Micro-Review: Josephson Storm's Myth of Disenchantment
Book: Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
What if (contra Max Weber and Charles Taylor), the story of modernity has not been secularization and disenchantment, but rather the dissolution of an artificial divide inherited from Protestant polemics against “Papist superstition”: the divide between religion (qua faith with a theology that is a rationalized science of God) versus magic (the enchantment of a world treated as susceptible to human manipulation)? So argues Josephson Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment. In this view, magic and science are twins. Disenchantment has only been disestablishment and dis-institutionalization, not disbelief.
It follows not only that the disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world is a myth, but even the critical claim that Enlightenment rationality is only another myth is itself a myth. He makes much of the element of Zauber (magic) in the supposed de-magick-ing of the world. Perhaps fewer people identified as (say) Lutherans or Catholics, but that does not mean that their lifeworlds were less enchanted. For, argues Josephson Storm, the Enlightenment was never as disenchanted as it was made out to be: the element of magic is built into human attempts to understand their world. He cites evidence of engagement with magic from early modern proto-scientists to the philosophes. He carries this line of argument all the way to the 20th century, from Freud to the Frankfurt School. This takes him down seldom-traveled paths, such as a study of Walter Benjamin that prioritizes WB’s engagement with Ludwig Klages, and indeed Klages’s generally disguised influence on a range of thinkers all the way down to Jacques Derrida and the critic of “logocentrism.”
Ultimately, on Josephson Storm’s account, magic is just haphazard proto-science, and so is not limited to a time or place (despite great cultural variation); rather magic is a move that recurs perforce in any era, anytime humans need to operate within the element of the contingent and unknown. Indeed, scientists might need to be magicians to come up with hypotheses (unproven by definition, and so magical). Modern thinking remains magical thinking.