Reenchantment of the World

A summary of:
Berman, M. (1981). The Reenchantment of the World. Cornell University Press: London.

Berman is – to say the least – not thrilled with the state of things as he sees them. And he writes this in 1981. I can only imagine the mood he’s in today.

In his book, he traces the arc of scientific thought to its sad zenith:
“Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and thus not really a part of the world around me. The logical end point of this world view is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated “thing” in a world of othere, equally meaningless things. This world is not of my own making; the cosmos cares nothing for me, and I do not really like a sense of belonging to it. What I feel, in fact, is a sickness in the soul” (17). To Berman, “We have, as Dante wrote in the Divine Comedy, awoken to find ourselves in a dark woods” (23). It is dark precisely because there is no light, i.e. no God: “The phrase is Weber’s: die Entzauberung der Welt. Schiller, a century earlier, had an equally telling expression for it: die Entgotterung der Natur, the ‘disgodding’ of nature’” (69).

His point is really that scientific thinking is becoming our human nature (much as Carr and others would argue): “What I am arguing is that the scientific world view is integral to modernity, mass society, and the situation described above. It is our consciousness, in the Western industrial nations…” (22). Just as Carr might argue, and Marx, and apparently Marcuse concluded: “they have become what they own” (17).

Berman argues that we must not think of scientific as being ‘better’ than other ways of knowing. Scientific thinking, the scientific method – these are “situation-bound” (150), i.e. a product of their time; and therefore, it cannot have “epistemological superiority” over other ways of knowing. As an alternative, for example, there are more enchanted ways of understanding the world. Berman may be criticized for romanticizing the past, arguing that, “For more than 99 percent of human history, the world was enchanted and man saw himself as an integral part of it” (23). He blames this disenchantment for our recent toxic relationship with the earth, not to mention the devastating psychological effects this has on humans. Consider these:

• “The history of the West… is the progressive removal of mind, or spirit, from phenomenal appearances” (69).

• “Modern science and technology are based not only on a hostile attitude toward the environment, but on the repression of the body and the unconscious; and unless these can be recovered, unless participating consciousness can be restored in a way that is scientifically (or at least rationally) credible and not merely a relapse into naïve animism, then what it means to be a human being will forever be lost” (132).

He suggests that the only hope for us is to re-enchant the world; and more specifically, “Some type of holistic, or participating, consciousness and a corresponding sociopolitical formation have to emerge if we are to survive as a species” (23).

The trouble is, you can’t just forget the things that have become part of your worldview. “Here, then, is the crux of the modern dilemma. We cannot go back to alchemy or animism – at least that does not seem likely” (23). On the other hand, Berman cannot stomach the idea of living in the world that scientific progress promises to lead us toward. And it’s true, I would rather live in a world like the one Heraclitus knew (“ ‘What is divine escapes men’s notice because of their incredulity’” (95)) than the world of Simon Stevin (“What appears a wonder is not a wonder” (67)) or Isaac Newton (“The mystery of nearly two millennia was over: one could be reassured that the heavens that confront us on a starry night held no more secrets than a few grains of sand running through our fingers” (42)).

One of the troubling features of the scientific worldview for Berman is that it changes the questions we ask: “So long as men were content to ask why objects fell, why phenomena occurred, the question of how they fell or occurred was irrelevant. These two questions are not mutually exclusive, at least not in theory; but in historical terms they have proven to be so. ‘How’ became increasingly important, ‘why’ increasingly irrelevant. In the twentieth century, as we shall see, ‘how’ has become our ‘why’” (28). This, in fact, is not so different from what Wertheim argues.

This obsession with the how has caused us to view the world as being a big, complex, machine. For example, “Man’s activity as a thinking being – and that is his essence, according to Descartes – is purely mechanical” (34). From this perspective, we have developed the scientific method (which further reinforces this worldview, it should be noted): “Subdivide, measure, combine; subdivide, measure, combine…. This method may properly be called ‘atomistic,’ in the sense that knowing consists of subdividing a thing into its smallest components” (34). Max Weber recognized how this kind of thinking stripped hitherto natural processes of purpose, making them meaningful or valuable only insomuch as they are instrumentally valuable, profitable, expedient: “Max Weber called this attitude of mind zweckrational, that is, purposively rational, or instrumentally rational” (40).

The other goal of science is control; obsessive, pathological control: “Finally, atomism, quantifiability, and the deliberate act of viewing nature as an abstraction from which one can distance oneself – all open the possibility that Bacon proclaimed as the true goal of science: control” (46). Calculation was of course necessary for the development of modern capitalism; and “The German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the money economy ‘created the ideal of exact numerical calculation,’ and that the ‘mathematically exact interpretation of the cosmos’ was the ‘theoretical counterpart of a money economy’” (55).

And, as I have been harping on about forever, the result is that, “modern science is grounded in a sharp distinction between fact and value; it can only tell us how to do something, not what to do or whether we should do it” (51).