Disenchantment, Re‐enchantment, and Enchantment

Abstract

said, famously, that the modern world is disenchanted. A number of recent writers have said, by contrast, that postmodernism and some developments like New Age religion are re-enchanting the world. My purpose in this article is to put Weber and these writers alongside each other, but then to undercut the discussion by suggesting a third possibility: that the world may still be enchanted, for those who have eyes to see, and who have kept fresh the responses of wonder, reverence, and delight. Perhaps it never was really disenchanted! Here I shall draw on the work of the poet and artist David Jones, as well as on that of some more recent theologians who are arguing for a close connection between aesthetics and religion, and suggest that their work depends on a wider sense of sacramentality, and one very different from Weber's understanding of that concept. Max Weber on Disenchantmentm oth_1533 369..386It needs to be noted straightaway that the English term "disenchantment" is a poor translation of the German "Entzauberung": the latter (which is not original to Weber, for Wieland had used it earlier and Schiller had used the cognate verb entzaubern) means something like "losing its magic". In English it is primarily people who become disenchanted, somewhat like being disillusioned, whereas Weber is describing the world as having lost some of its allure and coming to seem lifeless in certain ways. As Francois-A. Isambert notes, the poetic force of the term has popularized it, while concealing its original sense and so giving the misleading impression that Weber was nostalgic for the old Patrick Sherry Lancaster University, Religious Studies Department, Lancaster LA1 4YG, Lancashire, UK P.Sherry@Lancaster.ac.uk Modern Theology Re-enchantmentThus most recent writers reject Weber's attitude to the putative modern disenchantment of the world (though they may agree with some of what he Disenchantment, and Enchantment 373

Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and the Re‐enchantment of the World

“…Max Weber proposed disenchantment as an expression of the modern condition that has proceeded from a process of rationalization, where, “One could in principle master everything through calculation. But that means the disenchantment of the world” (Weber ; Sherry , 370). An alternative translation of Weber's concept is “losing its magic,” that is, a demagicification, with its early origins in religious concerns that delegitimized practices involving spirits and forces as blasphemous magical rituals.…”

“…Taylor notes that the presence of either of these features makes atheism untenable, whereas Weber dismissed the return of religion since this would involve a “sacrifice of the intellect” and thus equated disenchantment with the end of religion. However, numerous writers since Weber have argued that the world was never fully disenchanted (Sherry ) and the narrative behind the concept of disenchantment itself has been re‐examined multiple times.…”

Re-Enchanting the Human in an Era of Naturalism

“…See also Patrick Sherry, “Disenchantment, Re-enchantment, and Enchantment”, Modern Theology 25, no. 3 (2009): 369–86. In this article, by employing the term, ‘re-enchantment’, I mainly agree with Weber and McGrath respectively that our view on the world, especially on the human, is secularized, or naturalized in my own term, and that one needs to propose a religious perspective in order to retrieve to see the human as the holistic being rather than the mechanical one.…”