Enchantment to Disenchantment

I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and am finding it quite enjoyable and compelling. Beginning a book this size is always daunting, but to my surprise, Taylor’s work is very accessible. The central question he poses is this: “why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (Taylor 25). Five hundred years ago people rarely if ever doubted the existence of God. Our predecessors lived in an “enchanted” world, a world in which personal forces such as spirits, demons and God existed outside of the human subject and were actually involved in the natural world. In this enchanted world, “atheism comes close to being inconceivable…It just seems so obvious that God is there, acting in the cosmos, founding and sustaining societies, acting as a bulwark against evil” (Taylor 26). Today, of course, we live in a “disenchanted” world, that is, a world in which God is not a given, a presupposition, to all things. What caused this paradigm shift? Taylor argues against the common story “subtraction” story, that is, that with the rise of science God and spirits simply left the picture. Instead, something had to fill the void as it were, what Taylor calls the human spiritual and moral aspiration for “fullness.” Taylor identifies “exclusive humanism” as the rising dominant worldview, which arose with the aid of science. As scientific worldview “disenchanted” our world, exclusive humanism could fill the role for the human aspiration for fullness. The rise of exclusive humanism was conditioned on a shift in understanding of the self. Humans no longer saw themselves as “porous” that is open to possession by outside forces or “vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers.” The new sense of self was a “buffered” self, that is, persons lived in a universe autonomous from outside forces that could possess them. According to Taylor more than disenchantment needed to occur in order for the new self to arise; “it was necessary to have confidence in our own powers of moral ordering” (27).Taylor writes,

Where an exclusive humanism was undoubtedly available was in Epicureanism. And it is no surprise that Lucretius was one of the inspirations for explorations in the direction of naturalism, e.g., with Hume. But Epicureanism just as it was couldn’t really do the trick. It could teach us to achieve ataraxia by overcoming our illusions about the Gods. But this wasn’t what was needed for a humanism which could flourish in the modern context. For this was becoming one in which the power to create moral order in one’s life had a rather different shape. It had to include the active capacity to shape and fashion our world, natural and social; and it had to be actuated by some drive to human beneficence. To put this second requirement in a way which refers back to the religious tradition, modern humanism, in addition to being activist and interventionist, had to produce some substituted for agape (Taylor 27, italics mine).

Thus, according to Taylor, the rise of exclusive humanism, which is the dominant worldview of secularism, did not simply appear after the world was disenchanted. It wasn’t as if science came in and stripped away all myths only to find beneath the surface an obvious humanism. Instead, modern humanism was imagined. Of course, as Taylor notes, this didn’t happen overnight. Much of Taylor’s book is devoted to telling the story of how this shift occurred and I hope to blog some more on it as I continue to read the book.For now, I just thought I’d post on this idea of the paradigm shift from “enchantment” to “disenchantment,” a porous to a buffered self, and the idea that exclusive humanism did not come about negatively, but was imagined and serves as a substitute for agape.