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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Joshua Landy.
I'm sitting in for Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization
and above all by the disenchantment of the world.
That's what Max Weber said back in 1917.
And it's easy enough to see what he was talking about.
These days when we see a rainbow,
we don't see a sign of God's covenant or the trailing scarf of the goddess Iris.
We see a natural process of prismatic refraction.
These days when we see someone claiming supernatural powers for himself,
we may sue him for fraud, but we will certainly not burn him at the stake for Harrison.
When we see someone foming at the mouth,
we are far more likely to call a doctor than someone an exorcist.
The world is disenchanted.
The gods have departed.
Is that the end of the story?
Is there really no way back?
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Well, there's certainly some truth to the Weber story.
After Copernicus, we're no longer at the center of the universe.
Instead, we just live on one planet among many,
in one galaxy among many,
whirling endlessly around our sun.
After Darwin, we're no longer at the center of our planet.
Rather than having been created ex-Nihilo to play out some cosmic struggle of good and evil for God's benefit,
we humans are simply the latest stage in a series of random mutations.
And after cognitive science, we are no longer even at the center of ourselves,
since so much of what goes on in our minds,
as we now know escapes the control of the part that calls itself I.
Nihilo by little, science has stretched its tentacles into more and more corners,
formerly occupied by religion and myth.
It has removed the persuasion that there is something beyond what is offered by the evidence of our senses.
It has uprooted the conviction that things are what they are and where they are for a reason.
It has eradicated mystery, order, and purpose, and in their place,
it has put nothing at all, simply leaving a gaping void.
But this is only part of the picture.
First of all, while religion may have surrendered some of its more baroque claims,
religion in general, is alive and well.
Secondly, there's no shortage of new forms of belief, from rosocrucianism to theosophy, from spiritism to Scientology.
But thirdly, and most importantly, modernity has seen the rise of a new breed of enchantments,
modern enchantments, secular enchantments,
enchantments that the most clear-eyed rationalists can feel happy embracing,
enchantments that have allowed modern individuals to live richer lives without compromising their fundamental beliefs.
In fact, the progressive disenchantment of the world has been accompanied from the start and continually by its progressive re-enchantment.
What formed is this re-enchantment take?
Well, quite a few different ones actually.
One thing the secular moderns quickly realized is that this idea of God, which they had so roundly attacked, contained a variety of meanings,
fulfilled a variety of functions.
God gave us dignity as proud rulers of an earth that sat at the center of the cosmos.
But God also imbued that world with mystery and with wonder,
even suspending its laws periodically to make way for miracles.
God's very existence gave us a sense that this world had no bounds, that even if our human lives are finite, the divine is infinite.
And God carved up that world into separate zones, marking out sacred spaces as more powerful, more rich in experience than their profane counterparts.
God even made it possible for us to have from time to time epiphenic experiences, moments of being in which for a brief instant,
everything hangs together, and the promise is held out of a mystical union with something larger than oneself.
And then, perhaps most importantly, God also gave direction to our lives as efforts to serve good, to overcome evil, to achieve salvation.
In so doing God granted a hierarchy of value to our actions, making some more desirable than others.
And when we nonetheless made bad choices, God made redemption possible.
This is why the reenchantment of the world, the secular replacement for God, had to be the work of many hands and many decades.
Enchantment was not one thing.
And so disenchantment was not one thing.
And so reenchantment was not one thing either.
Joined together by a common purpose, a variety of artists, philosophers, performers, and, indeed, ordinary citizens, set about the complicated and vital task of filling a God-shaped void.
Of course, there are many who still claim that the world is completely disenchanted, and that the only kind of enchantment that is out there is the insidious kind.
That anything that carries an air of specialness is that way because it is being given a specious veneer of transcendence by the evil capitalist system, deviously striving to keep itself in place.
We, literary humanists, have fallen for this idea because we are suckers for the dramatic gesture, especially the cynical dramatic gesture.
We love to see ourselves as hard-bitten, world-weary cynics, whereas of black jackets and smokers of cigarettes because why not we're all going to die anyway?
Around here, everyone wants to be a James Dean, a Philip Marlow, a Holden Colfield.
We like to believe or to pretend to believe that there is no truth that power is everywhere, the communication never happens, that love is a modern invention designed to ensure the safe transmission of property.
Love, we say, that would be so convenient.
Let me venture a definition.
If a pragmatist is someone who believes that if something is convenient it is true, a literary theorist is someone who believes that is something is convenient, it is false.
We are a bunch of inverse pragmatists.
And so we have ended up in a rather ironic state of affairs, this disenchantment of the world that was kicked off by science, Copernicus, Darwin, cognitive scientists, is now being continued by the very same humanists that are in the world.
The very same humanists who lamented it most.
And scientists, conversely, scientists with their astonishing discoveries about the nature of the brain, the wonders of the deep, the paradoxical world of the very small.
Scientists are the ones who are re-enchanting the world.
So maybe it's time for us literary humanists to give up our cigarettes and black jackets and take re-enchantment back.
One person who has not fallen for this inverse pragmatism is my guest today, Michael Saylor.
Michael Saylor is a professor of history at the University of California at Davis.
And for the sake of full disclosure, I should say that Mike is also my partner in crime.
He and I recently edited a collection of essays on re-enchantment, including contributions from Robert Harrison himself and previous entitled opinions, guests, sub-gun wrecked Andrea Nightingale and Dan Edelstein.
Mike, welcome to entitled opinions.
Well thank you Josh, glad to be here.
Good to have you.
So tell me, Mike, was Weber Wright the world disenchanted?
Weber was Wright, the world disenchanted.
I don't think we need to give up our cigarettes.
I think Barack Obama probably can use some cigarettes in his job.
We can maintain our black jackets.
But it's disenchanted in a way that Weber didn't think it was disenchanted.
We have a disenchanted form of enchantment, and I think that was an aspect that Weber never really considered.
Weber is interesting.
Weber said, as you said in 1917, the world disenchanted.
What he meant by that, and he was pretty clear about it,
was that everything had become quantifiable in the modern world as a result of the scientific revolution, modern technology.
In the 19th century, a kind of positivistic mindset that viewed the world in terms of concrete objects that could be quantifiable and anything that could not be measured by the senses or by instruments aiding the senses,
was in a sense immaterial and not worth even discussing, at least among scientists.
The spirit, the soul, the imagination, art.
These are epiphenomena.
But the world is made up of discrete and material quantities that can be manipulated by reason.
So Weber was taking this into account.
He was taking into account the fact not only that science had such a major cultural impact,
but also that bureaucracies, which were growing in the late 19th century in the modern cities,
were using these methods to be practical, be efficient, administer that for Weber,
the world had become a kind of rational and administered sort of place, where we had lost a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense of wider, well certainly a sense of the gods.
The world was no longer an animistic world.
We no longer turned the world to find purpose and to seek order and to seek redemption.
What did we have left?
Well, we had this kind of hard-bitten rationality that you referred to, and then for Weber, sure, art, spirituality, these things existed, but they're subordinate.
They're residual categories.
They're forms of escape quite literally.
And the danger for Weber, and it was a danger that was taken up by a doorknob and some of those other disenchantors that you referred to,
the danger for Weber, was that these forms of escape could be so beguiling, so wonderful, that we would lose ourselves in them.
And indeed, who knows, political leaders, charismatic figures might actually present us with a new enchanted narrative that we couldn't resist.
And Weber was quite worried about the situation.
So, in shortment as lingering danger, this is an ingenious interest.
Absolutely.
That would be a form of re-enchantment that is quite dangerous.
So for Weber, we really have to just live up to the fact that we live in a disenchanted world, understand it, and do the best we can in this rather dismaying situation.
Of course, Weber's narrative was one that had been propounded by the romantics in the late 18th century as well.
They too were worried about the disenchanted world as a result of science and technology and a kind of administration of the world.
But in the late 18th century, of course, we get the opposite sort of movements, a movement not towards reason if you will, but towards the imagination.
Obviously, we have the rise of the novel in the late 18th century, and we also have the romantic movement, of course.
Now, the rise of the novel, the romantic movement, a kind of turned fictions, a turn to the imagination.
Why didn't this take off?
The reason it didn't take off, arguably, in Europe and in America, certainly in Great Britain and in America, you see an evangelical revival in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
You see a kind of religious discourse that is very worried about the imagination.
It wants to contain it, fears the desires that the imagination answers to and promotes, and so it wants to really contain the imagination.
And the imagination of Western culture, in fact, has always been seen as subordinate to reason anyway.
But there's a kind of reaction to the fictional turn that we see in the 18th century.
This reaction, I think, though, starts to wane, begins to wane, around the 1840s, the 1850s, Evangelicism itself, starts to dissipate to a certain degree.
Science itself is coming into critique, the traditional Judeo-Christian narrative, in terms of critiquing the Bible as a literal statement of fact.
In Germany, the higher criticism of the Bible certainly, Darlings, Strauss, and Wirabach, exactly, Renal, all of those.
Darwin, of course, is an 1859 to theory of natural selection, is a critical blow to the idea of the Bible as a literal fact.
What happens to the Bible then, of course.
Rapidly, it's seen to be a form of literature, a form of symbolic truth. But the interesting thing here is once the Judeo-Christian narrative is seen in some ways as a fiction.
Fictions become redeemed. And fiction's become redeemed in a whole variety of matters.
So it's not just in the realm of religion, it's also in the realm of entertainment.
Because we also see mass culture taking hold in the 19th century.
We see a variety of entertainments, novels, museums, and a whole range of places where people can go to kind of escape and live in their imaginations.
And by the late 19th century, of course, we see a kind of wholesale colonization of the imagination through the aesthetic movement, where in a sense the world of the imagination is a separate sphere.
A place to go to escape the travails of the early, early, early, every day world.
So really, by the late 18th century, I think, when Weber is saying everything has been rationalized and quantified, instead what we see is alongside this rationalization and turn to calculation and administration.
We see a turn to the imagination in a very rational way, because people are perfectly aware that what they are doing is engaging in the embrace of provisional fictions.
Make believe. Make believe.
Exactly. Make believe. Indeed, if you want to look at the origin of make believe for this generation of the 1880s, you only have to go back to the 1860s.
This is when children's fiction ceases to be didactic, evangelical, utilitarian, and emphasis, and becomes much more playful.
And the generation of the 1880s that really championed this aesthetic movement were raised on this playful form of fiction in the 1860s.
Like Alice in Wonderland, which so savagely and beautifully mocks all of those didactic poems.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So, I mean, this is a beautiful point, because people often ask the question about turn of the century literature isn't this just romanticism all over again.
Right. So, here we are again with Oscar Wilde. Well, this is a sadism, but we've seen aestheticism before, it's the rheumatics and various people playing with self-referringality.
Well, that's just the German rheumatics, the Schlegel, and so on.
But what you're saying is no, actually, something very different is happening here.
Right. Right. What we are really seeing here is a self-reflexive form of rheumaticism.
In the early 19th, late 18th, early 19th century, people talked about romantic irony.
And of course, we're seeing romantic irony in the late 19th century. So, as you say, what's the difference?
Well, fundamentally, romantic irony in the early 18th century always referred to a higher metaphysical realm.
There was a kind of finitude to human existence, and that's where the irony came in.
But nevertheless, most of the rheumatics, one could claim, really did believe in a spirit of soul, a higher metaphysical role.
Right. Which you can get if you just keep ironizing enough.
You get out of one realm and into the eventual--
Eventually.
Exactly.
Early, there's that possibility.
It's almost like negative theology, if you just keep plugging away with these negative claims,
eventually the positivity will flood in.
Absolutely.
Maybe not as a claim, but as some kind of revelation.
Absolutely.
Whereas for the moderns--
No, it's not there.
It's not there.
This form of, again, I wouldn't call it romantic irony.
I would use a term that contemporaries use themselves in the 1880s and 1890s.
The term is the new romance.
They were quite self-conscious about this being a non-metaphysical form of romantic irony,
where they knew that this is make believe, that this is pretense, and that we're not going to access some higher essence, some higher world.
Instead, what we're going to do is access a wonder world of the imagination that we can still be immersed in.
This is important because oftentimes when we talk about irony, we mean distance.
But it's assumed that when you have ironic distance, you can't have immersion.
That's simply not true, I think, from our own experience.
When we watch a good novel, when we watch a good movie, a good play, what have you?
Any form of the imagination?
Very often, we're caught up in it.
While at the same time in the back of our minds, we're perfectly aware that this is all pretense.
If you want to find a good manifesto for this, later on in the 20th century, you can simply look at J.R.
Tolkien's essay on "Fairy Stories," where J.R.R. Tolkien specifically says that "Colarage was wrong" to claim that we entertain fiction by the willing suspension of disbelief.
That's commonplace, people just assume, "Okay, we go into fiction by suspending our disbelief."
Tolkien says, "What that means is you actually have to try to turn off your rationality and you never can."
So rationality is still primary here as you're engaging in fiction.
You're desperately trying to allow a little bit of magic into your life, but you're doubting it the whole time.
Tolkien says what really happens is you fully immerse yourself into the fiction while being aware on some secondary level that you're engaging in pretense.
And that's completely immersed.
And that I think Tolkien is more right about the way we deal with fiction than "Colarage."
He deserves to be more widely known for this.
He really is given us the manifesto for our modern disenchantment of the late 19th and early 20th century.
He would say, "You can go into these secondary worlds, one of which he, of course, created that of Middle-earth, live in it, think about it, talk about it with your friends, and still retain your rationality."
So that's the question I have.
So one thing one can say about this is that part of the difference between this moment and the romantic moment is that the spread is much wider.
As you were saying, in romantic period, religion was making a resurgence and the phenomenon was fairly local.
Whereas starting in the late 19th century, it becomes a mass movement.
And everyone's reading Conan Doyle and then everyone's reading Tolkien.
But then the question would be, so the devil's advocate question would be, "You talked a lot about escape, isn't this just escapism?
Can we really talk about this as a rational enchantment?
Is it really a strategy for living? Isn't it really a strategy for evading life?"
Right, exactly.
Well, first of all, it is a form of escapism.
And none of the writers, creators, nor those who took advantage of them, their readers would deny that.
I mean, in many ways, they're looking for another way of being another way of being enchanted.
By the same token, though, because it's a disenchanted form of enchantment, it's also tied directly to our everyday lives and our way of being in this world.
In several respects, actually.
First of all, when we talk about escapism, we often assume that it's a form of a rationalism too, that we are kind of bracketing our reason.
And allowing our desires, our passions, to take hold.
In point of fact, when you look at the forms of enchantments that are being produced in the late 1880s and 1890s and into the 20th century in mass culture, such as Sherlock Holmes, such as Middle-Earth, for example,
these are highly rational forms of enchantment. They stress reason.
Why?
Because that seems a little paradoxical.
I mean, reason is supposed to be the enemy of enchantment.
How can reason possibly be compatible with enchantment?
Because what happened in the 19th century is that many of those scientists who are trying to make a cultural claim for the prominence and priority of science stressed, it's very hard-bitten, rational character.
And the imagination, therefore, seemed to be the binary opposite of scientific reason.
The positivists certainly felt that anything that was imaginary just couldn't be talked about wasn't even worth discussing.
This is simply false.
And many of those in the 1880s and 1890s who are reacting against the kind of reductive, positive discourse, began to argue that reason is beholden to the imagination.
You must bring reason and imagination together. It's not just writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, who of course made Sherlock Holmes the epitome of an individual who brings reason and the imagination together.
In fact, Holmes calls this the scientific use of the imagination and makes it central to his own method.
Okay, so you have writers, but you also have philosophers, the pragmatists, of course, who acknowledge that the two are intertwined.
Other philosophers who continue this mode of discourse include the phenomenologists, the existentialists, etc.
It really, this acknowledgement to the intrinsic relationship between reason and imagination.
Not just that, right? Because you need, I think, is not just the intertwining.
But a specific sense that reason itself can be imaginative.
Yes, can be enchanted. Well, the two are intertwined in that sense that there are one faculty and not two.
Imagination is not just some sort of tertiary faculty between the passions and the reason.
The reason and the imagination are intertwined. There are one faculty.
So that's one reason, certainly, and Sherlock Holmes is if you want to explain why did Sherlock Holmes become the poster boy?
The poster boy, and indeed the first character that people pretended was real and wrote monographs about and formed clubs around.
Certainly we see this turn to fiction as a kind of pretending that it's real earlier in the 18th century.
The vogs for various fictional characters start in the 18th century.
There's Clarissa and Pamela, particularly Pamela in the 18th century.
Dickens, many people, we're very concerned about little now and other fictional characters,
Gertr's Virtha, of course, too. But none of them had the kind of widespread popular and ongoing appeal of Sherlock Holmes.
People didn't write monographs about Pamela. They didn't write monographs about little now.
In fact, they probably would have been locked away if they had. Whereas in the 19th century you find quite rational and respectable adults doing this.
And joining clubs, this is not child's play, this is adult play.
For the Baker Street regulars.
Baker Street irregulars.
Exactly.
Who, you know, Holmes becomes a kind of virtual character.
And Doyle, a bit of an embarrassment.
And Doyle, very much an embarrassment.
Because Doyle, you see, was seeking modern re-enchantment in his invention of Holmes.
Doyle had been raised as a Roman Catholic, eventually left that faith, became an agnostic, but a searcher.
And Holmes reflected Doyle's own sense that the world is disenchanted.
That Vibarian sense that it's become mundane and routine. There aren't enough great criminals anymore in the world.
What does Holmes start to do? He starts to take drugs. He plays his violin.
He slounges around in his pajamas in his robe.
You know, Doyle didn't do that. He was a very active doctor, but he felt the same on we that Holmes did.
Holmes' solution was temporarily Doyle's solution.
Let us bring imagination and reason together, and suddenly the world becomes reenchanted through reason.
We could almost call this an animistic form of reason, animistic reason.
That animism that Vibar had said had been taken out of the world, reason puts it right back in.
How does it do that?
Because when a mystery is proposed, suddenly you have to search for clues as the answer to this mystery.
Suddenly everything takes on a new meaning within this misparameter of mystery.
You have to scrutinize everything. The dog that did not bark, the car-bunkle, the thumb.
Suddenly everything is charged with meaning.
And indeed, each one of these clues, each one of these elements, actually starts to connect to other elements.
Suddenly the world has an order.
Exactly.
It's a temporary order. It's a provisional order that's designed to answer a specific question,
but it's an order nevertheless that has practical results that leads you to that Moriarty who's sitting at the web.
I was going to say, for me, this is not just a replacement of God, it's a replacement of the devil.
Absolutely.
So we have a secular devil.
So what's in says, I know Holmes says at one point, with that man in the field,
one's morning paper presented infinite possibilities, petty theft, wanting assaults,
purposeless outrage to the man who held the clue, all could be worked into one connected hall.
Absolutely.
One connected hall.
But one connected provisional hall.
It's a provisional hall, but it's also an enchanted one.
Yes.
So it's not just that things hang together in a rational way that you could explain, for example, by appealing to evolutionary processes or something like that.
No.
There's an agency behind them.
And that's where I think the master criminal in a sense replaces the devil.
Absolutely.
As this figure who not just counts for all of the bad things in the world, but magnetizes them.
Give them this enchanting charge.
Yes.
If you like.
Yes.
Exactly.
That will today.
I mean, we're obsessed with these almost superhuman villains.
This superhuman villain.
Well, I mean, Fritz Langstachtima-Buzah is a similar character who kind of is behind the screen.
He's the kind of Wizard of Oz in the negative sense who is actually manipulating all of this other wider, mysterious evil.
And yet there's an explanation for it.
It can be found.
So we've got heroes as well as villains.
Sure, we've got redemption as well as a devil.
But the other important thing here, I think, is that again, this is rational.
Yeah.
This is secular.
Yeah.
This is provisional.
That's right.
But we can still be enchanted by it.
The provisionality of it doesn't disturb us.
It did disturb Doyle.
That's the interesting thing.
Doyle with his fairies.
Well, with his fairies.
I mean, I think we have to remember that we're beginning to see the acceptance of pragmatic and provisional narratives in the late 19th century to replace more essentialized metanarratives.
But of course, this is an ongoing process.
Well, he's not a relatively new.
Doyle in his stories couldn't really accept the solution that he had at Holmes' utter.
Right.
And so increasingly he began to attend spiritualist meetings.
And ultimately, around 1914-15, became a full-fledged spiritist.
And in the 1920s, he proclaimed the existence of fairies with these ridiculous photographs that everybody else knew was fake.
But he didn't.
As you said, he was an embarrassment to the Baker Street regulars because while Holmes championed rationality, his very creator seemed to be a lunatic.
And it was the Baker Street irregulars who could believe in Holmes in that ironic provisional way.
Right.
So you're absolutely right.
We've got this now.
And that's a form of the rational enchantment.
You're listening to entitled opinions at Kaseyous Yustamford.
I'm Joshua Landy, sitting in for Robert Harrison.
And I'm talking with historian Michael Saylor about the reenchantment of the world.
So we've talked to Fairmount about the causes of disenchantment of the vapors talking about,
and acronistically, I mean, the sense that the time vapors said it.
By the time we articulated it, it was in a sense on the way,
or at least being compensated for.
And we've talked a little bit about one strategy for reenchantment.
The strategy via reason itself, a paradoxical strategy of reenchantment, for reenchantment.
What about science?
I mean, it seems as though science would be the ultimate denier of enchantment.
Is there any way, and I think this is obviously a very timely question, is there any way that science can be compatible?
Again, this is a misconstrual of science.
And again, this is part of that 18th and particularly 19th century discourse that position science
as dealing only with observable qualities that could be manipulated and quantified,
a positivistic view of science, which is part of science, but it's not the whole of science.
So aspects of science were completely written out of this discourse,
such as the fact that inquiry's scientific inquiries as philosophic inquiries begin in wonder.
And this goes back to Aristotle. There's no reason to write wonder out of science at all.
In fact, virtually all scientists would agree that they are attracted to science because they are just amazed at the
planetitude of the universe.
And the mystery of the universe.
Something that Catherine Preston pointed out to me recently, there's a species of aphid that lives on mustard plants.
And as you know, we get mustard gas for mustard.
And mustard plants contain a poison. They're immune to the poison because it works only as a, you have to have a combination of a poison in particular enzyme,
rather like certain bombs required to substances in combination.
They eat the mustard plants with no damage.
But when they get eaten, that the enzyme that lives in their body is broken down, combines with the mustard poison and kills the predator.
I mean, that's just fantastic. Absolutely.
So nothing disenchanting about that.
No, you know, if you get the new scientist every week as I do because I'm clueless about science, but it stimulates my sense of wonder.
It's a little, you know, cabinet of wonders every week that comes in my mailbox.
Similarly, science fiction. Why does science fiction take off as a genre, as a specific literary genre, in the late 19th and early 20th century?
You know, we can find proto science fiction throughout history, but why is a genre precisely because people are realizing that science is a source of wonder and want to know more about it.
The other thing about science too is not only is it connected directly with the question of wonder and the feeling of wonder, but also science is self limiting and knows itself to be self limiting.
And once we understand that, we realize that there's a whole other realm that we can inquire into, be comfortable with, discuss that doesn't seem to be encapsulated by a reductive or narrow world view.
Right. You know, we were now we're getting into territory covered by Andrea Nightingale in the volume.
Absolutely. The first, the first, the first, the fact that kicks off the volume.
This fascinating conjuncture of statements of self limitation. So you have girdle, theory, heisenbergs, uncertainty principles.
And maybe we should even include Wittgenstein's tractantas. Right. Right. So where the gesture is very much, let's delimit the space it won't come be known.
Take, which opens up everything. Take epistemology, take science to its limits, show where the limits are, and rather that being a closing off, as you said, it's an opening up.
In a sense. That's absolutely right. And I think again, the inheritance of a kind of positivistic discourse through its, through its repeated invocation by sociologists, by philosophers like Horkheimer,
Adorno, throughout not just the late 19th century, but the 20th century has led us to have a completely misleading view of of science as kind of all encompassing and all reductive when it's not.
So you're absolutely right about that. And the other thing I would say too is, of course, obviously, Weber was totally unaware of quantum mechanics as he would be taking place after his death.
But quantum mechanics is one of the most enchanting certainly to me again, as a layperson incomprehensible, but certainly enchanting point of view because of its stress on complementarity.
I don't remember the exact quote, but didn't Neil's Boris say something like, if it doesn't blow your mind.
You don't understand. You do not understand it. Exactly right. Exactly right.
So science has always been one of our greatest sources of enchantment.
But there's this long philosophical strand, right, that says, "No, no, no, no, no."
"On top theology was created by Plato and then Descartes came in with all the scientific stuff and this was the decline of the world and this is what's responsible for it."
This is not true? Not at all. Not at all.
First of all, because I think any one of them would have admitted that once, I mean, certainly, look, how does wonder work?
Wonder works because you have a question, and a question that has not been answered. And just, it just peaks your curiosity. It touches your sense of awe and the sublime and the luminous.
All right, what happens when you explain it? Well, like anything, okay, it's no longer wonderful. It's explained.
And there's always a certain part of it that will remain an unexplained. And in fact, from that, you go on to new wonders.
So wonder is that...
I don't know. I mean, I think there are wonders that remain wonders even when you understand.
Well, that's true. I mean, in the same way that optical illusions...
Right, the rain.
Do not get dispelled. This is a jam point.
Even when you see through it, you still are susceptible. I know that when I'm looking at a stick in water, it's not really bent.
But I still see it at bent.
Absolutely.
And I think there are some wonders that whose explanations make them in a sense more when I think the A-foot have made it.
It makes me even more.
And Darwin felt the same way.
George Levine has a book called "Darrwin Loves You," which is great.
Which says that... Yes, absolutely. And he quite carefully chose that title.
Yes.
But, you know, for Darwin, the world was absolutely wonderful.
And didn't lose an Iota of that from his own explanation.
It only increased it, in fact.
The only thing I would say about wonder that I was trying to convey is that anything that's wonderful is not going to rain wonderful if you stay with it for too long.
And that's true for anything in life.
And it's just been misconstrued to say that the moment that we explained something,
and we lost that sense of wonder that's going to be true for everything.
No. You just have to come back to it.
But even rainbows pale, even in their effulgence they pale.
But the question would...
So I could imagine somebody saying, "All right, you, moderns, you know, you've found a substitute for religious enchantment."
But it's a pale shadow.
It's ever an essence.
What we have is something...
Certainly.
We have certainty.
We have an enduring wonder.
We have a much more full blooded enchantment.
What would a modern say to that?
The modern might say two things.
First of all, I mean, I myself am not religious.
So I can't speak to the religious experience.
What I've read about some religious experience makes me think that that notion of certainty is actually overblown for some religious thinkers.
So if you take Kierkegaard, for example, Kierkegaard says, in fact, that faith must be constantly renewed and it's a struggle.
That is always there.
Well, it is necessary.
I mean, it's not faith in this sense.
It demands it.
And doubt is always there.
And in fact, you know, recently Mother Teresa's, either letters or diaries, I forget, which came out, which talked to her own wrestling with the problems of doubt.
Similarly, I know, from my own looking at Tolkien, the Tolkien often said too that, you know, you must continue to reaffirm and to go to mass.
He was a Roman Catholic.
Right.
So this notion of certainty, I think, might be overstressed in terms of religion, perhaps.
But the other thing I would say is that at least for those so-called secular moderns, the notion of uncertainty can be quite wonderful.
Because if you have provisional narratives, that allows an enormous scope for a multitude of definitions, possibilities, metaphors, self-descriptions, which gives us a real sense of freedom.
And I think a kind of meta-narrative would exclude or preclude.
And what we have in the modern world is the capacity to kind of cross dwell in mutually weekly in commensurate worlds.
We can be different people, have different forms of agency and identity in multiple worlds, and not experience cognitive dissonance.
So what gets open?
Perhaps one could say what one loses in full bloodedness when gains in variety.
I don't even know if we lose it in full bloodedness, because I don't know if that full bloodedness ever really exists in.
And in fact, I think that ability to cross-dwell in what is known as weekly in commensurate worlds, I think is a bit of a mouthful.
I'm stealing it from my think, a dryfuss and another author that I read in Critical Inquiry.
It is.
And one should just speak plainly and say, we've always probably been able to do this and have always done it from the peasant in the middle of the world.
And the peasant in the field who considers himself to be also a member of a religious community and a member of a family and connected to an overlord and any number of other things to people who are on the internet and pretending to be a dog or a man or a woman on second life.
It's just that now at least we can acknowledge it and work with it.
And also to deal with the real problems that some of this stuff raises. Because here we are celebrating the disenchanted enchantment of the modern world.
But this is not to say that Adorno's worries, Vavers' worries of charismatic authority aren't real.
Or that the imagination and its stimulus to desire isn't something we have to contend with.
Or that the laws of escape aren't something that can really cause trouble in people's lives.
Here's another worry.
Another worry might be, look, perhaps modernity has managed to provide itself with secular wonder.
But can you actually provide a reason for living?
Can you find a replacement for the hierarchy of value that religion gave you? For the tell us, right? For the goal and destination of your life that religion appeared to give people.
I think you can still have a tell us, and again we're going to speak in pragmatic terms here then. If you see your life not as going towards predestined end that's been given to you in advance.
But instead of you to find your life as a project, indeed a series of projects.
I think that's what we find people doing. They negotiate these projects for themselves with other people.
And here's something interesting if you want to go back to mass culture again. If you want to go back to Sherlock Holmes.
Or if you want to go back to Tolkien and Middle Earth, or if you want to go back to science fiction fans and Star Trek.
Or any number of imaginary worlds of the 20th century and 21st century.
What are people doing? Trekkies or Trekkers and Middle Earth fans, etc.
What they're doing is they're getting together with their friends who share common interest in this imaginary world.
And they're kind of discussing it because they enjoy it. It's a hobby.
But what they're also doing is they're debating the merits of this particular narrative.
They're trying to figure out if say Middle Earth is exclusively a religious world and indeed a Christian world.
Or if, in a sense, it's a world in which atheists or people of other faiths, non-Western faiths, can find a place for.
If the hierarchy of Middle Earth actually is a kind of hierarchy one wants to see in this world, or if we want to do away with such hierarchies.
In other words, a whole bunch of social and political questions are being negotiated and personal questions are being negotiated there.
Which enables people to see that narratives are always in the process, they're on narratives, or always in the process of being revised and negotiated.
So what you're saying is that certain fictions, it's not that certain fictions in themselves cause certain transformations in the readers, but they are catalysts.
They're catalysts.
For this public sphere of the imagination in which the right kinds of conversations are possible.
Absolutely.
They're almost inevitable.
Not intended.
They actually just come about by happenstance by the very virtue of these people gathering and what you call the public sphere of the imagination.
And seeing in fact that narratives in fiction may seem closed, but once we get together with other people, once we engage in intersubjectivity and communication with one another, they are suddenly open, they always are open.
And our tell us in the modern world, the modern disenchanted and chanted world, it's a tell us of an open project.
Now again, I don't see that as any less valid a tell us as a close tell us.
It takes away some things, but it gives us other things.
So we're just simply living in a kind of new way of thinking about ourselves in the world.
And another response is, look for some of us, there's no going back anyway.
It's not as though that's a real choice.
That's right.
It's a very interesting book that came out recently by Charles Taylor on this subject.
And the implication of the book seems to be, look, you modern could choose to adopt the best narrative.
Right.
The best narrative.
The one true narrative.
But it's a strange way of phrasing it because the idea that you could rationally choose on the grounds that it makes your life happier somehow to be religious is a strange one.
It seems to me that if you want to have that full blooded commitment to religion that in fact is going to give you that better life, it needs to come for more than just your desire to live happily.
It needs to come from a deep, seated belief that this is actually true.
Exactly.
So for many months, there is no going back and this is what we have.
That's right.
And so what we have are these contingent projects and an awareness of their contingency, which is what allows us, in a sense, what gives us our sense of dignity and embracing them.
Exactly right.
So here's this is where I want to issue a slight challenge.
But a very minor way.
I know we agree on almost all things.
And we're sitting three feet apart from each other.
Right.
So it's a little dangerous.
Right.
But it seems to me that actually, it's going back to an earlier point of view, it's about colorage.
Yeah.
Actually, there's something potentially to the understanding of modern fiction as requiring that very powerful combination of
belief and disbelief.
Another way of thinking about it outside of the colorage in framework is Nietzsche's both of tragedy.
Yes.
So Nietzsche's theory being that when we watch a tragedy, we are both witnessing the horrible truth of human existence and being protected by this beautiful illusion of art.
So that our takes the horrible, which, and the horrible is chaos, the horrible is disorder, and imposes upon it this artificial order of the of the play itself, the play itself is ordered in exactly the way that the events are not.
Right.
Now, what I would claim is, well, the whole point of going to a tragedy is so that you can cultivate your aptitude in real life to see the world in that way.
To have this simultaneous belief and disbelief.
Right.
And the same way, actually, I think, in magic shows, which are really getting going in the mid-19th century.
I mean, magic, of course, magic performance has been around for a very long time, but it's becoming a more middle-class entertainment.
It's moving into the theater.
People are starting to wear those lovely tuxedos and all that.
They do to this day.
Those performances are all of a sudden design, not to trick people into thinking, here's somebody who's actually in league with the devil, who's actually someone in spirits to help him perform actual magic.
No, no, no, no.
These are entertainments that present themselves as entertainments.
So the audience is supposed to come in with the specific intention of deceiving themselves or allowing themselves to be deceived.
And so it's this double consciousness that is fostered by these, by magic performances, by self-reflexive fictions.
And so that's where the small challenge to you comes up.
Isn't it really the self-reflexive fictions?
The ones that say this is an illusion, but embrace it anyway and know the whole time that it's an illusion.
Isn't it those kinds of fictions that really help?
I think Josh, in order to kind of address that conflict and defend myself, I'm going to bring Nietzsche in to help you with that.
And of course, Nietzsche himself repudiated the birth of tragedy precisely in the terms that you are suggesting in his later work.
That it is precisely that double-minded consciousness that we are both immersed in a fiction, and we are rationally trying to figure out how that fiction works, that the kind of constitutes our modern form of disenchanted enchantment.
It's a new way of practice, not a new way of thinking.
I mean, people have probably always at times thought this way, but it's a practice.
It's a practice that trickles down.
I think that's from the elite.
But yeah, yeah, it trickles down.
This isn't merely a new set of ideas.
This is a new way of life.
Right, it's a new way of life.
And mass culture actually makes it possible again.
It's one of the reasons why Adorno and Horkheimer, there was a lot to be said for the promulgation of insidious narratives through mass culture.
The Holocaust, the Second World War, fascism, authoritarianism.
Okay, yeah, we can see elements that point to the truth of that.
Nevertheless, if you also look at mass culture and Walter Benjamin certainly did in the 1920s and 30s, there's a lot of irony there.
And there's a lot of training of people to be aware of the arbitrary provisional nature of representations and to mock them.
In film, in all forms of mass communication, novels, short stories.
So it's ultimately a very precarious balance.
Yeah, it is.
Because on the one side, you want to inshine yourself.
Right.
You need to inshine yourself.
Because the world does not come equipped with hierarchy value.
Right.
The world does not come equipped with purposes.
The world does not come equipped with meanings.
You have to endow it with all of those.
At the same time, you have to take that step back.
You always have to be an harness.
Because if you don't, that's where precisely danger of insidious enchantment of this yearning for the dictator.
I mean, or the charismatic leader might rear its head.
Absolutely.
And indeed, in the last eight years of our politics, we've seen it again.
So I think, now let's get back to your idea of the public sphere of the imagination.
Because I think this is an element that helps us, again, practice this irony and this distance.
Richard Worthy, I believe in contingency irony and solidarity, kind of maintain that the harness outlook is difficult for most people to adhere to.
Intellectuals tend to be able to do it because they're paid to do it and within the academy, they're repeatedly trained to do it.
You know, those people with black jackets and smoking a lot.
But, you know, I think he's wrong about the difficulty of everybody to do it.
And that's because basically they're doing it already amongst themselves when they get together to talk about Star Trek.
Or whatever that's Sopranos or any fictions that they do.
How about some?
Even high culture?
Well, I'm sorry, yeah, exactly.
I just, and so, you know, here we are arguing against a doorknob that we're almost stuck in his terms, right?
Right.
At high culture as well, exactly right.
Because you could argue that some of the famous self-reflexive modernist...
A high modernist...
Just fall in the same care.
Absolutely.
In fact, let's do away with the distinction between a lead culture and mass culture anyway, because at this point...
In terms of this conversation, it's really not that relevant.
Right, we're talking about narratives.
We're just talking about narratives, recognized.
We're talking about...
Exactly, we're talking about a specific kind of narrative.
Right.
But it's a kind of narrative that could be of the mass distribution type or right be of the more elitist type.
That's not where the distinction cuts.
Right, that's right.
And the important thing, too, I guess, in terms of talking about the groups that you're discussing any form of narrative with or any form of representation with,
is ideally it should be a diverse group of multiplicity of opinions.
Because that's how these narratives can be negotiated and interpretations can be checked or queried,
validity testing can take place.
So, you know, many times, again, just to take two examples here.
Tolkien had a public sphere of the imagination.
It was not a diverse group.
It was the inklings.
It was a bunch of males, a bunch of his friends, who largely shared his use.
They tended to be mostly Christian, and they tended to be middle-class English males.
And so, in a sense, his own views were replicated.
They weren't really challenged somewhere or somewhere, but largely the underlying premises were never challenged because they were shells shared.
Certainly, in many respects, CS Lewis and Tolkien were identical on many issues as were other members of the inklings.
Okay. If you look then at some of the public spheres of the imagination, fanzines that arose around the Lord of the Rings in the 1960s and 1970s,
you get a greater diversity of people joining these groups and challenging one another.
So, I recall reading on one fanzine, someone arguing that no one should write middle-earth fiction who wasn't a Christian.
Because this would be fundamentally untrue to the vision of Tolkien.
And immediately, there was responses by many readers saying, "First of all, this is a form of fanaticism and exclusion.
How can you say this?" Some people said, "I'm a Muslim, I'm a Jew, I'm an atheist."
We find a lot here. A long discussion ensued to the point that in a couple of issues down the road, the initial writer,
backtrack and said, "You know, I have learned from this discussion."
And actually, I share your views or I take your views.
So, this is the catalyst model. The catalyst model of a public sphere in which, again, we can be aware that what we say isn't essential.
And, you know, that we simply can take it without reflecting.
And, indeed, where we at least have to consider a variety of views, the more that we do this, the more that we're always of a distance between what we say.
It's very hard to do. We're all essentialists, I think, at root, for whatever reason.
We're hard, we're hard, I believe that in some ways, but that gets reductive too.
But, yeah.
Right, I mean, now, here's another objection I can anticipate.
The slacker objection.
Somebody might come along and say, "Look, you're suggesting that we all become ironists and stand back from our commitments."
Isn't this just Generation X, Y, and Z? You know, isn't this just the...
I don't really care about anything.
I'm completely disengaged. Complete withdrawal of kind of cynicism.
Arguably in some ways, there has been a lot of that, and we've seen it in the culture of the 1990s in particular.
Someone, some people claim that after 9/11, irony was dead, though, and that it wasn't irony, did not die.
But, so what? Does this lead to anything constructive and positive or just a kind of slacker cynicism?
I would argue that it leads to something that is positive, because within these public spheres of the imagination, people tend to, and they don't...
You know, they didn't join these groups to do this, but they just inevitably tend to relate the narratives not only to their personal lives, but to their social lives, and to their political lives.
Because people are actually always, I think, invested in different worlds, including the political and want to be.
The hunger for addressing larger questions is certainly seen in this election cycle.
And Barack Obama, a pragmatist, was... you can argue about what sort of pragmatist, but nevertheless, was able to capitalize on that hunger, which is actually played out within these public spheres of the imagination.
Why do people... why are people so attracted to Star Trek or the Lord of the Rings, or, you know, works of high culture, so-called?
Because they do provide not just cynicism and skepticism and a slacker mentality of disengagement, they actively actually provide engagement.
That people want to then have a ventuated in their own lives.
I think it's right, I see the difference between ironic imagination and slacking as a difference between, on the one hand, knowing what you believe, but standing back from it.
On the other hand, not even bothering to know what you believe, or put it another way. So that's, I think, the difference in terms of one's relationship to oneself, and in terms of where I'm relationship to the world, it's the difference between caring about the world the one is engagement with and refusal of stake responsibility.
So I actually think there is a big difference.
Yes.
What Socrates is doing is doing it being an ironist.
It's very different from what a generation exer is.
Socrates has a political mission. He's trying to use his irony in this very constructive way.
Absolutely. Well, I think generation exer simply just felt shut out of the system, whereas once they get together with other people and see that it's possible to make a difference, they very rapidly no longer, not only not feel excluded, but they very rapidly become engaged.
I think one of the things you do see in public series in imagination is the fact that we are social creatures, so that we might be hardwired perhaps to be essentialists, but we may also be hardwired to be social creatures.
And they're not going to save us.
That could save us, or it could destroy us.
I mean, again, the charismatic figure could lead us to lose our irony and just go in the wrong direction.
That's why we need a diversity of voices within these public spheres.
And that's why in Chapman, I think, is the emphasizes multiplicity.
Well, Mike, we're going towards the end of our time here, and I'm just wondering what you think the legacy of this long process that was begun?
Well, I suppose, as early as the 17th century with the scientific revolution, and then, of course, importantly in the 18th century, industrial revolution, and so on, positive isn't in the 19th century.
And then, as you said, by the time a vapor was actually in a sense at an end, because this disenchantment had been complemented by a rational reenchantment.
What's the legacy of this today? What's for you the big significance of this trend for our current thinking, our current way of life?
Right. Okay. Well, I think this disenchanted form of enchantment, one that brings together reason and the imagination is really important in our modern age, because it does address questions of meaning, and it does address certainly questions of rationality. It brings both together.
And the reason this is particularly important, I think, is that we're seeing the hunger for meaning actually resulting in, on the one hand, a kind of resurgence of religious fundamentalism, religious fanaticism, a return to kind of very exclusionary ways of thinking entirely unironic.
And on the other hand, I also worry as a humanist that we in the humanities and the social sciences are also taking a kind of reductive turn by embracing the findings of biology.
I am entirely in favor of some of the findings of evolutionary psychology and some of the claims that are being made by scientists that can be applied to the humanities.
So I have no problem with that. The danger, and it is, of course, though that you simplify and the narratives do become too reductive, because again, I think this sort of discourse has a kind of unironic component to it. It reduces everything to things that are calculable and quantifiable and manipulable. It's going back to a kind of 19th century positivism.
So I think the kind of bringing together of reason, the imagination, irony that we see in a kind of disenchanted enchantment always reminds us there's something else.
And a third way.
There's not only this a third way, but it's a third way that reminds us that there's always something else, something outside of whatever narrative we're giving, and that's incredibly important.
Well, Michael Saylor, thank you so much for being on the program.
Well, thank you, Josh. Robert Harrison, we'll return next week.
Thank you very much for tuning in. We'll see you then.
[MUSIC]
I see trees of green red roses too. I see them blue, fogging you, and I think to myself, what I wonder for world.
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white, the bright, blessed day, the dark, sacred night.
And I think to myself, what I wonder for world.
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, all parts along the faces, are people going by.
I see friends shaking their eyes, saying, "I think they'll."
They really say, "I love you. I hear bigger smile. I watch them grow. They'll not much more than I ever knew."
And I think to myself, what I wonder for world.
I hear the sun, I think to myself, what I wonder for world.
Oh, yeah.
(gentle music)