Against Enchantment 2: Owen Barfield

Owen Barfield

Last month’s exploration of the history of enchantment began with a look at the other side of the equation—the disenchantment of the world mapped out by Max Weber—and then a survey of the ways that enchantment and disenchantment were understood by Ken Wilber, one of the modern thinkers who’s built a theory of history on Weber’s thesis. Wilber’s insistence that myth and magic belong to an outmoded stage of human development is far from unique to him, of course; it’s an attempt to gi...