The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age

by Joshua Landy (Editor), Michael Saler (Editor)

The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"—or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Literature, Cultural

403 pages, Hardcover

First published January 21, 2009

About the author

Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Chair of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he teaches "Film and Philosophy," "Literature and the Brain," "Getting through Proust," and other hopefully fun classes. He also co-directs Stanford's Initiative in Philosophy and Literature. And since 2017, he's been one half of the nationally syndicated public radio program “Philosophy Talk.”

Reviews

[Anusha Datar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection includes a variety of perspectives about the ways that modernity continues to be haunted by our more spiritually-oriented past. I thought the collection was engaging and well-curated, though I certainly enjoyed some essays more than others.

I wish that the essays in each chapter felt more cohesive as a full narrative - I felt like there were some obvious connections between them, but it still left me with some lingering questions or disconnections.