Do we live in an unenchanted or disenchanted world?

Last updated on: January 31, 2018 at 2:58 pm by Dan Peterson

Do we live in an unenchanted or disenchanted world? 2018-01-31T14:58:50-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The main library of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Sather Tower looms in the background on the campus of the University of California. (Wikimedia Commons public domain)

It was my very great privilege to spend two months with the late Huston Smith in a small 1990 seminar that he led under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Held at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, it was devoted to the theme of “The Great Chain of Being.” Here, Dr. Smith is quoting from the social scientist Manfred Stanley. The subject is the alienation of humanity from nature and the world that, for more than a few, has been brought on by modern scientific reductionism:

At its most fundamental level, the diagnosis of alienation is based on the view that modernization forces upon us a world that, although baptized as real by science, is denuded of all humanly recognizable qualities; beauty and ugliness, love and hate, passion and fulfillment, salvation and damnation. It is not, of course, being claimed that such matters are not part of the existential realities of human life. It is rather that the scientific worldview makes it illegitimate to speak of them as being “objectively” part of the world, forcing us instead to define such evaluation and such emotional experience as “merely subjective” projections of people’s inner lives.

The world, once an “enchanted garden,” to use Max Weber’s memorable phrase, has now become disenchanted, deprived of purpose and direction, bereft — in these senses — of life itself. All that which is allegedly basic to the specifically human status in nature comes to be forced back upon the precincts of the “subjective” which, in turn, is pushed by the modern scientific view ever more into the province of dreams and illusions.

Cited at Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, rev. ed. (Wheaton, IL: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1989), 116-117.

Now, Huston Smith himself, commenting on the foregoing:

To say that it is difficult — burdensome — to maintain a respectable human image in a world like this is an understatement. The truth is, it is impossible. If modern man feels alienated from this world he sees enveloping him, it shows that his wits are still intact. He should feel alienated. For no permanent standoff between self and world is possible; eventually there will be a showdown. And when it comes, there is no doubt about the outcome: the world will win — for a starter, it is bigger than we are. So a meaningful life is not finally possible in a meaningless world. It is provisionally possible — there can be a temporary standoff between self and world — but finally it is not possible. Either the garden is indeed disenchanted, in which case the humanities deserve to be on the defensive, no noble image being possible in an a-noble — I do not say ignoble — world; or the garden remains enchanted and the humanities should help make this fact known.

Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, 117.

***

And now for a bit of science news:

“Does general relativity violate determinism inside charged black holes?”

“What’s the Speed of Dark Matter?”

“Missing Neutrons May Lead a Secret Life as Dark Matter: This may be the reason experiments can’t agree on the neutron lifetime, according to a new idea”

“Could an updated Feynman experiment finally lead to a Theory of Everything?”

[“Nobel Laurette”?]

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