Reenchanting The World

 

Much of Enlightenment thought revolved around the need for reason and rationality in modernity, manifesting in a shift away from traditional or primitive beliefs in the numinous, magical or supernatural. It was assumed that rational thought was not only the key to economic and scientific progress for mankind, but a teleological goal for the human species that would ultimately prove our difference from animals. The world, rationalists claimed, was an ordered and predictable whole, and humans possessed the intellectual capability to understand it if they weren't misled or derailed by irrational forces like myth, religion and the supernatural. 

The philosopher Max Weber was one of the first to suggest, in a phrase borrowed from the poet Friedrich Schiller, that this insistence on a worldview based on reason, knowledge and scientific principles was actually paving the way for "the disenchantment of the world." In destroying non-rational and numinous forces, rationality, science and empiricism had failed to create a new value system, as they themselves were subject to endless revisions and experimentation, and hence could not create a stable system of belief the way that religion, myth and the numinous could. 

Weber did acknowledge modern rationality's role in bringing about calculability and predictability in the social environment, but argued that this could reduce individuals to mere “cogs in a machine," curtailing their freedom and agency to the extent that they are trapped in an “iron cage” of efficiency, predictability and rationality. He described the eventual effects of rationalisation as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness," in which enchantment, myth, non-rational values and and creativity had no scope to thrive. Thus, the rationalisation of the world is actually a progressive disenchantment.

His views were re-examined following the Second World War, during which the human desire for rationality and domination of irrational elements, including the seemingly unknowable other, was seen to have led directly to the rise of totalitarianism, xenophobia and genocide. Weber's idea of rationality as disenchantment was taken up by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose book Dialectic of Enlightenment was constructed around a dialectical opposition between Enlightenment and Myth.   

They argued that humans had, in attempting to subdue the non-rational forces within themselves, been forced to choose between submitting to a mysterious world of nature, and attempting to conquer nature. By turning nature into an object to control, humanity was caught in its own trap as humans began to dominate each other. People were instead turned into abstractions and statistics, leading to the rise various other irrational forces, and a number of new forms of mythology, both sacred and secular. As Horkheimer and Adorno saw it, as a result of rationalisation and subsequent disenchantment, humanity reaches a situation where ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology.’ This was seen, for example, in significant movements in art and literature like Dada and Surrealism that aimed to reinstate the irrational.

However, this philosophical narrative of rationality and disenchantment is not one that can be uniformly applied to all cultures and regions. Weber himself wrote that it was largely applicable to Western societies, where specific sociopolitical formations had promoted the growth of rationality. He wrote that "A child of modern European civilisation who studies problems of universal history shall inevitably and justifiably raise the question: what combination of circumstances have led to the fact that in the West, and here only, cultural phenomena have appeared which — at least as we like to think — came to have universal significance and validity?" Hence, only the West had, in his view, been able to achieve the phenomenon of rationality.

Another aspect of this could be that not all societies in the world share the ontological dichotomy created by the Enlightenment, between magic and the rational world of everyday existence. For example, the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier argued in the prologue to his novel The Kingdom of The World that literature from a European or Europeanised perspective tended to bracket the 'marvellous' as anything occurring outside of reality and therefore fantastic or supernatural, whereas the indigenous reality was different, as it was more 'marvellous' or magical than that fantasy literature, and was indeed an ontology in its own right. 

While Carpentier's essay was not meant as a theory of philosophy, it depicts a new literary worldview that runs contrary to rational ideas of what is logical and plausible, rejecting these grand narratives as not necessarily representative of the indigenous and postcolonial reality. Carpentier spoke of magical realism as uniquely Latin American, and the result of an interaction between existing indigenous beliefs and specific historical realities. Magical realism has also been influenced by Surrealism, such as in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, and by postmodern ideas such as self-reflexiveness, metafiction, parody and intertextuality. 

Today, it has been adopted as a literary genre by several marginalized and postcolonial literary traditions around the world. For example, Toni Morrison used the technique of magical realism in her novel Beloved to convey the unique reality of Black women, a reality that was different from the rational ideas of the white European men who had contributed to Enlightenment thought. Indeed, for the former slaves Sethe and Baby Suggs in Morrison's novel, magical thinking and charismatic religious beliefs are ways in which they cope with the trauma of having been enslaved. This is perhaps a good example of Horkheimer and Adorno's ideas about the aftermath of humans attempting to rationalise and therefore dominate one another; ultimately, it leads to a backlash of non-rational forces that may, at times, be needed to cope with this reality.

Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children covers the period after India's independence in a magical-realist style that mingles folktales, oral history, indigenous and Western cultural touchstones, and actual historical events. This, according to the critic Nicholas Stewart, serves to "examine both the effect of these indigenous and non-indigenous cultures on the Indian mind and in the light of Indian independence," while also depicting the plurality and fundamental unknowability of postcolonial existence. This is, in its own way, a rejection of the rationalist idea that the world is orderly, predictable and ultimately knowable. 

Thus, the idea of the reenchantment of the world is a complex one, as it is predicated on the belief that the disenchantment had already happened. However, the truth is more complex, as the narrative of disenchantment by rationalisation and then a subsequent reenchantment is, perhaps, confined to societies based on rational and logical principles. Certainly, in many other parts of the world belief in non-rational and seemingly magical forces coexists with the real, rational world and continues to this day, finding a voice in the genre of magical realism. 

Societies need to recognise both the rational and the so-called irrational as coexisting parts of an ontology, simply because rationality left on its own has only led to control, domination and a limited understanding of the world, at the expense of values and a sense of the sacred which ultimately is required to round up any view of the world. On the epistemological front, a purely rational viewpoint is as unprovable as is myth, so the foundations on both fronts are quite shaky. A society needs to use what it needs and is self-sustaining.