The Philosophy of Reenchantment This book presents a philosophical study of the idea of reenchantment and its merits in the interrelated fields of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology. It features chapters from leading contributors to the debate about reenchantment, including Charles Taylor, John Cottingham, Akeel Bilgrami, and Jane Bennett. The chapters examine neglected and contested notions such as enchantment, strong evaluation, transcendence, resonance, perceptual experience, religious meaning, moral experience, interpretation, attention, and the sacred or reverence-worthy; notions that are crucial to human self-understanding but have no place in a scientific worldview. They also explore the significance of adopting a reenchanting perspective for debates on major concepts such as disenchantment, realism, nature, and God. In this way, this volume seeks to put the concept of reenchantment firmly on the contemporary philosophical agenda by showing the extent to which it connects with central questions about agency, value, metaphysics, and religion. The Philosophy of Reenchantment will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in philosophy (especially those working in moral philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and social theory), theology, religious studies, and sociology. Michiel Meijer is Postdoctoral Researcher of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp. He is the author of Charles Taylor’s Doctrine of Strong Evaluation (2017) and has published widely on subjects such as moral value, human agency, moral epistemology, moral ontology, moral phenomenology, and moral psychology in the fields of metaethics, normative ethics, and social theory. Herbert De Vriese is Assistant Professor at the Center for European Philosophy of the University of Antwerp. His work focuses on secularization, critique of religion, and disenchantment in general, and the role of philosophical theory and critique in historical and sociological debates on (the end of) classical secularization theory, postsecularism, and classical narratives of disenchantment in particular. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy Microaggressions and Philosophy Edited by Lauren Freeman and Jeanine Weekes Schroer Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy A Constructive-Engagement Account Bo Mou Perception and the Inhuman Gaze Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences Edited by Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, and Dermot Moran Logics of Genocide The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World Edited by Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith A Philosophical Account Nathaniel Goldberg and Chris Gavaler The Indexical Point of View On Cognitive Significance and Cognitive Dynamics Vojislav Bozickovic Toleration and the Challenges of Liberalism Edited by Johannes Drerup and Gottfried Schweiger The Philosophy of Reenchantment Edited by Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720 The Philosophy of Reenchantment Edited by Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-41814-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-82344-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Varieties of Reenchantment in a Disenchanted World 1 MICHIEL MEIJER AND HERBERT DE VRIESE PART I Reenchantment and (A)Theism 15 1 What Is Reenchantment? An Interview With Charles Taylor 17 MICHIEL MEIJER AND CHARLES TAYLOR 2 Religion Without Magic: Responding to the Natural World 38 JOHN COTTINGHAM 3 Might There Be Secular Enchantment? 54 AKEEL BILGRAMI PART II Genealogies of Reenchantment 79 4 Did Disenchantment Ever Happen? Retrieving the Forgotten Story of Transcendence 81 GUIDO VANHEESWIJCK 5 Theorizing Reenchantment Across Different Value Spheres 105 HERBERT DE VRIESE vi Contents 6 Reenchantment as Resonance 132 PAOLO COSTA PART III Working With Reenchantment 159 7 The Eyes of a Child 161 SOPHIE-GRACE CHAPPELL 8 Nature, Enchantment, and God 178 FIONA ELLIS 9 Reenchantment and the Risk of Reification: On Taking Morality (Too) Seriously 195 MICHIEL MEIJER 10 Detachment and Attention 220 ROB COMPAIJEN 11 Moral Absolutes and Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism 239 DAVID MCPHERSON Epilogue: On the Call From Outside 260 JANE BENNETT AND AKEEL BILGRAMI List of Contributors 271 Index 275 Acknowledgments The interview in Chapter 1 has previously been published as Michiel Meijer and Charles Taylor, “Fellow Travellers on Different Paths: A Conversation with Charles Taylor,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, online first article (August 2019): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453719866233. The discussion between Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami in the e pilogue was first published on the website The Immanent Frame: S ecularism, Reli- gion and the Public Sphere. We thank both authors for the permission to reprint their blog posts. See Jane Bennett, “On the Call from Outside,” The Immanent Frame, August 18, 2010. https://tif.ssrc.org/2010/08/18/on- the-call-from-outside/; Akeel Bilgrami, “Understanding Disenchantment,” The Immanent Frame, September 6, 2010. https://tif.ssrc.org/2010/09/06/ disenchantment/. Introduction Varieties of Reenchantment in a Disenchanted World Michiel Meijer and Herbert De Vriese Preliminaries The Philosophy of Reenchantment goes back to a conference held at the University of Antwerp on 6 and 7 December 2018. The conference theme, “Varieties of Reenchantment in a Disenchanted World,” stemmed from the recognition that the current philosophical debate over reen- chantment is far from being a coherent and well-organized discussion, as it allows for a wide range of conceptions and applications across distinct philosophical domains and approaches. The aim of the conference was to bring clarity to this debate by bringing together a variety of schol- ars from different philosophical traditions (most of whom appear in the present volume) on the basis of a shared agenda for something called “reenchantment” in going against the grain of the dominant scientistic trend in philosophy. In a crucial attempt to achieve that aim, the pre- sent book develops and integrates a number of key ideas from the recent work of the contributors so as to offer the first integral account of what is involved in understanding reenchantment as a distinctive approach to philosophy. The background to the volume is (quite obviously) the major influence of the well-known Weberian claim that the modern world is a “disen- chanted” one, that is, to borrow a phrase from Jane Bennett, the image of modernity as either “a place of dearth and alienation (when com- pared to a golden age of community and cosmological coherency) or a place of reason, freedom, and control (when compared to a dark and confused premodernity).”1 Our concern here is not whether disenchant- ment is a laudable or a regrettable historical development. Rather, the assumption is that “disenchantment” is a fairly recognizable condition in which experience and understanding in present-day liberal society takes place, and as such provides the implicit background of the more explicit beliefs and sensibilities of the majority of its members. The narrative of disenchantment emerges here as what Charles Taylor calls a “context of understanding,” a lived condition which includes both matters that are explicitly acknowledged by almost everyone (such as that there are no