people on different moral/ spiritual paths who are getting a powerful sense of confirmationdisconfirmation as they move on this path. So, what are the “things” involved here, if you like, in an “ontology of things?” Well, they are not “things,” exactly, but certainly “stages” in the development of life, where really something is very worthwhile and you get there or you don’t get there. These issues are so weird from the standpoint of the other (naturalist) ontology. Yet the other ontology is so powerful because it belongs to the whole world of technological control (which, of course, has a downside to it we are now learning about) but it seems to me just inevitable that the power and importance of the technological stance is such that it will always generate people who are really into it and think that technology is what it’s all about. And so, there will always be tremendous resistance to this alternative ontology. All you can do here is act hermeneutically, that is, to

What Is Reenchantment?  27 try to give an account of what’s going on when you follow the other path, which is something that hits people, and certain people say “Yes, there is something there; there is something going on like what is being described.” What happens is that some just respond to this and some don’t. MM:  On this particular topic, many are quite skeptical about the possibility of drawing any ontological conclusions from an account of moral experience. What are your views on this matter? How do you conceive of the scope of moral phenomenology, since your account of moral experience clearly has an ontological purpose? In other words, what are we committed to ontologically by the phenomenology of strong evaluation? CT:  Well, there are two phases to answer that. It could just be the minimal thing that there is a real distinction between what I  am now and the being that I  could become or already started to become. There is something really valid here, something important, and this is not just because it suits my taste (or whatever). Now, when we ask what underlies that, then you get almost inevitably these different stories (Buddha stories, Christian stories, etc.), which will not ever succeed in establishing one as against the other. But obviously there is a deeper ontology somewhere that makes this the case. That is something further to be explored, and as each of us goes on his or her path, sometimes we can get really much closer to understanding what this “path” is all about. MM:  In this account, how would you define “ontology”? CT:  Well, ontology is whatever there is, and “what there is,” interestingly enough, is this dimension of movement for human beings, different from simply how they feel, different from ordinary happiness, and so on, and this is not just a projection. MM: To add another aspect of your work, most commentators understand your account of strong evaluation as the formulation of a philosophical anthropology. However, one central tenet of your views on strong evaluation is that you seek to make room for non-human sources of value. We already spoke about Murdoch, Heidegger, and Rilke in this respect. It seems to me that your effort to transcend subjectivism or anthropocentrism in moral thinking reaches beyond “mere” philosophical anthropology. For example, in a reply to some critics of Sources of the Self, you explain that not just naturalism but “any anthropocentrism pays a terrible price,” as you put it, by suppressing its underlying ontology.6 By contrast, you explain that your own view is close to those of “deep ecologists” and “theists.” In this regard, do you see yourself as moving beyond anthropological concerns, so that, on top of the question of the nature of human agency, you add an extra question, a more metaphysical question, about the nature of the world that typically inspires human agency?

28  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor CT:  Yes,

but I wouldn’t say it’s a different “anthropology” that human beings are in the universe in a way which calls on them to relate to it. So yes, a different anthropology is bound up with this different ontology, and that is what the argument is about all the time: is there anything beyond either what we feel or what our reason tells us we have to do? And I  am saying “Yes, there is” but, once again, it’s only something that can be retrieved hermeneutically, by the way we move through life and change our view about where we are going. MM:  In this respect, I think it’s worth noting that many commentators who accept or even praise your moral phenomenology and philosophical anthropology seem to lose track of what you are trying to achieve ontologically. For example, there is Bernard Williams, who, in his review of Sources of the Self, argues: “From a strong base in experience, Taylor very rapidly moves uphill, metaphysically speaking,” too rapidly, for Williams’s taste.7 So, what about that response? CT: Now, I  quite understand that. I  mean, Bernard was a very close friend of mine, so I know what the difference was about, but there is another point here that I want to take up, about metaphysics. There is an absolute muddle about the use of the word “metaphysics.” For example, Habermas keeps talking about “post-metaphysical,” asking “When did that happen?” But when you go back to Aristotle, what metaphysics is doing, is saying “well, look at all these individual sciences (physica, ethica, politica, and so on); how does it all fit together?” In his Metaphysics, he is trying to make an overarching view. Now, I  think there is never going to be a post-metaphysical era, in the sense that there is never going to be a moment when we don’t ask that question. It’s just that if you have a totally reductive view, then metaphysics collapses into physics, right? Everything that we face (thinking, human emotions, all that) can be explained by the sort of movement of these particles etc., and then it all collapses. So, when people say “post-metaphysical” they might mean “Well, people still think that you can answer all these questions out of physics,” in which case they would not be there. But Habermas doesn’t think that either. He is not a reductivist in that sense. [Laughing:] So I don’t know what he thinks. So, you can see that the meaning of metaphysics necessarily is sliding around, because there is this minimal sense of what it’s doing for us (its manner of putting it all together) and there is a maximal sense where we say that the way we put it all together involves invoking things which aren’t dealt with in any existing modern terms of physics (psychology, sociology, etc.). So, there could be the notion that you have to have recourse to something, and, of course, in the modern philosophy tradition, someone like Leibniz, it’s all this spooky non-physical stuff, which is definitely holding it all together, right? So maybe Habermas means that, but it’s difficult to see what we are

What Is Reenchantment?  29 even arguing about here. There is a kind of muddle about that, in the sense that people haven’t thought through the different senses in which the word “metaphysics” can be used. MM:  To continue on this uncertainty about metaphysics, you raise the issue of how ethics and ontology are related in all of your major publications, but there is always something tentative in the way you raise this topic. You often insist that it is not all that clear how we should go about answering these ontological questions. Is this because you believe that ontological issues can only be treated hermeneutically, as you said, in the sense that we never really arrive at a final or complete description of the background ontology that makes sense of our actions? What is the place of hermeneutics with regard to this ontological issue? CT:  Yes, well I think hermeneutics properly understood is that you can never end it, as when we get this “theory of everything” where the physicists want to get to, an ultimate view of what the constituents of matter are and how they all relate. Probably we will never do that, but it’s a conceivable point. But when you get to hermeneutics, there is always the possibility open saying “Well, there are various accounts of a lot of what’s going on here, but there are things that we haven’t really captured. So, let’s just improve our interpretation.” MM:  Your views in Retrieving Realism8 either suggest a different approach or can be seen as a variation of the same idea. In this book, you argue with Hubert Dreyfus that we are best advised to be “pluralistically realist” about ontological differences. You allow the possibility of multiple descriptions of reality, all of which may be true. I am curious whether your pluralistic robust realism is a shift in emphasis or maybe a change of mind as compared to your view that naturalist ontology must be rejected, or at least revised, in favor of moral phenomenology? To me, this last claim seems more critical, or more radical, than adopting a pluralistic view. CT:  Well, a pluralistic view is itself adopted very tentatively. It’s saying “Well, we don’t see how it fits together, really.” For example, the relation between mind and physics, we are still very uncertain about that. And you can’t say that we are bound to get to a final account here. It may be. But the metaphysical search for something uniting it all may be ultimately frustrated. Who can say? Perhaps Dreyfus signed it with a little more belief that that’s the way it is than I did. Because for me it’s a possibility that you just can’t rule out. MM:  Well, at the same time you suggest that one superior approach (in this case, moral phenomenology, the phenomenology of strong evaluation) can be used to show the inadequacy of other views (in this case, a naturalist ontology). Is that a way of trying to salvage our different languages of self-understanding, perhaps at the expense of pluralistic realism?

30  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor CT:  No,

we don’t do away with physics. We just do away with the idea that physics can explain human life and issues of strong evaluation. Nobody is (yet) challenging physics in its own domain. So, what we are ideally looking to do in metaphysics is to have a way of taking that knowledge and this knowledge and putting it all together in a way which can be coherently understood. But maybe that’s going to elude us. Who can say? Nobody can say it’s guaranteed. MM:  I want to ask you more about a central claim of Retrieving Realism, namely, that our grasp of the world is not simply a representation within us but resides rather in our dealing with reality or our being “in contact” with it. I wonder how this “contact theory” relates to specifically moral understanding. You and Dreyfus write about “getting in sync with the demands of the universe” and about “balancing ourselves” in view of these demands.9 At the end of the book,10 you suggest that Samuel Todes’s “phenomenology of balance” might be a model for understanding value, the way we relate to a moral reality. Now, there is a moral theory in analytic philosophy that can be seen as reenchanting in this way, under the name of “robust realist non-naturalism.” This position rejects scientific naturalism for being reductive, etc., and locates moral facts and properties in the world, as existing independently of human sensibility, and that our judgments seek to represent. I wonder what you think about this anti-naturalist representational approach to ethics as an effort of reenchantment? In one way, this view is clearly anti-naturalist, but in another way, it builds on the model of natural science by positing these objective moral facts and properties in the world as existing independently of human beings. I  am not sure whether this position comes close to your own view or that you see it rather as symptomatic of the mediational epistemology that you reject? I think there is room for both interpretations of your work. CT:  Yes, that’s because there is truth in both interpretations. Of course, everything I am saying could be re-described in the language of properties. It is a kind of “property” of human life that it has these possible stages forward, but I don’t find that helpful, because people say “What are these properties? How do you yield them?” or some such. I think, therefore, that you get closer to showing what the alternative to naturalism is if you try to explain what it is to make steps forward and what the experience is. So, rather than focusing on this idea of properties and the question “What exactly are they?” I am focusing on the paths that you can be following. So, it’s experiential all the way along, whereas the other procedure gives you a kind of puzzlement: “How do we experience this?” MM:  OK, that explains. But then the question arises what your specific approach in terms of following a certain moral/spiritual path and experiential stages in moral development clarifies about the nature of

What Is Reenchantment?  31 strong values themselves. Strong values as you describe them are not rendered valid by our own desires but stand independent of these and offer standards that are normative for desire. So, what is the nature of the strong values implicit in our evaluations if they cannot be traced back to contingent desire? This seems to suggest an independent reality of some sort, which enables us to judge our own desires in terms of higher and lower value. This idea of an independent reality seems also in line with your view in The Language Animal,11 in which you argue that human meanings (or “metabiological” meanings, as you call them) have “their own kind of independent reality,” as against the biological meanings we share with non-human animals.12 CT:  That’s the same issue in another language: “metabiological” is a way of touching on these issues of human meaning. So, once again, there is this experience of searching, finding, and changing as one discovers what the direction is, which confirms or disconfirms. But the confirmation is in the experience itself. You could say: “Why should I trust that?” Well, if there is really some truth to this, you are just throwing your life into the ash can if you aren’t following this logic. And no one really does. People have a sense of what is a meaningful life for them by saying things like: “Doctors who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, and so on, is not a meaningful life for me; I’d rather go to the Congo with Médecins sans Frontières.” If you just replied to this by saying “Well, that’s like you prefer red wine to rosé” that would make no sense. MM:  About this universal feature that people are on a path and aim to climb to a higher way of life: it would seem that there are a lot of people who do not recognize themselves in this kind of formulation. What would you say to them? CT:  I think there are two phases to this. First of all, they recognize themselves in another formulation which has a close relation to this. Donald Trump is an example. He has the same set of judgments, standards, or levels, except that he thinks that he has attained them all and can look down on everyone else. What he calls “the art of the deal,” being clever, being able to draw people to you, and so on. Obviously, he gets a tremendous kick out of that. [Laughing:] This is the same ontology as I would be thinking of myself as being Saint Francis, right? It’s the same set of cheers; not much objectively better but I think I’ve got there. But when you look at Trump, you wonder whether there is not almost inevitably, in this kind of complacence – not in there being no ladder because there is a ladder – but in this kind of complacence, is there not a high degree of delusion? [Laughing:] And the answer is clearly “yes.” MM:  To take this picture of “getting in sync with reality” elsewhere, I am also wondering what you think of the positions of John McDowell and Akeel Bilgrami. They also seek a kind of reenchantment by

32  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor defending a view of values as emanating from the world rather than just from ourselves. McDowell’s moral phenomenology has much in common with your own, but he sees ontological questions as neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding value. In the same way, Bilgrami speaks of the “external calling” of value from the world, but he avoids the term “ontology” or “metaphysics” when discussing the source of value. Perhaps their views can be seen as theories of strong evaluation without moral sources. How does your view relate to those kinds of positions? CT:  Well, I think we probably are partly divided by just purely semantic questions. If this is connecting up to your question earlier about people who think that there are these “facts” in the world; I don’t mind that, but I prefer my way of putting it. McDowell and Bilgrami do mind that, somehow, they are worried about that, and I think they are wrong to be worried about that. The way to dispel that kind of worry is a closer understanding of what it is to live a human life and pass through these different phases, and so on. This is the best way you can put it. To get to the whole issue we keep circling around, this kind of ostensive relation to the world, getting into sync with it, there is something that answers to something very deep in us, fulfills a very deep drive or aspiration in us, and that some aspirations are deeper than others, etc., etc. Even for Trump. So that way of trying to understand it, I think, is the best you can do. MM:  And you see McDowell and Bilgrami as companions in this respect? CT: Yes. MM: Well, an obvious difference with Bilgrami’s enchantment is that he explicitly presents himself as being an atheist. In this respect, commentators such as Owen Flanagan and Quentin Skinner have accused you of trying to sneak in the Christian God in your account of strong evaluation by pressing ontological questions and by developing this non-anthropocentric perspective. What is your response to that charge? In what sense have religious concerns motivated your views on strong evaluation? Or, to what extent are strong evaluations in need of a theistic framework? CT:  I don’t think that they are in need of a theistic framework. But I think, as I said, there is a plurality of paths, and mine takes a theistic form; that is, a kind of openness, love, generosity, whatever you want to call it, makes sense to me. “Receiving” as well as “giving” makes sense to me. Now, I understand that other people have the same structural understanding of paths – of really getting somewhere, as against just thinking you’re getting somewhere – and that the nature of their path is not defined in those terms, which I  find very interesting and I’d like to learn about it. However, critics such as Flanagan and Skinner seem to think that there is some insight to be gained by saying that the theistic way does not work at all, which I don’t feel reciprocally.

What Is Reenchantment?  33 MM:  Another

aspect of your work that seems relevant here is the way in which you connect ontological concerns with issues of moral motivation. You do not bring in theism only to debate abstract ontological problems, but also to open up a more practical question, a question about what we need, on a more political level, to accomplish what morality demands of us. In Sources of the Self, you argue that an increasingly secularizing culture might be aiming higher than its moral sources can sustain, and in “A Catholic Modernity?” you continue to discuss the high demands for solidarity and benevolence in the Western world.13 You explain that such “high standards need strong sources” and you talk about the doubt that can arise about the adequacy of a nontheistic viewpoint for ethics in a way that does not arise for theism.14 How do you think about these claims today? Do you perhaps see social tendencies that make sense of your analysis, for example, the moral inability (or, perhaps, moral indifference) of Europe to respond properly to the influx of refugees? CT: Yes, I  would now less be making discriminations, because I  think there are stronger and weaker atheistic or nontheistic forms of commitment. But the point is that there is a real danger of the demands of solidarity (which are part of our political system) in the sense that, whatever their sources and potential, they are held in a weak enough fashion that we easily break off from that ideal. I think the present populist way is a clear example of that. It’s just a minority; it’s not everybody who is breaking away from the demands of solidarity, but the going gets slightly tough. So I withdraw any particular claim about one type of source being better than another type of source, but I think the issue of – as I use the term in my Sources book – moral sources and the moral demands being out of phase with each other is a real problem, a real danger which we live in. MM: Some last questions about your paper “Recovering the Sacred,” in which you stress the importance of theism for projects of reenchantment. In that paper, you argue that moral demands are not just “our doing” nor are they inscribed in the universe independently of us, to mark the contrast with the enchanted world in the original sense, which was inhabited by forces that impinged on human beings independently.15 But at the same time, you seek to make room for what you call the “the inescapable place for the anchored” or the idea of an “anchored reality,” which I understand as the background ontology that can make sense of our responses.16 In this context, you appeal to the notion of an “anchored reality” as opposed to what you call the “interstitial” realm that arises in the interface between humans and world. Could you explain some more why it is important to make this distinction between “anchored” and “interstitial” for understanding reenchantment?

34  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor CT: 

This distinction is important, because (and I think this is another way of talking about it) it puts forward the issue whether there is a very strong sense of the sources that can give you this power to act up, whatever the accepted social ethic is. There is a way of living in the world where you are not concerned with developing those sources, whatever that means. I think for all of it, it means to some degree getting another relation with the universe surrounding us. Those who think that we can live in the world in a way that we’re not concerned with strengthening those sources, they become very much part of the problem. That is, when we have a civilizational structure of a universal human rights democracy, plus a sense of what we owe to human beings outside our society that we count as refugees – when we have all that – and we are living in a way which is not nourishing our sources, then we are going to fail to live up to the demands of solidarity, with all these terrible consequences. MM:  In your essay, you also argue that a revised notion of an anchored reality (that is, one that is different from the originally enchanted one) “can be affirmed” in the interface, for those who are open to it.17 But this seems to suggest a possibility, not so much a necessity. How does that relate to your claim that there is an inescapable place for the anchored, in your view? CT:  We are circling around another point earlier to that. I think that the account I  am giving of human experience, which permits of these degrees of approach, is actually everybody’s experience. And I think that the interpretation of our world which screens that strong evaluative experience out, is a misinterpretation. Possibly there could be a connection between that misinterpretation and not rising to the occasion of strengthening the sources enough. There could be such a connection, but not necessarily. But there certainly is a possibility that this kind of relationship with something deeper is not at all recognized, where people think that it all comes from inside. If you respond to the Kantian phrase of “the starry sky above and the moral law within,” then there is some relation to the cosmos, but it’s mediated by a sense of awe within. This goes along with the sense that reason in me is infinitely higher than the rest in me. By invoking the notion of an “anchored” reality I  want to make a claim that the sense of everything being inside of us (purity, reason) is an inadequate self-understanding. MM:  To round up this topic, how does your pluralistic stance on these issues of anchored/interstitial relate to the revisionary stance of the Axial revolutions and their proposed paths of hope, self-transformation, and salvation? What becomes of those if they are among lots of other kinds of strong evaluations that people make as post-Axial agents? That is, in a context in which the necessity of these paths of hope and salvation is undermined.

What Is Reenchantment?  35 CT: 

I guess there are two things that I am trying to say here. First, there is the self-understood notion or understanding of what it is to move up or down. And then there is a recognition that that is what is going on; that there is a moving up and down going on which is somehow anchored in reality. You have post-Kantians today who do not recognize this. When you listen to their rhetoric, you can see that there is a sense of higher and lower which is operating, but they are not accepting that at all because it belongs to what they consider as a very bad alternative (where they often also have religion under). So OK, I’ll use Hegel-language, “an sich” and “für sich.” With my notion of being on a “path” I mean everybody “an sich,” but some people are in a sense obfuscating that by dressing it up as something else. Or, utilitarians used to think that what’s right is just a matter of adding up the utilities. But what makes you committed to maximizing utilities for everybody? Hume talks of “sympathy.” And he starts off seeing this as an explanatory concept. But what starts off as a kind of explanatory force that underpins the development, turns out to be actually a value. There is a deep confusion here. So, there is the fact that everybody is doing it, and there is the fact that some people don’t understand clearly what they are doing. But they can still participate in the development of a social ethic and maybe even in various ways rise to the occasion by doing that. I mean, one of the big differences between those inarticulate moral theories and various religious outlooks is that they are operating on a sense of the dignity of the person. They would feel a lower kind of person if they were not living up to this, right? Whereas something like the Christian notion of agape takes you in another kind of direction. So that makes a real difference, but on another level, there is a difference about the way we understand this, where I want to make a very strong, brutal claim that they are wrong and I am right. But that is not the same difference as that between people who don’t really have a very strong source and people who do have a strong source. It’s another issue. MM:  Final question, on reenchantment in your current work. Am I right to assume that you are now working on the second part of The Language Animal? Can you give a sense of what your line of argument is in this work and how it relates to reenchantment? CT:  Yes, that’s right. As I was saying earlier about that, there is a new kind of stance towards reenchantment in the notion that a work of art gives you a very powerful sense without claiming that this is the final account of the world, such that we have this relation to it. This sense is maybe best expressed in Hamann’s idea of translating. From our human point of view, we restate that there is something there, which we can’t get to in its own terms. This is a little bit a Kantian

36  Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor “Ding-an-sich versus phenomena” type of distinction, but I  don’t want to push that too far. MM:  Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. CT:  OK, thank you.

Notes 1. Charles Taylor, “Disenchantment-Reenchantment,” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2011), 287–302; and Charles Taylor, “Recovering the Sacred,” Inquiry 54, no. 2 (2011): 113–25. 2. Hans Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017). 3. Taylor, “Disenchantment-Reenchantment,” 297–98. 4. Charles Taylor, “Ethics and Ontology,” The Journal of Philosophy 100. no. 6 (2003): 305; and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007), 607. 5. Taylor, “Ethics and Ontology,” 310, 312. 6. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Charles Taylor, “Reply to Commentators,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54, no. 1 (1994): 213. 7. Bernard Williams, “Republican and Galilean: Review of Sources of the Self,” The New York Review of Books 37 (November 8, 1990): 48. 8. Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, Retrieving Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). 9. Ibid., 135–37. 10. Ibid., 166. 11. Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016). 12. Ibid., 262. 13. Taylor, Sources, 317; and Charles Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2011), 182. 14. Taylor, Sources, 516. 15. Taylor, “Recovering the Sacred,” 117–18. 16. Ibid., 119. 17. Ibid., 118.

Bibliography Dreyfus, Hubert, and Charles Taylor. Retrieving Realism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Joas, Hans. Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. “Reply to Commentators.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54, no. 1 (1994): 203–13. ———. “Ethics and Ontology.” The Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 6 (2003): 305–20.

What Is Reenchantment?  37 ———. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007. ———. “A  Catholic Modernity?” In Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, 167–87. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2011. ———. “Disenchantment-Reenchantment.” In Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, 287–302. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2011. ———. “Recovering the Sacred.” Inquiry 54, no. 2 (2011): 113–25. ———. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016. Williams, Bernard. “Republican and Galilean: Review of Sources of the Self.” The New York Review of Books 37 (November 8, 1990): 45–48.

2 Religion Without Magic Responding to the Natural World John Cottingham

Preamble Let me begin with Max Weber’s celebrated phrase ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Entzauberung der Welt), which obviously informs the theme of this volume. The phrase, which appeared in a 1919 paper reflecting on the rise of science in the modern world,1 has become a sort of shorthand for referring to the way in which the scientific outlook appears to have displaced, or at least pushed into retreat, the religious framework that was once so central to our view of ourselves and our relationship to the cosmos of which we are a part. In what follows, I  want to consider three possible interpretations of the notion of disenchantment. These are simply ways in which people today might construe the notion: I shall not primarily be concerned with historical exegesis, or with what Weber himself may have meant by the term, though some of what I say will connect with ideas he raises. For each of the three possible senses of disenchantment, I shall consider a corresponding remedy – so that alongside the three types of disenchantment we shall have three possible attempts at ‘reenchantment’. My interest in the notions of enchantment, disenchantment and reenchantment are, as will become apparent, connected in large part with the question of what it is to subscribe to a religious, and in particular theistic, worldview. I hope by the end of the chapter it may become a little clearer what it might be to recover a religious understanding of the world.

Disenchantment as ‘De-Magicking’ My first sense of ‘disenchantment’ might be glossed ‘de-magicking’, and directly relates to the etymology of the German term. The primary meaning of the German word Zauber is ‘magic’, and Weber’s use of the term could be taken to imply that traditional religious belief involved regarding the world as subject to all sorts of mysterious, quasi-magical or supernatural forces or entities. Certainly this is the assumption made by many secular philosophers today, and indeed they have devised a pejorative

Religion Without Magic  39 label – ‘spooky’ – to record their disdain for such phenomena and for the worldview that supposedly relied on them. The naturalist creed that dominates so much contemporary philosophy accepts, either implicitly or explicitly, a swift modus tollens argument about the spooky that conveniently disposes of religious belief:  (i) R>S: Religious belief entails the existence of spooky phenomena;   But (ii) NOT S: there are no such phenomena;   Therefore (iii) NOT R: religious belief is false. Yet if we look for example at the founding texts of Christianity, we find that the supposed emphasis on magical or spooky occurrences is rarely to be found. The figure of Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels, is not that of a magician, casting spells or invoking occult forces. He is a preacher and a healer. The great bulk of his utterances are in line with the prophetic tradition in the Hebrew Bible: the predominant emphasis is on the moral requirements of justice and righteousness, mercy and compassion. And the acts of healing, again following a pattern found earlier in the lives of the Old Testament prophets, are presented as signs and wonders, where what comes to the fore is not so much the paranormal as the moral dimension, connected for example with the need for faith, or with the cleansing of sin. If ‘enchantment’ means that the world conceived in religious terms is a world full of magical or occult forces and entities, then whatever may be true of certain kinds of pagan religion, the world described in the Christian Gospels is very much not of this kind. One of the few instances of supernatural beings entering the stage in the Gospels is in the references to angels. At the end of the Temptation story, where Christ retires into the wilderness and undergoes a mental ordeal in which he heroically resists the Satanic lure of supernatural demonstrations of authority  – note the explicit rejection of supernatural powers  – we are told that ‘angels came and ministered to him’ (Matthew 4:11). But what exactly is the significance of such beings? We are familiar with many beautiful depictions of angels in Christian art, most notably in the Italian painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries;2 but it would surely be a piece of naive literalism to think that the difference between the outlook in the fifteenth – or even the first – century and the present-day outlook was that people in those days thought angels were likely to pop up all over the place, whereas now we know there are no such beings. Nevertheless, angels are indisputably mentioned in the Gospel text; so even if we don’t understand them in a crudely literal way, don’t we have to admit that some kind of supernatural forces or powers are involved? And in any case, doesn’t the entire biblical narrative presuppose at least one indisputably supernatural entity, namely God? So (the secularist may say) isn’t our original dismissive modus tollens argument

40  John Cottingham basically sound? Traditional theistic religion surely does posit the existence of the spooky  – certainly at least one great spook, the great spirit that is God. And insofar as science has banished supernatural entities, it has ‘demagicked’ or ‘de-spooked’ the cosmos, so that there is now no room for God. This is a familiar enough picture, but I want to suggest that for several reasons it is misleading. As many philosophers of religion and theologians have pointed out, orthodox mainstream theism does not regard God as a ‘thing’ – an additional entity alongside all the other entities in the cosmos. God is, to borrow a phrase of Aquinas, ‘outside the order of entities’, the source and ground of the very existence of the world, rather than an extra spooky supernumerary that could be removed from the cosmos while leaving it in other respects as it is.3 I have argued elsewhere that on balance the term ‘supernatural’ turns out to be more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to explicating what is involved in holding a theistic outlook.4 It may invite us to ‘locate’ God as an item ‘beyond’ the natural world, as if there are two worlds, and two kinds of being – those that dwell here in the physical cosmos, and those that dwell in ‘another place’, perhaps visiting our universe from time to time. That is of course a crude caricature, but as so often when we are dealing not with empirical hypotheses but with metaphysical frameworks of interpretation, a certain image may hold us captive, even though when challenged we would say that ‘of course we did not quite mean that.’ It is very easy, as Nicolas Malebranche warned in the seventeenth century (following the much earlier lead of Aquinas), to ‘humanize’ God  – to construe him as a kind of entity in addition to those we know of already, but then to add that he is an entity of a supernatural kind. Even when, following Scripture, we call God a ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’, warns Malebranche, we should use such language not so much to show positively what God is as to indicate that he is not material. And even this is not quite right, since the infinite God contains within him the perfections of matter while not being material, just as he includes the perfections of created minds without being a mind in the way we conceive of minds. His true name is he who is, i.e. unrestricted being, all being, the infinite and universal being.5 Malebranche is clearly influenced by Aquinas here, though it is perhaps worth pointing out that one can see a not entirely dissimilar conception even in the very different system of Spinoza, for whom, in the words of Philip Clayton, ‘God cannot mean personal presence, or the presence of one substance to others,’ since for Spinoza ‘God is the framework, the one absolute substance or context, within which all else exists.’6 At all events, Malebranche’s conception of God as the infinite source of being, who contains within himself the perfections of matter and of mind, points to the traditional idea that all created things bear in some way the stamp

Religion Without Magic  41 of the divine, albeit in some cases very remotely and indistinctly.7 This provides a further reason why the term ‘supernatural’ can be unhelpful, namely that it risks removing God from the world we know, the very world which is our principal means of access to the divine. The theist is not so much positing extra entities in addition to the natural cosmos, as refusing to accept the account of ‘nature’ as it is understood by contemporary so-called naturalists, namely as something whose fundamental character is exhausted by the categories of the physical sciences. Nature for the theist is ‘charged with the grandeur of God’, in the poet Hopkins’ famous phrase, shot through with meaning and value. (I shall come back to the concept of nature later on.) So the whole idea that science has removed the spooky from the cosmos rests on what I take to be a kind of category mistake, or a distorted picture of the kind of thing reflective theists believe about God. Of course there are many kinds of believers, and since the nature of God has always traditionally been supposed to be beyond human comprehension, it is no surprise that many people prefer to deal with crude substitutes for the divine; and I  would not deny that some people have conceived of God as a kind of supernatural Cartesian ghost. But those philosophers of religion who wish to ‘reenchant’ the world, or resist its disenchantment, by nailing their colours to the masthead of a dualistic or Cartesian ontology seem to me to be barking up the wrong tree, partly for the Malebranchian reasons just mentioned, and partly because there are better strategies for defending the cause of religion than by attempting to provide a philosophical vindication of spooky phenomena. I think we can get some idea of the incongruity of such a strategy by looking at a curious corner of our modern popular culture, where we do seem to be witnessing a bizarre attempt to reenchant the world in just this manner. In a survey carried out in the UK by the National Centre for Social Research in 2017, for the first time a majority (53  percent) ticked the ‘no religion’ box. Yet in spite of that, the researchers noted that many people in this category were increasingly having recourse to concepts that seem to fall into the category of the supernatural. In the Twittersphere and other social media, it turns out that people who die are often addressed as if the electronic messages will somehow be able to reach them in some supernatural domain. ‘Fly with the angels in the stars,’ was one of many tweets to the cosmologist Stephen Hawking after his death in March 2018, even though in his lifetime Hawking himself had dismissed the afterlife as a fairy story. From the Twitter evidence, there appears to be growing eagerness to promote and endorse the strange idea that when people die they become angels (though of course this is from the standpoint of traditional theistic doctrine a highly unorthodox idea, which has no basis in scripture or ecclesiastical doctrine). A recently broadcast BBC World Service report on this phenomenon cited the case of Jade Goodie, a British reality TV

42  John Cottingham star who died of cancer in 2009: among 1,100 tweets subsequently examined by the sociologist Tony Walter, there were only 13 references using conventional religious language (such as ‘may your soul rest in peace’) but over 167 references to Jade being ‘with the angels’ or having actually become an angel; a typical phrase was ‘you have gained your angel-wings.’8 What are we to make of these messages? Are they just banal and rather tasteless bits of chatter – a result of the hyper-egalitarian principle fostered by social media of everyone being allowed to ‘have their say’, even if they have nothing coherent or sensible to contribute? It is I suppose conceivable that those who posted these tweets were sincerely committed to the idea that the dead live on as angels, though it’s possible that it is just a passing social media fashion, a kind of mindless meme spreading round the Twittersphere like an infection. But if we take it more seriously (and Professor Walter uncovered some evidence from interviews that it appeared to be sincerely motivated), then it would seem to be, admittedly in a rather inchoate and inarticulate way, a return, or attempted return, to an enchanted or supernaturalist conception of the cosmos. So we might infer from such phenomena that the demise of the theistic worldview has left the population at large without a framework of concepts and categories for coming to terms with the traumas and difficulties of human life, and that people are casting around to devise alternative categories that appear to bring them comfort. One attitude emerging from the survey which seemed fairly typical was that of one of the interviewees, Michaela, who said she grew up as a Catholic in Austria, but found that ‘Going into church, confessing my sins, and things like that didn’t ring true to me. It was all about heavy energy and lots of judgement. When I moved to London, I could finally break free from all of the traditions and I could make up my own beliefs, gaining my own freedom, and that feels good.’ A maxim often attributed to G. K. Chesterton is that when people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.9 One general inference from the survey I have just referred to might be that human beings have an ineradicable need to ‘reenchant’ their world in some way or another, and that if traditional religious frameworks have lost their power to bestow meaning, they will simply invent categories of their own to do the job (one might call this reenchantment as remagicking by invention). But could such a project succeed? The obvious obstacle is the difficulty of seeing how meaning and value, or indeed truth, could be manufactured or invented in this way, as opposed to being discovered or responded to (I shall come back to this point later). At all events, the kind of deliberate attempt to bring back enchantment by fiat, by making something up, seems a desperate and doomed strategy, even though one may of course have sympathy for the rootless lives of those who are driven to make the attempt.

Religion Without Magic  43

Disenchantment as Flattening I now move on to my second sense of ‘disenchantment’, namely disenchantment as ‘flattening’. The idea here is that following the Scientific Revolution, our conception of how to understand the world has been levelled out or flattened, so that we are prepared to accept only one type of framework for making sense of things, namely the framework of explanatory science. One symptom of this is that religious beliefs have often been forced into a quasi-scientific template, and interpreted as a set of supposed explanatory hypotheses. As a corrective to this trend, it’s helpful I think to go back to some of the insights of Wittgenstein, many of whose ideas have, in my view, suffered an unfortunate eclipse in the naturalistically oriented philosophical climate of the last few decades. In his ‘Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough’ Wittgenstein argues that the anthropologist James George Frazer committed a fundamental error in his account of ritual practices, by trying to understand them in quasiscientific terms, as aimed at the production of certain effects.10 Elsewhere, Wittgenstein makes an important distinction between faith and superstition. Superstition, unlike faith, ‘springs from fear and is a sort of false science’.11 To take the baptism of a child as an example, if this is motivated by the belief that it will make the child’s life more lucky or more ­successful, we have a case of mere superstition – a kind of ­primitive pseudotechnology. To promote the child’s health and wellbeing one would do far better to have recourse to modern scientific medicine. But if the ­baptism is an act of joyful affirmation and thanksgiving for the new life – what Wittgenstein called a ‘trusting’ (ein Vertrauen) – then it is a genuine manifestation of religious faith. Going back for a moment to our earlier discussion of the appearance of angels in the Temptation story in the Gospels, the moral is that we should beware of an over-rationalistic approach to what is meant by the scriptural references to angels or other such beings  – as if the reviving refreshment Christ received after his temptation ordeal was rather like a supporter arriving with a tray of food and drink, except that the nutrition on this occasion was of a more magically effective kind than any ordinary terrestrial supporter could provide. The ministry of the angels cannot be understood in isolation from the moral and spiritual framework that gives the story its meaning: ordeal is resisted, not magically, but through moral courage and a trustful determination to hold fast to the good. It is interesting to note here that when discussing Entzauberung Weber links it with the notions of ‘rationalization and intellectualization’ – Rationalisierung und Intellektualisierung. I’ve already suggested that if Entzauberung is taken to mean ‘getting rid of the magic’, it is not a very happy notion when applied to the religious narratives, since it’s not in fact clear that these narratives do hinge on the assumption of magical forces in the way supposed. If we focus instead on Weber’s reference to

44  John Cottingham the intellectualizing tendency of modern thought, it can I think be used to point us towards a very distorting way in which religious thought and practice has come to be perceived. From our modern scientific perspective it is all too easy to interpret religious behaviour instrumentally, as a kind of primitive technique for bringing about results that we now, from our superior standpoint, know to have been ineffective. To be sure, one can point to religious words and actions that fall into this category  – in other words the category of superstition or magic. We all know the story of how the bones of the saints were supposed in the Middle Ages to be efficacious in curing illnesses, though even here (again following Wittgenstein) we should be wary of supposing that the veneration of relics was simply a crudely utilitarian attempt to bring about what we now know to be much better secured by modern medicine. But authentic religious practice, as it is described in the Scriptures, is never a superstitious endeavour to secure benefits by magical means. The Hebrew Bible contains countless warnings against superstition and idolatry, and in the New Testament the very paradigm of religious prayer offered by Christ puts in the first and most important place a principle of humility and submission, ‘Thy Will Be Done,’ rather than a magical formula for getting results. Once we have been put on our guard against the dangers of flattening, of forcing religious language and practice into this kind of instrumental template, we can perhaps glimpse a strategy for recovering its depth. Modern philosophy of religion, like philosophy in general, especially in the Anglophone world, has often tended to model itself on the austere, impersonal language of scientific inquiry – trying to eliminate all nuance and ambiguity, and to tackle problems in increasingly small and intricate parcels where everything is made maximally explicit. But for many of the issues that arise in a religious context, for example, the problems connected with human suffering, sin, evil, repentance, conversion and redemption, simply cannot be properly dealt with using these austere and impersonal techniques of inquiry. The key point here is that much religious discourse is multilayered – it carries a rich charge of symbolic significance that resonates with us on many different levels of understanding, not all of them, perhaps, fully grasped by the reflective, analytic mind. Any plausible account of the human condition must make space for the crucial role of imaginative, symbolic and poetic forms of understanding in deepening our awareness of ourselves and the reality we inhabit. And for this reason it may be a serious error to try to understand religion in a ‘flattened’ way, to reduce all religious thinking to a bald set of factual assertions whose literal propositional content is then to be clinically isolated and assessed. The reality with which religious thought and practice attempts to make contact is not a straightforward collection of states of affairs or verifiable facts. We need to approach it ‘lightly and poetically’ as Rowan Williams

Religion Without Magic  45 has put it,12 not trying to insert or reinsert magical properties, but rather being more responsive to the properties that are already there. To do this, we must be ready to discern them in a multilayered and holistic way, in a way that is open, receptive, porous, instead of detached, controlling, manipulative, experimental. Once we give up the futile attempt to flatten out the world that we are trying to understand, and become open to perceiving its richly contoured structure, the job of reenchantment may not need to be artificially engineered, because we may start to find that the mystery and wonder and splendour was always already there.

Disenchantment as Bleaching Out I now come to my third sense of ‘disenchantment’, namely disenchantment as what may be called bleaching out. In the literal sense of removing all the colours from reality, this has a long history from the early modern period onwards. Hume superciliously comments on how hard it is to convince the ‘peasant’ that snow is not really white or fire red. And he refers back explicitly to Locke, who famously attacked what he called the ‘vulgar’ way of talking, as if light and heat were really in fire, and to Malebranche, who scornfully dismissed the ‘error’ of supposing that colours are in coloured objects. Though they deploy different arguments and terminology, all three philosophers make the mistake, it seems to me, of privileging the abstract scientific picture of reality (expressed in quantitative, mathematical and mechanical terms) over the ‘manifest image’ presented to conscious awareness.13 But their downgrading of the manifest image as less real is a confusion, or at all events philosophically quite unwarranted. Even a philosopher as brilliant as Bertrand Russell was once tempted to say – absurdly – that tables and chairs are not ‘really’ solid, on the spurious grounds that they are made up of atoms that are largely comprised of gaps (the empty space between protons and electrons).14 The truth, of course, is that the table I write on is really and genuinely solid; this is quite compatible with its being composed of arrangements of atoms which are not themselves solid. Both the ordinary macro-properties manifest to consciousness, and the scientifically discovered micro-properties, are perfectly genuine, and it is a philosophical mistake to privilege either by saying one is more ‘real’ than the other. Nevertheless, the bleaching fallacy continues to dominate the modern conception of reality. One of its continuing symptoms is the idea that any apparent ‘enchantment’ in the world – its vibrant colours, its beauty, its wonder, and indeed any value and meaning found there – must come not from the world but from us, and is then foisted on the world by our minds (again this follows Hume, who famously spoke of the mind’s tendency to ‘spread itself’ on external objects). So the resulting picture is that the world is ‘bleached’, not just of colours, but of all meaning and value, and that any ‘enchantment’ has to be supplied by us. A  recent

46  John Cottingham striking example of this approach appears in a book called Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey. Humphrey argues that conscious awareness is a kind of illusion created by the brain, or a part of the brain. It is an internal ‘magical mystery show’ that evolved because of its survival value – roughly because it makes life more enjoyable and motivates people to continue wanting to live.15 The suggestion that consciousness is an ‘illusion’ sounds a disparaging or dismissive one. But to his credit, Humphrey ends up acknowledging that if consciousness is in a certain sense an illusion, it is one that is of vital importance to our human lives. For in virtue of being subjects of experience, we humans live in what Humphrey calls soul land: Soul land is a territory of the spirit. It is a place where the magical interiority of human minds makes itself felt on every side. A place where you naturally assume that ever other human being lives, as you do, in the extended present of phenomenal consciousness. Where you acknowledge and honour the personhood of others, treating everyone as an independent . . . responsible . . . conscious being in his or her own right.  .  .  . It is a place where the claims of the spirit begin to rank as highly as the claims of the flesh. Where you join hands with others in sharing . . . the beauties of the world you have enchanted. . . . This spiritual territory is not only where almost all humans do live but where they give of their best.16 The glowing encomium to the wonders of ‘soul land’ reminds us of the use of the term ‘soul’, as it commonly occurs in novels and poetry and drama and in religious and spiritual writings, where it is used in connection with certain central and deeply significant goals of human life – our quest to find our true ‘self’ or identity, our search to lead integrated and morally worthwhile lives, our yearning for the affection that can give meaning to our existence, and our longing for the strange exaltation that arises from loving union with another human being or a sense of intimate harmony with the natural world. All these precious elements of our human birthright seem connected with the wondrous domain of ‘soul land’ – the domain we are able to enter in virtue of what Humphrey terms ‘phenomenal consciousness’ – the bright flame of conscious ­awareness with which each of us is endowed. And yet – and this is where, despite his eloquence, his argument seems to go so curiously astray – Humphrey insists that this magical mystery show is created by us. It is we, he says, who have enchanted the world. But why are we regarded as the creators of the magical show? This can only be because he supposes that all the wonderful properties just listed are not really there. Science – and here once more we find the recurrent doctrinaire privileging of the scientific image over the manifest image – science has (supposedly) taught us that the only truly real properties

Religion Without Magic  47 are those expressible in the neutral, quantitatively based terminology of physics and the other natural sciences. So all the wondrous properties glowingly listed by Humphrey cannot, he thinks, be real, but must have been magicked into existence by the mind: ‘It was something to live in an enchanted world. But now the canopy has been lifted to reveal who is pulling this levers: it is you.’17 Yet it is impossible to believe, as Humphrey would have us believe, that all this is just something we create. All the wonders that Humphrey, rightly, adverts to are not just smoke and mirrors, a piece of weird magic that somehow evolved as an evolutionary accident, or because it turned out to be somehow advantageous in the struggle for survival. On the contrary, the values and beauties and duties, knowledge of which we gain access to as conscious beings, are objective values and requirements that command our respect. We do not create them, we do not magic them into existence, we respond to them. The more we think about this, the more Humphrey’s idea that it is we who call these things into existence feels all wrong. For the phenomenology – the way it feels to the subject – is not that of fantasizing or dreaming up or imagining, or of spinning a magical web: it is the phenomenology of response, of being confronted by, and often overwhelmed by, something wondrous, something greater than ourselves, that demands an answer from us. We are daily made aware that we are not in sole charge, not deciding by creative fiat what is valuable or what to call important. We are confronted – and that does not just mean impinged upon by a meaningless bombardment of particles. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke powerfully expresses it in a famous sonnet about the compelling beauty of a statue of Apollo,18 there are decisive moments in human experience when we are confronted by something that seems to scrutinize and find us wanting: we are called upon to change, to become something better or to ‘give of our best’, as Humphrey himself, with commendable honesty, acknowledges. We are called on to embark on the task of ‘finding the soul’, finding our true selves and realizing the best that we can become. The fact that we biological creatures have these wondrous powers of conscious awareness, and these powerful moral and spiritual impulses – in short that we manifest all the characteristics traditionally described in terms of having a ‘soul’ – does not have to be understood as a strange purely internal or subjective phenomenon, a ‘magical interiority’ in Humphrey’s phrase. Nor does it have to be relegated to a special category of the illusory, or regarded as a bizarre cosmic anomaly. For on the theistic picture, all the relevant properties are there already, objectively there, and there is nothing anomalous about this. They are anomalous if the only ultimate reality is nothing more than the quantitative realm of physics; but not anomalous if nature is taken in the way it was generally understood in the Middle Ages and early modern period, as reflecting a conscious presence, the source of value and goodness. Even

48  John Cottingham in Aristotle, nature or physics is seen through the lens of his teleological vision of the cosmos. Nature, in this sense ‘does nothing in vain’, as Aristotle frequently and famously asserts;19 or as Leibniz put it, reviving and indeed radically updating the Aristotelian notion to fit a Christian context, the ‘divine and infinitely marvellous artifice of the Author of nature [ensures] . . . there is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.’20 There is of course no way of proving the truth of this, or any metaphysical account of the nature of reality. But the choice is clear: either beauty, meaning, value are objective features of reality, or they are magicked up by the mind. And if we reject the latter account, we have to find some way of articulating a genuinely objectivist account. By genuine objectivity in this context I have in mind the notion of strong normativity – the fact that moral values and obligations exert an authoritative demand on us, whether we like it or not. We may often turn away from what is good and right, but even as we do turn away we recognize that moral demands retain an undeniable authority over us. To use an image borrowed from Gottlob Frege in the very different context of logic and mathematics, they are like boundary stones which our thought can overflow but not dislodge.21 It is the stripping out of this kind of strong normativity that Weber probably had uppermost in his mind in his original article, where he linked disenchantment to the retreat of ‘ultimate and sublime values’. In my view, such values are only truly at home in a theistic cosmos. In the brief final section of this chapter, however, I  shall simply give some representative examples of alternative secular attempts to provide a grounding for objective value, and point out how they typically slide back into the fallacious idea that we can somehow do the job of reenchantment ourselves.

Reenchantment or Response? As representative of the difficulties facing secular strategies for seeing reality as imbued with objective value, I have space only for two examples. The first is John McDowell, who is particularly relevant here in terms of what I earlier called ‘bleaching’, since he made a famous analogy between colour properties and value properties. Noting the notorious problems in what he calls ‘bald’ ethical naturalism, the attempt to ‘construct the requirements of ethics out of independent facts about human nature’, McDowell relies instead on the idea of second nature. In addition to our ‘first nature’, our physical and biological makeup as investigated by physics, chemistry and biology, we human beings have a ‘second nature’, acquired through a ‘decent upbringing’, whereby we are ‘alerted’ to an objective domain of ethical requirements which are ‘there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them’.22 Through our

Religion Without Magic  49 human upbringing, the long process of acculturation and the moulding of ethical character, our ‘eyes are opened to reasons at large by acquiring a second nature’.23 The problem here is that on the McDowell view, the ‘reality’ of the moral demands to which we are subject is in the end simply a function of a given human culture with a given biological and social history. There is no further, no more ultimate, moral reality to constrain it or measure it against. Yet that brings right up against the difficulty of what has aptly been called the ‘radical contingency of the ethical’. The history of our ethical culture is a contingent one; it might have been otherwise, and if it had, then, it seems to follow, even on McDowell’s enriched picture of nature, that the relevant ethical ‘realities’ and ‘demands’ might have been different. I  see no way of escaping the subversive implications of this for what Bernard Williams called the ‘peculiar institution’ of morality.24 Once the idea is accepted that the authority and power of the moral demands which seem to call forth our allegiance is simply a function of the contingent culture into which we happen to have been inducted, then true normativity evaporates.25 We can after all imagine (and indeed there are actual historical examples) of cultures that have inculcated respect for profoundly inhuman practices and attitudes; are we to say that those so indoctrinated have had their eyes opened to certain ‘values’ and requirements that are ‘there in any case’; or are there objective normative standards against which such an inhuman cultural system can be found wanting? But if the latter, then what is the ultimate basis for such objective standards? To put the point another way, it is hard to see how McDowell can in the end provide a proper basis for the kind of strong objectivity and normativity that his conception of the ‘reality’ of moral demands seems to imply. My second example is Iris Murdoch, who defends a form of Platonism in her attempt to bring strong, objective normativity back into our worldview. In her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she advances a worldview which affirms the reality of goodness, or simply ‘the good’ as a kind of substitute for theism. Her slogan is ‘the good is the reality of which God is the dream.’26 Now a long-standing problem with Platonic metaphysics, never perhaps fully addressed by Murdoch, is that of explaining the ontological status of abstract forms such as ‘the Good’ – in what sense are they supposed to be ‘real’? But even if that worry can be dealt with, it is hard to see how something as inert, impersonal and abstract as a Platonic form could generate normative requirements merely by its being there to be contemplated. Murdoch here remarks that ‘of course Plato did not think that morality consisted in staring at an abstract idea,’ and she goes on to speak of the need for ‘an orientation of our energy and appetites’, through the power of love.27 So the Good in whose reality she believes is not after all an inert Form or concept, but a real power, exerting a kind of ‘magnetic’ force (to use an analogy she frequently deploys),

50  John Cottingham which, in quasi-religious fashion, can ‘purify our desires’ and be ‘inescapably active in our lives’.28 Although she insists on rejecting the idea of a personal God, it seems that the implications of Murdoch’s position come very close to those of theism, notably in her insistence in that we ‘experience of the reality of the good’ as ‘a discovery of something independent of us’,29 something which imposes normative requirements and has transformative power. The upshot of these worries is that whatever it is that, for Murdoch, underwrites the reality and objectivity of goodness must, on Murdoch’s own account, be something active, powerful, independent and authoritative, and capable of transforming our lives. As traditionally conceived, the God of theism manifestly meets these requirements, goodness, authority, power and activity being among the defining characteristics of such a being. But nothing in Murdoch’s ontology seems to explain the ‘inescapable activity’ she wants to attribute to ‘the good’. This is not, of course, a knockdown argument for the existence of the personal God of theism, but it does suggest that a theistic worldview might provide Murdoch with a more coherent backdrop for many of the things that she herself wants to say about the power of goodness. If Murdoch were to accept the theistic view of the cosmos, then although unfashionable, her position would at least be consistent. But despite her professed objectivism about value, by the end of the book she seems to me clearly to resile from this position, and slide back into the seductive idea that we can create meaning for ourselves. She returns several times over to a Hindu story of a merchant who was asked by his mother to bring back from his travels a holy relic from one of the saints. Remembering on the way home that he had forgotten this commission, he picks up a dog’s tooth from the gutter, and solemnly presents it to his mother. She places it in her chapel where it is venerated and ‘it begins miraculously to glow with light.’30 Returning to the story at the end of the book she quotes Keats and Valery. Keats: ‘what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not.’ It must be the truth. And Valery (cited by Simone Weil): ‘Love is a determination to create the being which it has taken for its object.’ The dog’s tooth, Murdoch reiterates, ‘when sincerely venerated glows with light’.31 If theism is true, we don’t have to ‘reenchant’ the cosmos, because it is already enchanted, not in any magical sense, but because it is replete with objective beauty and goodness, charged with the grandeur of God. For the theist, our task is to be open to its wonder and its authoritative power, and to orient ourselves towards the normative requirements that we cannot in integrity deny. But the idea of a halfway house, where we can resist theism but preserve genuine objective value is an illusion. If we buy into a worldview that strips out value from the world, then nothing we can do can put it back again.

Religion Without Magic  51

Notes 1. ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and above all by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.’ (Es ist das Schicksal unserer Zeit, mit der ihr eigenen Rationalisierung und Intellektualisierung, vor allem: Entzauberung der Welt, daß gerade die letzten und sublimsten Werte zurückgetreten sind aus der Öffentlichkeit, entweder in das hinterweltliche Reich mystischen Lebens oder in die Brüderlichkeit unmittelbarer Beziehungen der Einzelnen zueinander.) Max Weber, Wissenschaft as Beruf [1919]. 2. See for example Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity (1500) or Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks (c  1485), both recently discussed in an interesting paper by Anthony O’Hear ‘Christian Mysteries in the Renaissance’ (typescript). 3. ‘extra ordinem entium existens, velut causa quaedam profundens totum ens et omnes eius differentias.’ Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione [Sententiae super Peri Hermeneias, 1270–71], I, 14. 4. See John Cottingham, In Search of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2019), Ch. 5, sectn 2. 5. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth [Le recherche de la vérité, 1674], Bk III, Part 2, Ch. 9, p. 251. 6. Philip Clayton, ‘The Religious Spinoza’, in The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought, eds. C. Firestone and N. Jacobs (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), 73. Cf. Spinoza Ethics Book I, prop. 36, start of Appendix. 7. See René Descartes, Conversation with Burman [1648], AT V 156: CSMK 340. ‘AT’ refers to the standard Franco-Latin edition of Descartes by C. Adam & P. Tannery, Œuvres de Descartes (12 vols, revised ed., Paris: Vrin/ CNRS, 1964–76); ‘CSMK’ refers to the English translation by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, The Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 8. Reported by Jane Little on the BBC World Service in the series Heart and Soul: Personal Approaches to Spirituality Through the World in the episode ‘Hashtag Pray’, broadcast on the BBC World Service, 21 October 2018. 9. ‘It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense’ (G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’, 1923); ‘You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief  – of belief in almost anything’ (‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’, 1924). Both stories are in the collection The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). 10. See further Jacques Bouveresse, ‘Wittgenstein’s Critique of Frazer’, Ratio 20, no. 4 (December 2007), reprinted in J. Preston, ed., Wittgenstein and Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 82. 12. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 34. 13. See for example Nicolas Malebranche’s vigorous attack on the ‘error’ whereby almost everyone believes that ‘heat is in the fire . . . and colours in coloured objects’ (Recherche de la Vérité, Bk I, Ch. xi), and Locke’s assault on the ‘vulgar’ way of talking ‘as if Light and Heat were really something in the Fire more than a power to excite [certain] Ideas in us’ (Essay concerning Human Understanding [1670], Bk II, Ch. xxxi, §2). For a discussion of Descartes’s views, which influenced both these thinkers, see Cottingham, Cartesian Reflections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 7. The

52  John Cottingham contrast between the ‘manifest image’ (arising from our ordinary lived experience of the world) and the ‘scientific image’ was drawn by Wilfred Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ [1956]. 14. Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Ch. 1. 15. Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Dust (London: Quercus, 2011), 49–50. My discussion of Humphrey in this section of the paper draws on material from my In Search of the Soul, Ch. 3. 16. Humphrey, Soul Dust, 193–94, emphasis added. 17. Ibid., 168. 18. Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), 67. 19. For example in de Caelo I, 4; de Partibus Animalium II, 13. For more on this theme in Aristotle, see R. J. Hankinson, ‘Philosophy of Science’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Ch. 4. 20. G. W. Leibniz, “Monadology [1714],” in Philosophical Writings, eds. G. H. R. Parkinson and G. W. Leibniz (London: Dent, 1973), §§65, 69; trans. G. H. R. Parkinson, ed., Philosophical Writings, ed. G. W. Leibniz (London: Dent, 1973), 190. 21. Gottlob Frege, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic [Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Vol. I, 1893] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 13. 22. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), Lecture IV, §7, 82. 23. Ibid., 84. 24. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Collins, 1985), Ch. 10. 25. See further John Cottingham, ‘The Good Life and the “Radical Contingency of the Ethical”,’ in Reading Bernard Williams, ed. D. Callcut (London: Routledge, 2008), Ch. 2, 25–43. 26. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1992), 496. 27. Ibid., 497. 28. Ibid., 109. 29. Ibid., 508. 30. Ibid., 338. 31. Ibid., 508.

Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione [Sententiae super Peri Hermeneias, 1270–71]. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1911. Bouveresse, Jacques. “Wittgenstein’s Critique of Frazer.” Ratio 20, no. 4 (December  2007), reprinted in J. Preston, ed. Wittgenstein and Reason. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Chesterton, G. K. The Incredulity of Father Brown. London: Cassell, 1926. Clayton, Philip. “The Religious Spinoza.” In The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought, edited by C. Firestone and N. Jacobs. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2012.

Religion Without Magic  53 Cottingham, John. “The Good Life and the ‘Radical Contingency of the Ethical’.” In Reading Bernard Williams, edited by D. Callcut. London: Routledge, 2008, 25–43. ———. In Search of the Soul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Descartes, René. “Conversation with Burman [1648].” In Œuvres de Descartes, edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–76, Vol V. Translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. 3, The Correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Frege, Gottlob. The Basic Laws of Arithmetic [Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Vol. I, 1893]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Hankinson, R. J. “Philosophy of Science.” In The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, edited by J. Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust. London: Quercus, 2011. Leibniz, G. W. “Monadology [1714].” In Philosophical Writings, edited by G. H. R. Parkinson and G. W. Leibniz. London: Dent, 1973. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690]. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. Malebranche, Nicolas. The Search after Truth [La recherche de la vérité. 6th ed., 1712]. Translated by T. Lennon and P. Olscamp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McDowell, John. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin, 1992. Russell, Bertrand. Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sellars, Wilfred. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind [1956]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Weber, Max. “Science as a Profession [Wissenschaft als Beruf, 1920].” In Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129– 56. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Collins, 1985. Williams, Rowan. The Edge of Words. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

3 Might There Be Secular Enchantment? Akeel Bilgrami

Introduction The term ‘enchantment’ has had a wide variety of deployment – in myths, in children’s stories, and in the literature around the sociology of modernity thanks mostly to Weber’s dramatic description of the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century as generating a ‘disenchantment of the world’. Weber’s negative formulation (disenchantment)1 to describe a process of social and ideational transformation in the modern period became such an effective demarcation that it has become something of a commonplace to say ‘there is no going back.’ Whatever critiques we may make of modernity – and there have in recent decades been an abundance of them in a variety of disciplines – the idea that we may achieve a simple reversal, that is to say, simply seek to ‘re-enchant the world’ seems to many to be a misguided aspiration, a misplaced and mistimed one, an exercise in nostalgic illusion.2 There is something compelling about this scepticism regarding the possibility of such reversals. In past work,3 I have nevertheless argued at length that the so-called ‘disenchantment of the world’ is not a completed project of comprehensive global reach, citing paths of argument that are primarily Gandhian and joining him with other sources in the rich field of popular religion as well as indigenous thought and practice that have widely been invoked by anthropologists who also deny the claims to its completeness and comprehensiveness. And, in case figures like Gandhi are dismissed as speaking wholly to conditions in regions of the ‘south’ (once called the ‘orient’), I  had argued further that, in fact, Gandhi stood in close affinity to a wider range of successive dissenting voices in the north (once called the ‘west’) from early modernity through the long romantic period down to early Marx and after, all resisting the claims to completeness and comprehensiveness despite the thrusting forces of capitalist development (and, indeed, communist modernity while it lasted, as well). I had made these claims not so as to force the potential for any systematic reenchantment, but rather a bricolage of local reversals on specific issues

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  55 built on alliances between ideas to be found in southern aspirations to resistance and ideas contained in voices of northern dissent.4 But, in the present chapter, I want to briefly spell out a line of argument that stresses something different, even though obviously related – the possibility that, if we get out of the Weberian theoretical clutches for understanding the nature of enchantment and disenchantment, there is scope to claim that in one sense – though not all senses  – nowhere was enchantment ever undermined. What sense is that? In my opening paragraph I said that ‘enchantment’ is a term that we have been brought up on in our myths, in our children’s stories, and via a familiar negative formulation in our Weber-inspired social sciences as something that went missing in the modern period. In each of these wide uses of the term, it has been linked both to magic and to religion, which though they are strictly separable (since one may subscribe to the enchantments of magic without subscribing to any religion) are often nevertheless linked by a common appeal to the supernatural. And here there is the possibility of raising two questions: Might there be enchantments that make no appeal to any element of religion or the supernatural? And if there were, would there be any wider significance to it, might it matter not just to metaphysics and theology but eventually to the wider field of society and politics? In this chapter, I  will restrict myself to the first of these questions, leaving the second to a sequel to this chapter. In earlier work, I had suggested that there was indeed both the possibility and fact of such secular enchantment and that its wider significance would lie in bringing us to a better grasp of how the very concept of nature had been transformed into the concept of natural resources in the modern period, with its inevitably deleterious effects on the environment that we have witnessed in the last few centuries. In this chapter, I’d like to present how it is quite possible to record that transformation and yet hold out for a claim that, in one sense (though again, obviously not all senses), there was no disenchantment of the world. If, in response to the first of our questions, we claim that there is a form of secular enchantment, one that makes no appeal to either religion or the supernatural, we had better be clear about what is meant by these terms. Well, obviously, I cannot even pretend to get clear in a short essay on what is meant by ‘religion’ – it would be impertinent for anyone to make any claim to doing so in anything less than a very large book. Assuming, then, some intuitive grasp of what it is to not make an appeal to any element in religion, we might make some sort of initial stab at getting clear on what is meant by avoiding an appeal to the ‘supernatural’ since it is this that is said to be common to both the ingredients of religion and magic that characterize enchantment. But to do this, we would have to get an even more prior clarity on what is meant by ‘natural’. And it is here that conceptual or intellectual history gives us a striking clue that

56  Akeel Bilgrami Weber had already picked up on, though he didn’t develop it with sufficient distinctions. The term ‘natural’ has had a highly varied philological and conceptual history, but in the period that Weber made his special focus (not just a focus on the rise of modern science but the somewhat later institutionalization of modern science in the second half of the seventeenth century), the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ came to acquire a very specific meaning. A certain rigour was brought in this period to an earlier and more vague distinction in unschooled5 understanding, vague because it did not keep apart two, perhaps three, separate distinctions – the distinction between supernatural and natural, and the distinction between transcendent and immanent. I say ‘possibly three’ because there was often a further conflation of these with the distinction between the sacred or religion on the one hand and the secular on the other. In this multiple conflation, an easy assumption was made about the coincidence of the natural, the immanent, and the secular on the one hand and the supernatural, the transcendent, and the religious or sacred, on the other. This was so despite the fact that longstanding pantheistic6 religious ideas exposed them as fallacious conflations. If nature itself was sacralized by the presence of divinity, this trio of distinct categories simply could not be made to coincide. It was to these messy confusions that a certain perverse clarity was brought by the developments of the mid-seventeenth century, after which the concept of what was natural came to be defined by the exhaustive identification, the equation (without remainder) of ‘nature’ with ‘that which the natural sciences studied’. Over the entire period of subsequent modernity, as natural science became more specialized, shedding the nomenclature of ‘natural philosophy’, this equation became entrenched and, as a result, nature got evacuated of all properties that were not countenanced by the natural sciences, i.e., that could not be studied by the methods of and brought under the laws of the new sciences. It is not as if natural scientists claimed that they had brought all of nature or natural phenomena under these laws. In fact, there was (and continues to be) much genuine modesty about how little was in fact explained by these methods and laws, how much there was that remained unexplained. But the ambition lay in the claim that there was nothing in nature that fell outside the subject matter of natural science. It was the business of science to explain all properties in nature, even if, in one’s modesty, one admitted that the business had hardly gotten going. One of the insufficiencies in the Weberian discussion is that it does not clearly distinguish between disenchantment understood as this equation of nature with what the natural sciences study and disenchantment as a form of secularization (i.e., a decrease in religious belief and practice). They are both developments in the modern period, they both owe to the increasing centrality and influence of the new sciences in the mentalities of people and public life, but their effects on this mentality and on public

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  57 life were not exactly the same. The equation’s effect was to desacralize nature. And in the modern period it was this that drove the claims to disenchantment. Since the natural sciences do not study the sacred, our conception of nature must be evacuated of the presence of a divinity. It should be plain, however, that this was not exactly the same idea as a loss of belief in God since one could always subscribe in one’s belief to a God that is given a station external to the universe of matter and nature, a ‘Deus Absconditus’ to use the expression then in currency. So, a position quite within religious belief (in fact, a standard orthodoxy of belief around the Anglicanism that was dominant in England) could subscribe to the exhaustive equation of nature with the subject matter of the natural sciences. To put it in a word, the exile of God preceded the death of God, which was only proclaimed a good while later by Hegel and Nietzsche. ‘Deus Absconditus’ survived for a prolonged period prior to His demise. What then was the effect of the desacralization of nature, the exile of God from nature? Matter in the Newtonian conception, as is well-known, was inert. The universe needed a push from an Archimedean position outside it to set it in motion since the inner source of dynamism – the presence of the divinity in nature – was now missing. ­Metaphors such as those of God as a clock winder reflected my own metaphor of his ‘exile’, a being who set (and maintained) all in motion from an external ‘providential’ role and place above and outside natural properties and proceedings. Matter was now ‘brute’ matter. Newton, in the Opticks, went so far as to call it ‘stupid’. It is not as if there was no metaphysical dissent against these developments, but these developments won out against it, mostly because of worldly alliances that were formed by the Newtonian establishment in science with the Anglican orthodoxy and a wide range of emerging commercial interests which were keen to desacralize nature so that one could take from nature with impunity, without the constraints of an age old metaphysics everywhere present in popular religion, which placed God in nature and demanded respect for it of a form that goes back to animist tendencies well before the emergence of the axial faiths. (It is a widely recorded fact in all recorded social worlds that, though human subjects always took from nature ever since they first inhabited it, for centuries prior to the modern period, there were routine rituals performed to ­register respect for and seek restorative return to nature – before cycles of planting, and even before cycles of hunting. Taking ‘with impunity’ is a relatively recent emergence.) All dissent against these developments was dismissed by this alliance of interests as Low Church populism, the term of opprobrium being ‘enthusiasm’, the phenomenon that was responsible for the puritan radical unrest of the revolutionary period of the midcentury. The Royal Society was explicit in its use of such a dismissive vocabulary. The Royal Society was much more than a body of scientists

58  Akeel Bilgrami (‘natural philosophers’); it was also a body of scientific mandarins with detailed links to the High Church establishment and in service to commercial interests. Over time, such a desacralization of nature and matter brought with it an illicit extrapolation. The deracination of God from nature (‘Deus Deracinus’, if there were such an expression, would convey such an uprooting of this kind that is not conveyed by ‘Deus Absconditus’ which, to the English-speaking ear, sounds more like a fugitive fleeing)7 had the effect of evacuating nature of all value properties as well, perhaps an unsurprising consequence in a time when value was pervasively assumed to have religious foundations. Thus, by the time of the eighteenth century, in high philosophy (in which philosophizing about value was not particularly tied to religion) both David Hume and Adam Smith were able to declare that values were wholly derivable from our states of mind (our desires and moral sentiments, our capacities for sympathy  .  .  .) whereas the world we inhabit was a fully Newtonian world, bereft of all properties that fall outside the scope of explanation by Newton’s laws. For all the metaethical disputation between Humeans and Kantians that continues to this day, Kant, too, conceived the world (‘phenomena’ to use his term) in these Newtonian terms and relegated value to a ‘noumenal’ realm of pure practical reason, to be sharply distinguished from the pure reason that was the subject of his first Critique, a domain of objective judgement which was frameworked by its prefatory questions, ‘How is Physics possible?’ and ‘How is Mathematics possible?’, making clear the extent to which our understanding of the nature of ‘phenomena’ was equated with the subject matter of the new science. Thus, this illicit extrapolation by which the desacralization of nature amounted also to value properties being evacuated from the world and made entirely dependent on our states of mind, left no conceptual space for a position that might be called the ‘secular enchantment’ of the world (including nature) by the presence of value properties in it. ‘Secular’ because value properties need not be grounded in a sacred or religious source (a possibility that the extrapolation does not seem to have any comprehension of) and ‘enchantment’ because they are not susceptible to being subsumed under the explanatory and predictive laws of natural science. The point here is modest. I’ve only tried to say so far that an illicit extrapolation removed the possibility for something that there is conceptual space for – the idea of secular enchantment. This is not the enchantment of centuries-long popular religious belief in pretty much every corner of the world, but it is not without precedent; it is apparently the enchantment that John McDowell finds in a high philosophical location in Aristotle.8 But creating a logical or conceptual space is one thing, as I said a modest thing. Providing a philosophical argument for filling it with some right is another, far more ambitious thing.

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  59 I will try to do that more ambitious thing now and then, having done it, I will return at the end to diagnose how it is that despite establishing by argument that there is this more secular form of enchantment, there is nevertheless truth in the Weberian ideas regarding the disenchantment of the world (with all its deleterious effects, the ones to the natural environment being only the more obvious). In other words, how, given that secular enchantment is established by the definitive and universal force of a philosophical argument that I hope to give, can we both say (as I do) that the world was never disenchanted (after all, if it ever was disenchanted then the argument would not be a philosophical one) and say at the same time, with Weber, that the modern period is distinctively characterized in his terms. This is a conundrum well worth addressing and I will leave it till the end. Most of the rest of the chapter that now follows is focused on providing the argument for value properties (with no religious grounding) being properties in the world (including nature) rather than properties in some broad sense reducible to or derivatively dependent on our mentality and its states.9

Secular Enchantment, Value, and Agency Let me proceed to give the argument for this conclusion regarding such a secular enchantment of the world, (i.e., to repeat for the conclusion that values are properties in the world) in two stages. First, by showing how the conclusion is a very natural one. But to show that an idea or proposition is natural is not (yet) to establish that it is true. It is only to show that we may believe it without strain. Having shown that, I will proceed to use considerations that surface in the discussion, to establish its truth in the stronger form that philosophy (at any rate, certain ways of doing philosophy) demands. I should say as a signpost before I proceed that the concept of human practical agency will play a central role in the argument I am seeking to provide for secular enchantment. Since it is naturalness I am seeking to provide first, let me start with an expression that is frequently and unselfconsciously on our lips: ‘I will do . . .’. The expression hides an ambiguity. On some occasions it is said by way of expressing an intention that ‘I will . . .’. On other (perhaps fewer) occasions, it is the assertion of a prediction that ‘I will . . .’. This is, philosophically speaking, a radical ambiguity. It points to radically different ways in which the subject (the speaker) relates to herself. In the former case the subject relates to herself qua agent. In the latter case, the subject does not – the subject rather sees herself as an object (an object whose behavior is being predicted). Just to be clear, in the latter case, the subject who is making the prediction is certainly an agent, it’s just that she, qua agent, sees herself as an object, not an agent, not a subject.

60  Akeel Bilgrami Another way to put this is to point out that in the following pair of sentences that reflect the ambiguity in ‘I will do . . .’. 1) I intend that I will do . . . 2) I predict that I will do . . . Of the four occurrences of the personal pronoun ‘I’, the first and second occurrences in 1) pick out an agent or subject, the first occurrence of ‘I’ in 2) does so, too. It is only the second occurrence of ‘I’ in 2) that does not do so. The subject has, in this last occurrence, become an object. Why has that happened? Because in 2) the angle that the agent picked out by the first occurrence of ‘I’ has on himself is completely detached. That is what converts the referent of the second occurrence into an object. When one predicts something (an eclipse, say) one has a detached or disengaged perspective on the sun and the moon, and it is no different when one predicts something about human behaviour, even one’s own behaviour, as in 2). One sees oneself as the object of causes, one’s motivational tendencies and dispositions, one sees oneself as one sometimes sees others, and as others sometime see one – in a detached and disengaged way. For this reason, this is sometimes called a third-person perspective or angle on oneself (though, it is important to point out that that is a philosophical not a linguistic point, since the same grammatical first-person pronoun ‘I’ is figuring even when one is seen by oneself from this detached, thirdperson point of view). By contrast, in 1) the perspective that the referent of the first occurrence of ‘I’ has on herself is not detached at all, and that is why it is called a first-person point of view. It is a perspective of practical engagement. And that is why the second occurrence of ‘I’ in 1) remains a subject or agent. The difference between intending and predicting, which is the hidden radical ambiguity in frequent expressions such as ‘I will do  .  .  .’, thus reflects two different points of view on oneself. The fact is that we often intend and sometimes predict that we will do something and, when we do, we are respectively in one or other of these points of view on ourselves. But it also is remarkable that we cannot have both these perspectives on ourselves at the same time. Each one of them, by its very nature, pushes the other out. One may go from one perspective to another, even sometimes very rapidly go from one to another, but one can’t occupy them both at once. It is also remarkable that much of philosophy has had a tendency to totalize one or other of these points of view. A great deal of a certain form of naturalism in recent analytical philosophy has refused to see the first-person point of view (whether in the realm of phenomenal or phenomenological states such as sensations and pains or in the realm of intention that we are discussing) as irreducible, aspiring in some eventual sense to reduce (or make dependent in some way) talk of intentions that reflect such a point of view (at the very least) to tendencies

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  61 or dispositions to behaviour and (often eventually) to neurophysiological states. This, in effect, totalizes the third-person or disengaged perspective on oneself. By contrast, a philosopher like Sartre sometimes totalizes the first-person or agentive point of view, describing the third-person or disengaged point of view on oneself to be a kind of bad faith in which one is dishonestly disguising the agentive subjectivity of an intention to do something as a determinist and objectivist pretence of predicting that one will do it. For this reason, Sartre, even often dismissed all of psychoanalysis (a paradigmatically regimented form of the third-person point of view on oneself) as a regime of bad faith, a denial of the responsibility that one possesses as a practical agent. Though I will not argue for it here, I will assume for the purposes of this chapter that such totalizing tendencies are unwarranted, they are indulgences only philosophers would be prone to, which is perhaps why Wittgenstein thought philosophy needs exorcism. Even so, there may be indirect instruction to be drawn from these implausible philosophical attempts to totalize one or other point of view. From the totalization of the third-person point of view, we learn a striking, if obvious, thing – that if it were the case that we only had a third-person point of view on oneself, we would simply not be practical agents. If all we did was to understand ourselves (explain and predict our behaviour) from a third-person point of view, then though we would be agents in a theoretical sense (i.e., possess the kind of agency that goes into studying phenomena in a disengaged and detached way), we would lack practical agency (a central specific kind of such agency, being moral agency).10 In saying this, I am just echoing the elementary distinction that underlies the two great distinct projects that Kant undertook in his successive Critiques – of ‘pure’ and of ‘practical’ reason. Kant was explicit that our knowledge of the world we inhabit, ‘objective judgement’ about ‘phenomena’ (to use his terms), which was the large topic of the Critique of Pure Reason,11 did require agency; but it was not practical agency, for which he wrote a quite distinct work, the Critique of Practical Reason.12 It is this latter capacity for practical agency that would go missing if all we had was a third-person point of view on ourselves. This is something we can learn from the naturalist totalization of the third-person point of view. It is an obvious lesson because it is just a straightforward hypothetical or conditional articulation of the totalization. I will be making dialectical use of this point somewhat later in my argument, so let me put it down as an explicit proposition: (P) If one only and always had a detached, third-person point of view on oneself, one would not be a practical agent. A somewhat more subtle lesson to be learnt from pondering the excesses in the Sartrian totalization of the first-person point of view is that, far from abandoning our practical agency (as Sartre suggests happens each

62  Akeel Bilgrami time we take a third-person point of view on ourselves), the occasional adoption of a third-person point of view on ourselves may, in fact, enhance our practical agency. Spinoza, for instance, gives the example of how if we inquire in a detached way about our anger on some occasion and understand what prompted it, it may help us to learn to control it in the future – a clear case of enhancing our agency, rather than diminishing it. Freud, too, is full of such examples and it is no wonder that Stuart Hampshire likens Freud to Spinoza in these respects.13 But, as a result, a fascinatingly puzzling point is suggested. This Spinozist and Freudian insight is only true on occasion. Taking such a third-person point of view on this or that occasion (on one’s anger here, on one’s anxiety there) may help to enhance our agency in the ways just described. But, we have already said in (P) that if we always took a third-person point of view on ourselves we would precisely abdicate our practical agency. So, here is the mildly paradoxical result: The very same thing (the third-person point of view on oneself) which when writ small enhances agency, when writ large, destroys it. This is not a puzzle to be resolved or eliminated. It points to an ineliminably tense element at the heart of human agency. I have tried to draw from an expression in our most ordinary and ­natural of speech, by finding implications of a radical ambiguity in it, a philosophical distinction that has been widely noted, between two perspectives we may take on ourselves  – a perspective of detachment and a perspective of engagement. Now, if there is such a distinction between p ­ erspectives that we take on ourselves, then one may presume – perspectives, by their nature, being general sorts of things  – that the same d ­ istinction of ­perspectives will apply to how we relate to the world. The idea that the distinction has no generality and is only a distinction regarding ­perspectives on ourselves would seem  – at any rate, without argument – to be a dogmatic restriction placed on the very idea of a perspective. So, it is quite natural to expect that if there are these two perspectives we have on ourselves, then we have these two perspectives on the world as well, a detached perspective on it and an engaged perspective on it. That we can have a detached perspective on the world is, perhaps, uncontroversial. Natural science provides a paradigmatic and highly regimented version of it, though obviously there are also many more informal and unregimented things we say or think about the world in a quite detached way – in our everyday observations, say, such as ‘There is a storm on the horizon,’ ‘Here is a book on the table.’ What, then, would an engaged perspective on the world be? By ‘engaged’, I  don’t mean engaged in the sense that a natural scientist is engaged in her inquiry. As I  said earlier, a natural scientist, qua scientist, is an agent; but, as I also said, when she engages in inquiry, her angle on the world is detached and theoretical. (This just echoes what I said about the first ‘I’ in 2) above regarding the detached perspective on ourselves.) What I am asking, then, is what is it to have a practically engaged perspective on the

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  63 world? In other words, if 1) expresses a practically engaged perspective on oneself, what would the counterpart to 1) be for a practically engaged perspective on the world? A plausible way to go about answering this is by asking what in the world prompts the first-person or practically engaged or non-detached perspective on it. What would the world have to be like if it prompts not merely the disengaged, theoretical angle on it (paradigmatically exemplified in scientific inquiry), but our practically engaged angle on it? The answer, presumably, is that the world would have to make normative demands on us, if we are to have a practically engaged perspective on it. But this suggests that over and above the properties in the world that prompt our disengaged or detached angle on it (properties, such as H2O, condensation, etc.), it must contain properties which make normative demands that engage us in the practical sense. And it is quite natural to assume that this is just what we mean by the world containing value properties.14 To present this intuitively, we can spell things out with a distinction in the language or vocabulary with which we describe the world, though, in the end, the point here too (just as with the distinction of engaged and disengaged perspectives on ourselves) is not linguistic but philosophical. To give an example I  have before, one may describe what we see on the horizon as a meteorological phenomenon, and use the vocabulary of condensation, H2O, etc. But we can also describe it as a ‘threat’. These contrasting descriptions help to give us a sense of the difference in the perspectives that we may have on the world. To see it in terms of H2O and condensation is to exercise our detached point of view on it, as I said most paradigmatically exercised in natural science. But when we see it as a threat, when we describe it in value terms, describe properties in the world that make normative and practical demands on us, we are prompted to be engaged with it practically, not to explain (or predict) it, but rather to do such things as shut the windows or seek protection for our dwelling. To take another example in the metaethical literature, suppose we see a group of teenagers burning a cat. On the one hand we can see this in disengaged terms (in terms of combustion, say) or we can see the very same acts in value terms, as ‘cruelty’; these latter terms make normative demands on us, and prompt our practical agency (go over and stop the teenagers, say). Examples can be multiplied. We may in a detached way see a peasant’s condition in terms of daily caloric counts or we may see it as a need. When we see it in the latter terms, normative demands are made on us since ‘need’ is a value term, and our practical agency is involved and we might offer some food and so on. I repeat that I am presenting this in terms of language to bring out what is absolutely natural and intuitive in what I mean by this distinction between two perspectives on the world. But the distinction, at bottom, is philosophical and not linguistic. That is to say, if someone has completely internalized

64  Akeel Bilgrami the connection between low caloric counts and starvation and need, she may go straight from recording the caloric count to offering the peasant food. The idea is not that we have to translate the words that we use in our descriptions of the detached apprehension in terms of caloric counts to the vocabulary of need in order to be practically engaged, the idea is only that we have to see these as two distinct perspectives on the world responding to two quite different properties that prompt detached (or merely theoretically engaged) and practically engaged responses, respectively. It’s just that the linguistic differential helps us to see intuitively that there is a philosophical distinction of perspectives and properties always in play, and it is only if the world contains value properties (even if we don’t always use value vocabulary to describe it) that the distinctly practical engagement with the world is prompted since the world now makes normative demands on us. Where are these threats, cruelties, needs? In the world, just where the condensation, burning, and caloric counts are. It is completely natural to say that the threat is right there on the horizon where the condensation is, that the cruelty is right there where the burning is. We simply and naturally do say, pointing to the world, ‘That’s a threat,’ ‘That’s cruel,’ no different from ‘That’s condensation’ and ‘That’s combustion.’ Threats and cruelties are properties in the world. They are not properties that are studied by the natural sciences. They do not prompt our theoretical agency, but our practical agency. It is this completely natural thought that is denied due to an artifice of philosophers who  – as a result of equating the very idea of ‘nature’ with ‘what the natural sciences study’ – generate an illicit extrapolation from disenchantment seen as desacralization to disenchantment seen as the evacuation of value properties in the world and nature. The standard and familiar artifice on which this denial is constructed is to say that value is not in the world but rather a ‘projection’ of our states of mind onto the world – our vulnerability on to the storm (condensation, etc.), and hence calling it a ‘threat’, our sympathy for the cat on the act of burning it (combustion etc.), and hence calling it ‘cruel’. Value thus becomes entirely derivative of these states of mind. In all these cases it is our states of mind (broadly speaking our desires in favour or, as in these particular examples, against certain things) that are the basis and source of value; and the world (an exhaustively Newtonian world in that initial period of disenchantment in the late seventeenth century) gets landed with a projection of values on it by our talk of threats, cruelties, etc. So, far from being an illicit extrapolation of the kind I have suggested, the claim is that it is my view that involves something illicit: what I  am insisting is a natural thing to say must instead get counted as an illicit act of projecting our mentality on to ‘brute’ matter, which is susceptible exhaustively to the methods of inquiry of the natural sciences that in some eventual sense countenance only properties such as

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  65 condensation, combustion, etc. To put it in a word: There are only states of mind, such as our desires for (and against) things and our values are constructed from them, as against my idea, what I have claimed is the more natural idea, that values are desirabilities (and undesirabilities) in the world to which our desires (that lead to our practical acts of shutting windows against threats, stopping teenagers from committing cruelties) are responses. All I  have tried to show so far is that if we start with ordinary and natural expressions in our speech and draw from them certain crucial links between agency and value, we will be able to see why we can believe without any strain that value properties are in the world. I’ve insisted that seeing how natural this is (via these links between value and agency) uncovers what an artificial philosophical construction it is to say instead, as only philosophers would, that our ordinary and natural descriptions of the world are illicit projections. But, as I  admitted earlier, showing why it is natural to say certain things (and artificial to construct reductive grounds for denying them), is not yet to do the stronger thing that philosophers demand – establish their truth. Still, what we have shown so far provides the resources to proceed to do that stronger thing, as I will now argue. The first thing to demand of the denial that there are values or desirabilities in the world and the assertion that there are only desires in us from which values are derivatively constructed is that it must face up to the challenge of explaining what prompts our practical agency. We have claimed that it is prompted by desirabilities or values in the world, so if those don’t exist, what prompts it? And the answer will presumably have to be that our practical agency is quite simply prompted by our states of mind, primarily our desires. ‘Quite simply’ is a good way to put it. It is indeed a thoroughly simple thought, eschewing the complexity of our claim that our desires are responses to perceived desirabilities or values in the world, which  – via our responsive desires  – prompt our practical agency. That is dismissed as an unnecessary complexity. Why, it will be asked, can’t our desires just be direct prompters of our practical actions rather than this complication of going via the perception of desirabilities. That is to say, why can’t our desires be viewed as self-standing states rather than be viewed, as I am insisting, as responses to desirabilities in the world, responses which then go on to prompt our practical actions? Should we have a decisive answer to this challenge, we would have established that desirabilities or values are properties in the world, and thereby, in turn, provided grounds (on the surely correct assumption that natural sciences do not study values) for secular enchantment – i.e., the idea that the world, including nature, contains non-supernatural, nonreligious properties (thus secular) that are outside the scope of natural science to study (thus enchantment).

66  Akeel Bilgrami To answer this challenge, I will appeal to an oft-cited point made about beliefs by Gareth Evans,15 and extend it to desires. In a brilliant passage, Evans points out an impressive peculiarity about our relations to our own beliefs. He presents it by asking us to notice that in the normal cases, if we are asked two quite distinct questions, we – quite revealingly – do not do distinct things in order to answer them, but rather do the same thing. If one is asked ‘Is it raining?’, we look outside and answer. But if we are asked ‘Do you believe that it is raining?’, we, in all the normal cases, also look outside and answer. In other words, we look outside when we are asked about what is going on outside, but also apparently about what is going on inside. Whether asked a question about the world or about our minds, we look at the world to answer. To answer the second question, we don’t do an interior scan of our minds, looking to see if it contains the belief that it is raining. I think this Evansian point can be extended to desires as well. If we are asked ‘Do you desire x?’, in the normal cases, we do not scan our interiors to see if it contains the desire for x, we rather consider the desirability of x. In both the case of belief and desire, I have been qualifying the point by saying ‘in the normal cases’. There is no need to deny that sometimes we do, in fact, have to scan our interiors to see if it contains a certain belief or desire. Psychoanalytic scrutiny provides obvious examples of this. But in the routine and banal cases of the sort that Evans gives and their counterpart for desires, his insight holds with real conviction. If my extension of Evans’s point about beliefs to desires is right (and it seems obviously right), that suggests that the way in which our desires are given to us (the way in which they are available to us) is via the desirabilities in the world. They are not given to us directly by observation of ourselves. They are given to us indirectly via our perception (or when it is not present before us, via our conceptualization and imagination) of x’s desirability. Desirabilities are simply what I am calling values, properties in the world that prompt our relevant states of mind (our desires, moral sentiments, etc.) by making normative demands on us. To extend Evans’s point, thus, is of a piece with a secular enchantment of the world. The disenchanted picture of the world which relegates value to being derived from our self-standing (rather than world-responding) states of mind is incompatible with the extension of Evans’s insight to desires. I still have not given the clinching consideration to drive this point home since someone may simply deny what I have done – extend Evans’s point about beliefs to desires. There are no desirabilities or values in the world, it will be insisted, only the facts that fall within the purview of science. Or to put it differently and somewhat barbarously, it will be insisted that there are only believabilities (facts) in the world, no deisrabilities (values), which are entirely derived from our desires and states of mind. So, Evans is right, but my extension of his view to desires is false.

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  67 I am tempted to dismiss this as just begging the question, but I think I can do better. And so here, then, is the punchline of this entire elaborate argument that I have been constructing for the last many pages linking secular enchantment to considerations of human agency. If I was wrong to extend Evans’s insight about beliefs to desires, then it would strictly follow that one’s relations to one’s desires, i.e., the way one’s desires are given or available to one, would have to be by one’s directly gazing into one’s minds (rather than indirectly via the perception of desirabilities in the world, as I said) to see whether the desire is present. And if the very idea of desirabilities or values being properties of the world has no purchase, if all values are derivative of our states of mind such as desire, then we only and always have access to them by this direct scrutiny of our minds. It is here that the relevance of (P) in our discussion above impresses with its relevance. The whole point of (P) was to say that if what is being suggested here is true, if we always had access to our minds via our scrutiny of our interiors, then we would have abdicated our practical agency. To look at our minds in that way is precisely to see it with disengagement. The mind’s motivational power is lost when it is the object of one’s own gaze. Consider the difference between ‘x is desired by me’ (the thought when I am looking into my mind to see if it contains the desire) and ‘x is desirable’ (a thought about a desirability in the world). While I have the former thought the desire just lies inert in my mind, the leaden object of my own gaze. As such, the desire has no power to prompt my practical agency. It just sits there, the object of my self-scrutiny. But when I have the latter thought, my desire is available to me indirectly via the value or desirability of x, and it is not leaden, it is not an object, it is a genuinely subjective or agentive state with motivational power to prompt my practical agency. Thus, if we keep firmly in mind the deep links between practical agency and value, the challenge to secular enchantment made by the self-standing conception of desires simply runs afoul of the conditions of practical agency that are registered in (P). The argument is now complete for the following conclusion: If we are practical agents, there must be secular enchantment, values must be properties in the world and not derived from self-standing states of mind. Two qualifying admissions regarding this conclusion. First, I will have to admit, of course, that the conclusion, deep though it aspires to be, is a conditional one, so in that sense limited. It is only established to the extent that we are, in fact, practical agents. If someone were to deny that we are practical agents, I have nothing to say (except perhaps ‘Come off it!’), at any rate nothing to say in this chapter, to repudiate such a remarkable denial. I have argued elsewhere16 for a radical conclusion that if a subject thinks it is an agent, then it is one. I have also argued for the converse. But this is not the occasion to elaborate those arguments and claims. For the purposes of this chapter, I am quite

68  Akeel Bilgrami content to rest with the conditional conclusion that ‘to the extent we may assume that we are practical agents, then to that extent we must accept the secular enchantment of the world as I’ve presented it’. That is a sufficiently unobvious and ambitious conclusion. Philosophical argument cannot take on all comers at once. It can rest quite content with piecemeal conclusions on the basis of some argument, piecemeal in the sense that it says if you don’t believe my conclusion (that values are properties in the world – including in nature – and so the world – including nature – cannot be exhaustively viewed as ‘that which the natural sciences study’), see how much else you have to give up believing (that we are practical agents). That is quite enough achievement for philosophers to take satisfaction in. Second, I should also admit that for all that I have said in this chapter, the conclusion that values are properties in the world has not established what it is often taken to imply – that values are objective in the way that repudiates all of the standard and familiar versions of relativism about values. I am not a relativist, but that is not for reasons that are detectable in what I have presented in this chapter. I have only argued here that, if we are practical agents at all, values are in the world (including nature), that there is a perceptual practical and moral epistemology. For all I have said in this chapter, there may be differential perception of value in the world having its source in different cultures or different upbringings and experience within a culture. Someone may see something or some fragment of the world as a threat or as cruel that someone else may not. That there is no relativism that follows from the fact of differential perception of properties in the world (whether value properties or the properties that natural science studies) is something that requires further argument than what has been provided here. The only thing I have shown is that even if there is differential perception of value, that does not imply (and it would be a grotesque non-sequitur to think it implies) that values are not properties in the world; no more than it is implied that there are no physical properties in the world, just because (to take a well-worn example) among two natural scientists, who have internalized different physical theories of light, one may see a wave where the other sees particles. Let me now return to link this entire argument I have given for secular enchantment with my opening remarks in the chapter in which I set up the questions to be addressed. I have mostly spoken in my argument to the enchantment side of secular enchantment, to the side that has it that there is more to nature, more properties in nature – value properties in particular – than it is the business of the natural sciences to study. I have not spoken much about the secularity of this enchantment because, as I said at the outset, this enchantment’s secularity merely lies in the fact that these value properties need not have a sacral or religious ground nor seek any outreach to the supernatural. The natural world contains values, something that is only denied by a superstition of modernity that equates

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  69 nature with what the natural sciences study. So, elements in nature can be enchanted (i.e., fall outside the purview of natural sciences) without any commitment to the supernatural. Now, of course, it might be said that the enchantment I have provided for, by the lights of this superstition, is a commitment to the supernatural. Well, there are two ways of looking at this: One can look at it just in the way that my last sentence has conveyed or one can say that if mere values (without any sacred or religious source) being in the world is to count as supernatural simply because natural science does not study values, that is a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that nature must be equated with what the natural sciences study. It is just an exposure of its status as a superstition of our time. And a quite decisive reason to look at it in this second way is that if one did not, if one looked at it in the first way instead, we would have turned the very idea of ‘supernatural’ into a bad pun – on the one hand meaning what it always meant (an element of spook that is unscientific and contradicts the laws of science and goes beyond the vocabulary of our ordinary and natural talk about the world) and on the other hand meaning what the superstition has artificially forced it to mean (that even our most ordinary and natural talk about the world as containing threats and cruelty, is spooky). The plain fact is that nothing in our talk that sees value properties in nature makes that talk unscientific. You can only be unscientific if you contradict some proposition in some science. But no science contains the proposition that there is nothing in nature that is not countenanced by the natural sciences. That proposition is so dogmatically absurd that, no science could have put it forward. If Richard Dawkins at times says that sort of thing, he is not saying it the excellent scientist that he no doubt is, he is saying it in his own time as a philosopher and public intellectual. And, as Wittgenstein often said of many propositions of a similarly dogmatic sort, only a philosopher would suggest it. One subscribes to the supernatural only if one gives unscientific answers to science’s questions (as for instance creationism does to the scientific question about the origins of the universe). One makes no commitment to the supernatural if one says that not all questions (not even all questions about nature) are science’s questions. The question of value is not a question of science, and the secular enchantment that finds values in nature is quite properly, then, an enchantment about the natural, something, I repeat, only a superstition of modernity (exhaustively equating the natural with what natural science studies) would deny.

Framing Disenchantment I have spent a great deal of time trying to show that, in one quite distinct and specifiable sense, we have never been disenchanted. What specific sense is that? Ever since we evolved into having the size of brain that

70  Akeel Bilgrami suffices to make us the full-fledged and irreducibly practical agents that we human subjects are, our relations – qua such subjects – to the world must necessarily have been to the world as enchanted with value properties, properties that are outside the scope of the natural sciences and its laws. But how are we to reconcile this with the Weberian idea, which I have also readily acknowledged at the outset: that in the modern period there has been a disenchantment of the world which has transformed the very idea of nature by initially equating it with what the natural sciences study and then, via the consequent removal of all constraints of value on it, in turn, transforming it into a site from which we take with impunity – essentially thus transforming the very idea of ‘nature’ into the idea of ‘natural resources’. How can I  both acknowledge these chronic effects of disenchantment while denying, as I have spent so many pages doing, that we have ever been disenchanted? Let me briefly (much too briefly in a chapter that is already too long) address this puzzle before closing. It can’t be addressed adequately in the space I have, so it will only be a very few gestural remarks – without any rigorous detail – in the rough and general direction of addressing it. What is needed in order to make sense of these large disenchanting transformations even as we retain (and necessarily retain if we are to account for our practical agency) our quotidian perceptually and agentively responsive relations to a world suffused with value properties, is to introduce a point familiar to psychologists under the name ‘the frame problem’. Here, then, might be a way to think of it. The conceptual transformation by which nature came to be conceived as natural resources (along with the other accompanying transformations I mentioned) is one that occurs at a level of collective, public understanding, a form of understanding generated by alliances made between powerful forces in society that control governance, political economy, and a slowly emerging and increasingly consciously determined public opinion on these large collective and public matters. It is at this level that policy gets shaped and implemented and though that happens on sites distant from quotidian life, many ordinary people often acquiesce, sometimes even enthusiastically, in these transformative outlooks and policies. By contrast, there is a quotidian level of understanding in these very same people that is and always has been in accord with the enchantment that I have said is a necessary condition for being practical agents at all, an understanding of our relations to the world as bearing a perceptual practical and moral epistemology of the sort I have elaborated at length. Our thinking and our responses to the world in these two frames is often implicitly, and mostly unknowingly, at odds with the each other. And that is unsurprising since one has a frame problem only when the two frames are insulated from each other. So, the important point here is that this distinction is not just a distinction between the collective level, on the one hand, and the individual (local and quotidian) level, on the

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  71 other, but also, as a result of that distinction, often each individual mentality finds itself in two quite different frames. On the one hand, there is the frame of quotidian life, where agentive responses are shaped by our perception of the normative demands of the value properties in the world around us. On the other hand, the individual human mind, unless it has very deliberately and self-consciously resisted it, has also surrendered itself to a different more public frame of thinking that the collective has shaped, which is dominated by the ideas and ideologies that have had such a longstanding run since they took hold in the period that I have identified genealogically in this essay. And because it is in two frames, each insulated from the other, it cannot see the many inconsistencies that may exist between judgements and responses that it makes in the two different frames. Just to be clear it is not as if the very general contours of the idea of a differential framing, public and quotidian, is a modern phenomenon. No doubt such differential framing, thought of in these very general labeling terms that I have given it, has existed throughout history. So, it is not as if the distinction between two frames emerged only in early modernity. What occurred in early modernity is a significant transformation of the thinking in one of these two frames, a significant transformation of the collective outlooks at the public level of thought of an earlier period, and that transformation is a result of what I have been invoking in my Weberian rhetoric of disenchantment. In the way I have put it, disenchantment and the shaping and forming of policies by which its lamentable transformations of the concept of nature and the world we inhabit are effected, occur in the thinking and agency of a collective and public level and individuals thinking in that more public frame of mind. But there is something worth raising as a question, though I regret that I do not have the space to answer it here at all and will have to leave that for another occasion. So far in this chapter, I have only spoken in neutrally philosophical terms of a practical perceptual epistemology that characterizes the thinking that goes into the quotidian frame which preserves enchantment in a secular version. But might we go on to ask: Are there, in the conceptual resources available in the epistemologies of value that are exercised by the thinking in the quotidian frame, political possibilities to counter the ill effects of the disenchantment that has occurred due to the thinking that occurs in the collective frame? My own view is that there is real scope for such political possibilities and that it should be the goal of a humane politics to first break down the boundaries between these two frames, so that people move into a unified frame of thinking and thereby realize the contradictions (hitherto unrecognized as contradictions while there were two frames since frames are insulated from each other) between the thinking in their quotidian and their public responses to the world; and then, via

72  Akeel Bilgrami political education, scale up the thinking that often went into the quotidian frame and deploy it to be critical of the thinking that went into the public and collective frame where policies were shaped. A  broad framework for political possibilities of this kind could not possibly be convicted of being an exercise in nostalgia since all the critical resources by which it is generated are derived from the quotidian frameworks that are present here and now. They are not hankerings for a remote and unrecoverable past. Much may turn, then, for our contemporary concerns, if we posed the question in just the way I have and seek to answer it in detail and depth.

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  73

Appendix: Why Secular Enchantment Entails No Intentional Vitalism In recent years, there has been a small but growing recognition of the idea that I  have described as ‘secular enchantment’, viz., that nature, even artifice or things, are quite properly describable in terms that do not exhaustively fall within the purview of natural science, but rather make normative demands on our practical agency. However, I want to strongly dissociate myself from certain philosophical commitments that seem to others to follow from the idea that nature and ‘things’ make normative demands on us. What I  want to disavow is the claim made by some (Jane Bennet, somewhat differently by Bruno Latour)17 that the use of the expression ‘normative demands’ here is literally true. Bennett explicitly commits to such an intentional vitalism in nature; Latour, more complicatedly, attributes intentions to ‘assemblages’ constructed around nature and artifice. It is both wrong and unnecessary to make any such reckless theoretical commitments. First, wrong. The idea that nature makes demands on us is a metaphor. Nature contains values but their normative demands are not intentionally made. The reason is straightforward. It is a mark of what we mean by intentionality that subjects who possess intentionality are potentially appropriate targets of a certain form of criticism. I can criticize you for doing something wrong or for having destructive thoughts, as you can me. More relevantly to our present topic, I  can criticize you for making certain normative demands of me  – unreasonable ones, by my lights. But we don’t criticize elements in nature or artifice in the same sense. We may say ‘a hurricane was destructive’ but that is a ‘criticism’ only by courtesy, not the sort of criticism that you and I make of each other’s doings and thoughts and demands. The view I oppose seeks a wider application for intentionality than my restricted one. I don’t want to dogmatically rule this out. We may cautiously admit some cases of this, but only if we have sober grounds continuous with the grounds on which we attribute human intentionality. The possibly admissible cases are not those of the intentional vitalists. Thus, we might allow, for instance, that a group or collectivity of individual human subjects has intentionality. This is quite different from saying that elements in nature or ‘things’ have intentionality. A group of individual human subjects might be said, qua group, to have intentionality, precisely because it can engage in the deliberative structure of thought and decision that individual human subjects do. This happens, say, when individuals in the group put aside their individual preferences and think from the point of view of the group, bestowing on the group a singular point of view. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contractualism may

74  Akeel Bilgrami be read as viewing the general will to be the outcome of such a group reasoner and decision-maker. And that is precisely why we can criticize the group (a corporation) over and above criticizing individuals (its CEO). We may extend the criticism and even punish the corporation (over and above the CEO or even sometimes instead of the CEO) by fining it. But elements in nature and things do not possess or carry out any such deliberative structure or process, so there is no similar ground for attributing intentionality to them, nor, as a consequence, intelligibly criticizing or punishing such elements. That is why talk of nature making normative demands on us is metaphorical in a way that it need not be in the case of a group, and certainly is not in the case of individual human subjects. Second, unnecessary. There is no theoretical advantage in multiplying notions of intentionality, one that human individuals (and perhaps groups of human individuals) literally possess, as well as another that things in the world (including nature) also literally possess; conversely, no disadvantage, nothing we lose, in conceding that the idea that nature makes normative demands on us is a metaphor. Why not? Because it is not a metaphor that can be paraphrased away without loss of meaning and information. It is not a dispensable metaphor. And the crucial point is that when we say a metaphor can’t be paraphrased away, we are not merely putting forward a linguistic thesis about a certain figure of speech. The linguistic thesis that a metaphor is not paraphrasable away has a metaphysical counterpart. To make the linguistic claim is simultaneously to make the following metaphysical claim: there is an aspect or a fragment of reality, which can only be captured by that metaphor. And the reality that is captured by the metaphorical attribution of intentionality to things, to elements in nature, when we say that they make normative demands on us, is as authentic as any reality that literal attributions of intentionality describe. It is just not the same reality. It is not intentionality. Thus, without compromising at all the significance of the fact that value properties are in nature, making normative demands on us, I can still disavow intentional vitalism.

Notes 1. M. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in The Sociology of Science, eds. B. Barber and W. Hirsch (New York: Free Press, 1962), 569–89. 2. I don’t just have in mind the vast infantry of up-to-the-minute modernists, who are bound to say this. It is a broader tendency. How broad is reflected in the fact that even Charles Taylor, whose own intellectual stances are avowedly inflected by his deep religious commitments, nevertheless is sufficiently impressed by the stamp of the slowly evolving ‘secular’ age in the world of Latin Christendom, to be skeptical of talk of ‘re-enchantment’, if that talk is conceived as some sort of systematic reversal of what Weber was describing. See particularly his essay, ‘Disenchantment/Re-enchantment’, in The Joys of

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  75 Secularism, ed. George Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). See also Ch. 1 in this volume. 3. See particularly the chapters on ‘enchantment’ in my Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 4. Thus, for instance, I had claimed that Elinor Ostrom’s remarkable work on governing the commons based on a careful study of the commons in four continents may be one kind of source for developing the basis of local reversals of this kind. See Ostrom Elinor, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 5. I say ‘unschooled’ because scholarly theological and academic understanding were, no doubt, more aware of keeping apart the conflations that needed exposing. 6. The term ‘pantheist’ is said to have been coined by John Toland, a heterodox figure of the mid and late seventeenth century, but what it denoted, obviously, had a much earlier history, with origins going back all the way to early animist traditions. 7. In fact, ‘absconditus’ does not mean what it sounds like to the English-speaking ear. It means, roughly, ‘put away for safeguarding’. And I think we should explore in more detail than the Weber-influenced social sciences have done both the metaphysical and the more worldly motivations for (this mandarin) thinking by which God needed to be safeguarded by such an enforced migration to a strictly external and providential station and role. What were the dangers exactly of the ‘enthusiasm’ that belief in a sacralized nature amounted to that he needed safeguarding by such an exile? After all, for many Newtonian scientists including Newton himself, Newton’s laws were apparently compatible with the existence of God. And indeed, there is no reason to think that if his existence was compatible with Newton laws, that it was only God conceived as a clock winder at an external station providing for motion that was compatible with them. From the point of view of Newton’s laws, if that conception of God was acceptable, there is no ground for saying that the enthusiast’s quite different conception of God as present in nature and providing for motion as an inner source of dynamism was incompatible. So, if it is not the laws of science that made it compulsory, why was it so compulsory to see him as the former rather than the latter? What intellectual as well as worldly interests did it serve? 8. See John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, Monist 62, no. 3 (July  1979). McDowell has gone on to develop the position (often called ‘value realism’ or, in its more particular form, ‘moral realism’) he attributes to Aristotle in several essays along his own independent lines. What I will be presenting an argument for in this chapter departs from McDowell significantly because, as will emerge, I  tie my argument very closely to considerations of agency and the perspective of agency. One of the consequences of doing so, though not one I will have the space to develop in this chapter, is that on my view it is quite meaningless to assert (or, for that matter, to deny) a commonplace claim among philosophers, which McDowell explicitly subscribes to, the ‘supervenience’ of values on natural facts (i.e., facts that are susceptible to natural scientific study). For more on these disagreements between McDowell and me, see the discussion on this topic in Ch. 5 of my Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) and in the symposium on that book in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81, no. 3 (November 2010). 9. It is worth making explicit here that this raises the question of a longstanding and familiar distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘world’, whereby human subjects with minds are viewed as inhabiting a natural world. For long, the standard

76  Akeel Bilgrami way of making this distinction was mired in a Cartesian intellectual history by which even the human body, in its materiality, is viewed as part of the world, external to the human mind. The idea that values are derivable in some sense from states of mind eventually led, in the intellectual history of these themes, to an intellectual tradition (often described as the ‘hermeneutical’ or the ‘verstehen’ tradition) whereby the mind and all things implicated in mentality were describable in terms of enchantment (i.e., in terms that were not susceptible to nor subsumable under the methods and laws of the natural sciences, but rather were the subject matter of ‘the human sciences’) while the ‘world’ remained resolutely disenchanted, the domain exhaustively studied and explained by the natural sciences. The argument in the present chapter is precisely intended to show that this is a shallow concession to enchantment and that there is no real understanding the enchantment thus allowed to human mentality without seeing the world itself as enchanted by the presence of value properties (and thus not exhaustively studied and explained by the natural sciences). 10. I am assuming, for the sake of argument, contradictory to my own philosophical convictions, that the antecedent in this conditional is coherent, i.e., that we can coherently conceive of a subject that only has a third-person perspective on herself. 11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Some highly misguided and implausible naturalist and psychologistic readings of Kant seek to deny that he thought agency is presupposed in ‘objective judgement’, the subject of his first Critique. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). (He, of course, wrote more than work on practical reason.) 13. See Spinoza Ethics, trans. G. H. R. Parkinson, especially part 6. The Freud references are too wide and diverse and ubiquitous and well-known to mention any specific work. Hampshire, who has written on both Spinoza and on Freud, discusses some of these issues in his book Freedom of the Individual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Legacy Series 2016). 14. It would be an elementary confusion to think that what philosophers often (rightly) say  – that there are value elements involved in scientific inquiry  – does anything to spoil the distinction I am addressing here between the perspective of theoretical agency (as is present in scientific inquiry and which I am insisting is disengaged and detached) and the engagements of the perspective of practical agency. My distinction is just the distinction between the themes of the first and second of Kant’s Critiques. That the sciences are often said not to be value-neutral does not amount to an objection to this distinction. Nor is this distinction undermined if detached scientific inquiry is motivated – as it often may be – by practical considerations. 15. See Gareth Evans, Varieties of Reference (Oxford University Press, 1983), 225. 16. See Chs. 4 and 5 of my book Self-Knowledge and Resentment. 17. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) and Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Bibliography Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A  Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bilgrami, Akeel. Self-Knowledge and Resentment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Might There Be Secular Enchantment?  77 ———. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Evans, Gareth. Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Hampshire, Stuart. Freedom of the Individual. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. McDowell, John. “Virtue and Reason.” The Monist 62, no. 3 (July  1979): 331–50. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Translated by G. H. R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Taylor, Charles. “Disenchantment-Reenchantment.” In The Joys of Secularism, edited by George Levine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation [1917].” In The Sociology of Science, edited by Bernard Barber and Walter Hirsch, 569–89. New York: Free Press, 1962.

Part II

Genealogies of Reenchantment

4 Did Disenchantment Ever Happen? Retrieving the Forgotten Story of Transcendence Guido Vanheeswijck In some sense, it can be argued, the process of disenchantment is irreversible. The aspiration to reenchant  .  .  . points to a different process, which may indeed reproduce features analogous to the enchanted world, but does not in any simple sense restore it (Taylor, “DisenchantmentReenchantment”, 287).∗

Introduction1 Reenchantment is a highly controversial term, to say the least. Since the 1980s, some historians even claim that the phenomenon coined by Weber as “the disenchantment of the world” has never occurred and that, consequently, there is no need for any form of reenchantment.2 Moreover, and apart from the discussion whether or not disenchantment has ever taken place, every plea for “reenchantment” depends in any event on the way Max Weber’s term “disenchantment” and its antonym “enchantment” are defined and interpreted. To give one example. In his most recent monograph, Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung, Hans Joas uncovers the ambiguity of the Weberian term disenchantment in order to “disenchant disenchantment.”3 According to Joas, at least three different terms or concepts are necessary to make sense of what Weber had in mind when he designated the transition from a premodern to a modern worldview as the disenchantment of the world, i.e. demagification, desacralization, and detranscendentalization.4 The only remedy left against Weber’s abuse of the term disenchantment in his eyes is to redifferentiate all the aspects that Weber had de-differentiated by showing that, even if demagification, desacralization, and detranscendentalization are interrelated, they remain different processes, the complexity of which cannot be subsumed under a deceptive theoretical unity. ∗ Charles Taylor. “Disenchantment-Re-enchantment.” In Dilemmas and Connections. Selected Essays, ed. Charles Taylor (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011b), 287.

82  Guido Vanheeswijck This chapter focuses on the specific role and existential impact of detranscendentalization within the general process of disenchantment. Even if the answer to the question whether or not disenchantment took place remains a bone of contention among scholars, I want to spell out the argument that detranscendentalization (I know, it is a terrible term) effectively took place in the transition from the premodern to the modern era. Consequently, my central argument will be that if we reflect about the possibility of reenchantment from this perspective, it may equally entail a new form of transcendence. In order to elaborate this specific issue, three steps are taken. First, Joas’ threefold distinction of the concept of disenchantment is further modified. It is expanded to six different shades of meaning, belonging to as divergent domains as those of cosmology, ethics, epistemology, and religion but at the same time intimately intertwined as interrelated aspects of the process of disenchantment. As will become obvious, these diverse meanings inherent in the overall concept of disenchantment are selected from a wide variety of monographs and articles, written by the most eminent scholars in the field of genealogical research as to the concepts of enchantment and disenchantment. Next, the question whether disenchantment in terms of detranscendentalization has ever happened is addressed in dialogue with the findings of a fairly recent historiographical (Scribner,5 Walsham)6 tradition. Finally, in line with an affirmative answer to the second question, I arrive at the central issue and focus on the relation between reenchantment and transcendence. In particular, the relation between secular enchantment and religious enchantment with regard to the problem of transcendence will be examined.

The Different Meanings of the Concepts of Enchantment/ Disenchantment and Their Genealogy The concept “enchantment of the world” has received more than one meaning in sociological and philosophical scholarship since Weber’s introduction of the term. All these shades of meaning have been developed by a host of scholars, among whom the most important ones are Max Weber, Marcel Gauchet, Charles Taylor, and Akeel Bilgrami. (1) The first and most general meaning to which the original German term “Zauber” in Weber’s neologism “Entzauberung der Welt”7 refers is magic. A magical world is a world filled with spirits and demons whose benevolent or malevolent forces impinge on human beings. (2) The second meaning is related to a cosmological theory, called “the Great Chain of Being.” This theory was propounded by theologians and philosophers alike, who saw the cosmos as a hierarchically structured whole, both in its general structure and in its different components. The hierarchical complementarity of the different parts within the cosmos was reflected in the hierarchical order of the state and the hierarchical order within human beings (soul versus body). (3) The third meaning is situated on the anthropological level. The enchanted concept of subjectivity is not that

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  83 of a “buffered” self, the center of which is the mind as the only locus of feelings and thoughts; no, the enchanted self is seen as being “porous,”8 which means that the boundary between man and world is fuzzy and the genesis of meaning is not only in the mind, but in things as well. But what is often forgotten is that the cluster of these three different shades of meaning has its repercussions at diverse other levels. (4) The relation between a porous self and an enchanted world has its consequences for the ethical dimension: in that perspective meaningfulness is not something subjectively projected on an indifferent world, but it has an ontological status, making an appeal to and resonating within us. Put differently, an enchanted world is no world divided into facts and values, but forms a whole where all things are permeated with symbolic value and belong to a deeper level of ontological and ethical meaningfulness.9 (5) In an enchanted worldview where the boundaries between man and world, the immanent and transcendent realms, the domains of facts and values are porous, the epistemological dominance of a detached thirdperson perspective is absent.10 (6) All these dimensions (cosmological, anthropological, ethical) are intertwined on the religious level as well. In an enchanted world, the power of the sacred is situated in the reign of the invisible and its operative strength depends on the reality of an interaction between the beyond and the world here below. Accordingly, the issues of meaningfulness and of religious belief are seen in a completely different perspective from that of people living in a disenchanted world. It is not surprising that the antonyms of the six different meanings of an enchanted world pop up in the following description of what we may understand by the Weberian term “disenchantment of the world.” (1) Magic as a salvation technique disappeared; spiritual and demonic enchanters evaporated. (2) The cosmological theory of the Great Chain of Being with its hierarchical theory of correspondences was replaced by a mechanistic worldview, in which all quantitative measurable data are causally related. (3) On the anthropological level, the concept of subjectivity has been transformed from a porous into a buffered self. It goes without saying that this threefold change of meanings had its repercussions at the other levels as well. (4) The opposition between a buffered self and a disenchanted world affected the ethical dimension: since meaningfulness does no longer exist outside of us but is projected on an indifferent world, we have entered, in Weber’s formula, an age of “disenchanted polytheism of values.” (5) In a disenchanted worldview, where the boundaries between man and world, facts and values are clear-cut, the epistemological dominance of a detached third-person perspective is omnipresent. (6) All these dimensions (cosmological, anthropological, ethical, epistemological) contribute on the religious level to a disenchanted world, where the power of the sacred (or a transcendent God) has faded. Accordingly, the issues of meaningfulness and of religious belief are seen in a completely different perspective from that of people living in an enchanted world.

84  Guido Vanheeswijck To sum up. The descriptive standard view on the transition from an enchanted world to a disenchanted world may be defined in two stages, accompanied by an existential question: (1) originally there was an enchanted world; and (2) we have definitely lost this enchanted world. And then (3) the existential question arises whether we are now in need of reenchantment. The genealogical default position, functioning as the justification of the standard view on the religious level and most apparent in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, reads as follows: the Protestant Reformation as a variant of Christianity rejected the Catholic belief in the operative force of sacraments and sacramentals and other magical forces as mechanisms for salvation. Consequently, it operated as a catalyzer for getting rid of all enchanted obstacles that prevented scientists from developing an objective worldview and entrepreneurs from pursuing worldly success. In particular Weber’s view of religion as capable of self-rationalization, and thus of disenchantment, exerted a huge influence over following decades. His connection between capitalism and Protestant ethics was regarded as one of many possible examples of religion’s internal capacity for self-transformation and as a warning against such simplifying theories as that “science has substituted religion.” His claim that, with the rise of modern capitalism, money becomes a goal in itself and is no longer subservient to “higher goals,” let alone religious ones, is derivative from his conviction about the central role of the spirit of Protestantism and its image of God in this regard. Originally, certain strands of Protestantism, such as Calvinism, developed a theory of predestination, in which man’s fate is regulated by divine providence. Every person’s salvation depends solely on God’s grace. This made – paradoxically enough – Calvinist believers strive for worldly success. The more wealth one could accumulate within earthly existence, the firmer the proof of election by God. But, whereas the economic works by man were seen originally as an homage and an act of gratitude to the benedictions of God, by the same token, a lot of energy was invested in worldly affairs, which eventually were cut loose from their divine purposes. In his debate with Karl Löwith on the origin of modernity, Hans Blumenberg argued in his classic book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age in a similar vein. Like Weber, Blumenberg saw a decisive role for Protestantism in the transition from a medieval enchanted worldview to a modern disenchanted one. Already late-medieval eschatology was, according to him, not primarily based on the hope for salvation, but on the fear of condemnation. This fear was theologically deepened in Protestantism by the nominalist account of a voluntarist and almighty God, who could at any time alter the “ratio” of his own creation arbitrarily. Hence man could no longer be considered as the image of a trustworthy God whose almighty will and thinking infinitely transcend the human

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  85 condition, nor could nature be seen as the enchanted reflection of divine creation. As a result, man was left on his own, lonesome between an almighty but capricious Deus Absconditus on the one hand, and a whimsical and irrational nature on the other. Accordingly, this predicament gave rise to the modern idea of self-assertion (“Selbstbehauptung”): man could only escape from his unenviable position by becoming master and commander of nature by his own rationality, not by understanding God’s rationality. Modern science, in combination with different strands of Protestantism, developed in this context as a perfectly legitimate endeavor to subsume the world under universal scientific laws and so disenchant the universe into a mechanistic world. In more recent decades, philosophers have widened the scope of Weber’s and Blumenberg’s thesis. Both their positions revolved around the relation between Christianity and modernity in very specific historical figures (philosophical and theological nominalism and its influence on Protestantism). For Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor, these specific episodes only tell a relatively small part of the whole story. Inspired by Karl Jaspers’ Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, where Christianity’s centrality in the process of disenchantment is questioned by pointing to the importance of what Jaspers coined as the era of ‘axial religions’ (roughly 800–200 B.C.), Gauchet and Taylor continue to recognize the pivotal importance of Christianity, but situate its importance in a larger story about the evolution of religion. In The Disenchantment of the World, Marcel Gauchet claims somewhat paradoxically that the “reign of the invisible” or “transcendence” first needed to be articulated more deeply, in order to eventually drift away from the “visible” or “immanent” world. The axial age, and the Judeo-Christian tradition, constituted historical stages of a long process that articulated and deepened this ontological dualism, and thus made it possible to ultimately separate the transcendent from the immanent. Gauchet follows Weber in his description of this evolution as “disenchantment”, but broadens the term’s meaning: We cannot understand religion’s origins and major developments unless we try to understand the enormous transformation which has shaped us and which came through the disenchantment of the world. For Weber this expression specifically meant “the elimination of magic as a salvation technique.” I do not believe that broadening it to mean the impoverishment of the reign of the invisible distorts this meaning. For as I will try to show, the disappearance of enchanters and powerful supernatural beings is only the superficial sign of a much deeper revolution in relations between heaven and earth, which decisively reconstructed the human abode separate from the divine. The true significance of the link between Protestantism and

86  Guido Vanheeswijck capitalism lies not in the influence of spiritual norms on worldly behavior, but in our interaction with the beyond and our investment in the here-below.11 Gauchet sees Christianity as the penultimate stage in this process of disenchantment (prior to the Enlightenment), depicting it as “the religion for the departure from religion” – la religion de la sortie de la religion. This process of disenchantment he calls irreversible. Charles Taylor is more prudent in his considerations about the public role of religion in the future. In his magnum opus on secularization, A Secular Age, he describes the vicissitudes of religion as a “zig-zag account,” in opposition to linear theories about the gradual decline of religion in human history. His main purpose is not to describe the process of disenchantment empirically, be it as the decline of religion in the public sphere or as the decay of personal religious beliefs. Rather he wants to offer a cultural analysis of the transition from an enchanted to a disenchanted world at a transcendental level, looking for the conditions which made it possible for Western culture to evolve from a clearly religious age around 1500 A.D. to a secular age in our times. Taylor dismisses a linear “subtraction story” about, for instance, science and religion – where science is held to make religion obsolete by taking over its truth function but disenchanting its contents – as one-sided. The subtraction story of positivism, scientism, or new atheism ignores the essential role of religious transformations in the genesis of modern science. The history of religion proves that it is itself capable of rationalization (the Weberian thesis). Already in the axial period, the following reflexive questions were raised: how can the gods behave as capricious as human beings? How can good and evil be mingled in a divine nature? Later on, the late Middle Ages and the period of Protestant Reform inaugurated what Foucault has called the “disciplining” of culture. This new culture of discipline certainly contributed to the rigid methods of modern science. Taylor, therefore, describes his own account as a Reform Master Narrative. Though Taylor’s and Gauchet’s genealogies of modernity, secularization, and disenchantment broadly converge on an empirical and transcendental level, their ways part when it comes to their appreciation of the disenchantment of the world. Gauchet’s story logically results in his thesis about the irreversibility of disenchantment in the public sphere. Taylor’s zig-zag account leads to a more nuanced position. With Robert Bellah (and Hegel), Taylor believes that “nothing is ever lost.” Every historical epoch is always indebted to previous eras. Therefore, Taylor believes it is by no means predictable which road the future will take: will our society eventually ban all references to religion, or will it rediscover the richness of the religious past? Put differently, will our society be satisfied with a disenchanted world, or will it be looking for reenchantment? Are we now

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  87 in existential need of retrieving an alternative form of enchantment and if so, what would that reenchanted alternative consist of?

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen? Before looking at that question, however, I first have to answer the preliminary question whether the disenchantment of the world has ever happened. Did disenchantment effectively take place, and if so, when did it happen and what do we understand by that process? Over the last decades, a number of historians have criticized the Weberian story about disenchantment. These historians argue more or less that “thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.”12 Put differently, if their arguments are correct and disenchantment has never taken place, the sociological and philosophical quest for reenchantment is an otiose one. In fact, questions of this kind regarding the real status of cultural phenomena have always been a matter of debate between historians and philosophers. While historians generally criticize the lack of historical sources used by philosophers, the latter reproach the former for their lack of conceptual clarity. But the most important topic of controversy among them relates to a different form of questions. In Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Charles Taylor devotes a short chapter, “Digression on Historical Explanation” to the latter difference.13 He underlines that in his philosophical analysis of modern Western culture not the causal-genealogical question of the historian – e.g. what brought disenchantment about? – is central, but the less ambitious, but existentially more important, interpretive question of the philosopher  – e.g. what drew people to disenchantment? What did attract them to disenchantment? What gave it its spiritual force? Of course, both questions – the causal-genealogical and the existential-interpretive – are one way or another interwoven, but a reliable judgment of a historical or philosophical interpretation always has to take into account which of both questions were predominant.14 With regard to the question whether disenchantment effectively took place, historians like Robert Scribner and Alexandra Walsham have tried, by means of a meticulous causal-genealogical analysis of Protestantism, to expose Weber’s thesis of the “disenchantment of the world” as a false interpretation of what really has happened. According to Scribner, the explanation for the apparent plausibility of the thesis resides less in the nature of the Reformation of the sixteenth century and more in its historiography. Historical understanding of exactly what “the Reformation” had been about and what it produced developed through many stages and phases, although the view of the subsequent

88  Guido Vanheeswijck two centuries emphasized its potently sacred character: the Reformation was part of a great divine intervention in the world, part of God’s ultimate plan for creation and humanity. It was the Enlightenment that first interpreted the Reformation as part of a long-term process of rationalization and secularization, an interpretation further reworked by the historiography of the nineteenth century until it reconstructed our modern view of the Reformation.15 His conclusion was, therefore, unambiguous: “It may turn out that the disenchantment of the world played a marginal role in both the developing history of Protestantism and in advance toward the modern world.”16 In a similar vein, Walsham proclaimed that “the disenchantment thesis may have nearly run its course and be approaching the end of its natural life. Future scholars are likely to regard the protracted debate about it as an historiographical red herring and an interpretative cul de sac.”17 To underpin their standpoint, Scribner and Walsham go over a number of historical facts. Obviously, the devil maintained a privileged place in Protestant theology and practice alike. Far from desacralizing the world, Lutheranism and Calvinism remained apocalyptic and eschatological and even saw world history as a cosmic struggle between the divine and the diabolical.18 Moreover, Protestantism maintained rituals, sacred time and holy places as well so that the boundaries between the sacred and the secular remained highly porous and the seepage from the one into the other highly unpredictable.19 A further consequence of Protestant belief was a very specific variant of enchantment, i.e. what Robert Scribner has called a “moralized universe.” Whereas pre-Reformation Christianity believed that certain human actions, good or bad, could provoke supernatural intervention in the natural world – for instance, the birth of a deformed child was seen as punishment for human sin and divine punishment or reward was related to moral or immoral behavior and vice versa – Protestants significantly “broadened the notion by insisting that the material consequences of moral failures were  .  .  . applicable to the failings of the population at large.” This broadened notion of divine punishment/reward became constitutive for Protestant disciplinary prohibitions and obligations and generated a moralized universe with the effect of increasing anxiety: “Indeed, anxiety may even have been increased by awareness of the omnipresence of a sacred order in and among the secular.”20 Apart from the notion of a moralized universe that functioned as a less sacramental but more general variant of an enchanted world, similarity between Catholicism and Protestantism was also obvious in other respects: If we were to lay a Protestant template on that . . . of Catholic belief, we would find one nestling inside the other like a pair of angle

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  89 brackets. The relationship of Protestant to Catholic was a matter of degree [italics mine]  .  .  . because it was positioned in the same force-field of sacrality. . . . The possibility of consorting with, and becoming implicated in, demonic activity was as real for Protestants as for Catholics.21 Even if Protestant theology adopted a rhetoric of enlightened rationality and explicitly attacked the basic presuppositions of the Catholic economy of the sacred (sacraments were re-conceptualized as signs, Eucharist was seen as the memorial of Christ’s sacrifice rather than its re-enactment), it was also clear that theology is not a static body of doctrine but that it is responsive to cultural alterations, often leading to a process of syncretism with popular beliefs, in particular when the difference between high theory and daily practice is taken into consideration.22 On the basis of these historical data, both historians claim that Protestantism was itself deeply enchanting and moralizing. Consequently, they opt for John Bossy’s neutral phrase “migrations of the holy” instead of the Weberian term “disenchantment of the world” to describe the evolutions from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.23 In their perspective, the plea for a ‘reenchantment of the world’ does not make any sense. However, there is one important proviso in their argument. Notwithstanding their claim that Protestantism was as enchanting as Catholicism used to be, both Scribner and Walsham emphasize the central difference between Catholicism and Protestantism with regard to the structure of sacrality and enchantment: What difference did the Reformation make to this complex and subtle structure of sacrality? The radical point of departure associated with Martin Luther . . . resides in their understanding of the absolute sovereignty and otherness of God, so that it was impossible for human beings to gain any knowledge of the divine by merely created means [italics mine]. This viewpoint destroyed the basis for sacraments and sacramentals, indeed for any kind of ritual by means of which this-worldly symbolic action could have any transcendental efficacy. All sacred action flowed one-way, from the divine to the human.24 Therefore, Alexandra Walsham concludes that, in spite of the strong resemblances between popular Protestant and Catholic belief, “none of these observations should be allowed to eclipse the fact of long-term change.”25 If we allow then for the long-term, the surprising conclusion must be that the meticulous scrutiny of sources by the historians does not contradict the main thrust of the interpretations by Weber, Gauchet, and Taylor, i.e. that a disenchantment of the world has really taken place

90  Guido Vanheeswijck and that the Reformation has played a role in that process. Although they confirm the findings of Scribner and Walsham that the Protestant Reformation itself was not disenchanting at all, all three of them highlight the fact that the Reformation initiated an unintentional process in the long run leading to the disenchantment of the world.26 At best, the historians’ detailed analyses demonstrate that the teleological paradigm in which Protestantism itself is equated with modernization, secularization, and progress proves to be untenable. But such a strict teleological paradigm has never been held by the proponents of the Weberian thesis.27 That is the main reason why, as indicated, Charles Taylor speaks about a zig-zag trail: The straight path account of modern secularity can’t be sustained. Instead, what I’m offering here is a zig-zag account, one full of unintended consequences. That the autonomy of nature eventually  .  .  . came to serve as grist to the mill of exclusive humanism is clearly true. That establishing it was already a step in that direction is profoundly false. This move had a quite different meaning at the time, and in other circumstances might never have come to have the meaning that it bears for unbelievers today.28 Applied to the concept of disenchantment, its energy is double: in the short run this could lead to an intensification of certain of the old beliefs, particularly in witches, who were now redefined in a much more sinister role as helpmeets of the devil. . . . But in the longer run, this attack could not but undermine the whole outlook within which these persecutions make sense.29 To conclude. There are at least two ways of assessing the transitions that took place in Western culture around the sixteenth century: either in terms of “migrations of the holy” or in terms of the Weberian phrase “disenchantment of the world.” At first glance, both assessments seem to be contradictory. But if we take into consideration that in the short term “migrations of the holy” took place and accept that in the long run a disenchantment of the world has occurred, the two assessments might be complementary. But given that in the long run the Weberian position is correct, another question arises that is primarily of existential importance and that was not dealt with in the historians’ approach: is it possible to live in a completely disenchanted world? In this respect, Hans Joas refers in Die Macht des Heiligen to a passage from William James in order to clarify what is meant by the expression “disenchanted world.” James argues that the kind of meaninglessness brought about by the process of disenchantment never leads to a “world

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  91 relationship of the illusion free state of mind of the realist,” but “to that of the depressed.”30 If one is suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which the world may inspire someone, and if one tries to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, it will be almost impossible, according to James, to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. The whole universe, he continues, would then be without any significance or perspective. Hence, a completely disenchanted world is a world impossible to live in. If that is the case, if from an existential perspective to live in a completely disenchanted world is impossible, then why should one not only dispense as far as possible with the concept of disenchantment, but also get rid of the quest for reenchantment as something superfluous?31 But once again, I have to raise the question: is it really true that every reference to disenchantment is a mere figment? Or, put in more existential terms, what gave people the feeling of being caught up in a disenchanted world? Here, I follow Hans Joas’ central claim that the genealogical link between the religious search for transcendence and the ongoing process of disenchantment is much more complicated and multi-layered than is generally assumed by Weber and Gauchet. In response to their “negative genealogies” indebted to Nietzsche, he develops an affirmative genealogy, i.e. a scrupulous historical reconstruction of the genesis of whatever is seen as sacred (e.g. the sacredness of every individual in the declaration of human rights) from a pragmatic point of view. Instead of seeing disenchantment as part of a linear, teleological story towards secularization, he observes recurrent cycles of sacralization, desacralization, and resacralization in the context of an affirmative genealogy as historically contingent responses to ethical and existential challenges that give substance to people’s identity. In other words, there is no contrast between granting the impossibility of “living in a completely disenchanted world”, on the one hand, and accepting that a specific form of disenchantment has taken place since the sixteenth century with its inevitable repercussions on any future form of reenchantment whatsoever. More specifically, the main difference that has occurred between the enchanted forms of a premodern and possible forms of reenchantment in our current era may have to do with a drastic shift in the idea of God. When the idea of God’s providence gave way to the idea of a hidden God, or put differently, when the idea of God’s transcendence drastically changed, the experience of the relation between man and world drastically changed as well. Other forms of enchantment undoubtedly occurred, as Joas maintains correctly,32 but they were thoroughly different from their religiously oriented predecessors in premodern times. Consequently, the main differences between these alternative forms of enchantment are intimately related with the last aspect Joas distinguished in Weber’s overall concept of disenchantment, i.e. that of detranscendentalization.

92  Guido Vanheeswijck

Secular Reenchantment Versus Transcendent Reenchantment: The Future of the Religious Past? However much disagreement there still may be among proponents of the “migrations of the holy” thesis and advocates of the “disenchantment of the world” thesis, they all agree that the interpretation of the Christian dogma of incarnation during the period of Reformation and Counter-Reformation has played a pivotal role in the process towards disenchantment. That the original openness to a transcendent God who had incarnated Himself in his creation gave way to the idea of a Deus Absconditus from the Late Middle Ages onwards, led – unintentionally and in the long run  – to the disappearance of the transcendent realm. This world, no longer participating in the beyond, gradually acquired the status of self-sufficiency and of uniformity, susceptible to universal scientific laws. Given this disenchanting outcome, the question then arises what we are looking for exactly, when we talk about reenchantment? In his essay “Disenchantment-Reenchantment,” Taylor tries to clarify this question by defining the challenge posed by reenchantment: The issue of re-enchantment can be put this way: when we have left the enchanted world of spirits (popular magic) and no longer believe in the Great Chain (high theory), what sense can we make of the notion that nature or the universe which surrounds us is the locus of human meanings which are “objective,” in the sense that they are not just arbitrarily projected through choice or contingent desire?33 To clarify this question, let me return to the different shades of meaning of enchantment/disenchantment, as presented in the first section of this chapter. Undoubtedly, it is easier to define what reenchantment cannot be than to explain what it can be. Obviously, it does not entail a return to magic in the premodern world. It is impossible for us to go back to a world filled with malevolent and benevolent spirits and moral forces, with the assistance of which human beings could exercise control over nature. Moreover, it is clear that the process of disenchantment in the sense of Entzauberung (demagification) was carried out first of all for religious reasons. From the beginning, there was a clear-cut distinction between (axial) religion and magic: “on the one hand, human dependence on, and deference toward, the divine; on the other, human attempts to appropriate divine power and apply it instrumentally.”34 Hence, the enchanted belief in this instrumental application of magical powers to the world was exposed as credulity, first for religious reasons and only later for scientific reasons. In this specific sense of demagification, disenchantment is irreversible and a return to the enchanted chain of beings impossible.

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  93 But if it is impossible to go back to a magical world, does that also apply to the other aspects of enchantment, of which I select the aspect with the strongest existential impact, i.e. that of the porous status of the enchanted self, in which the boundary between man and world is fuzzy and the genesis of meaning is not only in the mind, but in things as well? At first glance, it seems to be so as well. The anthropological change which replaced the porous self of yore with what Taylor describes as a buffered self in a disenchanted world has become equivalent, in the field of modern epistemology and science, with the dominant position of an objective, detached point of view, a scientific third-person perspective which, in the domain of ethics, has given rise to a projection theory of values. Besides, this third-person perspective does not only disenchant the world, it is seen as well as the only objective way to know the world as it really is. In the domain of ethics, the main consequence of this epistemological stance is that, due to the introduction of the fact–value distinction, the values of a buffered self are seen as sheer subjective projections on an indifferent world that is no longer the “objective” locus of human meanings. This theory of ethical projectivism, together with the epistemologically disengaged, detached way of looking at the world, may be considered as the two main features of the process of disenchantment, at least with regard to the framing of its existential repercussions on daily life experiences. The concept of “framing” will be elaborated somewhat later in my argument. But first, I dwell on the problem whether the default position of an epistemologically disengaged approach and an ethical projection theory of values makes the project of reenchantment simply impossible. Secular Reenchantment It is precisely at the juncture of these two levels (epistemological and ethical) that Taylor and Bilgrami opt for new opportunities of reenchantment. Focusing on the distinction between the methodologies of ethics and positive science, they claim that in the domains of anthropology, ecology, and ethics a scientific third-person perspective is in need of an additional, complementary approach and they even argue that an ethical relation to other people or to nature is impossible from a detached third-person stance.35 In brief, two aspects inherent in the concept of disenchantment – a detached third-person stance and the idea of a buffered self – prevent people, in their eyes, from having the existential experience of being practical agents. In this respect, Taylor’s distinction between weak and strong evaluations is very illuminating. Whereas a weak evaluation depends on choices that we may not make or on espousing ends that we may not accept, because the worth of our choices is left outside our reflection on them, in

94  Guido Vanheeswijck the case of strong evaluations we cannot release ourselves from reflecting on their intrinsic worth. In other words, strong evaluations are in need of an ontology “to allow there to be real differences in motivation between ‘altruism’ and ‘strategy’.”36 The question then arises whether strong evaluations are possible in a completely disenchanted world. Here, Akeel Bilgrami’s analysis of the concept of enchantment (and agency) complements Taylor’s position. Bilgrami claims that the notion of agency is impossible “when one has a conception of value as residing entirely in our desires and moral sentiments rather than as external callings that make demands on us, to which our desires and moral sentiments are responses.”37 In that respect, he refers to a remark made by Gareth Evans. If one is asked “Is it raining?”, we look outside in order to formulate an answer. But if we are asked “Do you believe that it is raining?,” Evans argues, we look outside as well to formulate an answer. In other words, we have to look outside, not only when we are asked about what is going on outside, but also about what is going on inside. We don’t need an interior scan of our minds to see if it contains the belief that it is raining.38 Bilgrami thinks that “this Evansian point can be extended to desires as well. If we are asked ‘Do you desire x?,’ in the normal cases, we do not scan our interiors to see if it contains the desire for x, we rather consider the desirability of x.”39 Applied to the field of epistemology, Bilgrami sees the first-person perspective as indispensable in order to experience a value as “desirable” or “worthwhile” (= its desirability) instead of being simply “desired.” Hence, there is only a notion of agency when there is openness to external moral callings and that openness presupposes an enchanted world: “So it is only because the world itself contains desirabilities (or values) that we perceive that our agency really gets triggered or activated. The very possibility of agency, therefore, assumes an evaluatively enchanted world.”40 If we accept Bilgrami’s and Taylor’s view of disenchantment as the exclusion of all external callings in the ethical construction of a buffered self and as the reduction of agency to “a mere receptacle for our desires and their satisfaction,”41 then the need for an alternative to a disenchanted world springs to mind. We have to search for a middle ground between the modern projectivist ethical view of disenchantment, where meanings and values are arbitrarily conferred on an indifferent world, and the premodern view of enchantment, where values are inscribed in the world independently of us. Inspired by a phenomenological view of agency as a non-buffered but intentional subject, Taylor and Bilgrami argue that these values arise in the interface between our agency and external callings that make demands on us. The recognition of this interstitial space is part and parcel of a possible and subtle definition of a (re)enchanted world. Ontologically speaking, this alternative construction of a new ethical order and of the notions of agency and freedom requires a minimal form of enchantment.

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  95 If disenchantment is tantamount to the construction of a buffered self, devoid of any external normative calling, then “we may claim enchantment in a secular age by finding such external callings in a quite different conception of value than is found in the constructions of modernity.”42 What is common to Bilgrami and Taylor is that in stressing a responsiveness of human agency to external callings of one kind or another, they propose a notion of a life of harmony between the experience of agency and the world in which one lives – merely lives, not masters or conquers [italics mine] – and thereby flourishes at the cost of becoming merely a passive receptacle of desires and their fulfillment, and at the cost therefore of the perpetual possibility of alienation. . . . Perception of the external and experience of our own subjectivity therefore go hand in hand in what Taylor calls the non-buffered self, who is responding to a world enchanted with value elements (that is, a world described in value terms rather than in terms such “population,” “caloric counts,” etc.)43 What is different between the two is that Taylor leaves open the opportunity to experience normative demands in terms that are religious, related to a transcendent and sacred source. In that respect, Bilgrami distinguishes a minimal or secular form of enchantment and transcendence from a maximal or religious one. Within a minimal or secular form of enchantment, the concept of value is laden in the world itself and thus transcending the boundaries of people’s mind. But in the secular form, that enchanted conception of value need not be grounded in a sacred or religious source. Within a maximal or religious form of enchantment, by contrast, the same sensitivity to value elements as laden in the world is present. But in the religious form, that enchanted conception of value is grounded in a sacred or transcendent source as well. Against that backdrop, the ambiguity inherent in the terms “enchantment” and “transcendent” is obvious: So the ambiguity I am identifying lies in the fact that if the notions of “disenchantment” and “immanent” are given in terms of the construction of early modernity, one may oppose them with notions of “enchantment” and “transcendental” that are in a quite different sense not enchanted or transcendental at all, because it is not a sacred or supernatural form of transcendence and enchantment.44 Reenchantment and Transcendence It is precisely Taylor’s purpose to retrieve a largely forgotten significance of the sacred or transcendence in order to assess an alternative relation between reenchantment and the transcendent.45 But is this religious form

96  Guido Vanheeswijck of enchantment, grounded in a sacred source, still plausible in our contemporary world? Or is the idea of a secular enchantment, to borrow John Cottingham’s terminology in his chapter in this volume, ultimately nothing but a “halfway house,” that is, the “mere illusion” that theism can be resisted while still preserving genuine objective value?46 To clarify these questions and to seek for a way out of the conundrum of our existential predicament, I need (at least) two stages. First. I return to the religious aspect of the genesis of modern disenchantment, i.e. its relation to the nominalist shift in the view of God. All of the authors mentioned in this chapter agree that the nominalist emphasis on God’s hiddenness (“Deus Absconditus”)47 and his “deracination” from nature (cf. Bilgrami’s neologism of “Deus Deracinus”) had the effect of evacuating nature of all value properties. Due to their emphasis on God’s “deracination,” the nominalist theologians and philosophers downgraded the value of this world. Put differently, this religious aspect of disenchantment eventually led to the ethical aspect of disenchantment, i.e. the evacuation of value properties in the world and nature. From the late Middle Ages onwards, precisely this view of the hidden, omnipotent, and fully incomprehensible God became predominant and eventually gave rise to the secularization of the West, whereas the image of the loving father tended to be forgotten. Taylor argues that in stressing God’s hidden omnipotence at the expense of the image of the loving father, the nominalists – unintentionally – returned to the inspiration of the pre-axial religions and, therefore, forgot the deep inspiration, inherent in the axial period. Taylor considers the axial religions and in particular Christianity as a step forward in human ethical behavior and moral sensitivity. Whereas pre-axial religions connected vertical transcendence to capricious and often violent gods that scaffold a hierarchical ordering of society, Christianity developed a specific conception of transcendence that set it apart from pre-axial religion – with its emphasis on the whimsicality of transcendence. Christianity pre-eminently manifested itself in a vision of agapeic transcendence, i.e. it not only links transcendence to immanence, but also disentangles transcendence from its potentially violent characteristics. The Christian God is transcendent and immanent at the same time: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Put differently, the God of Christianity is a God of vulnerable Love who, as being immanently present in the world, embodies “agapeic” transcendence. Of course, Taylor is well aware that the historical record of Christianity does not always testify to this ideal of agape, and that it has fallen prey to violent tendencies as well. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that Christianity, by the moral deepening of its view on transcendence, contains in principle the antidote to violence. Analogous to Bilgrami, who correctly sees “an illicit extrapolation from disenchantment seen as desacralization to disenchantment seen as the evacuation of value properties in the world

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  97 and nature,”48 and therefore defends a secular form of enchantment, Taylor sees an illicit extrapolation from disenchantment as the consequence of a nominalist view of God, to the impossibility of a religious form of enchantment, and therefore defends a religious form of enchantment, based on the idea of agapeic transcendence. Second. I  make use of an interesting passage in Bilgrami’s chapter in this volume about what psychologists call the “frame problem”. He alludes to that problem in order to solve an apparent paradox in his argument. What does that paradox consist of? On the one hand, he argues that our relation to the world as practical agents must necessarily be a relation to the world as enchanted with value properties, outside the scope of the natural sciences. But, on the other hand, how to reconcile this position with the Weberian idea that there has definitely taken place a disenchantment of the world which has transformed the traditional enchanted idea of nature into the contemporary disenchanted idea of “natural resources?” To answer that question, Bilgrami introduces a distinction between two frames, the quotidian frame of understanding and that of collective, public understanding: On the one hand, there is the frame of quotidian life, where agentive responses are shaped by our perception of the normative demands of the value properties in the world around us. On the other hand, the individual human mind, unless it has very deliberately and selfconsciously resisted it, has also surrendered itself to a different more public frame of thinking that the collective has shaped, which is dominated by the ideas and ideologies that have had such a longstanding run since they took hold in the period that I have identified genealogically in this essay. And because it is in two frames, each insulated from the other, it cannot see the many inconsistencies that may exist between judgements and responses that it makes in the two different frames.49 I paraphrase. Although we are living  – in frame of quotidian life  – as agents in an enchanted world; in the public, collective frame, the Weberian discourse that “nature” is equivalent to “what the natural sciences study” and thus is fully disenchanted remains predominant. Accordingly, Bilgrami pleads for “conceptual resources available in the epistemologies of value that are exercised by the thinking in the quotidian frame . . . to counter the ill effects of the disenchantment that has occurred due to the thinking that occurs in the collective frame.”50 In a similar vein as Bilgrami, Taylor argues that a sheer theoretical shift in ideas can never entirely account for complex processes such as disenchantment. For him, the transition from enchantment to disenchantment is mainly due to a shift in what he calls the “social imaginaries”

98  Guido Vanheeswijck of people. Already in his first writings, Taylor has been sensitive to the complementary and even indispensable function of imagining the world, alongside theorizing it, in terms which announce his later use of “social imaginaries.” Taylor defines social imaginaries as incorporating “a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice.”51 There is, in my view, a strong affinity between Taylor’s concept of “social imaginaries” and Bilgrami’s use of the concept of “collective framing”. Accordingly, Bilgrami’s distinction between the quotidian frame of understanding and the collective, public one as applied to the dominant position of the Weberian discourse on disenchantment may equally apply to the domain of religious experience. Whereas in the frame of quotidian life, the experience of “the agapeic God” may be present; in the public frame, the discourse on “God Absconditus" gradually got the status of the default position. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber states (in a footnote) that both Luther and Calvin entertained a twofold image of transcendence: the loving father of the New Testament and the hidden God of nominalism. Whereas Luther adhered to the image of the loving father, in Calvin’s work the image of the “Deus Absconditus”– an absolutely omnipotent and hence unpredictable and despotic God – received more weight.52 In modern Western culture, the former view of God, albeit inherent in the New Testament, tended to be forgotten. The latter view, that of the hidden, omnipotent and fully incomprehensible God, became predominant at the level of collective, public framing. As a historian of culture, Taylor highlights the role of the nominalist concept of the incomprehensible God – the transcendent “Other” – in the framing of the evolutionary process towards disenchantment; as a philosopher of culture and as a Christian believer, he draws attention to the possible role the biblical concept of a loving God or an agapeic transcendence still can play in current Western society. That this openness to agapeic transcendence and thus to the possibility of transcendent enchantment remains an embattled option, particularly in (the academic circles of) Western Europe and North America, seems to me to go without saying. The most outspoken way of equating our contemporary ethical predicament with a rejection of this latter form of transcendence and an espousal of pre-axial polytheism in a disenchanted form is already found in Max Weber’s much celebrated text, “Science as a Vocation:” We live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense. As Hellenic man at times sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo, and above all, as everybody sacrificed to the gods of this city, so do

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  99 we still nowadays, only the bearing of man has been disenchanted and denuded of his mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity.53 On the last pages of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues somewhat surprisingly that Christianity is in need of polytheism and that the simple opposition between pagan polytheism and Christian monotheism does not do justice to the historical facts. In Taylor’s reading, however, there is no need of polytheism regarding the view of God; he emphasizes instead that elements from pre-axial religion might be helpful with regard to our attitudes towards God: these earlier cultures allowed for the integrity of different facets of life and their demands in a way that modern religious or moral outlooks have lost. Different gods – Artemis, Aphrodite, Mars, Athena – force us to respect the integrity of different ways of life: celibacy, sexual union, war, the arts of peace, which life according to a single principle often ends up denying.54 In its tendency towards discipline and reform, “Christianity sidelined important facets of spiritual life, which had in fact flourished in earlier ‘paganisms.’”55 In doing so, Christian life itself began to suffer from a form of mutilation that Taylor defines as “excarnation,” to the extent that it has imposed a kind of disciplined homogenization to the different facets of life. The Church, originally meant to be the place for all human beings in their disparate itineraries, obviously began to fall far short in preserving Christianity’s specificity of its incarnated view of God which resides in the continuous effort to remain living within the tension between the agapeic transcendent (“the beyond”) and the finite realm of the immanent (“the here-now”). According to Max Weber, preserving the belief in God’s unqualified ethical attitude towards men would entail an “intellectual sacrifice”. Instead, he advised to bear the fate of our times, even if that approach should confront us with the insoluble problem of meaninglessness, connected to the “disenchanted polytheism” of competing values. The tensions inherent in our daily experiences, be it in the shape of disenchanted polytheism, simply have to be endured. But is that the only possible answer? In Sources of the Self, Taylor refers to Weber’s “lively sense of the conflict among goods”56 positively, but this flattering epithet addressed to Weber did not prevent Taylor from charging him for not willing to face the possible dilemma arising from the battle between different values and goods: This [battle] can be the basis, of course, for a cruel dilemma, in which the demands of fulfilment run against other goods. . . . But a dilemma doesn’t invalidate the rival goods. On the contrary, it presupposes them.57

100  Guido Vanheeswijck Here, the central issue regarding the relation between reenchantment and transcendence is most obvious and its inherent ethical and existential tensions become most outspoken. If the notion of agapeic transcendence is still a viable one, if Christianity, as the “religion for departing from religion” remains “the most relevant religion in a post-religious society,”58 it presupposes an ethical attitude in which the dilemma that our highest spiritual aspirations inevitably lead to mutilation and intellectual sacrifices is not seen as inescapable. On the contrary, the dilemma of mutilation “is in a sense our greatest spiritual challenge, not an iron fate.”59 In order to escape from that iron fate, we need to retrieve the notion of agapeic transcendence, a notion that has been too quickly abandoned during the process of disenchantment and its (to a certain extent justified) reaction against a suppressing form of transcendence. That “a strong, anchored-in-reality-beyond-us sacred can be denied” does not make redundant another view of transcendence that “arising in the interstitial interface [between man and world] can be affirmed”.60 But the retrieval of this abandoned notion presupposes a sensitivity for the use of “subtler languages”, a term Taylor borrowed from the Romantic poets.61 And that kind of sensitivity is often lacking when talking about reenchantment, both in its secular and religious variants. In order to clarify this statement, I return – for the last time – to Akeel Bilgrami’s chapter in this volume. In the appendix, Bilgrami argues in opposition to Jane Bennet and Bruno Latour that the idea of nature as making normative demands on us must be read as a metaphor. Put differently, the idea of a secular enchanted world is to be understood as a metaphorical linguistic utterance, be it a “metaphor that cannot be paraphrased away without loss of meaning and information.” Now, this linguistic thesis that a metaphor cannot be paraphrased away, Bilgrami continues, has metaphysical consequences as well: To make the linguistic claim is simultaneously to make the following metaphysical claim: there is an aspect or a fragment of reality, which can only be captured by that metaphor. And the reality that is captured by the metaphorical attribution of intentionality to things, to elements in nature, when we say that they make normative demands on us, is as authentic as any reality that literal attributions of intentionality describe. It is just not the same reality.62 In a similar vein, when Taylor argues for the use of “subtler languages” in order to retrieve the abandoned notion of “agapeic transcendence”, he also tries to capture an aspect or a fragment of reality by means of a metaphor. And the fragment of reality, indicated by that largely forgotten term, may be as authentic as any reality that literal attributions describe.

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  101 Hence, two possibilities are open to interpret the existential experience of an enchanted world from an epistemological first-person point of view: a secular interpretation of enchantment and a religious one. In both cases, its starting point is the rejection of the underlying presupposition in the Weberian position, i.e. the equation of the concept of “nature” with “what the natural sciences study.” But the main challenge in relation to the possible acceptance of a religious interpretation of enchantment is to take one step ahead, that is, to find words in the open space between non-buffered man and a reenchanted world so as to give subtle expression to the experience of transcendence, “insofar as it does not suppress or blank out perfectly valid interstitial meanings.”63

Notes 1. I am grateful to the editors of this volume, Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese, for their very helpful and pertinent remarks on a first draft of this chapter. 2. Bruce Robbins, “Enchantment? No, Thank You!” in The Joy of Secularism, ed. George Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 75. 3. Hans Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), 11. 4. Ibid., 207. 5. Robert Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (Winter 1993): 475–94. 6. Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (June 2008): 497–528. 7. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1998), 139. 8. The terms “porous” and “buffered” are coined by Charles Taylor and explicitly used in Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 9. Cf. Akeel Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, eds. M. Warner, J. VanAntwerpen, and C. Calhoun (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 145–65. 10. Cf. Ibid. 11. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World. A  Political History of Religion, Trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton, University Press, 1997), 3. 12. Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” The Historical Journal, 497. 13. Charles Taylor, “Digression on Historical Explanation,” in Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, ed. Charles Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 199–207. 14. Ibid., 202–3. 15. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’,” 492. 16. Ibid., 494. 17. Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” 528. 18. Cf. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’,” 483.

102  Guido Vanheeswijck 19. Cf. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’,” 484; Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” 510–12. 20. Ibid., 486; cf. Ibid., 515–16. 21. Ibid., 491; cf. Ibid., 516–17. 22. Ibid., 493; Ibid., 510–17. 23. Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” 517. 24. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’,” 482. 25. Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” 528. 26. Cf. the title of Brad Gregory’s monograph: The Unintended Reformation. How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 27. It is for example not held by Marcel Gauchet, despite Hans Joas’ (in my view incorrect) characterization of Gauchet’s interpretation as ‘post-Weberian Hegelianism’ (Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 207, 333). For the strong resemblances between Taylor’s Reform Master Narrative and Gauchet’s genealogical narrative, see Marcel Gauchet, “Le désenchantement désenchanté,” in Religion et sécularisation. Sous la direction de Sylvie Taussig, ed. Charles Taylor (Paris: CNNRS Editions, 2014), 73–82. Against that backdrop, it would be interesting to compare Joas’ effort to “disenchant disenchantment” to Gauchet’s approach and to indicate the differences, even if they make use of exactly the same terminology (see Gauchet, “Le désenchantement désenchanté,” 80). 28. Taylor, A Secular Age, 95. 29. Ibid., 80. Cf. Charles Taylor, “The Future of the Religious Past,” in Dilemmas and Connections. Selected Essays, ed. Charles Taylor (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 285. 30. Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 250. 31. Cf. Bilgrami, “Might There Be Secular Enchantment?” in The Philosophy of Reenchantment, eds. Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese (New York: Routledge, 2020), 54–77. 32. See for a defense of a Darwinian form of reenchantment: George Levine, Darwin Loves You. Natural Selection and The Re-enchantment of The World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). For a nuanced interpretation of and rejoinder to this Darwinian form of reenchantment, see Charles Taylor, “Disenchantment-Reenchantment,” in Dilemmas and Connections. Selected Essays, ed. Charles Taylor (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 295–96. 33. Ibid., 294. 34. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’,” 477. 35. Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?” 145–65; cf. Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. 36. Charles Taylor, “Recovering the Sacred,” Inquiry 54, no. 2 (April 2011), 117. 37. Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?” 153. 38. Cf. Ibid., 154. 39. Bilgrami, “Might There Be Secular Enchantment?” 66. 40. Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?” 154. 41. Ibid., 155. 42. Ibid., 156.

Did Disenchantment Ever Happen?  103 3. Ibid., 164–65. 4 44. Ibid., 158. 45. An analogous purpose is found in Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 46. John Cottingham, “Religion Without Magic: Responding to the Natural World,” in The Philosophy of Reenchantment, eds. Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese (New York: Routledge, 2020), 50. 47. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 161: “In the end, a mechanistic universe was the only one compatible with a God whose sovereignty was defined in terms of the endless freedom of fiat.” 48. Bilgrami, “Might There Be Secular Enchantment?” 64. 49. Ibid., 71. 50. Ibid., 71. 51. Taylor, A Secular Age, 172. 52. Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) Verlag, 1988 (1920)), 92: “Beide, Luther und Calvin, kannten eben im Grunde . . . einen doppelten Gott: den geoffenbarten gnädigen und gütigen Vater des N.T. . . . und dahinter den ‘Deus absconditus’ als willkürlich schaltenden despoten. Bei Luther behielt der Gott des Neuen Testaments ganz die Oberhand, weil er die Reflexion über das Metaphysische, als nutzlos und gefährlich, zunehmend mied, bei Calvin gewann der Gedanke an die transzendente Gottheit Macht über das Leben.” 53. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 148. 54. Taylor, A Secular Age, 772. 55. Ibid., 771. 56. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 511–12. 57. Ibid. 58. Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, 4. 59. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 521. 60. Taylor, “Recovering the Sacred,” 118. 61. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 381. 62. Bilgrami, “Might There Be Secular Enchantment?” 74. 63. Cf. Taylor, “Recovering the Sacred,” 124.

Bibliography Bilgrami, Akeel. “What is Enchantment?” In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, 145–65. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. ———. “The Political Possibilities of the Long Romantic Period.” In Secularism, Identity and Enchantment, edited by Akeel Bilgrami, 175–214. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. Cloots, André. “Christianity, Incarnation and Disenchantment: Marcel Gauchet on the ‘Departure of Religion’.” In Radical Secularization. An Inquiry into the Religious Roots of Secular Culture, edited by Stijn Latré, Walter Van Herck, and Guido Vanheeswijck, 47–66. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World. A Political History of Religion. Translated by Oscar Burge. With a Foreword by Charles Taylor. Princeton: Princeton, University Press, 1997.

104  Guido Vanheeswijck ———. “Le désenchantement désenchanté.” In Charles Taylor. Religion et sécularisation. Sous la direction de Sylvie Taussig, 73–82. Paris: CNNRS Editions, 2014. Graham, Gordon. The Re-enchantment of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Gregory, Brad. The Unintended Reformation. How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans, 1917. Joas, Hans. Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. Levine, George. Darwin Loves You. Natural Selection and The Re-enchantment of The World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Robbins, Bruce. “Enchantment? No, Thank You!” In The Joy of Secularism, edited by George Levine, 74–94. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Scribner, Robert. “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (Winter 1993): 475–94. Storm, Jason. The Myth of Disenchantment. Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. A Secular Age. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. “The Future of the Religious Past.” In Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections. Selected Essays, 214–86. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011a. ———. “Disenchantment-Re-enchantment.” In Dilemmas and Connections. Selected Essays, edited by Charles Taylor, 287–302. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011b. ———. “Recovering the Sacred.” Inquiry 54, no. 2 (April 2011c): 113–25. Troeltsch, Ernst. Protestantism and Progress: The Significance of Protestantism for the Rise of the Modern World, edited by B. A. Gerrish. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Walsham, Alexandra. “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed.” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (June 2008): 497–528. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–56. London: Routledge, 1998.

5 Theorizing Reenchantment Across Different Value Spheres Herbert De Vriese

Who is afraid of enchantment? At least among theorists and scholars in the field, this surely is a pertinent question deserving further consideration. For it is easily observed that under the thin layer of increasing academic inquiry in terms of enchantment, disenchantment and reenchantment, something strange is going on: many scholars and theorists appear to have limited confidence in the key concepts of their research. Under the veil of an enchanting title, they often prefer to operate with other concepts and theoretical models. If the constellation of their academic work were compared to a political regime, and their research activities to meticulous efforts to distribute the exercise of power, one could convincingly claim, borrowing an expression of Claude Lefort, that the seat of theoretical power is empty. More often than not, the term ‘enchantment’ and its derivatives disappear from the scene as soon as the real work of study and examination begins, or must comply with a merely symbolic or ornamental function.1 A brief look at two dominant tendencies within the academic field in question will help clarify this observation. The first one appears in numerous studies which take Max Weber’s oeuvre as their starting point: it is the tendency to explain Weber’s thesis of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ by breaking it down into several, theoretically more manageable theses, in which the central concept of disenchantment suddenly disappears. It is either replaced by other (and supposedly analytically clearer) concepts such as ‘demagification’, ‘desacralization’, rationalization and secularization,2 or dissolved into alternative (and supposedly more robust) conceptual frameworks describing the elimination of magic from religion,3 the general decline of magic in the modern world,4 the erosion of belief in spiritual forces and supernatural powers,5 the rationalization of social life and politics,6 the rise of the scientific worldview and its effect on human thought and action,7 the devaluation of ultimate values and the loss of meaning in life,8 the functional differentiation of modern society9 and many other interpretations, which in addition can be combined so as to produce a critical and systematic analysis of the various uses of disenchantment in Weber’s works.10 At any rate, there seems to be a

106  Herbert De Vriese consensus among scholars and theorists, particularly outside the domain of philosophy, that ‘Entzauberung’ is too blurry a theoretical concept to serve as a solid cornerstone for the interpretation of modernity. The dominant trend is to distinguish between at least two completely different and independent theses, which can do without the concept of disenchantment as soon as their actual research program starts: one stating a great historical process of religious disenchantment, with its origins in ancient Judaism, the other stating a historical process of scientific disenchantment, with its roots in Greek philosophy.11 The second tendency appears in numerous contributions to the discourse on reenchantment. Many of them use the term ‘reenchantment’ in an exclusively transitive sense – such as in appeals for the ‘reenchantment of science’, the ‘reenchantment of morality’, the ‘reenchantment of nature’ and so forth – so as to limit its meaning to the recovery, or restoration to its former status, of a specific condition that has been lost or drastically impoverished as a consequence of processes of modernization.12 Eventually, by virtue of its focus on one particular aspect of reality, this tendency confirms the first one: it considers the disenchantment of the world in terms of something more specific that is assumed to have disappeared or severely degraded, and is therefore able to dismiss a comprehensive account of the (dis)enchanted world as superfluous or even irrelevant. In this chapter, I will attempt to counter this ‘Zauberphobie’ by exploring the theoretical potential of enchantment. The clue of my approach is simple: I believe that something of considerable theoretical import is lost by reducing the (dis)enchanted world to a series of distinct claims, models and conceptions. In my view, enchantment and its derivatives have a unique conceptual force to articulate the fullness of a world experience that is not yet tainted by processes of modernization, for two important reasons: first, because they successfully realize the conceptual grasp over a totality that cannot be replaced by the sum of partial approaches, and second, because they effectively resist any understanding in terms of typically modern categories and distinctions. To put it differently, if theorists wish to develop a general interpretation of how the world has changed as a result of processes of modernization, and if they wish to find an adequate starting point for this purpose, my suggestion is that the conceptual framework of enchantment is among the ideal candidates for offering the required guidance and assistance. My exposition falls into three parts. First, I will turn to recent scholarship on the source of Weber’s concept of ‘Entzauberung’ in order to illuminate an inherent tension in the concept. Second, I will examine the recently revitalized debate on disenchantment in Weber’s Protestant Ethic and argue in favor of a consciously intended, unifying theoretical gesture. Third, in line with a unified conception of the idea of an enchanted world, I  will open up new avenues for reflection on reenchantment by

Theorizing Reenchantment  107 blurring the boundaries between different value spheres, most notably those of science, art and religion.

Schiller, Bekker, Zauber For many decades, it has been a popular theme in academic literature on the disenchantment of the world that Weber’s inspiration for this phrase comes from a famous poem by Friedrich Schiller, “Die Götter Griechenlandes” [“The Gods of Greece”]. It even grew into one of the most persistent myths in Weber scholarship, wrongly assuming that Weber had borrowed the expression from Schiller.13 Yet the attribution to Schiller, though very plausible, was never demonstrated with conclusive evidence. Two German scholars had suggested another source of inspiration: the highly influential and controversial work by the Dutch theologian and philosopher Balthasar Bekker, De Betoverde Weereld, published in four volumes from 1691 to 1693.14 Bekker, an exponent of the Early Enlightenment who had fiercely campaigned against a world of evil spirits and superstitious beliefs, belonged to the field of Weber’s research interests, and hence it is quite possible that Weber had come across the German title Die bezauberte Welt [the enchanted world].15 In 2017, the religious studies scholar Jason Josephson-Storm added new and valuable support to this hypothesis, by discovering the expression ‘Entzauberung dieser Welt’ [disenchantment of this world] in an 1837 discussion of Bekker’s De Betoverde Weereld by the neo-Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.16 He did not offer conclusive proof that Weber actually read Fries’ particular work (a two-volume history of philosophy), yet successfully reinforced the idea of a rather evident association between the phrase ‘Entzauberung der Welt’ and Bekker’s book title.17 Which hypothesis is most likely to be true? It is interesting to leave the matter in abeyance, while exploring the idea that Weber’s phrase might stem, either directly or indirectly, from both Bekker and Schiller. The attractiveness of such a twofold source of inspiration lies in its capacity to solve a problem in Weber’s use of the concept of disenchantment, which the reference to Schiller alone cannot convincingly solve: the conspicuous tension between a negative appraisal of disenchantment, marked by desolation, nostalgia and grief over the loss of something precious, and a positive appraisal, evoking a sense of cultural achievement and liberation, and emotionally charged with relief, empowerment and even pride in the capacities of human reason. If we imagine the phrase ‘disenchantment of the world’ to be a breakthrough discovery in Weber’s theoretical development, a sudden aha experience (which will most probably never be decisively grounded in verifiable facts and information), this could have to do with his insight into the inherent tension within the concept of disenchantment. As endless discussions of Plato’s ‘pharmakon’ demonstrate, such inherent paradox or contradiction within a concept or

108  Herbert De Vriese metaphor does not necessarily imply its failure or ineffectiveness as a theoretical device. By contrast, such an in-built ambivalence often allows to do justice to complex realities that are themselves characterized by conflict, friction and discord. In view of that, and when compared to Weber’s concept of rationalization, the concept of disenchantment is theoretically more powerful: it embraces the attitudes to the modern world of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Bekker was a devoted follower of Descartes. His 1668 treatise De Philosophia Cartesiana Admonitio candida  & sincera was a staunch defense of Cartesian philosophy against the rising anti-Cartesian sentiments and policies in his country. He argued that salvation could not be learned from nature, no more than natural phenomena could be understood from scripture, and that Cartesian philosophy would be a significant benefit to the latter undertaking, without harming the former quest.18 But Bekker, a Calvinist minister at Amsterdam, was not a secluded scholar. He was a preacher and public intellectual who sought to transform the superstitious world of his age. He wrote a trenchant critique of a witchcraft trial, showing the absurdity of all the alleged proofs, and did not shrink from publicly castigating popular beliefs in spirits, demons and witchcraft.19 While embarking on a lifelong mission to combat this kind of superstition, his magnum opus De Betoverde Weereld, as Jonathan Israel puts it, became “the most monumental and comprehensive investigation of Satan, demonology, spirits, apparitions, magic, enchantment, and witchcraft . . . even written so far”.20 Using rationalistic conceptions and arguments, Bekker not only refuted belief in sorcery and possession by the devil, but denied any influence of evil spirits over corporeal bodies, and hence excluded any role for the devil in this world.21 As the book had a wide impact, with numerous reprints and translations in French, English and German, Bekker became one of the chief representatives of the Early Enlightenment’s struggle against spirits, demons and Satan’s power.22 Bekker reminds us of the fact that the enchanted world is not a pleasant place. It is the domain of evil forces, where innocent people are persecuted and gruesomely tried and murdered as an immediate consequence of fallacious ideas and lack of sound reasoning. It is difficult to see, from our contemporary perspective, why Bekker’s campaign to disenchant the world, expelling superstition and the horrible wrongs and abuses in its name, should be deplored or met with ‘disenchantment’.23 The significance of Schiller’s poem “The Gods of Greece”, first published in 1788 and receiving its final and classic version in 1800, is better documented in academic literature. Although the poem does not mention the term disenchantment, let alone the phrase ‘disenchantment of the world’, its recognition as a vital source for Weber’s conception of that phrase is sustained by a series of sound arguments.24 Of particular weight is the consideration that Weber was familiar with Schiller’s poem and had probably even consulted it while writing Wissenschaft

Theorizing Reenchantment  109 als Beruf [Science as a Vocation], a seminal text for his theory of disenchantment.25 But how does it resonate with his views? Schiller laments over the lost world of Greek mythology, a wonderful world inhabited by humans and gods alike, where “the gods were more human, and human beings more divine”.26 This world of harmony and beauty is painted in sharp contrast to the modern world, famously described – the key word to Weber’s connection with Schiller – as “entgötterte Natur”. In this ‘disgodded’ or ‘de-deified’ nature, the direct contact with a plurality of divine forces, whereby human life itself was elevated to a higher level and pervaded by a sense of joy and balance, had vanished. As Sara Lyons aptly remarks, the result was not a ‘godless’ world, but rather one that was no longer “suffused with divinity”, one in which the harmonious relationship between the human and the natural, fostered by Greek polytheism, was broken.27 Now, what is interesting for his role in Weber’s theory of disenchantment, is Schiller’s twofold explanation of how this beautiful world came to an end. In his poetic rendering, two different historical processes have worked together to create the dull, empty and alienating natural world of modernity: first, a religious process characterized by the rise of monotheism, with a hidden and transcendent Christian god that no longer allowed for a sensuous relationship with the divine in the outer world and in addition thoroughly concentrated religious worship in the one true source of salvation; and second, an intellectual process characterized by the rise of modern science, which reduced living nature to a mute and indifferent mechanism.28 One threatens to miss  a crucial dimension, however, when reading “The Gods of Greece” as a mere critique of modernity and nostalgic lamentation over the past. As a leading voice in the Romantic Movement, it would become Schiller’s ambition to retrieve the essence of an ‘enchanted’ way of life, not in the sense of an elitist ‘aestheticization’ of life, but as an all-encompassing moral, social and political project that should result in nothing less than the “true human society”. This was the central message of his influential Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen [On the Aesthetic Education of Man], published in 1795.29 For a clearer understanding of this ambition, one must place it within the idealist philosophical background of his age, in particular Kantian philosophy. Contrary to the uses of theoretical and practical reason, Schiller argues, the aesthetic experience enables humanity to access true freedom and the realization of its fullest potential. For it is in this experience alone that human beings will overcome the subject–object division, which is the a priori condition for their spontaneous (and almost inevitable) activity to construct reality in terms of a theoretical or practical interest. The aesthetic experience releases them from such a burdensome task. Liberating them from their subject–object confinement, it enables them to encounter the world in a disinterested way and to see its deeper truths and mysteries. Yet in this process, human nature itself is completed. All of

110  Herbert De Vriese a sudden, the tedium and seriousness of ordinary life fades away, causing a deep sense relief and fulfillment and an overwhelming mood of joyfulness [Heiterkeit].30 “Beauty alone makes all the world happy,” Schiller writes in Über die ästhetische Erziehung, “and every being forgets its limitations as long as it experiences her enchantment.”31 For the line of argument I am pursuing here, the reference to ‘enchantment’ [Zauber] is important. For it is often overlooked that Schiller makes a very similar allusion to ‘Zauber’ in his poem “The Gods of Greece”. Writing about the bygone times, when the world was more beautiful and humanity happier, he observes that the manifestation of truth was different, since truth was still entwined then with “the enchanting veil of poesy” [der Dichtung zauberische Hülle].32 In my reading, this is not only an implicit critique on the exactness, rigidity and bareness of both theoretical (scientific) and practical (religious) truth in a disenchanted world, but also an implicit call to restore the aesthetic quality of truth, and the fuller mode of human existence into which it opens up. So, with the same zeal and fervor with which Bekker revolts against the enchanted world of ghost and spirits, Schiller revolts against the disenchanted world of Christianity and modern science. Returning to the idea that Weber’s thesis of disenchantment was drawn from these two very different reactions to the loss of the enchanted world, I  can now summarize that ‘Zauber’ had two different faces: in Bekker’s eyes, the face of evil spirits, with agonizing fears and gruesome atrocities as a result, that ought to be cleared from the world by an enlightened religion and rational thought; in Schiller’s eyes, the face of divine mystery in nature, with the promise of joyfulness and deep fulfillment, which human beings can only reach however insofar as they overcome, in both theoretical and practical matters, the limitations of autonomous thinking and enlightened reasoning.

Disenchantment in The Protestant Ethic So far, my inquiry has been rather speculative. How to cope with a skeptical reader who finds the hypothesis of a double source of inspiration behind Weber’s phrase of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ unwarranted and unconvincing? My answer would be that at least three things can be retained from the above account. First, independently of the question of a possible influence on Weber, the distinction between enlightened and romantic perceptions of the enchanted world seems fruitful for a general theory of enchantment, especially if approached from a culturalhistorical perspective. Second, it might provide a valuable frame of interpretation for the Weber biographer who wishes to address the divergence between Weber the scientist and Weber the cultural critic.33 Third, and most important for the further course of my argument, the recognition of two conflicting meanings within the very same concept of ‘Zauber’

Theorizing Reenchantment  111 can serve as a heuristic tool for examining the inner tensions and conflicts within the discourse on disenchantment. More specifically, it may be asked whether Weber himself has deliberately used the term ‘Entzauberung’ as an inclusive and holistic concept, capable of incorporating different and seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his work. In the introduction to this chapter, I referred to the tendency in academic literature to break Weber’s thesis of disenchantment down into different meanings and several subtheses. Recently, the debate about the necessity of such approach was reanimated by Hans Joas in his 2017 monograph Die Macht des Heiligen [The Power of the Sacred]. Joas strongly disapproves of Weber’s ambiguous use of the concept of disenchantment. Insofar as it denotes a historical process, he contends, Weber’s concept is as unclear as it is inappropriate and should hence be replaced by three alternative concepts: demagification, desacralization and detranscendentalization.34 According to Joas, his analysis removes the suggestive power of Weber’s disenchantment narrative and makes it fit for the dustbin of failed theories: In an incredibly suggestive way, Weber has combined events in the narrative of disenchantment that run from the prophets of the Old Testament via the Reformation and the Enlightenment up to the crisis of meaning in Europe during the so-called fin-de-siècle and the eve of the Great War. However, when we uncover the conceptual ambiguity, the narrative molders and loses its suggestive power.35 In further support of his argument, Joas turns to what, in his opinion, is conclusive evidence of Weber’s far too nonchalant and unacceptably inaccurate use of the term disenchantment. He draws attention to a wellknown problem in research on Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism], related to its publication history. Weber’s famous work originally appeared in 1905 as two different contributions to the journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.36 In spite of repeated requests by his publisher to combine and prepare both essays for publication in book form, he postponed doing so until shortly before his death in 1920.37 Subsequently, with the expanded and revised edition being published as part of Weber’s collected essays in the sociology of religion,38 and the question being asked how to locate The Protestant Ethic within the entire system of his writings, the suggestion arose that Weber’s formulation of the disenchantment thesis in this work was the major connection with ideas he had explored elsewhere.39 But this was proof of a complete lack of attention for the changes made to the first edition. For the disenchantment thesis was completely absent from the original version of The Protestant Ethic: even the word disenchantment did not have one single mention in it. Analyzing some of the insertions to the 1920 edition by which the

112  Herbert De Vriese idea of disenchantment entered into the work, Joas demonstrates that they significantly diverge from the content and context of the original account. He takes this as proof of Weber’s ill-defined and highly suggestive use of the term disenchantment and, after having extended that suspicion to other parts of his oeuvre where the term appears, concludes that it cannot serve as an analytically meaningful and theoretically coherent conception.40 As further reinforcement for his claim that Weber’s later ideas on disenchantment were forced upon The Protestant Ethic and should be removed from the work so as to restore its original approach and focus, Joas refers to the Weber scholar Friedrich Tenbruck, who had commented as follows on one of the most striking ‘disenchantment passages’ added to the 1920 edition: One thing is clear: the section is completely alien to the rest of the PE. The insertion was not part of the original and it never could have been, as it breaks loose from the initial format and surveys completely new dimensions.41 Already in the 1970s, Tenbruck had studied the problem of disenchantment and The Protestant Ethic in great detail.42 But an appeal to his academic authority in this context is, to put it politely, a bold rhetorical move. Tenbruck agrees that the insertion goes well beyond the original argumentation and disturbs its inner logic. But he seriously considers the possibility that this must have been clear to Weber as well and therefore asks why it could have meant so much to him. In clarifying that difficulty, he states, in direct opposition to Joas’ standpoint, that the incorporation of the disenchantment discourse makes sense and deserves a more fundamental appreciation. In his reading, it operates as Weber’s indication of how The Protestant Ethic would fit into the entire system of sociological research on the history of religion that he had conducted during the period of almost 15 years since its first publication. This distinctive twist in the argument is absent from Joas’ account. In order to get a correct representation of Tenbruck’s view on the specific passage, let me quote him at length: The passage quoted above belongs to the enlargements that Weber made and it clearly goes beyond the boundaries of the PE; therefore greater importance should be attached to it. These additions provide the reader with an adumbrated version of a more extensive process, the historico-religious process of disenchantment, in which the PE is to be understood as the final act. Since this idea was not even hinted at in the original text, it follows that it must have been conceived at a later date. But this then prompts the question: when and where did Weber develop this idea? . . . Furthermore, why did he introduce the

Theorizing Reenchantment  113 additions at a later date, despite the fact that even the later edition of the PE is not concerned with the historico-religious process? The possibility must be ruled out that Weber could have repeatedly, yet casually, inserted such a sweeping view in the course of his work, had he not been convinced that he had elsewhere submitted the proof for this process.43 Further elaborating this point, Tenbruck argues that the concept of disenchantment goes to the heart of Weber’s work and is the key to “questions about the unity, origins and coherence of his writings”.44 Far from undermining Weber’s thesis of a great historical process of disenchantment, he cements it by articulating its inner logic as well as tracing its major building blocks and showing how The Protestant Ethic fits into it as its ultimate conclusion.45 Accordingly, the problem of disenchantment in The Protestant Ethic can be summarized as Weber’s illuminating, but somewhat overhasty attempt to bring his earlier treatise in line with his later findings.46 While I will follow here in the footsteps of Tenbruck, my claim is less ambitious. For the purposes of my argument, I can refrain from discussions about the tenability of a grand historical narrative and will just concentrate on the concept of ‘Entzauberung’.47 My claim is that Weber’s usage of the term disenchantment in the 1920 edition of The Protestant Ethic is meaningful and theoretically relevant, first of all because the new concept is well suited to grasp and identify the subject matter treated in this work, and second because it persuasively confirms the way in which he has used the term in other writings. For the first point, a closer look at the text reveals an intrinsic connection with an important dimension of religious faith, namely the question of the certainty of salvation [certitudo salutis]. Of momentous significance for adherents of a salvation religion, Weber explains, is a sense of certainty or assurance of one’s religious state of grace, and hence the practical motivation to attain such certainty. In view of that, both the means for attaining it and the signs by which one might become aware of having effectively achieved a state of grace are of ultimate concern to the faithful.48 Now, what is characteristic of the religious ethic of protestant denominations, Weber remarks, is that possession of the state of grace can no longer be guaranteed “through magical-sacramental means of any kind, through the relief found in confession, or through particular good works”.49 Placed in a historical perspective, this implies that the rise of protestant puritanism has drastically changed the search for (signs of) religious salvation – at least for the devoted puritan. One of the central aspects of what has disappeared from the road to salvation, is the recourse to what Weber denotes as “magical-sacramental means of any kind” [irgendwelche magisch-sakramentalen Mittel].50 Weber’s use of the cluster concept ‘magical-sacramental’ in this context is striking, because

114  Herbert De Vriese it seems to blur the theoretical boundaries between magic and religion.51 But this is how Weber synthesizes the kernel of a particular search for salvation that is rejected by Protestantism. And most important for my discussion here: the denotation is part of the original edition of The Protestant Ethic.52 If the attention is now turned to the supplemented ‘disenchantment passages’ of the 1920 edition, one characteristic immediately catches the eye: Weber’s use of the term disenchantment relates to a peculiar, doublefaced phenomenon of religion and magic. The very first mention of the word ‘disenchantment’ in the new edition is accompanied by the following (new) footnote: The special position of the ancient Israelite ethic . . . and its development since the epoch of the prophets was already completely founded . . . upon this fundamental fact: the rejection of sacramental magic as a road to salvation.53 Furthermore, this cluster concept of ‘sacramental magic’ is explicitly present in two substantial disenchantment passages of the new edition. In the first of them, fusing together the abstention from song and ceremony at Puritan funerals and the rejection of all magical means for the salvation quest, Weber writes that one could no longer rely on “forces of salvation of a magical-sacramental type” [Heilswirkungen magisch-sakramentaler Art].54 The second passage, even though it equates the ‘disenchantment’ of the world with “the elimination of magic as a means to salvation” [die Ausschaltung der Magie als Heilsmittel], again conspicuously blends the distinctive discourses of religion and magic. The context is Weber’s account of the salvation quest in Catholicism, where the faithful could resort to sacramental grace [Sakramentsgnade] in compensation for their own imperfection, by virtue of a miraculous transformation performed by a priest-magician [der Priester war ein Magier].55 In a (new) footnote to this specific sentence, Weber clarifies that the same goes to some extent for Lutheranism as well, because “Luther did not wish to eradicate this last residual of sacramental magic” [diesen letzten Rest von sakramentaler Magie].56 The other disenchantment passages, two in number, are brief insertions that relate disenchantment to the devaluation of sacraments and the furtherance of this-worldly asceticism.57 The intrinsic connection between disenchantment and a holistic conception of ‘sacramental magic’ in The Protestant Ethic has so far been largely overlooked. And yet, it confirms the way in which Weber has used the concept ‘disenchantment’ in other texts, namely as an inclusive and unifying concept able to assimilate very different aspects of humanity’s relation with the world – aspects which the analytical mind would eagerly like to dissect and put into separate boxes. In addressing this integrative function, and this is the second point of my argument,

Theorizing Reenchantment  115 I repeat that my focus is on the question of a meaningful usage of the term disenchantment, not on discussions about a necessary and linear historical process of disenchantment purportedly unique to the West. A good illustration of what I am aiming at is Weber’s use of the concept of disenchantment in Science as a Vocation, which ingenuously brings together the scientific explanation of the universe without reference to supernatural forces, the technical mastery of the world without resort to magic, the ethical orientation towards competing values without commitment to personal deities and the narrowing of social and political life by lack of high and sublime ideals.58 In view of that, what is lost with disenchantment according to Weber appears to be a quality of human life that surpasses typically modern dichotomies such as those between theory and praxis, fact and value, private and public life, the natural and the supernatural order, and so forth. This relates to a remarkable episode in Science as a Vocation, where he considers how the rise of modern science was at first, under the influence of protestant puritanism, intimately bound up with the religious fervor “to show the path to God”.59 Again, what is lost with disenchantment is a relation to the world that challenges any strict division between scientific and religious motivations. The upshot of my argument is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts: as soon as one makes a sharp distinction between the religious aspirations and the theoretical achievements of a Calvinist scientist like Swammerdam,60 one ruins the ‘enchantment’ of his work – and thus fails to understand it. The appeal to an inclusive concept of disenchantment in Science as a Vocation confirms the integrative way in which Weber has introduced the term in the 1920 edition of The Protestant Ethic in relation to the loss of ‘sacramental magic’. This enables me to articulate the result of my investigation in this section. As I have tried to demonstrate, disenchantment is not an “alien body” [Fremdkörper]61 in The Protestant Ethic. Quite the reverse, I believe it belongs to the heart of this work and successfully provides a conceptual grasp over one of its essential themes: the specific transformation of the religious quest for salvation under the influence of protestant puritanism. For reasons I  have developed above, I  consider disenchantment to be a far better candidate to capture that theme than standard renditions of The Protestant Ethic in terms of “the elimination of magic as a means to salvation”,62 “the rejection of the sacramental mediation of salvation”,63 “the devaluation of institutional grace”,64 and the like. Disenchantment indicates both the elimination of magic and the removal of religious sacraments and institutions as means to salvation, and this in a way that makes clear-cut distinctions between magical and religious components irrelevant. Does this indistinctiveness, perhaps, tell the secret of the extraordinary attraction of Weber’s thesis of the disenchantment of the world, not only in The Protestant Ethic, but in his other writings as well? In my opinion, it does, and explains its lasting influence

116  Herbert De Vriese on the accepted self-understanding of modernity – in spite of all efforts to break it down into different meanings and theses.

Across the Division Between Different Value Spheres Contributing to the ongoing debate on Weber’s thought, however, is not the principal aim of my inquiry. What I maintain as the gist of the above account is support for a holistic understanding of the enchanted world. In the first part of this chapter, this support came from a broad and inclusive cultural-historical understanding of ‘Zauber’ in the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism. In the second part, it came from a close reading of the disenchantment passages in the 1920 edition of The Protestant Ethic through the lens of Weber’s cluster concept of ‘sacramental magic’. Taken together, they constitute a sufficiently firm basis for proposing an alternative theoretical approach to (dis)enchantment, one that is marked by unification and integration. More concretely, my aim is to advance a theoretical understanding of enchantment and its derivatives as references to the fullness of a world experience that is not yet tainted by processes of modernization, and which escapes a reductive reading in terms of typically modern categories and distinctions. So far, I have brought some evidence that (dis)enchantment is an appropriate term for realizing such an inclusive understanding of the premodern world. One may even ask whether a better term exists, within the currently available conceptual frameworks, that could perform such an integrative function. But another question still awaits an answer: Why are we in need of such a concept? What is its theoretical potential? The answer lies in another tenet of classical sociological theory, with which Weber is often associated, although not as its main theorist: the thesis of functional differentiation. According to this thesis, modern societies develop different domains of life – economics, politics, education, science – with a high degree of autonomy and their own distinctive societal function, expressed in specific institutions, values, tasks and codes of conduct. One of the considerable shortcomings of academic research on disenchantment, in my view, is its lack of critical engagement with the thesis of functional differentiation.65 As a result, its conventional approach to disenchantment is indebted to a theoretical framework of neatly divided functional domains, which is taken for granted and presupposed, instead of being critically examined as itself a partial implication of disenchantment. This is exactly what happens, for instance, when scholars affirm a clear-cut distinction between, on the one hand, a process of disenchantment within the practical domain of religion, “in which paths to salvation completely devoid of magic (Puritanism) are formulated,” and, on the other, a process of disenchantment within the theoretical domain of science, where knowledge of the universe is more and

Theorizing Reenchantment  117 more understood “by reference to empirical observation and the experimental method of the natural sciences”.66 In short, functional differentiation tends to contaminate disenchantment theory with typically modern notions and assumptions from the very outset. It imposes a paradigm of distinct value spheres as the proper and only valid theoretical framework through which the disappearance of the enchanted world must be seen and examined. An inclusive and holistic conception of enchantment is meant to solve the flaws of such an approach. For that reason, it may prove theoretically relevant. Up till now, these considerations remain general and highly abstract. To delve deeper into the issue, I  will make use of Gordon Graham’s 2007 monograph The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion, which, to the best of my knowledge, is one of the scarce convincing attempts to address the biases of functional differentiation in the theoretical conception of the enchanted world. Moreover, as its title declares, the book gives a vital impetus to the question of how to discuss reenchantment against the background of the modern division into various value spheres. By way of conclusion to my inquiry, I  will first spell out the methodological strengths of Graham’s account of functional differentiation, then proceed to a critique of his approach to reenchantment in a world of distinct value spheres, so as to finally articulate what I hope is a more robust and consistent view of reenchantment. “Human understanding,” Graham writes, “has a history in which concepts come and go.”67 Accordingly, the concepts that are currently in vogue should not be treated as though they were natural kinds, capable of accounting fully for the phenomena of the past. All the more so, he warns, prudence is called for when accounting for culturally evolving forms and configurations of human life. Taking ancient Greek civilization as an instructive case, Graham exposes the shortcomings of capturing the past through present-day concepts: It is pointless to ask whether the pre-Socratics were philosophers, scientists, or theologians. They were all and none of these things, since the attempt to apply these distinctions as we now make them is anachronistic. The concepts of philosophy, theology, and science have evolved  .  .  . from this shared beginning, and discrimination between them is possible now where previously it was not.68 In line with this criticism, he blows up the difficulties even further by introducing to this context the modern conceptual apparatus of distinct value spheres: Exactly the same is true in the case of Art and Religion. . . . We think of Sophocles as a great dramatist or playwright and consequently classify Oedipus Rex alongside Hamlet and Lear. Yet we might as

118  Herbert De Vriese readily describe him as a great liturgist. To do so would sound very odd, but ‘liturgist’ is actually no odder than the anachronistic ‘playwright’. As is well known, Greek tragedies were written for and performed at religious festivals in which music played an important part. They thus share features both with major Christian observances like Midnight Mass at Christmas, and with a night at the opera. Since we now regard these as importantly different, it is tempting to identify Greek tragedies with one or the other (usually opera-type performance), but the truth is that they cannot be exclusively identified with either.69 Further elaborating that point, Graham reminds us of the fact that the Greeks did not have a word for art and that a similar point can be made about religion. Therefore, if speaking of ‘Greek religion’, one should realize that “the distinctions that are now important, between religion, magic, myth, superstition, and political ceremony, cannot be drawn meaningfully within it.”70 Applied to the enchanted world of premodern European civilization, Graham’s analysis yields a significant methodological contribution: the projection onto the premodern world of the typically modern conception of different value spheres such as, following Weber’s classification, the familial, the religious, the economic, the political, the aesthetic, the erotic and the intellectual (scientific) sphere,71 is an anachronistic imposition of distinctions that specifically characterize our present-day worldview and sensibilities, but which cannot be assumed to have a central meaning or particularly explanatory value for understanding the past. If the differentiation thesis in all of its formulations has any essential message to tell, then it is exactly to arouse the awareness that notions such as religion, art and science, even though they are continuously used as basic building blocks of modern theory, have received a distinctive meaning and status in modern societies which they did not have before. Honoring that intuition, the concept of enchantment presents itself as a theoretical device to avoid the risk of anachronistic projection. Moreover, substantial accounts of “the enchanted world”72 may by their very use of the word ‘enchanted’ already communicate the important qualification that a reductive interpretation in terms of modern distinctions does not apply. So far, the theoretical value of the concept of enchantment has been mainly ascribed to its formal, methodological function. For a more substantial appreciation of its value, my investigation again departs from Graham’s analysis. In a most original approach to the idea of value spheres, Graham proposes that their autonomy and intrinsic logic are not so much defined by their unique societal function, but rather by their ability to offer a specific type of ‘vocation’ in life.73 Reflecting on the significance of the term vocation in Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, he argues that not only science and politics, but religion, morality, art and

Theorizing Reenchantment  119 perhaps sport as well, can all be regarded as separate cultural domains within which it is possible to realize a meaningful life by finding and following one’s vocation.74 In other words, each distinctive value sphere owes its special status to the fact that it offers the exclusive possibility to modern individuals to cultivate and realize a lifelong vocation within it. Intriguingly, Graham calls the realization of such a lifelong vocation, if successful, reenchantment.75 In a closer study of this typically modern form of ‘reenchantment’, Graham focuses on the value sphere of art. A five-chapter analysis of different art forms extensively goes into the question whether art is capable of restoring the original enchantment of a world not yet broken up into different value spheres. After carefully weighing up the pros and cons, he concludes that aesthetic reenchantment fails to offer a valid substitute for the loss of existential meaningfulness which it is meant to compensate for. At that juncture, however, Graham all of a sudden equates the original type of enchantment with the value sphere of religion.76 Interpreting “art’s ambition to re-enchant the world”77 as its “aspiration to re-enchant a world disenchanted by the demise of religion”,78 he frames the passage to modernity, in spite of his earlier criticisms of secularization theory, as one from religion to a “world of secular humanism”, and then concludes that “aestheticism cannot provide us with a satisfactory concept of post-religious re-enchantment.”79 In so doing, he falls into the very pitfall for which he himself had so emphatically warned before: the pitfall of projecting onto the premodern world the central categories of the modern world. For one can easily see how Graham remains attached to a paradigm of functional differentiation in his own historical account. Instead of seeing religion as one of those various value spheres which in modern societies come to replace, in part, the unbroken unity of the originally enchanted world, his view is indebted to a modern classification into the neatly divided domains of science, art and religion. By extension, this deficiency of theorizing reenchantment can be traced in much of the contemporary literature on the topic. In it, reenchantment is generally understood either as the alternative to the existential meaningfulness found in religion, and in that case much emphasis is laid on the possibility of “secular reenchantment”,80 or as a synonymous term for religious, chiefly Christian, spirituality in rivalry with the emptiness of secular modernity.81 In my view, those who insist on the characteristically theistic or secular nature of their conception of enchantment have already ruined the object of their analysis. What they fail to realize is that they have first cut open and dissected the phenomenon of enchantment and then pretend to show its genuine and vibrant life. And yet, such a deficient approach can be easily avoided if one expounds Graham’s ideas in a more consistent fashion. The crucial point is that the vision of realizing one’s lifelong vocation does not provide a phenomenology of enchantment, but of its modern substitute. In sum, following one’s vocation is a

120  Herbert De Vriese new dimension of the modern world.82 If we unpack the original experience which it is meant to replace, a fuller understanding arises: enchantment offers a similar existential fulfilment as the one received in realizing one’s vocation, but without an act of conscious choice and discipline, and in relation to a world undivided by what we now tend to see as distinct and very different cultural domains. Consequently, transferred to the modern world, a full-blown and substantially richer account of reenchantment emerges, too. These are succinct and evocative reflections, in need of further elaboration. Yet I do believe they comply with meaningful experiences of modern life  – experiences that blur the distinctions between theoretical, practical and aesthetic domains, and seem to receive their special quality of existential fulfilment by cutting across the boundaries of different value spheres.

Notes 1. The examples can be multiplied, but I limit myself to three noteworthy publications where one will search in vain for a detailed treatment of the concept(s) of (dis)enchantment: Ronald G. Asch, Sacral Kingship between Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment: The French and English Monarchies, 1587–1688 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2014); Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Bernard Stiegler, Reénchanter le monde: La valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). See also the publications mentioned in footnote 12. 2. For ‘demagification’ (‘de-magic-ing’, ‘demagicalization’, ‘demagicization’), it must first of all be noted that many classic English translations convey Weber’s phrase ‘Entzauberung der Welt’ as ‘the elimination of magic from the world’ (or even clumsier, ‘from the world’s occurences’), see for instance Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West, trans. and introduced by Stephen Kalberg, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 107, 114, 135, 137; for further instances of this interpretation of disenchantment, see Gilbert G. Germain, A Discourse on Disenchantment: Reflections on Politics and Technology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 28; Jason JosephsonStorm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 4, 271; Jonathan J Zisook, “Disenchantment of the World: Weber, Judaism, and Maimonides,” Journal of Classical Sociology 17, no. 3 (2017): 175; for ‘desacralization’ (or ‘profanation’), see for instance Daniel Bell, “The Return of the Sacred: The Argument about the Future of Religion,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 31, no. 6 (1978): 32; Daryl J. Wennemann, “Desacralization and the Disenchantment of the World,” Philosophy and Theology 5, no. 3 (1991): 237–49; for ‘rationalization’, and more precisely the critique on the tacit acceptance in sociology that rationalization and disenchantment are more or less equivalent, see Friedrich H. Tenbruck, “The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber,” The British Journal of Sociology 31, no. 3 (1980): 321; for ‘secularization’, although the generally accepted view is that one cannot equate it with disenchantment, see for

Theorizing Reenchantment  121 instance Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 113; Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 8–9. 3. Cf. Robert W. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 475. 4. Cf. Keith Thomas, “An Anthropology of Religion and Magic,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6, no. 1 (1975): 98. 5. Cf. Jibu Mathew George, The Ontology of Gods: An Account of Enchantment, Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), esp. Ch. 3. 6. Cf. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 88. 7. Cf. H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 177–79. 8. Cf. Basil Bilal Koshul, The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber’s Legacy: Disenchanting Disenchantment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 48; Nicholas Gane, Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalization versus Re-enchantment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 23. 9. Cf. Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 28. 10. See for instance Jeffrey E. Green, “Two Meanings of Disenchantment: Sociological Condition vs. Philosophical Act  – Reassessing Max Weber’s Thesis of the Disenchantment of the World,” Philosophy and Theology 17, no. 1/2 (2005): 51–84; Steven Grosby, “Max Weber, Religion, and the Disenchantment of the World,” Culture and Society 50, no. 3 (2013): 301–10; Hans Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), 207. 11. Wolfgang Schluchter, Die Entzauberung der Welt: Sechs Studien zu Max Weber (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 7–13, distinguishes between “Entzauberung als großer religionsgeschichtlicher Prozess” and “Entzauberung als wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher Prozess”. See also Richard Jenkins, “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium,” Max Weber Studies 1 (2000): 12; Kenichi Mishima, “The ‘Disenchantment of the World’ or Why We Can No Longer Use the Formula as Max Weber Might Have Intended,” in The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber, eds. Edith Hanke, Lawrence Scaff, and Sam Whimster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 354. 12. Cf. David Ray Griffin, The Re-enchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988); Alister McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis (New York: Doubleday, 2002); Richard Harries, The Re-enchantment of Morality: Wisdom for a Troubled World (London: SPCK, 2008). 13. Lawrence A. Scaff, Weber and the Weberians (New York: Basingstoke, 2014), 159. 14. Balthasar Bekker, De betoverde weereld, zijnde een grondig ondersoek van’t gemeen gevoelen aangaande de geesten, deselver aart en vermogen, bewind en bedrijf: als ook’t gene de menschen door denselver kraght en gemeenschap doen. In vier boeken ondernomen (Amsterdam, D. van den Dalen, 1691– 1693). The hypothesis was launched by Christian Begemann and reinforced by Hartmut Lehmann. See Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 211.

122  Herbert De Vriese 15. There is even a possibility that Weber had consulted Bekker’s work: a German translation was available in the Heidelberg library collection under the title Balthasar Bekkers bezauberte Welt. See Hartmut Lehmann, “Max Weber and the Dialectics of Disenchantment and Re-enchantment in Modern History,” in Max Weber in the 21st Century: Transdisciplinarity within the Social Sciences, eds. Frank Adloff and Manuel Borutta (Florence: European University Institute, 2008), 75. 16. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment, 271. Jakob Friedrich Fries, Die Geschichte der Philosophie dargestellt nach den Fortschritten ihrer wissenschaftlichen Entwickelung (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Weisenhauses, 1837), Erster Band, Dritter Teil, 307: “Sein berühmtestes Werk, welches er 1690 und 1691 unter dem Titel ‘die bezauberte Welt’ herausgab, und welches in viele Sprachen übersetzt wurde, stützte sich sehr einseitig auf das nach Descartes gebildete System des Geulinx, aber es gelang ihm doch, den Ausführungen gegen Gespenster und Hexenglauben nebst allen verwandten Träumen eine so ansprechende Gemeinverständlichkeit zu geben, daß es durchgreifend zur Entzauberung dieser Welt wirkte.” 17. Other scholars have argued that the verb ‘entzaubern’ was already employed in a Weberian sense in 1815 by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who scorned the scientific admiration “for the human intellect  .  .  . capable of disenchanting the universe”. See Karl Homann, F. H. Jacobis Philosophie der Freiheit (Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Alber, 1973), 172; Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 209; Christian Polke, “Von göttlichen Dingen. Jacobi und das Problem von Theismus und Naturalismus,” in Systemkonzeptionen im Horizont der Theismusstreites (1811–1821), herausgegeben von Christian Danz et. al. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2018), 20: “Es ist weit vor Weber Jacobi, der den Aufstieg des okzidentalen Rationalismus und die Vorherrschaft der naturwissenschaftlichen Wirklichkeitsparadigmen als Entzauberungsprozess gelesen hat.” Cf. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Werke. Zweiter Band (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer d. Jüng., 1815), 52: “Selbst die Herrlichkeit und Majestät des Himmels, die noch den kindlichen Menschen auf die Knie wirft, überwältigt nicht mehr das Gemüth des Kenners der Mechanik, welche diese Körper bewegt, in ihren Bewegungen erhält, ja sie selbst auch bildete. Nicht vor dem Gegenstande erstaunt er mehr, ist dieser gleich unendlich, sondern allein vor dem menschlichen Verstande, der in einem Copernicus, Gassendi, Kepler, Newton und Laplace über den Gegenstand sich zu erheben, durch Wissenschaft dem Wunder ein Ende zu machen, den Himmel seiner Götter zu berauben, das Weltall zu entzaubern vermochte.” But lofty words for Jacobi, as predecessor of Weber, are not justified here. Jacobi’s use of the verb ‘entzaubern’ is borrowed from another writing by Fries, his Popular Lectures on Astronomy, from which Jacobi takes several quotes in a substantial clarifying footnote to the cited passage above, 52–53. In his seventh lecture on astronomy, Fries uses the term ‘Entzauberung’ seven times in the distinctive context of scientific disenchantment. Nature, he writes, “speaks of an enchantment that no calculation will ever disenchant. . . . The purpose of that scientific disenchantment is to liberate faith from all nonsense of superstition.” See Jakob Friedrich Fries, Populäre Vorlesungen über die Sternkunde. Gehalten zu Heidelberg im Winter 1811 auf 1812 (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1813), 229–30: “Wollt ihr draußen in der Natur seines [Gottes] Namens Zeugniß erfragen: so fragt des Lichtes freundliche Kinder die Farben, fragt der Töne selbst geschaffene Welt im Leben ihrer Melodien und Harmonieen, fragt Sterne, Blüthen, Augen – wen ihr wollt; die alle verkündigen uns einen andern Zauber, den Keine Rechnung je entzaubern wird – nur Linien, Winkel, Zahlen,

Theorizing Reenchantment  123 die laßt unbefragt. . . . Darin, meine ich, liegt das große Werk dieser Entzauberung, daß wir dem klaren Licht der Wissenschaft, so kalt es seyn mag, sein Recht geben. . . . Den Glauben nun von allem Aberwitz des Aberglaubens zu befreyen, dient jene wissenschaftliche Entzauberung, sobald einmal das Werk gelungen seyn wird, die Schranken menschlicher Einsicht dem Volke klar zu machen.” The reference to Bekker in his 1837 history of philosophy (see footnote 16), then, makes it credible that Fries’ use of the terms ‘Zauber’ and ‘Entzauberung’ was inspired by his knowledge of Bekker’s The Enchanted World. 18. Balthasar Bekker, De Philosophia Cartesiana Admonitio Candida & Sincera (Amsterdam: Hoogenhuysen, 1668), 16, 113–17. 19. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 379. 20. Ibid. 21. For Bekker’s most elaborate Cartesian refutation of Satan’s power over human life and natural affairs, see De Betoverde Weereld, Vol. 3, Ch. II, 5–12: “Der Geesten, en besonderlik der bosen, omgang met de Menschen is beswaarlik met de Reden over een te brengen.” In a beautiful poem dedicated to his wife, Bekker considers as his highest achievement the clearing of the world from ghost and devil (“van Spook en Duivel vry”). Cf. Brief van Balthasar Bekker aan Frouk Fullenia (Uytrecht: Jochem Michielsz, 1991), 1. 22. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 392–94. Yet, Bekker’s assault on witchcraft and demonic power was not appreciated by all of his contemporaries. It also led, in result of fierce opposition by orthodox theologians, to his deposition from the ministry. Cf. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 382–88, section “The Public Furore”. 23. Pun intended: one of the deficiencies of the English term ‘disenchantment’ is its emotional charge of disappointment and disillusionment. This is different in the German language, because it will use the word ‘Enttäuschung’ instead of ‘Entzauberung’ in order to express such an emotional state. Also on behalf of its etymological roots in incantation, which literally means ‘chanting’ magical words or formulas in order to cast a spell, the English term ‘disenchantment’ favors the Romantic interpretation of ‘Entzauberung’ and has difficulties in communicating the sense of relief conveyed by the Enlightenment understanding of ‘Entzauberung’. It is not a coincidence, perhaps, that none of the two contemporary English translations of Bekker’s, De Betoverde Weereld chose The Enchanted World as its title, but opted for The World Bewitch’d (London, 1695) and The World Turn’d Upside Down (London, 1700). In attempting to unearth the etymological roots of ‘Zauber’, a less charming picture appears. ‘Zauber’ is derived from ‘Zubar’ (Old High German), ‘taufr’ (Old Norse) or ‘téafor’ (Old English), which designated ‘red pigment, ruddle, red ochre’ or ‘ointment’. According to Heinrich Wesche, Der althochdeutsche Wortschatz im Gebiete des Zaubers und der Weissagung (Halle: Niemeyer, 1940), 6, the word stems from the old Germanic ritual of staining runes with blood in order to render them magically effective, which in a later phase was replaced by painting them with red substances. 24. For a summary of the central arguments, see Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment, 271; Antônio Flávio Pierucci, “Secularization in Max Weber. On Current Usefulness of Re-Accessing that Old Meaning,” Brazilian Review of Social Sciences, special issue, no. 1 (2000): 153, footnote 8. For the origin of the attribution to Schiller and a further argument in support of it, see Lawrence A. Scaff, “Weber, Art, and Social Theory,” Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics VII, no. 2 (2005): 7, 20.

124  Herbert De Vriese 25. This is suggested by other implicit references to Schiller’s poem in Weber’s text. See Pierucci, “Secularization in Max Weber,” 136. 26. This stanza comes from the original 1788 poem and was removed in the revised version published by Schiller in 1800 after a storm of protest against its supposedly anti-Christian tendency. See Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 98. For our purposes here it is important to note, however, that the second version, which comes after his reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) and his publication of On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), is more in line with his new ideas on idealism and ‘romantic reenchantment’. 27. Sara Lyons, “The Disenchantment/Re-Enchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularization, and the Gods of Greece from Friedrich Schiller to Walter Pater,” The Modern Language Review 109, no. 4 (2014): 879. 28. Two illustrations from the poem may suffice. For the ‘disenchantment’ by monotheism: “Alle jene Blüten sind gefallen/ Von des Nordes schauerlichem Wehn;/ Einen zu bereichern unter allen,/ Mußte diese Götterwelt vergehn.” For the ‘disenchantment’ by modern science: “Wo jetzt nur, wie unsre Weisen sagen,/ Seelenlos ein Feuerball sich dreht,/ Lenkte damals seinen goldnen Wagen/ Helios in stiller Majestät.” Cf. Friedrich Schiller, Werke in vier Bänden (Salzburg: Bergland-Buch, 1986), Band I, resp. 213, 215. 29. In the final letter of On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller sketches a historical evolution of three political regimes: the legal state of rights, the moral state of duties and the aesthetic state of freedom. The latter state, which is characterized by lack of limitation by either physical force (law) or moral discipline (obligation), is the final destination to which Schiller’s long path of the education of humanity is heading. Cf. Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, in Werke in vier Bänden, Band I, 569. In light of this work, Sara Lyons’ interpretation of Schiller’s poem as a plea for restoring “a poetic vision of the world,” is far too ‘aestheticized’ for it entirely misses the existential and socio-cultural import of Schiller’s ‘aesthetic reenchantment’. See Lyons, The Gods of Greece, 880 (italics mine). 30. Cf. Schiller’s famous dictum from the prologue to his drama Wallenstein: “Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst” [“Life is serious, art is joyful”]. 31. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), 139. Cf. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 570: “Die Schönheit allein beglückt alle Welt, und jedes Wesen vergißt seiner Schranken, so lang es ihren Zauber erfährt.” 32. This line comes from the revised 1800 version of the poem, the ‘classic’ version and almost certainly the one with which Weber was familiar. See Schiller, Werke in vier Bänden, Band I, 213. Worth mentioning is that the original version, “Die Götter Griechenlandes [1788],” in Friedrich Schillers Gedichte. Ausgewählte Werke II, herausgegeben von Joerg K. Sommermeyer (Berlin: Orlando Syrg, 2019), 112, has “Der Dichtung malerische Hülle”. The ­English translation is mine. 33. For an interesting discussion in term of Weber’s own methodology of the social sciences, see Koshul, The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber’s Legacy, 80–87. 34. Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 207, 254–55. 35. Ibid. English translation from Marius Timmann Mjaaland, “Secular Formatting of the Sacred: Human Rights and the Question of Secularization and Re-Sacralization,” Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics 13, no. 2 (2019): 166.

Theorizing Reenchantment  125 36. Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 20 (1905): 1–54 and 21 (1905): 1–110. The fact that some copies of part 1 were already distributed in late 1904 explains why some scholars date the first edition in 1904–1905. Weber cemented the error by mentioning in his collected writings the years 1904–1905 as the (wrong) date of publication of the essays. See Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Erster Band (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1920), 17n: “Veröffentlicht im Jafféschen “Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik” (J. C. B. Mohr, Tübingen) Band XX, XXI (1904 bzw. 1905). 37. Stephen Kalberg, “Introduction to the Translation,” in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West, trans. and introduced by Stephen Kalberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 38. Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Erster Band (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1920), 17–206. 39. Tenbruck, “The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber,” 319–20. 40. Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 233, 239. 41. Tenbruck, “The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber,” 320. Quoted from the original German article in Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 223. 42. Friedrich H. Tenbruck, “Das Werk Max Webers,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 27 (1975): 663–702; republished in 69, Suppl. 1 (2017): 375–413. 43. Tenbruck, “The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber,” 320–21. 44. Highlighting the significance of disenchantment, Tenbruck takes issue with scholars who consider ‘rationalization’ to be the common thread that links Weber’s entire oeuvre. See “The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber,” 322–23, 326: “Therefore, the process of rationalization is at heart an historico-religious process of disenchantment, and the stages and moments in the history of rationalization derive their unity from the process of disenchantment. Weber’s discovery was not the identification of the separate events but a logic, the internal drive behind the whole sequence.” This view is confirmed by Jenkins, “Disenchantment, Enchantment and ReEnchantment,” 12. 45. Ibid., 328–29, 341–42. 46. Ibid., 331. 47. An analogous situation presents itself in secularization theory, where many scholars, while accepting the devastating critique of the classical secularization paradigm, have continued to use and explore the concept of secularization. 48. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 110. In a letter to Hermann Graf Keyserling, 12 December 1912, quoted in Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Webers späte Soziologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 136–37, Weber underlines that the investigation into “the guarantees for the certainty of salvation” [den Unterpfändern der ‘certitudo salutis’] is The Protestant Ethic’s most important contribution to the sociology of religion. 49. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 139. 50. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 162. 51. No wonder, Joas’ analytical approach is allergic to Weber’s ‘double designation’ [Doppelbezeichnung] ‘magisch-sakramental’. While rejecting the

126  Herbert De Vriese theoretical relevance of this concept by relating it to Weber’s prejudiced position in a discourse of confessional polemics, primarily directed against Catholicism, Joas conveys the untenable suggestion that it is also part of the overhasty and inconsiderate supplements of the 1920 edition. See Die Macht des Heiligen, 225–26, esp. 226: “Andere Einschübe in den Text des alten Protestantismus-Aufsatzes”. At any rate, the acknowledgment that the ‘Doppelbezeichnung’ belongs already to Weber’s original 1905 account of The Protestant Ethic is absent. 52. Cf. supra, footnote 50; Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik, 107, 126. See also 185: “Der zornige Haß der Puritaner gegen alles, was nach »superstition« roch, gegen alle Reminiszenzen von magischer oder hierurgischer Gnadenspendung verfolgte das christliche Weihnachtsfest ganz ebenso wie den Maibaum und die unbefangene kirchliche Kunstübung.” 53. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 94: “Schon die Sonderstellung der altisraelitischen Ethik . . . und ihre Entwicklung seit der Prophetenzeit beruhte . . . ganz und gar auf diesem Grundsachverhalt: der Ablehnung der sakramentalen Magie als Heilsweg.” (my translation) 54. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 95. 55. Ibid., 114. 56. Ibid. This statement invalidates Joas’ ideological reading of Weber with respect to sacramental magic. See footnote 51. 57. The first one-sentence insertion equates “the religious disenchantment of the world” with “the most radical devaluation of all sacraments as means to salvation”. The other two-sentence insertion relates “the radical disenchantment of the world” to the inner disengagement of mundane interests as the single remaining vestige of spiritual fulfillment. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 156, 158. 58. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Socio­ logy, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2000), resp. 139, 139, 148, 155. 59. Ibid., 142. 60. Ibid. 61. An allusion to Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 223; Tenbruck, “Das Werk Max Webers,” 667. 62. Mishima, “The ‘Disenchantment of the World’,” 354–56. Stephen Kalberg’s long-winded translations of ‘die Entzauberung der Welt’ as “the elimination of magic from the world’s occurrences” or “a process that eliminated magic from the world”, can be regarded as another attempt to convey this reading of Weber’s work. See Weber, The Protestant Ethic, resp. 107, 137 and 135. 63. Anthony J Carroll, “Disenchantment, Rationality and the Modernity of Max Weber,” Forum Philosophicum 16, no. 1 (2011): 119. 64. Charles Turner, Modernity and Politics in the Work of Max Weber (London: Routledge, 1992), 105. 65. ‘Uncritical’ engagement with the differentiation thesis, by contrast, abounds: very often it serves as the master narrative of modernity in which the disenchantment thesis must be placed. A  notable exception is Egil Asprem’s insightful treatment in The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 23, 65. See also footnote 9. 66. Stephen Kalberg, “Glossary,” in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West, trans. and introduced by Stephen Kalberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 561. See also footnote 11.

Theorizing Reenchantment  127 67. Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10. 68. Ibid., 11. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 12. Confining myself to the most critical part of Graham’s analysis, I make abstraction from his idealistic understanding of the past as the gradual development of an implicit aspiration that one only fully understands at the end, from the vantage point of the present. Ibid., 13–14. 71. Max Weber, “Zwischenbetrachtung,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Erster Band (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1920), 436–73. 72. In academic literature, the most extensive and consistent treatment of the premodern world in terms of “the enchanted world” is found in Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. the first chapter “The Bulwarks of Belief,” 25–89. Yet Taylor’s approach to this world, which he convincingly characterizes as one in which “the line between personal agency and impersonal force was not at all clearly drawn” (32), suffers from the flaw of a predominantly epistemological explanation: the major difference with the modern world is its habitation by a different subject, a “porous self” (38), which is assumed to be particularly vulnerable to those external forces. The same goes for Morris Berman, who more than two decades earlier introduced the concept of “the enchanted world” in the introduction to his The Reenchantment of the World (London: Cornell University Press, 1981), 15–24, but then drops it in favor of an epistemological account of “psychic wholeness” experienced by a “participating consciousness”. Cf. 75: “Given this system of knowledge, modern distinctions between inner and outer, psychic and organic (or physical), do not exist.” 73. Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World, 15: “The accomplishment of a meaningful life can be conceived of as a process of self-realization. . . . Let us call any mode of existence in which such a self can be realized a ‘vocation’. Vocations depend on spheres of meaning  – Art, Politics, Religion, Science, Morality  – each of which is a developed cultural entity, part practice and artefacts, part philosophical idea, the idea being the aspiration embodied in the practices and their products.” 74. Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World, 7–8. 75. Ibid., 46–47, 61, esp. 115–17, 143, 157. 76. Or, perhaps, one could have expected this twist of argument on the basis of a cautious formulation in the introduction to the book, ibid., 7: “It is also plausible to think that one such sphere encompasses the others within it; religion has often been thought of in this way.” 77. Ibid., 181. 78. Ibid., 100. Cf. 154: “If art is to re-enchant the world in the aftermath of religion’s demise.” 79. Ibid., resp. 157, 172. 80. See Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002); George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, eds., The Re-enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). 81. See McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature; Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World; see also the discussions in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of this volume. 82. See Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 89–97, Ch. 3, “Luther’s Conception of the Calling.”

128  Herbert De Vriese

Bibliography Asch, Ronald G. Sacral Kingship between Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment: The French and English Monarchies, 1587–1688. Oxford: Berghahn, 2014. Asprem, Egil. The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Bekker, Balthasar. De betoverde weereld, zijnde een grondig ondersoek van ‘t gemeen gevoelen aangaande de geesten, deselver aart en vermogen, bewind en bedrijf: als ook ‘t gene de menschen door denselver kraght en gemeenschap doen. In vier boeken ondernomen. Amsterdam, D. van den Dalen, 1691–1693. ———. De Philosophia Cartesiana Admonitio Candida & Sincera. Amsterdam: Hoogenhuysen, 1668. ———. Brief van Balthasar Bekker aan Frouk Fullenia. Uytrecht: Jochem Michielsz, 1991. Bell, Daniel. “The Return of the Sacred: The Argument about the Future of Religion.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 31, no. 6 (1978): 29–55. Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. London: Cornell University Press, 1981. Cameron, Euan. Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250– 1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Carroll, Anthony J. “Disenchantment, Rationality and the Modernity of Max Weber.” Forum Philosophicum 16, no. 1 (2011): 117–37. Cohen, H. Floris. The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Fisher, Philip. Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Fries, Jakob Friedrich. Populäre Vorlesungen über die Sternkunde. Gehalten zu Heidelberg im Winter 1811 auf 1812. Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1813. ———. Die Geschichte der Philosophie dargestellt nach den Fortschritten ihrer wissenschaftlichen Entwickelung. Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Weisenhauses, 1837. Gane, Nicholas. Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalization versus Re-enchantment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. George, Jibu Mathew. The Ontology of Gods: An Account of Enchantment, Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Germain, Gilbert G. A Discourse on Disenchantment: Reflections on Politics and Technology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Graham, Gordon. The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Green, Jeffrey E. “Two Meanings of Disenchantment: Sociological Condition vs. Philosophical Act – Reassessing Max Weber’s Thesis of the Disenchantment of the World.” Philosophy and Theology 17, no. 1/2 (2005): 51–84. Griffin, David Ray. The Re-enchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals. New York: State University of New York Press, 1988.

Theorizing Reenchantment  129 Grosby, Steven. “Max Weber, Religion, and the Disenchantment of the World.” Culture and Society 50, no. 3 (2013): 301–10. Harries, Richard. The Re-enchantment of Morality: Wisdom for a Troubled World. London: SPCK, 2008. Homann, Karl. F. H. Jacobis Philosophie der Freiheit. Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Alber, 1973. Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. Werke. Zweiter Band. Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer d. Jüng., 1815. Jenkins, Richard. “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium.” Max Weber Studies 1 (2000): 11–32. Joas, Hans. Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. Josephson-Storm, Jason. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Kalberg, Stephen. “Introduction to the Translation.” In Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West. Translated and introduced by Stephen Kalberg, 3–6. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Koshul, Basil Bilal. The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber’s Legacy: Disenchanting Disenchantment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Landy, Joshua, and Michael Saler, eds. The Re-enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009. Lehmann, Hartmut. “Max Weber and the Dialectics of Disenchantment and Reenchantment in Modern History.” In Max Weber in the 21st Century: Transdisciplinarity within the Social Sciences, edited by Frank Adloff and Manuel Borutta, 73–80. Florence: European University Institute, 2008. Levine, George. Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Lyons, Sara. “The Disenchantment/Re-Enchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularization, and the Gods of Greece From Friedrich Schiller To Walter Pater.” The Modern Language Review 109, no. 4 (2014): 873–95. McGrath, Alister. The Reenchantment of Nature. The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Mishima, Kenichi. “The ‘Disenchantment of the World’ or Why We Can No Longer Use the Formula as Max Weber Might Have Intended.” In The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber, edited by Edith Hanke, Lawrence Scaff, and Sam Whimster, 353–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Mjaaland, Marius Timmann. “Secular Formatting of the Sacred: Human Rights and the Question of Secularization and Re-Sacralization.” Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics 13, no. 2 (2019): 164–82. Partridge, Christopher. The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture. London: T&T Clark International, 2004. Pierucci, Antônio Flávio. “Secularization in Max Weber. On Current Usefulness of Re-Accessing that Old Meaning.” Brazilian Review of Social Sciences no. 1 (2000): 129–58.

130  Herbert De Vriese Polke, Christian. “Von göttlichen Dingen. Jacobi und das Problem von Theismus und Naturalismus.” In Systemkonzeptionen im Horizont der Theismusstreites (1811–1821), herausgegeben von Christian Danz et al., 7–30. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2018. Roth, Guenther, and Wolfgang Schluchter. Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Scaff, Lawrence A. “Weber, Art, and Social Theory.” Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics VII, no. 2 (2005): 1–26. ———. Weber and the Weberians. New York: Basingstoke, 2014. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954. ———. Werke in vier Bänden. Salzburg: Bergland-Buch, 1986. ———. Friedrich Schillers Gedichte. Ausgewählte Werke II, herausgegeben von Joerg K. Sommermeyer. Berlin: Orlando Syrg, 2019. Schluchter, Wolfgang. Die Entzauberung der Welt: Sechs Studien zu Max Weber. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. ———. Max Webers späte Soziologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. Scribner, Robert W. “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 475–94. Sharpe, Lesley. Friedrich Schiller: Drama, thought and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Stiegler, Bernard. Reénchanter le monde: La valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel. Paris: Flammarion, 2008. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Tenbruck, Friedrich H. “Das Werk Max Webers.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 27 (1975): 663–702, republished in 69, Suppl. 1 (2017): 375–413. ———. “The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber.” The British Journal of Sociology 31, no. 3 (1980): 316–51. Thomas, Keith. “An Anthropology of Religion and Magic.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6, no. 1 (1975): 91–109. Turner, Charles. Modernity and Politics in the Work of Max Weber. London: Routledge, 1992. Weber, Max. “Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus.” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 20 (1905): 1–54, 21 (1905): 1–110. ———. “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Erster Band. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1920. ———. “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Erster Band, 17–206. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1920. ———. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West. Translated and introduced by Stephen Kalberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Theorizing Reenchantment  131 Wennemann, Daryl J. “Desacralization and the Disenchantment of the World.” Philosophy and Theology 5, no. 3 (1991): 237–49. Wesche, Heinrich. Der althochdeutsche Wortschatz im Gebiete des Zaubers und der Weissagung. Halle: Niemeyer, 1940. Zisook, Jonathan J. “Disenchantment of the World: Weber, Judaism, and Maimonides.” Journal of Classical Sociology 17, no. 3 (2017): 173–90.

6 Reenchantment as Resonance1 Paolo Costa

A Disenchantment Tale Let me start the long argument that will gradually lead me from disenchantment to resonance with a first-person foray into the subject. I begin by laying out what I take to be a truthful, albeit intimate, picture of a plausible experience of enchantment in the modern dispensation. The reader, I guess, can find an analogue in her own life-experience paving the way for the ensuing sense-making effort. The circumstance is familiar enough. I spend a few days alone on the mountains. The weather is splendid. I decide to sleep under the starry sky, and when I wake up I have a sense of being at one with the whole universe. The peaks, the meadows, the trees, the wild animals speak to me. They seem present and unconstrained in a special sense, different from the meanings that are usually associated with such words. And so am I. It is not just that I  feel at home in the world. The change of mood, besides, gives me a fresh perspective on life and a new sense of import of the things I used to cherish. Even negative states of mind such as exhaustion and bewilderment, let alone joy and contentment, take on a new taste now. As a result, I  begin to wonder when and why I  agreed to spend the best years of my life in an environment that does not resonate with me anymore, doing things that I  cannot care less about and surviving by killing time as successfully as I can. I am at loss for words and short of compelling reasons. What is happening to me, to cut a long story short, is that I am undergoing an episode of enchantment. Things appear in a new light now, endowed with potentialities and agential powers that seemed unrealistic only a few hours earlier. This kind of oceanic feeling, as it happens, is neither new nor alien to me. It comes with a halo. More precisely, it has a hazy resemblance with other emotional states I did experience previously in my life, only in less dazzling hues. I am reminded in particular of those endless summer afternoons during my childhood when I wandered with a friend in the woods

Reenchantment as Resonance  133 surrounding my grandparents’ house. Time and space were not effective constraints during those hours we spent drifting in and out between daydreaming and playing. I was accustomed back then to that over-receptive state of mind where consciousness functions as a lantern and diffuses its light without focusing on anything in particular.2 And yet such an openended stream of consciousness was not self-contained. It was drawn by a sense of fullness that had no equivalent in everyday life. With the benefit of hindsight, it looks like something uncanny was located somewhere beyond ordinary time and space and had the eerie ability to feel more important and real than everything else. I am baffled and at pains to make sense of such a puzzling mood. But then, in a matter of moments, I am back to the big city, and what I am enduring now is a bout of disillusionment. All at once, human life does not seem to be about fulfilment at all. The majority of my choices and actions, in fact, appear to be revolving around survival. There is little of inherent worth to be recognized out there. I am mostly confronted with the opportunities and obstacles interspersed between me and the satisfaction of my basic needs and desires. I am literally running for my life by sticking to the escalating rhythm of an existence ruled by ruthless competition. Urgency dominates everywhere and it looks like all things, both living and non-living ones, are related only by external ties. The longing for fullness appears as a childish luxury now or, at most, as a spineless form of escapism. The plausibility of this familiar process of disillusionment deserves serious thought. Once the relationship between the intense but elusive experience of fullness enjoyed on the mountains and the subsequent metropolitan exposure of its unconventional quality is symbolically understood in terms of existential periphery and center (or, for that matter, labor and leisure), what is implicitly claimed is that it is unbecoming of us, as adults, to indulge in juvenile illusions about what life has really in store for us. The “Sunday of life,” to evoke the title of an insightful novel, may as well possess a shielded place in our lives, but it is a prerogative of a mature disposition not to misjudge its true nature.3 “Be realistic!” then, is a warning fit for a man or a woman facing a risk of regression to a form of consciousness that gives up the spotlight consciousness of the problem-solver for the lantern consciousness of the uncultivated explorer. At first sight, this way of tackling the issue makes perfect sense. In what follows, however, I  intend to test the intuitions upon which the above inference is based by investigating three interlocking questions as thoroughly as I can in the limited space available here. First, I shall wonder why the experiences of enchantment have to cave in and give way to disillusionment: is this an inescapable feature of the human condition and, if such is the case, what sort of inescapability are we dealing with here? Second, as long as episodes of enchantment do happen, I want to ask then what kind of human potential is embodied by them. Third, and

134  Paolo Costa finally, I shall inquire whether there are ways to account for the reasons supporting the two stances of enchantment and disenchantment without making them mutually incompatible.

Coping With Disillusionment In a nutshell, the lesson that most people draw from personal incidents such as the one outlined earlier is that disillusionment cannot but have the upper hand once dissonance occurs between sudden surges of unrealistic expectations from the world and the sobering demands of ordinary life. There is much that is true in this picture of the human condition, but also much that is overstated. In this section, I  shall selectively borrow from Alfred Schutz’s essay “On Multiple Realities” to shed light on both. Schutz famously distinguishes in his paper what he called there the “paramount reality” from other “finite provinces of meaning” or, borrowing the term from William James, “sub-universes.”4 By this Schutz means that the human sense of reality is not a homogenous, all-of-a-piece achievement. It is, on the contrary, a multifaceted affair resulting from a string of experiences, cognitive styles, “worlds,” which are irreducible one to the other and can be entered or left only by means of a disturbing leap. Examples of such provinces of meaning are children’s play, religious rituals, dreaming, intense esthetic or intellectual experiences, humor.5 The reason why these meaningful practices are called “provinces” by Schutz is that they play a marginal role in human existence if compared with the world of everyday life. The latter also goes under the name of “world of working” and is described by him as the world of physical things, including my body; it is the realm of my locomotions and bodily operations; it offers resistances to overcome which requires effort; it places tasks before me, permits me to carry through my plans, and enables me to succeed or to fail in my attempt to attain my purposes.6 In short, it is the stubborn intersubjective world of active, wide-awake, grown-up men and women which existed long before we were born and was handed down to us by our parents and teachers primarily as a form of tacit knowledge that resists extensive doubt in its reliability.7 Its paramountcy or predominance is a fact of human life that Schutz plausibly (and predictably) explains as “founded upon the basic experience of each of us: I know that I shall die and I fear to die,” what he also pictures as “the fundamental anxiety.” Put otherwise, the segment of the physical world which is pragmatically relevant for us, which is within our scope and is centered in space and time around ourselves, i.e. the world of our working, of bodily movements, of manipulating objects and handling things, matters to us. And this “matteredness” is made up of “the many interrelated systems of hopes and fears, of wants and satisfactions, of

Reenchantment as Resonance  135 chances and risks which incite man with the natural attitude to attempt the mastery of the world.” A desire to tame the environment, to control it by drafting and realizing projects arises, that is, as a partially successful remedy for an experience of radical contingency which is intrinsic to the human condition. Being a matter of life and death, it should come as no surprise that people assuming a natural attitude take “the world and its objects for granted until counterproof imposes itself.”8 “Predominance,” however, is not the same as truth or indisputability. The human sense of reality, in effect, is fundamentally destabilized by the fact that everyone in everyday life incessantly leaps from the center to the margins of lived experience altering in the process their “accent of reality,” that is, respectively, tensions of consciousness, kinds of suspension of doubt, forms of spontaneity, senses of self and time-perspectives.9 Moving in and out of dream states, in and out of rituals, in and out of play, amounts in the end to a chain of shocks that leave people deeply uncertain about the meaning of it all. It is precisely at this juncture that a culture, with its web of imaginaries, narratives, practices, institutions, etc. may intervene to transform a matter-of-fact relationship between center and periphery within human daily life into a value-laden worldview. This is what happened, I  claim, to the paramountcy of the personal experience of disillusionment in modern times. Such an existential predominance, in other words, ended up being symbolically overlaid and sanctioned by a Grand Narrative of disenchantment that, among other things, turned upside down the ancients’ faith in the inherent association of knowledge with happiness and replaced it with something along the lines of Jon Elster’s adage that “cognitive accuracy is often achieved at the expense of emotional well-being.”10 You know that you have to die, so be prepared: buffer yourself from self-inflicted delusions and fantasies. Disillusionment with life, from this point of view, appears to be born of rationality or, to quote the closing lines of Voltaire’s “Story of a Good Brahmin,” of “preferring reason to felicity.”11 A mute and non-resonant world is what you get in exchange for reaching a detached stance towards the external and internal nature, which, by making it both all-the-way-down objective and infinitely manipulable, reinforces Schutz’s “natural attitude” of the wide-awake, grown-up man to the nth degree. Hence, if the alleged superiority of personal disillusionment over any form of enchantment today must be challenged, what has to be tested is first of all the reliability and consistency of the métarécit of disenchantment underpinning such a symbolic predominance. And this is precisely the goal of the next stage of my three-stepped argument.

Disenchanting Disenchantment My aim in this section is to present in abridged form one of the most systematic recent attempts to deconstruct the standard master narrative of the disenchantment of the world and dispel its overrated cogency.

136  Paolo Costa This work of demolition was undertaken by Hans Joas in his book Die Macht des Heiligen, aptly subtitled Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung. The fourth, more than 100 pages long, chapter of his “alternative for the narrative of disenchantment” is devoted to a meticulous analysis of Max Weber’s hugely influential view of modern Western civilization.12 The attitude of the German sociologist towards the disenchantment tale is characteristically suspicious. What triggers his skepticism is precisely the sense of familiarity enveloping such teleological narratives of maturation. Prima facie, the transition from an enchanted to a disenchanted condition is made better sense of if it is understood along developmental lines. In brief, this major shift is customarily accounted for by envisioning it as a Gestalt switch, on which a familiar story of growing up can be told. Once upon a time a child believed in Santa Claus and his elves, but then she came to see that the only way of getting a present is by having someone in flesh and blood who buys it for you in an ordinary shop. This, as I have shown earlier, is typically seen as a due transition from the margins to the center of human experience. Accordingly, the action of uncanny powers is replaced by a more fact-of-the-matter scenario. And we spectators can see ourselves reflected in the step forward. For thinkers with a strong pragmatist leaning such as Joas, who is persuaded that human intelligence proves itself above all in creatively responding to specific historical challenges, such narratives of maturation, once transposed to the level of world history, appear both too sanctimonious and too simple to be true.13 Indeed, incredulity towards the self-satisfied tone of most modern master narratives of breakthrough (e.g., modernization, rationalization, functional differentiation) is the cornerstone of his negative attitude with regard to both the standard secularization thesis and the disenchantment just-so story. The first was dismantled by Joas in his book Faith as an Option, while the latter is taken care of in Die Macht des Heiligen, which delves deeper into the contested issue of the relationship between religion and modernity.14 “Disenchantment” is notoriously a term of modern coinage. As such, it makes sense only if it is entrenched in some take on religion shaped by a modern point of view. This is the reason why Joas begins his investigation with a self-reflexive three-step move that brings to the fore its distinctive situatedness. Concisely put, he shows how the “Geschichte von der Entzauberung” is the late offspring of a new field of investigation made possible by the rise of secularity or, how he prefers to call it, the “secular option.”15 By this he means the gradual emergence during the eighteenth century of the possibility of imagining and practicing a decent, even flourishing life outside of religious belief. This historical innovation went hand in hand with a new way of looking at religion as a contingent, natural, discrete human phenomenon susceptible of being investigated by means of standard scientific tools.

Reenchantment as Resonance  137 Hume, James, and Durkheim are the main protagonists of the story told by Joas in the first three chapters of Die Macht des Heiligen. It is a history marked by a conspicuous heterogony of ends where the intention of studying religion as a natural phenomenon dialectically led to unearthing the expressive, experiential, semiotic, mimetic, social dimensions of the human transactions with the religious and non-religious sacred. What such story has taught us, in a nutshell, is that detachment (or noninvolvement) does not imply disenchantment and that religion, when it ceases to be a self-evident element of daily life, can be made into a rich, contested and open-ended field of investigation for both believers and unbelievers. Such is the historical context where the master narrative of disenchantment took shape and, thanks in large measure to Max Weber, became the most influential picture of the place of religion in modern life. It is also the context, however, in which the goal of “disenchanting disenchantment” can be envisioned and attained.16 With this I do not mean to imply that it is an easy task. Just the opposite, because Weber, as Joas notices at the outset of his inquiry, enjoys today the status of an “Einstein” of the social sciences and the concept of disenchantment is “one of the key concepts whereby Western societies understand themselves” and their modernity.17 Now, how do you handle an idea-force that is entrenched in an entire form of life? In a word, you unpack it. Thus, following a trail already blazed by David Martin with regard to the secularization thesis, the ­German sociologist shows in details what “disenchanting disenchantment” might mean in the last analysis.18 Schematically, it amounts to: (a) drawing attention to its extravagant influence on later understandings of the alleged decline of religion in modern societies; (b) comparing and contrasting this hyperbolic impact both with the contingent and relatively belated 17 occurrences of the word in Weber’s oeuvre and with their inherent ambiguity; (c) unraveling this polysemy and showing that, everything considered, it cannot be made suitably coherent; (d) unmasking the non-empirically grounded status of Weber’s multilayered claim; (e) conjecturing that “Weber at a certain point in his intellectual development [was] swamped or drowned in the varieties of his historical reconstructions and, as a consequence or a remedy to this fragmentation, [imposed] on his material certain . . . ‘dangerous nouns of process.’ ”19 Joas’s reconstruction/deconstruction, painstakingly carried out in the central section of Die Macht des Heiligen, can be described in broad brushstrokes as a hyper-Weberian criticism of Weber’s ultimate inconsistency. Indeed, ironically, he takes Weber to task for misrepresenting Entzauberung as a self-evident aspect of modern life, in patent contrast to his “laudable tendency as a rule not to speak of abstract entities, but real actors when it comes to action.”20 On the contrary, according to Joas, his “use of this concept is essentially ambiguous” and three different

138  Paolo Costa concepts are actually needed to make sense of the historical developments designated by Weber with only one word. What we are talking about here, in brief, is not just disenchantment, but “demagification, desacralization and detranscendentalization.”21 This “lack of differentiation” that “makes possible the suggestive narrative of a thousand years long process” can be traced back, according to Joas, both to a “time-diagnostic and to a culturally specific dimension.”22 Let me quote him at length on this crucial point. The narrative of disenchantment essentially derives its existential meaning from the fact that it seems to provide the empirical justification for a sense of crisis or loss of meaning. Weber appears therefore as the nondelusional-sober analyst, who makes clear to his contemporaries with a quite prophetic gesture that they live in a time without prophets and gods. Relying above all on Tolstoy, he emphasizes that there is no way to scientifically answer existential questions. The diagnosis itself was in the air. To quote Jürgen Habermas, it reflects the experience of nihilism, typical of his generation, “that Nietzsche had dramatized so impressively.” Habermas also noticed that it is not the diagnosis itself, but rather its justification in light of the very process of disenchantment within the history of religion, which is truly Weberian. Weber infers from this diagnosis that “general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.” The crisis of meaning does not thereby destroy the possibility of orienting oneself to ideals, and it is remarkable that Weber even uses the term “holy” for these ideals, but the path of the formation of the ideals appears to him radically individual, activist, and separated by a gulf from the investigation of history. This is the flip side of his historical narrative, which swamps the ever-new processes of sacralization and idealization in a narrative of progressive disenchantment.23 As it is also the case in personal experiences of disillusionment, modern disenchantment always goes together with an enigmatic sense of liberation and empowerment. Let us see how Joas understands this puzzling combination in Weber’s thought. In the narrative of disenchantment, however, besides the melancholy diagnosis of time, according to which the Entzauberung has led to a shattering crisis of meaning, there is also the idea of a culturally conditioned superiority of the West, which has a long history behind it. The disenchantment actually leads to a crisis of meaning, but it is also a precondition and part of a process of rationalization,

Reenchantment as Resonance  139 which has created a dynamic order through modern capitalism and the modern bureaucratic sovereign state, which no other religious or cultural traditions have anything to oppose to. Thus, Weber’s other key concept, apart from disenchantment, i.e., rationalization, is at least as ambiguous and equally at risk of subsuming very different processes under a fictitious metaprocess and not taking them as such and examining their mutual causal effects.24 The remedy envisioned by Joas against this bogus sense- and coherencemaking ex post move is to re-differentiate what Weber himself has ended up de-differentiating. That is, his theory’s deceptive theoretical unity must be undone and the underlying complexity openly brought to the fore: We can at least – he notices – tentatively separate what Weber evens out in the concept of disenchantment. We will be able, then, to ask if de-magification, de-sacralization, de-transcendentalization and secularization are not in actual fact distinct developments. Explaining one of these processes as the prerequisite or pacesetter of one of the others would then stop to be obvious.25 Two wide-ranging philosophical points and one terminological clarification made by Joas are of special interest for my purposes here. The first concerns the alleged “primacy of magic,” i.e. Weber’s propensity to regard Magie as a “basic layer” of religion and of its historical development.26 Joas is understandably wary of an identification between the two that alludes to an all-too-human instrumental intention underlying the religious transactions with the sacred, and thus suggests to look at the issue from a different angle. For, once the boundary between magic and religion is both emphasized and watched, magic can be seen as one aspect, and not necessarily the most fundamental aspect of the general effort to come to terms with the overwhelming power of luck in human affairs that, only if taken to the limits, is bound to lead to the sacrifice of the intellect decried by Weber in his Munich lectures.27 Put otherwise, if, on the one hand, the “enchantment” that is supposed to have been dispelled in the modern Western civilization is simply the “subjective” rationality of the sorcerer’s claim to be able to manipulate the course of things, the impact on our self-understanding of Weber’s narrative of disenchantment is bound to be both marginal and untroublesome. If, on the other hand, the concept is seen as encompassing belief, piety, religious rituals, etc., and going so far as to include in its scope even spirituality or meaning-seeking practices, the thesis appears simply incorrect. The second general point concerns Weber’s implicit claim that any longing for an inherent meaningfulness or worth in human life is in the last analysis irrational and that, therefore, making full use of the intellect has always a disenchanting impact on the heart and mind of those who

140  Paolo Costa harbor it. Such a claim is only apparently trivial insofar as it implies the philosophical onerous assumption that all that is the case in the world simply is or happens and does not “mean” anything in itself. From Joas’s pragmatist standpoint, however, Weber’s intellectualism is hardly selfevident, as long as the human access to the realm of meaning does not seem to depend, strictly speaking, on deliberate acts of sense-making. As he is keen to point out, world pictures (Weltbildern) are not the same as “the dynamics of everyday or ordinary experience” where, as Joas observes, “we experiment such pre-reflexive constitution of meaning not as an addition to the world, but as the world.”28 The kind of meaninglessness purportedly brought about by the process of disenchantment, therefore, would be equal to a loss of the world and, as he wraps up, would not lead to the “world relationship of the illusion-free state of mind of the realist, but to that of the depressed.”29 And this is too much even for a society actually troubled by the quest for meaning such as ours. The useful terminological clarification concerns, finally, the conceptual pairs (a) sacred and profane, (b) transcendent and immanent, and (c) religious and secular. Preserving the semantic differences is helpful because, as Joas takes great pains to show, if the distinction between the three pairs of opposites is clear, it follows that there must be three different processes of change from one side to the other, and these in both directions. There are then processes of sacralization and profanation (or de-sacralization); there are processes of transcendentalization and immanentization (or detranscendentalization); there are processes of religious revitalization and secularization. As a result, it is by no means compelling to conceive of these different processes as if they were in some kind of consequential relationship to one another.30 In conclusion, Joas’s self-appointed mission to “disenchant disenchantment” should not be viewed as a deliberate effort to genealogically discredit the narrative of disenchantment made immensely popular by Weber. Rather, Joas takes Weber at his own word and tries to see if the disenchantment tale actually surfaces as a sort of condition of intelligibility from his comparative study of religious ethics. But since this is not the case, the question is left open whether its symbolical enthronement may be justified or not.

Overcoming Disenchantment To sum up, Joas’s project can be boiled down to an immanent critique of Weber’s disenchantment thesis influenced by David Martin and, via him, by Popper’s trenchant attack on the modern philosophies of history and their misguided aspiration to know what the future has in store

Reenchantment as Resonance  141 for us.31 The end result of this criticism is a deflationary reappraisal of the role played by such a master narrative in Weber’s allegedly wertfreie inquiry into the origins of Western modernity and its supposed civilizational superiority. The argumentative strategy is effective as it succeeds to unravel the polysemy of the concept of disenchantment and to disjointedly weigh up the several macroclaims that originate from it. With this in mind, let us go back now to the experiential encounters with disenchantment. From a noncommittal perspective, the disenchantment metanarrative appears as a self-referential story that tells something about the claimant, i.e. about us. It maintains, first, that we are disenchanted inasmuch as we experience whatever goes under the name of “enchantment” – let’s call it loosely the “religious” domain – prima facie as a distinctively opaque field. This claim may be further elaborated by saying that, from a disenchanted standpoint, religiously minded people seem to admit a mysterious kind of agency in their dealings with the social and natural environment. They ascribe, that is, an agential power to invisible forces or entities whose behavior cannot be thoroughly explained by natural laws. We are disenchanted, therefore, when we at least need auxiliary reasons to believe in such non-ordinary agential powers. This is disenchantment from the object’s side, as it were. From the subject’s side, conversely, disenchantment can be viewed as a specific stance that denies the world any independent power to “enchant,” i.e. to bring about a cognitively justified state of, say, overwhelming awe or terror in humans. Disenchantment, in this regard, appears as a condition of disengagement where a minded subject is set against a mindless external reality and any emotionally charged property of what is out there is regarded as a projection of the (responsible) feeling being onto an unresponsive reality.32 This disengaged attitude is a personal trait that is highly encouraged and cultivated in many areas of modern life (e.g., the economic sphere, the scientific community, or the political arena), but not in all quarters. There is a widespread sense, on the contrary, that countercurrents of reenchantment are happening more or less everywhere in Western societies not just now, but since the beginnings of the modern age. But is this understandable tendency to compensate a disengaged attitude towards self, society and nature with a more receptive stance comparable to how the context of action was (or is) experienced by people (still) living in an “enchanted” world, that is, in a society where non-ordinary agential powers are treated as part of the fabric of the world? There is a consensus, I  guess, even among those who are most sensitive to the thesis of a Wiederverzauberung, that a meaningful gap divides the modern form of enchantment from earlier ones. Let us take, for example, the sardonic and detached way Thomas Mann depicts the mental dreamlike condition of the patients of the Berghof sanatorium,

142  Paolo Costa with their well-ordered routine and the dilated time granted by a noneventful life, in his influential novel Der Zauberberg – The Magic Mountain.33 The seclusion of the health resort, in fact, casts a sort of spell on its dwellers, but this enchanting power is both delusive and toxic for them. It is an unviable way out from the modern world’s flatness that consistently overturns the seeming ascent towards the Higher into a descent in an Underworld of disease, spookiness, apathy, whose superficial enchantment is abruptly broken by the sturdy reality of war at the novel’s end. Another example of the erratic waves of reenchantment that moderns have experienced from the start can be found in Holy Mountain, a recent (2018) film directed by the renowned South-Tyrolean climber Reinhold Messner. The holy mountain portrayed in the movie is the Ama Dablam, a 6,828 meter–high peak in the Himalayas, revered as sacred by the local people. The true story of an unsuccessful expedition and its almost fatal rescue, told by Messner with a combination of fiction, archive material, and firsthand testimony, looks at first sight like a classical story of an arrogant human trespassing and its natural nemesis. At a closer look, however, there is no trace in the film of the age-old religious duty to protect sacred places. Put otherwise, the kind of “reenchantment” advocated here does not amount to a revived taboo. It is rather a way of preserving the authentic core of the modern climbing performance whose deeper spiritual meaning, according to Messner, is threatened by what he himself called the technological “murder of the impossible” (and, as a result, of the true “adventurous”) in an influential article published more than 50 years earlier.34 The idea I want to convey with this uneven pair of examples is that we have a deep-seated sense today that we somehow grasp what it might mean to live in an enchanted world, although this meaning in its purest form escapes us. The apparent “queerness” of the enchanted world to modern eyes, I mean, arises from the coexistence of a feeling of proximity with what is supposed to take place in an experience of enchantment (i.e. the materialization of extra-ordinary agential powers) and the nagging sense of inconsequentiality originating from the experience  – the helplessness of it all. We resonate, for example, with the dreamy atmosphere of the snow chapter in the Magic Mountain, but then we generally do not know what to make of it. Are Hans Castorp’s visions “real”? And in what sense? Are they just psychologically robust, as deep emotions usually are, or are they real in the sense that they capture the true meaning of what the novel’s main character is actually going through in the sanatorium? Why on earth will nothing be the same for Hans after the event? I interpret such indeterminacy and the resulting hesitation as an evidence that we are not so alienated from the seemingly exotic condition of enchantment as not to derive a bit of discomfort from the entrenched habit of making sense of the paradox surfacing here in terms of the

Reenchantment as Resonance  143 tension between human imagination and the stubbornness of facts. While this internal strain is partially mirrored by the already discussed dualism in human experience between the paramount reality of work and provinces of meaning such as play or art, it is not equivalent, say, to the putative chasm between an earthly form-of-life and an immortal one. We are not disenchanted in that sense. What Joas helped us to realize is that Weber’s effort at keeping the concept of disenchantment under strict epistemic control was unsuccessful in the end. Even his seemingly value-free historical investigations have a tendency to produce a global sense-making effect in the end. The notion, that is, is not semantically stable and tends to spill over in an empirically questionable claim that modern life as such amounts to disenchantment. The truth, however, is that it is not conclusively established that being disenchanted is the epitome of rationality. Yet, there actually is a subtler sense in which moderns can be pictured as more disenchanted than people in past times. This has much to do with the zeal with which the disenchantment tale is embraced today, superimposing a symbolic layer to personal experiences of disillusionment. But why is it so? My hunch is that a significant number of people in modern times get an additional thrill in exchange for experiencing themselves as the only sources of meaning on earth. If this is the case, then Western modern human beings have an incentive to regard themselves as disenchanted selves inasmuch as they see even their fleeting moments of enchantment as falling within the remit of their responsibility. In what follows, I  want to make at least plausible that a modern self has also good reasons to view herself as a receptive being engaged in a resonant relationship with her environment.

Religious Unmusicality in Light of Disenchantment The recursive endorsement of a disenchanted stance deeply affects the range of possibilities accessible to ordinary agents. Weber, according to his wife Marianne, stoically embraced a dispiriting view of reality precisely because he wanted to see how much he could stand while exerting “to the utmost his freedom from illusions.”35 Before him, a quintessentially Victorian hero like Charles Darwin also pictured the evolution of his mind in his Autobiography as a loss in sensitivity due to his efforts at attaining scientific clarity. Formerly  – he observes with a disingenuously despondent tone of voice – I was led by feelings such [the sense of sublimity]. . . . But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become color-blind. . . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.36

144  Paolo Costa Not accidentally, the variety of esthetic experience commonly used by Darwin to exemplify his personal sense of the sublime was Handel’s Hallelujah chorus. And, in fact, the association of the belief in God with the “powerful though vague and similar feelings excited by music” exercised his curiosity until the end of his days.37 But it was Weber himself, as far as I know, who for the first time employed the metaphor of “religious unmusicality” to designate a psychological condition of indifference toward faith and spirituality. To be precise, the first recorded self-description as a religiously unmusikalisch or tone-deaf person occurs in a private letter sent by Weber to Ferdinand Tönnies in 1909, where he presents himself as the exemplary embodiment of such a non-resonant state of mind. “It is true – he writes therein – that I am absolutely unmusical in matters religious and that I have neither the need nor the ability to erect any religious edifices within me – that is simply impossible for me, and I reject it.”38 In recent times, Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty dusted off and borrowed Weber’s figure of speech with slightly different intentions and an overlapping aim in mind: to signify both their distance and absence of animosity against the so-called “return of the sacred.”39 The metaphor of religious tone-deafness has become popular in today’s highly agonistic public sphere precisely because it captures and makes intelligible a remarkable experience, which conveys the sense of a paradox. To begin with, there is a subjective rock-hard certainty. You are confident that you do not understand what is going on in the heart and mind of a believer. You know that you are not like her. And still, blaming your estrangement on the other person’s flaws is unreasonable, since there are too many people with whom you sympathize and who, nonetheless, still have a strong connection with the realm of experience that you are not, or no longer, attuned to. As a result, it makes sense to look for a passive element in yourself, an out-of-control disposition that can account for the gap. Here comes the idea of a lack of receptivity. Maybe you are the problem. It all comes down to your insensitivity to experiential contents which you have never had access to or now fail to make contact with. These are experiences that you can barely figure out, that you can perhaps envision in a detached way, but that leaves you cold, and with which you cannot resonate no matter how hard you try. It was Weber again who articulated clearly the point I am trying to bring home here: “In this regard too I consider myself a cripple, a stunted man whose fate it is to admit honestly that he must put up with this state of affairs.”40 Weber seems to be merely acknowledging a fact about himself here. More specifically, he is describing himself as a person unable to do something that he might even like to do if only he were not incapacitated by what looks a lot like a “natural” contingency. A remarkable dissonance, however, can be felt between this self-portrait and both what Weber reportedly said about his resolution to exert to the utmost the freedom from illusions and, more important, the concluding remarks of his lecture

Reenchantment as Resonance  145 on Science as a Vocation. In those renowned pages, he explicitly claimed that it is a moral duty not to make that sacrifice of the intellect, which, as he says, “is a crucial characteristic of men with positive religion.”41 Weber, in short, is proclaiming here not so much his inability, but his unwillingness to give in to the charms of religion. He then even goes so far as to ask of religiously musical people to accept the fundamental fact (Grundtatsache) that their “fate is to live in an age alien to God.”42 There is an interesting parallel here with the tension between the alleged value-free diagnosis and the explicit endorsement of the disenchantment tale discussed earlier. In the following paragraphs, however, I shall proceed in a slightly different direction. I shall further elaborate, that is, the metaphor of religious unmusicality in order to see if Weber’s wavering between incapacity and deliberate refusal can be traced back to a too polarized view of the relationship between the more active and the more receptive side of the human mind. Is it reasonable to think of oneself as an “unmusical” person? It is, of course. This statement, however, must be qualified, for the claim to extraneousness can only be partial in the case of music. Let us say, hence, that what is alluded to in describing oneself as unmusical is a comparatively lower responsiveness on one’s own part to the supposed power of music to arouse emotions. In other words, what is sensed is the absence of a transformative, incremental, relation between even excellent music and one’s particular sensorium. While one can hear music, one may also be unable to listen to it: one can be “oblivious to the charms of music.”43 Another way of making the same point may be to say that unmusical people do not have full access to what has been effectively described by Roger Scruton as an “acousmatic space”: “a space full of movements and fields of force in which nothing actually moves,” because the causality that operates in this space “is or aims to be a causality of reason. In successful works of music there is a reason for each note, though not necessarily a reason that could be put into words.”44 What is likely to sound like a platitude to a “musical” person may actually appear almost incomprehensible to an unmusical one. I propose to regard the absence of resonance in an experiential field such as music as a form of deafness to a distinctive variety of worth or significance, since music, seen as a both bodily and mental way of coping with reality’s superabundance of meaning, is able to bring about momentous experiences of “self-transcendence.”45 Unmusicality, that is, can be viewed as a form of inability to fine-tune with the pulling power of an experiential field, which is also a sui generis epistemic space. In this resonant space, the participants’ attention is drawn to something that is simultaneously present and absent. It is present as the “aboutness” towards which the redundant intentionality of the agents involved converges. But it is also absent, in so far as it is ineffable. So you may learn something when you listen attentively to music, but you realize what you

146  Paolo Costa have learned only later and in a specific situation that will operate as a mental trigger. For my argument’s sake, I  wish to emphasize this power to capitalize on the listener’s passivity. We can picture music as a sort of attractor affecting human receptivity by means of a special causal power that impinges on both mind and body. In order to be fully enjoyed, music demands a form of abandon, of giving oneself up to it. And this, in turn, explains why sometimes a structured fruition context analogous to a ritual space is needed in order to insulate the listener from the surrounding noisy world. From this point of view, being able to listen to music entails a double sacrifice. On the one hand, the listener is asked to give up an absolute control over her emotional life in order to encourage a full display of human sympathy. On the other hand, the expected sacrifice has to be grasped (etymologically) as making a realm of experience “sacred,” i.e. extra-ordinary. This is precisely what an unmusical person seems unable to do. Considered from another angle, however, the unmusical person might be also described as someone who is unwilling to open up to what she sees as the deceptive charms of music, precisely because she fears that she might not be able to fully control the consequences of such an exposure to contingency. If the analogy holds, a religiously unmusical person can be likened to someone who can hear, but is incapable and/or unwilling to listen to music, because adopting a receptive stance would entail turning her back on an essential aspect of her own selfhood. There is indeed a form of estrangement at play here, but is not the same as a form of total alienation. If this is the case, then, claiming for yourself a condition of religious tone-deafness may also strike an upbeat note, for it entails a principled refusal to sacrifice your autonomy in exchange for emotional connection. In short, full agential responsibility for one’s own deepest value attachments and commitments is expected in every area of life. In this sense, religious unmusicality involves as well a declaration of moral independence from the world on the part of the subject. But is this slide from a seemingly innocent avowal of a psychological trait to a principled disengagement with the (admittedly conjectural) world’s transformative moral powers as harmless as it may appear at first sight? Are there no compelling reasons for arguing that a substantial degree of passivity is required for making contact with those sources of our sense of worth by which moral personhood is shaped all the way down? Let me venture a tentative answer to these difficult questions. In the extensive web of beliefs in which each of us is placed, I  assume, there are a few of them that play the role of self- or world-disclosive takes on the human condition. Let us call them “over-beliefs.” I regard them as the deposit of our experiences of self-transcendence. The sentence’s meaning is easier than the words that conveys it. By experiences of

Reenchantment as Resonance  147 self-transcendence I mean all those life events, encounters, occurrences, that disclose new understandings, new perspectives on our mode of being-in-the-world. With a remarkable choice of words, Iris Murdoch described such beliefs as “deep moral configurations of the world, rather than as lines drawn round separable factual areas.”46 They are usually condensed in gnomic sentences such as: The very best thing is not to have been born. To be happy is to feel at home in the world. What these sentences have in common is their semantic density. While they are straightforward, they are in no sense immediately understandable. They express a standpoint on what there is, and their angle cannot be grasped unless you come to terms with their way of responding to some deeper meaning in life. In this regard, they demand a conversion of the gaze in order to be fully understood. On account of their holistic nature, they can be pictured as the product of a distinctively human form of creativity that does not exclusively depend on our ability to represent discrete things correctly. They rather proceed from our way of relating to the environment, of resonating with it, of living through the significance of what is at stake in our encounters or assessments. If we agree on this approach to the issue, the analogy with musicality seems to be in order. Although music can be approached in a detached stance, a totally disengaged attitude is incompatible with the conditions of accessibility to its content. Hence, an a priori refusal of reckoning with the transformative power underpinning it is bound to prevent you from opening up to the nonverbal over-beliefs conveyed by highly resonant music. For example, you may spend all your life being puzzled by the enigmatic dialectics between the impersonal force of sex and the personalizing power of love until one day you happen to really watch Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the opera suddenly opens up a new moral configuration that changes your gaze about life for good.47 The same thing, I guess, can be said about a profound spiritual experience: when it goes through, it straddles the gap between the more active and the more receptive parts of the self while reconfiguring our relationship to the world as such. Life indeed resonates differently, now. If I am not mistaken, the intellectual effort required to cope with this kind of beliefs  – of which core religious beliefs are a genuine instantiation – operates at the level of articulation rather than of justification. For the point of the exchange is less establishing once and for all who is wrong and who is right, ceteris paribus, than bringing the beliefs to the fore, making them explicit, and making sense of them as charitably as possible. To this end, it seems sensible to pursue an alliance between reason and passion. Emotions, in fact, cannot be separated from such beliefs. For, in order to make sense of them, one has to appreciate the

148  Paolo Costa significance they have for their holders, that is, the intimate connection with the idea of flourishing that they incorporate. As noted earlier, these are not opinions that are placed on the margins of the person’s system of beliefs. Endorsing or rejecting them demands, then, an effort, even a struggle – and not any struggle whatsoever, but a struggle for recognizing and being recognized in one’s distinctive identity. Now, going back to Weber’s self-characterization as a religiously unmusical person, my argument so far might be recapped by saying that the inability to accept those aspects of the human condition that might seem to require a “sacrifice” of the intellect may be better conceived of in analogy with a form of voluntary closure to the musicality of the world – the chant in enchantment, to borrow an insightful remark from Jane Bennett.48 Still, this form of disengagement is neither inescapable nor mandatory. In brief, religious musicality – by which I mean a ­distinctive form of responsiveness to the deeper meanings of human existence – is not necessarily a psychological trait inimical to the a­ utonomy of j­ udgment or mental clarity – a yielding, as it were, to the need to be consoled for the hardships of life – but is rather the expression of a reasonable faith in a specific potential of the human embodied mind: the capability to be touched, gripped and moved by something that has no immediate material reward. Accordingly, the most challenging property of the transient experiences of enchantment can be traced back less to their imperviousness to the analytic and clarifying power of reason than to their ability to activate a form of situated moral creativity that, while embodied by a subject, is never entirely mastered by her. Their key quality, in short, is the unruly disclosive force that places them right at the center of a person’s process of identity making.

Resonance and Strong Evaluations What is left, then, once disenchantment has been judiciously disenchanted and enchantment is understood as a form of responsiveness to the “musicality” of the world? While Weber’s metaphor of religious unmusicality is expedient to shed light on the multilayeredness of the master narrative of disenchantment, a more inclusive account is required to make clear what is really at stake in it. If the unresponsiveness to the deep moral configurations of the world is not just a contingent psychological trait, then we need to shift the focus onto our entire relationship to it. More specifically, we are challenged to see the world as a place where intrinsic worth incessantly surfaces in the guise of affordances that can be seized only if we do not oversee them in a disengaged attitude. In the closing section of my chapter, then, I  shall draw on Hartmut Rosa’s social theory of Resonanz to further clarify how much embracing a resonance-centered view of the human condition can help us to account for “the notion that

Reenchantment as Resonance  149 nature or the universe which surrounds us is the locus of human meanings which are ‘objective,’ in the sense that they are not just arbitrarily projected through choice or contingent desire,” even after “we have left the ‘enchanted’ world of spirits.”49 To begin with, it is important to stress once more that unpacking the different claims assembled under the umbrella-concept of disenchantment does not mean to stamp it out. It is rather equivalent to making possible selective and unconventional uses of the diagnosis concocted by Weber. This is precisely what Rosa does in his resonance book when he claims that there is a specific sense in which the rise of a disengaged, self-reliant, “buffered” identity was the precondition for considerably expanding the role played by resonance in the everyday exchange humans have with the world.50 In this sense, the modern age is both hostile and amenable to resonant experiences. This is why the concept can be used simultaneously as a diagnostic tool and as a critical way of pinpointing the promise of happiness encapsulated into the modern life-form.51 Although it is fleshed out in an impressively detailed socio-philosophical account, Rosa’s theory of resonance rests in the end on a simple idea. According to it, resonance is the basic connection humans have with their environment. In particular, it is a two-ways relationship between the self and the world, which can be symbolically expressed by the diverging movement of “af←fect and e→motion.”52 This is how the author explains what a “responsive relation or ‘vibrating wire’ between subject and world” exactly means: We can  .  .  . define resonance as a specifically cognitive, affective, and bodily relationship to the world in which subjects are touched and occasionally even “shaken” down to the neural level by certain segments of world, but at the same time are also themselves “responsively,” actively, and influentially related to the world and experience themselves as effective in it.53 In a resonant liaison, that is, self and world mutually affect themselves and alter each other simultaneously. Resonance, in other words, is not just an echo, but it is a responsive relationship where the two related poles are both active, albeit in different ways. They speak, that is, in their own voice and the transformative possibilities they embody are reinforced by their association with constitutive goods that are never reducible to mere preferences. As Rosa clarifies the point: resonant experiences are fundamentally tied to the affirmation of strong evaluations, occurring when and where subjects come into contact with something in the world that constitutes for them an independent source of value, that confronts them as valuable and important as such and concerns them in some way.54

150  Paolo Costa Hence, a resonant relationship always entails a dialectic of openness and closure, of self-affirmation and vulnerability to the other, and, when the transaction succeeds, its upshot exceeds any expectation. Succinctly put, this is not a zero-sum game. Yet, as Rosa properly notices, such a relationship can fail from both sides and in each case in two ways. From the side of the subject, a relationship to the world can fail if the subject “hardens” or closes itself off, becoming rigid and thus incapable of reacting to the world with empathy. . . . Conversely, a resonant relationship can also become impossible when the subject becomes too radically open, losing itself in the world, forfeiting its particular “frequency,” and no longer speaking with its own voice, becoming formless and functioning only as an “echo” of the world.55 A form of resonance may arise from the encounter, inter alia, with another person, or a landscape, or a human artifact, every time the self internalizes the pulling force of a bond with them that makes itself felt under the guise of non-indifference, care, inherent value. In such cases, the present time expands and one behaves as a both centered and decentered being inasmuch as the relationship provisionally becomes the axis of the self’s existence. Still, this is not a purely harmonious or consonant condition. For the ability to engage in a resonant relationship with the world presupposes a familiarity with the opposite situation of indifference or estrangement that everybody knows by acquaintance in the hyperkinetic world begotten by the new technologies. As Rosa observes: resonance can never exist where everything is “pure harmony,” nor does it arise simply from the absence of alienation. It is rather a flash of hope for adaptive transformation and response in a silent world. . . . At the root of resonant experience lies the shout of the unreconciled and the pain of the alienated. At its center is not the denial or repression of that which resists us, but the momentary, only vaguely perceptible certainty of a transcending “nevertheless.”56 These fleeting, but telling instants of deep resonance are a sort of firsthand refutation of the dualism of substances. Put concisely, they are intense moments where one comes to know by contact that the center of gravity of the human form of life is neither on the self’s nor on the world’s side. The things that really count in people’s lives exist, in other words, in a place which is neither subjective nor objective, neither mine nor yours, neither inside nor outside, and that is in principle out of the reach of any kind of psychic or political sovereignty. Seen against this background, the disenchantment thesis can be selectively employed to account for the distinctive way in which the resonant

Reenchantment as Resonance  151 nature of the self-world relationship has been shaped by the conditions of modernity. Rosa claims, in short, that some kind of segregation of the human mind against physical nature – as it is the case with the modern buffered self  – is needed to broaden the self’s space of resonance. The Western culture of inwardness, especially its modern variety, has actually led to the creation of a metaphorical “sounding board” which made possible the proliferation and intensification of experiences of resonance with, respectively, things, persons, environments, communities, fictional realities, and so forth. This thoughtful combination of the resonance approach with the disenchantment story can be bolstered by resorting to Helmuth Plessner’s influential view of the eccentric positionality as the distinctive feature of the human form of life. If Plessner got it right, as I think he did, the tensional space between the animal centeredness and the always provisional de-centeredness of the human embodied mind can be seen as the precondition for having a resonant relationship between self and world.57 To invoke Schutz’s idea-force, while the predominant part of the human existence is self-centered, goal-oriented, and control-obsessed, there are interstitial experiences (play, love, eroticism, art, rituals, etc.) that continually de-stabilize the apparent self-sufficiency of what he calls the “paramount reality.” Every human culture has relied on this eccentric realm of experience to devise and endorse axes of resonance around which the various societies construct their ideals of good life. Now, in a civilization that is very efficient in technically reducing the impact of luck on human happiness, there is a lingering temptation to opt for a “sealed” variety of bufferedness in order to exponentially increase control over the resonant experiences by turning them into self-contained psychological events that function like a sort of intimate echo-chambers.58 Still, a true and more rewarding form of resonance, Rosa claims and I am inclined to agree with him, is first and foremost a fine-tuned response to affordances whose resonant potentiality can be realized only through a chain of exploratory positioning acts. The end goal of such a dialectic of vulnerability and carefulness is a virtuous balance point between active searches and receptivity, will to mastery and willingness to be taken by surprise. Observed from this angle, in brief, modern disenchantment looks like a deeply ambivalent cultural phenomenon. This ambivalence, however, is already encapsulated in the situated nature of human freedom. For the distinctive quality of a not merely “negative” variety of human liberty resides precisely in the ability to respond to an inherently worthy claim coming from outside the jurisdiction and the expectations of the self. The responsive act, on the one hand, is receptive, but it helps, on the other hand, to disclose and articulate the personally significant truth-content it responds to.59 This element of exploration, other-reliance, and uncertainty is crucial in the authentic resonant experiences investigated by

152  Paolo Costa Rosa, inasmuch as resonance is the medium of a meaningful process of personal transformation and not just the mechanical result of an external and totally contingent cause. The fecundity and cogency of the concept of resonance comes precisely from its capacity to integrate and do justice to both the receptive and the creative side of human agency without unilaterally giving priority to one or the other. Albeit not an infallible way of reenchanting the world, it surely is a first step toward rediscovering some of its latent musicality. In conclusion, I summarize backwards the long argument presented in this chapter in seven ascending points. 1. To understand our relationship to the world in terms of resonance is philosophically plausible. 2. To claim that such is the case is not the same as claiming that the world we inhabit is enchanted in the same way as the pre-modern world was supposedly enchanted, i.e. full of entities or forces endowed with supernatural agential powers. 3. In this sense, resonance is compatible with a fair amount of disenchantment of the world. 4. The main reason why the variety of disenchantment compatible with resonance is better viewed as a partial one is that it does not entail the more dubious claim that religious unmusicality is the intellectually most respectable stance in a world where an unbridgeable gulf allegedly separates secular from religious people. 5. In order to defend this middle position, it is convenient to disenchant Weber’s popular narrative of the disenchantment of the world: to divest it, that is, of the aura of fatality that has surrounded it so far. 6. Despite all of this, the experience of the world as a resonant place remains essentially unstable. Such instability is contingent on a basic fact about the human condition, i.e. the paramount need to master a relatively dangerous and unpredictable environment, which is shared by all animals. 7. Finally, with regard to the all-embracing problem of how to assess the deep moral configurations of the world in light of the competing reasons for adopting a stance of disengagement or involvement towards them, the least that can be said is that it must be treated as an open question.

Notes 1. I have a special debt of gratitude to Hans Joas and Hartmut Rosa for their generous support and inspiration. I conducted the research upon which the chapter is based while I was a three-month Max-Planck-Preis fellow of the Max Weber Kolleg at Erfurt University in the summer of 2019. My gratitude also extends to Micha Knuth, Gesche Keding, Elena Nardelli, Kurt Appel,

Reenchantment as Resonance  153 Fiona Ellis, David McPherson, Michiel Meijer, and Herbert De Vriese, for the intellectual companionship they have provided. 2. Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby. What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 129–30. 3. Raymond Queneau, The Sunday of Life, trans. Barbara Wright (London: John Calder, 1976). 4. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5, no. 4 (June  1945): 551; William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), vol. 2, 291–92. 5. Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter. The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1997), 7–12. 6. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” 549. 7. Ibid., 533–34; 551. 8. Ibid., 550. 9. Ibid., 552. 10. Jon Elster, “Rationality and the Emotions,” The Economic Journal 106, no. 438 (September 1996): 1394. 11. Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet], “Story of a Good Brahmin,” in The Portable Voltaire, trans. Herman I. Woolf (New York: The Viking Press, 1979), 438. 12. Hans Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017). The English translation of citations from this work is mine. 13. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). 14. Hans Joas, Faith as an Option, trans. Alex Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 15. Hans Joas, “Die säkulare Option. Ihr Aufstieg und ihre Folgen,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57, no. 2 (May 2009). 16. Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 11. Joas was not the first who came up with the idea of “disenchanting disenchantment.” Marcel Gauchet, for example, spoke of a “désenchantement désenchanté” in an exchange with Charles Taylor that took place at Paris in 2012. See Marcel Gauchet, “Le désenchantement désenchanté,” in Charles Taylor: Religion et sécularisation, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Paris: CNRS editions, 2014), 82. Almost a decade earlier, furthermore, Basit Bilal Koshul, a pakistani sociologist of religion, wrote a book called The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber’s Legacy: Disenchanting Disenchantment (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), which is cited by Joas himself. See Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 250–51 (footnote 190). 17. Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 206, 203. 18. David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978); see also Paolo Costa, La città post-secolare. Il nuovo dibattito sulla secolarizzazione (Brescia: Queriniana, 2019), Ch. 2. 19. Hans Joas, “Introduction: More Weberian than Weber? David Martin’s Political Sociology of Religion,” in David Martin and the Sociology of Religion, ed. Hans Joas (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 2. 20. Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 219. 21. Ibid., 207. 22. Ibid., 260. 23. Ibid., 260–61. The internal quotations are from Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Vol. I (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 247; Max

154  Paolo Costa Weber, “ ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949), 57. 24. Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 261. 25. Ibid., 255. 26. Ibid., 248, 216, 243, 245. 27. Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004). 28. Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 221, 250. 29. Ibid., 250. 30. Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen, 252. 31. See Paolo Costa, “The One and the Many Stories: How to Reconcile SenseMaking and Fact-Checking in the Secularization Narrative,” in David Martin and the Sociology of Religion, ed. Hans Joas (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 50–66. 32. See Paolo Costa, “A Secular Wonder,” in The Joy of Secularism. 11 Essays for How We Live Now, ed. George Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 33. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John H. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995). 34. Reinhold Messner, Mord am Unmöglichen. Spitzenkletterer aus aller Welt hinterfragen die Grenzen des Möglichen, edited by Luca Calvi and Alessandro Filippini (München: Piper, 2018). 35. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988), 678. 36. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 139. See also George Levine, Darwin Loves You. Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 135–36. 37. Darwin, The Autobiography, 92. 38. Max Weber, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe: Briefe 1909–1910, eds. Mario R. Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Heidelberg: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), Band 2/6, 63. 39. Jürgen Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” in The Future of Human Nature, trans. William Rehg, Max Pensky and Hella Beister (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003); Richard Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” in The Future of Religion, eds. Santiago Zabala, Richard Rorty, and Gianni Vattimo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 40. Weber, Briefe 1909–1910, 64. 41. Weber, The Vocation Lectures, 29. 42. Ibid., 28. 43. Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 30. 44. Roger Scruton, Music as an Art (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018), 81–82. 45. On the crucial distinction between “being-desired” and “being-worthy-ofbeing-desired,” see Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?” in Philosophical Papers I: Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–44; Michiel Meijer, Charles Taylor’s Doctrine of Strong Evaluation. Ethics and Ontology in a Scientific Age (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). 46. Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 30, no. 1 (January 1956): 47. 47. On the philosophical relevance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni see Bernard Williams, “Don Juan as an Idea,” in The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on

Reenchantment as Resonance  155 the Legacy of an Opera, eds. Lydia Goher and Daniel Herwitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 48. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life. Attachment, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 34. 49. Charles Taylor, “Recovering the Sacred,” Inquiry 54, no. 2 (April  2011): 113–25. 50. On the notion of a “buffered self,” see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 51. See Hartmut Rosa, Resonance. A Sociology of our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), part 4. 52. Ibid., 164. 53. Ibid., 163. 54. Ibid., 170. 55. Ibid., 113. 56. Ibid., 187–88 (italics in the original; see also 446). 57. Helmuth Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human. An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Millay Hyatt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). See also Rosa, Resonance, 35, 77, 83. 58. On the modern “closed world structures,” see Taylor, A Secular Age, Ch. 15. 59. See Charles Taylor, “Resonance and the Romantic Era: A Comment on Rosa’s Conception of the Good Life,” in The Good Life beyond Growth: New Perspectives, eds. Hartmut Rosa and Christoph Henning (New York: Routledge, 2018), 62.

Bibliography Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life. Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Berger, Peter L. Redeeming Laughter. The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1997. Costa, Paolo. “A Secular Wonder.” In The Joy of Secularism. 11 Essays for How We Live Now, edited by George Levine, 134–54. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. ———. “The One and the Many Stories: How to Reconcile Sense-Making and Fact-Checking in the Secularization Narrative.” In David Martin and the Sociology of Religion, edited by Hans Joas, 50–66. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. ———. La città post-secolare. Il nuovo dibattito sulla secolarizzazione. Brescia: Queriniana, 2019. Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882. Edited by Nora Barlow. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993. Elster, Jon. “Rationality and the Emotions.” The Economic Journal 106, no. 438 (September 1996): 1386–97. Gauchet, Marcel. “Le désenchantement désenchanté.” In Charles Taylor: Religion et sécularisation, edited by Sylvie Taussig, 73–82. Paris: CNRS editions, 2014. Gopnik, Alison. The Philosophical Baby. What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.

156  Paolo Costa ———. “Faith and Knowledge.” In The Future of Human Nature. Translated by William Rehg, Max Penksy, and Hella Beister, 101–15. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by Hugh B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890. Joas, Hans. The Creativity of Action. Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. “Die säkulare Option. Ihr Aufstieg und ihre Folgen.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57, no. 2 (May 2009): 293–300. ———. Faith as an Option. Translated by Alex Skinner. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. ———. Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. ———. “Introduction: More Weberian than Weber? David Martin’s Political Sociology of Religion.” In David Martin and the Sociology of Religion, edited by Hans Joas, 1–15. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Koshul, Basit Bilal. The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber’s Legacy: Disenchanting Disenchantment. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. Levine, George. Darwin Loves You. Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by John H. Woods. New York: Knopf, 1995. Martin, David. A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. Meijer, Michiel. Charles Taylor’s Doctrine of Strong Evaluation. Ethics and Ontology in a Scientific Age. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. Messner Reinhold. Mord am Unmöglichen. Spitzenkletterer aus aller Welt hinterfragen die Grenzen des Möglichen. Edited by Luca Calvi and Alessandro Filippini. München: Piper, 2018. Murdoch, Iris. “Vision and Choice in Morality.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 30, no. 1 (January 1956): 32–58. Plessner, Helmuth. Levels of Organic Life and the Human. An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology. Translated by Millay Hyatt. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Queneau, Raymond. The Sunday of Life. Translated by Barbara Wright. London: John Calder, 1976. Rorty, Richard. “Anticlericalism and Atheism.” In The Future of Religion, edited by Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, 29–41. Edited by Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Rosa, Hartmut. Resonance. A Sociology of our Relationship to the World. Translated by James C. Wagner. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Schutz, Alfred. “On Multiple Realities.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5, no. 4 (June 1945): 533–76. Scruton, Roger. Music as an Art. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018. Taylor, Charles. “What Is Human Agency?” In Philosophical Papers I: Human Agency and Language, 15–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Reenchantment as Resonance  157 ———. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. “Recovering the Sacred.” Inquiry 54, no. 2 (April 2011): 113–25. ———. “Resonance and the Romantic Era: A Comment on Rosa’s Conception of the Good Life.” In The Good Life beyond Growth: New Perspectives, edited by Hartmut Rosa and Christoph Henning, 55–69. New York: Routledge, 2018. Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet]. “Story of a Good Brahmin.” In The Portable Voltaire, translated by Herman I. Woolf, 436–38. New York: The Viking Press, 1979. Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography. Translated by Harry Zohn. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988. Weber, Max. “ ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy.” In On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, 50–112. Translated by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949. ———. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. Band 2/6: Briefe 1909–1910. Edited by Mario R. Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen. Heidelberg: Mohr Siebeck, 1994. ———. The Vocation Lectures. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004.

Part III

Working With Reenchantment

7 The Eyes of a Child Sophie-Grace Chappell

I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect may . . . be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather as I generally observe such men retain a certain freshness and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.1 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.2 It is not a question of re-enchanting the world, but of dis-dis-enchanting ourselves. The world is and always has been a place of possible epiphanies, of peak experiences in which value is made directly available to us; if and when we are available to it. We don’t need to wave a magic wand over the world out there. We need to clear our eyes of the preconceptions and prejudices that fog our vision. Ever since Romanticism—and long before too, as my second epigraph shows—one way to put this idea has been to talk about learning to see with the eyes of a child. Such talk is familiar and can seem merely sentimental or rhetorical. But it need not be either soppy or sloppy. There is a serious point to be made about the child, and the child’s perspective, in political philosophy. There is another serious point to be made about the child’s perspective in philosophy of mind. The points are related, and together they support what, provocatively perhaps, I shall call enchanted realism.

Political Philosophy Start with the notion of the agent who is presupposed in much of the moral psychology that underlies most of our present political philosophy. Who is the agent that our political philosophy talks about? What is that agent like? What is its (his? her? their?) position in life? What

162  Sophie-Grace Chappell relationships does this agent stand in? What kind of history or biography does the agent have? Typically all such questions are left officially unanswered, in the interests of generality and neutrality: the agent is left bare. And/or it is assumed that we can formulate a coherent vision of what it is to be an agent that, from the start and by definition, abstracts away from such particularities as character, social position, relationships, and history. So, for instance, in the moral psychology that underlies the political theory of John Rawls, “the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it.”3 For Rawls, the self is bare because, in structuring our philosophical theory of the self, we have to think of the self as prior to its own ends; we have to take it that, chronologically, the person already exists in advance of any ends or purposes or aims that he may have; or both. And this is not just how we must think of Rawlsian man. It is how Rawlsian man must think of himself. On pain of what Kant would call heteronomy, the only aim that the Rawlsian person can legitimately see as necessary for himself, as written into his own nature, is his own commitment to “the principles of right and justice”. If he is true to himself, he must be committed to justice not as just another inclination among inclinations, but as a “finally regulative” principle that adjudicates between all his (other) inclinations. The Rawlsian person is “a bare self” because he is antecedent to all his own aims, ends, and purposes except for this transcendental commitment to justice. And he must also understand himself as so antecedent; to fail to see himself in this light is for him “to give way to the contingencies and accidents of the world”. “According to [Rawls] we are free and independent selves, unbound by antecedent moral ties, capable of choosing our ends for ourselves.”4 These free and independent selves then come together as reasonable bargainers with each other: persons are reasonable when “they are ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will likewise do so.”5 But how are we to relate Rawls’s stipulative account of idealised persons to the known biographical and sociological facts about actual and empirical persons? Real persons, unlike Rawlsian ones, do not always appear in the world as “free and independent” or “capable of choosing their ends for themselves” – still less as “unbound by antecedent moral ties” or capable of reasonable bargaining. On the contrary, in real life all of us at all times are bound by antecedent moral ties, to the parents and families and communities and societies from which we come. And all of us at some times are neither free, nor independent, nor capable of choosing our ends – shared or individual, political, or personal – for ourselves. This is so for everyone at the beginning of their lives. For most people who do not die suddenly, it is so at the end of their lives, too. For anyone who is seriously ill for any length of time, it is so during that period of sickness, whenever it comes in their lives. For some people, it is so

The Eyes of a Child  163 throughout their lives. How then can Rawls claim to be advancing an account of political justice that is true of and for everybody, when his underlying anthropology seems in plain fact to be properly true of no one, and even approximately true only for a succession of temporary elites? Part of Rawls’s answer to this objection presumably lies in a distinction that he himself has made famous. Rawls wants us to think about “ideal theory” as a heuristic to help us do “non-ideal theory”. Roughly, he thinks that if we can just get straight how things would stand in a tidiedup version of reality with all the mess and noise and confusing factors removed from it, then that will show us how to apply the ideas that we have developed, by way of stipulations about his smoothly functioning ideal reality, in our noisy, messy, non-ideal, real reality. Thus, Rawls stipulates, [a]ll citizens are fully cooperating members of society over the course of a complete life. This means that everyone has sufficient intellectual powers to play a normal part in society, and no one suffers from unusual needs that are especially difficult to fulfil, for example, unusual and costly medical requirements. Of course, care for those with such requirements is a pressing practical question. But at this initial stage, the fundamental problem of social justice arises between those who are full and active and morally conscientious participants in society, and directly or indirectly associated together throughout a complete life. Therefore, it is sensible to lay aside certain difficult complications. If we can work out a theory that covers the fundamental case, we can try to extend it to other cases later.6 Rawls tells us to set aside the contingent and incidental features of human political life, the “difficult complications”, until “later”. But when is “later”? And what if these “difficult complications” are “the fundamental case”? What if the needs that Rawls calls “unusual”, and apparently takes to be a secondary matter (whether that means in time or in importance), are actually needs that occur in almost every human life? Compare here the opening lines, and indeed the title, of MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues: We human beings are vulnerable to many kinds of affliction and most of us are at some time afflicted by serious ills. How we cope is only in small part up to us. It is most often to others that we owe our survival, let alone our flourishing, as we encounter bodily illness and injury, inadequate nutrition, mental defect and disturbance, and human aggression and neglect. This dependence on particular others for protection and sustenance is most obvious in early childhood and in old age. But between these first and last stages our lives are characteristically marked by longer or shorter periods of injury, illness, or other disablement and some among us are disabled for their entire lives.

164  Sophie-Grace Chappell These two related sets of facts, those concerning our vulnerabilities  .  .  . and those concerning  .  .  . our dependence  .  .  . are so evidently of singular importance that it might seem that no account of the human condition whose authors hoped to achieve credibility could avoid giving them a central place. Yet the history of Western moral philosophy suggests otherwise. From Plato to Moore and since, [on the rare occasions] when the ill, the injured, and the otherwise disabled are presented in the pages of moral philosophy books, it is almost always exclusively as possible subjects of benevolence by moral agents who are themselves presented as though they were continuously rational, healthy, and untroubled. So we are invited, when we do think of disability, to think of the disabled as “them”, as other than “us”, as a separate class, not as ourselves as we have been, sometimes are now, and may well be in the future.7 Leaving the perennial and universal facts about human vulnerability and dependence out of our philosophical anthropology is not a way of eliminating distractions from the “fundamental case” of human interaction. It is a fundamental misrepresentation of the fundamental case. Rawlsian man is supposed to be Everyman, a neutral locus of agency standing behind the veil of ignorance and choosing a shape for society from a bargaining position outside all actual societies. But in truth, Rawlsian man is both (as the theory is supposed to work  – in theory) too “bare”, too distant from the real particularities of human life as it actually is, and also (as the theory actually works – in our psychology), too “laden”, too easily and too closely identifiable with actual agents who are anything but neutral loci of agency standing behind that veil. It is not entirely cheap, for example, to point out that Rawlsian man can stand, unlike so many actual people; and also – and again unlike so many actual people – that he has the detachment and the width of vision to be a bargainer. (“Our focus is on persons as capable of being normal and fully cooperating members of society over a complete life”; “Those who can . . . are regarded as equal citizens.”)8 Rawls went in search of a “bare” agent, an agent who could represent all humans and any humans, at the uniquely fulcral standpoint of the original position. What he actually found, if he found anything at all, was a human who occupies a very particular, far from originarily natural, and remarkably privileged position. As our psychologies will naturally fill him in from Rawls’s would-be minimalist descriptions of him, he will be someone able-bodied, long-lived, healthy, probably white, probably male, probably college educated and affluent, probably young, certainly not disabled, and fully possessed of all sorts of top-end, high-level rational and imaginative capacities, in particular the “two moral powers”. And this figure comes to us fully formed; not a word about the influences that formed him. It is as if we were to develop a theory of the flower that never mentions soil or water. It is as if we were to go on a hunt for the

The Eyes of a Child  165 average person, and come up with James Bond in an open-top Ferrari, cruising through the Provençal sunshine on La Grande Corniche with a Walther PPK in his Armani-blazer pocket, a very dry Martini on the walnut dashboard, and Ursula Andress in the red-calf-leather passenger seat. A realistic account of the human individual must begin somewhere else; somewhere that does proper justice to the dependency of each human individual on his or her familial, social, political, and communal background, and so, in the process, captures the fundamental place in each human individual’s experience of other human individuals, and of each individual’s vulnerability to these others. Where might that be? The answer is obvious. A  realistic account of the human individual, and of the place of other human individuals in any human individual’s experience, should begin where the human individual begins. It should begin with the baby: the human child. Section I has been about the presuppositions of political philosophy. Section III will be about the presuppositions of the philosophy of perception. Section II fills in a bit more on the nature of enchanted realism.

Enchanted Realism Enchanted realism says that when we encounter the world, a seamlessly and inseparably integral aspect of what we encounter is value. It is intrinsically part of encountering the world that we encounter the world (typically, mostly) as good, as possessing and instantiating evaluative properties; not as neutral, or normatively inert, or as a mere nexus of primary qualities. The evidence for enchanted realism is primarily a matter of familiar facts of human experience. The main example that I want to present here is a striking meditation on the enchantedness of the world; it is the David Attenborough nature documentary, The Blue Planet. What happens in The Blue Planet is essentially a narrative that summarises several generations of scientific observations of the facts about natural history or zoology. We are shown pictures of animals living, breeding, nesting, hunting, competing, contriving, migrating, giving birth, and dying; we are shown the places where they live, the challenges they face, the other species that they have to or choose to interact with. There are a few evaluative comments, usually about the wonder of it all, sometimes about the fragility of the environments they live in; but nearly everything that is said is simply zoological fact. The photography is visually magnificent, the tone of Attenborough’s commentary is mostly reverential, and there is, of course, the emotional suggestiveness of the incidental music. Still, what the programme gives us is essentially (a layperson’s version of) the scientific facts about the dolphin or the polar bear or the sea-turtle or whatever creature it is that we are focusing on this week.

166  Sophie-Grace Chappell These scientific facts, just on their own, are sufficient to mandate particular evaluative attitudes to those facts which fit into the framework of the virtues of enchanted realism: attitudes of awe, reverence, wonder, curiosity, fascination, delighted attention, interest, affection, laughter, protectiveness, and other feelings. These responses, I want to suggest, are at least often truth-apt. It can be true (or false) to say of some phenomenon of nature that it is good (and/or is something more fine-grained and particular, e.g. beautiful or fascinating or astonishing), and in most of the cases where it actually occurs when most people are watching The Blue Planet to say that is true. This is one main thesis of enchanted realism: the person who gets things right in ethics is the person who sees things as they are. Seeing them as they are means seeing their true value. But the disenchanted eye of the adult, or at least the philosophically trained/ calloused adult, can find this hard to do. Enchanted realism’s second main thesis is not about evaluative perception but rather about something that evaluative perception very naturally leads to: evaluative motivation. The second main thesis is that just like evaluative perception, evaluative motivation, too, can proceed directly from the presentation of facts alone. (Not “moral/ evaluative facts” but “natural facts”: in the case of The Blue Planet, facts of zoological and ecological science.) We see how things are, and that prompts a response from us; we see that climate change is threatening the polar bear and the ecosystem it lives in, and that prompts us to do something about the threat, for example reduce our carbon footprint, eat the right food, stop cutting down our forests, and begin putting the Earth first. Thus evaluative motivation moves from a scientific fact (“climate change is destroying whole ecosystems”) to a need (“we need to stop it”) to taking actions that aim to fulfil that need (such as the just-specified agenda). Now there is an absolutely standard response to both of these main theses of enchanted realism. The response derives from, or more exactly just states, the ingrained Humeanism of our current philosophical culture. Against enchanted realism’s first thesis, the Humean insists that it is an illusion to think that anyone can just see the evaluative aspect of reality, the way it is in itself. There is, according to her, nothing of this sort to be seen. For there is no way evaluative reality is in itself – all that is happening when we think we see evaluative reality is that we “gild and stain” the reality in which we find ourselves with an evaluative colouring that is, in more than one sense, a projection of our own inclinations, attitudes, and desires. Against the second thesis of enchanted realism, the Humean similarly insists that only desire can motivate. So no mere belief or perception of the facts, whether or not combined with a view about what “needs” those facts suggest, can directly generate motivation all on its own. For there to be motivation there has to be desire present as well as all this cognitive stuff. For the Humean the reality that we perceive is basically evaluatively inert. All there is really there is the world of Newtonian atomism, bare

The Eyes of a Child  167 bodies in blind motion. Anything more, any evaluative aspect that we profess to find in reality, really comes from the subject’s side, not the object’s. And one quick proof of this, according to the Humean, is the simple fact of relativism. Two observers can see the same facts but have radically different attitudes to them, and hence different evaluations of them and different motivations relative to them. The world in itself is value-neutral; and witness to that fact is the different values that different observers actually put on it. One point we might make against this Humean view is frankly polemical. (And none the worse for that; polemic has its place.) Hume’s disenchanted anti-realism is the ideology of environmental pillage. In the Henrician reformation of 1533 and after, what enabled the sack and plunder of the monasteries of England, and with it the largest landgrab since the Norman Conquest, was the novel doctrine that there was nothing sacrosanct in those monasteries – they were material there for the taking. Likewise in early modernity and since, what has enabled the sack and plunder of the natural world is the novel9 doctrine of Entzauberung, the view that nature is nothing but bare bodies in Newtonian motion – that it, too, is literally nothing but material there for the taking. Hume is neither the exclusive proprietor nor the originator of this view: like many things that we now call Humean, it actually owes far more to two greater, more original, and more incisive British empiricists, namely Hobbes (with his utter cynicism about the reality of any value that goes beyond agents’ desires) and Locke (with that charter for imperialism, his doctrine that the earth most rightfully belongs to whoever most fully exploits it). But Hume gives canonical expression to the view that I am calling disenchanted anti-realism. And the view is with us to this day. It is the grounding presupposition of modern international capitalism. It is also, by an extraordinary coincidence, the grounding presupposition of orthodox modern analytical philosophy. I want to say that seeing the world with the eyes of a child is what programmes like The Blue Planet provide us with. What I mean by that is not that they teach us to see naively or ignorantly (though I can hardly deny that my view is what some call “naive realism”). Rather, I mean that from them we (re-)learn to see the world as enchanted realism says it is, and not as disenchanted anti-realism says. But it seems no accident that so much of our political philosophy is set up to occlude the viewpoint of the child. For the change in vision that I am talking about is, profoundly, political.

Philosophy of Perception Enchanted realism commits me to the direct availability of the evaluative in our experience: of all the abundantly rich variety of evaluative properties that we find in the world of ordinary human life, and again in the worlds depicted in The Blue Planet. This in turn commits me to a view about the admissible contents of experience. I claim that we can

168  Sophie-Grace Chappell experience value directly; so I need to be able to explain how value can be part of those admissible contents. In Section III, I do at least something towards that explanation. The two most familiar views about the possible contents of perceptual experience are often, as by Tim Bayne,10 called phenomenal conservativism and phenomenal liberalism. Phenomenal conservatism: What we actually, directly, literally perceive is only instances of low-level phenomenal properties. Phenomenal liberalism: What we actually, directly, literally perceive is not only instances of low-level phenomenal properties, but also instances of high-level phenomenal properties. Phenomenal conservatism (PC) is the natural home of theories of impressions and sense-datum theories, and of the appeal to “in reality all we ever really see . . .” that is the keynote of so many forms of empiricism. The idea for phenomenal conservatives is that some relatively small and/ or modest range of phenomenal properties are the real or basic ones, the “low-level” ones, and that it is these low-level properties that should be the basis of our theory of phenomenal knowledge and content. Thus PC is characteristically (to use Bayne’s word as quoted below) an austere account of what is directly available to us in perceptual awareness – and we all know how analytical philosophers love austerity in their theories. By contrast, phenomenal liberalism (PL) claims that the range of phenomenal properties that are directly available to us to perceive is wider and more generous, and includes not only the “low-level” properties but the “high-level” ones, too. Everything turns, of course, on what PC and PL mean by two phrases in particular. One is (as I  put it; there are plenty of similar formulations in the literature) “actually, directly, literally perceive”; the other is “lowlevel” (and “high-level”). The first phrase is supposed to mark a distinction between perception strictly so called on the one hand, and on the other, either figurative perception or inference (perhaps very quick, perhaps subconscious). Seeing that the apple is red is, as the usual story goes, literal perception, involving the specific sensory modality of vision. By contrast, seeing that the lecture is going to last a long time is (we’re told) only figurative perception, involving, quite possibly, all sorts of different epistemic inputs, some of them deductive or to do with, say, having previous knowledge of the lecturer, but only some of them sensory – and literal vision might not be part of this “seeing” at all. (I might be listening to a lecture that begins with the words “I will make six points today,” and after an hour the lecturer says “Secondly”, and so I say to myself “I see this will take all day.”) As for the distinction between “low-level” and “high-level”, here is Bayne’s exposition of it: [PC holds] that the phenomenal character of visual experience is exhausted by the representation of low-level properties  – colour,

The Eyes of a Child  169 shape, spatial location, motion, and so on. [Likewise with hearing,] the phenomenal character of audition is exhausted by the representation of volume, pitch, timbre, and so on; the phenomenal character of gustation is exhausted by the representation of sweetness, sourness, and so on. The phenomenal world of the conservative is an austere one . . . [By contrast, according to PL] the phenomenal character of perception can include the representation of. . . “highlevel” properties, such as being a tomato. We perceive objects and events as belonging to various high-level kinds, and this, the liberal holds, is part of perception’s phenomenal character. What it is like to see a tomato, taste a strawberry, or hear a trumpet is not limited to the representation of “low-level” sensory qualities but involves the representation of such “high-level” properties as being a tomato, a strawberry, or a trumpet.11 Here Bayne gives us an incomplete menu of alternatives. About whether high-level and low-level phenomenal properties are, in themselves, available to perception, there are not just the two possible positions that Bayne labels phenomenal conservatism and phenomenal liberalism. There are four alternatives; at least four, four that are obvious even before we start doing un-obvious things like e.g. positing more than two levels of phenomenal property. Here the four are in a table:

Directly available to perception?

Low-level phenomenal properties

High-level phenomenal properties

Position

No

No

Phenomenal nihilism

Yes Yes No

No Yes Yes

Phenomenal conservatism Phenomenal liberalism Phenomenal socialism

There is the option of allowing only low-level phenomenal properties to figure directly in perception, phenomenal conservatism. And there is the option of allowing both low-level and high-level phenomenal properties to figure in perception, phenomenal liberalism. But there are two further options. The third is to allow neither high-level nor low-level phenomenal properties to figure in perception, which the table calls phenomenal nihilism. And the fourth is the option of allowing only highlevel phenomenal properties to figure in perception. This last, the view that what we actually, directly, literally perceive is only instances of highlevel phenomenal properties, is a position that, for more than one reason, I  shall call phenomenal socialism; and (with a softening of “only” to “only or primarily”) I shall be defending it.

170  Sophie-Grace Chappell No doubt nihilism is the least attractive of the four possibilities, but one can see ways of motivating even that. Someone might be a phenomenal nihilist because, for example, they don’t believe in phenomenal properties; or because they believe that no perception of properties is ever really direct; or because they believe that all perception is illusion; or because they are eliminativists about subjective experience. None of these alternatives interests me particularly (though Daniel Dennett, for example, seems at different times to flirt with all four); but the point here is simply that phenomenal nihilism is on the menu. What about phenomenal socialism, the view that we have direct access only or primarily to high-level phenomenal properties (HLPPs), not to low-level ones (LLPPs)? The obvious objection to that, from a liberal or conservative viewpoint, is that we can get at the high-level properties only via the low-level properties: access to HLPPs has access to LLPPs as a necessary condition, or supervenes on it, or something like that. But as I shall explain in a moment, I don’t think this objection has any real power at all. Without that objection, I  see no serious argument against phenomenal socialism. But what is the argument for it? My main argument for phenomenal socialism – and here we see the second reason for the name – has to do with the essentially social way in which human beings learn to perceive in the first place. The low-level features that are fundamental to phenomenal perception, Michael Tye tells us,12 are things like “being an edge, being a corner, being square, being red”. How is this supposed to work as an analysis of what is basic or primary or fundamental in our experience in perception? Human beings are not born geometricians or colour-scientists, and only later learn to be babies. They begin as babies. And babies are not interested in geometrical properties or colour properties; not at any rate primarily, and not at any rate at first. What a baby is interested in is human relationships, and in particular, her relationship with her mother or other first carer. Accordingly, the first visual object that a typical baby learns to recognise after birth is not a geometrical feature or a colour-sample. It is the human face. Likewise the first auditory object that she learns to recognise (she has already done this, in fact, before birth) is certainly her mother’s voice, and probably the voices of others who are around a lot as well – her father and siblings, perhaps. And the first smells that she learns to recognise  – after birth, since smell presupposes breathing – will be her mother’s smell, the ­typical smell(s) of wherever she and her carers live, and of course the smell of milk. So the phenomenal properties that are truly primary for humans – the ones that humans, as such, typically learn first  – are high-level phenomenal properties, HLPPs. Not only that, they are a particular kind of HLPPs: as I  shall call them collectively, they are the social ones.

The Eyes of a Child  171 Specifically, the social properties are those HLPPs that are salient in the socialisation of typical babies; and these are the phenomenal properties that teach the baby about her sources of care and food in the other human beings around her. Phenomenal socialism is, as I have said, the view that we have direct access only or primarily to HLPPs, not to LLPPs. What we can now see is that the main reason to be a phenomenal socialist comes from familiar facts about ordinary human developmental psychology. Here are three quick objections to this argument: 1. The argument confuses developmental psychology with metaphysical explanation. A  story about how babies learn to perceive phenomenal properties, and which phenomenal properties they learn to perceive first, is something different from a story about which phenomenal properties are metaphysically basic. Understanding how human minds develop over time is not the same thing as knowing how perception works metaphysically speaking at any one moment. 2. The perceived properties of the face, the voice of the mother, the smell of milk, etc. are not really phenomenal properties because the baby doesn’t really perceive them, not directly anyway; what it does is directly perceive LLPPs, and learn to infer the mother’s presence or the presence of milk from grouping those low-level properties into high-level properties. 3. Even if the baby does directly perceive the HLPPs, it can only do this on the basis of and in virtue of perceiving the low-level phenomenal properties: because perception of the high-level properties supervenes on perception of the low-level properties. The first objection complains about a “confusion” of the roles of developmental psychology and of metaphysical explanation in our theory of phenomenal perception; but the whole point of phenomenal socialism, as I’ve just presented it, is to suggest a way that developmental psychology might be metaphysical explanation, or at any rate be crucially relevant to it, in the case of phenomenal perception. To talk of a confusion here is simply to beg the question against that proposal. The second objection insists that the baby does not really perceive the social properties, the HLPPs associated with the mother’s face and voice and smell, the smell of milk, etc.; she must, according to this objection, be inferring or constructing those HLPPs on the basis of some more direct perception of LLPPs. But why be dogmatic about this? That the baby can and does directly access the HLPPs certainly seems to be what happens. Why be so desperate to deny this appearance? There isn’t even a clear argument for denying it unless the third objection is viable. But actually it very obviously isn’t viable. It is a well-known datum of developmental psychology that the baby’s perception of the

172  Sophie-Grace Chappell HLPPs does not supervene on her perception of the LLPPs. Consider more closely the best-known example of all, an example I’ve already been using. As any parent can tell you, babies track faces, faces as such, not the subvening properties of faces. The gestalt of a visible face can and does undergo all sorts of change in the properties that constitute it, and still remains the same gestalt: it gets red with exertion or tanned with the sun; it looks different in ordinary daylight, inside a neon-lit supermarket, and in the low light of the bedtime nursery; it acquires new wrinkles or loses old pimples; bits of it disappear behind sunglasses or makeup or new hairstyles or facial hair; and so on. These are the subvening properties of the face; and they change all the time. The baby’s perception of the face may possibly supervene on some smaller set of most salient properties of the face; but not even that much is clear, and even if it does, the identity of this smaller set is very fuzzy-edged. Babies, even newborns, will “lock on” to very simple representations of faces, like this one 😊; but they are strikingly unfussy about how such representations are composed, i.e., precisely, about the constituent lower-level properties of such representations. So in the case of babies’ facial-recognition capacity, there is at the very least massive “multiple realisation” of the lower-order properties that a baby will take to be constitutive of representations of faces. Moreover, there is no way of closing the disjunctive range of possible alternative lower-order properties that the baby will see in this way. But to admit this is to wave goodbye to any clear notion at all of the supervenience of the higher-order properties on the lower. In the light of these considerations, perhaps the high-level/low-level terminology itself needs reconsidering. As a matter of actual human development, there is nothing particularly “low-level” about the phenomenal properties that usually go by that name. It takes a particular kind of sophistication even to notice most of them: “painterly” sophistication in the case of simple colour-samples; geometrician’s sophistication in the case of, e.g., “being an edge”. Perspective drawing’s notion of how things “actually appear to us” is a foreign one to most human minds: millennia and centuries passed before any society got hold of the idea of drawing, for example, a square object seen from below as a rhombus on the canvas, in line with that notion. According to phenomenal socialism, it is not with such allegedly basic phenomenal properties that our perception of the world begins, and it is not in terms of them that we should seek an understanding of perception or of its metaphysics; it is with the social phenomenal properties. If this argument generalises – as it surely does – from facial recognition to the recognition of other social HLPPs, then the third objection against phenomenal socialism fails. At the same time the case for phenomenal socialism becomes a lot stronger. For now it seems, quite generally, that in their development from birth onwards (and indeed before), humans

The Eyes of a Child  173 often perceive HLPPs as the primary objects of their perception, and without any prior dependence on LLPPs. And this conclusion is just the thesis of (moderate) phenomenal socialism. Perhaps we can now see how to handle a fourth – and more considerable – objection to any position that says that we can and do directly perceive high-level phenomenal properties, such as phenomenal liberalism and phenomenal socialism. Suppose someone first sees only the lower-level components of some high-level phenomenal property or object, such as a face, or a tune, or an inscription of the name Sophie Grace. Then, by whatever kind of aspect or gestalt shift, they come to see the high-level phenomenal property too. That is, they come to see the relevant shapes as a face, or to hear the component sounds as a tune, or to see some squiggles on a page as the written words Sophie Grace. If you like, they acquire a capacity to parse or “read” what is in front of them: in the case of the writing, a literal capacity to read. But surely – this objection runs – whatever kind of change in the spectator there may be in such cases, it can’t be a change in what they perceive, only in how they interpret it. For by hypothesis, the low-level phenomenal properties remain unchanged throughout. That last inference, of course, presupposes something that I  have already rejected, viz. the assumption that the HLPPs must supervene on the LLPPs. If there is (as I’ve argued) no such supervenience, then it is not true that there can be no change or continuity in the HLPPs without some underlying change or continuity in the LLPPs. As has been argued, we can perceive the same HLPPs and wildly different LLPPs. For example, the face that the baby tracks as the same face can undergo all sorts of change in lighting conditions and detail of appearance. Or again, we can hear the very same tune “Flower of Scotland” played on different instruments in different keys and with different tones, and yet hear it as the same tune. Conversely, I now add, we can perceive the very same LLPPs and yet come to perceive quite different HLPPs. And that is exactly what happens when we learn to “read” a face or to read an inscription. An obstinately resistant sense remains that this can’t be a matter of a change in our perception. After all, it will be said, in cases like these, at any given moment exactly the same low-level phenomenal properties are presented to the reader and the non-reader. So surely, their perceptual experiences are identical at that time. If there is a difference between them, and evidently there is, it can’t be in their perceptual experience; it must be in how they interpret that experience. This obstinate resistance is still begging the question against the thesis of phenomenal socialism. The claim at issue is, precisely, that there can be changes in HLPPs without changes in LLPPs, and it is no argument against that claim simply to say “Surely not”. Nor is there any force to the suggestion that we can’t imagine what it would be like for us to experience a change in HLPPs without a change in LLPPs. Certainly we can imagine this – it’s what we experience when we see a gestalt shift.

174  Sophie-Grace Chappell That said, it is perhaps a more constructive response to this resistance to question the hard line that is being drawn between perception and interpretation. By now it is close to traditional to observe that perceiving is – essentially and always – interpreting the world, and there is no such thing as perception without interpretation; so to change our interpretation of what we perceive is also to change what we perceive. We might also say that a characteristically Humean error seems to be motivating the resistance. This Humean error – we might even call it a Zenonian error  – is the fallacy of the time-slice: the fallacy of assuming that the basic unit for metaphysical analysis is always and only the instant. Pick any instant  – runs the argument  – and at that instant we will be unable to see any difference in perception between the reader, the person who sees the words Sophie Grace, and the non-reader, who only sees the shapes of the words (if even those). But all time is composed out of instants. So to say that there is no difference in perception between the reader and the non-reader at any instant is to say that there is no difference between them at any time. And to say there is no difference between them at any time is to say that there is no difference between them at all. Now it is not just in this case that the time-slice approach leads us to sceptical conclusions. As Hume himself gleefully pointed out, the timeslice approach also wreaks sceptical havoc on the commonsense intuition that we can perceive causal connections. Hume could equally well have pointed out that it wreaks sceptical havoc, too, on the commonsense intuition that things move (actually move, as opposed to showing up in one place at one instant, and another at another); that is why I call the time-slice approach Zenonian. Most fundamentally, Hume saw that his time-slice approach implied scepticism about the existence of substance; about the existence of objects that have properties and endure through time. Hume apparently did not mind sceptical conclusions  – or if he did, he took the mind’s natural indolence to be a sufficient remedy to them. He never seems to have seriously considered the possibility that these direly sceptical consequences of his time-slice approach give us reason to reject the whole approach. But we should consider it. For at least some purposes of metaphysical analysis, including the present ones – perception, causation, substance – we should say that the basic unit is not the instant but the (suitable-length) time-span. For perception, to stick with that case, is not (just) a state; it is (also) a process: “[C]ognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs.”13 Accordingly, the main difference between a high-level perception, such as reading Sophie Grace, and a low-level perception, such as seeing only the shapes of those words (or perhaps even only the visual arrays in which those shapes are present), will be a difference not between two

The Eyes of a Child  175 states, captured in snapshots at some instant, but between two processes, “filmed” (as it were) as they unfold in real time. And then the differences between the reader and the non-reader will be differences about what is salient to the two observers, and hence differences about what properties those two observers track over time. Once she has noticed them, the reader latches onto the inscription of the two words, and looks in the context for the endurance-through-change of that inscription, perhaps for the appearance of further messages  – that kind of thing. The nonreader, by contrast, simply takes in an array of shapes (or just an array, in which she does not even notice shapes). If some part of that array is particularly salient to her, it will not (ex hypothesi) be the words. She as a non-reader will not track the words’ persistence, or their failure to persist, over time; her attention will be elsewhere. I am a phenomenal socialist, as well as some other kinds of socialist, because, for human beings, the social comes first. For us, perception begins with the social properties, the properties that are salient for a neonate, an infant, or an otherwise young human being; moreover, I  have suggested, saying that these properties are developmentally primary need not and should not be sharply separated from saying that they are explanatorily primary. These social properties are a subset of the properties that the literature usually calls the “high-level” phenomenal properties. Does phenomenal socialism, as I have now developed it, get us all the way to direct perceptual realism about the evaluative? Yes, provided that, along the way, we accept two moves in particular. The first of these moves is the claim that we are directly aware not only of the social phenomenal properties, but in particular of those among them that are ethically relevant properties like arrogance, kindness, humiliation, grace, and so on (in the case of human interactions), or beauty, elegance, intricacy, ingenuity, and so on (in the case of “the world of nature”). The claim is that these sort of properties are everywhere in the world as we actually experience it, and it is possible for us to perceive them accurately as features of situations that we can find ourselves in. This perception is of course (as I call it) figurative perception – it isn’t the sort of perception that is associate with any single sensory modality, but rather the kind of perception that is involved in “I see your determination to get this job.” The second move, however, is the denial that there is any clear boundary between sensory and figurative perception. As we might say, the whole point of sensory perception is to achieve figurative perception, because that is what we need for knowledge and understanding of the world around us. How directly this happens is not merely given, but also a matter of our capacities: we can learn to grasp truths about our environment directly and non-inferentially, straight from the deliverances of our senses; we can also learn to grasp truths about how our environment can be, and what ways we might change it, by applying our imaginations

176  Sophie-Grace Chappell to those deliverances. What the senses tell us, then, is a series of contributions to overall understanding: sensory awareness is, in the end, just one kind of route to awareness. Perceptual consciousness is a special style of access to the world. But access is not something bare, brute, or found. The ground of access is our possession of knowledge, understanding, and skills. Without understanding, there is no access and so no perception.14 There is no deep categorical gap between the kind of perception that makes us aware of a piece of writing in our visual field, and the kind that makes us aware of the lives of animals, or aware that some other human is sad or angry or behaving embarrassingly. The former typically involves just one sensory modality, the latter typically involves a whole range of sensory modalities and other ways of accessing particular kinds of knowledge. But both are perceptual routes to knowledge. If we can see an inscription of the words Sophie Grace by accessing high-level phenomenal properties, then we can also see an instance of grace by accessing high-level phenomenal properties. Now as I have argued, the world of ordinary life is full of high-level phenomenal properties of this latter kind; in ethics, they (or some of them) are often called the thick properties. Such properties – and our direct experience of them – are the working materials of ordinary ethical consciousness; and they are part of what makes it as reality-involving as any other kind of consciousness. Philosophy of perception, no less than political philosophy, begins from a question of philosophical anthropology: “In describing our nature as perceivers in the world, or as agents among other agents, what is primary?” My thesis in this chapter is that, in both cases, it is very strange indeed to think that what is developmentally primary in the human lifecycle simply has no bearing on what is primary for our philosophical anthropology. Rediscovering a sense of the strangeness of that presupposition of so much contemporary philosophy is a step on the way to liberating ourselves from it. And to liberate ourselves from it is the first thing we need to do, if we are to learn, or relearn, or un-unlearn, to see the world with the eyes of a child.

Notes 1. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield [1850] (New York: Norton, 1990), Ch. 2. 2. Mark 10.15. 3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 560. 4. Michael Sandel, “Review of John Rawls, Political Liberalism,” in Harvard Law Review 107 (1994): 1768–69. 5. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 49.

The Eyes of a Child  177 6. John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” in Collected Papers, ed. John Rawls (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1980]), 332 (italics added). 7. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 1–2. 8. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 301, 303 (italics added). 9. Not entirely novel: Leucippus, Democritus, and Lucretius all believed something like this, too. But their view was a marginal one in the ancient world, and never had the drastic consequences for general culture that modern atomism has had. 10. Tim Bayne, “Perception and the Reach of Phenomenal Content,” in The Admissible Contents of Experience, eds. Katherine Hawley and Fiona Macpherson (London: Wiley, 2011), 16–35. 11. Ibid., 16–17. 12. Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 141. 13. Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 9. 14. Alva Noe, “Conscious Reference,” in The Admissible Contents of Experience, eds. Katherine Hawley and Fiona Macpherson (London: Wiley, 2011), 105.

Bibliography Bayne, Tim. “Perception and the Reach of Phenomenal Content.” In The Admissible Contents of Experience, edited by Katherine Hawley and Fiona Macpherson, 16–35. London: Wiley, 2011. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. New York: Norton, 1990 [1850]. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need The Virtues. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Noe, Alva. “Conscious Reference.” In The Admissible Contents of Experience, edited by Katherine Hawley and Fiona Macpherson, 101–13. London: Wiley, 2011. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. ———. Political Liberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory.” In Collected Papers, edited by John Rawls, 303–58. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1980]. Sandel, Michael. “Review of John Rawls, Political Liberalism.” Harvard Law Review 107 (1994): 1765–94. Tye, Michael. Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Varela, Francisco, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson. The Embodied Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

8 Nature, Enchantment, and God Fiona Ellis

Introduction What does it mean to say of the natural world that it is enchanted? Should we be describing it in these terms? And if not, why not? According to the position with which I  shall begin, this mode of description is perfectly legitimate provided that the enchantment at issue is distinguished from a more pernicious variety – one which flies in the face of modern science, and involves a reversion to pre-scientific superstition. Enchantment in this latter sense is associated with supernaturalism and magic, it carries quite obvious religious connotations, and we are encouraged to suppose that a more satisfactory conception must be shorn of these features. One way of summing up the recommended alternative is to say that enchantment must be secularized,1 although there are difficulties with this mode of description given that the term ‘secular’ is often used interchangeably with the term ‘disenchanted’,2 and given that the proposal at issue purports to take us beyond a disenchanted conception of reality. It will become clear that the other terms in this debate – ‘natural’, ‘supernatural’, ‘religious’ – are similarly unclear. One highly interesting version of such a position is defended by John McDowell. He insists that enchantment must be comprehended from within a naturalistic framework, albeit one that involves a rejection of scientism.3 This latter requirement takes us beyond disenchantment as standardly conceived, but McDowell insists that his position stands equally opposed to supernaturalism and, by implication, religion. Such a proposal is of great interest to those who reject scientism, but who deny that this forces them in the direction of supernaturalism and religion. I  agree that the proposed middle-ground seems infinitely preferable to the extremes of scientism and suspect supernaturalism. However – and this takes us back to the previous point about terminology – the notions of supernaturalism and religion can be variously interpreted, they are not bound to be suspect, and there is room for allowing that McDowell’s brand of naturalism has theistic import. I shall spell out what this means, what the implications are for an understanding of enchantment, and why

Nature, Enchantment, and God  179 the position doesn’t involve a retreat into pre-scientific superstition, at least as that notion is understood by McDowell.

Enchantment and Disenchantment: Preliminaries McDowell argues that there is more to nature than what the natural scientist can comprehend, and that there are non-scientific modes of understanding that can offer insight into the relevant aspects of reality. He takes this concession to amount to a ‘reenchantment’ of nature,4 but insists that the enchantment it brings is only ‘partial’.5 So total enchantment is ruled out, and modern science has led us away from this picture in the sense that we no longer take seriously the idea that its subject matter is ‘filled with meaning, as if all of nature were a book of lessons to us’.6 We accept rather that it is ‘empty of meaning’, that it is ‘disenchanted’.7 The image of disenchantment (Entzauberung) is borrowed from Max Weber,8 who was inspired, in turn, by a line in Friedrich Schiller’s 1788 poem ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’ (The Gods of Greece) in which reference is made to die engotterte Nature – de-divinized nature, the nature from which the gods have been eliminated.9 McDowell spells out his conception of what it means to describe things in disenchanted terms with reference to a contrast between two kinds of intelligibility: the kind sought by natural science, and the kind to be found in a text, an utterance, or some other kind of action.10 Intelligibility in the latter sense has its origin in mind, and we are to suppose that things which are disenchanted are not mind-involving in the relevant sense, and that they are appropriate objects of natural scientific investigation in this respect. McDowell gives the example of the movements of the planets and the fall of a sparrow. So we enchant nature in a problematic way when we fail to acknowledge the ‘mindless’ status of these things – when we treat their behaviour as if it were on a level with a text, an utterance, or some other kind of action. McDowell talks in this context of an appeal to explanatory factors that are ‘occult’, ‘magical’, and ‘supernatural’,11 claiming that one who operates within such a framework is thrown into ‘the region of darkness . . . a region whose extent has shrunk for us with the advent of a modern scientific outlook’.12 He adds that in the most extreme version of the outlook this region has shrunk to nothing at all. McDowell’s description of the relevant explanatory factors as occult, magical, and supernatural suggests that we are in the realm of the problematic, and the implication from Weber and Schiller is that the enchanted approach at issue has a religious dimension – hence the idea that the alternative disenchanted picture is ‘de-divinized’ in some sense. Such a dimension is implicit in McDowell’s use of the term ‘supernatural’, and it is notable that his example of the sparrow’s fall has a biblical precedent – one which is picked up by Hamlet when he claims that ‘there is special providence in the fall of the sparrow.’ The reference here is to

180  Fiona Ellis Matthew 10: 29 where we are told that ‘not one [sparrow] will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.’ The sparrow here is a symbol for God’s loving care, and assuming that God has a significant role to play in this context – God’s special providence – then we have a sense in which its fall might be thought to have the status of a kind of action, and count as meaningful in this respect. It remains to be seen whether this interpretation of theism is defensible. For the moment we can note that a related picture figures in Weber’s account, although his focus is the pre-scientific religiosity of one for whom the workings of nature are determined by unpredictable and volatile spirits and gods, and who have recourse to magic in order to control them or pray to them.13 The position is well captured in Kenneth Miller’s description of our ancestors who ‘prayed as children, asking mercy from the gods of darkness, the demons of the night’: Our gods did magic. They did the work of nature, and they ruled the lives of men. They warmed to us some days, and on others they made us shiver. They healed us when they wished, and other times they struck us down with sickness and death. Most of all, they filled a need that all men have, a need to see the world as sensible and complete. Gods filled the voids in nature we could not explain, and they made the world seem whole.14 The gods do the work of nature in the sense that they make things happen, and the things they do  – moving the planets, making a sparrow fall – are determined by whim and mood. Their actions lend credence to the idea that nature has an underlying purpose, but its workings remain unpredictable, and the only thing we can say about the behaviour of the things we observe is that it is controlled by the gods. It is in this sense that the gods fill the voids in nature which cannot be explained – they are gods-of-the-gaps in this respect – and it is in this sense that its workings are to be approached in the way that we approach a text, an utterance, or some other kind of action. At one level then, we have a paradigm of pre-scientific superstition. The world has the status of a text in the sense that its workings are to be interpreted as acts of the gods, and this provides a primitive gesture in the direction of scientific explanation, for we are given some kind of answer – however inadequate – to the scientific question of why things happen. Having described the way in which our ancestors submitted to the ‘gods of darkness’, Miller continues as follows: Then something happened. Something wonderful happened. A few of our ancestors began to learn the rules by which nature worked, and after a while, we no longer needed Apollo to pull the sun’s chariot across the sky. . . . The movements of the sun and moon became

Nature, Enchantment, and God  181 part of a mechanism, a celestial machine in which each motion could be calculated and explained. . . . In a word, we learned to explore nature in the systematic way we now call science . . . the gods are gone, and we are no longer subject to their tyranny.15 So science provides a framework for learning the rules by which nature works, the relevant workings are approached accordingly, and there is no longer any need to view them as acts of capricious gods, or indeed, as acts of any kind at all. Rather, they are processes or events which exhibit a different kind of intelligibility from that which characterizes texts, utterances, and other kinds of action. They are scientifically explicable in this respect, and emptied of the kind of meaning they were thought to possess when the gods were on the scene. It is in this sense that the subject matter of natural science is appropriately disenchanted. We can agree that there is a distinction to be drawn between mindful and non-mindful behaviour, that the movements of the planets and the fall of a sparrow belong to the latter category, and that we do not approach these phenomena in the way that we approach texts, utterances, or any other kind of action. We can agree also that modern natural science has performed an emancipatory role in this regard. This much is indisputable, but there is a question of where this leaves us, particularly in the light of McDowell’s insistence that nature be comprehended in partially enchanted terms. One of the points of insisting upon partial enchantment is to reject the idea that science is the only legitimate mode of comprehension, and that it has a monopoly on nature in this respect. Science in this context is natural science, and the complaint is that something important is left out of the picture if nature is comprehended in these terms alone, namely, all the things that resist this level of explanation. Weber himself expresses similar misgivings along these lines, referring to the ‘mechanised petrification’ to which we succumb in such a context. He describes those who commit to this scientistic approach as ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’.16 The nature and limits of scientific explanation are unclear, and a nonreductionist in this context will insist that different sorts of investigations carry their own theoretical commitments, and that there is no requirement that they conform to a single model. Furthermore, even granting that mechanistic explanation is to be distinguished from other modes of inquiry, and that it involves explaining things in terms of the causal laws that govern the elements out of which everything is composed, it does not follow that everything is dead and inert at this level, and there are arguments within physics to challenge this assumption.17 So the image of mechanised petrification can be questioned to this degree at least, but even granting a richer conception of the relevant physical processes and interactions, it does not follow that everything is reducible to this level, and such an approach surely does leave us with a deeply impoverished

182  Fiona Ellis conception of reality – one which bears no resemblance to the ordinary world we inhabit, and which seems appropriately described as ‘empty of meaning’ or disenchanted in this respect.18

Partial Enchantment, Secular Enchantment, and the Death of God McDowell takes us beyond a world that is disenchanted in this scientistic sense. That is to say, he insists that there is more to nature than what can be comprehended by physics and chemistry alone. So there is a dimension of nature that exceeds this explanatory focus, and he concludes on this ground that nature is partially enchanted. It is partially enchanted in the sense that we are concerned with a level of meaning which is not applicable to everything. The question of what it means to describe this level of meaning as ‘enchanted’ is more difficult. McDowell wishes to deny that the term has anything to do with magic, religion, or anything remotely ‘other-worldly’, and he is concerned above all to accommodate the meanings which structure human existence and to which we are responsive as meaning-seeking animals.19 So enchantment is an irreducibly this-worldly notion, and the phenomena of mind, meaning, and value are central to the dimension at issue. The minds at issue belong to humans rather than gods, and this human focus brings meaning and value into the picture. Not in the sense that these things are projected onto a nature which, in itself, is empty of meaning and value, for this would be to revert to the disputed scientistic picture. Rather, the idea is that there are aspects of the natural world that exceed the limits of scientific investigation, and to which we are capable of being responsive as human beings, when, for example, we acknowledge the significance of love, the authority of value, and the impossibility of living as if these things amounted to nothing. McDowell’s position is contentious from the point of view of much orthodox thinking, for the idea of a disenchanted world has gone hand in hand with the idea that the gods or God have vanished from the scene, the assumption being that they have taken all value and meaning in their wake. Schiller’s talk of a de-divinized nature is explicit in this regard, it is presupposed by all those who insist that value has its source in God, and Nietzsche brings out the supposed consequences when, in his pronouncement of the death of God, he warns that we have ‘wip[ed] away the entire horizon’, ‘unchained this earth from its sun’, and ‘empty space [is] breathing at us’ as a consequence.20 We can note, however, that the atheists to whom Nietzsche addresses his pronouncement have no real sense of the supposed difficulty – as they see it, God is irrelevant to value, and it is a childish superstition to endorse such a framework.21 We know also that Nietzsche himself seeks an alternative, non-theistic way of supplying the required ground.

Nature, Enchantment, and God  183 The idea that a God-involving framework involves childish superstition is familiar from our modern scientist’s approach to the magicmaking gods, and such an attitude is prevalent in contemporary analytic philosophy. The implication here is that the introduction of God or gods is no more than an unsophisticated and pre-scientific attempt to comprehend the workings of nature. This is no doubt part of what was going on when Apollo was brought in to pull the sun’s chariot across the sky, or when thunder in the mountains was explained with reference to the anger of the gods. However, religion is not reducible to the desire to comprehend the world scientifically, it has a fundamentally moral and spiritual dimension, and as John Cottingham has put it in the context of defending theistic religion, it involves ‘a moral and spiritual opening of the self to the presence of the divine’.22 Cottingham talks in this context of an epistemology of receptivity rather than one of control, the guiding question in this context being that of how I can embark upon a path of moral and spiritual change which might open me to a deeper awareness of something that I  now glimpse only faintly.23 The contrast here is with the ‘controlling’ attitude of one whose sole aim is to theorize and to know. The idea of a moral and spiritual opening of the self is central to McDowell’s scheme of things, but he denies that this involves being open to the divine, and would agree with Nietzsche’s atheists that this addition is problematic, even whilst stopping short of describing such a commitment as a childish superstition.24 The Latin etymology of the term ‘superstition’ – super-stare – is not explicitly pejorative, but it might be thought to lend justice to the complaint at issue here, for it is said to involve a ‘standing still over by a thing; hence, amazement, wonder, dread, especially of the divine or supernatural’.25 McDowell would take issue with the idea that the ‘thing’ in question is divine or supernatural, and we can ask whether he would allow that the self’s openness can bring forth amazement, wonder, and dread. This question is important given the association of these terms with the notion of enchantment as intuitively understood, and given this notion’s association with the divine and the supernatural. McDowell would no doubt retort that such attitudes are perfectly explicable responses to the value-involving world in which we live and move and have our being. He could add also that the whole point of a secular conception of enchantment is to give us a resolutely this-worldly focus so that we can make sense of the idea that meaning and value are to be found in the here and now rather than in some second, supernatural realm. This is surely a point in favour of such a position, and it is taken seriously by all those who endorse an analogously secular conception of spirituality, doing so on the ground that it allows us to ‘naturalize spirituality, to get away from “other-worldly” religions and philosophies, and to reappreciate or “re-enchant” everyday life’.26 Robert Solomon says these words in the context of defending a Nietzschean conception

184  Fiona Ellis of spirituality, and Nietzsche himself castigates religion for its ‘declared aversion to life’, its ‘slander[s] against “the here and now” ’, and ‘every lie about the “beyond” ’.27 Talk of lies about the ‘beyond’ returns us to Nietzsche’s atheists, but we know that there is enough in Nietzsche to suggest a serious worry about whether this ‘beyond’ can be removed whilst leaving everything in its place. Hence the claim that we have wiped away the entire horizon, and unchained the earth from its sun. We have here two conflicting ways of understanding what it could mean for God to be part of the picture. According to the first approach, God is an entity which can be removed at no cost to what really matters. This is the typical atheist’s conception of God, and the underlying framework encourages this way of thinking. It does so in the sense that God is severed from what really matters. God in this context corresponds to the supernatural, the supernatural stands opposed to the natural, and there is no such thing as the supernatural. So the supernatural is dropped from the picture and the natural world – the only world there is – is reenchanted. Enchantment is a this-worldly notion, and it survives the removal of the aforementioned supernatural entity. According to the second approach, this first way of thinking about God is deeply problematic, and it is appropriate to describe it as a case of childish superstition in the sense that it involves an immature conception of God. God is not an entity, and God’s presence is so deeply intertwined in the natural world that the atheist’s supposition – that removing God is the easiest thing of all – makes no sense at all. On this second way of thinking, as Mulhall has summed it up, God is not so much an entity as a medium or a system of co’ordinates, and . . . belief in God is best understood not as the addition of one supernatural entity to the supposed furniture of the universe, but rather as an atmosphere or framework that orients us in everything we say, think, and do.28 Hence the claim that, in removing God, we have wiped away the entire horizon and unchained this earth from its sun. On this second picture the supernatural and the natural are inextricably linked, and they stand and fall together. The implication here is that a secular conception of enchantment cannot be made good, although I have noted that Nietzsche himself does not rule out the possibility of a non-theistic solution.29 It is familiar enough in theology and much philosophy that the ‘entity’ conception of God is flawed, and I am going to assume in what follows that this complaint is justified, even whilst acknowledging that the picture thinking to which we must so often resort in this context can encourage such a conception. I am going to allow also that the second approach  – according to which the natural and the supernatural are

Nature, Enchantment, and God  185 inextricably linked – constitutes a viable alternative, and that we have every reason to take it seriously.30 The question of where this leaves Nietzsche is both hugely important and unclear, and I shall make some tentative points in this direction towards the end. My main task, however, is to consider the implications for an understanding and assessment of a supposedly this-worldly conception of enchantment, and to make a case for rejecting its atheism. My focus again is McDowell, but there are important implications here for secular conceptions of nature more generally.

Divine Enchantment? McDowell holds that God – and gods more generally – can be removed from the picture at no cost to the reality of a world which is enchanting in the relevant, value-involving, sense. He is with Nietzsche’s atheists in this respect, and must therefore agree that the offending items are irrelevant to the world thus understood. We can agree that there are pictures to be rejected in this context. So, for example, we must reject the idea that nature is controlled by a realm of capricious gods, or that there is a single capricious god at the helm, or that pseudo-explanations like this are preferable to science. Things like this are irrelevant to the idea of an evaluatively enchanted world, but it does not follow that this is what it means to remove God, unless God is to be modelled on the offending items, or on items more generally. According to the position I wish to defend, God is no thing, and the natural and the supernatural are intertwined rather than dualistically opposed. More specifically, I challenge the idea that the God/world and God/value distinctions are as absolute and unambiguous as McDowell – and other naturalists – assume, and want to make a case for claiming that the value-involving natural world is God-involving. A similar diagnostic approach is to be found in John Robinson’s famous 1963 book Honest to God.31 Robinson is indebted here to various German theologians, all of whom seek to move beyond dualistic supernaturalism and reductive naturalism. It should be clear from what has been said that McDowell himself is wanting to transcend a dualism along these lines – hence his insistence that one can be an anti-scientistic naturalist without succumbing to suspect supernaturalism. The difference, however, is that whereas McDowell rules out the possibility that the desired middle ground could have theistic import on the ground that God could only ever be a distant supernatural being, Tillich identifies such a conception with suspect supernaturalism and distinguishes it from theism. Tillich takes this to involve bringing a naturalist critique to supernaturalism, and once the relevant idol – God as a supernatural being – has been torn down we are in a position to ‘challenge the naturalist’s assumption that God is merely a redundant name for nature or for humanity’.32

186  Fiona Ellis It is in this way that we accommodate God’s transcendence; however, and this is the theologian Paul Tillich speaking: To call God transcendent in this sense does not mean that one must establish a ‘superworld’ of divine objects. It does mean that, within itself, the finite world points beyond itself. In other words, it is self-transcendent.33 And as Robinson sums up the approach: This, I believe, is Tillich’s great contribution to theology – the reinterpretation of transcendence in a way which preserves its reality while detaching it from the projection of supranaturalism [Robinson’s term for suspect supernaturalism]. ‘The Divine’, as he sees it, does not inhabit a transcendent world above nature; it is to be found in the ‘ecstatic’ character of this world, as its transcendent Depth and Ground.34 All of this offers a very different way of understanding what it could mean to talk about the Divine. It lends plausibility to the idea that God could be the ‘ “beyond” in the midst’,35 and it suggests a corresponding deconstruction of the very idea of the ‘this-worldly’. After all, if the world – the only world there is – has transcendent depths, then it makes no sense to set it against some other-worldly realm, and the very idea of the ‘this-worldly’ loses its point. We have arrived at a somewhat contorted version of the final stage of Nietzsche’s ‘History of an Error’ in Twilight of the Idols – contorted in the sense that whereas in Nietzsche – and contemporary philosophy more generally – atheism seems to be the solution to the error of theism, the enticing suggestion now is that the reverse is true – or at least, that atheism is premature, and that a properly non-dualistic position is compatible with theism.36 But where does this leave McDowell? And where does it leave Nietzsche’s more nihilistic worries? According to the position at issue, we are to reject the framework in which God is to be located in some second, supernatural, realm so as to allow instead that this world points in a theistic direction. The natural world has transcendent depths in this respect, and given the traditional connection between God and goodness – God as essentially good, God as the source of goodness  – it makes sense to suppose that the natural world thus conceived is evaluatively enchanted in McDowell’s value-involving sense. It is worth noting that McDowell is hugely indebted to Iris Murdoch’s Platonist vision, and that ‘true naturalism’ as she describes it involves commitment to the idea that ‘as moral beings we are immersed in a reality which transcends us and that moral progress consists in awareness of this reality and submission to its purposes.’37

Nature, Enchantment, and God  187 She talks in this context of the ‘infinite difficulty of the task of apprehending a magnetic but inexhaustible reality’.38 The theistic undertones are clear, but Murdoch likewise takes herself to be operating within an atheistic framework, albeit one which promises a more authentic form of religion – a religion without God.39 The implication in Murdoch is that theistic religion is a form of idolatry, and that we must move beyond God if we are to see matters aright. The more compelling alternative in the light of what has been said is that religion can be and often is idolatrous, that there are faulty conceptions of God, but that nothing has been said to rule out the possibility that the relevant deficiencies can be overcome, and that the moral reality whose purposes we submit to in this context has theistic significance.40 Does this not lead us back to a totally enchanted world – ‘as if all of nature were a book of lessons to us’ as McDowell puts it? McDowell is concerned to ensure that the subject matter of natural science is emptied of the kind of meaning things were thought to have when the gods were on the scene, to dispense in this way with the supernatural and the magical, and to put enchantment in its properly natural place. He is absolutely right to insist that natural-scientific explanation be given its due place in the task of understanding the natural world, and we can agree that modern science has emancipated us from primitive versions of how this task might be completed. We can agree also that there is more to understanding than scientific understanding, and that a concession along these lines puts us in a position to appreciate dimensions of nature that elude a purely scientific approach. However, none of this suffices to rule out the possibility that nature could be enchanted in a God-involving way, for the theist can grant the significance of scientific investigation, and even if she allows – as she surely will – that the relevant findings offer scope for theological reflection, it is no part of her position that these approaches are to be conflated, nor that God interferes with the workings of nature in the manner of the magic-making gods. Such a conception of God is remotely tempting if we think of God as that distant supernatural being who sits beyond the world and comes in and sorts things out when he feels like it. However, this caricature is absurdly anthropocentric, it takes us back to the contested, dualistic, framework, and it fails to do justice to the idea that God’s role in the world’s processes is quite unlike that of a puppet master.41 This is not to deny that there are difficult questions concerning how this role is to be understood (the natural and the supernatural as inextricably linked). The point is simply that there is nothing here to compromise the autonomy and legitimacy of science, and every reason for thinking that a world which is totally enchanted in a God-involving sense can accommodate the distinctions so important to McDowell, and that it can allow equally that things – whether entities like ourselves that have minds or entities that do not – can do their own thing. We should bear in mind also that the worldview of one for whom the workings

188  Fiona Ellis of nature are controlled by the gods, deficiencies notwithstanding, gives limited but significant expression to an insight which is fundamental to McDowell’s anti-scientism, and whose importance is pre-empted by Weber when, in the context of introducing the term ‘disenchantment’, he describes the process of intellectualization which arose in the wake of modern science, and identifies the meaning of this process in the claim that ‘we can in principle control everything by means of calculation.’42 The insight in question is that calculation has its limits, and that the need to control must be tempered by an attitude of receptivity, or Gelassenheit. The point is familiar from Cottingham, and its expression in the present context returns us to the idea that there is more to the attitude of Weber’s primitive ‘savage’ than the desire to comprehend the world scientifically.

Nietzsche, Again I have made a case for taking seriously the idea that the natural world is divinely enchanted, and argued that this framework is already implicit in McDowell’s supposedly secularist scheme. So I must deny that the earth is irrevocably unchained from its sun as Nietzsche puts it, and that the entire horizon (of the meanings which structure human existence and to which are responsive as human beings) has been wiped away. The issues here are hugely complex, and it is not possible to do proper justice to them in the context of the present discussion. However, the following points can be made. First, when Mulhall describes the atheists’ indifferent response to the madman’s pronouncement of the death of God, he adds that their attitude is premised upon a conception of God as an illusory entity, and that this is why they are wholly indifferent to God’s demise. The point is familiar from before, and it suggests that the atheists are looking in the wrong place for God. The obvious addition to this is that they need to redirect their attention, and this has been my diagnostic approach to McDowell’s secular framework, and to secularism more generally. Mulhall seems to be gesturing in a similar direction when he says of the madman that he ‘finds this conception of God as an (illusory) entity to be far more childish than the religious faith it claims to have outgrown’. What he goes on to say on his behalf, however, suggests a rather different picture: His contention is that our perception of God as nonexistent does not amount to the transcendence of an illusion, it is not a discovery but a deed, and a bloody, terrifying one at that, for which we must take responsibility. We are God’s murderers. His presence was real, part of the living tissue of our culture, our responses, our most intimate self-understanding. His destruction is therefore a radical act of violence, not only against Him but against ourselves. Hence, the

Nature, Enchantment, and God  189 madman compares the death of God to the wiping away of our horizon, to the swallowing up of an ocean, to the loss of spatial orientation; such comparisons assume that God is not so much an entity as a medium or a system of coordinates, and that a belief in God is best understood not as the addition of one supernatural item to the furniture of the universe, but rather as an atmosphere or framework that orients us in everything we say, think, and do.43 Mulhall argues that so long as we take our bearings from the values of Judaeo-Christian morality – i.e., the morality we live by – we maintain the life of God, and that the choice of imagery used by Nietzsche to describe the disorientation we face when the earth has been unchained from its sun is strongly reminiscent of the Christian description of the sinful state which occurs when we turn away from that which is most holy.44 On Mulhall’s interpretation then, we have a possible enactment here of the Fall. The notion of sin is central to Murdoch’s scheme of things, and she glosses this notion in terms of the perennial temptations of egoism and narcissism. This is one of the reasons that the task of apprehending moral reality is so infinitely difficult, and Murdoch talks in this context of the slowness of moral change and achievement.45 On her position then, we can be redeemed only by moving beyond the self-enclosed realm of the selfish ego and making contact with the Good. It is part and parcel of her framework that this movement is difficult but not impossible. Murdoch’s position operates within familiar McDowellian parameters, these parameters admit of a theistic interpretation, and there is nothing yet to compromise the idea of an evaluatively enchanted world. The point is simply that it can be epistemologically inaccessible to us given the relevant human failings. Now it is crucial to note in this context that we ourselves have a central role to play in determining the shape of moral reality, when, for example, we give expression to the Good or do God’s work as the theist would say. If this is right, then there is a real sense in which we ourselves are responsible for bringing goodness into the world, or to put it in more relevant terms, we are a source of enchantment. Such a position is compatible with moral realism for there is no implication that the values we embody are valuable simply because we desire them, nor that they are made to be valuable in the act of some random choice. However, we are given a highly relevant sense in which the world can be described as empty of meaning, when, for example, we fail to see beyond the demands of the selfish ego. The epistemology of receptivity is compromised in such a scenario, and we might even go so far as to describe what we have as a form of hell.46 Nietzsche’s vision of hell is more far-reaching than this, for it threatens to implicate all of us whether we know it or not. That is to say, there is

190  Fiona Ellis a collective turning away from the good, and this is something for which we must all take responsibility. To put it another way, we are the source of disenchantment in this sense – meaninglessness comes from us! Such a vision makes perfect sense if taken to mean that we are capable of moving in this direction, and that the temptation remains ever real. According to a more radical interpretation, by contrast, there is no turning back, and we are all on the road to hell. This more radical interpretation is difficult to accept. Not simply in the existential ‘I can’t live with this’ sense, but in the sense that it is difficult to reconcile with the reality of moral achievement, and the idea that we ourselves are capable of lighting up the world in this respect even in the face of the familiar evils and temptations. Is this not what it means for God’s presence to be real? And does this not provide a shape for the kind of solution that Nietzsche himself was so desperate to find? It seems fitting to end this paper with a point made by Grace Jantzen when, in a paper on the Nietzschean abyss, she tells us that ‘God will come only as love is born within us, only as we ourselves become divine,’ and closes with the following quotation from the medieval mystic Hadewijch: Oh how deep is the abyss of Love . . . Her deepest abyss is her most beautiful form; To lose one’s way is to touch her close at hand; To die of hunger for her is to feed and taste . . . Wordlessness is her most beautiful utterance . . . Her withdrawal is approach . . . Her deepest silence is her sublime song.47 The notion of enchantment reaches its zenith in this context, it offers a serious response to Nietzsche’s atheists, and it does so by pointing us towards the unfathomable abyss of the divine nature and the human heart. Hardly a knock down argument, but eminently worthy of consideration in the light of all that has been said.

Notes 1. The kind of position with which I am concerned can be related to a growing body of literature in which a secular conception of enchantment is taken seriously. See, for example, The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, ed. George Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); and Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). A  helpful discussion of some of the issues can be found in Sara Lyons, ‘The Disenchantment/ Re-enchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularization, and the Gods of Greece from Friedrich Schiller to Walter Pater’, The Modern Language Review 109, no. 4 (October 2014): 873–95. 2. See, for example, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Nature, Enchantment, and God  191 3. McDowell’s expansive or liberal naturalism is spelled out in various papers, many of which are collected in part II of Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). See especially ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, ‘Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World’, and ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’. 4. John McDowell, ‘Responses: J.M. Bernstein’, in Reading McDowell on Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 298. 5. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 85. 6. McDowell, Mind and World, 71. 7. Ibid., 70–71. 8. See his 1918 lecture; Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in The Vocation Lectures, eds. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004). 9. Henry D. Wireman, The Poems of Schiller, ed. Henry D Wireman, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (Charleston: Nabu Press, 2010), 72–76. 10. McDowell, Mind and World, 72. 11. John McDowell, ‘Reply to Fink’, in John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature, ed. Jakob Lindgard (Oxford: Blackwell 2008), 217. 12. McDowell, ‘Reply to Fink’, 217. 13. Weber claims that ‘[w]e are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable forces . . . on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment of the world. Unlike the savage for whom such forces existed, we need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control the spirits or pray to them. Instead, technology and calculation achieve our ends,’ (Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, 13). 14. Kenneth Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A  Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 92. 15. Ibid., 193. 16. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 109. 17. See, for example, John Hawthorn and Daniel Nolan, ‘What Would Teleological Causation be?’, in Metaphysical Essays, ed. John Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 265–84. Hawthorne and Nolan are concerned with the question of whether there is fundamental teleology. They challenge the (prevalent) assumption that it should be consigned to the flames, and make a case for taking it seriously even at the level of physics and chemistry. 18. Cf. David Wiggins: ‘Contrasting the actual discrediting of entities of some kind, palpable or impalpable, with the discovering of new entities at the atomic or sub-atomic level, let us not conceive the latter as determining the level to which everything else must be reduced (in the serious sense of “reduce”), even if this is the level at which macroscopic events are promised certain sorts of explanation. Let us note too that these promised explanations may or may not be forthcoming and may or may not be completely formulable at that level; and may, even if forthcoming, leave high and dry but perfectly unharmed the familiar macroscopic entities in which we cannot abandon our interest. Indeed there are some practical interests we cannot become blind to, and some entities in which it is impossible for us to lose our interest,’ David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 156. 19. David McPherson uses this helpful expression in his Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. J. Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), s. 125.

192  Fiona Ellis 21. Stephen Mulhall presents a compelling interpretation along these lines in his Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Ch. 1. 22. John Cottingham, ‘Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding’, in New Models of Religious Understanding, ed. Fiona Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 31. 23. Ibid., 32. 24. He says of the supernatural that ‘[i]t is tendentious to use the term “superstition” for continued belief that that region is not empty, and to use the imagery of darkness for what would supposedly occupy that region. . . . What “natural” means, as the root of “naturalism” in say, “relaxed naturalism” as I use that phrase, is: not supernatural (not occult, not magical, . . .). And there is no need for me to take a stand on whether everything is natural in that sense (thereby, among other things, giving needless offence to people who think that respect for modern science is compatible with a kind of religious belief that preserves room for the supernatural,’ McDowell, ‘Reply to Fink’, 218. 25. Charles T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890). 26. Robert Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. A similar theme is to be found in André Compte-Sponville’s, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (London: Bantam Press, 2009). 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Anti-Christ, § 18’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15–16. 28. Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall, 22. 29. The solution is perhaps hinted at in Nietzsche’s final stage of the history of an error: ‘The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? . . . But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!’ ‘How the “True World” finally became a fable’, Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 171. However, we might equally hazard a more pessimistic conclusion. Hence Erich Heller: ‘What is the appropriate response to these hammer blows of language? Should we say, “This is clear enough! What is the agitation about?” No, but rather to share the deep spiritual apprehension which is conveyed by the voice that says what the opinion it utters does not say: namely not merely that from now onwards we shall have to make ourselves at home in one world, but much more: that now we must be prepared to exist in not even one, at least, in no world which would allow us truly to exist,’ Erich Heller, ‘Nietzsche’s Last Words about Art and Truth’, in In the Age of Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 57. 30. I argue for a theistic form of naturalism along these lines in my Fiona Ellis, God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 31. John Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963). 32. Ibid., 32. 33. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 8. Quoted in Robinson, Honest to God, 34. 34. Robinson, Honest to God, 34. 35. Ibid., 32. Robinson borrows this evocative expression from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 36. See footnote 29 for some further thoughts on Nietzsche’s ‘History of an Error’.

Nature, Enchantment, and God  193 37. Iris Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality,’ in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol 30 (Dreams and Self-knowledge, 1956), 32–58. 38. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), 42. 39. See, for example, Iris Murdoch, ‘The Ontological Proof’, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 419–25. 40. Mark Johnston offers a diagnosis along these lines in his brilliant Saving God: Religion After Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 41. For more on this see Rowan Williams’ contribution to Rupert Shortt’s, God’s Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2005), 8–9. 42. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, 12. Compare Heidegger’s claim that ‘man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is,’ Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 134. 43. Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall, 23. 44. Ibid., 22–28. 45. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 42. 46. Compare Rowan Williams’ definition of hell as ‘being alone with his ‘selfish little ego’ for all eternity, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/6021637/ Archbishop-of-Canterbury-Hell-is-being-alone-for-ever.html. 47. Grace Jantzen, ‘Eros and the Abyss: Reading Medieval Mystics in PostModernity’, Literature and Theology 17, no 3 (September 2003): 262. The quotation comes from Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. C. Hart. Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 344–45.

Bibliography Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Compte-Sponville, André. The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. London: Bantam Press, 2009. Cottingham, John. “Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding.” In New Models of Religious Understanding, edited by Fiona Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Ellis, Fiona. God, Value, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hadewijch. The Complete Works. Translated by C. Hart. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. Hawthorn, John, and Daniel Nolan. “What Would Teleological Causation Be?” In Metaphysical Essays, edited by John Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Heller, Erich. “Nietzsche’s Last Words about Art and Truth.” In In the Age of Prose, 43–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Jantzen, Grace. “Eros and the Abyss: Reading Medieval Mystics in Post-Modernity.” Literature and Theology 17, no. 3 (September 2003).

194  Fiona Ellis Johnston, Mark. Saving God: Religion after Idolatry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Levine, George, ed. The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays For How We Live Now. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Lewis, Charles T., and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890. Lyons, Sara. “The Disenchantment/Re-enchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularization, and the Gods of Greece from Friedrich Schiller to Walter Pater.” The Modern Language Review 109, no. 4 (October 2014): 873–95. McDowell, John. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. ———. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. “Responses: J.M. Bernstein.” In Reading McDowell on Mind and World, edited by Nicholas H. Smith, 297–300. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. “Reply to Fink.” In John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature, edited by Jakob Lindgard, 214–19. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. McPherson, David. Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Miller, Kenneth. Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Mulhall, Stephen. Philosophical Myths of the Fall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Murdoch, Iris. “Vision and Choice in Morality.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes (Dreams and Self-knowledge) 30 (1956). ———. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970. ———. “The Ontological Proof.” In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Chatto and Windus: London, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams, translated by J. Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols. Edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Robinson, John. Honest to God. London: SCM Press, 1963. Solomon, Robert. Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Shortt, Rupert. God’s Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2005. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. Vol. II. Existence and the Christ. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In The Vocation Lectures, edited by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004. ———. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Scotts Valley: Create­ Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2013. Wiggins, David. Sameness and Substance Renewed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wireman, Henry D. ed. The Poems of Schiller. Translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring. Charleston: Nabu Press, 2010.

9 Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification On Taking Morality (Too) Seriously Michiel Meijer There was once a time when nature was essentially experienced as being “enchanted” with magical forces, such as spirits, angels, gods, demons, and souls, forces that were intentionally active in human affairs. What Max Weber coined the “disenchantment” of the world is the ­disappearance of this world through an ongoing series of transformations – of demagification, rationalization, secularization, materialization, and ­scientization – to a neutralized realm of scientific facts. Although some philosophers denounce disenchantment as the loss of a time when the world was a home, many others applaud it as the end of an age of prescientific superstition. For supporters and opponents alike, however, the rise of the scientific worldview has made it especially difficult to clarify the experience of value. Most contemporary ethicists are reluctant to fully embrace scientific explanations of value and yet remain highly skeptical of clarifications that do not fit the model of science. Such a predicament suggests that the experience of enchantment has in fact not collapsed but endured despite the demise of the enchanted vocabularies in which it was originally expressed. In this chapter, I aim to move beyond the current impasse by considering what might be involved in the “reenchantment” of ethics. In so doing, I  examine two candidates for such reenchantment: the position called “robust realism” in metaethics and the recently proposed model of “humane philosophy” in the philosophy of religion. Despite significant differences, the robust realist and humane approaches are quite similar in their aim of being sincere and true to the character of our lived value experience, which seems especially relevant for investigating the meaning of reenchantment in ethics. My argument starts by explaining the experience of enchantment in terms of the realist appeal of moral values and by sketching the broad metaethical discussion on this topic. I continue to show that recent robust realist attempts to rehabilitate moral experience tend towards the reification of value rather than its reenchantment. I conclude by arguing that the model of humane philosophy salvages our initial realist experience of value in a way that avoids reification, and thus proves to be a more appropriate model for understanding reenchantment in ethics.

196  Michiel Meijer

“Finding Room” for the Realist Experience of Value In what follows, I take reenchantment in ethics to be a view that takes seriously what I  call the “realist” experience of value. Given the wide consensus that ethical theory cannot ignore the realist way in which values strike us, this seems a reasonable starting point. That is, most philosophers agree that moral values seem to make a kind of normative “call” or “demand” on human beings, as they are essentially experienced as being more important or more worthy than our other goals and desires. In addition to their having this seemingly intrinsic normative force, it is commonplace that moral values appear to involve objective properties – they seem to hold independently of what we think or feel about them. Because of the experience of being confronted by an objective demand, it is often argued that moral values have an inherent realist appeal: they seem to originate from the world rather than from ourselves.1 For example, the demand which strikes us in face of a drowning child is typically experienced as having its source outside our beliefs and desires. This distinctive character of moral experience has been well described by Maurice Mandelbaum: It is my contention that the demands which we experience when we make a direct moral judgment are always experienced as emanating from “outside” us, and as being directed against us. They are demands which seem to be independent of us and to which we feel that we ought to respond. . . . I see a person unable to start his car, a delivery-boy apparently looking for an address, a child who has lost something, a woman loaded down with parcels and trying to open a door. In such cases I often feel a “pressure” upon me. Such pressures are no less “real” in our experience than are the pressures which we feel when we are hungry or when in anger we wish to destroy that which antagonizes us.2 The realist experience of value suggests that the world contains value properties. Such a claim is fundamentally at odds with disenchanting narratives according to which the world cannot contain such strange things as values. As Simon Blackburn describes this condition, the challenge for moral realists has become one of “finding room for ethics, or placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit.”3 In the past decades, much moral philosophy has tended to overcome this challenge by reducing or rejecting initial interpretations of our experience as moral agents; that is, to put ordinary moral experience on hold in an attempt to square ethics with a scientific worldview – for example, by reducing values to natural properties of the empirical world or by rejecting moral judgments as erroneous human projections. This philosophy has no conceptual place left for the realist experience

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  197 of value except as resulting from a suspicious kind of longing for a bygone age. Recent metaethical reflection on value has generally moved away from moral experience as well. An obvious explanation for this condition is that most metaethical theories, realist and non-realist alike, add to the disenchanting ethics of suspicion by accepting the thesis that the world (nature, matter) contains no values. The only exception to this rule (applicable to such diverse positions as ethical naturalism, error theory, expressivism, and constructivism) is robust ethical realism.4 Robust realists aim to be sincere and true to the realist experience of value by insisting that the world contains distinctive value properties over and above those countenanced by the natural sciences. In this way, one robust realist aims “not just at soundness but also at sincerity,” in the sense of responding to the growing need to “take morality seriously” in a stifling scientistic climate, while another settles for “illuminating plausible motivations” for endorsing robust realism against the “almost instinctive contemporary embrace of metaphysical naturalism.”5 Robust realists (also “non-naturalist” realists) keep our moral experience in focus in the following way.6 First, they present the strong values implicit in our experience as irreducibly normative properties, which resist any scientific reduction or non-normative explanation. Second, they argue that these properties exist as genuine properties in the world. And third, they contend that the existence of irreducibly normative properties allows for objective moral facts and truths which lie beyond the scope of empirical science. Robust realists often emphasize that their metaethical position is unique in taking moral experience at face value. In fact, according to David Enoch, robust realism is “obviously the default position” to the extent that “much of the game for other views is to cleverly accommodate what non-naturalist realism straightforwardly accommodates.”7 Because of this, robust realists claim to be sincere in the sense explained above – they insist that their view alone satisfies the full commitments of moral experience and discourse in a non-reductionist or non-deflationary way. An important feature of robust realism is that it stands in a tradition (going back to G. E. Moore) that tends to start from just one aspect of value experience: our moral beliefs or judgments. This means that the robust realist focuses not directly on moral experiences but turns instead to the judgments we make on account of them. Clearly, this is not the only way to understand moral life, because our intuitive experiences, or what Bernard Williams calls our “spontaneous convictions,” do not have to be expressed in terms of beliefs or judgments; especially, that is, if we are to respect their nature as “moderately reflective but not yet theorized.”8 According to Williams, however, it lies in the nature of our understanding of an ethical theory to take it as “a structure of propositions, which, like a scientific theory, provides a framework for our

198  Michiel Meijer beliefs.”9 In line with this requirement, robust realists argue that moral claims are best understood as explanatory hypotheses about facts that purport to explain why certain actions or events have the moral significance they do. William FitzPatrick explains this starting point: Ethical claims purport to state facts (attributing ethical properties to actions, persons, policies, etc.), and so are straightforwardly true or false in the way that other purportedly fact-stating claims are, by accurately representing the facts or not.10 In this way defending a “robust” moral realism, robust realists typically posit a range of objective moral facts that exist independently of our beliefs and desires. For FitzPatrick, for example, it is a moral fact that “it is morally wrong to stone gays or rape victims, or to deprive girls of education, or to make voting rights contingent on race, and so on.”11 For the robust realist, we know moral facts like that with such great certainty that they are best understood as “brute facts about value that are not further explicable.”12 In this respect, Russ Shafer-Landau makes it clear that being a moral realist just is to be committed to “a set of brute facts for which no further explanation is available,” as a basic metaphysical reality: values just are “a brute fact about the way the world works” and there may not be much more for philosophy to say here.13 With this outline in place, robust realism can be characterized in the following way. First, robust realists take morality seriously by focusing on moral judgments. Second, they reflect mainly on the semantic properties of such judgments, in particular on their being true or false. Third, they argue that moral judgments involve a factual kind of understanding akin to descriptive knowledge. According to the robust realist, this distinctive moral methodology – to understand moral experience in terms of moral judgment, to interpret moral judgments as factual statements, and to argue that our judgments give us cognitive access to objective facts about value – helps clarify the realist experience of value in a way that makes robust realism the view to beat.

In Pursuit of Ethical Robustness At a first glance, robust realism seems to provide a rather straightforward explanation of the realist experience of value. To return to Mandelbaum’s description at the beginning, the robust realist has no problem in explaining why and how we experience moral demands as emanating from “outside” us. That is, we experience the demand in face of a drowning child as the external calling of value from the world precisely because this demand is a property of the relevant moral facts, not a subjective projection. However, my aim here is to show that this explanation comes

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  199 at a certain price, and that we need a different approach to understanding value because this price is too high. By starting from questions such as “Do moral judgments express beliefs?” and “Is moral language factual?” robust realism (and metaethical reflection more generally) reduces the question about the nature of value to one about the nature of moral judgment.14 It has already been noted that much metaethics tends to generate a sense of suspicion regarding our initial realist experience of value by raising problems of “finding room” for this experience within a world construed as disenchanted. Robust realism stands out from disenchanting views precisely because it seeks to make room for moral experience by positing moral facts. Its advocates typically seek to salvage our realist experience by establishing the analogy with “robust” propositional truth in the ethical domain without reducing normative truths to scientific ones, for example, by arguing that normative truths are “just as respectable as empirical or mathematical truths” because they are “independent of us, our desires and our (or anyone else’s) will” and therefore “perfectly objective, universal, absolute.”15 One of the upshots of this methodology is that it leaves no room for reenchantment in ethics except as a theory that sees values either as purely abstract objects (perhaps like mathematical entities such as prime numbers) or as properties that “inhabit” the world as part of the “fabric” or the “furniture” of the world; that is, to see them as discrete entities that are there anyway – perhaps on a par with “geological” or “biological” properties.16 A  number of difficulties arise, however, when considering that both of these explanations seem to cut us off from the realist experience of value. As we saw, Mandelbaum’s phenomenology of moral experience is one of being practically engaged with the world, in responding to the external calling of value. But neither the comparison with mathematical objects nor the analogy with empirical properties helps to clarify the nature of such moral engagement and responsiveness – in fact, seems peculiarly ill-equipped to do so. The internal metaphysical debate among robust realists is worth considering in this regard. While Shafer-Landau seems happy to admit that his theory has “very limited explanatory resources,”17 FitzPatrick criticizes Shafer-Landeau’s realism precisely for rejecting “any demand for an explanation of the source of the correct moral standards,” that is, to criticize the claim that such standards “are just true and there is nothing that makes them true.”18 Against this, FitzPatrick makes it clear that there is in fact “a rich story to be told,” even when granting that, at some point, we will face “brute facts about value that are not further explicable.”19 His richer account strategically seeks to take the sting out of Shafer-Landau’s ontological inarticulacy by explaining the source of value in terms of a difference in perspective rather than a deep metaphysical one. FitzPatrick’s “dual-aspect view” or “uncompromising ethical

200  Michiel Meijer realism” centers on the claim that “many familiar facts and features of human life, behavior, and experience, which can be subject of empirical investigation, are also inherently value laden, and as such are the source of objective standards of goodness for us.”20 For example, the natural property of being painful is also normative or value laden to the extent that pain is seen as something bad and typically to be avoided. To call a property “natural,” then, is just to focus on features of the world that are capable of being investigated empirically, whereas speaking of “normative” properties means to draw attention to aspects that are simply not visible from the point of view of empirical inquiry. In fact, after recognizing this basic metaphysical truth – that the very properties and facts we typically refer to as natural are also inherently value laden – there “may not be anything more for philosophy to say here.”21 FitzPatrick can be seen as drawing the most explicit ontological picture of robust realism. Despite this effort, there is broad consensus among metaethicists that robust realism’s ontology is its Achilles’ heel. Although robust realism is sometimes praised for its robust epistemology, it is usually rejected on account of its ambiguous metaphysics. Moreover, opponents often point at the limits of robust realism by arguing that moral facts have little, if any, explanatory power. In their defense, robust ­realists strategically focus on epistemological arguments to justify their moral ontology. As we have seen, they do so by arguing that moral language behaves very much like representational language as moral claims purport to state facts in the way that other purportedly fact-stating claims do. Furthermore, robust realists stress that moral judgments and ordinary factual judgments alike seek to describe facts which reflect truths not of our own making, allowing for the general conclusion that “moral discourse at least purports to be objective in roughly the way usual empirical discourse is.”22 The implication of this strategy is that robust realists are simultaneously committed to the ontological difference between moral and empirical facts and the epistemological similarity between moral and empirical claims. This twin-track strategy – insisting on the disparity between the moral and empirical worlds at the ontological level while endorsing their analogy at the epistemological level  – intertwines epistemological and ontological considerations in such an ambiguous way that even those who are initially drawn to robust realism ultimately recoil from endorsing it in full. This severely undermines robust realism’s most important asset, namely that it can claim to be the default position by being true to the nature of moral experience. It would seem, therefore, that robust realists want to have it both ways. They reject the scientistic language of their naturalist opponents, but nonetheless continue to employ language of this kind in defending the “robustness” of their own view. Ironically (or so I will argue below) this reflects both a mistake to take morality too seriously and a mistake not to take it seriously enough.

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  201 To use the terms that are central to this volume, the root of the problem seems to be that robust realists want to have it both ways by making room for the enchanted experience of value within a largely disenchanted vocabulary. Does Shafer-Landau want to have it both ways by arguing for a “sui generis category of values” which is ultimately dependent for its realization on physical properties?23 Does FitzPatrick want to have it both ways by defending an “uncompromising” realism which does not threaten or obscure the “supervenience” of the normative on the natural?24 Does Enoch want to have it both ways by allowing himself a kind of “metaphysical nonchalance” while at the same time being “not at all metaphysically nonchalant about the normative and moral properties themselves?”25 Although I  think the answer to these questions is an unqualified “yes,” my aim in contrast to other critics is to locate the source of the difficulty neither in robust realism’s ambiguous metaphysics nor in its explanatory impotence. Instead, I seek to show that robust realism’s disenchanted vocabulary prevents it from remaining true to the realist character of moral experience on which it centers. Roughly, my claim is that the pursuit of ethical robustness runs the risk of leaving ethics behind altogether. More precisely: robust realism leads to reification rather than reenchantment.

The Price of Robustness: Reification Reification – from the Latin res or “thing”; German: Verdinglichung; literally “making into a thing” – is a complex term for treating something immaterial or abstract (such as an idea or an experience) as a material or physical thing. To represent something abstract as a concrete thing can be both effective and ineffective as it can both increase and decrease understanding. For example, to see a wedding ring as the reification of a couple’s love can be quite helpful, whereas the reification of a fantasy creature such as a unicorn leads to confusion. In the philosophical literature, the concept of reification originates from critical social theory, going back to the work of Karl Marx and George Lukács. It has been taken up more recently by Axel Honneth in a way that is particularly revealing of the implications of robust realism. I therefore briefly consider Honneth’s use of this concept before applying it to the present analysis. Honneth starts from the concept of reification as defined by Lukács: [For Lukács] “reification” signifies nothing but the fact “that a relation between people has taken on the character of a thing.” In this elementary form, the concept clearly designates a cognitive occurrence in which something that doesn’t possess thing-like characteristics in itself (e.g., something human) comes to be regarded as a thing.26

202  Michiel Meijer This definition is then applied to the kind of social agency that is required by the capitalist system. Very crudely, the claim is that all members of capitalist society are being socialized into a reifying system of behavior; that is, to the extent that every subject involved in the world of market exchange will necessarily perceive their surroundings as mere things and objects. Honneth explains this condition: “Here the subject is no longer empathetically engaged in interaction with his surroundings, but is instead placed in the perspective of a neutral observer, psychically and existentially untouched by his surroundings.”27 In this context, “reification” emerges primarily as an acquired habit of mere observation, in which the natural and social worlds come to be apprehended in a detached and emotionless way  – in short, as things. What makes the habitual adoption of such an emotionally neutral stance objectionable is that it renders the natural and social worlds “thing-like,” which thereby cease to be meaningful frameworks for human action and interaction.28 In Honneth’s view, the development of this habit is best understood as a process of forgetting. In the process of reification, he argues, we tend to “forget” the original framework of intersubjective recognition in which we are placed at the level of social agency.29 This means, in other words, that reification as “forgetfulness of recognition” leads to a distorted form of understanding or praxis only insofar as the connection with recognition has been lost or obstructed. Honneth criticizes such a detached form of knowledge as a kind of misunderstanding to the extent that “we lose the consciousness of the degree to which we owe our knowledge and cognition of other persons to an antecedent stance of empathetic engagement.”30 To conclude this point, Honneth’s key insight is that prior to cognition there is a fundamental human experience, praxis, or relation to the world that is denied by reification. How can that insight be applied to the present discussion? How can reification be translated into ethical theory? Generally, it seems sensible to speak of reification with regard to value when we conceive of values as mere “things” to be observed, that is, when we make value properties into knowable objects of the external world. In fact, this is precisely what happens to the realist experience of value once we focus not directly on moral sensibilities but turn instead to the judgments we make on account of them. While there is nothing wrong in itself with reflecting on moral judgments, the problem is that extracting moral propositions from the non-propositional context of ethical life as a whole takes us away from the qualitative experience from which our judgments originate. Following Honneth, we might say that this shift in emphasis  – the shift from moral experience to moral judgment – ultimately leads to two different forms of moral knowledge: one sensitive to our human engagement with the world, and another, distorted form, which sees moral understanding as a detached kind of descriptive knowledge.

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  203 The point, then, is not that the broad metaethical focus on moral judgments is wrong, but that it comes at a certain price. In the case of robust realism, the “price” of being a moral realist is to be committed to brute moral facts which are there anyway, whether or not we are responsive to them. On this view, the “world” is nothing but a set of objects about which we can get objective knowledge (either scientific or moral). As a result, the world becomes a “thing” to be observed rather than a place to live in. This price is too high precisely because it fundamentally distorts what I have been calling the “realist” experience of responding to moral demands that speak to us. To return to our original example: from within a robust realist framework, the moral demand that a drowning child makes on us is seen as a cognitive property of an external object about which we can make factual judgments that are either true or false. Such terminology is far from innocent as it obscures the reality that we owe our explicit judgments to an antecedent stance of affective moral engagement. Therefore, the risk of taking morality seriously by focusing on moral judgments is that this focus tends to gloss over the tacit mode of understanding that precedes our more explicit judgments. In defending a robust epistemology, robust realism in particular hazards separating human beings from reality rather than exploring our involvement with it – the very condition that drew us to the idea of moral reality in the first place. In fact, to argue that the world amounts to little more than a set of objects about which we can get objective knowledge is, to borrow a term from Charles Taylor, a kind of “epistemological blockage,” which obscures from view our practically involved relation to the world.31 In this respect at least, robust realists seem to take morality too seriously. On closer inspection, the implicit reification of value by robust realism cuts much deeper. The problem is not merely that the world becomes an object of detached analysis, but that human beings themselves become detached from their environment as well. This point emerges most clearly by considering the imagined agent behind robust realism. Although robust realists say very little about the nature of agency, Shafer-Landau’s notion of “ideal epistemic agents” is revealing of the implicit anthropology. Even when there are no ideal human agents in practice, ShaferLandau makes it clear that, in principle, such agents will have a perfect moral understanding. As he puts it: Epistemologically ideal agents who have reached this limit will be fully informed. This means that they will know all facts. Moral realists believe that some of these facts are moral ones; so a genuinely ideal epistemic judge will know all moral facts. . . . When it comes to ideal epistemic agents, however, the important point is that their impeccable accuracy reflects an acquaintance with a truth not of their own making. Their perfect knowledge is not constitutive of

204  Michiel Meijer moral facts, but rather reflects an awareness of what is there, awaiting their discovery.32 Robust realists generally tend not to emphasize agency as such, instead focusing on the judgments we make in the background of our actions. But the picture of an epistemic judge suggests that agency is a rather straightforward affair of acting either on subjective preferences or being responsive to objective facts.33 Enoch explicates this implicit anthropology: Objective facts are those we seek to discover, not those we make true. And in this respect too, when it comes to moral truths, we are in a position more like that of the scientist who tries to discover the laws of nature (which exist independently of her investigations) than that of the legislator (who creates laws).34 Whatever the merits of this kind of robustness in other domains, its anthropological result is that it makes us more like detached observers than sentient respondents. Within this picture, agency is ultimately identified as resulting from an intellectual ability to grasp factual truths. Because of this, the idea that, say, a concern to help the needy is just that – a genuine interest in the other – seems hardly expressible to the extent that regret at harming another person seems to be reduced to regret at being mistaken. There is a world of difference between the two experiences, and it is the very point of the robust realist to keep them apart: true moral knowledge is about what is “out there,” awaiting to be “discovered” by epistemic agents and therefore (supposed to be) completely independent of affective awareness and responsiveness. In this way, the epistemological defense of a robust ethical realism that centers on the analogy between moral discourse and empirical discourse ends up costing the robust realist more overall, in terms of the reification of both the world and ourselves. These points show that the resulting kind of reification is ethical as well as metaphysical and anthropological. To see values as objects of discovery is to make them into objects of detached observation. To see moral agents as epistemic judges or quasi-scientists is to make them into detached observers of their world. This can be seen as a form of selfreification because detached observers can no longer be seen as agents in the full sense. Even if this last point is anthropological rather than ethical, its implications are especially problematic for understanding value. Once human beings become mere spectators of their own lives, they are no longer affected by the moral demands they perceive in their experience. Following Honneth, we might conclude that, in the “habit” of focusing on moral judgments, the robust realist seems to “forget” that we are practically involved with the world before we can observe and evaluate. Again, Mandelbaum’s phenomenology of moral experience is about

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  205 having a sense of moral engagement in responding to the world and its inhabitants. To forget this experience is to forget the very reason for which we undertook moral reflection in the first place. This means that robust realism is, at best, a rather estranging kind of reenchantment, and, at worst, a disenchanted ethics in disguise. Disenchantment, then, understood as the move from an enchanted world to a neutralized realm of facts, is at the heart of robust realism. In conclusion, robust realism stifles reenchantment in ethics by generating at least two forms of reification. First, it creates a reified relation to the world, leaving our realist experiences of value as responses to something which we can only know as an alien power, rather than interact with it. Second, it creates a reified relation to ourselves, which prevents us from making sense of our enchanted moral sensibilities and thereby appropriating them as our own in an attempt to understand ourselves.35 The price of robust realism, then, is that it ultimately adds to the dominant ethics of suspicion, by leaving us with a sense of puzzlement about the realist experience of value. At its worst, it forces us to fundamentally distrust this experience, and to make it seem as if disenchanting views are the only options left for ethical theory. Now, if I am right to argue that, if we are to avoid reification in ethics, the question about the nature of value needs to be asked not in terms of moral judgment but in terms of moral engagement, then the further question that has to be addressed is: how can this insight be used to develop an alternative approach to reenchantment in ethics, one that challenges a robust realist conception of moral realism as involving merely descriptive knowledge?

The Humane Approach to Ethics The picture that emerges from the above discussion is not that the idea of reenchantment in ethics is vain but that robust realist reenchantment is simply the wrong kind insofar as it leads to reification. The thrust of the “humane” approach to ethics which I  will propose as an alternative is less about discrediting robust realism than about extending the broad metaethical framework itself in which this position makes sense. In brief, the worry is that contemporary metaethics has not in fact been performing its task of explaining “how ethical thought and talk fits into reality”;36 it has rather been imposing upon us a particular framework for understanding value in the guise of a theory of what morality itself is. More specifically, the traditional framework of metaethics – as primarily concerned with the truth-conditions of moral statements – is seen as unsatisfactory in two related ways, in that it suppresses those features of morality which lie beyond the domain of deliberated judgment and at the same time imposes a disenchanted framework which admits of no escape into rival models. It should not be surprising, then, that efforts

206  Michiel Meijer of reenchantment within this framework – such as robust realism – are suspect from the very beginning, and therefore doomed to fail.37 The idea of “humane philosophy” has been launched by John Cottingham.38 He introduces the model of humane philosophy primarily with respect to the philosophy of religion, but his arguments can be generalized. One of the upshots of the present analysis is that the framework within which the realist experience of value takes shape is not primarily characterizable in terms of propositions assented to, as it requires a framework of moral engagement. Cottingham’s plea for humane philosophy explicitly aims to make room for such a framework by invoking the multiple ways in which values speak to us; ways that are, as he puts it elsewhere, “characteristically expressed through practices whose value and resonance cannot be exhausted by a cognitive analysis of propositional contents.”39 In so doing, Cottingham seeks to challenge what he describes as Western philosophy’s “ratiocentric bias – the notion that calm and detached rational analysis provides the unique key to understanding ourselves and our activities.”40 In response to this bias, he claims that we need to recognize the limitations of intellectual analysis, and the way in which insight is achieved not just by the controlling intellect, fussily classifying and cataloguing the pieces of the jigsaw, but by a process of attunement, whereby we allow different levels of understanding and awareness to coalesce, until a picture of the whole begins to emerge.41 With regard to ethics, this amounts to recognizing “the fact that serious moralizing, outside the seminar room, is never a static and abstract academic exercise, but is characteristically a call for personal change and individual growth.”42 Building on Cottingham’s conception, Fiona Ellis spells out further what it means to be a humane philosopher in this sense. First, it involves “rejecting scientism, and granting an approach which is adequate to the task of comprehending ‘ourselves and our activities,’ ” supposing that science cannot capture “all that is relevant to human existence.”43 Second, this leads to embracing an appropriately “expanded conception of reason/cognition,” which means that the humane philosopher “takes as her focus the moral and spiritual sensibilities” that shape moral belief, arguing that “such responses are that without which we should fail to engage with our subject matter.”44 Third, the focus on experience – rather than the language used in describing that experience – does not mean giving up on “the idea that our moral responses have cognitive import” nor that “we can aspire to a kind of truth by their means.”45 In so arguing, Ellis identifies John McDowell and David Wiggins as pioneers in acknowledging that “our responses come in at the epistemological level.”46

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  207 McDowell’s and Wiggins’s contribution to metaethical debates is widely recognized, yet few attempts have been made to systematically develop their views.47 With regard to McDowell in particular  – who was one of the first to stress the need for a “partial reenchantment of nature”48 but stopped writing about moral realism since the publication of Mind, Value, and Reality – there remains a sense that his position, while potentially groundbreaking, is mostly a negative one and therefore at least incomplete.49 The inspiration behind McDowell’s and Wiggins’s views  – which are too complex to be treated in detail here – was to give an account of the unique metaphysical status of moral properties by constructing them as both anthropocentric (“humane”) and real. They are real insofar as they are indispensable to the explanations that “manifest our capacity to understand ourselves” but not real in the reifying sense that they populate the world like empirical entities.50 In this way, McDowell famously described values in an analogy with secondary qualities as “stubbornly phenomenal” yet present in our experience as “properties genuinely possessed by the objects that confront one,” while Wiggins saw values as both “property-involving” and “incurably anthropocentric,” and thus standing in an essential relation to some exercise of human sensibility and responsiveness.51 Clustering these insights (from McDowell and Wiggins to Cottingham and Ellis) as part of a general trend towards a more humane approach to ethics, I take the main point of these authors to be that our human responses must be acknowledged as a legitimate part of moral reality – as opposed to the distorting reifying picture of robustly independent moral facts. What I am calling “the humane approach to ethics,” then, stresses that our moral responses themselves need to be fitted into our picture of the world and our place in it, as part of the phenomena to be investigated. Moral reality, in short, presents itself not as a self-standing normative reality but as a matter of human sensitivity to aspects of the world we inhabit. One major advantage of this approach over robust realism is that it enables us to remain true to the realist experience of value. From within a humane perspective, the experience of value “without” goes hand in hand with experiencing ourselves “within,” in the sense that value properties simultaneously emanate from “outside” us and are “unintelligible except as modifications of a sensibility like ours.”52 As Akeel Bilgrami puts this point: So in the very moment and act of perceiving values without, we also perceive ourselves within, as subjects rather than as objects. The experience of value without and agency within are not two different and independent experiences.53

208  Michiel Meijer Bilgrami in fact gives a good summary of the humane approach to ethics when he describes the world as being “enchanted” with value properties that have “built-into” their very nature our human capacity for responding to them.54 To mark the contrast with robust realism, the suggestion here is that moral understanding involves not just explanatory hypotheses about certain states of affairs but a basic moral orientation in which the cognitive recognition of value properties is intertwined with prereflective awareness and emotional response. With these points in place, we can see that the difference which separates the humane approach from robust realism is essentially about what gives us best access to the realist experience of value. The robust realist sees moral experience primarily as involving a descriptive kind of knowledge which is typically expressed in the indicative propositions that figure in moral judgments. By contrast, the humane philosopher sees moral experience first and foremost as an affective mode of awareness, which provides a kind of existential orientation in engaging with the world. We can now specify this contrast by examining the picture of moral agency to which the humane philosopher is committed and, moreover, by invoking the implicit notion of reenchantment in the background of this commitment.

Reenchantment Without Reification The hints of what might be involved in a humane conception of agency are already implicit in Cottingham’s notion of “serious moralizing” as invoking a call for personal change and moral/spiritual growth. This notion indicates a quite different anthropology from the one implicitly adopted by robust realism, as it explicitly draws attention to a kind of moral selfunderstanding that is rarely discussed in metaethics. A similar appeal to moral self-understanding, and, more particularly, self-evaluation, is also central to Taylor’s philosophical anthropology of “strong evaluation,” which states that all human beings share an implicit “sense of qualitative discrimination” or “sense of higher worth,” something which commands their allegiance in a personal search for a higher way of being, as opposed to a more debased one.55 Unlike the epistemic judge of robust realism (who is on the lookout for moral facts), Taylor’s picture of human agents as strong evaluators starts from the notion that we evaluate and rank our different motivations relative to each other: “we contrast a higher motivation with a baser, more self-enclosed and troubled one, which we can see ourselves as potentially growing beyond, if and when we can come to experience things from the higher standpoint.”56 Shifting to this contrasting conception of agency – and the emphasis it places on self-evaluation and moral growth – helps to make sense of the idea that being moral is not so much a theoretical exercise but a practical mode of being involved with the world. The kind of moral realism that emerges from this picture is less about subscribing to factual claims with distinctive moral qualities

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  209 than about being in contact with reality as the result of an increased selfunderstanding. As McDowell puts this point, if what we are engaged in is an attempt to “understand ourselves,” then “the aspiration to understand oneself is an aspiration to change one’s responses, if that is necessary for them to become intelligible otherwise than as defective.”57 This emancipatory type of cognition cannot be achieved by reflection alone, as it requires not intellectual grasping but a kind of receptive attention akin to listening or “attunement.”58 If we now recall our initial concern for sincere theories that take morality seriously, the following picture emerges. One view ultimately puts our experience as moral agents on hold in favor of considerations that support a robust moral epistemology; the other instead keeps engaged value experience in focus and allows strong evaluative self-interpretations to shape our moral epistemology. The idea that moral agents qua moral agents are not just concerned with contemplating moral facts but are living through an emancipatory process of self-understanding seems fundamental to the realist experience of value. Asking what “facts” or “properties” are involved in such a learning process seems not very helpful. Indeed, the moral stages in the development of a human life which the humane philosopher invokes must seem quite weird from the standpoint of robust realism, which – having “labored for the past thirty years now in the shadow of Mackie’s ‘argument from queerness’ ”59 – induces a sense of puzzlement or suspicion about how we are able to experience ourselves as being on an emancipatory path towards self-understanding. This is because the sense of moving forward (or backward), of finding (or losing) one’s moral orientation, becomes prominent in experiences and practices whose meaning cannot be captured by reducing them to mere factual statements. It therefore appears doubtful that the robust realist could say in clear terms what is involved when people seek their bearings in responding to the world as engaged practical agents. To continue to ask about the epistemological credentials of this humane conception of agency is, quite simply, to miss the point. Surely the values that move us have certain representational properties, but these are merely abstractions – they do not explain moral experience. The abstractions of the robust realist make good sense within intramural metaethical disputes, but they hardly provide an explanation of the realist appeal of values, let alone of their demandingness and independence (their “normativity” and “objectivity”). This is now what the humane philosopher has to say where there seems nothing the robust realist could say. In this respect, the conceptual means of robust realism seem simply too crude to explore our moral responses as defining orientations in an illuminating fashion. Cottingham’s plea for an “epistemology of receptivity” – one that understands moral/spiritual allegiance as a “life-changing moral and spiritual quest” rather than an isolated set of “hypotheses about the cosmos” – helps to illustrate what might be involved in developing a non-reifying

210  Michiel Meijer moral epistemology.60 In elaborating on this in the context of the philosophy of religion, he notes that both critics of religion and mainstream practitioners of natural theology seem to operate with what Cottingham calls an “epistemology of control,” that is, to “stand back, scrutinize the evidence  .  .  . and pronounce on the existence or otherwise of God.”61 Cottingham’s opposing epistemology of receptivity stresses that when it comes to understanding religious truths, we need not be “hard, detached, critical evaluators, but open, yielding, receptive listeners,” while adding that many other areas of life call for a receptive stance where “any kind of personal relationship” is involved.62 The relevance of these reflections for the present discussion emerges in full force when considering that the “dispassionate evaluation of ‘spectator evidence’ ”63 forms an integral part of the robust realist’s position, for whom values emerge primarily as things to be observed. The contrast between an epistemology of receptivity and a robust epistemology such as Enoch’s – which states that “when it comes to moral truths, we are in a position more like that of the scientist who tries to discover the laws of nature” – could not be clearer.64 Cottingham’s emphasis on human receptivity and responsiveness also sheds new light on the imagined agent behind the humane approach. It suggests that moral agents are best understood as “addressees” or “respondents,” then also more particularly as self-interpreting agents in pursuit of moral orientation. This means, first, that human beings are open to certain normative calls and can be addressed by moral demands. It also means, second, that they are responsive beings who can respond to such callings and demands. And third, human beings are self-interpreting beings, capable of choosing and endorsing a particular response as fitting through an evaluative process of interpretation. This dynamics of address, response, and interpretation is what constitutes human beings as agents. Clearly, this paints a very different picture of the moral agent than the epistemic judge of robust realism. The agents of humane philosophy are in a world of moral meanings that they understand imperfectly. Their task is to increase their understanding through engaging with the world, in order to know who they are and how they ought to act. The ­self-knowledge that results from this process can never be absolute or interpretation-free. By contrast, according to robust realism, moral agents are in a world of moral facts that are to be understood in a­ bstraction from their significance for human beings. This picture leaves room neither for experiential meanings nor for self-interpretive languages that we use to find our bearings. However, if human beings are interpreting beings rather than epistemic ones, then there is no such thing as the structure of meanings independently of our interpretation; for one is woven into the other. Seeing moral claims as fundamental interpretations of human meanings also means that a certain circularity cannot be avoided. The realist

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  211 experience of value can never be defined decisively and therefore moves inescapably in a circle of address, response, interpretation, and action. The implication here is that we have to be within the circle if we are to have any moral understanding at all: to be a human agent just is to be within a circle of meanings and interpretations. It is a crucial point of what I  am calling the humane approach to ethics that such circularity is an ineradicable part of our moral-epistemological predicament.65 And it is precisely this predicament that robust realism seeks to overcome by having recourse to moral facts. Robust realism’s search for “robustness” can be seen as a way of breaking beyond the circle of human meanings and interpretations. From within this perspective, what we need in ethics is not contestable interpretations but brute data, that is, moral facts and judgments about which we can be so certain that they can be identified free from interpretation. Unfortunately, though, moral meaning does not come to us as brute data – that is, open and exposed – but through often very hazy human experiences of value. Although lucid interpretations create moral understanding, this does not mean that in the end some full-grown, perfect interpretation will exist. An ideal moral agent who knows all there is to know about morality is no more in store for us than a pure experience that precedes all interpretation. This means that the realist experience of value does not in any sense record “data” or “facts.” As Taylor puts this point, human agency is always interpreted and interpreting: Already to be a living agent is to experience one’s situation in terms of certain meanings; and this in a sense can be thought of as a sort of “proto-interpretation.” This is in turn interpreted and shaped by the language in which the agent lives these meanings. This whole is then at a third level interpreted by the explanation we proffer of his actions.66 At this point, it should be clear that the humane moral philosopher operates with a wholly different notion of moral realism to begin with. We already encountered one characterization of this contrast by acknowledging that humane philosophers such as McDowell, Cottingham, and Taylor are not just concerned with the truth-evaluability of moral beliefs but also with their emancipatory force in an act of self-understanding. We also saw that this topic is hard to describe in purely cognitivist terms, because it invokes a mode of moral orientation in which beliefs, sensibilities, and actions merge together in ways that resist separation. We can now specify the contrast with robust realism by adding that, for the robust realist, the picture of morality as consisting of a set of fact-stating claims is supposed to do all the explanatory work to account for moral realism. Ultimately, what the robust realist seeks to explain is moral judgments, not people living their lives. This is the context in which the

212  Michiel Meijer problem of reification takes root: robust realism is interested in properties rather than persons. Moral realism, humanely conceived, is different as it invokes something broader as well as deeper. According to the humane philosopher, gaining moral insight requires more than having true moral beliefs (whatever that means); it also requires being able to grasp how such beliefs relate to our sense of our life as a whole and the direction it is taking as we lead it. The humane approach to ethics therefore does not stop at reflecting on the metaethical level of what we ought to believe; it involves a deeper recognition of what it is good to be. For this reason, a humane moral realism cannot stop at listing a series of brute moral facts, such as “that it is morally wrong to stone gays or rape victims,” and simply declare that such facts are not further explicable.67 From a humane perspective, it is a kind of discussion-stopper to insist on brute facticity in this area. Without a further clarification of the moral significance of values such as dignity, respect, solidarity, and benevolence, which make sense of the above judgments – and, moreover, without defining the kind of moral self-understanding and orientation they provide – these facts do not explain all that much. Intriguingly, robust realists explicitly refuse to give this additional kind of explanation by insisting on brute facts. In their defense, they often repeat the claim that moral facts invoke a “metaphysically irreducible” kind of normativity and that there is simply nothing more to say on this issue. Enoch takes this view to its final conclusion when he asserts that that there is no positive argument whatsoever to support the claim that moral facts are metaphysically irreducible: Is there anything that can be said here. . . . Any positive argument that can be offered, supporting the irreducibility claim? I do not have such an argument up my sleeve. Indeed, there is some reason to think that we find ourselves here in a dialectical predicament where no such argument is possible.68 Returning to Taylor’s phrase, this is quintessential epistemological blockage: in their attempt to rehabilitate the realist experience of value, robust realists are entrenched in a reifying language to such an extent that their reasoning here almost literally prevents them from articulating this experience. More important, however, the very unwillingness to investigate this problem seems to rule out even the possibility of gaining insight into the nature of moral experience. This is particularly explicit in ShaferLandau’s view that “nothing makes” moral standards true – they are just true.69 Taking this position is annihilating our sense of value in its very meaning, closing off the entire area within which our moral intuitions can be articulated and explored. In this way, the pursuit of ethical robustness seems to come at the cost of stifling the very experience that it was

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  213 meant to capture. Ironically, robust realists must therefore be criticized not only for taking morality too seriously, but for not taking it seriously enough.70

Conclusion I have sketched the contours of what might be involved in developing a humane kind of reenchantment in ethics  – one that recognizes that ethical theory involves not just analyzing moral judgments but also coming to grips with basic human responses and experiences. From within this humane perspective, it is a mistake to think that we can capture the nature of such responses by describing values as brute data, or to exclude our self-interpretations as irrelevant to ethics, as though it were of no moral significance what we are and aspire to be. Yet this mistake tends to get lost from view in a predominantly disenchanted culture that understands morality primarily in terms of propositions. When we restore a wider focus on reenchantment in ethics, then what comes to light is a framework of address and response, of meaning and interpretation, which keeps our realist experience of value in focus while also removing the unwarranted suspicion about such fundamental human experience. As developing such a framework gives center stage to the idea that our moral thinking is answerable to the world because human beings are receptive to the demands of reality itself, the aims of the humane approach are squarely within the domain of the position traditionally entitled “moral realism.” However, by insisting on such notions as moral engagement, orientation, emancipation, interpretation, and self-­understanding, it sets out to provide a quite different framework for defending moral realism from the more established ones. For the humane philosopher, this is just as it should be: the whole point is that a more robust moral realism runs the risk of reifying both our values and ourselves. Again, insofar as we succeed in achieving the relevant sort of understanding, we do so on the basis of explanations that validate our realist responses – showing how these responses are, in the end, well-placed.

Notes 1. While refuting intrinsic normativity and moral objectivity, anti-realists commit themselves to account for the (allegedly false) experience of them, and agree with realists that moral experience supports realism. See John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 30–35, 50–63; Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), Ch. 8–13; and Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, “What Can Moral Phenomenology Tell Us About Moral Objectivity?” Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (2008): 267–300. 2. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience [1955] (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1969), 54–56.

214  Michiel Meijer 3. Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 49. 4. Three caveats are necessary regarding this characterization of metaethics as largely disenchanted. First, very few metaethicists refer to the discourse on disenchantment at all. Notable exceptions are John McDowell and Akeel Bilgrami, who present their metaethical views in crucial reference to disenchantment as a broader cultural phenomenon. Second, naturalist realists think that values exist, albeit in a disenchanted fashion as they see them as natural facts of the world on a par with scientific facts. Third, constructivists also believe that value exists, but is constructed rather than discovered, and therefore depending not on properties of the world (which would require reenchantment as I understand the term here) but on properties of rational agents and what such agents would agree to in an idealized process of rational deliberation. 5. David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A  Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 104, 268; William FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism, Non-Naturalism, and Normativity,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 161, 167. 6. I focus here on the position that emerges from the views of Russ Shafer-­ Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism”; and Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously. 7. David Enoch, “Non-Naturalistic Realism in Metaethics,” in The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, eds. Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett (New York: Routledge, 2018), 33. 8. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy [1985] (London: Routledge, 2006), 94. Thanks to Rob Compaijen. 9. Williams, Ethics, 93 (my emphasis). 10. FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism,” 161. 11. William FitzPatrick, “Skepticism About Naturalizing Normativity: In Defense of Ethical Nonnaturalism,” Res Philosophica 91, no. 4 (2014): 581. Of course, these are just examples. But even if we are wrong about what the moral facts are, robust realists contend that there have to be some examples of this sort to make sense of moral life. 12. FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism,” 194. 13. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism, 46; Russ Shafer-Landau and Terence Cuneo, “Moral Realism, introduction,” in The Foundations of Ethics, eds. Russ Shafer-Landau and Terence Cuneo (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 158. 14. See, for example, Alexander Miller, Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). 15. Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 1. 16. Enoch makes the comparison between the realities of mathematical knowledge and moral knowledge, Mackie speaks of the “fabric” and “furniture” of the world in rejecting moral realism, and Shafer-Landau draws the analogy between moral and geological/biological properties. See Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 203; Mackie, Ethics, 15–16; Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism, 63. 17. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism, 48. 18. FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism,” 194. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 195; William FitzPatrick, “Ontology for an Uncompromising Ethical Realism,” Topoi 37, no. 4 (2018): 537. 21. FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism,” 196–97. It is worth noting that FitzPatrick’s robust realist ontology comes very close to Hubert Dreyfus’s

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  215 and Charles Taylor’s “pluralistic robust realist” affirmation of “many languages each correctly describing a different aspect of reality,” a position that is largely neglected by metaethicists. FitzPatrick’s dual-aspect view also resonates with the relatively ignored metaethical position of Akeel Bilgrami, whose anti-naturalism is based on a similar “perspectival duality” between first-personal engagement and third-personal detachment. See Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, Retrieving Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 154; and Akeel Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, eds. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). See also Taylor’s and Bilgrami’s contributions to this volume in Chapters 1 and 3, respectively. 22. Enoch, “Non-Naturalistic Realism,” 31. 23. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism, 4, 63. 24. FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism,” 160, 191; “Ontology,” 537. 25. Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 5. 26. Axel Honneth, Reification: A  New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 21. 27. Ibid., 24. 28. Ibid., 22. 29. Ibid., 52–63. 30. Ibid., 56. 31. Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor, “What Is Reenchantment? An Interview With Charles Taylor,” in The Philosophy of Reenchantment, eds. Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese (New York: Routledge, 2020), 25. 32. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism, 17. 33. Enoch’s account of moral deliberation and disagreement is a case in point: “What does such disagreement feel like? In particular, does it feel more like the disagreeing over which chocolate is better, or like disagreeing over factual matters (such as whether human actions contribute to global warming)?” David Enoch, “Why I Am an Objectivist About Ethics (and Why You Are, Too),” in The Ethical Life, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 195–96. 34. Enoch, “Why I Am an Objectivist,” 199. 35. These points raise an important question about how close the concept of reification is to another great pillar of critical social theory: alienation. Worldreification can be seen as an “alienation” from the world in the sense that it creates a boundary between human moral subjects, on the one hand, and values as external objects, on the other. Self-reification, then, alienates us from ourselves as it leads to an inadequate self-understanding. This topic – and, moreover, how alienation relates to reenchantment – definitely deserves further investigation. 36. Tristam McPherson and David Plunkett, “Introduction: The Nature and Explanatory Ambitions of Metaethics,” in The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, eds. Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1. 37. It is most revealing of the disenchanting temper that even a robust realist such as Enoch admits that “Robust Realism does lose plausibility points merely for not being naturalist.” In fact, his view is that “a theory that is naturalist but as good as Robust Realism in other respects . . . would be, on account of its naturalism, preferable to Robust Realism” (2011, 134). This is another manifestation of robust realism’s aim to have it both ways. To say that morality must be “taken seriously” but that any theory which

216  Michiel Meijer is not naturalist loses plausibility merely for not being naturalist, is to say that all alternatives to ethical naturalism are handicapped by definition. This climate makes it very difficult for the advocates of such alternatives to articulate their claims, as they are in a quite different situation from their naturalist opponents: whereas the latter can build their theories in a free and unrestricted way, the former need to “catch up” by default. The real shock is that a “non-naturalist” robust realist such as Enoch accepts this as his task at all. 38. John Cottingham, “What Is Humane Philosophy and Why Is It at Risk?” in Conceptions of Philosophy, ed. Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 39. John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003), 99. 40. Ibid., 250. 41. Ibid., 251. 42. Ibid., 243–44. 43. Fiona Ellis, ed., New Models of Religious Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 12. 44. Ibid., 13. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. In arguing against scientific naturalism to allow for non-scientific modes of understanding, Ellis makes it clear in God, Value, and Nature to be building on a position that is “familiar from Wiggins and spelled out further by McDowell” (2014, 52). 47. Notable exceptions to this gap in the literature are Alan Thomas, Value and Context: The Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006); and Fiona Ellis, God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 48. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 97; and John McDowell, “Responses,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, ed. Nicholas Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 298. 49. Jan Bransen, “On the Incompleteness of McDowell’s Moral Realism,” Topoi 21, no. 1 (2002): 187–98; Axel Honneth, “Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism: John McDowell and the Challenge of Moral Realism,” in Reading McDowell, ed. Nicholas Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 246–65. In this respect, McDowell admits that his brand of moral realism in Mind, Value, and Reality is “more negative than positive,” and therefore “better described as an ‘anti-anti-realism’ than as ‘realism’ ” (1998, viii), in line with his aim in Mind and World to “exorcize” certain philosophical questions rather than engage in “constructive” philosophy (1994, xxiii–xxiv). 50. John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 144. 51. Ibid., 134, 136; David Wiggins, Needs, Values, and Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 197, 201. 52. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 143. 53. Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?” 164. 54. Akeel Bilgrami, “Understanding Disenchantment,” The Immanent Frame, accessed March  8, 2019, https://tif.ssrc.org/2010/09/06/disenchantment/. Reprinted in this volume in the Epilogue. 55. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 20, 47. 56. Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 67. 57. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 145, my emphasis. 58. Cottingham, “What Is Humane Philosophy,” 251.

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  217 9. FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism,” 159. 5 60. Cottingham, “What Is Humane Philosophy,” 253; John Cottingham, “Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding,” in New Models of Religious Understanding, ed. Fiona Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 32. 61. Cottingham, “Transcending Science,” 32. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Enoch, “Why I Am an Objectivist,” 199. 65. On this particular point, see Paul Van Tongeren, “Moral Philosophy as a Hermeneutics of Moral Experience,” International Philosophical Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1994): 199–214. 66. Taylor, Human Agency, 27. 67. FitzPatrick, “Skepticism About Naturalizing Normativity,” 581. 68. Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 105. 69. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism, 48. 70. The lack of interest in this topic goes well beyond robust realism. In fact, contemporary metaethics is full of attempts to uphold the features that account for robust realism’s appeal in ways that avoid its ontological problem rather than to address it. There is no space here to discuss the various accounts on offer, from theories that effectively deny the reality of moral values while sustaining morality’s objective and normative character, such as quasi-realism and error theory, to more recent “quietist” views that reject ontological theorizing tout court in defending moral facts, “buck-passing” accounts which argue that moral properties constitute reasons for action only by virtue of other properties, and “companions-in-guilt” arguments that link ethics to some allegedly associated discipline (such as mathematics) for the purpose of vindicating its metaphysical credentials. Without getting into the details of these strategies, they all seem to suggest that the collapse of robust realism entails the collapse of all non-scientistic ontologizing – that is, without asking what ontological demands can be met and without looking at the various non-reifying accounts on offer, such as those of the humane philosophers I have been discussing.

Bibliography Bilgrami, Akeel. “What Is Enchantment?” In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, 145–65. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. ———. “Understanding Disenchantment.” The Immanent Frame. Accessed March 8, 2019. https://tif.ssrc.org/2010/09/06/disenchantment/. Reprinted in this volume in “Epilogue: On the Call from Outside,” [page numbers]. Blackburn, Simon. Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Bransen, Jan. “On the Incompleteness of McDowell’s Moral Realism.” Topoi 21, no. 1 (2002): 187–98. Cottingham, John. On the Meaning of Life. London: Routledge, 2003. ———. “What is Humane Philosophy and Why is it at Risk?” In Conceptions of Philosophy, edited by Anthony O’Hear, 233–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. “Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding.” In New Models of Religious Understanding, edited by Fiona Ellis, 23–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

218  Michiel Meijer Dreyfus, Hubert, and Charles Taylor. Retrieving Realism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Ellis, Fiona. God, Value, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. ———, ed. New Models of Religious Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Enoch, David. Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ———. “Why I Am an Objectivist about Ethics (and Why You Are, Too).” In The Ethical Life, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, 192–205. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ———. “Non-Naturalistic Realism in Metaethics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, edited by Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett, 29–42. New York: Routledge, 2018. FitzPatrick, William. “Robust Ethical Realism, Non-Naturalism, and Normativity.” In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, 159–205. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. “Skepticism about Naturalizing Normativity: In Defense of Ethical Nonnaturalism.” Res Philosophica 91, no. 4 (2014): 559–88. ———. “Ontology for an Uncompromising Ethical Realism.” Topoi 37, no. 4 (2018): 537–47. Gibbard, Allan. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Honneth, Axel. “Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism: John McDowell and the Challenge of Moral Realism.” In Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, edited by Nicholas Smith, 246–65. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. Reification: A  New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Horgan, Terry, and Mark Timmons. “What Can Moral Phenomenology Tell Us About Moral Objectivity?” Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (2008): 267–300. Mackie, John. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Mandelbaum, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Moral Experience. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1955 [1969 edition]. McDowell, John. Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994 [1996 edition]. ———. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. “Responses.” In Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, edited by Nicholas Smith, 269–305. London: Routledge, 2002. McPherson, Tristram, and David Plunkett. “Introduction: The Nature and Explanatory Ambitions of Metaethics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, edited by Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett, 1–25. New York: Routledge, 2018. Meijer, Michiel, and Charles Taylor. “What Is Reenchantment? An Interview With Charles Taylor.” In The Philosophy of Reenchantment, edited by Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese, 17–37. New York: Routledge, 2020. Miller, Alexander. Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Shafer-Landau, Russ. Moral Realism: A Defence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003.

Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification  219 Shafer-Landau, Russ, and Terence Cuneo. “Moral Realism, Introduction.” In The Foundations of Ethics, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau and Terence Cuneo, 157–61. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Taylor, Charles. Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ———. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Thomas, Alan. Value and Context: The Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon, 2006. Van Tongeren, Paul. “Moral Philosophy as a Hermeneutics of Moral Experience.” International Philosophical Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1994): 199–214. Wiggins, David. Needs, Values, and Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press, 1985.

10 Detachment and Attention Rob Compaijen

Introduction Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila begins with the following, tragic scene: The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping. She couldn’t holler anymore and they didn’t hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I’ll do it! and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the stoop and shut the door and the cats went under the house. . . . She was afraid to be under the house, and afraid to be up on the stoop, but if she stayed by the door it might open. There was a moon staring straight at her, and there were sounds in the woods, but she was nearly sleeping when Doll came up the path and found her like that, miserable as could be, and took her up in her arms and wrapped her into her shawl, and said, ‘Well, we got no place to go. Where we gonna go?’1 It is difficult not to experience the way this girl is treated as appalling. We are strongly inclined to feel sorry for her, and for the fact that she has to grow up in such a violent and neglecting household. Although we barely know her, we feel she deserves better and should be taken good care of. Doll, the help of the family, feels the same way, and we are moved by her loving care, and the warmth expressed by the act of wrapping the girl into her shawl. Perceiving and experiencing this scene in such an evaluative way is a most natural thing to do. We incurably experience the world we live in as containing values. We see persons as spineless or courageous, situations as deplorable or acceptable, actions as praiseworthy or disgusting, works of art as uninteresting or beautiful, and so forth. However, despite these pervasive experiences of value as pertaining to (objects in) the world, we encounter in our culture a narrative of disenchantment that boldly claims that the world is an empty place. The world, on this view, does

Detachment and Attention  221 not contain values, and any experience of value as pertaining to (objects in) the world is simply an illusion. In this chapter, I will critically engage with this disenchantment narrative and explore the possibility of reenchantment. First, I  will argue that we should understand the experience of disenchantment as resulting from detachment; that is, from the reflective process of moving away from our present point of view. Through natural science we have come to learn a point of view that is radically detached: it embodies a point of view that is radically outside of the realm of human experience. I will show that this entails the phenomenon of disenchantment, because we realize that the world of meaning and value is not mirrored in the picture of the world that is provided by this strongly detached point of view. In the second part I will argue that we should conceive of reenchantment in terms of perceiving the world from a point of view I describe as ‘detached engagement’. I will discuss attention, as understood by Iris Murdoch, as an illustration of this point of view. Attention, I aim to show, involves a reenchantment of the world not in the sense that it repopulates the world with strange entities, but in the sense that it reveals what was there all along but was removed from sight under the influence of the radically detached point of view.

Disenchantment Belgian philosopher Arnold Burms has described disenchantment as the experience that tells us that the world of human value and meaning is not mirrored in the picture of the world that the sciences provide us with.2 When we experience the world as disenchanted, Burms observes, “[i]t seems as if the world is provocatively uninterested in what is most dear to us.”3 On a fundamental level, disenchantment refers to a “discrepancy between objective facts and subjective experience”.4 In this section I  explore this idea. More particularly, I  will explore the idea that disenchantment is primarily an experience that results from looking at the world from a strongly objective point of view. Understanding disenchantment in this way challenges what might be called an ontological conception of disenchantment. Disenchantment, that is, is frequently understood as a process that results from coming to see what the world really is like. ‘Under the spell of premodern superstitions’, so this story goes, ‘we believed that there are gods and spirits, that things have meaning, that the world contains values – but, given what the natural sciences tell us about the world, we now know that none of that is actually the case.’ The idea that the world does not contain values is presented, in other words, as an ontological discovery. The idea I explore in this section, however, is that, underlying this ontological narrative, there is an experience that the world is an ‘empty’, disenchanted place, and that, as I point out below, this experience is induced by looking at the world from

222  Rob Compaijen a strongly objective point of view. In the section ‘Detached Engagement’, I extend my treatment of these issues by reflecting on the ideas of engaged and detached points of view, and by providing an analysis of a point of view that I describe as ‘detached engagement’. Detachment and Disenchantment It is one of the remarkable features of our existence as human beings that we are not fully immersed in our experience of ourselves and of the world. I do not mean that we are never captivated by the objects of our attention; it is clear that we sometimes are. What I mean is that we are not held captive by them. As reflective creatures, we are able to take a step back, move away from the immediacy of our experiences of the world and of ourselves, and look at them, as it were, from the outside. This reflective process of transcending our present point of view is what I will refer to as ‘detachment’. Describing detachment in terms of ‘transcending’ naturally invokes the image of a ‘vertical’ movement. It suggests, in effect, that detachment signifies an increase in objectivity: it paints the picture of gradually moving away from the parochial character of my present point of view. Thomas Nagel elaborates this point in The View From Nowhere, where he writes that “[a] view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual’s makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is.”5 Detachment, so understood, involves a movement away from the particularity of my point of view and it has as its limit a maximally detached view from nowhere – a point of view that has been described as a God’s-eye view, an Archimedean point, the point of view of the universe, and so forth. Detachment, then, is a matter of degree, as are subjectivity and objectivity: “A standpoint that is objective by comparison with the personal view of one individual may be subjective by comparison with a theoretical standpoint still farther out. The standpoint of morality is more objective than that of private life, but less objective than the standpoint of physics.”6 I will be focusing on this ‘vertical’ conception of detachment, because the experience of disenchantment seems intimately related to it. However, it is important to note that there are also other, ‘horizontal’ ways of transcending our present point of view.7 Think, for instance, of when one looks at oneself after a fight with one’s partner through his or her eyes, or when we converse with someone brought up in a radically different cultural background. Unlike a strongly objective point of view, these external perspectives on ourselves are themselves characterized by a high degree of particularity: they reflect a person’s or culture’s ‘rich’ (normative) ideas about the world.

Detachment and Attention  223 I have described detachment as the reflective process of transcending our present point of view. I have also noted that our points of view can be detached to a greater or lesser degree. Taken together, this means that we are involved in detachment every time we transcend or move away from our present point of view by adopting a point of view that is more objective. Using Nagel’s examples, moving from the personal view of one individual to the moral point of view seems a genuine example of detachment (e.g., one detaches oneself from one’s preoccupation with having one’s personal preferences satisfied), as is the further step of moving from the moral point of view to the point of view of physics (e.g., one detaches oneself from viewing the world in evaluative terms). Now, crucially, the pursuit of objectivity that is central to this account of detachment can, if taken far enough, result in the idea that value is an illusion. This is a line of thought developed by Nagel in The View From Nowhere, where he writes that “[i]t can seem, when one looks at life from outside, that there is no room for values in the world at all” and that “[v]alues can seem really to disappear when we step outside of our skins, so that it strikes us as a philosophical perception that they are illusory.”8 Elaborating these ideas, he describes this process in more detail as follows: The pursuit of objectivity with respect to value runs the risk of leaving value behind altogether. We may reach a standpoint so removed from the perspective of human life that all we can do is to observe: nothing seems to have value of the kind it appears to have from inside, and all we can see is human desires, human striving – human valuing, as an activity or condition. . . . [I]f we continue along the path that leads from personal inclination to objective values and ethics, we may fall into nihilism.9 Nagel argues that if we adopt a point of view that is radically objective, value itself seems an illusion.10 The more general idea explicated in these passages seems to be that value becomes increasingly difficult to discern with each further step in detachment: the further we move away from the ‘internal’ point of view of some activity or practice (including the practice of human life), the more difficult it becomes to perceive its value. Importantly, there comes a point in this process of detachment where all value has become invisible. To put it in terms of the topics of this chapter: at this stage of detachment, we will experience the world as disenchanted. Our powerful and pervasive experiences of value are not mirrored in the world that is presented to us when we look at it from a point of view that is radically external or radically objective. There are many everyday situations that seem to confirm the idea that value becomes invisible when we look at some activity or practice

224  Rob Compaijen from an external point of view. We are all familiar, I think, with situations in which the value or meaning of an activity or project that we genuinely care about seems to have evaporated when, for one reason or another, we are forced to look at them from the outside. This is, at least, what I experience on a regular basis when talking about, for example, academic philosophy with those who do not care too much for it: the sense of urgency and value I experience academic philosophy to have when I am ‘practicing’ it, seem to disappear quite easily when, in a conversation with ‘outsiders’, I myself am forced to look at it from the outside. On a large scale, Nagel’s analysis is confirmed by the natural sciences. (The point of view of the natural sciences is, undoubtedly, part of what Nagel is thinking about in the above passages.) The natural sciences embody a thoroughly objective point of view that is radically outside of our ordinary (value-laden) experience of the world, and it is in virtue of the objective nature of its point of view that it is unable to perceive value in the world. Let us look at an example. Gilbert Harman asks us to imagine a situation in which you see a couple of children trying to burn a cat alive.11 Unless one is a psychopath one will experience this scene as cruel and straightforwardly evil. Now, from the point of view of the natural sciences we can describe the situation at hand in different ways (in terms of the temperature of the flames, in terms of changing chemical structures in the cat, or in terms of the frequency of the cat’s screams), but we will not be able to describe it as cruel or evil. Natural science, Akeel Bilgrami writes while discussing this example, “studies combustion and condensation, but not value properties, not things described in value terms such as cruelty and threats”.12 Nagel, then, seems right to argue that adopting a strongly objective point of view makes it impossible to discern value. He clarifies this phenomenon by referring to internal and external points of view, and I have followed him in this. Yet, it seems possible to shed a bit more light on it by understanding the perception of value (and meaning) to require our points of view to be engaged, whereas value (and meaning) becomes invisible when our points of view are detached. At a conceptual level it is not easy to be precise here. Generally speaking, we can describe an engaged point of view in terms of being involved, emotionally invested, committed, and so forth, while the opposite holds for a detached point of view. In the next section I will explore the idea of engaged and detached points of view, and how they relate to the perception of value, in more detail. For now it is important to see that the experience of disenchantment indeed seems to be induced by looking at the world from a strongly objective point of view. The cruelty of putting a three-year-old out on the stoop, in the dark and cold; the moving compassion of someone picking her up and wrapping her in a shawl; the admirability of people who take

Detachment and Attention  225 loving care of their of terminally ill partners; the horror of rape – it all dissipates when we adopt a strongly objective point of view towards the world, as is done in the natural sciences. I do not think it is farfetched to say that privileging the importance of such a point of view towards the world, as seems to be done in our culture from modernity onwards, can give birth to a narrative of disenchantment that declares the world to be devoid of value and meaning. Detached Engagement If one argues that adopting a strongly objective point of view makes value invisible, one suggests that value becomes increasingly difficult to discern with each further step in detachment. This might seem rather obvious. If the perception of value is related to looking at the world from a relatively internal, engaged point of view, it seems clear that with each step away from such a point of view, value becomes more difficult to perceive. However, in this section I will point to an interesting phenomenon that challenges this picture. The phenomenon I want to draw attention to is that a slightly detached point of view – one that I will describe as ‘detached engagement’ – is capable of actually increasing our discernment of value. (This will then be important for my account of reenchantment in the second section of this chapter.) To be able to do that, however, we first need to have a closer look on what it means to say that a point of view is engaged or detached. I have described an engaged point of view in terms of an internal point of view that is involved, emotionally invested, committed, and so forth. I think we can make this more specific by understanding that, in engagement, we allow ourselves to be moved.13 This is, I confess, an ambiguous phrase, but the ambiguity involved in this understanding of engagement is important. As I see it, the phrase contains two ideas. The first is that, when our point of view is engaged, we are open to aspects or properties of the world that motivate us to perform some action. This is, if I  am not mistaken, the view brought forward by Bilgrami. Contrasting the engaged and detached point of view, he writes: [S]omeone may go to Calcutta and view another person’s condition in detached terms of average daily caloric counts but then may also perceive that that person is in need. When he perceives the world from a perspective that describes it in value terms of this sort  – needs – he will be prompted to practical agency – to give money to Oxfam, say.14 Viewing the world from an engaged point of view allows us to discern values that motivate us to act in this or that way.15 Unsurprisingly, Bilgrami describes the engaged point of view as the point of view of practical

226  Rob Compaijen agency. A  detached point of view, by contrast, is the point of view of observation.16 It paradigmatically belongs to the (natural) sciences: In many of our ordinary observations we think of the world in a detached way quite informally (“That’s a square table,” “Here’s the tree in the quad,” “The water in the lake is cold,” “She is going to class”), but when we do natural science, that detached perspective takes its most regimented form, and we predict and explain the objects, properties, and events in the world, bringing them under laws and generalizations, moving to a vocabulary of molecules, chlorophyll, H2O, neurons, etc.17 When we relate to the world in a detached spirit, one is standing back from it, observing it in such a way that we are not moved to action. Now, of course, someone who views a person’s condition in terms of average daily caloric count can be motivated to act, just as someone who discovers, through a detached analysis of its chemical structure, that the tap water in a restaurant is poisoned. The important point here is to see that, if they are so moved to action, they have, at that moment, left the detached point of view behind and have adopted an engaged point of view. On Bilgrami’s view, that is, the engaged point of view of practical agency and the detached point of view of observation crowd each other out. There is, as he puts it, a “failure of fit between the two points of view.”18 Although this is an important part of what is involved in engagement, it is not the whole story. This brings me to the second aspect of the idea that, in engagement, we allow ourselves to be moved. Viewing the world from an engaged point of view might make us respond to what we discern in ways that cannot be understood as actions in a proper sense. That is, the perception of value moves us to certain emotional responses. A phenomenology of the experience of value both strongly suggests that we should understand engagement in terms of the wider idea of allowing ourselves to be moved, and challenges the idea that value becomes increasingly difficult to discern with each further step in detachment. I will discuss two kinds of cases. First, consider aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience is a clear example of engagement in the wider sense of allowing ourselves to be moved. The experience of aesthetic values such as beauty or the sublime typically does not move us to practical agency. That is, an experience of the sublime in nature, or the experience of beauty in a work of art, is not typically an experience that involves a demand to act. This accords, I think, with a fundamental passivity that is involved in aesthetic experience – we tend to experience the beautiful as something that pulls us towards it, and the sublime as something that overtakes us. (I take it that this is part of what Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer are getting at when they understand aesthetic experience

Detachment and Attention  227 in terms of ‘disinterestedness’.) But although aesthetic experience is not engaged in the sense that it moves us to act, it is engaged in the sense that it can be deeply moving. In aesthetic experience we are moved to emotional responses: admiration, wonder, awe, but also irritation, uncanniness, disgust, and so forth. The point of view we inhabit in aesthetic experience, then, seems a genuine example of engagement. At the same time, however, there is a sense in which the aesthetic point of view is detached as well. In the experience of beauty or the sublime, we are lifted above our daily routines; our practical, active way of relating to the world. I think we should say that, in aesthetic experience, one is an observer – not a detached, but a deeply engaged observer. And it seems to me that, precisely because this is a point of view that has transcended our immersion in our everyday, practical ways of relating to the world, it involves an increased capacity to discern aesthetic value. I myself at least experience it this way: I am much more open to, for example, the beauty of the surrounding (natural) world when I  am not occupied by work, deadlines, the immediate care for my children, and so forth. We stumble upon a fascinating phenomenon: there is a point of view that is both deeply engaged and qualifies as detached. I will describe it, paradoxically, as ‘detached engagement’. Viewing the world from the point of view of such detached engagement, is also what happens in situations that are ethically salient and, in a sense, much more ordinary. Celebrating my birthday with friends and family, I  have found myself standing in the kitchen, watching my guests have animated conversations. At these moments, I feel, to put it rather paradoxically, absent and present, an observer and participant, at the same time. Standing there, observing what is taking place before my eyes, I feel grateful – not only for the fact that these people are a part of my life, but also, more basically, for the sheer fact that something wonderful is taking place. Similarly, sometimes I perceive my wife and children in a slightly detached way, from a standpoint that is no longer immersed in the familiar patterns of everyday family life. At such moments, I see them no longer as the persons I know so well and share a life with, but as – to put it paradoxically again – familiar strangers; and this leads, interestingly, to an intensification of love, gratitude, and compassion.19, 20 To summarize: in the above analysis, I  have done two things. First, I have provided a substantial understanding of what it means to relate to the world in a spirit of engagement. An engaged point of view is not exclusively tied to practical agency. Engagement, I have argued, means allowing oneself to be moved, and while that includes practical agency, it also means being moved to respond emotionally to (aspects of) the world. Second, I have challenged the idea that detachment makes value increasingly difficult to discern. Although it is true, as we have seen in section  1.1, that adopting a strongly detached, objective point of view makes value invisible, there are instances of detachment – leading to a

228  Rob Compaijen point of view I have referred to as ‘detached engagement’ – that do not decrease but increase our capacity to discern value. (This is a topic I will return to in the next section.) Nagel, in his important account of these matters, seems insufficiently aware of this phenomenon. It also challenges Bilgrami’s claim that there is a failure of fit between an engaged and detached point of view.21 In the next section I  will discuss Murdoch’s views on attention as an illustration of detached engagement, and show that that provides us with a meaningful understanding of what reenchantment can be.

Attention and Reenchantment ‘Reenchantment’ is a rather bewildering notion. It suggests a process of repopulating the world with entities that, for one reason or another, are no longer present. Yet, what could that possibly mean? Instead, I think we should understand reenchantment in terms of perceiving what was there all along but was removed from sight. In this section I will develop the view that we should understand reenchantment in terms of attention, and that attention, as a ‘detached-engaged’ way of relating to the world, provides us with a clear view of value. Why, it might be asked, should we understand reenchantment with reference to a ‘detached-engaged’ point of view? Why isn’t it enough to simply return to the engaged point of view? After all, the perception of value is dependent on relating to the world in a spirit of engagement. In our everyday, engaged way of relating to the world we regard a situation at work deplorable, we view a decision our partner has made as courageous, we are appalled by the cruelty of some act of violence we hear about, and so forth. Adopting the everyday, engaged point of view seems a proper example of perceiving what was there all along but was removed from sight under the influence of the strongly detached point of view embodied by the natural sciences. Such a strategy seems to be advocated by, for instance, John McDowell when he writes about curing what he calls ‘vertigo’. He points out that we might experience a profound anxiety (‘vertigo’) when we adopt a standpoint outside of our immersion in human practices (‘the whirl of organism’) and come to believe that what we are doing and experiencing is an illusion: We cannot be whole-heartedly engaged in the relevant parts of the ‘whirl of organism,’ and at the same time achieve the detachment necessary in order to query whether our unreflective view of what we are doing is illusory. The cure for the vertigo, then, is to give up the idea that philosophical thought, about the sorts of practice in question, should be undertaken at some external standpoint, outside our immersion in our familiar forms of life.22

Detachment and Attention  229 All that we have to do, on this line of thought, is to abandon the error we have made in supposing that we should approach the issue of value in a strongly detached way. However, I think that we should say and do more, and understanding why will explain the importance of a detachedengaged point of view for a viable meaning of reenchantment. The problem, as I  see it, is this: reenchantment cannot unqualifiedly be understood in terms of readopting the everyday, engaged standpoint, because that standpoint itself runs the risk of obscuring our perception of value. Developing a line of thought that I touched upon earlier in my account of detached engagement, I think there are modes of engagement that run the risk of making value invisible. We can be ‘entrenched’ in the mood we are in, in the life we lead, in the practices and projects we engage in. Think, for example, of when we are invested in our jobs or careers or projects to a degree that we do not notice that our loved ones are not doing well. Or think of when we are immersed in our ‘inner life’ because we are worried and now neglect the responsibilities we face in our lives. In situations such as these, one is so ‘absorbed’ that one, interestingly, jeopardizes one’s capacity to be moved (i.e., one’s engagement). The invisibility of value that I am gesturing at here is, to be sure, of a different nature than the principled invisibility of value that is fundamental to the strongly detached point of view. Value is in principle accessible here, but threatens to become invisible due to the specific way in which our relation to the world is engaged. Elaborating this line of thought, Murdoch writes that “we may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own.”23 Murdoch’s insistence on the vital importance of attention – a notion she “borrow[s] from Simone Weil”24 – for (moral) life grows out of this concern. She describes attention as “a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.”25 From this description I take four features of attention that I will explore in what follows: attention as perception of the particular (it discerns ‘what confronts on’); attention as moral perception (it is loving, ‘patient and just’); attention as accurate perception (it presents us with ‘what is really the case’); and attention as something that we do not possess immediately, but that results from ‘moral discipline’. First, attention, Murdoch stresses, is a matter of perceiving the particular. It is “directed upon an individual reality”.26 In one sense, of course, all perception is directed upon individual realities. We do not see universals. We do not see oak trees, but these particular oak trees; we do not see barn owls, but these particular barn owls; we do not see human beings, but these particular human beings. Yet, in another sense, we often do see

230  Rob Compaijen such universals. For all sorts of reasons, we tend to reduce the individual realities we encounter to the more general categories we believe they represent. The idea of ‘attention’ is meant to criticize this reductionist tendency. Properly attending to this particular oak tree, barn owl, or person makes us aware of their peculiarities. (When, in what follows, I speak of attention in terms of perceiving the world, I do not mean, then, that ‘the world’ is the proper object of attention. Its proper objects are individual realities in the world.) Yet, we should be more specific about the object of attention. Attention not only makes us aware of individual realities, but it reveals to us the value (goodness, beauty) they have or, to put it differently, that resides in them. This is something that Murdoch elaborates in her famous example of a mother-in-law who dislikes her daughter-in-law: A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son married beneath him.27 However, at some point, M decides to look at D again: “M looks at D, she attends to D, she focuses her attention.”28 As a result, Murdoch writes, “D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on.”29 Apparently, then, attention is a way of focusing on individual realities in a way that brings out their value. The obvious worry here is that, thus understood, attention involves a kind of wishful thinking, falsifying its object by neglecting or even the bad or the ugly. I will reflect on this worry below, in my discussion of the third aspect of attention. Second, attention is a moral perception of the world. This is already suggested by the prior analysis, because attention was argued to bring out the value of individual realities. It does that, however, by having a distinctly moral character. When one is being attentive, on this view, one has “a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation”.30 Murdoch characterizes attention in terms of patience, justice, and love. These virtue terms are meant to convey the thought that, in loving attention, the influence of the self in appropriating (the individual realities in) the world is reduced. Murdoch writes: “The same virtues, in the end the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person.”31 The main threat to loving attention (and to moral life more generally), according to this line of thought, is the

Detachment and Attention  231 distorting perspective of the self. Hence, Murdoch’s famous remark that “in the moral life the enemy is the fat, relentless ego.”32 Attention, on this analysis, enables us to perceive the value of individual realities by being loving, just, patient; that is, by detaching us from the distorting influence of our selves. Yet, what does that mean, exactly? One of the upshots of viewing ethics as a perceptual discipline, as does Murdoch, is that it makes clear that morality is concerned with much more than with action alone. Describing the self as the enemy of moral life, then, is not simply a way of saying that we should abstain from selfish action. What Murdoch seems to have in mind by advocating loving attention is much more radical: we should learn to detach ourselves from self-concern and self-absorption. We are often and deeply concerned about ourselves: about our own existence, as well as our own well-being. Murdoch writes, for example, about the “consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair”.33 We can easily add envy, fear of not being recognized, pride, our desire to play a role (an important one) in realizing ideals, and so forth. Such expressions of self-concern distort our perception of the world. Unsurprisingly, then, Murdoch highlights the importance of humility in these matters, claiming that: “The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are.”34 It is clear that Murdoch’s views are grounded in a deeply pessimistic moral psychology. She endorses a “a doctrine of original sin” which she takes to be generally Freudian in nature.35 That is, she accepts the view of the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural attachments are sexual, ambiguous and hard for the subject to understand or control. Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings.36 We do not need to accept this pessimistic moral psychology (I, for one, do not unqualifiedly endorse it) in order to embrace the importance of attention for ethics. The importance of attention, to recall, is that it exemplifies a deeply engaged way of perceiving the world that, at the same time, involves a detachment from the ‘entrenchment’, ‘immersion’, or ‘absorption’ that is so typical of our everyday ways of relating to the world. We do not need to understand that entrenchment, immersion, or absorption solely in terms of self-concern as pictured by Murdoch in order to see her views on attention as valuable. This relates to a further point. The above analysis suggests that Murdoch understands self-concern as the sole threat to moral life. But should we not say that there are other threats as well? We could think of, for example, the absorption that is characteristic of our everyday lives, but

232  Rob Compaijen also of indifference, unjust political structures, and the skeptical denial of values.37 It seems that Murdoch either has to reinterpret such threats in terms of self-concern (which will yield, I suppose, some unpersuasive interpretations), or has to broaden the scope of potential threats. Yet, however this may be, I think it is clear that self-concern poses a fundamental threat to moral life. If self-absorption and self-concern are the key causes of distortions of the ethical point of view, then we can easily imagine an argument to the conclusion that what we need is a completely disinterested, detached point of view. However, Murdoch argues that, instead, we need loving attention, which has a distinctly engaged character. Now, she claims  – and this is the third feature of attention that I want to highlight – that loving attention presents us with ‘things as they are’. This is, without a doubt, the most controversial aspect of her account of attention. The controversy resides in two ideas. In the first place, returning to the worry expressed above, if loving attention allows us to perceive the value residing in individual realities – even in individual realities that we are, at first, strongly inclined to dislike or disapprove of – are we then not involved in a kind of wishful thinking? Moreover, and more generally, can we really accept the suggestion that a deeply engaged and ethical point of view provides us with an undistorted picture of the world? This is an idea that we will quite certainly feel hesitant about; and if we do, that gives witness to the influence and the force of the idea that only a strongly detached point of view has a chance of presenting us with the world as it really is. In Murdoch’s account both these worries ultimately seem to be misplaced. If, that is, the core problem is that we have a strong tendency to see the world “through lenses distorted by the needs and wishes of our fearful, insecure, and greedy selves”,38 then loving attention – as a point of view in which we have detached ourselves from self-concern and selfabsorption – provides us with an undistorted view of the world. This also implies that loving attention is not a kind of wishful thinking, because the primary reason why – if we relate to the world in an engaged way – we do not discern value in (the individual realities in) the world is that our self-concern and self-absorption makes it invisible or turns it into a kind of vice. It is the mother-in-law’s stingy self-concern, on this view, that makes her see her daughter-in-law’s character as ‘vulgar’ while a truthful, attentive perception shows it to be, in fact, ‘refreshingly simple’. There remains, of course, something problematic about Murdoch’s insistence on loving attention as providing access to ‘things as they are’. There is the general question of whether we can ever claim to have access to things as they are. There is also the question of how this relates to scientific attempts to understand the world. But perhaps it is possible to retain the force of Murdoch’s analysis while leaving behind her concern of having access to things as they are. All that is required to do that,

Detachment and Attention  233 it seems to me, is to accept that it is possible to increase our discernment of value. And I believe that our everyday experience of discriminating between, for example, virtuous literary critics and ordinary readers, between moral exemplars and ordinary moral agents, and so forth, gives witness to that possibility. This relates to the fourth feature of attention. Loving attention is not something we possess immediately – by nature, as it were – but results from what Murdoch describes as ‘moral discipline’. Loving attention results from a process of gradual formation. How should we understand this formative process? We have already seen that it involves the gradual detachment from self-concern and self-absorption. Yet, how does that work, exactly? Again, an adequate answer to this question takes up more space than I have here. Let me therefore focus on one key element emphasized by Murdoch: aesthetic experience. She writes: It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. This exercise of detachment is difficult and valuable whether the thing contemplated is a human being or the root of a tree or the vibration of a colour or a sound. Unsentimental contemplation of nature exhibits the same quality of detachment: selfish concerns vanish, nothing exists except the things which are seen. Beauty is that which attracts this particular sort of unselfish attention.39 The experience of beauty in nature and in great art has a key function in the cultivation of loving attention, because it teaches us what it means to detach from self-concern and self-absorption. In a famous passage, Murdoch illustrates these ideas as follows: I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I  observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.40 While there seems to be a kind of natural fit between attention and beauty (the perception of beauty is typically captivating), the last sentence suggests that the cultivation of loving attention is something that we ourselves might actively shape. We can deliberately detach from our self-concern and self-absorption by turning the attention we already possess towards beauty in nature and art.

234  Rob Compaijen These reflections on Murdoch’s views provide us with an understanding of loving attention. They suggest that such attention is a proper way of conceiving of reenchantment, which, I claimed, we should understand as discerning what was there all along but removed from sight under the influence of the strongly objective point of view.

Conclusion In this chapter I  have sought to improve our understanding of disenchantment and reenchantment. To do that, I have adopted what could be called a ‘perspectival’ approach to these issues. That is, I have tried to show that the conception of the world as a disenchanted place implies a particular point of view: one that is strongly detached and has radically abstracted itself from our engaged ways of relating to the world. As such, it is unable to perceive value. In the course of this discussion, I  drew attention to the interesting phenomenon of what I described as ‘detached engagement’ – a point of view that, although it qualifies as detached, actually increases our susceptibility to value. In the second part, I argued that we should not understand reenchantment in terms of repopulating the world with suspect entities (such as values) but as perceiving what was there all along but was removed from sight under the influence of the strongly objective point of view. I pointed out that we should understand attention as conceived by Iris Murdoch as an example of such reenchantment. Attention – a loving, selfless perception of individual realities in the world – steers clear both from the radical detachment that makes value invisible, and from the self-concerned and self-absorbed engagement that jeopardizes our perception of value as well. As such, it is a pivotal illustration of detached engagement.41

Notes 1. Marilynne Robinson, Lila (London: Virago Press, 2014), 3–4. 2. Arnold Burms, Waarheid, Evocatie, Symbool (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 10. 3. Arnold Burms, “Disenchantment”, Ethical Perspectives 1, no. 1 (1994): 145. 4. Ibid. 5. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5. 6. Ibid. 7. Cf. Fred D’Agostino, “Transcendence and Conversation: Two Conceptions of Objectivity”, American Philosophical Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1993): 87–108. 8. Nagel, The View From Nowhere, 5. 9. Ibid., 209. 10. There is debate among philosophers and scientists about the plausibility of ‘the value-free ideal’ of science. See for an important book in this regard: Heather E. Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

Detachment and Attention  235 11. G. Harman, The Nature of Morality. An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4. 12. Akeel Bilgrami, “The Visibility of Value”, Social Research 83, no. 4 (2016): 918. 13. ‘Allow’ is not meant to convey the thought that engagement is always, or even typically, the result of a conscious decision. Our ordinary, everyday relations to the world are generally of an engaged nature, and only in exceptional cases do we choose to view the world from an engaged point of view. 14. Bilgrami, “The Visibility of Value”, 925. 15. Understanding our actions along the lines of the perception of value suggests an interesting – and (for many no doubt) controversial – picture of practical agency. Our actions, and, more fundamentally, our desires, should be thought of as “responses to value properties in the world” (Bilgrami, “The Visibility of Value”, 927. Original quotation in italics.). That is, “our agency consists in the fact that these . . . values in the world make normative demands on us that trigger our desires upon which we act” (Bilgrami, “The Visibility of Value”, 927). Desires, then, should not be understood as “self-standing” but, instead, should be understood as responses to desirabilities or values in the world (Bilgrami, “The Visibility of Value,” 927). 16. Akeel Bilgrami, “The Wider Significance of Naturalism. A  Genealogical Essay,” in Naturalism and Normativity, eds. Mario De Caro and David MacArthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 25. Responding to the idea that being an observer is, of course, itself a form of agency (e.g., one observes, explains, predicts), Bilgrami, in a more recent paper, writes that a detached point of view belongs to theoretical agency, whereas an engaged point of view belongs to practical agency (Bilgrami, “The Visibility of Value”, 923). 17. Bilgrami, “The Visibility of Value”, 924. 18. Akeel Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, eds. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 161. 19. Burms draws attention to phenomena or experiences that seem very similar, but he interprets them in a way that is importantly different from my own account. Referring to Albert Einstein, he writes that “the realization that all scientific knowledge is ultimately insignificant did not make the drive for knowledge worthless in his eyes, but gave that drive its specific intensity” (Burms, “Disenchantment”, 155). Another example he gives is “the recognition that one has no image at all of the adult that one’s own little son or daughter will become gives one’s love for them a special sort of intensity and poignancy” (Burms, “Disenchantment,” 156). It seems that he explains such cases of intensified attachment by reference to the alienation that results from looking at the objects of those attachments from an external, detached point of view. I am not sure I understand how this works as an explanation. However, it is important to see that Burms does not say (and does not seem to want to say), as I do, that the intensification of our attachments is dependent on an improved discernment of the value or meaning that pertains to the objects of our attachments. 20. Other examples can be given. I  am thinking, for instance, of astronauts who, when viewing the earth and human life quite literally from the outside, experience a heightened sense of the value of there being a planet that sustains human life. Apparently, this has been termed the ‘overview effect’ and has been studied by psychologists. See: Frank White, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (Reston: American Institute of

236  Rob Compaijen Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014 [1987]). I want to thank Alfred Archer for drawing my attention to this notion. 21. In his contribution in the present volume (Chapter 3), Bilgrami develops an interesting line of thought that seems similar to the point I  develop here, but, I believe, ultimately establishes a different conclusion. Here is what Bilgrami writes: “the occasional adoption of a third-person point of view on ourselves may, in fact, enhance our practical agency. Spinoza, for instance, gives the example of how if we inquire in a detached way about our anger on some occasion and understand what prompted it, it may help us to learn to control it in the future – a clear case of enhancing our agency, rather than diminishing it” (Akeel Bilgrami, “Might There Be Secular Enchantment?” in The Philosophy of Reenchantment, eds. Michiel Meijer and Herbert DeVriese (London: Routledge, 2020, 62)). He concludes that “[t]he very same thing (the third-person point of view on oneself) which writ small enhances agency, writ large, destroys it.”   The position I seek to establish differs from these interesting and convincing observations in two ways. First, note that the point of view that I characterize as ‘detached engagement’ is about our awareness of value properties in the world, whereas what Bilgrami describes here concerns our points of view on ourselves. Second – and more important – the point of the notion of ‘detached engagement’ is to go beyond a rigid distinction between engaged and detached points of view. What I aim to make plausible is that there are degrees of engagement and detachment, and that, interestingly, some forms of detachment foster an intensification of engagement. What I argue for, in other words, is a change or transformation of the nature of our engaged point of view. Bilgrami’s observations about enhancing practical agency, however, are not about such changes within our engaged point of view, but about practical importance of ‘the occasional adoption’ of the detached point of view on oneself. It seems, therefore, that his position does assume a rather rigid distinction between engaged and detached points of view. 22. John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason”, The Monist 62, no. 3 (1979): 341. 23. Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997]), 216. In a different context, Peter Railton makes more or less the same point, writing that “[s]trong and immediate affection may overwhelm one’s ability to see what another person actually needs or deserves” (Peter Railton, “Alienation, Consequentialism, and Morality”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (1984): 146–47). 24. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 34. 25. Ibid., 38. 26. Ibid., 34. 27. Ibid., 17. 28. Ibid., 22. 29. Ibid., 17–18. 30. Ibid., 40. 31. Ibid., 70. 32. Ibid., 52. 33. Ibid., 91. 34. Ibid., 103–4. 35. Ibid., 51. 36. Ibid. 37. Several authors writing about Murdoch’s ethical thought note that Murdoch seems unaware (or uninterested) in what Martha Nussbaum refers to as “the

Detachment and Attention  237 political and social determinants of a moral vision”. This quote is taken from a paper by Bridget Clarke who discusses these issues. See: Clarke, “The Prospects for Critical Moral Perception”, in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher. A Collection of Essays, ed. by Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 249. For another paper that critically discusses Murdoch’s views in this regard, see: Blum, “Visual Metaphors in Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy,” in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher. A  Collection of Essays, ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 307–23. 38. Susan Wolf, “Loving Attention”, in Understanding Love. Philosophy, Film, and Fiction, eds. Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 384. 39. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 65. 40. Ibid., 84. 41. I want to thank Alfred Archer, Wout Bisschop, Coos Engelsma, and Annemarie van Stee for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This work was supported by the NWO (The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research; Grant Number 016.Veni.195.447).

Bibliography Bilgrami, Akeel. “What Is Enchantment?” In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, 145–65. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. ———. “The Wider Significance of Naturalism. A Genealogical Essay.” In Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David MacArthur, 23–53. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. ———. “The Visibility of Value.” Social Research 83, no. 4 (2016): 917–43. ———. “Might There Be Secular Enchantment?” In The Philosophy of Reenchantment, edited by Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese, 54–77. London: Routledge, 2020. Blum, Lawrence. “Visual Metaphors in Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy.” In Iris Murdoch, Philosopher. A Collection of Essays, edited by Justin Broackes, 307– 23. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Burms, Arnold. “Disenchantment.” Ethical Perspectives 1, no. 1 (1994): 145–56. ———. Waarheid, Evocatie, Symbool. Leuven: Peeters, 2011. Clarke, Bridget. “The Prospects for Critical Moral Perception.” In Iris Murdoch, Philosopher. A Collection of Essays, edited by Justin Broackes, 227–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. D’Agostino, Fred. “Transcendence and Conversation: Two Conceptions of Objectivity.” American Philosophical Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1993): 87–108. Douglas, Heather E. Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Harman, Gilbert. The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. McDowell, John. “Virtue and Reason.” The Monist 62, no. 3 (1979): 331–50. Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. ———. “The Sublime and the Good.” In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by Peter Conradi, 205–20. New York: Penguin, 1999 [1997].

238  Rob Compaijen Nagel, Thomas. The View From Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Railton, Peter. “Alienation, Consequentialism, and Morality.” Philosophy  & Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (1984): 134–71. Robinson, Marilynne. Lila. London: Virago Press, 2014. White, Frank. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. Reston: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014 [1987]. Wolf, Susan. “Loving Attention.” In Understanding Love. Philosophy, Film, and Fiction, edited by Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau, 369–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

11 Moral Absolutes and Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism David McPherson

Introduction Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” is widely regarded as having provided a key source of impetus for the revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the last half-century or so. In this essay she criticizes modern moral theories, such as Kantianism and utilitarianism, which focus on providing action-guiding moral principles. She argues that such views depend upon a notion of moral obligation that is in fact merely a survival from an earlier divine law conception of ethics. The word “ought” continues “to be spoken with a special emphasis and a special feeling,” but it has lost the framework that originally made it intelligible.1 Anscombe contends that this notion of moral obligation should be jettisoned by secular philosophers since it is only harmful without its original theistic framework, and she suggests that it “would be a great improvement if, instead of ‘morally wrong,’ one always named a genus such as ‘untruthful,’ ‘unchaste,’ ‘unjust.’ ”2 Whatever one may think about the specifics of Anscombe’s criticisms of modern moral philosophy, one of the most important aspects of her essay is the suggestion that we would do well to move away from the narrow focus on action-guiding principles and instead take a more holistic approach that seeks to identify ways of being or types of character traits – the virtues – that contribute to a flourishing or good human life. In short, her recommendation is that we should seek to recover something like Aristotle’s account of ethics. However, what has not been properly appreciated is that Anscombe is making a disenchanting move in suggesting that we should abandon – at least if we are not theists – a special “moral” sense of “ought” that is supposed to contain some sort of “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force.3 In other words, she wants us to acknowledge the full extent of the disenchantment that she thinks in fact occurs if we have abandoned theism. At the same time, Anscombe wants to block a further kind of disenchantment that would involve rejecting all claims of objectivity in ethics, that is, claims that we can derive an ought from what is the case or value from a fact about the world. She suggests

240  David McPherson that we can recover an ordinary (i.e., non-peculiar) sense of “ought” by focusing on what a human being needs in order to flourish qua human being, where the virtues are thought to be central to what a human being needs.4 This sense of ought can be expressed as follows: if you want to flourish qua human being (and it is thought that any rational human being should want to flourish qua human being), then you ought to cultivate the virtues. Anscombe’s suggestions here have been taken up by other philosophers, such as Philippa Foot,5 Rosalind Hursthouse,6 and Alasdair MacIntyre,7 who have sought to articulate and defend a version of “ethical naturalism” that founds virtue ethics on an account of human flourishing (or well-being) that is understood on analogy with the flourishing of other living things. In other words, the focus is on providing a quasi-scientific account of human nature and human flourishing that can ground an account of the virtues that would contribute to such flourishing.8 I will refer to this as the disenchanted version of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics  – even though it seeks a minimal form of reenchantment in defending objectivity in ethics  – as a way of contrasting it with the reenchanted version of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics that I defend. This version – which is the dominant version – is disenchanted because of its appeal to an “ordinary ought” (in contrast to any special, set apart realm of obligation) and because of focusing on a third-personal, observational, or disengaged standpoint (as contrasted with focusing on a first-personal, participative, or engaged standpoint).9 The reenchanted version of neoAristotelian virtue ethics that I defend does affirm a special realm of obligation that contains a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force; that is, it places demands upon us that are set apart from other sorts of concerns.10 But to appreciate this we have to explore our engaged evaluative standpoint. I will focus here on the issue of absolute prohibitions: are there some actions that are never to be done? Although the most influential aspect of Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” is its call for a recovery of Aristotelian ethics, her greatest concern in the essay is in fact with consequentialist thinking that rejects absolute prohibitions. These two features of the essay raise the question: is the sort of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism that Anscombe recommends able to affirm and defend absolute prohibitions? Anscombe herself raises this question toward the end of the essay and expresses skepticism. In fact, her ultimate purpose in the essay seems to be to recommend a divine law conception of ethics. I agree with Anscombe that the disenchanted form of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics cannot adequately ground absolute prohibitions; however, I  also don’t think that appeal to divine law is adequate for grounding these prohibitions. I will argue that in order properly to defend absolute prohibitions we need to appeal to the common experience of the sacred (or what we can also call the reverence-worthy), which carries with it a sense of obligation that is especially set apart from other sorts of concern

Moral Absolutes  241 in virtue of involving a requirement of inviolability; that is, it conveys a kind of boundary marker that ought never to be crossed. I will also show how in her later work Anscombe does give recognition to a sense of the sacred in terms of what she calls “mystical perception” or a “religious attitude” of reverence for human life, which she thinks is in fact available to everyone, whether one is religious or not. But this does raise the question of whether a religious (i.e., theistic) worldview is needed for best making sense of the sacred. While I don’t think appeal to divine law is adequate for grounding absolute prohibitions, I will suggest that there are indeed features of a theistic worldview that can help to make sense of such prohibitions. However, the main focus of this chapter is to show the significance of a common anti-consequentialist form of moral perception that involves a sense of the sacred.

Against Consequentialism Let us begin by looking at what Anscombe has to say about consequentialism in “Modern Moral Philosophy.” One of her main theses in the essay is that “differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance,” because, in essence, they are all consequentialists of some form – that is, they believe that the ends justify the means  – and thus show a “corrupt mind.”11 She writes: The overall similarity is made clear if you consider that every one of the best known English academic moral philosophers has put out a philosophy according to which, e.g., it is not possible to hold that it cannot be right to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever and that someone who thinks otherwise is in error. . . . Now this is a significant thing: for it means that all these philosophies are quite incompatible with the Hebrew-Christian ethic. For it has been characteristic of that ethic to teach that there are certain things forbidden whatever consequences threaten, such as: choosing to kill the innocent for any purpose, however good. . . . [It] would [take] a certain provinciality of mind not to see this incompatibility as the most important fact about these philosophers, and the differences between them as somewhat trifling by comparison.12 In referring here to the “Hebrew-Christian ethic” Anscombe is appealing to a divine law conception of ethics. But does she allow that other conceptions of ethics, such as the disenchanted form of Aristotelian ethics that she recommends to secular philosophers, could also reasonably affirm absolute prohibitions? As previously indicated, she is skeptical. Toward the end of the essay, Anscombe raises the question “whether one might ever need to commit injustice, or whether it won’t be the best

242  David McPherson thing to do?” For her, a paradigm case of injustice is the intentional taking of innocent human life (she also mentions the judicial condemnation of someone known to be innocent as another paradigm case). Among the different possible replies to this question, Anscombe mentions the following: One man  – a philosopher  – may say that since justice is a virtue, and injustice a vice, and virtues and vices are built up by the performances of the action in which they are instanced, an act of injustice will tend to make a man bad; and essentially the flourishing of a man qua man consists in his being good (e.g. in virtues); but for any X to which such terms apply, X needs what makes it flourish, so a man needs, or ought to perform, only virtuous actions; and even if, as it must be admitted may happen, he flourishes less, or not at all, in inessentials, by avoiding injustice, his life is spoiled in essentials by not avoiding injustice – so he still needs to perform only just actions. That is roughly how Plato and Aristotle talk.13 Plato and Aristotle do indeed seem to acknowledge absolute prohibitions. For instance, Plato has Socrates say in the Gorgias that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil,14 which is an idea central to any view embracing absolute prohibitions. Similarly, Aristotle remarks: “[There] are some things we cannot be compelled to do. Rather than do them we should suffer the most terrible consequences and accept death.”15 He mentions the act of killing one’s own mother as such a case. Elsewhere Aristotle qualifies his view of the virtues of character as consisting in attaining the mean between excess and deficiency with respect to some feeling or action by saying: “[Not] every action or feeling admits of the mean. For the names of some automatically include baseness – for instance, spite, shamelessness, envy [among feelings], and adultery, theft, murder among actions. For all of these and similar things are called by these names because they themselves, not their excesses or deficiencies, are base. Hence in doing these things we can never be correct, but must invariably be in error.”16 There is a lot left unexplained in these remarks. For instance, what explains the wrongness of murder (i.e., the intentional killing of an innocent human being) such that it always ought to be avoided? It does not seem enough to say – in line with the disenchanted form of neoAristotelian virtue ethics – that it undermines the “good functioning of the social group” (and the virtues that maintain this) and runs counter to our social nature (and the virtues that fulfill this), though these claims are true; rather, the wrongness seems above all related to the violation of the inherent value of human life, which should be regarded as inviolable, irreplaceable, and reverence-worthy.17 Murder is fundamentally impious, given that piety (as part of the virtue of justice) is the virtue of being properly responsive to that which is sacred or reverence-worthy, which

Moral Absolutes  243 in this case is human life.18 The virtue of piety is also concerned to show reverence for the sources of our existence, and hence the example Aristotle mentions of killing one’s own mother is especially impious. Rather than do this “we should suffer the most terrible consequences and accept death.” Additionally, if living in accordance with absolute prohibitions is seen as necessary for our own fulfillment (eudaimonia), it is because we have already accepted a moralized understanding of it, for example, in terms of a righteous, holy, noble, upright life, which is in part constituted by the virtue of piety in being properly responsive to that which is sacred or reverence-worthy. But if we do away with appeals to a special moral ought and only accept an ordinary (i.e., disenchanted) ought, where virtuous actions are ultimately justified by their conduciveness to our flourishing as human beings, where this is understood on analogy with the flourishing of other living things, then it seems difficult to see how certain actions could be ruled out as such. Indeed, Anscombe continues the previously cited passage as follows: [It] can be seen that philosophically there is a huge gap . . . which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human “flourishing.” And it is the last concept that appears the most doubtful. For it is a bit much to swallow that a man in pain and hunger and poor and friendless is flourishing, as Aristotle himself admitted. Further, someone might say that one at least needed to stay alive to flourish. Another man unimpressed by all that will say in a hard case “What we need is such-and-such, which we won’t get without doing this (which is unjust) – so this is what we ought to do.”19 In other words, it seems that there could always be exceptions made for the sake of the end of flourishing (this parallels a similar common critique of rule-utilitarianism). And so here Anscombe points to a fundamental inadequacy in the disenchanted Aristotelian view, given that she thinks justice requires acknowledging absolute prohibitions. In light of this inadequacy, she suggests the following as another possible reply to her question “whether one might ever need to commit injustice, or whether it won’t be the best thing to do?”: The man who believes in divine laws will say perhaps “It is forbidden, and however it looks, it cannot be to anyone’s profit to commit injustice”; he like the Greek philosophers can think in terms of flourishing. . . . [If] he is a Jew or Christian, he need not have any very distinct notion: the way it will profit him to abstain from injustice is something that he leaves it to God to determine, himself only saying “It can’t do me any good to go against his law.” (He also hopes for

244  David McPherson a great reward in a new life later on, e.g. at the coming of [the] Messiah; but in this he is relying on special promises.)20 Ultimately, it seems then that Anscombe is recommending a divine law ethic, at least as a supplement to a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethic, in order to ground absolute prohibitions. Alasdair MacIntyre does the same in an essay titled “On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture.” There he draws the following lesson from the famous claim made by the character Ivan Karamazov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov that if God does not exist, then everything is permissible: Dostoievski through Karamazov was not saying, that atheists are free from all moral constraints, that, if atheism is true, anyone is morally free to do anything at any time. . . . [What] Dostoievski . . . was saying, was that, if we take atheism to be true, then there is no type of action, no matter how horrifying, of which we can be sure that we could never find good reason to perform it, that it would never be overwhelmingly and overridingly in what we took to be the general interest to perform it. Dostoievski  .  .  . was not predicting Auschwitz or the Gulag. He was predicting the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the saturation bombing of the Ruhr and the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was predicting not the crimes of the obviously wicked, but the crimes of the apparently good, types of action that it is rational to prohibit unconditionally only if one is a theist. But it [is] just this kind of position that will appear at best groundless, at worst unintelligible, to those whose presuppositions are those of our secularized culture.21 MacIntyre thinks that the reason why it is rational for the theist to regard certain actions as absolutely prohibited is because on the theistic view “we are unconditionally bound to obey a certain rule not in spite of our interests and natural inclinations, but because of them. . . . [Our] nature is such that our end is such that we cannot achieve it except by respecting a law to whose giver we are accountable.”22

Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Reasons in Favor of Absolute Prohibitions What should we make of Anscombe’s and MacIntyre’s appeals to divine law in order to ground absolute prohibitions? They do fit with what Sabina Lovibond identifies as an “element of anti-naturalism” in the idea of absolute prohibitions: To say fiat iustitia, ruat caelum [“let justice be done though the heavens may fall”] is to give hostages to fortune: if there is even so much

Moral Absolutes  245 as one moral requirement that we are seriously going to treat as absolute, i.e. as a requirement that is never to be called into question, then this policy is liable sooner or later to produce consequences which, by any normal human standards, will count as disastrous.23 For instance, if we are never to take innocent human life intentionally, then in some cases of warfare this can lead to disaster. We can also see the “anti-naturalism” or “other-worldliness” of absolute prohibitions in the “worldliness” of Callicles’ response to Socrates’ claim in Plato’s Gorgias that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil: Tell me Socrates, are we to take you as being in earnest now, or joking? For if you are in earnest, and these things you’re saying are really true, won’t this human life of ours be turned upside down, and won’t everything we do evidently be the opposite of what we should do?24 There is certainly truth in this response, as there is a sense in which absolute prohibitions do run counter to the “ways of the world,” though we might regard this as counting in favor absolute prohibitions. And such prohibitions are also difficult to make sense of from within an ethic centered on the sort of disenchanted account of human flourishing that is put forward by a number of neo-Aristotelians. It is thus unsurprising that we find some who think that absolute prohibitions can only be grounded from within a religious framework. But how exactly are we to understand Anscombe’s remark that “[it] can’t do me any good to go against [God’s] law,” or MacIntyre’s suggestion that we cannot achieve our interests “except by respecting a law to whose giver we are accountable”? One possibility is suggested by Anscombe’s parenthetical remark: following God’s law is a necessary condition for obtaining some “great reward in a new life later on,” whereas failure to do so is subject to divine punishment. However, there seems to be something shallow about following God’s law simply for the sake of reward and to avoid punishment. A better possible understanding for the claim that “[it] can’t do me any good to go against God’s law” is that it has to do with faith in divine providence, where God is seen as creating the world for good and as being on the side of the good and thus as working to ensure that good ultimately triumphs over evil. Thus, following God’s law, which includes certain absolute prohibitions, is a matter of aligning our lives with the will of God and ensuring that we also are on the side of the good and are helping to bring about the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Relatedly, it can also be a matter of achieving a right relationship with God, which is our highest good.25 These considerations no doubt give the religious believer compelling extrinsic reasons to live in accordance with absolute prohibitions

246  David McPherson (e.g., never intentionally kill an innocent human being), provided they have been divinely decreed, but they miss  what should be seen as the intrinsic reason for these prohibitions: they concern that which is sacred or ­ reverence-worthy and thus should be regarded as inviolable. For instance, the reason why we should never intentionally kill an innocent human being is because doing so violates the special dignity or sanctity of human life. The other theological considerations may provide additional motivational support, but unless a theist embraces theological voluntarism (where something is thought to be right or wrong simply because God willed it to be so, and which is a position that I  believe should be rejected because it makes morality arbitrary and undermines God’s praiseworthiness), he or she will believe that God decreed certain absolution prohibitions because they concern that which is sacred or reverence-worthy and thus should be regarded as inviolable. So there is a special moral ought here – that is, an ought that contains a “ ­ peculiar” or “mesmeric” force in that it makes unconditional demands upon us – not simply because something has been commanded by God, but because we are able to identify an important good: for example, human life as something inherently reverence-worthy, for which we ought to show reverence, where doing so is constitutive of a normatively higher, more meaningful way of life.

The Moral Phenomenology and Ontology of the Sacred If this is so, then it is not immediately clear that a non-theist could not have experiences of the sacred or the reverence-worthy that are the basis of absolute prohibitions. In fact, the force of Anscombe’s argument against consequentialism seems to depend on our having such experiences of the sacred or the reverence-worthy. Without this we might wonder why the consequentialist rejection of absolute prohibitions is so significant. We might imagine that a modern, secular moral philosopher, such as the utilitarian Peter Singer, could respond: “So what? We are well past such a superstitious conception of ethics, and we are better for it.” Such philosophers often regard their moral views as “enlightened” in comparison to traditional views that affirm the sanctity or special dignity of human life.26 Clearly Anscombe does not think such views are enlightened but rather they are benighted; hence she charges consequentialists with having a “corrupt mind.” But this charge seems to presuppose that there is some common anti-consequentialist moral perception – for example, about the special dignity or sanctity of human life such that “it cannot be right to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever” – and there is a natural potentiality to realize this through proper ethical formation, and we can fail to realize it because of corruption by bad moral theory. In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Anscombe does apparently accept a natural law ethic according to which God’s law is “written on our hearts”

Moral Absolutes  247 (as something to which our conscience bears witness).27 She refers on two occasions (en passant) to the “natural divine law,”28 though this is never filled out and deployed in the main arguments of the essay. However, she does fill out the idea of a common anti-consequentialist moral perception (which can be seen as an integral part of the natural moral law that is “written on our hearts”) elsewhere. In her later work Anscombe appeals to what she calls “mystical perception” in order to make sense of certain normative demands upon us (including absolute prohibitions) that in fact appear to contain a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force. Such perception seems essentially to involve a recognition of that which is sacred or reverenceworthy, which involves overriding normative demands. Anscombe thinks that this perception is “as common as humanity”: for example, it is present in the perception that we dishonor our bodies in casual sex, in our sense that we owe respect to someone’s dead body, and in our horror at the evil of murder.29 In light of this, she distinguishes between two kinds of virtue. Some virtues, such as temperance in regard to food and drink and honesty about property, “are fundamentally utilitarian in character.” “Utilitarian” here just means that they are instrumental to things going well for us. By contrast, some virtues, “though indeed profitable, are supra-utilitarian and hence mystical.” One example is chastity. Anscombe writes: Not that this virtue isn’t useful: it’s highly useful. If Christian standards of chastity were widely observed the world would be enormously happier. . . . But it . . . is a supra-utilitarian value. . . . [This] is what comes out in the perception that the life of lust is one in which we dishonour our bodies.30 We can say that there is something fundamentally sacred or reverenceworthy about human sexuality to which the virtue of chastity (as involving right intention in sexual desire) is properly responsive.31 Another example of a mystical or supra-utilitarian virtue is what Anscombe describes as the virtue of “respect for life,” which I think can be seen as part of the virtue of piety. Although the prohibition on murder certainly “makes life more commodious,” she says: everybody perceives quite clearly that the wrong done in murder is done first and foremost to the victim, whose life is not inconvenienced, it just isn’t there anymore. He isn’t there to complain: so the utilitarian argument has to be on behalf of the rest of us. Therefore, though true, it is highly comic and is not the foundation: the objection to murder is supra-utilitarian.32 Elsewhere Anscombe speaks similarly of a “religious attitude” of “respect before the mystery of human life” – or what I would call the

248  David McPherson sacredness or reverence-worthiness of human life – which is “not necessarily connected only with some one particular religious system.”33 Given that this “religious attitude” appears to be equivalent to what she calls “mystical perception,” and given that she thinks the latter is “as common as humanity,” we can say that Anscombe would in fact affirm that one does not have to be part of a religious system at all in order to have a “religious attitude” of reverence for human life (though we might also say that having this attitude makes one religious in a broad, non-conventional sense). Indeed, there are philosophers who are not religious (or theists) who have sought to make appeals to something like this “religious attitude.” For instance, Cora Diamond writes of [the] sense of mystery surrounding our lives, the feeling of solidarity in mysterious origin and uncertain fate: this binds us to each other, and the binding meant includes the dead and the unborn, and those who bear on their faces “a look of blank idiocy,” those who lack all power of speech, those behind whose vacant eyes there lurks a “soul in mute eclipse.”34 And in a recent essay titled “The Problem of Impiety,” Diamond seeks to show how certain ways of acting – she discusses suicide, genetic engineering, and other issues – can be absolutely ruled out as impious without appealing to divine prohibition, and in doing so she draws on Anscombe’s discussion of “mystical perception” and the “religious attitude” of reverence for human life.35 These ideas, I  contend, mark an important conceptual advance  – over appeals to divine law  – for understanding absolute prohibitions, since they are able to identify the intrinsic reason for such prohibitions: namely, they concern that which is sacred or reverence-worthy and thus should be regarded as inviolable. However, it might still seem that such talk of “mystical perception” or a “religious attitude” of reverence for human life is suggestive of a religious worldview, and we might think, more specifically, that a theistic worldview is best able to ground the sense of the sacred or the reverence-worthy here. Anscombe in fact seems to suggest as much when she writes: A religious attitude may be merely incipient, prompting a certain fear before the idea of ever destroying a human life, and refusing to make a “quality of life” judgment to terminate a human being. Or it may be more developed, perceiving that men are made by God in God’s likeness, to know and love God.  .  .  . Such perception of what a human being is makes one perceive human death as awesome, human life as always to be treated with a respect which is a sign and acknowledgement of what it is for.36

Moral Absolutes  249 I think a theistic worldview is important in the way suggested by Anscombe here: it can ground absolute prohibitions not in virtue of appealing to divine law, but rather because it enables a way of seeing human beings as made in the image of God and so as being worthy of reverence. In other words, we can say that theism provides a “moral ontology” that can support and make sense of the “moral phenomenology” of the sacred or the reverence-worthy in regard to human life.37 I think we need some such moral ontology or worldview that can make sense of the moral phenomenology of the sacred or the reverence-worthy here, that is, that can provide an account of what it is about human beings and their place in the cosmos that makes them worthy of reverence. Failing to provide this can have a deflationary effect on our moral experience.38 To fill out this point: the kind of moral ontology that seems particularly important is a teleological one, and we see this in Anscombe’s remark about what a human life, as made in the image of God, is for: namely, “to know and love God,” and, I think we should also add, to know and love one another as well as the wider world created by God. The idea is that there is something worthy of awe and reverence here: our having been created for such a higher purpose makes the experience of awe and reverence before human life appropriate or fitting, and indeed it make sense of the idea that there are normative demands for a reverential attitude toward human life and for appropriate actions following from this. However, if there is no underlying moral teleology in the universe, no way in which the universe is ordered toward the good, and if we are just the result of “blind,” mechanistic causal processes, then it is difficult to see how we can make sense of the idea that there are normative demands upon us for a reverential attitude toward human life whether or not we are responsive to these demands. It seems we have here what Bernard Williams has identified as the problem of the radical contingency of ethics, where our ethical beliefs are seen as entirely dependent on the contingencies of our personal, cultural, and evolutionary histories. Williams writes: “This sense of contingency can seem to be in tension with something that our ethical ideas themselves demand, a recognition of their authority.”39 In other words, the normative authority of ethics, as commonly understood, seems to carry with it a sense of necessity that is at odds with seeing our ethical beliefs as radically contingent. For instance, as ethical agents we do not typically experience it as a contingent fact that we should show reverence for human life, but rather we see it as something that is “categorical”: that is, we ought to show reverence irrespective of what we happen to desire. To give up this sort of normativity means that only a significantly reduced form of ethics remains possible, and hence there is a deflationary effect on our ethical experience. With such a reduced form of ethics there will likely still be things about which we deeply care; for instance, we may deeply care about being kind. The

250  David McPherson point, however, is that this will be based merely on happening to possess certain caring dispositions – for whatever contingent personal, cultural, or evolutionary reasons – rather than on categorical judgments concerning things about which we ought to care. Insofar as such categorical judgments are often linked to many of the things about which we deeply care, giving up making these sorts of judgments would constitute a significant loss. I think there are non-theistic moral ontologies that could also support the moral phenomenology of the reverence-worthiness of human life. For instance, I think, if we can find it convincing, support can be found in the non-theistic cosmic teleological perspective of Thomas Nagel, who argues that the universe is apt (in a non-accidental way) to give rise to beings like us such that “[each] of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”40 Human beings can be said to have a special purpose here because the universe comes to consciousness in human life as we come to understand and appreciate it, which is to say, as we engage in contemplation. And I  think we can find something worthy of awe and reverence in such a picture of human life. But does it make sense to think that there could be such a purpose in the universe without a purposive Being (viz., God) who created it? Nagel himself says: “I am not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without intention makes sense, but I do not at the moment see why it doesn’t.”41 My aim here is not to settle the issue of moral ontology, though I do want to highlight its significance. My primary aim is to show that we need to take account of a common anti-consequentialist form of moral perception that involves a sense of the sacred or the reverence-worthy, since this is needed for defending absolute prohibitions and for making sense of the sorts of evils (e.g., murder) that these prohibitions seek to avoid. Indeed, although I  acknowledged that absolute prohibitions are in a sense “anti-natural” in that they run counter to the “ways of the world” and they are difficult to understand from within an ethic centered on a disenchanted account of human flourishing, I have also shown that there is a sense in which the recognition of such prohibitions is completely “natural” to human beings in that they are based on a common anti-consequentialist form of moral perception. Hence such prohibitions have been a central feature of traditional conceptions of morality.42 To see the significance of this common anti-consequentialist moral perception we need to engage our moral experience. For instance, recalling my earlier discussion, if we consider our horror at murder, it does not seem that it can be explained simply in terms of how it violates the “good functioning of the social group” and runs counter to our social nature, or in terms of how it “robs” someone of future enjoyment or how it violates autonomy; rather, the horror primarily concerns the violation of human life itself, where there is properly a sense of something sacred or

Moral Absolutes  251 reverence-worthy having been violated. Likewise, the horror of sexual violence cannot be explained simply in terms of being an “unpleasant experience,” or in terms of violating consent, since we need to explain why this violation is so much worse than other violations of consent; again, we need the language of the sacred or reverence-worthy, since there is rightly a sense of desecration here. We might make a similar case with regard to other examples, but the general point is that we should recognize the apparent validity of a common anti-consequentialist moral perception involving a sense of the sacred or the reverence-worthy.

Absolute Prohibitions Without the Sacred? But might there be other ways of affirming absolute prohibitions apart from invoking the sacred? Sabina Lovibond  – who we saw raised the issue of anti-naturalism – seeks to defend absolute prohibitions not only apart from divine law and divine promises, but also apart from appeals to the sacred or the reverence-worthy. Instead, she attempts to show how such prohibitions can be seen as an important part of a traditioninformed ethical way of life. She writes: The customs of our ethical “ancestors,” interpreted as best we can from our own historical standpoint and held up to scrutiny against the background of a constant awareness of our own limitations: . . . these seem to be the available sources for a code of human conduct within which some actions would be excluded from consideration, though not because a supreme being had given orders to that effect. . . . [Some] people . . . manage to remain at their posts – to keep the “commandments” of the morality they acknowledge – even without hope: at any rate without the hope that things will turn out all right for them. . . . How do they do it; what is their incentive? Perhaps it is simply that they have become accustomed, or even attached, to the post in question and lack the desire to make alternative arrangements.43 Stuart Hampshire similarly writes about how certain “conduct is impossible as destroying the ideal of a way of life that one aspires to and respects, as being, for example, utterly unjust or cruel or treacherous or corruptly dishonest.”44 David Wiggins also writes about being “bound by our moral nature, i.e., bound by those sentiments without which . . . we should not recognize ourselves.”45 In all of these cases the idea is that avoiding certain actions is a necessary condition (a “practical necessity”) for maintaining our moral identities. However, we can ask the further question: why should I have this (or that) particular moral identity? The worry about the contingency of our moral beliefs can again arise here, which if recognized can have a deflationary effect, since,

252  David McPherson as discussed in the previous section, recognizing this contingency can seem to be in tension with recognizing the normative authority of morality. Perhaps one way to get around this worry about contingency is if we can show that our moral beliefs (and thus our moral identities) are at least partially based on what we think we need in order not to fall into a state of moral anarchy where everything is permitted. Hampshire seems to take this approach when he writes: “In arguing against utilitarians I must dwell a little on these epithets usually associated with morally impossible action, on a sense of disgrace, of outrage, of horror, of baseness, of brutality, and, most important, a sense that a barrier, assumed to be firm and almost insurmountable, has been knocked over, and a feeling that, if this horrible, or outrageous, or squalid, or brutal action is possible, then anything is possible and nothing is forbidden, and all restraints are threatened.”46 But such epithets themselves depend upon there being features of the world that make them appropriate and which demand certain responses, and they can’t just be based on the thought that without certain moral beliefs we will fall into moral anarchy, which is a consequentialist form of reasoning (akin to rule-utilitarianism) and so cannot be used to argue against consequentialism. Consider again the case of murder. What is horrible about murder isn’t simply that if we allow it then we will fall into a state of moral anarchy (though this may be true, at least if it becomes widespread enough); rather, as Anscombe says, “the wrong done in murder is done first and foremost to the victim.” And to make sense of this wrong we need to appeal to the sacredness or reverenceworthiness of human life such that it is properly regarded as being inviolable. The objection to murder, then, is “supra-utilitarian.” My general line of contention seems to hold: in order to justify and make sense of absolute prohibitions we need to appeal to the sacred or the reverence-worthy. Wiggins seems to acknowledge this by making conceptual space for a sense of the mysteriousness of human life, where this is equivalent to a sense of sacredness. Central to our “moral nature,” he thinks, is a capacity for solidarity that responds to the “indefinable influence” that other human beings have upon us (which recalls Anscombe’s “mystical perception” and Diamond’s comments about solidarity and its connection to “the sense of mystery surrounding our lives”).47 This solidarity involves a primitive aversion from acts that appear as a direct assault by one personal being upon another, acts such as murder, wounding, injury, plunder, pillage, the harming of innocents, the repaying of good with gratuitous evil, false witness.  .  .  .  [Such] acts pass beyond the valuations bad, disappointing,  .  .  . lamentable, and trespass onto the ground marked forbidden.48

Moral Absolutes  253 To go against such solidarity by failing to recognize some actions as “utterly forbidden,” Wiggins maintains, “menaces the very fabric of the ethical by threatening to destroy the basis of the ethical in solidarity.”49 I take his concern here not just to be about falling into moral anarchy, but more fundamentally it is about lacking proper responsiveness to other human beings. This suggests that a lack of acknowledgment of absolute prohibitions is much more corrosive to the ethical life than MacIntyre acknowledges in the passage cited earlier. The sort of solidarity to which Wiggins appeals and which involves recognition of some actions as “utterly forbidden” (especially in relation to human life) is at “the root of the ethical” in that it is the condition for the possibility of any viable ethical life whatsoever. Wiggins writes: “Human solidarity . . . is not an ordinary human pursuit. Its role is to condition, to civilize, and to humanize human pursuits.”50 We can also see such solidarity as a path of reenchantment in that it enables proper recognition of the sacredness or reverence-worthiness of every human life. This is a path not taken both in consequentialist moral frameworks such as utilitarianism and in the disenchanted version of neoAristotelian virtue ethics. Utilitarians like Peter Singer depend upon human solidarity for whatever appeal their quality of life assessments possess, but they end up undermining this solidarity in their willingness to come out against their fellows whenever it serves some supposedly more beneficial outcome in terms of overall quality of life.51 They are clearly not properly responsive to the sacredness of every human life. The disenchanted version of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics also overlooks the sort of solidarity whereby we can become properly responsive to the sacredness of every human life; it overlooks this by virtue of its denial of a special realm of obligation and because of its disengaged approach that focuses on what conduces to human flourishing where this is understood on analogy with the flourishing of other living things. To regard such solidarity as being at the root of the ethical life is to take an engaged approach that reveals to us a special realm of obligation containing a “peculiar” force that is derived from the sacredness and “indefinable influence” of every human life.52

Notes 1. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume III (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 26, 30–31. 2. Ibid., 26, 33. 3. Ibid., 31–32. 4. Ibid., 27, 29, 31–32, 38, 41. 5. See Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 6. See Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtues Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

254  David McPherson 7. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). 8. I say “quasi-scientific” because this version of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism takes a third-personal or observational approach that is akin to that which is adopted in the natural sciences. 9. This is not to say that those who endorse the disenchanted version of neoAristotelian virtue ethics give no recognition to the first-personal or engaged standpoint, but the issue here concerns the focus. Another way to put the point is that they do not go far enough in exploring our engaged evaluative standpoint. 10. Anscombe seems to use “peculiar” and “mesmeric” in ways that are for her pejorative, but I  mean to use them in a positive, non-pejorative way here. “Peculiar” can mean odd, but it can also mean special or set apart in some way. “Mesmeric” can mean hypnotic, but it can also mean compelling or attracting our attention. 11. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 26, 40. 12. Ibid., 33–34. 13. Ibid., 41. 14. See Plato, Gorgias, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987 [ca. 380 BC]), 469c. 15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999 [ca. 325 BC]), III.1, 1110a26–28. 16. Ibid., II.6, 1107a10–15. 17. The phrase “good functioning of the social group” is from Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 201–2, 209, 218, 226. Rosalind Hursthouse, it should be noted, affirms that a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethic should acknowledge some absolute prohibitions, though she does not explain their basis except to appeal to Aristotle’s remark that the names or descriptions of certain acts “connote depravity” (or “baseness,” in the translation I used) (Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 58, 87). But what we need to know is: in virtue of what is something depraved? We see the same problem in Hursthouse’s remarks on the wrongness of killing: “What is wrong with killing, when it is wrong, may not so much be that it is unjust, violating the right to life, but, frequently, that it is callous and contrary to the virtue of charity” (6). This agent-centered explanation gets things backwards: someone is callous in this case because he or she fails to be properly responsive to the value of human life.   Philippa Foot affirms a “limited moral absolutism” according to which “certain . . . actions are held to be such as to rule out circumstances in which it could ever be right to perform them.” The example she gives of an action that is absolutely prohibited is torture: “If the frequently unchallengeable description ‘torture’ applies to an action, then, whatever the circumstances, it is in my firm opinion morally ‘out’ ” (Foot, Natural Goodness, 77–78). However, she doesn’t explain why this should be so, though the most natural explanation would involve an appeal to human dignity or the sanctity of human life. Elsewhere Foot does speak of “a morality which refuses to sanction the automatic sacrifice of the one for the good of many because it secures to each individual a kind of moral space, a space which others are not allowed to invade,” which it does by virtue of a “demand for reciprocity” (Philippa Foot, “Morality, Action, and Outcome,” in Moral Dilemmas: And Other Topics in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 103). She goes on to say of this moral perspective that “it seems to define a kind of solidarity between human beings, as if there is some sense in which no

Moral Absolutes  255 one is totally to come out against one of his fellow men” (104). In a footnote she says: “Perhaps it is this idea that is partly responsible for the peculiar outage that we feel about torture” (104, n. 20). However, in regard to the “moral space” that others are not allowed to invade, I think it is best not to see this as being “secured” by reciprocal agreement, but rather as being a matter of the inherent sanctity (i.e., inviolability) of every human life. This seems needed for making sense of our outrage or horror when this moral space is violated, and also for providing a firm grounding for the demand for reciprocity and solidarity. 18. The virtue of justice is concerned with giving what is due, and the virtue of piety is a part of this, as it is concerned with giving the reverence that is due to that which is worthy of reverence. 19. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 41–42. Peter Geach provides what can be seen an addendum to Anscombe’s remarks: “[Somebody] might very well admit that not only is there something bad about certain acts, but also it is desirable to become the sort of person who needs to act in the contrary way; and yet not admit that such acts are to be avoided in all circumstances and at any price. To be sure, a virtuous person cannot be ready in advance to do such acts; and if he does do them they will damage his virtuous habits and perhaps irreparably wreck his hard-won integrity of soul. But at this point someone may protest ‘Are you the only person to be considered? Suppose the price of your precious integrity is a most fearful disaster! Haven’t you got a hand to burn for your country (or mankind) and your friends?’ This sort of appeal has not, I think, been adequately answered on Aristotelian lines” (Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge, 1978), 123). 20. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 42. 21. Alasdair MacIntyre, “On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture,” Proceedings of the ACPA 84 (2011): 29–30. 22. Ibid., 29. 23. Sabina Lovibond, “Absolute Prohibitions without Divine Promises,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 54 (2004): 148. 24. Plato, Gorgias, 481c. See Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd ed (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1991]), 20 and Ch. 12 (titled “Ethical Other-Worldliness”). 25. Candace Vogler mentions faith in divine providence as a basis for upholding absolute prohibitions, though she leaves the appeal somewhat vague (“In Defense of Moral Absolutes,” Villanova Law Review 57, no. 5 (2012): 904– 5); I have tried to clarify such an appeal here. Elsewhere she discusses the case of Sir Thomas More, and she says of his choice to side with fidelity and obedience to God over King Henry VIII (which cost him his life): “It is a matter of siding with knowledge of one’s nature, one’s right relations with others, and the relation between humans and God” (“Aristotle, Aquinas, Anscombe, and the New Virtue Ethics,” in Aquinas and the Nicomachean Ethics, eds. Tobias Hoffman, Jörn Müller, and Matthias Perkams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 256). 26. Peter Singer writes: “The traditional ethic is still defended by bishops and conservative bioethicists who speak in reverent tones about the intrinsic value of all human life, irrespective of its nature or quality. But, like the new clothes worn by the emperor, these solemn phrases seem true and substantial only while we are intimidated into uncritically accepting that all human life has some special dignity or worth” (Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995], 4). 27. The phrase “written on our hearts” is adapted from Romans 2:14–15.

256  David McPherson 28. This phrasing is somewhat strange, as it seems to run together distinctions that Aquinas makes between: (1) the eternal law (i.e., the dictates of divine reason); (2) the natural (moral) law (i.e., the eternal law as grasped through human reason/conscience; it reveals our natural end); (3) the human (positive) law (which should be derived from the natural law and promote our natural end); and (4) the divine law (i.e., law known through special divine revelation, namely, in the scriptures; it reveals our supernatural end) (see Summa Theologiae, I – II, q. 91). 29. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Contraception and Chastity,” in Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G. E. M. Anscombe, eds. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2008), 186–87. 30. Anscombe, “Contraception and Chastity,” 187–88. 31. Anscombe does say that “[sexual] actions are not sacred actions” (“Contraception and Chastity,” 187), however, I am not sure what she means by “sacred” here. According to my usage of “sacred,” we can say that there is something sacred about human sexuality in that we regard it as being reverenceworthy and as having demands of inviolability. We can see this sacred value perhaps most clearly in cases where it is violated (i.e., in the horror of sexual violence). 32. Anscombe, “Contraception and Chastity,” 187. 33. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia,” in Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe, eds. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2005), 269–70. Consider also the following remarks from Anscombe on abortion: “[A] woman of today may find a possibility of becoming pregnant, letting the baby grow to twenty eight weeks (because bigger ones are worth more) and then going somewhere where they will pay her for a late abortion, which yields the foetus for resale, say, as valuable material. If you act so, are you not shewing that you do not regard that human being with any reverence? Few will fail to see that. But the same is true of one who has an abortion so that she can play in a tennis championship; or for any reason for which someone might choose to destroy the life of a new human being. This lack of reverence, of respect for that dignity of human nature so wonderfully created by God, is a lack of regard for the one impregnable equality of all human beings. Lacking it, you cannot revere the dignity of your own human-ness, that is the dignity of that same human nature in yourself. You may value yourself highly as a tennis player or a natural scientist, but without a change of heart you cannot value yourself as being a human, a Mensch. For you have shewn the value you set on a human life as such. You are willing to extinguish it as suits you or as suits the people who want you to do so” (G. E. M. Anscombe, “The Dignity of the Human Being,” in Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe, eds. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2005), 72). 34. Cora Diamond, “The Importance of Being Human,” in Human Beings, ed. David Cockburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55. 35. Cora Diamond, “The Problem of Impiety,” in Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches, ed. David McPherson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 29–46. Consider another example: Raimond Gaita describes an experience of witnessing a nun’s behavior when she came to visit the psychiatric ward at which he worked when he was seventeen, and he marvels at the power of the nun’s love – as expressed through her demeanor toward the patients – “to reveal the full humanity of those whose affliction had made their humanity invisible” (A Common Humanity: Thinking about

Moral Absolutes  257 Love and Truth and Justice [New York: Routledge, 1998], 20). Gaita does not think that this revelation depends upon sharing the nun’s religious views, though he does think that only someone who is religious “can speak seriously of the sacred,” and so he says that the non-religious person will instead have to say something like: “all human beings are inestimably precious” (23). However, I don’t see why a non-religious person can’t also speak seriously of the sacred since this language can be used to describe that which is experienced as reverence-worthy, irreplaceable, and inviolable, or as Gaita puts it, “a unique kind of limit to our will” (24). 36. Anscombe, “Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia,” 270. 37. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 5–11; “Ethics and Onto­ logy,” The Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 6 (2003): 305–20. 38. For more on this general issue, see ch. 4 of David McPherson, Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 39. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 21. 40. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85. 41. Ibid., 93. 42. See David McPherson, “Traditional Morality and Sacred Values,” Analyse & Kritik 39, no. 1 (2017): 41–62. 43. Lovibond, “Absolute Prohibitions Without Divine Promises,” 157–58. 44. Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 90. 45. David Wiggins, “Categorical Requirements: Kant and Hume on the Idea of Duty,” in Virtues and Reasons, eds. Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 310; see also David Wiggins, Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 135, 234–35. 46. Hampshire, Morality and Conflict, 89. 47. The phrase “indefinable influence” is Simone Weil’s. She characterizes it as follows: “Anybody who is in our vicinity exercises a certain power over us by his very presence, and a power not exercised by him alone, that is the power of halting, repressing, modifying each movement that our body sketches out. If we step aside for a passer-by on the road, it is not the same thing as stepping aside to avoid a bill-board” (quoted in Wiggins, Ethics, 243). 48. Wiggins, Ethics, 246–47. 49. Ibid., 248. 50. David Wiggins, “Solidarity and the Root of the Ethical,” in The Lindley Lecture (The University of Kansas, 2008), 18, accessed, https://kuscholarworks. ku.edu/handle/1808/12420. 51. In regard to the phrase “coming out against one’s fellows,” see n. 17. 52. This chapter draws from parts of Chapters 1, 3, and 4 of my book Virtue and Meaning. I am grateful for the permission to use this material here.

Bibliography Anscombe, G. E. M. Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume III. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

258  David McPherson ———. Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe. Edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally. Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2005. ———. Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G. E. M. Anscombe. Edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally. Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2008. Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica. 5 vols. Translted by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1948 [1266–1273]. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999 [ca. 325 BC]. Diamond, Cora. “The Importance of Being Human.” In Human Beings, edited by David Cockburn, 35–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. “The Problem of Impiety.” In Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches, edited by David McPherson, 29–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Foot, Philippa. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. ———. Moral Dilemmas: And Other Topics in Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Gaita, Raimond. A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice. New York: Routledge, 1998. ———. Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004 [1991]. Geach, Peter. God and the Soul. London: Routledge, 1978. Hampshire, Stuart. Morality and Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Lovibond, Sabina. “Absolute Prohibitions without Divine Promises.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 54 (2004): 141–58. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court, 1999. ———. “On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture.” Proceedings of the ACPA 84 (2011): 23–32. McPherson, David. “Traditional Morality and Sacred Values.” Analyse & Kritik 39, no. 1 (2017): 41–62. ———. Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Plato. Gorgias. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987 [ca. 380 BC]. Singer, Peter. Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ———. “Ethics and Ontology.” The Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 6 (2003): 305–20. Vogler, Candace. “In Defense of Moral Absolutes.” Villanova Law Review 57, no. 5 (2012): 893–906.

Moral Absolutes  259 ———. “Aristotle, Aquinas, Anscombe, and the New Virtue Ethics.” In Aquinas and the Nicomachean Ethics, edited by Tobias Hoffman, Jörn Müller, and Matthias Perkams, 239–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Wiggins, David. “Categorical Requirements: Kant and Hume on the Idea of Duty.” In Virtues and Reasons, edited by Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn, 297–330. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ———. “Solidarity and the Root of the Ethical.” In The Lindley Lecture, 3–25. The University of Kansas, 2008. Accessed. https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/ handle/1808/12420. Williams, Bernard. Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Epilogue On the Call From Outside Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami

On the Call From Outside (Jane Bennett) In Akeel Bilgrami’s contribution to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age,1 “enchantment” refers to the historical belief that God or his divine expression is accessible to the everyday world of “matter and nature and human community and perception.” Correspondingly, “disenchantment” refers to that shift in perspective (encouraged by early modern science and its mechanistic model of nature) by which God was exiled from nature. Bilgrami’s ultimate aim is to “reenchant” the secular age by affirming the “callings” of a world laden with “value elements.” I will say more below about this interesting notion of a call from outside and its role in ethics; let me point out now that the processes of “enchantment” and “disenchantment” are for Bilgrami, as for Charles Taylor, essentially shifts in theological orientation, different views of the relationship between God and nature. This, of course, is not the only way to understand enchantment and disenchantment, which could also be figured in the first instance as a mood or affect circulating between human bodies and the animal, vegetable, and mineral forces they encounter. This is the approach I took in The Enchantment of Modern Life (and developed in Vibrant Matter),2 where enchantment is associated with the feeling of being simultaneously fascinated and unnerved in the presence of something truly wild or Other. The point here is that enchantment is not so much a belief as it is an energetic current produced by the encounter between two sets of active materialities, one set congealed into a “self” and one into what is often called the “objects of experience” but is better described, I think, as a set of nonhuman “actants.” Following Bruno Latour,3 I say actants rather than objects in order to acknowledge the extent to which these external bodies are lively and active forces rather than passive or brute matter. These vibrant animals, plants, viruses, hurricanes, storms, pharmaceuticals, and other technological artifacts vie with, make demands upon, and impede and enable human agency. They make their presence known to us, or, to extend Bilgrami’s use of the term, make “calls” to which we are continually responding.

Epilogue  261 Bilgrami, too, seeks to displace the idea that the world is brute matter, but the ultimate source of its calling-capacity is for him cultural (and, as I will discuss later on, moral) to a more exclusive degree. “The point,” he writes, “is not that nature in some self-standing sense is to be understood as enchanted, but rather that the world, understood as nature in its relations with its inhabitants, and a tradition and history that grows out of these relations, comprises the external evaluative enchantment.” In contrast, the (nonmechanistic) materialism I endorse and invite Bilgrami to consider presents modernity as “enchanted” with multiple modes and degrees of material (and not only human or cultural) agency. Absorbing and alienating encounters with electronic, pathogenetic, bacteriological, climatological, and other forms of nonhuman agency abound today, and thus the mood of enchantment most definitely survives the demise of the (premodern, European, Christian) experience of nature as directly inscribed with divine purpose. There is thus no need (contra Bilgrami) to “re-enchant” the secular world, though there remains the task of becoming more sensitized to the enchantments, the callings, already at work. What, more explicitly, are the implications for ethics of the mood of enchantment? In the wake of Schiller’s critique of Kantian morality as too disembodied (echoed in Foucault’s work on ethical ascesis), I understand ethics as requiring both principled beliefs (and duties) and also a set of moods, sensibilities, and bodily comportments hospitable to carrying them out. My contention is that the intensity of the compound mood of enchantment (wonder/disturbance) could serve as one impetus to ethical action, insofar as it contributes the energy or motive force needed to render human bodies capable of jumping the gap between mere conviction that a course of action is good and the actual doing of the deed. What Spinoza called the “joyful” affects are needed to energize a body called upon – by habit, sympathy, or reason – to love, forgive, treat with compassion or minimized harm to (an ontologically diverse range of) others. In short, I  think that, under the right circumstances, the mood of enchantment, which entails the experience of the outside as making a call, can be an important part of ethics. Bilgrami, too, is interested in the ethical implications of enchantment. He begins with the intriguing claim that the call from outside serves as the very condition of possibility of human will and therefore agency: to desire to have or to do something is to experience that thing or activity as “desirable rather than as desired,” as, in other words, a response to an external call. What is more, the very experience of ourselves as moral subjects depends upon this experience of a world of outside objects: “in the very moment and act of perceiving values without, we also perceive ourselves within, as subjects rather than as objects. The experience of value without and agency within are not two different and independent experiences.” In short, “it is only because the world itself contains desirabilities (or values) that we perceive that our agency really gets triggered

262  Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami or activated. The very possibility of agency therefore assumes an evaluatively enchanted world.” Based as it is upon an assertion of the constitutive interdependence of the notions of subject and object, this argument makes good sense. But it also reveals the extent to which Bilgrami and I have different views of human agency  – what composes it, how it is activated and sustained. I think that human agency is best conceived as the effect of a perspicuous configuration of human and nonhuman forces. When humans act, they do not exercise exclusively human powers, but express and inflect the powers of a variety of “foreign” bodies internal to them, including bacteria in the human gut, heavy metals absorbed into flesh, words and sounds from human and nonhuman cultures, etc. There is a difference between these nonhuman actants and a human (compound) individual, but neither considered alone has real agency. The locus of agency is always a human–nonhuman collective. Bilgrami himself makes a gesture toward the distributive quality of agency in his notion of an external calling from tradition and history, two complex assemblages formed by many different agents at work over different times and places. But these assemblages are not ones in which nonhumans qualify as real participants, though I imagine that Bilgrami would easily grant that climate, architecture, animals, vegetables, and minerals do serve as negative constraints or enabling contexts or environments for human action. Bilgrami steers clear of the kind of neo-animism I  court: recall that “the point is not that nature in some self-standing sense is to be understood as enchanted, but rather that the world, understood as nature in its relations with its inhabitants, and a tradition and history that grows out of these relations, comprises the external evaluative enchantment.” This claim understates, I think, the degree of exteriority or “independence” at work in the call: the call of culture, while surely not as parochial as the “sympathies and moral sentiments” with which Bilgrami contrasts it, is not all that external. Bilgrami hints at, but does not explore, the possibility of nonhuman agency. Another difference between us arises around the question of whether secular enchantment entails a world laden with “value.” Bilgrami clearly distinguishes his appeal to an external ethical source of value from Taylor’s position, which involves a transcendent source. I  share Bilgrami’s nontheism, but the raucous world of vibrant matter I envision is somewhat at odds with the idea of intrinsic moral value. My “enchanted” materialism does council presumptive efforts to align ourselves with the complex, open system-quality of the universe. But it seems also more attentive than Bilgrami is to the fact that an emergent and generative universe is not pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness, is not fully predictable, and does not necessarily tend toward equilibrium. Thus Bilgrami’s quest for “a life of harmony between the demands of an external source and our dispositional responses to its demands” seems not

Epilogue  263 quite right. A certain disharmony is built into the world at large and also into the mood of enchantment, which includes discomfort in the face of forms of material agency that one can neither master nor ignore. Thus it is that I find ethical utility in the experience of alienation, whereas Bilgrami seeks ways for secular moderns to live an “unalienated life.” To summarize, then: Bilgrami figures the outside as a supra-individual field of human language, norms, customs  – as, in short, a culture that precedes and exceeds us, and I conceive of the outside and its callings and threats as having a less exclusively human provenance, as the expression of material agency or what I’ve elsewhere described as “thing-power.” For me, these calls are what we actually can hear of the clamor of swarms of vibrant materialities, of technological and natural bodies in possession of what Spinoza described as the power to affect and be affected. I agree with Bilgrami that secular modernity is not a world of brute matter, that it is quite possible to speak of external calls without invoking or implying a transcendent, creator-God, and that learning how to discern, acknowledge, and appreciate such calls is an important part of ethics. But we have different understandings of what the call is and does.

Understanding Disenchantment (Akeel Bilgrami) Jane Bennett’s sympathetic yet critical commentary on my essay “What Is Enchantment?” describes the notion of disenchantment that I present as primarily addressing the theological displacements that emerged with the rise of the new science. Her own work, she says, offers a quite different focus, one of a mood or affect that “circulates between human bodies and the animal, vegetable, and mineral forces they encounter.” I don’t doubt that this interesting focus is quite different from mine, though I think it would be wrong to represent my view as being focused on the theological. In my analysis, the theological had only a central genealogical role to play in the process of “disenchantment.” But, I had argued that the fallout of the theological – once the theological transformations were exploited in alliances forged between established religious interests, commercial interests, and the mandarin interests of organized scientific bodies (such as the Royal Society) – was impressively diverse, ranging from transformations in political economy to political governance and, further yet, to the mentalities of human culture in its relation to the natural world. So the focus, if any, on the theological was intended wholly to emphasize that, unlike purely materialist accounts, I was following more refined Marxists like Christopher Hill, who had written of the importance of the conflict of religious ideas in shaping the period of history in which I had invested my genealogical efforts. I may have misled Bennett with the remark she quotes in her comment: “The point is not that nature in some self-standing sense is to be understood as enchanted, but rather that the world, understood as nature in its

264  Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami relations with its inhabitants, and a tradition and history that grows out of these relations, comprises the external evaluative enchantment.” One theme in my essay was to ask the question: “When and how did we transform the concept of nature into the concept of natural resources?” But, having raised the question, I had worried that it may seem to some that my interest in raising it was a narrow, ecological one. Because I didn’t want to ghettoize the question of nature into just this narrow self-standing concern, I  wanted it to relate the “natural” with larger issues of politics, history and culture, and the quoted remark was only intended to convey that broader interest. The idea was not to deny – indeed, it was to assert – that material nature was suffused with value properties that made normative and affective demands on one. It’s just that nature was not to be seen as merely the value-laden material elements among the “actants” that Bennett describes, but also the relations between the actants and human actors and a tradition and history of those relations. The idea was never to say that the latter in some way canceled the possibility of the former. I think if there is disagreement between us, it is not about the relevance of the material elements and their normative status but about whether the fact of this circulatory mood that she describes as central to her idea of enchantment can support her claim that there was no loss of enchantment in the modern period. She says: “There is thus no need (contra Bilgrami) to ‘re-enchant’ the secular world, though there remains the task of becoming more sensitized to the enchantments, the callings, already at work.” But, in my view, there can be no understanding of the fact of our having become desensitized to enchantments without conceding what she doesn’t want to concede to me, which is that the world is viewed by us in ways that are properly described as disenchanted in just the way I had expounded. Disenchantment, in my understanding of that process, was a result (a fallout, as I  said above) of our having (among other things) overintellectualized our relations to the world (including nature) as a result of having come to see it in a certain way: as not containing the properties that would make normative demands on us. Because of theological changes that led to viewing the world (including nature) as desacralized, one fundamental source of seeing the world as containing the value properties (good or bad, hostile or benign) that make normative demands on us was removed from our conception of the world. And this played a central role in seeing the world as alien to our sensibilities of practical engagement, something which became for us something either to be studied in a detached way or, when practically engaged with, to be engaged with as something alien, to be mastered, conquered, and controlled for our utility and gain, as in the extractive economies that were systematically generated first in that period. I’ve italicized “conception” and “for us” in order to make clear that disenchantment cannot be understood as a process without understanding

Epilogue  265 the desensitization that Bennett opposes when she says she wants us to be more “sensitized.” She can’t have what she wants here without also opposing  “disenchantment,” as I  understand the term and, therefore, equally proposing “reenchantment,” as I understand the term. I would diagnose this misunderstanding of “disenchantment” on her part as perhaps reflecting a rather deep philosophical disagreement between us on how to conceive of nature and matter, when we conceive of it in the non-mechanized way that we both wish to do. My stress on “conception” and “for us” are meant to convey something like the following conception of nature and matter. When one views nature and matter as not merely mechanized, as not merely something that we study in the natural sciences, i.e., with relative detachment, one views it as essentially containing properties that can’t be understood correctly unless one sees our capacity for responsiveness to them with our practical agency (that is what the “for us” was doing in my use of it above, stressing the relevance of this responsiveness) as built-into the kind of properties they are. They are not properties that are anyway there, independent of the kind of sensibility (our sensibility for practical normative engagement) that we, as agents, have. This does not mean that we mentally construct and project these properties onto the world, which in itself is brutely material (in the sense that “mechanized” is supposed to convey). It is a non sequitur to say that, just because a certain property (value properties) in the world can only be viewed by a certain kind of sensibility (the one that subjects or creatures possessed of a certain self-conscious agency possess), the subjects who possess that sensibility must be constructing these properties and projecting them onto the world. That is what Hume and others influenced by him think to this day, and they were first systematically encouraged to do so by the transformations that I was calling “disenchantment” that began in the late seventeenth century. In my view, the properties are really properties of nature and matter, they are not constructed by us. But they are properties in some sense “for us,” since those who do not possess the kind of self-conscious agency that is moved by normative demands would see darkness in the world where we might see it as containing values making those normative demands. If her “actants” are not conceived this way, then what she means by “actants” is not what I would have meant by them, had I used that word. In fact, I would have thought one has not gotten past mechanization, if one didn’t think of nature and matter as containing properties of the kind I am suggesting, over and above the properties studied by natural science. Thus, when Bennett says we should be more sensitized to the participatory role of material “actants” (that is, to what I, in my terminology, call the normative demands of the value properties in nature and matter), she is precisely saying what I, in my terminology, mean when I say that our angle on the world should be less detached and more responsive to its normative demands. But this predominance of detachment was exactly

266  Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami what was generated by the process of disenchantment, as I understand that process. Hence, there is no avoiding “reenchantment” if ‘sensitization’ is what you seek. There may also be something to sort out between us (a possible disagreement, I  mean) on the subject of agency, though I  rather think it may be more verbal than substantial. Bennett says: “There is a difference between these nonhuman actants and a human (compound) individual, but neither considered alone has real agency. The locus of agency is always a human–nonhuman collective. Bilgrami himself makes a gesture toward the distributive quality of agency in his notion of an external calling from tradition and history, two complex assemblages formed by many different agents at work over different times and places. But these assemblages are not ones in which nonhumans qualify as real participants.” I am going to put aside what I  have already clarified, viz., I  am not emphasizing history and tradition with a view to denying that material and non-human elements of nature can make normative demands on us. Nor do I  want to deny that there may be collective and distributed agency of various sorts. So, I  don’t think that is the issue between us either, if there is one at all. I gave an argument in my essay for saying that we wouldn’t be agents if there were not such things as “actants,” as I would use that term. In other words, we would not be agents if there were not normative demands being made on our agency by value properties in matter and nature, that is, value properties in the world that we inhabit. And when I say that these value properties and actants make demands on us, I suppose that I  am asserting that they are “real participants,” to use her expression. But there are ways to be “participants” in “assemblages” (these are all her and Latour’s terms, not mine, but I am using them in a way that I find plausible, which may not be what is intended by them) without possessing the kind of self-conscious agency we possess. I would deny that value properties in nature and matter that make normative demands on us are themselves agents in this self-conscious sense. So their demands on us are not intentional demands. They do not intend to make those demands since they don’t have any intentions. She might even grant this and say that intentional agency of a kind that implies the capacity for self-consciousness of the sort we possess, is not the only kind of agency that there is. I would have no objection to that, so long as one keeps different uses of the word agency apart and makes clear which one is in play. But, in the passage I have just cited, Bennett denies that we (human beings) have “real” agency. Well, in that case, she and I must mean different things by agency. And it is not credible to me that she is denying that we possess something that has been called “agency” for centuries by philosophers, and not just philosophers. So she must be stipulating a use of the term agency (let’s use her term for it, “real agency”) that is different from this. It is supposed

Epilogue  267 to be something that has a more distributed locus than being located in either us, human actors, or in non-human “actants.” I think the interest of that stipulated use of the word agent (“real agent”) would depend on what systematic philosophical use it was put to. Bennett, in a short blog, doesn’t say enough for me to assess that. But, however that assessment may turn out, what we would be assessing can’t be something that stands in disagreement with me – if disagreement means that she says something that I deny or vice versa. I have not said that no one can find any form of agency in the world other than of the sort that I am discussing with the term agency. And since it is not credible that she is denying that there is something of the sort I mean by the term agency, which human beings possess but pharmaceuticals or bacteria (to take just two examples of the “actants” that “participate” in her “assemblages”) don’t possess, we can resolve all these issues amicably in the word, by disambiguating the term agency in these ways. The disambiguation, it would appear, goes three ways. There is the kind of agency we possess. There is the kind of agency that “actants” possess. (If we see them, as I do with my metaphor, as “making normative demands” on us, or if we see them, as Bennett does, as “participants,” I suppose they must be allowed some “agency,” even if not ours). And then there is the distributed agency that Bennett calls “real agency,” which is neither of the above. I look forward to reading her book, which, judging from the hints given in this blog, brings the third of these to center-stage. But with this disambiguation in place, I cannot see that I have to withdraw anything I said on the basis of anything that is allowed in allowing this third notion of agency. One final point of what seems like a more substantial disagreement. Bennett ends her blog with the following comment on my notion of enchantment: But it [her idea of enchantment] seems also more attentive than Bilgrami is to the fact that an emergent and generative universe is not pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness, is not fully predictable, and does not necessarily tend toward equilibrium. Thus Bilgrami’s quest for “a life of harmony between the demands of an external source and our dispositional responses to its demands” seems not quite right. A certain disharmony is built into the world at large and also into the mood of enchantment, which includes discomfort in the face of forms of material agency that one can neither master nor ignore. Thus it is that I find ethical utility in the experience of alienation, whereas Bilgrami seeks ways for secular moderns to live an “unalienated life.” I think this is a rather basic misunderstanding of my view. Indeed I think there is a straightforward and unnoticed double movement with which

268  Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami the words “harmony” and “unalienated” are used in this passage that leads directly to this misunderstanding. There is one sense or use of the term harmony in which I was not suggesting that a world that was enchanted would induce an unalienated or harmonious life within it. Suppose we saw the world as enchanted, in my sense of the term. To do so is to see it as, not merely mechanized, but containing value properties that make normative demands on us. Let’s work with a simple example, simpler than the ones that involve her more complicated “actants,” though nothing that I  will have to say is such that it can’t be extended to more complicated examples. Let’s say that there is a meteorological perturbation off the coast of Bangladesh. Now, if there is to be enchantment of the sort I have in mind, that fragment of the world (nature, matter) is to be described, not just in that detached way (“meteorological perturbation”), as natural science would, but also as a fragment of the world which contains a “threat.” Threats are value properties in nature. They are not constructions of our vulnerability, which are then projected onto nature, as the disenchanted worldview would have it. But even though they are in nature, the natural sciences don’t study threats. Threats make normative demands on our practical agency, not demands for detached explanatory study, as meteorological perturbations do. Notice, however, that this particular value property off the coast of Bangladesh is certainly not harmony-inducing (in this first sense or use of the term, “harmony”) to the Bangladeshi fisherman living in a thatched dwelling on the coast, seeing it come in his direction. It is a threat, after all. It is, if you like, just what Bennett describes with her term “hostile.” It is a hostile part of the enchanted world. So, no harmony in one sense or use of the word “harmony,” despite enchantment. Even so, it might be that that value property in that fragment of the world makes a normative demand, let’s say on the municipality of that Bangladeshi locality to do one or another thing to remove the threat to the fisherman and his hut. If there were a suitable agentive responsiveness on the part of those on whom the normative demand was made, that would be a small and, as I said, very simple example of human agency being in sync with the normative demands of appropriate properties of matter and nature. When there is such responsiveness to such demands, there is “harmony” in a second, quite different sense and use of the word than the sense I mentioned above. And this harmony is a harmony between human agency and non-human properties of matter and nature. It seems apparent, then, that there need not be any disagreement between Bennett and me on any of this. I have accommodated what she means by hostility and disharmony in the relations in her “assemblages,” and I have shown how it is quite compatible with what I had in mind by talking of harmony generated by seeing the world as containing value properties (threats over and above meteorological perturbations) and our suitable agentive responses to them. All we need to do is avoid a

Epilogue  269 conflation of two different uses of words like harmony and alienation. Let there be all the hostility and disharmony she finds in these relations. It does nothing whatsoever to register disagreement with my points about a quite different notion of an unalienated life. My notion of alienation is, if I  understand her views, probably very close to a state of affairs that results from a too great “desensitization” to the elements of enchantment that she finds in the world. By this criterion of what is and is not alienated, one partly (though not wholly) overcomes alienation by even so much as recognizing (becoming “sensitized” to) the enchanted elements in the material environment, including what she describes as the “hostile” elements. To move from this partial to a more complete overcoming of alienation would require being responsive with our agency in the way I was describing above to the normative demands of the enchanted elements, including the hostile ones. The value properties in an enchanted world, as I said earlier, are defined upon our capacity to recognize them, but they are not defined upon our actually recognizing them and certainly not defined upon our being responsive to their normative demands in our practical agency. So she is very wide of the mark when she describes my view as being committed to something “predesigned to ensure human justice or happiness.” I dare say, it is no more pre-designed to do so than her notion of enchantment. She is right, however, to point out that I do stress the moral, perhaps measurably more than she does. That is already evident in the fact that my rhetoric is the rhetoric of value-properties (some of which are bound to include normative moral demands on us) whereas her rhetoric is restricted to talk of circulating “moods and affects.” My view derives from an Aristotelian picture of morals (if some recent interpretations of Aristotle, owing to John McDowell, are correct in their interpretations), where values in the world prompt our moral agency, rather than moral agency emanating entirely from a self-standing psychology, as in Hume and the very widespread Humean legacy of contemporary Ethics, which sees the world beyond our subjectivity as evacuated of anything that is not within the purview of natural science. It looks to me as if Bennett has no interest in seeing enchantment as, in this way, being part a wider metaphysics in which the metaphysics of morals is one embedded element. I detect only phenomena such as mood, affect, and the political implications of seeing enchantment along those lines, in what she has to say. I can’t myself see a way to a politics that flows from questions of enchantment without also seeing morals as flowing from it. Politics, in my view, can’t be in an orbit entirely of its own, independent of considerations of moral and other values. There is nothing moralistic in claiming this. It is not as if, in saying that the politics generated by recognizing such things as “actants” must be related to the normative moral demands that those things make on us, one is identifying the “politics of things” with those normative moral demands. Still, relating them together may put

270  Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami some theoretical constraints on how we are to understand the “politics of things.” I don’t know if Bennett would want to impose such constraints on the politics she would want to embed in a notion of enchantment. Her rhetoric in general and her criticism of me in particular (the criticism that, unlike her, I stress the moral) doesn’t make it obvious how she would permit such a constraint. But I say all this with some hesitation. I would need to read more of her work in detail to be able to say anything more confidently.

Notes 1. Akeel Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, eds. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 145–65. 2. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2001; Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press), 2010. 3. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Bibliography Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bilgrami, Akeel. “What is Enchantment?” In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, 145–65. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Contributors

Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University (US). She is one of the founders of the journal Theory & Event and edited the journal Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy from 2012–2017. Professor Bennett has published widely on enchantment from the perspective of political theory, her main field of research (especially ecological philosophy, American political thought, political rhetoric and persuasion, and contemporary social theory). She is the author of Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment (New York UP 1987), Thoreau’s Nature (Rowman Littlefield 1994), The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton UP 2001), and Vibrant Matter (Duke UP 2010). Akeel Bilgrami is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University (US). He is currently Executive Editor and President of the Board of Trustees of The Journal of Philosophy and the author of Belief and Meaning (Blackwell 1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard UP 2006), Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Harvard UP 2014), and Beyond the Secular West (Columbia UP 2016). He has published widely on the philosophy of mind and language, political philosophy, metaethics, and moral psychology, especially as they surface in politics, political economy, history, and culture, as well as on a range of issues from questions of enchantment and identity to the effects of globalization on politics and political thought. Sophie-Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University (UK) and Leverhulme Major Research Fellow 2017–2020. She has published over a hundred articles on ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Her books include Understanding Human Goods (Edinburgh UP 2003), Ethics and Experience (Acumen 2009), and Knowing What to Do (Oxford UP 2014). She has also edited or co-edited five collections of essays in

272  Contributors ethics. Her main current research is about epiphanies, immediate and revelatory encounters with value, and their place in our experience and our philosophical ethics. Rob Compaijen is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Protestant Theological University (The Netherlands). His research focuses on ethical reflection, theory of value, reflective equilibrium, and virtue ethics. He is the author of Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, Williams, and the Internal Point of View (Palgrave MacMillan 2018) and has published in International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Ethical Perspectives, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, and Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook. Paolo Costa is Researcher at the Centre for Religious Studies of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, University of Trento (Italy). His previous publications include the essays “A Secular Wonder” (2011), “The One and the Many Stories: How to Reconcile Sense-Making and Fact-Checking in the Secularization Narrative” (2018), and the book La città postsecolare (Brescia: Queriniana, 2019), a reconstruction of the recent secularization debate. John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Reading University, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Roehampton University, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College Oxford (all UK). His books on moral philosophy and philosophy of religion include Philosophy and the Good Life (Cambridge UP 1998), On the Meaning of Life (Routledge 2003), The Spiritual Dimension (Cambridge UP 2005), Why Believe? (Continuum 2009), Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge UP 2014), and How To Believe (Bloomsbury 2015). Herbert De Vriese is Assistant Professor at the Center for European Philosophy of the University of Antwerp (Belgium). His work focuses on secularization, critique of religion, and disenchantment in general, and the role of philosophical theory and critique in historical and sociological debates on (the end of) classical secularization theory, postsecularism, and classical narratives of disenchantment in particular. He is co-editor of Rethinking Secularization: Philosophy and the Prophecy of a Secular Age (Cambridge Scholars 2009) and has published in Inquiry, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, History of European Ideas, History of Economic Thought, and International Journal of Philosophy and Theology. Fiona Ellis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Roehampton (UK), and Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Religion. Her most recent monograph is God, Value, and Nature (Oxford UP 2014), and

Contributors  273 she has published on a variety of subjects, including the philosophy of love and desire, the meaning of life, and the nature of religious understanding. Her edited collection of essays – New Models of ­ ­Religious Understanding – was published by Oxford UP in 2017, and she is co-editing (with Clare Carlisle) a special edition of the journal Religious Studies on “Religious Experience and Desire” (September 2019). She is working on a new monograph entitled The End of Desire: Meaning, Nihilism, and God. David McPherson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University (US). His research focuses on ethics (theoretical and applied), social and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion, and has appeared in journals such as Philosophy, Religious Studies: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, and International Philosophical Quarterly. He is the editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge UP 2017) and the author of Virtue and Meaning: A  Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge UP, 2020). He is President of Philosophers in Jesuit Education. Michiel Meijer is Postdoctoral Researcher of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He is the author of Charles Taylor’s Doctrine of Strong Evaluation (Rowman & Littlefield 2018) and has published widely on subjects such as moral value, human agency, moral epistemology, moral ontology, moral phenomenology, and moral psychology in the fields of metaethics, normative ethics, and social theory. He is co-editing (with Mark Timmons) a special issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice on the topic of moral phenomenology (planned for January  2021). He is working on a new monograph entitled Realism without Reification: The Humane Model of Moral Understanding. Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University (Canada). He has been awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize, the 2008 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, and the 2016 Berggruen Prize. Professor Taylor has published widely in the areas of moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of action, philosophy of personal identity, philosophy of language, philosophy of the human sciences, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, and secularization. Among the most influential of Taylor’s books are The Explanation of Behaviour (Routledge  & Kegan Paul 1964), Philosophical Papers (2 vols. Cambridge UP 1985); Sources of the Self (Harvard UP 1989), and A Secular Age (Belknap Press of Harvard UP 2007).

274  Contributors Guido Vanheeswijck is Full Professor at the Department of Philosophy of University Antwerp and part-time Professor at The Institute of Philosophy of Catholic University Louvain (both Belgium). He has published widely on metaphysics, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of religion and is co-editor of Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (De Gruyter 2018).

Index

absolute prohibitions: and Anscombe’s critique of consequentialism 241 – 6; and divine law 244 – 6; and the sacred 246 – 53 Anscombe, Elizabeth 239 – 44, 246 – 9, 252 Bekker, Balthasar 107 – 8, 110, 123n21 Bennett, Jane 1, 5, 11 – 12, 73, 100, 148, 263 – 70 Bilgrami, Akeel 5 – 6, 8, 9 – 11, 31 – 2, 82, 93 – 7, 100, 207 – 8, 224 – 5, 260 – 3 buffered self 20, 82 – 3, 93 – 5 Catholicism 33, 42, 84, 88 – 9, 114 Christianity 6, 23 – 4, 27, 32, 35, 39, 48, 84 – 6, 88, 92, 96, 98 – 100, 110, 189, 241, 243, 247 Cottingham, John 5 – 6, 9 – 10, 96, 183, 188, 206 – 7, 210 – 11 Dawkins, Richard 69 Deus Absconditus 57 – 8, 85, 92, 96, 98 disenchanting disenchantment 4, 81, 102n27, 135 – 7 disenchantment: and anti-realism in ethics 167; and atheism 86; and attention 9; and Balthasar Bekker 107 – 8; as bleaching out 45 – 8; contemporary sense of 1 – 3, 12, 69 – 72; critiques of 87 – 91; as de-magicking 38 – 42; and detachment 9, 222 – 5; different meanings of 17 – 19, 105 – 6, 82 – 3; and disillusionment 134 – 5; the experience of 220 – 2; as flattening 43 – 5; and Friedrich Schiller 108 – 10; and magic 2, 5, 17 – 18, 38 – 40, 43 – 8, 55, 82 – 3, 85, 92, 105,

113 – 16, 139, 180, 182; and Max Weber 1 – 7, 17 – 18, 38, 48, 54 – 7, 59, 81, 84 – 5, 105 – 6, 110 – 16, 136 – 40, 179, 181, 195; and neoAristotelian virtue ethics 240 – 4; and non-naturalist robust realism 205; and religious unmusicality 143 – 8; and secularization 38 – 9, 54 – 9, 64, 86, 90 – 1, 96, 105, 119, 120 – 1n2, 136 – 7, 178, 260; and strong evaluation 20 – 1; and theism/religion 18, 39 – 41, 44, 58, 83 – 91, 105, 110, 114, 116, 136 – 9, 145, 239 divine 8, 10, 41, 48, 56 – 7, 84 – 6, 88 – 9, 92, 183, 245, 248, 251, 260 – 1 Dreyfus, Hubert 29 – 30 enchantment: and atheism 185 – 6; and the Bennett-Bilgrami debate 11, 73 – 4, 260 – 70; different meanings of 17 – 19, 59 – 69, 82 – 3, 93 – 5; divine form of 185 – 8; the experience of 132 – 4; and the functional differentiation thesis 116 – 17; and God 185 – 94; and naturalism 178, 185 – 6; and nature 8, 54 – 9, 178 – 94; and philosophy of perception 167 – 76; and political philosophy 161 – 5; and realism 165 – 7; and religion 5 – 6, 8, 178 – 94; secular conceptions of 6, 8, 32, 42, 45, 59 – 69, 178 – 85; and the theism/atheism dichotomy 4 – 5; and theism/religion 39, 55 – 6, 96, 83, 185 – 6 Evans, Gareth 66 – 7, 94 Gauchet, Marcel 82, 85 – 6, 89, 91 Graham, Gordon 117 – 19

276 Index Habermas, Jürgen 21, 28, 138, 144 Hawking, Stephen 41 Heidegger, Martin 24 – 5, 27 hermeneutics 9, 22, 25 – 6, 28 – 9, 75 – 6n9 Honneth, Axel 9, 201 – 2, 204 Hume, Humean 35, 45, 58, 137, 166 – 7, 174, 265, 269 Joas, Hans 7, 18, 81 – 2, 90 – 1, 102n27, 111 – 12, 136 – 40 Kant, Kantian 21 – 3, 34 – 5, 58, 61, 107, 109, 162, 226, 261 Korsgaard, Christine 21 – 2 Latour, Bruno 73, 100, 260 Mandelbaum, Maurice 196 McDowell, John 3, 8, 31 – 2, 48 – 9, 58, 75n8, 178 – 9, 182 – 3, 185 – 7, 206 – 7, 209, 211, 214n4, 228, 269 moral absolutes see absolute prohibitions Murdoch, Iris 9, 23, 27, 49 – 50, 147, 186 – 7, 189, 221, 228 – 34 Nagel, Thomas 222 – 4, 228, 250 naturalism 2 – 3, 60, 197; Charles Taylor’s critique of 27, 30; and McDowell 48, 178, 185 – 6 neo-Aristotelian ethical 10, 240, 254n8 Nietzsche, Nietzschean 8, 57, 91, 138, 182 – 6, 188 – 90 porous self 83, 88, 93, 101n8, 127n72 Protestantism 84 – 5, 87 – 90; and Weber’s The Protestant Ethic 110 – 16 Rawls, John 8, 21, 162 – 5 realism: enchanted realism 8, 165 – 7; moral realism 22 – 3, 75n8, 167 – 76, 189; non-naturalist robust realism 9 – 10, 197 – 201, 203 – 5, 208 – 13; pluralistic robust realism 29 – 30 reenchantment: and atheism 3, 5, 33; and attention 228 – 34; and detached engagement 225 – 8; the discourse on 106; Gordon Graham’s approach

to 116 – 20; and humane philosophy 205 – 13; modern forms of 141 – 3; and moral experience 196 – 8; and non-naturalist robust realism 30, 198 – 201, 203 – 5, 208 – 13; and objective value 47 – 8, 196 – 8, 240; the philosophy of 1 – 14; and reification 201 – 5; and resonance 148 – 52; secular conceptions of 31, 48 – 50, 93 – 5, 179; and secularization 33, 261; and strong evaluation 20 – 6, 149; and theism/ religion 3 – 6, 8 – 10, 17, 23 – 4, 27, 32 – 5, 40, 42, 45, 49 – 50, 117 – 19, 249; and transcendence 95 – 101 Reformation 18, 84, 87 – 90, 92 reification 9, 195, 201 – 5, 208, 212 resonance 4, 7, 22, 132, 145, 148 – 52 Ricoeur, Paul 25 Rilke, Rainer Maria 24 – 5, 27, 47 Rosa, Hartmut 7, 148 – 52 sacred 4, 10, 17, 33, 56 – 8, 69, 83, 88 – 9, 91, 95 – 6, 100, 137 – 40, 142, 144, 146, 240 – 3, 246 – 52 Schiller, Friedrich 107, 109 – 10, 179, 182, 261 Schutz, Alfred 7, 134 Scribner, Robert 82, 87 – 90 strong evaluation 4 – 5, 17, 20 – 7, 29, 32, 93 – 4, 148 – 9, 208 supernatural 2 – 3, 38 – 41, 55 – 6, 65, 68 – 9, 85, 88, 95, 105, 115, 152 Taylor, Charles 4 – 6, 9 – 12, 81 – 2, 85 – 7, 89, 90, 92 – 100, 127n72, 203, 208, 211 – 12, 260 theology 40, 55, 88 – 9, 184, 186, 210, 260, 263 – 4 transcendence 2, 4, 6, 56, 82, 85, 91, 95 – 101, 186, 262 – 3 Walsham, Alexandra 2, 82, 87 – 90 Weber, Max: and disenchantment 1 – 7, 17 – 18, 38, 48, 54 – 7, 59, 81, 84 – 5, 105 – 6, 110 – 16, 136 – 40, 179, 181, 195; Hans Joas’ critique of 111 – 12, 136 – 40; and The Protestant Ethic 84, 98, 110 – 16 Williams, Bernard 28, 49, 197, 249 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 43 – 4, 61, 69