John Michael Greer is writing a series of essays on enchantment. He started a few months ago, publishing one essay for the series every month. The proximate thesis of the series is his disagreement with Max Weber's claim about the disenchantment of the world:
"In his 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that the disenchantment of the world—that is, a change in attitudes toward the world that stripped it of its spiritual and magical dimensions—was central to the rise of modern capitalist society, and was prefigured by certain important trends in Protestant Christianity. The idea of disenchantment as a basic theme of modernity became very popular in Weber’s time and remains popular today, because it reflects one of the common prejudices of our time: people in the past ignorantly believed in magic and religion, the claim goes, but we’re enlightened nowadays and know better."
His ultimate thesis, however, is deeper and is somewhat related to this series of yours. Roughly, the enchanted state corresponds to your temporals-skewed society, while the disenchanted state - to the spacials-skewed one.
"Over time, these personal relationships give way to more abstract and arbitrary interactions, personhood slowly bleeds out of the world, and in due time you end up in a situation where only human beings are considered persons.
Then the process continues, excluding more and more phenomena from personhood, until the vast bureaucratic systems that run every dying civilization erase the personhood of the population, and the ruling elites of society fall deeper and deeper into the habit of thinking of themselves as the only subjects in a world full of passive, meaningless objects. That’s where we are in the modern industrial world. What happens after that is the decay and disintegration of the society, as people outside the elite classes shrug and walk away from a system that no longer even makes a pretense of meeting their needs."
It may be that my original exposure to Weber was distorted by having been mediated through the Frankfurt School, and certainly Horkheimer has a very literal sense of spirit in his reading of disenchantment. I of course don't find anything like that compelling. But I concede it is possible, and may be true of Weber, that one can use "enchantment" as a foil for "enlightenment," with the understanding that these terms are code. Even then though it would be unnecessarily confusing code. I gravitate toward spatials/temporals precisely to avoid the confusion associated to left/right and liberal/conservative. I don't see any reason to further confuse matters. And if one, like Horkheimer, means it literally, that's simply outside my frame of reference.
Thanks for another of your always thought invoking comments.
Spatials vs temporals strikes me as a handy meta-framework that nicely subsumes the currently fashionable more specific dichotomies of virtuals vs physicals and anywheres vs somewheres 🙂
John Michael Greer is writing a series of essays on enchantment. He started a few months ago, publishing one essay for the series every month. The proximate thesis of the series is his disagreement with Max Weber's claim about the disenchantment of the world:
"In his 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that the disenchantment of the world—that is, a change in attitudes toward the world that stripped it of its spiritual and magical dimensions—was central to the rise of modern capitalist society, and was prefigured by certain important trends in Protestant Christianity. The idea of disenchantment as a basic theme of modernity became very popular in Weber’s time and remains popular today, because it reflects one of the common prejudices of our time: people in the past ignorantly believed in magic and religion, the claim goes, but we’re enlightened nowadays and know better."
His ultimate thesis, however, is deeper and is somewhat related to this series of yours. Roughly, the enchanted state corresponds to your temporals-skewed society, while the disenchanted state - to the spacials-skewed one.
Here is the quote from his last essay - https://www.ecosophia.net/stumbling-through-the-fog :
"Over time, these personal relationships give way to more abstract and arbitrary interactions, personhood slowly bleeds out of the world, and in due time you end up in a situation where only human beings are considered persons.
Then the process continues, excluding more and more phenomena from personhood, until the vast bureaucratic systems that run every dying civilization erase the personhood of the population, and the ruling elites of society fall deeper and deeper into the habit of thinking of themselves as the only subjects in a world full of passive, meaningless objects. That’s where we are in the modern industrial world. What happens after that is the decay and disintegration of the society, as people outside the elite classes shrug and walk away from a system that no longer even makes a pretense of meeting their needs."
Interesting. Thanks for the tip.
It may be that my original exposure to Weber was distorted by having been mediated through the Frankfurt School, and certainly Horkheimer has a very literal sense of spirit in his reading of disenchantment. I of course don't find anything like that compelling. But I concede it is possible, and may be true of Weber, that one can use "enchantment" as a foil for "enlightenment," with the understanding that these terms are code. Even then though it would be unnecessarily confusing code. I gravitate toward spatials/temporals precisely to avoid the confusion associated to left/right and liberal/conservative. I don't see any reason to further confuse matters. And if one, like Horkheimer, means it literally, that's simply outside my frame of reference.
Thanks for another of your always thought invoking comments.
Spatials vs temporals strikes me as a handy meta-framework that nicely subsumes the currently fashionable more specific dichotomies of virtuals vs physicals and anywheres vs somewheres 🙂
Yes! I hadn't even thought of that, but now you mention it, of course. Thanks.