The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences
Jason A. Josephson-Storm
This is a must-read, IMO, for understanding our current thinking and debates around enlightenment vs. postmodernism, religion vs. science, the paranormal and esoteric.
After finishing this book, I felt strangely liberated, as if I got a short peek behind the Wizard of OZ's curtain, realizing that we had been under a spell all along - a spell that is surprisingly thin and superficial, yet at the same time extremely crafty.
The book kind of takes you on a whirlwind journey, making you relive 250 years of intellectual history and thought about enchantment and disenchantment in a crazy time-lapse. The author weaves all these different intellectual currents together quite masterfully, showing not only the astonishing number of academics, scientists and intellectuals who were knee-deep into the paranormal, the occult, and various esoteric ideas, but how these directly relate and interact with much of their (and by extension, our) secular theories and ideas. It really makes you reconsider where we came from and why our thinking is shaped as it is.
Josephson-Storm hails from a background in critical theory, so there were a few "rolling eyes" moments because of the jargon and political bias here and there - but this is mostly concentrated in the introduction and otherwise very minor. To his credit, he takes the "critical method" very seriously and applies it to his own thought as well. And the amount of reading and leg work he has done, and the mastery he achieved, is super impressive.
Reading this work for me wasn't so much about labelling thinkers or certain traditions as good or bad, but about understanding how the heck we have got to where we are, and this requires a sort of untangling of the dynamics in modern and postmodern thought, and how they played out. There are tons of fascinating details in the book that turned the light bulbs on in my head, and if postmodern thought is good for anything, it surely is great at showing how our history consists largely of various myths created at specific times which then got retrojected into the past, and how even while debunking such myths, you end up perpetuating them and creating new ones. When coupled with in-depth research and deep thought, this method can be super productive, and this book is a great example. In any event, Josephson-Storm might not deliver the one and only true story (which in some sense perhaps can never be done), but he delivers a fascinating story that hadn't been told like that before.
I could go into more detail, but if you are interested not only in the history of modern Western esotericism and its various currents, but how they were part of and interacted with so-called "mainstream thought" (which in some sense could be seen as yet another myth), and how this relates even to our current discussions about logic, reason, religion, science, cosmology, hyperdimensional cosmology, facts vs. feelings, wokeism etc., I highly recommend it!
Link to the book at Chicago University Press
Edit: Here's the table of contents:
Jason A. Josephson-Storm
This is a must-read, IMO, for understanding our current thinking and debates around enlightenment vs. postmodernism, religion vs. science, the paranormal and esoteric.
After finishing this book, I felt strangely liberated, as if I got a short peek behind the Wizard of OZ's curtain, realizing that we had been under a spell all along - a spell that is surprisingly thin and superficial, yet at the same time extremely crafty.
The book kind of takes you on a whirlwind journey, making you relive 250 years of intellectual history and thought about enchantment and disenchantment in a crazy time-lapse. The author weaves all these different intellectual currents together quite masterfully, showing not only the astonishing number of academics, scientists and intellectuals who were knee-deep into the paranormal, the occult, and various esoteric ideas, but how these directly relate and interact with much of their (and by extension, our) secular theories and ideas. It really makes you reconsider where we came from and why our thinking is shaped as it is.
Josephson-Storm hails from a background in critical theory, so there were a few "rolling eyes" moments because of the jargon and political bias here and there - but this is mostly concentrated in the introduction and otherwise very minor. To his credit, he takes the "critical method" very seriously and applies it to his own thought as well. And the amount of reading and leg work he has done, and the mastery he achieved, is super impressive.
Reading this work for me wasn't so much about labelling thinkers or certain traditions as good or bad, but about understanding how the heck we have got to where we are, and this requires a sort of untangling of the dynamics in modern and postmodern thought, and how they played out. There are tons of fascinating details in the book that turned the light bulbs on in my head, and if postmodern thought is good for anything, it surely is great at showing how our history consists largely of various myths created at specific times which then got retrojected into the past, and how even while debunking such myths, you end up perpetuating them and creating new ones. When coupled with in-depth research and deep thought, this method can be super productive, and this book is a great example. In any event, Josephson-Storm might not deliver the one and only true story (which in some sense perhaps can never be done), but he delivers a fascinating story that hadn't been told like that before.
I could go into more detail, but if you are interested not only in the history of modern Western esotericism and its various currents, but how they were part of and interacted with so-called "mainstream thought" (which in some sense could be seen as yet another myth), and how this relates even to our current discussions about logic, reason, religion, science, cosmology, hyperdimensional cosmology, facts vs. feelings, wokeism etc., I highly recommend it!
Link to the book at Chicago University Press
Edit: Here's the table of contents:
Introduction
A Philosophical Archaeology of the Disenchantment of the World
Reflexive Religious Studies: The Entangled Formation of Religion, Science, and Magic
Overview of the Work: Europe Is Not Europe
1 Enchanted (Post) Modernity
Weird America
Haunted Europe
Conclusion: New Age (Post) Modernists?
Part 1: God’s Shadow
2 Revenge of the Magicians
Francis Bacon and the Science of Magic
The Philosophes and the Science of Good and Evil Spirits
Conclusion: The Myth of Enlightenment
3 The Myth of Absence
Nihilism, Revolution, and the Death of God: F. H. Jacobi and G. W. F. Hegel
The Eclipse of the Gods: Friedrich Schiller
The Romantic Spiral: Friedrich Hölderlin
A Myth in Search of History: Jacob Burckhardt
Conclusion: The Myth of the Modern Loss of Myth
4 The Shadow of God
Spirits of a Vanishing God
The Haunted Anthropologist: E. B. Tylor
The Magician and the Philologist: Éliphas Lévi and Max Müller
Theosophical Disenchantment: Helena Blavatsky
Conclusion: Specters of the Transcendent
5 The Decline of Magic: J. G. Frazer
The Cultural Ruins of Paganism
The Golden Bough before Disenchantment
The Departure of the Fairies
The Dreams of Magic
The Lost Theory: Despiritualizing the Universe
Conclusion: A Devil’s Advocate
6 The Revival of Magick: Aleister Crowley
The Great Beast: A Biographical Sketch
The God-Eater and the Golden Bough
Disenchanted Magic
Conclusion: From The Golden Bough to the Golden Dawn
Part 2: The Horrors of Metaphysics
7 The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival
Degeneration and Mysticism: Max Nordau
Kant the Necromancer: Carl du Prel and Arthur Schopenhauer
Hidden Depths: Sigmund Freud
Conclusion: The Cosmic Night
8 Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical Theory
The Cosmic Circle
Magical Philosophy and Disenchantment: Ludwig Klages
The Esoteric Constellations of Critical Theory: Walter Benjamin
Conclusion: The Magic of Theory
9 The Ghosts of Metaphysics: Logical Positivism and Disenchantment
Philosophical Technocracy: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
Revolutionary Antimetaphysics: Positivist Disenchantment and Re-enchantment; Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath
Positivists in Paranormal Vienna: Rudolf Carnap and Hans Hahn
Conclusion: The Magic of Disenchantment
10 The World of Enchantment; or, Max Weber at the End of History
The Disenchantment of the World
Weber the Mystic and the Return from the God Eclipse
Conclusion: Disenchantment Disenchanted
Conclusion: The Myth of Modernity
The Myths of (Post) Modernity
The Myth of Disenchantment as Regulative Ideal
Against the Tide of Disenchantment
Notes
Index
Last edited: