A MUSING ON ENCHANTMENT
We live in and for those things that captivate us and for people, causes, and goals we endow with special meaning.
We are all sustained and inspired through life by our interests. Some ideas, preoccupations, and pursuits engage us and others don't. Some we assess as important and worthy of the investment of our time and energies, while we ignore the vast pool of possibilities that transpire around us and never capture our attention. The pursuits that grab us serve to mold our characters and our lives. Interests, so understood, are a product of our conscious thoughts, propelled and warmed by our emotions.
Let me start with epistemology 101. If I see Mary before me, am I apprehending Mary as she truly is? Or, is my understanding of Mary somewhere in between what and who Mary is in and of herself and what my mind actively imposes upon my perception of Mary? Or, when I encounter Mary, am I just having a conversation with myself alone?
I opt for number two. I believe there is an objective reality “out there.” But that reality is at least partially perspectival. I perceive the world out there, but it is shaped by my mental processes that actively make it recognizable and give it meaning. The Mary I see is not precisely the Mary whom you see.
The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was among the foremost thinkers who postulated that the mind is not a passive entity, a blank slate on which the data of the external world impose themselves. Rather, the mind is an active agent that impresses itself upon the world, and in so doing renders it understandable and meaningful to us. In short, the mind is an essential agent in interpreting, and thereby creating, reality. In this sense, reality as we experience it is partially objective and ineluctably subjective. This is not to deny the brute existence of a world beyond our subjective perceptions of it. The earth and stars existed well before human beings emerged to perceive them. It is rather to affirm the essential role that our minds play in making external reality known and intelligible to us. By further example, the objects and the world we perceive is not the same world that our dog or cat, with its canine or feline mind, perceives. Our understanding of external realities is, in great measure, the product of the meaning we impose upon them.
Kant's successors, among them romantic philosophers and artists, were fascinated by such notions of perception and carried forward the explanation into the question of how we know what we know. The British poet, William Wordsworth, in his nature poem, “Tintern Abbey,” captures this epistemic notion when he writes,
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create,
And what perceive;
It is my view that Wordsworth gets it right.
As noted, some things capture our interest and most don't. Our emotions play a pivotal role here. As the philosopher David Hume expounded, our reason, moral choices, and thoughts more broadly, would be sterile and would fail to move us unless they were enveloped in, and fueled by, our emotions. And within the spectrum of emotions, some are warm and move us greatly, as William James noted, and some are cold and barely affect us.
I would like to add a third element to the psychology of what interests move us, which I would refer to as “enchantment.”
In short, we greatly live in our enchantments, - what we value, whom and how we love, those goals we choose to pursue – and we claim our defining beliefs as ours because they enchant.
What is enchantment? It takes us initially into the realm of religion. The twentieth-century historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, wrote extensively about religious consciousness. In his seminal work, The Sacred and Profane, he argued that ancient peoples, whom he referred to without disparagement, as “archaic,” experienced the world much differently than we do. They lived in a sacred reality occupied almost everywhere by spirits and the gods. Stones, rivers, mountains, trees, and much of nature were the habitats of spirits who dwelled within. This spiritual domain, the domain of the sacred, they felt was more real than entities that were remote from the gods. As such, the closer one lived to the spirits, and the gods, the closer one came to reality, and such proximity was a source of power. By contrast, the realm away from the gods was the profane world that partook of less reality. The sacred world, in both space and time, to the archaic mind was an enchanted world.
In contrast to the religious consciousness of archaic peoples is the modern world, which we can understand as profane or secular, and its predominant reality is experienced as such. The modern world we inhabit is characterized by a lack of such enchantment.
Indeed, the realm of the sacred in the modern world has shrunk into small and discrete enclaves. It is vestigial. Perhaps we find it almost exclusively within august cathedrals, in the sanctuaries of churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship. Contemporary religious believers may still enter into the sacred in the performance of religious rituals. By partaking in ritual and communing with the divine, they feel that they temporarily enter into a different and sacred reality. In Jewish ritual, for example, to say the requisite prayer over the bread or wine is to sacralize it, to make it holy. In other words, it is to set it apart from the secular world of use and exploitation. Other religions have their analogous rituals, the purpose being, again, to escape the secular and enter the sacred. But in the modern world, as noted, these are exceptional spaces and experiences set off from the overriding secularity in which we primarily live.
The German sociologist, Max Weber, famously wrote about the “disenchantment of the world.” It was disenchantment that was wrought by the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment, which created modernity, replaced the pervasive sacred consciousness of premodern people with the mindset that is fashioned by reason and analytical thinking, with science, and with the pursuit of objectivity, that distances the person from the world around her and him. It is the consciousness with which we are ordinarily familiar.
Needless to say, the modern world has brought us unspeakable gains in contrast to the lives of people of earlier ages. And it need not be said that we can only move forward. There can be no going back, nor would be want to. But it was Eliade's and Weber's contributions to note that with modernity and the dominance of secular consciousness, something has also been lost, something of which we are not mindful.
I apply the concept of enchantment not to historical analysis, but, as suggested, to the psychology of personal experience. If we love our work and find it meaningful, if we are committed to the pursuit of justice, if we value and esteem particular friends, I maintain that we do so not primarily because such interests are justified by reason, or because they are eminently practical, or are solely compelled by necessity. We do so because we feel they stand out from the humdrum of ordinary experiences and relations. They carry an aura of specialness that inspires us in ways that are uniquely pleasing. In short, they enchant us. And we remain committed to them as long as they do. It is enchantment in our goals, aspirations, and activities that inspires us and bathes our experiences with meaning and delight. It makes what we do feel important and worthy of our enduring commitment and energy.
But what occurs when we feel that our vocations or our work is no longer fulfilling or no longer achieving a larger purpose? What happens when it lapses into tedium or drudgery? What occurs when our friendships, which have been a source of great meaning, run dry and turn cold? The time sometimes comes when our outreaches to others and our love fail to bring love and caring attention in return, or even worse, we find ourselves abandoned or betrayed by those whom we greatly valued. What once filled our lives with the richness of experience is now empty. What occurs when those pursuits that animated our special interests, perhaps art, or music, or name what you will, grow flat? Those experiences and pursuits which once filled us up, for reasons known and unknown, have become deflated. They lose their interest and their zest. In short, the enchantment, which bathes our experience in an aura of meaning, interest, even excitement, is gone.
Taking the longer view, we need conclude that time changes things. Nothing endures forever, and the experiences we engage ebb and flow, as does the enchantment that animates them. When enchantment fades and discontent sets in, we have no choice but seek other sources of interest. We need to keep despair at bay, call upon our resources, and conclude that the darkness accompanied by loss can readily be followed by the dawn of new friendships, new adventures, and pursuits that bring us meaning and delight. We need to discover new sources of inspiration beyond the merely mundane and practical. And with requisite openness to the myriad opportunities life can provide, we often do.
Joe: I'm still a secular person who allows myself to be enchanted by your words.
Best regards, Fay
Reading this post Joe I remembered the laboring effort to read all of Charles Taylor's weighty book, A Secular Age. He agreed with Weber that post-Enlightenment rationality and worshipping science rather than the "spirits" lead to a secularizing and disenchantment in modernity. I get their point because believing all things around you have an spiritual energy makes one alert to what one experiences on walks, swimming, or running by each day. This is not religion of old. But my experience and that of many other secular people is that as you suggest we replace this readily with new meaning, like my Dodgers just set a franchise record for the most wins in a seasons and I wait with keen anticipation for the Baseball Playoffs not the Kingdom of God. I don't think the ball and bat of my teammates are endowed with special divinity but a home-run off the bat of Vlady Guerrero sends me into ecstatic enchantment until or if we lose the game. Modernity has replaced ancient mystical enchantment with mystical beliefs that our new tribal team can win it all and they sometimes do not disappoint. I find great meaning in not only my work as a Humanist Chaplain but as an avid sports fan and fly fisherman who honors life of all beings and release my catch along with feeling the awe of the stream in its rushing current. Enchantment is everywhere but with an updated narrative of cause and effect the spiritual has a different meaning but not less meaningful.