Magical powers
[quote=Nietzsche, The Gay Science]Industrial culture ... is unquestionably the most debased form of life that ever was. ...
It is curious that submission to powerful, awe-inspiring and even terrible individuals, to tyrants and generals, is felt far less acutely than submission to such generic bores as our captains of industry: in the employer, workers usually see nothing but a sly dog who feeds on the misery of others, whose name, stature, character and reputation are a matter of perfect indifference to him.
[/quote]
Nietzsche then speculates that this lack of nobility or larger-than-life greatness in employers leads workers to question the right of those employers to exploit and dominate them. As he puts it: "And then you have socialism."
Nietzsche was no ally of the socialists but he shared their critical attitude to the property-owning middle class, the bourgeoisie, and I think he identified something significant. Another word that would work in place of "debased" is "disenchanted". Although the concept of disenchantment in studies of modernity is often applied more to the rise of science and the decline of religionto secularizationI think it can be used to describe the rationalization and desacralization of power.
Alongside the erosion of religions dominance in the field of knowledge was the fading of the magical aura of governance and privilege, as positions of political and economic power were increasingly taken by the middle classmere politicians, businessmen, and administrators, where before there were kings, nobles, and their servants.
Power was increasingly legitimized rather than merely assumed or taken on the basis of an ancient unexamined right to rule, the legitimacy of which had ceased to be tenable. In industry, it was legitimized by the laws of property and employment. In politics, by the consent of a constituency. In the organization of society as a whole, by administrative expertise guided by utilitarianism and the common good. But this made power contestable, thus the magic spell of government and economic privilege was broken.
Incidentally, this is a very schematic and probably Eurocentric simplification of history, but I hope its not too misleading.
Skipping over a couple of hundred years of disenchantment, it occurs to me to ask: are people today enchanted by magic spells? Off the top of my head, and not all equally relevant to power, here are some candidates:
Are these the replacements for the old enchantments of religion and the divine right of kings? It might seem odd to see spirituality and scientism together in that list, so maybe some of them are more characteristic of disenchantment? But maybe they're both. Max Weber, to whom we owe the concept of disenchantment in sociology, had the dialectical idea of re-enchantment via disenchantment, identifiable in a society marked by "incommensurable value-fragmentation into a plurality of alternative metanarratives" (SEP) in the vacuum left by the disenchantment of the Enlightenment.
The fact that these narratives are incommensurable somewhat goes against the thought that because there are so many of them competing, they cannot be incontestable. With the fragmentation of values, ostensibly competing narratives do not compete rationally, judged by the same standards and according to the same logic. They are a matter of personal taste, and nobody can argue you out of what you like.
But more importantly than all that, and more relevant to the subject of power, doesn't the economy now seem to be a system of magical forces, incontestable in politics?
[quote=Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon]Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology have been otherwise known as economics. Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing, and product design. Its beatific vision of eschatological destiny is that global imperium of capital, a heavenly city of business with incessantly expanding production, trade, and consumption. And its gospel has been that of Mammonism, the attribution of ontological power to money.[/quote]
Crucially thoughand here we return to Nietzschedespite the power of this enchantment, the view of the politician or the business leader as "nothing but a sly dog who feeds on the misery of others" has not gone away. The two seem to be compatible. Thus a disrespect for power does not lead, as in the days of the socialist movement, to an actual challenge to that power, or even a notion that it could be challenged. Isn't this what we saw in fascism, and more recently in the Trump presidency: the desire instead to see the replacement of "generic bores" with "powerful, awe-inspiring and even terrible individuals"?
Well that was longer than Id intended.
[hide=Note]I've conflated the distinct concepts of enchantment and ideology in this post. I'm thinking that if the differences come down to power and religion (for enchantment) vs. economic exploitation (for ideology), they can be combined together without confusion.[/hide]
It is curious that submission to powerful, awe-inspiring and even terrible individuals, to tyrants and generals, is felt far less acutely than submission to such generic bores as our captains of industry: in the employer, workers usually see nothing but a sly dog who feeds on the misery of others, whose name, stature, character and reputation are a matter of perfect indifference to him.
[/quote]
Nietzsche then speculates that this lack of nobility or larger-than-life greatness in employers leads workers to question the right of those employers to exploit and dominate them. As he puts it: "And then you have socialism."
Nietzsche was no ally of the socialists but he shared their critical attitude to the property-owning middle class, the bourgeoisie, and I think he identified something significant. Another word that would work in place of "debased" is "disenchanted". Although the concept of disenchantment in studies of modernity is often applied more to the rise of science and the decline of religionto secularizationI think it can be used to describe the rationalization and desacralization of power.
Alongside the erosion of religions dominance in the field of knowledge was the fading of the magical aura of governance and privilege, as positions of political and economic power were increasingly taken by the middle classmere politicians, businessmen, and administrators, where before there were kings, nobles, and their servants.
Power was increasingly legitimized rather than merely assumed or taken on the basis of an ancient unexamined right to rule, the legitimacy of which had ceased to be tenable. In industry, it was legitimized by the laws of property and employment. In politics, by the consent of a constituency. In the organization of society as a whole, by administrative expertise guided by utilitarianism and the common good. But this made power contestable, thus the magic spell of government and economic privilege was broken.
Incidentally, this is a very schematic and probably Eurocentric simplification of history, but I hope its not too misleading.
Skipping over a couple of hundred years of disenchantment, it occurs to me to ask: are people today enchanted by magic spells? Off the top of my head, and not all equally relevant to power, here are some candidates:
- Conspiracy theories
- Demagoguery, nationalism, the alt-right
- Science (as scientism)
- New Age spirituality: "I'm spiritual but not religious"
- Progress/Decline/Catastrophe
- Consumerism
Are these the replacements for the old enchantments of religion and the divine right of kings? It might seem odd to see spirituality and scientism together in that list, so maybe some of them are more characteristic of disenchantment? But maybe they're both. Max Weber, to whom we owe the concept of disenchantment in sociology, had the dialectical idea of re-enchantment via disenchantment, identifiable in a society marked by "incommensurable value-fragmentation into a plurality of alternative metanarratives" (SEP) in the vacuum left by the disenchantment of the Enlightenment.
The fact that these narratives are incommensurable somewhat goes against the thought that because there are so many of them competing, they cannot be incontestable. With the fragmentation of values, ostensibly competing narratives do not compete rationally, judged by the same standards and according to the same logic. They are a matter of personal taste, and nobody can argue you out of what you like.
But more importantly than all that, and more relevant to the subject of power, doesn't the economy now seem to be a system of magical forces, incontestable in politics?
[quote=Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon]Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology have been otherwise known as economics. Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing, and product design. Its beatific vision of eschatological destiny is that global imperium of capital, a heavenly city of business with incessantly expanding production, trade, and consumption. And its gospel has been that of Mammonism, the attribution of ontological power to money.[/quote]
Crucially thoughand here we return to Nietzschedespite the power of this enchantment, the view of the politician or the business leader as "nothing but a sly dog who feeds on the misery of others" has not gone away. The two seem to be compatible. Thus a disrespect for power does not lead, as in the days of the socialist movement, to an actual challenge to that power, or even a notion that it could be challenged. Isn't this what we saw in fascism, and more recently in the Trump presidency: the desire instead to see the replacement of "generic bores" with "powerful, awe-inspiring and even terrible individuals"?
Well that was longer than Id intended.
[hide=Note]I've conflated the distinct concepts of enchantment and ideology in this post. I'm thinking that if the differences come down to power and religion (for enchantment) vs. economic exploitation (for ideology), they can be combined together without confusion.[/hide]
Comments (172)
Yes. Magic, like Marketing, is in the business or creating desirable images in the mind of observers. The power of mis-direction does not force, but merely leads the sheep willingly to the fold. That's only a bad thing when mutton is on the menu. :smile:
The consumerist nature of our current society driven by inherent competition between individuals and corporations thus forces the individual consciously or unconsciously to accumulate more money so that they can compete with the joneses and not just fulfil their basic and unmet needs.
This sometimes vulgar display of material wealth not only enslaves the employee but also the employer.
But hasnt that always been the American Dream?
And now heres green day for some light hearted entertainment. @Jamal
Quoting Jamal
That phrase alone is going to require a fair amount of unpacking.
Quoting Jamal
From a secular POV (which everyone, of course, doesn't share) we never were enchanted by magic spells so we can't be disenchanted now. There never was any such thing as 'magic' if by 'magic' we mean 'effective control over the material world'.
Your list is infused with incommensurable value-fragmentation and plurality of alternative metanarratives, so to speak.
Conspiracy theorya shared narrative which unites an 'out group' around a supposed falsehoodis entirely separate from science. I'm not sure what anyone means by 'scientism'. Demagoguery*** is in disfavor, and isn't equivalent to nationalism and populism, which are currently in ill repute in some circles. New Age spirituality is one of my pet peeves, so no quarrel there. "Progress / Decline / Catastrophe" Consumerism ..... All four terms have meaning, of course, but what did you mean?
Great phrase, like Mark Zuckerberg for instance.
However...
***demagoguery "political activity or practices that seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument." How disfavored I suppose depends on the desires and prejudices of 'ordinary people'.
[quote=Wole Soyinka]...the more I learned about Yoruba religion the more I realised that that was just another interpretation of the world, another encapsulation of man's conceiving of himself and his position in the universe; and that all these religions are just metaphors for the strategy of man coping with the vast unknown.
[...]
...the corpus of Ifa is constantly reinforced and augmented, even from the history of other religions with whom Ifa comes into contact. You have Ifa verses which deal with Islam, you have Ifa verses that deal with Christianity. Yoruba religion attunes itself and accommodates the unknown very easily; unlike Islam, because they know: they did not see this in the Koran - therefore it does not exist.
[...]
The Roman Catholics until today they do not cope with the experience and the reality of abortion! They just shut the wall firmly against it.[/quote]
Wole Soyinka in Conversation with Ulli Beier on Yoruba Religion. 1992
Well I think one can find the same kind of rigidity on these boards very easily. There is no science of morality, or subjectivity, or aesthetics or value, therefore these things do not exist. And no doubt there will be those here who will disdain to learn anything of, let alone from, the 'primitive' religions of Africa.
https://academyofideas.com/2017/06/carl-jung-spiritual-problem-modern-individual/
"We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect..." the dreadful locution of self-exaggeration:
'we'. Even Jung could not bear the helpless inadequacy of the modern individual.
If you scratch around in Jung, you will come across hints that the zeitgeist can manifest the archetypes in proportion to the totality of their denial. Think here of the rise of fascism, or the civil rights/hippy revolution of the sixties. Understand these archetypes as Orisha, Greek god, or meme according to your religion. Try to allow a little accommodation to the next wave of irrationality that will no doubt pour over us.
No. Taken in, possibly, but not enchanted. And the taking-in is both conditional (Will this potion put me one up on my rival?) and temporary (a new fad will replace it; a new idol will replace him). We now have the attention-span of flies: we're all for something as long as it smells good.
Thanks to the CEO's (whom most Americans revere and value - I don't think it's the same in Europe) and their armies of ad-men, we want everything for a very short time and hate everything for only slightly longer. The magic of divine right, class privilege and noblesse oblige was longevity, stability, the security of permanence. I think we miss that. While turnstile novelty keeps the adrenaline pumping, it leaves us very anxious.
That's off-the-top and I'm aware that this enormous topic requires a good deal more thought, but I'll take a drive-by at the questions.
Quoting Jamal
No, we always had those, and scapegoats to go with them.
No, we always had those as well. How do you get to be a god's chosen people, except though a belief in your tribe's specialness? (I don't think alt-right belongs there; the flag-carrier can as easily shout "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" as "Germany, Germany, Above All" or "For King and Country")
Yes, absolutely. Quantum Entropy has a lot of candle-power.
No, that's more personal; flakes don't do lock-step.
That's just a description of how we as a species operate.
That's a compensation for the loss of something - maybe enchantment, conviction, fulfillment, recognition, self-esteem - like gluttony and alcoholism.
Base and noble in Nietzsche's conception, and in that of old (Greek) religions (where he got the idea), correspond roughly to ruled randomly by animal instinct vs someone who has overcome that "basic" animal nature and managed to order those instincts into some more.
So why would workers find it more difficult to submit to captains of industry? Because they don't see a real difference in them, they are just as base as the workers and so there is no perceived natural difference in rank between them that maybe could justify their "rule".
Maybe you could say some of the current ideas are substitutes for the religions of old in that they employ some of the same methods. In Nietzsche conception though the problem is rather with the valuations they promote, not necessarily with the method. Capitalism seeks to merely fulfill desires in the most efficient manner, it strives for contentment, happiness for the largest number. Mere utility therefor is its main value. Religions of old, and Nietzsche, saw those as something to be overcome... the aim should be over-man.
Nicely put.
Quoting invicta
Yes, I see what you mean. Its not only the actual relationship between the two which is enslaving, but the displaythe bewitching images of desired-for wealth. As you say, the American Dream, which probably could have made my list.
Quoting BC
People are always telling me that.
Quoting BC
Weber talks about the fragmentation of values following societys secularization, resulting in a polytheism, an array of smaller enchantments. The idea is that we now have numerous gods and demons, but they look different, and some of them are secular. The conspiracy theorist doesnt arrive at the idea that the moon landings didnt happen via a process of rational enquiry, but because they are looking for meaning; and once they have found it, it is incontestablethey will not be dissuaded (at least for a while).
Its odd that you say demagoguery and populism are disfavoured, when they have so recently made a resurgence. Its not only Trump (and do think he and his style of politics have just gone away now?)
This is from 2019 and I think it identifies a real phenomenon:
[quote=The Rise of Populism;https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/rise-populism]The rise of new political movements is transforming the political systems of many advanced democracies. Three changes in particular are taking place.
1. The dimensions of political conflict have changed. The traditional economic and redistributive conflict between left and right is waning. In its place, a new conflict between nationalist and socially conservative versus cosmopolitan and socially progressive positions has emerged. These changing dimensions of political conflict are apparent from voting outcomes and the positioning of political parties (Inglehart and Norris 2019), from changes in the composition of party supporters (Piketty 2018), and from survey data (Gennaioli and Tabellini 2019).
2. Support for traditional social democratic parties has shrunk, and new parties have emerged and have rapidly gained consensus, positioning themselves on the new dimension of political conflict.
3. Many of these new parties, so-called populists, campaign on anti-establishment and anti-elite platforms, and claim to represent the true interests of the people at large (depicting the latter as a homogeneous group).[/quote]
I didn't mean to suggest that populism was equivalent to nationalism, but they seemed to belong together, and do sometimes go together in the real world.
Progress / Decline / Catastrophe: these are narratives that frame the way we perceive and describe the world. On the one hand there is the view that everything is getting worse (you seem to be under the power of this spell sometimes yourself), and on the other hand (Pinker) there is the view that capitalism and science are super and will lead us onwards and upwards unless we lose our nerve. I suggested them as candidate magic spells because of the way they work as articles of faith, or as real forces rather than mere ideas.
Consumerism: this is quite commonly identified as an ideology, meaning a system of false beliefs that obscures reality (and in the OP Im conflating ideology with magic and enchantment). Consumerism is the belief that buying stuff will make you happy or help you to forge a meaningful identity or raise your status. I think its also connected with commodity fetishism, fetishism being a concept from the anthropology of magic.
As for scientism:
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting Vera Mont
I don't really disagree, but I think it's probably compatible with what I was saying. I'm not denying there's a huge difference between, on the one hand, the magic of divine right and a world infused with God, etc., and on the other hand the magical pull of a new pair of Nikes. And yet it doesn't seem too mistaken to describe them both as magical in the way that Weber seemed to be suggesting, as being like the difference between theism and polytheism.
Quoting Vera Mont
Off-the-top answers are welcome. The OP was rather off-the-top itself.
Quoting Vera Mont
Again, while I don't disagree with your characterizations, I do think they might be compatible with my position. Having said that, I'm not really wedded to my suggestion, that these are all magic spells equivalent to Enchantment with a capital E.
Good point about "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". This has been a French motto since the Revolution but it didn't stop them suppressing slave revolts and colonizing all over the place.
Regarding consumerism, first, just because it's a compensation doesn't mean it can't be viewed as some kind of magic; and second, I think it's much more than a compensation--it seems it can be more like a default belief or behaviour, no longer confined to the rich or available to people merely when things go wrong. It's more like we begin in consumerism and when that doesn't satisfy us, that's when we turn to alcohol. (That was merely half serious, but the serious half is very serious)
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Yes, exactly.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Yes, thanks. I wasn't really exploring Nietzsche's angle on it, merely reacting to one of his insights about the perception of those in power as ordinary, in which I saw a parallel with Weber's concept of disenchantment.
The new enchantment is the tedium of the knowledge class and the New Age sentiments that have developed in response to the minitia mongering. Technology is tedium all the way down, but gets reified as utility. One is praised for its hard nosed mining for more minutia. The other is used as a cudgel to techno-minutias endless nihilistic permutations of mind numbing detail and so becomes useless generalities on life.
an interesting aside: Ursula LeGuin's phantasy worlds remain 'magical' all the way to the last page. The practitioners of powerful magic spells remain. Tolkien, on the other hand brought magic to an end in Middle Earth. The practitioners of magic were either destroyed (Sauron) or their powers were exhaustedGandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, et al). Men without magic would rule the 4th Age.
It's been a long time since I read Harvey Cox's Secular City which is about Christianity in a secularizing/secularized world. I've wrestled with thais issue since the late 1960s. Perhaps that's why I'm leery about magic and enchantment.
In one way we do have magic a plenty -- it is the performed prestidigitation of advertising and public relations--much (most?) of it is trickery and falsity. The magician's skill isn't in harnessing occult power, of course; it is in misdirecting our gaze and attention so that we miss the critical step. In retail mall architecture, the "Gruen Transfer" is intentional disorientation of the mall customer. (Might be a dated concept; are people still dazzled when they walk into a retail mall? I kind of doubt it. But still, successful retail is highly distracting -- the better for you to buy something you didn't really want or need.
Advertising is predicated on deficiencies -- ours -- that products offer to emend. You can have the sexier smile, the sex-getting sexy figure, the status-giving car, the love-inducing diamond, etc. If it doesn't work, well... there are other products to sell you. Advertising is not magic -- it's just ordinary lying and deceit, most of the time.
Magic is "a way of thinking that looks to invisible forces to influence events, effect change in material conditions, or present the illusion of change" (Source)
I'd add something like a mode of behaviour to "a way of thinking". It's real, as real as religion, although like religion, it might not always work, or work in the way people think.
I admit Ive used the concept loosely. Maybe Ill write a post delving into it.
I think people try to make the dichotomy between science and religion when really, its tedium of the endless minutia involved in technology and the fantasy of the spiritual sentiment that the consumers of products borne out of endless minutia look to to escape or to avoid the minutia that they do not have the capacity, means, or inclination to monger (but use the products of said mongering). Talk to an engineer and minutia is god. They are its miners and mongerers. The saviors.
And yes mongering minutia for technology is different than other types of minutia historical facts on the Thirty Years War, abstract philosophies from 14th century Japan, gardening, whatever, because the mongering of tedium in technology is the mode of our very way of surviving in the world now so its usefulness, and its tedium are uniquely and paradoxically part of modernity
See my post above:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/788937
For me its evident that it all boils down to happiness and being content with our lot.
Its funny I googled some meditation ideas and was channeled towards a paywall for certain articles on meditation.
Spirituality our new saviour is now up for sale for £15.99 a month or a one off payment of £666
You see whereas in the past traditional Christian teachings were freely to everyone seeking answers capitalism has created the cunning entrepreneur who will exploit the human condition at any cost.
Feeling miserable? Heres my book buy it and it will go away screw the book says the cosmetic surgeon what you need is a brand new smile and whilst were at it how about a face lift and you will get 20% off on a boob job.
There have been many multi-million dollar lawsuits over yoga terminology and acoutrements in the USA, with corporations copyrighting Sanskrit terms and then suing others who tried to use them.
But then, as Rumi said, 'there would be no fool's gold if there were no gold'.
As for wishful thinking magical thinking its part of being a child, an adult child. Santa of course aint real but the guy Xenu from Scientology is, he knows if you good or bad.
And if you bad thats no good become a member now pay the cult leader and you get to go heaven (or the other planet)when the really BAD aliens arrive ! Im talking about the ones with probes!!!
You know, 'disenchantment' has it's own Wikipedia entry.
[quote=Wikipedia, Disenchantment;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Disenchantment]In social science, disenchantment (German: Entzauberung) is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society. The term was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller by Max Weber to describe the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society. In Western society, according to Weber, scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society, in which "the world remains a great enchanted garden".[/quote]
The article goes onto mention the Frankfurt School, which we've discussed recently.
There's a bogus, but profound, Einstein quote, 'either everything is a miracle, or nothing is'. I think there has to be an element of that feeling in life, otherwise, as Neitszche also glumly predicted, nihilism engulfs everything.
Thats not bogus at all. To me hes expressing the dichotomy between the believer and non-believer.
Yes, in fact Ive vaguely hinted at the need for re-enchantment, so Im not saying its all bad. Just that, well, the bad stuff is bad. Otherwise, Im groping towards (though not so far in this particular discussion) the idea of the sacred as a positive thing. Since I personally think I have a feeling for the sacred while being non-religious and mostly non-mystical, I think we can get to some secular version of the sacred.
Ah, I need to start questioning some of the quotes attributed to Rihanna, I think I saw a legitimate Gandhi quote attributed to Justin Beiber the other day on social media. And no it wasnt satire either
Did you ever encounter Habermas' dialogues with Cardinal Ratzinger? I've never read the books but I've read a few articles about them - see Does Reason Know what it is Missing?, NY Times.
So far I havent read Habermas, I admit partly because superficially his work seems a bit boring compared to that of the original Frankfurt lineup.
Of course, but its not great. The SEP article on Weber is better, particularly on re-enchantment, which is of relevance to the OP.
(There's a current academic who has criticized the 'disenchantment' thesis - Jason Josephen-Storm - a review here - review also mentions the Frankfurt School.)
I've just read your OP properly, I had skipped over it before (hadn't noticed the link to Weber). The thought that springs to my mind is the G K Chesterton quote, 'When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.' I see a lot of that in today's world. Take for example the proliferation of science fiction about multiverses, multiple realities and the like - Inception, Matrix, Tenet. Many of them express, to me, a gnawing doubt about the nature of reality which is being projected through popular media. And everywhere a powerful longing for identity, but refracted now through the infinite mirrored hallways of social media. There's a deep sense that nobody knows what is real anymore. Not even scientists, with their mad dreams of multiple universes. Makes it easy to believe in anything. Life is like a movie, but unfortunately with real blood.
Yep, I've been looking into his work and I've read a few articles, but not the book (yet). As for the Institute for Social Research, as you may know I've been working through their work, and my OP is clearly informed by that--they made great use of the concept of disenchantment, and I'm attempting to use something along the lines of their approach to the critique of ideology. That might come out more explicitly in the discussion, but as they're focused on reason more generally, I'm not sure exactly how it fits. The "culture industry" is relevant though, for sure.
Quoting Wayfarer
Also quoted by @unenlightened above.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you're right.
There could be an ulterior motive somewhere and that it doesnt all appear as it is. I just cant figure it out says the conspiracy theorist
Quoting Wayfarer I fear I may have enchanted you. My profound apologies.
You talking about me?
Quoting unenlightened
I once said this to a friend of mine, who is a marketing manager but is actually very intelligent and interesting. He roared with laughter and spoke for an hour to prove I was talking bollocks. Quite convincing.
Quoting unenlightened
The enchantment I mentioned as being the most important one today was the economy, which was just my secret code for capitalism (I dishonestly avoided making the post look too Marxist). This one works in the way you describe I think. I still have to sort out the differences between magic, enchantment, and ideology. Magic is a knowing use of objects and rituals, whereas enchantment is to be under a magic spell, often unknowingly, and it's the latter that fits with the concept of ideology. Anyway yeah, I agree.
Quoting Jamal
If the pointed hat with the big D on it fits :monkey: ... I am actually in battle with the huge army that serves under the banner of "The Enlightenment", as anyone who pays attention to my posts will be aware.
Thank you for enriching my stew of ideas.
Quoting unenlightened
I'm still on the fence on that one. Or rather, I'm for and against.
The OP mixes up two topics, related and both interesting but perhaps better treated separately. It begins and ends with the disenchantment and possible re-enchantment of power, but in the middle there's a very speculative digression into the "polytheism" of small enchantments.
But what's done is done, and I don't mind discussing either.
(For your own comfort and safety, please breathe between paragraphs.)
[quote=Aristotle]It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.[/quote]
To reach an understanding is to find a mutual accommodation. Therefore, to understand something or someone, one requires some vacancy of mind together with the ability to reach out with empathy to the thing or person.
For example: you read this post, and to understand it, you have to entertain the ideas it presents, and consider the significance for your other significant understandings of believing them. If your mind is too full of other stuff you won't have room to entertain a new thought
We all love to be entertained, and to entertain. Entertainment distracts the mind from its own conflicts and confusions.
And some of us have reached an understanding with a significant other. This is the enchantment of romantic love - a mutual accommodation.
The enchantment to beware is the one sided accommodation where the ideas of others find a home in you, but you find no home in them. Heroes and idols, one sided love affairs manipulations. Beware especially the one-sided media that disguise themselves as poly-vocal; the chat show, the discussion, and do not mistake a claim to be unbiased as any kind of accommodation.
I tend to experience romantic love more like being hit on the head with a mallet, causing brain damage, madness, and aberrant behaviour. I think I experience understanding like that too sometimes. Or, to use a different metaphor, it's like immersion, and the accommodation may never come.
Are you saying that we cannot be unenchanted, but that we can be enchanted well, genuine understanding and romantic love being the models we should look to?
EDIT: I hadn't seen your last paragraph when I wrote this.
Humans are cunning animals with plenty of ambition to go with it so despite all their scheming and fanciful ideals it comes down to a sentiment expressed by the great Bob Dylan
@Jamal
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'
Your experience is only half the romance: it takes two to tango. Alas my instruction to breathe came too late. The whole point is the mutuality of relationships of understanding.
What you describe is what magicians call 'possession' and psychiatrists call 'obsession'. Not entertaining or accommodating an idea in your mind, but the idea taking over your mind. Trump is such a magician. Magicians recite their spells without for a moment entertaining them, so they work on others and not themselves. @Banno calls it "bullshit" which is a defensive warding counter-spell, whose effect is very limited because it lacks poetic power.
Quoting Jamal
I'm saying that magic is part of everyday life, and we are well advised to recognise how it works. I am saying that it works best on those who deny it.
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Isn't it also important not to be too quick to conclude that the other has failed to understand?
Otherwise, sage words indeed, as befit your role.
To be possessed of reason is a great gift, but to be possessed by reason is to suffer a life-long tyranny.
Add decentralisation to that as well.
The proximity to the powers that be seems to be important to me: the corporation, while faceless, takes the position of the provider to a certain degree, yet has no issue with dictating the terms of one's toils without any pretense of having one's best interests, or the best interests of anybody, in mind, as profits are all that matter.
Furthermore, there is a sense of purpose and identity that goes with living under an authoritarian strong-man who speaks to all of the xenophobic or otherwise dark tendencies some people desire to see realized. At least Trump had the interests of the reactionary right and alt-right in mind. I doubt a single cart-gatherer for a super-market truly believes that the supermarket they work for cares that they harbor racist thoughts - or would validate them. Probably because they don't and wouldn't, as a corporation is not a political tribe.
edit: not supporting Trump here, he was perhaps the most criminal president we have ever had
I don't think it's incompatible, either; I never meant my comments as a direct contradiction. I only question some of the categories.
But, no, I don't think either ostentation or consumerism has much relation to magic.
The emperors of China, the sun king, the pharaohs, not to mention Mansa Musa of the Mali empire, all displayed their great wealth, and it only added to their aura of sanctity. They all lived and ruled over nations with a strong sense of identity and belief that a god (or several) favoured them above other nations, and their rulers above other men.
I think most people today undervalue the pull of magic, of awe, of myth, wonderment and yearning.
There is a commercial degradation of both language and spirit when "myth" is used as a synonym for "lie" and pizza can be routinely "awesome". Again, I don't know about Europe today, but modern American jingo is not interchangeable with Nathan Hale's ideal of patriotism. Nor can televangelism be compared to the monastic zeal of the middle ages. All surface, no conviction. And no amount of baconcheeseburgers will substitute for manna.
When you stop believing that Santa Claus and his elves - or Baby Jesus and his angels - make Christmas, it doesn't matter how much tinsel you hang or money you spend of gifts - the magic is gone forever.
And what is left? Imagine a world where everyone helped everyone else continually with no entertainment. Imagine a world where everyone just entertained themselves without helping anyone else. Its meaningless in every direction. Those people will just say have a mixed economy of helping and entertainment. Somehow, this mundane realization is seen as the modern standard, and this is tedious as the tedium of technology. The myths were there so that there was a veneer of something greater than entertainment and surviving.
Though it should be revealed as such, its banishment leads to Sisyphus and the mundanity of contingency. Next stop (hopefully) Cioran Pessimism.
But we still can have Science - not the science of mere technology to which commercialism has reduced it, but Science as a quest for knowledge and mastery, just as wizardry was a quest for knowledge and control.
We still can have Philosophy - not polemics, not nit-picking pedantry, but the striving to understand our relationship to the world.
We still have ideals... some of us, who have not lost them in the tide of ideologies.
Yes, but "magic" is a loosey goosey term, once it's taken out o the theater and pressed into service at the Academy. A lot of what we say about religion is also loosey gooseynot because we are sloppy thinkers. (I mean, we might be sloppy thinkers, but there is an awful lot of slop in the topic to start with,).
As somebody said, "Religion is magic you believe in; magic is religion you don't believe in."
I would now reveal all to you, but it's time for my Tuesday lunch date; if I remember, I'll disabuse you of your enchantment later.
Personal chanting is supposedly the magic by which we create the world. So why does it seem that the world is totally fucked up? Because that's what we wanted. Utopia is boring.
**God, that's such smug bullshit. I bet all the people who like smug bullshit will appreciate it. God, they're so smug.**
Oh, please do not abuse us with disenchantment!
Quoting BC
But this, I like very much. We do always include a lot of slop in big topics; it's hard, slow work, picking out and washing the nuggets.
The term is used in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. No doubt its used loosely sometimes in those disciplines. I guess youve been unlucky and have somehow, in all of your reading, managed to miss the more rigorous use of the term.
The mystery of how its done always appeals and makes us think, stretching our imaginations to ponder.
Once you know though that mystery disappears, and that makes me sad :(
Great thread. Good read.
The divine right of kings was at least more consistent than the divine right of politicians. Given its premise and the prevailing beliefs, there was perhaps good reason for the passive obedience to a kings will, whereas for the politicians and leaders of today there is none. In the absence of the divine right of kings some philosophers supplied the legitimacy of power with newer, but just as baseless myths, like the Social Contract or the right of some majority to determine who has authority over whom. In a sense people continue to hold in fact doctrines they have rejected in name.
So it is with Nietzsches socialist. He is unable to legitimize the business owners authority as he once did the leaders of a superior kind, those militant types who hitherto governed them with force and subjection. The act of submitting voluntarily to someone who is neither superior in class or race was too foreign to him, I suppose, so the socialist runs, serf-like, to the politicians and the State.
I would say the magical forces do not manifest as economics and economy, but as politics and the State. The relationship between employee and employer rises from the Law of Necessity (in Nietzschean terms) whereas the relationship between man and state is one of unbridled superstition.
But my point was "Science" is the tedium. Otherwise it is just more achoring myths. I'd put it really as entertainment more than myth. But we love our myths, because minutia mongering is oh so tedious. Bits, bytes, chemical reactions, equations, and the like. Sounds good until it's just bip bop boop bop bip boop bop all day all day all day.....
Thank you.
Quoting NOS4A2
I think you have a view of what socialism means that is very different from mine. The socialists I had in mind, and the ones Nietzsche was referring to, were not running to the State and politicians, but fighting for rights, grouping together with no help from the State (on the contrary) to challenge the power not only of the employers but of the State that backed them, demanding changes to the law, calling for a revolution and for emancipation. The idea you have that socialism is some kind of worship of the State or necessarily a privileging of government, or that socialist workers have not acted independently of authority, is badly mistaken, and it maligns a long tradition of efforts that, while they did not lead to revolution in Western Europe as intended, did win for the workers many important rights and improvements to their conditions. And you brush it off with contempt!
And this is a clue to what I see is the problem with your second paragraph quoted here. Capitalism subsumes politics and the State. To be under the spell of the State and politicians is to be under that of capitalism, in most countries, where no political party is willing to challenge capitalism.
Of course there have been state socialisms, including some very horrible ones, and of course professional social democrats look to the state to do everythingthats just not really what were talking about when we talk about workers being massacred by police for going on strike.
By the way, although I wont tell you not to respond to me with a brilliant and comprehensive denunciation of socialism in all its forms, I dont know if I want to debate that, as its not really where I was going with this discussion.
On the other hand, its actually interesting to see that the OP is meaningful to someone with a very different world-view, and once again I appreciate that you addressed the central issue.
The spells we are under determine which spells we think people are under, but were not always right.
But there's always someone smarter than me (and, there's always someone smarter than anyone, is all I really mean) -- so there's always a possibility that even though I can spot a spell, that I'm enchanted. And if I'm enchanted, was it the enchantment that allowed me to spot the spell? Are there spells which counter-spells?
Magic is something maybe only seen from the outside. In which case, it's hard to identify if it's magic, because you sort of have to know how it works "from the inside" too. In which case it's no longer magical, so how do you spot the spell if it's lost its potency?
So while I find it all very interesting, I also get lost very quickly.
As you know, Nietzsche is no fan of socialism. I only consider what Nietzsche previously wrote of socialists and assume it in this aphorism. He mentions socialists and state-idolaters in the same book, but it goes further back, for instance, in Human All Too Human. Their desire for state power is unavoidable.
Maybe Im wrong but my reading is that Nietzsche was psychoanalyzing the socialist, criticizing how he dehumanizes the employer. The employer is unknown and uninteresting. At the same time he is a cunning, blood-sucking dog of a man, while everything else about himhis name, shape, manner, reputationno socialist cares about. In my mind this is dehumanization.
But, in an extra little slight upon the socialist, following a tyrant into tyranny isnt as painful, and if the nobility of birth showed in [the employers] eyes and gestures, there might not be any socialism of the masses. Perhaps this is why, historically, socialists have followed tyrants and demagogues.
As for capitalism, there is no system that does not consider the management and segregation of capital. In that sense, all economic systems are invariably capitalist, socialist or otherwise, the only difference in being who controls it, private or the State. Had socialists named it something else, like the Monopolist system, we might well have been passed it by now.
I'm not sure how this fits into your thread, but if I have strayed too far, I apologize.
Quite possibly. I haven't read much in anthropology, and have not found a lot of magic in sociology, psychology, and philosophy--literally and figuratively.
BTW, one example of "magic" might be the placebo effect. The fake pill can not have a beneficial effect, yet the patient improves. Conversely, the "nocebo" effect also works, where delivering a very bad prognosis seems to speed up the progress of the disease. Low expectations tend to produce low performance. This "magic" is possible because the knowing brain (that thought it was taking a real pill) is also in charge of the details of the body's operation. Ditto for the "nocebo".
Look. I understand that magic is "really real" for many people. A lot of people believe in witch doctors and their magic, for instance. Atheists may think that nothing fails like prayer, but a lot of believers would vehemently disagree. At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, some gay men resorted to magical cures (crystals, for instance) because there was, literally, nothing else. Part of the "magic" was the real camaraderie of the afflicted, but one doesn't need magic to understand that. When effective medication came along, the crystals were dumped. Many cultures have employed magic to control nature. While granting that magical acts may be truly comforting, when it comes to control of nature, magic has no efficacy. Dancing does not make it rain, but it is a meaningful activity.
No, that's exactly the science I didn't mean. I mean learning the secrets of stars and clouds and oceans; learning the language of whales and cicadas; rediscovering the magic of knowledge that civilization had shut down for so long. One of the recurring myths of pre-agricultural peoples is the ability to communicate with and change places with animals, an ability we lost through some transgression against Nature. The Eden story is a reiteration of that theme. We are only just beginning to shed the constraints of the conqueror's application of natural curiosity.
Learning the secrets of stars, whales and cicadas involves a tremendous amount of tedious work -- work considered tedious by the people who love doing it. The exciting moments are thinly scattered.
Now wait a minute... one of the benefits of civilization has been the rich discoveries of science, boring details and brilliant discoveries alike. What "magic of knowledge" did civilization shut down for so long???
Although Ive been reading the book recently, I didnt notice the bit about state-idolaters. On top of that, I misinterpreted you, forgetting that you were writing about Nietzsches socialist. I was too quick to jump to the defence of my socialist, the revolutionary workers I had in mind, against what I thought was your own characterization. Apologies.
But I dont think Nietzsche is writing about the dehumanization of the employer. He is writing about how ordinary the employers appear to workers when compared with great tyrants and generals. He has as much contempt for the bourgeoisie as he does for socialists.
The employer is unknown and uninteresting, lacking in greatness, from Nietzsches own point of view. From the same section, entitled Of the Absence of Noble Demeanour:
He dislikes both. His sympathies are clearly with, as youd expect, nobility and greatness.
Quoting NOS4A2
This is difficult to address because it hinges on the definition of capitalism, which we dont want to get into. If I just say that any stable State is not in opposition to the economy, and if economic actors are powerful such that they significantly influence the State, then to be under the spell of the State is to be under that of the economy.
Quoting NOS4A2
Im not sure but dont worry, its interesting. I derailed things with my misinterpretation.
Forgot to address this. Its not about who the socialist wants to follow, its about who the masses want to follow, and this is what I came back to towards the end of my original post. (Not that Im endorsing Nietzsches view on this entirely, though he does identify something real)
To be fair to you I do have a mild contempt for most statisms, whether it be socialist, conservative, liberal, or fascist. The only difference between them is who ought to benefit from State power, the rise of which increases in inverse proportion to social power. In my mind, until State power decreases social power will never increase, and I think that makes me more socialist than I care to admit out loud. Unfortunately I lack the brain wiring required to accept any kind of collectivism.
I wonder if since N's time the idea of the "industrialist" and "commercial magnate" has gone under the sort of makeover required to form him into a being more interesting, that a worker might follow him as obediently as a soldier would his general. There are definitely obsequious and servile workers, but then again I'm not sure the stereotype of the industrialist has been altered too much since those days.
On the other hand, and despite the atrocities of the 20th century, State prestige has only grown in accordance with its power. Petitioning the state, taking part in its elections, and casting ballots is now the only means by which we can secure any right, which the state gets to confer at its whim and fancy. State power, then, becomes the means of salvation. That's why I would argue that the replacements for the old enchantments of religion and the divine right of kings is the State.
Yes, I do. Some may not be aware that I stole the term from Harry Frankfurt. As a simple warding spell it has its place in everyday encounters, keeping at bay the smaller daemons. Using it allows me to tend my garden. Of course at any moment this or that Ubermensh might come along and ruin everything, but then again, maybe not.
Preserve us from The Great And The Powerful; from those who suppose themselves to control more potent spells. Would that they might learn just to tend to their own gardens.
I think the collectivism-individualism polarity obscures more than it enlightens. Ive recently been reading some Frankfurt School Marxists, and collectivism is one of the things they seem to hate the most. Socialism is about getting the balance right, and any socialism that does not exist to enable the full flourishing of individuals is not one I could get behind.
[quote=The Communist Manifesto]In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.[/quote]
In other words, individual freedom is the necessary condition for collective freedom.
But thats a side-issue.
Quoting NOS4A2
Theres a sense in which Elon Musk has an aura, not of nobility, but of something modern and yet equivalent to it. At the very least, he does appear out of the ordinary, at least in his public image. But Henry Ford had something similar, so this might be an American thing. Nietzsche in his day may have been unaware of any charismatic, larger-than-life captains of industry.
On the other hand, maybe even these people would have appeared lacking in greatness to Nietzsche. In any case, the main point of the last part of the OP was that even if business tycoons and executives appear ordinary to the masses, the magic of the economy (or the system) itself is so strong that they do not turn to socialism as they once did, but once again to larger-than-life characters.
Quoting NOS4A2
As Ive implied, I think this is compatible with my position. The difference is that, unlike me, you dont see it as inextricably bound up with the economy (which is not to say that you cant have an oppressive State without capitalism).
Well, you got to my point first, hats off to you.
Quoting Vera Mont
While I sympathize with your romanticism, as BC pointed out. It's all pretty tedious stuff. Some of it, mind-numblingly so. Mongering minutia is what we need to do to survive. We are all infused in the mongering and the mining of the Almighty minutia.
You notice even in this forum, to have cache, you have to mine more minutia than the next guy? If not, you are just not legitimate. The modern day legitimacy is how much minutia you can mine and monger. Mark my words. Otherwise, you are an untethered New Age, mystic freak. All big picture, no analysis. All pie in the sky, no hard-nosed data. When you get granular enough, the nihilism becomes ever so present because at some level, it is just people who need their minds to be occupied with details so it doesn't have to think broadly or generally or existentially. Minutia minutia minutia!
[quote=Karl Marx] History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.[/quote]
Ok Karl, you da man. But what is the mechanism that determines it to be so?
Anyone?
Yep. People are stupid.
While you might be looking for something with a bit more nuance, the general thrust of such an answer is indubitable.
Here's a good example. A friend of mine who is interested in a lot of different topics, was a volunteer at a museum. One of his tasks was sorting "debitage" from an aboriginal site in Minnesota excavated some years earlier. Debitage is the rocks, bits of wood, bone, charcoal, and stone flakes and such that aboriginal people deposited on the sites they used. Each little piece is examined, identified, sorted, and characterized. It might sound mindless (and it is mind-numbing work) but it yields a lot of real data about diet, tools, trade, and so on. For instance, many of the stone pieces used in making arrow heads were from a distance of -- sometimes -- 150 to 300 miles away.
It's all about minutiae.
I did a project of my own minutiae back in 1990. I put together a long list (thousands of entries) of words derived from Anglo-Saxon. This was before the Internet became useful. I went through a collegiate dictionary and found the words, one by one. Very tedious, but I found it interesting. Then I wrote a program (more minutiae) to determine what percent of words in given text were derived from Anglo Saxon, and from that determine reading difficulty.
Hundreds of hours went into this project. There was a real, practical reason for doing this project, and we don't have to go into detail. It was "successful". (No animals were harmed by this research, but nobody's life was saved either, as far as I can tell.)
Life can so easily get bogged down in the foggy murky bog of minutiae.
Quoting Banno
It doesn't really work for me. Are you saying that Trump is sufficiently plausible, convincing, a clever manipulator of people? He doesn't look that good to me, that he is the explanation of his own success. It's the same with our Boris; he's fucking turnip, always has been and always will be, and rarely makes enough sense to even achieve falsehood. If people are stupid why aren't the smart people in charge?
Yeah, about that. Are you sure Trump, Boris, Berlusconi and friends are in charge?
How does the person making this generalization exempt himself? Are you immune to bullshit?
Our famous rulers, from William the Conqueror on down to Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Anthony Albanese, et al didn't have to consult the masses to begin their ascent. The relevant gate keepers are relatively few in number. Only after Tweedledee and Tweedledum have been admitted as acceptable possibilities, do The People get to vote.
I didn't exempt myself. Nor should you. But think how much less damage Putin could do if he were but an arborist.
That is so in all areas of human endeavour. We celebrate the military victories, not the sloshing around in foxholes; thre political victories, not having doors slammed on campaigners' faces; the religious epiphanies, not the polishing of church pews.
Quoting BC
Who says? Stone-chipping and hide-tanning; canoe construction and making fire; wheels and pottery were all invented before civilization. Inquiry into how things work is far older than humanity, and human curiosity is far older than civilization.
Quoting BC
First, all that does not serve power; then, all that contradicts doctrine, then whatever does not generate monetary, political or military advantage.
Pie is tedious to make. You have to get the proportions right, chill the dough long enough, roll it to the right thickness, bake it at the right temperature. Getting it up into the sky is even harder. But once done, it's magical. Hell, it was in the OP, and I never claimed legitimacy.
I didn't have you down as a conspiracy theorist. If that counts as an explanation at all, it's less convincing than the demonic tides in the collective unconscious theory.
I've cleaned the pews at Christ Lutheran a few times, and the main epiphany was that somebody else ought to do it.
Quoting Vera Mont
Or they ARE civilization. Even Neanderthals had a set of technologies. They could, for instance, extract a strong black pitch (glue) from birch bark. Not sure what they did with it, just off hand. Maybe repaired their bone china? They turned animal hides into leather (one of their processes involved chewing on the hide; we can tell by looking at their teeth.)
6000 years ago, aboriginal people were mining copper on Isle Royale in Lake Superior.
Quoting Vera Mont
I don't know. Say more about that.
I tend to believe any conspiracy theory right up until the point of analysing it. Including "collective unconscious". They are all-and-some propositions, explaining anything or everything and so not being all that useful. And that's also the trouble with 's explication in terms of magic, in that it closes off further analysis as just more magic.
But of course, nothing in those accounts shows them to be wrong.
I don't have the answer. But I have a garden.
It's partly the way you're interpreting events. We naturally look for repetition, so we highlight the similarities between now and the 1930s, using words like "mirroring.". This view is melancholic per Kierkegaard.
Alternately, we may see ourselves as unique in all of human history, and in some ways we are. There's hard edged drama to this outlook, because we see how we have problems no society has ever faced before.
It's a matter of predisposition.
They - science, innovation, laws, mores, beliefs and rituals are part of culture, but many cultures predate civilization.
My idea of civilization agrees roughly with National Geographic's
though I'm inclined to date its origins a little earlier.
Once a rigid hierarchical class system is in place, so is a prescribed religion and written law. Everyone has his or her place. You can no longer be a cobbler who dabbles in scientific experimentation: you have not enough time to spare from earning a living; the only lines of inquiry you can afford to pursue are those that might improve the treatment or dyeing of leather and thus enhance your financial prospect. Education becomes regimented and exclusive to the clerical an administrative classes; everyone else is trained in the skills pertaining to his trade, or put to work in the fields. Women, of course, are relegated to purely physical functions, no brain work.
A few exceptionally clever lads of the upper classes may become professional scientists: they design fortifications, aqueducts and cleverly concealed tombs for their aristocratic patrons. They're welcome to try turning lead into gold, improving the aim and range of projectile weapons and curing toothache, but had better not come up with any crazy ideas about life on other planets or a non-emperor-centered solar system.
I do think the state is inextricably bound to the economy, much to my dismay. It intervenes in trade on account of its preferred beneficiaries and plunders from its subjects their property, their labor, and the fruits of it.
So if we, like Marx and Engels, are to distinguish people by class, between oppressor and oppressed, it seems to me the proper distinction lies between the State, those who seek to capture the monopoly on violence, and the rest of usworkers, employers, sole proprietors, or anyone who is legally deprived of his efforts, and legally forced to labor for anothers benefit.
I think youre dead on about how the individualism/collectivism debate obscures things. Ironically, individualism is a more inclusive form of collectivism. It considers every individual of any collective, which means the entire group. Collectivism as it has traditionally manifested subordinates the individual to group interests, which is always decided by a powerful group at the expense of the rest. The myth of the common weal or the common good is used to smuggle this conflict past the customs. Perhaps this is an example of another magic spell, something to be enchanted by.
So, when I speak of "civilization" I use the same scheme that National Geographic uses. So ancient Egypt was a civilization, the Lakota people were not. Ancient Rome was a civilization, the typical African population were not.
Even though I use "civilization" in that way, such usage is certainly not above criticism. Whether one lived in Athens, on the plains of North America, or in the tropical forests of Africa, South America, and so on, the problems of survival and regulation were very similar. Cultural continuity required transmission of heritage through oral or written language. Both have been successfully used.
Does the fact that Athens built temples with fluted pillars make them superior to the Lakota who prioritized portability--so superior that Athens is a civilization and the Lakota are not?
I probably won't change my actual practice, but in a fight it might be hard to defend it.
For anthropologists, monument building is a mark of civilization.
Most of the depositors in the Silicon Bank were very wealthy individuals and funds. Not many payrolls were at stake.
I object to a lot of government activity (and to a lot of corporate activity too), but the government is also a service provider and its services are paid for with taxes. Mostly it seems like a good deal (especially at the state and local level).
I'm not especially interested in aboriginal cultures, but they seem to have built monuments in words. I much prefer reading about the civilizations of the Middle East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome than about the ancient people of the western hemisphere, Africa, Eurasia, and so on. That doesn't mean that these other cultures are inferior to my preferred civilization-topics. Or does it?
I don't think civilization is inherently better aesthetically. Obviously it ended up being more successful than other modes.
Not superior or inferior; different. In attitude, in priorities, in social organization, in philosophy and psychology.
It organizes the affairs of whomever captures it, capitalist or otherwise. All that changes from one ideology to the next is the class of beneficiaries and the extent of its exploitation.
The bulk of GDP is produced by business because government doesnt produce anything. Its only means of subsistence is the exploitation of its own people. But we should remember that government, too, is an employer par excellence. Over 15% of the American workforce are involved in military, public, and national service at the local, state, and federal levels. Thats to say nothing about those employed in its orbit, like lawyers and contractors of various sorts.
Im afraid the industrial scale of this exploitation goes largely unnoticed.
The Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas were civilized--cities, big stone monuments, and all. Did the Western Civilization reps in the persons of the Spanish view them as fellow civilized people? Did the Pilgrims and Puritans from Merry Old England recognize the Nauset tribe of the Wampanoag Nation as a culture, a civilization, or primitive barbarians (even though the natives helped the Pilgrims survive)?
The Soviet State is a better example of government exploiting the people than the American State. The Soviet government was essentially "state capitalism" -- the government owned the means of production pretty much lock stock, and barrel, and the people were by and large its employees.
Exactly.
Not Civilization?
Civilization? Not Civilization? Can't tell.
Australians, around 60,000 years. Native Americans, about 10,000. True, it's a long time. Not a lot of Beethoven or Shakespeare, but robust in other ways.
As Augustine pointed out, where there are cities, there is continuous unrest and violence. It's more dramatic.
Immanent critique springs to mind. You dig into it from the inside, or to mix metaphors, you pull at the loose threads of contradiction, till you see how the spell really worksand then you tell people about it. You dont presume to begin outside, like youre something special; you're able to see the spell thanks to your critical reason, which you apply from within while knowing youre under a spell like everybody else. You continue to fetishize commodities after youve read Capital.
This is a bit like the question of the historical relativism of philosophy: its a problem only if youre not aware of it. You dont have to be transcendent in your thinking, only critical.
Quoting Moliere
Im a bit lost too. Theres magic, enchantment, ideology, and, though I didnt mention it, theres myth too. And these terms are all used differently by different thinkers. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer contrast magic as a mostly ancient practice that addresses things in their specificity, with myth and enlightenment, which tend to bring things under general concepts as a means to explain and dominate nature. I feel like I should have stuck to the Weberian angle of disenchantment and enchantment. But then the OP would have been more boring.
Quoting Moliere
I like the idea of counter-spells. The recent lifestyle movement they called minimalism was set against the spell of consumerism, but was really just a magic spell itself, sitting alongside all the other self-help trends as yet another choice in a consumerist world.
[quote=The Minimalists;https://www.theminimalists.com/minimalism/]Minimalism is a tool that can assist you in finding freedom. Freedom from fear. Freedom from worry. Freedom from overwhelm. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from depression. Freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture weve built our lives around. Real freedom.[/quote]
I like this. Good points.
Quoting Jamal
As long as we can acknowledge being a bit lost then I'm OK with that :D
Less boring is always better, especially for an OP because it's hard to gauge what'll actually stick or pick up enough people.
I think I'm mostly on track in stating "magical thinking", yes?
Quoting Jamal
Me too! Almost like the glasses in They Live! -- I think part of the point of calling it "magic" is to note how odd this behavior is in relation to other things we say and do and to attempt to counter-spell it, as it were. Or at least acknowledge that we're stuck with it.
Just describing this phenomenon feels so surreal to me in the magical sense. For lots of reasons but foremost being that I feel like "magic" is the right description for how consumerism has an adaptability unto itself, or at least feels like it's behaving on its own, like it's alive. But it's not like consumerism is a thing with properties, either, so it sits in a quasi-place.
An enchanted one, I hope.
[quote=Max Weber, Sociology of Religion]For the various popular religions in Asia, in contrast to ascetic Protestantism, the world remained a great enchanted garden, in which the practical way to orient oneself, or to find security in this world or the next, was to revere or coerce the spirits and seek salvation through ritualistic, idolatrous, or sacramental procedures. No path led from the magical religiosity of the non-intellectual classes of Asia to a rational, methodical control of life.[/quote]
Quoting Moliere
Let's not psychologise, let's philosophise.
That it's partly the way I'm interpreting events is partly the way you're interpreting events. Interesting that you have recourse to the medieval humours to understand me.
My interpretation of the notion of "magical powers", is that it is an 'undue' influence, a misleading, or distortion precisely of my interpretation of the world. Folks may recall my threads on psychology as just such a systematic misleading tool. Every experiment begins with misdirection in order to prevent the natural human response of compliance with the other's wishes, or its opposite. The main successes being in the field of advertising and brainwashing; this has now reached the level of seriously interfering with elections by tailored posts based on individual data for example. Other techniques might include 'love-bombing' for example used by cults and others to recruit. There might be talk of memes here too.
So much for the secular magicians.
But we are already haunted by our selves. Billions of people all haunted by the way they interpret events, all seeing the magic from the outside, or not seeing it because it is inside. I was brought up with "The Bomb". It was the new thing in the world, to be accommodated by psyche; by pretty much everyone in the world. "When you hear the alarm, crouch under your desk, put your head between your knees, and kiss your arse goodbye." It was transformative, this new destructive power, and more shocking even than the revelation of the depths of human depravity exposed in the deliberate mass starvation in Russia, and the Final Solution in Europe. This is my interpretation of events: we haunt ourselves. The secular magicians are playing with forces they cannot comprehend because they cannot comprehend themselves.
So how to philosophise the forces that guide philosophy? First, breathe.
Now let us speak as equals round a campfire in the dark, of stories we have heard of faraway places and forgotten monsters, and the wonder of the stars, and the brevity of life.
[quote=Trent Reznor, Hurt]And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way.
I think it's fruitful, but I don't know where the track is.
Quoting Moliere
Can we distinguish between counter-spells that reveal the truth, like the glasses, and those that merely compete on the same ground, like the minimalism example I gave--bewitching us with something different and possibly better, but still bewitching us? How would we make that distinction? Have I lost the plot?
Quoting Moliere
Yes, and this is why it helps to use the concept of magic; I disagree with those who are dismissing it with an easy let's get real, there's no such thing as magic. You can't point to quasi-places on an everyday map.
Fair. I probably don't either then.
Quoting Jamal
Yes, I think we can. And I think that's helpful too. In fact, one can probably sell the glasses, would be a way to put it. Counter-spells for sale, get your counter-spells here! Doesn't exactly have the same mystique as a magic box of glasses that shows you The Forms.
There's a similarity there with Plato's myth. I think I'd like to say They Live! is like that myth, but for something magic-akin (in Zizek's mind, ideology). It's a myth to talk about ideology rather than a spell proper.
Quoting Jamal
Cool. Same page, here. I find the notion of applying anthropological categories formerly reserved for understanding "primitive" peoples to better understand ourselves an interesting thought.
Quoting unenlightened
Interesting. So rather than looking at "interpretation" there's an outside influence on a person's interpretation. That already answers my question, then, about whether the self is a spell -- no! The self is already there, as is an interpretation too. There's a lot already going on before we can say, here's a distortion of an interpretation.
Quoting unenlightened
Advertising, brainwashing, love-bombing -- techniques developed to influence people for organizational ends. But there's something different, here. It's not like door knocking where you have a pamphlet to talk about what's pertinent to a person about the world around them. There are honest ways of building relationships -- and it's exactly that it's not a technique, but a relationship. It's not a procedure for getting a person to do X, but a conversation which goes both ways.
Quoting unenlightened
Great point. The self as a haunting is really fascinating to me. In a good way. Stories of the past as hauntings of the present invokes the impossibility of memory bringing the past forward to effect the future (through our actions).
I like this phrase "the secular magicians". It fits.
Quoting unenlightened
:)
You were taught to worship Shiva.
You have to laugh, surely, at such hubristic naivety? And written just after WW1, that fine exemplar of rational methodical control not.
A thermostat controls the temperature by allowing it to fluctuate between limits. Where is the thermostat of humanity, and whose hand is upon it? Poor Max is clearly in the thrall of his own magic if he thinks it is a human hand.
Speak for yourself Frank; everyone already knows I'm insane!
Ok, sorry.
He had initially supported the war, maybe because it seemed to represent a cure for, as he saw it, the mediocrity of rationalization and disenchantment. He was not especially approving of the "rational, methodical control of life," as far as I can tell. Nationalism of course is another kind of magic.
Apparently he sort of turned against the war later, but I've forgotten why.
I meant you were part of a generation baptised in it.
Yeah, but no, but... one is not born with the right interpretation, or any interpretation, one is indoctrinated with here and now, already haunted by 'once upon a time'. In other words, magic is what we are made of, magic is subjectivity itself, and the repudiation of it is the repudiation of humanity itself in the name of "rational control", alias "total war". The scientist has thrown himself out of the bath with the bathwater, and has become Death.
And if that doesn't convince everyone to repudiate the enlightenment then nothing else I can think of will.
We recently had a thread about a famous American comic strip author. One of the things he's famous for is that he apparently guided his career by writing down his goals as if they were bound to happen. In each case, his goal was realized. One of his written messages was something like: "My comic will become the number one syndicated comic in America." And it happened.
I've used this myself, recently. Learning to trade on the foreign exchange market is known for its choppy psychological waves, especially at the beginning. Even before I learned first hand what they were talking about, I figured I better write down my goals. At the time, I thought they were very modest. Turns out, they were actually pretty challenging. My goals are like the glimmer of a lighthouse, confirming that the shore is over there. As I travel, the light gets brighter. My goals remind me to stay disciplined. At this point, I have chosen a strategy and I write it out every morning when I analyze the charts. It's my magic.
Notably, I'm drawn to using the ocean as a symbol of the wildness of emotion that follows trying and failing. The market itself is like an ocean with unknown depths and travelling "whales." Whales are institutional traders or guys like George Soros (known for having made the historically largest profit off the foreign exchange market.).
According the American literature, the ocean is the watery depths of the psyche and in response to a battle waged against it by a captain of rationality, it sends forth a white whale called Moby Dick. It doesn't end well for the captain or his ship. This book is specifically intended as a warning in an age of hyper-rationality: that waging a war against the psyche is dangerous to the whole community. The psyche has to play out its stories and it will react violently to being molested.
So this kind of magic doesn't allow you to create whatever world you might think of on a whim. It just acts as a rudder to guide you through the maze of possibilities toward the one you want. Every step of the way, you have to acknowledge the majesty and power of the psyche. Pit yourself against it, and you're doomed.
Dis-enchantment as the repudiation of subjectivity: no hauntings from the past, no indoctrinations in the here and now, and no invocations for the future. If we are magic, and we're still around to say, then the dis-enchantment must be some kind of an illusion.
Even if we are magic, for dis-enchantment to work the magical power cannot be me. There are magical powers in the world which act, which various invocationists unleash upon the world and which we don't know really how they work. Once the advertisement increases sales the secular magician goes on to summon another demon into the world without a care for what other effects might come about. It lives on somehow beyond that moment, in the hauntings. And there are other secular magicians who will offer to exorcise the hauntings, too. But these offerings are offerings directed at me, not formations of me. I suppose that's what I'd like to say, even if we are magic.
I'm that old bloke down the road who gives you a half-dozen oversized Zucchinis.
I find it enchanting.
Dow nunder, there's a book called "Dark Emu" by Bruce Pascoe. It describes the civilisation that existed here before colonisation, one so very, very different that it was unrecognisable as a civilisation by the white fellas as they wandered through fields of grain that had been cultivated for tens of thousands of years - from long before Asia and Europe decided to farm.
It's a book guaranteed to piss off folk who think civilisation consists in monuments. Add it to your reading list.
I was looking for a link to send to @Jamal, and came across this graph of reviews of Dark Emu, which sums up the response beautifully.
A book that divides.
Just had a look around the internet. Pretty controversial eh!
My first thought was that Bruce might implicitly be conceding too much to the linear progress narrative that divides people into distinct stages of development. Turns out thats one of the criticisms the book faced from historians.
There is a fair amount of inaccurate information circulating about the native Australians. Poignantly, that information (baloney about dreamtime and so forth) made it's way back to aboriginals who had no knowledge of the culture of their ancestors. They adopted the bullshit as their own.
I'll stick to scholars, thanks.
Maybe at that point its not bullshit any more. Maybe culture works like that all the time.
Maybe. Native Americans are aware that their own cultures are mostly lost and replaced by an all-purpose image that's Siouxan: the teepees, feathered headresses and so forth.
Are you saying that every generation is served up a dose of bullshit with the facts about their heritage?
I was going to start a thread on The Voice, but baulked because, you know, what first nations folk really need is more white fellas to tell 'em about themselves. Promulgating, or even addressing, the myth that they do not have their own history, isn't going to be helpful. Indeed, another criticism of Dark Emu is its failure to recognise the divergence in aboriginal culture.
I grew up on Anaiwan land, and was taught that the locals had been eliminated or moved to the coast. To some extent that was so, but there is now a strong community reestablishing Nganyaywana, and enough social history to fill a few books. It's tragic, yes, but it's quite unhelpful to simply dismiss the efforts of the many small local groups across Australia to maintain their integrity by lame claims from foreigners that they are appropriating each other's culture. Quoting Jamal
Yep. It's not what it was before the whites came, but it's not a blur of Gamilaraay, Wiradjuri, or other Koori cultures. Frank's comment is unhelpful, in belittling those efforts.
Sure. The same happens with individuals. If I expect the worst of you, I'll communicate that in various ways. Then it comes down to how open you are to suggestion.
In the case of the aboriginals, it would be as if someone misinterpreted some Scottish document and went on to create a fanciful story about your ancestors' beliefs. This narrative becomes popular, and since the oral traditions have broken down, you accept the mistake as your heritage. It's kind of sad.
Im showing my ignorance here, but do you mean the Indigenous Voice to Parliament?
Funny you should mention that, because thats pretty much what did happen with Scottish culture.
How so?
One way the "the oral traditions (are) broken down" is by pretending they are not there. That a people chooses not to tell you about their oral tradition does not mean they have none. So someone from outside suggesting that what is happening to Australian aboriginal peoples is the same as happened to American aboriginal peoples or Scottish aboriginal peoples is fraught.
There are many dimensions to it. One is about the Stuarts and Jacobitism (theres a book about this called The Invention of Scotland); the massive influence of the epic poems of Ossian, which were fabricated in the 18th century; the mythologizing of Scottish history by Walter Scott (who has been called the man who invented Scottish identity); and generally the disproportionate weight given to Highland culture at the expense of the Lowlands.
Much if it was a response to the Union with England. An identity crisis.
Another thing: kilts. Its not about our ancestors beliefs but its in the same ballpark. Many Scots believe that each tartan has been associated with a particular clan for centuries. This is untrue. Also, they didnt wear kilts.
I get the impression that you aren't aware of the mistakes that were made with regard to "dreamtime." Surely not.
Or maybe you didn't notice that I was specifically referencing that to explain my desire to go straight to scholars and bypass amateurs.
I have an unending hunger to know about human cultures. Wrong information just gets in my way.
Wow. I didn't realize that. Cool.
(that risks trivializing it but you get the point I trust)
Sure. But this isn't about you.
These are not an academic exercise.
It all goes back to food.
Funny you said that. My unspoken opinion was that both you and the author you mentioned were making the issue all about yourselves.
I'll leave it at that.
Crucially though, I can carry on wearing my kilt without feeling like I'm perpetuating a fake culture.
With or without underwear?
Quoting Banno
Just keeping it real, man.
I can claim to be unenlightened at least, but I have to live in a post enlightenment world, being no angel.
Quoting Moliere
I think that's right. We speak a nihilist language of moral subjectivity and subjectivity eliminationism. But this self negation must obviously fail. I am determined not to be, therefore I am. The Nazis failed and the capitalists will fail because when the Monopoly is complete, the money game is over, but the world remains.
One feels on all sides these limits of objective science We are still talking about the workings of brains more that 2000 years dead. There can be no logical or scientific explanation for that. There is meaning that communicates across millennia , and to deny it is to affirm it. There is value, and we discover the cost of denying it.
Any minute now I'm going to be talking about not living on bread alone, and rich men not getting into heaven. We are still waiting for the double blind trials on these...
"People are stupid.", says @Banno
I think we have been stupefied, not by conspiracy, but by the veneration of blindness in the name of objectivity, and we have been selling our souls for a mess of pottage. And all of this has been down to the failure of Western philosophy to defend the good.
I visited Culloden in my youth and found it a very haunted place. There were several large mounds with my name on the stone.
Those interested should read Black skin white masks. It might even be worth a thread. It's a difficult book, but goes right into the way the white man having destroyed the indigenous culture then sentimentalises it and tries to preserve it, while the remaining natives try desperately to adapt, giving rise to a second inverted conflict, rather like the way Cecil Sharpe and other aristocrats tried to preserve the English folk traditions in music, while the peasants moved on to Music-hall and other travesties. Hence an ongoing conflict between the 'traditionalists' and those dreadful innovators who dare to use electric instruments. See Bob Dylan, and the infamous cry of 'Judas', for example.
:clap:
There's a good Dylan song about a kid who goes looking for his native american father, only to be disillusioned by what he finds. The refraim is a quasi native chant sort of combined with a European sound.
"My mother took me aside
and tried to change my mind
she said there's nothing
nothing
left to find."
There is, in the Christian context, no reason to assume that anything supernatural occurs in the Bible. Setting a bush ablaze can be done through natural means. Bringing someone back to life can also be accomplished. Revelations doesn't show people coming back to life in some sort of spirit world, but instead being brought back with bodies, in the new Earth. "Everything is made new," not "everything is made magical." A sufficiently advanced 3D printer could accomplish this, provided consciousness is caused by physical system states.
Likewise, the Big Bang and evolution of Earth are explained in natural terms already.
The insistence on the supernatural seems to turn God into somewhat of a trickster, a deity who shows us a rational world guided by certain invariant principles, but who then uses magic at any key moments.
Even a God who exists outside the sphere of our observable universe isn't necessarily anti-naturalist. God can be behind an epistemic viel without being behind a magical one.
But there is nothing explicitly to rule out Christian naturalism, and indeed, Aristotle's somewhat enchanted naturalism was Catholic doctrine for centuries.
I wouldn't question your namesake. Only you get to talk about that, at least in my philosophy. (A rule or a spell?)
But for me, for us, for the world, the enlightenment has a way of living on as a magic of sorts.
I think we can make claims about ourselves without invoking powers or spells. Or, in the set up I started, we are formed of magic, and powers or spells or demons act on us. I'd say I am not the enlightenment, for instance, though it keeps coming up in my memory (hauntings), and even in the here and now.
Quoting unenlightened
Meaning is a magic -- thinking about dis-enchantment, and how it can dispell meaning into language as a series of barks. I think that qualifies as one of these pseudo-places @Jamal, at least for me. I really do believe when I read things that they mean something because it's as obvious as my senses. But as soon as I think about how it's possible to feel like I know what Aristotle means by the mean between extremes, without being fluent in ancient Greek, that is wild to think about in terms of a phenomena to be explained. Why should the various signifiers I utilize have anything to do with the mind of a man long dead?
I feel experimental, and stupefied. I've rewritten a response here many times now :D.
I've no explanation as of yet.
I've tried that book before. I didn't finish, but I know I'll do it again and finish it. Frantz Fanon should be more widely read.
The jacket blurb is
(I noted with amusement one of the reader reviews in Amazon was 'I bought this book to learn magic tricks and there are none in there! It's a rip-off'.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There are at this moment, soldiers in trenches in Ukraine trying to kill and being killed without invoking powers or spells, and without assuming anything supernatural occurs. For what are they killing and dying? We do not know and cannot ask in general, and I invoke them here only to show that a claim of nationality, or of religious or cultural tradition, has more power (word in thread title) over the secular such as your good selves than you seem to think. Whatever explanation you might put forward, it will not do to rely on avowed nonsense as a motive force, because that would be irrational, wouldn't it?
Speaking of trolls... Water into wine is difficult, but water into blood...
[quote=Enoch Powell]As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood"[/quote](quoting Virgil)
Now blood is certainly a magical substance. According to tradition, one spills it to assert and preserve its purity, Here the noble invokes it to rouse the rabble to a cause that still obsesses them, and is still being used to sway them to vote for Brexit, and perhaps soon to abandon the human rights act.
I'm not sure I follow. Religion and nationalism clearly exist in the world, so why would they be necessarily supernatural in any respect?
"Ukraine," "communism," "the universal church," don't not exist or only exist supernaturally just because their existence is diffuse in space or time, and hard for us to locate.
There is a reason that, when totalitarian states want to erase a culture, they destroy books and architecture, kill members of that culture or take their children away for re-education, etc. rather than hiring sorcerers to magic the culture out of existence, and presumably this is because cultures, nations, etc. are natural.
I think I'm just lost at a certain point, and don't know what else to say. These are conceptual distinctions rather than reasons why the secular is somehow immune. All are vulnerable whether we are secular, non-secular, "modern", or "primitive" -- each has a fear, an anger, a love that can be invoked or evoked. Are the emotions the self which spells work upon? Do they evoke the emotions within a self to change the self, or to re-direct it? Or is the self a spell of the secular put inside me that someone else can see better than myself?
It's this latter that seems odd to me. If we are magic, and there be magicians, then it seems quite possible that I am under a spell of some sorts. In fact it would be odd if I weren't. But then, what is magic if it's just what I am? Am I the synthesis of Daddy-Mommy-Me that the secular magician can pick apart, move, and change who I am?
What I think I'd like to say is that such spells can re-direct us, but there's always the possibility of waking up from the spell. After all, we are magic -- not just the magicians. And I have a hard time understanding what a power even is if it doesn't act on something, even if that something is itself a magic power.
This isn't a narrative of the supremacy of the individual, though, or even of secular societies. These are just conceptual distinctions only for us to talk about these things. I'm trying to think of what would be the necessary conditions of a working magical spell: how is it that dis-enchantment came to be? From what to what? And, given that dis-enchantment is an illusion -- holding to point 1 that we are magic -- there must be at least two somethings to account for the change, from enchanted to dis-enchanted.
So I posit two somethings: a self and a spell. The spell works on the self to dis-enchant the self. And I gather from what we've said so far, @unenlightened, that said dis-enchantment is an illusion. So there is a self, a spell, and the distinction between appearance and reality. Philosophically speaking here.
In a spirit of Enlightenment, Im breaking things down as follows:
Disenchantment: the loss of a unified total system of meaning and value, especially that which happened in Western society with the unseating of Christianity from its central and foundational position.
Re-enchantment: the return of meaning, which however might only be occasional and partial, rather than forming a total system.
Ideology: legitimation of the social order (the state, the economy, class hierarchy, etc) by means of enchantment
Magic and magical thinking: the beating heart of enchantment and ideology.
Magic
Im now thinking that magic or magical thinking is something that we should not revile. Its the element of enchantment that we should want to retain or revive. This is the route to the secular sacredness that I was briefly talking about with @Wayfarer. My thought is roughly that we can break the spells that bewitch us without abandoning magical thinking as such.
To try and make that work, Im thinking of magic in the way it's described by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In that book, magic is a practice in which the object, such as a mountain, a raven, or a tree, is imbued with inherent meaning, animated by its own spirit, and is not reducible to an instantiation of a general type, a mere specimen of a species. A respect for the thisness of the object is what differentiates magic from myth, religion, and especially Enlightenment, in which classification and conceptualization serve to abstract away from individuals in an attempt to form a unified system of science and philosophy.
Thisnesswhich is also known by medieval philosophers as haecceityhas its own special version in the work of Adorno, namely the non-identical. Its the part of the thing that remains unique to it when you bring it under a category or think of it in terms of concepts, but which is lost sight of in this process. The singular thing is non-identical with the specimen, the latter being an instantiation, an example defined by categories, universals, or concepts. But the thing is not exhausted by any category you put it in, any abstract universal you bring it under, or any set of concepts you apply to describe it.
Therefore conceptual thinking, though indispensable, has to proceed carefully so as to avoid losing sight of the very thing it attempts to understand.
There's a difficulty with trying to theorize about this. Adorno doesnt use the word haecceity or explicitly define the non-identical, because to do so would once again bring the singular individual under a universal concept (e.g., the universal kind called "singular individuality"). Thus Adornos project begins to look, not only difficult, but also somewhat paradoxical. The solution to this problem, I think, is to see the non-identical as akin to the thing-in-itself in Kant's philosophy, i.e., as a limit-concept about which we dont want to say too much. Its a correction by means of a negation (the "non" in non-identical), rather than positive ampliative knowledge.
Now we can see that magical thinking, which is an appreciation of the singular life of things, is an important counterweight to conceptual thinking. This is what Adorno described positively about Hegels philosophy:
[quote=Adorno, Experiential Content][Hegels] impulse to elevate spirit, however deluded, draws its strength from a resistance to dead knowledge.[/quote]
By dead knowledge, he means well, the way I think about it is like the difference between the living giant squid, with its shimmering colours and graceful movements, and the ugly dead specimen in the laboratory.
Incidentally, I don't think of this as a complete rejection of science or the Enlightenment, more like a correction or a warning.
[quote=Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies]science establishes ... concepts and makes its judgments without regard for the fact that the life of the subject matter for which the concept is intended does not exhaust itself in conceptual specification. What furnishes the canon for Hegelian idealism is ... the need to grasp...what the matter at hand actually is and what essential and by no means mutually harmonious moments it contains.[/quote]
This might all seem ridiculously abstract, but consider the real-world example of wolves and dogs. The model of the wolf pack as led by an alpha male is now outdated, and was based on studies of wolves in captivity, where their behaviour is very different from wild behaviour. And if this popular concept is wrong for wolves, its even wronger for dogs. This is why dog behaviourists have been trying to demolish the myth of alpha-dominance in dog training for years. From personal experience, its only getting through to people slowly.
You might just say it was bad science and that the concepts were wrong, not that science or conceptual thinking in general were at fault, but I see it more dialectically: science corrected its worst instincts, by paying more attention to the uniqueness of things, getting closer to what they are.
Am I saying that we should think of wolves and dogs as unique spirits with their own life-forces? It sounds a bit woo, but I think I am. Many and perhaps most people who live with dogs do this anyway: a dog is effectively a kind of person, and so personhood seems almost like the source of the magical thinking that Im advocating: we do think of each other as unique and as animated by our own spirits.
This brings me to scientism, arguably an aspect of disenchantment and instrumental rationality. It's what leads to the denigration of personhood and irreducible singularity more generally:
Quoting unenlightened
So although people, even eliminative materialists, treat others in their everyday lives as persons and ends in themselves, this has been somewhat reduced by scientism to mere sentiment or even illusion.
Another way of looking at magic:
[quote=E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Lévy-Bruhls Theory of Primitive Mentality]Theology, metaphysics, socialism, parliaments, democracy, universal suffrage, republics, progress, and what have you, are quite as irrational as anything primitives believe in, in that they are the product of faith and sentiment, and not of experiment and reasoning.[/quote]
I take issue with Evans-Pritchards assumed rationality-sentiment dichotomy, which is related to an underlying emotivist fact-value distinction that Im not on board with; and in any case, his separation of rationality and emotion might be untenable (see Damasio). But leaving that aside, the quotation does highlight the continuing relevance of magical thinking in societies in which magic seems to have been replaced or marginalized. I think this ties in with several of the posts by @unenligtened and @Moliere.
Thinking that the primary way to keep alive what is good in magical thinking is art, I looked into the connection and came across a letter from Van Gogh to his brother, which contains this:
[quote=Vincent Van Gogh;https://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/18/542.htm]It seems that in the book, My Religion, Tolstoy implies that whatever happens in a violent revolution, there will also be an inner and hidden revolution in the people, out of which a new religion will be born, or rather, something completely new which will be nameless, but which will have the same effect of consoling, of making life possible, as the Christian religion used to.[/quote]
Theres much more to say about magic in art, and Im guessing that was a big motivation for Adornos aesthetic theory, but Ill leave that for the moment.
Power
The OP grew from my interpretation of Nietzsche as describing a disenchantment of power. It turns out that Weber has a theory of authority that lines up quite nicely with this. There are three kinds of authority: charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational. The latter is characteristic of a modern rationalized society and therefore of disenchantment, so its not a stretch to talk as I did of the disenchantment of power, or of the desacralization of power as an aspect of disenchantment, even though Weber did not use the term in quite that way, as far as I know.
There are two different kinds of charisma. One is about an individuals personal qualities and abilities, and the other is institutional charisma...
[quote=Charles Lindholm, Charisma]... which can be inherited, or passed along with accession to an office, or invested in an institution. This is the charisma that gives an aura of sacred power to whomever has the right to wear the bishop's robe, or sit in the king's throne, regardless of their actual personal characteristics.[/quote]
Its clear that charisma of both types was what Nietzsche was identifying as lacking in the captains of industry and generic bores.
This aspect of the legal-rationalization of power was not a good thing in Nietzsches view, but it can be viewed positively, as opening up a space for critique.
Critique
In a disenchanted society, there remains ideological enchantment, where ideology is understood as the legitimizing ideas of the social order. In the view of critical theorists, critique of ideology is one of the central tasks of philosophy.
To that end, disenchantment can be understood and used in two ways:
This latter is what Im calling critical disenchantment. [hide=Note] Its probably needlessly confusing to describe critiquewhich in Hegel, Marx, and Adorno is regarded as negativeas positive, but thats the way Im thinking about it so Ill stick with it.[/hide]
Is this anything more than another name for the critique of ideology? Possibly. It is an enrichment of the concept, or one aspect of it. Or maybe its a radicalization, taking disenchantment out of the hands of the social scientists for whom it is merely a historical fact, and turning it into praxis, part of an attempt to change the world.
Another way to view disenchantment positively is as opening up the space for progress:
[quote=Maastricht University;https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/meta/433049/disenchantment-and-ideology]Society was no longer viewed as immutably anchored in tradition or Gods will. The idea of social design, the desire to create a better or perfect world, is a crucial characteristic of the modern way of thinking.[/quote]
And that leads us back to socialism. Nietzsches observation, as I interpreted it, that socialism resulted from the desacralization of power, leads us to Marxs comments about critique:
[quote=A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right;https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm]The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.[/quote]
Marx here refers to the move from the disenchantment of the Enlightenment, when the "holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked," to the critique of the law and politics as ideologies of capitalism. The word disillusion parallels the double aspect of disenchantment: to be disillusioned in one sense is bad, an unhappy state in which you realize something is worse than you thought; but in another sense its a good thing because you no longer perceive or believe falsely.
What we have now in postmodernity (or liquid modernity) is the negative disenchantment, without much of the positive, critical disenchantment, which was at its height with the socialist challenge to capitalism and the supporting Marxist theoretical challenge to ideology.
Given everything Ive said here, I guess it looks like Im advocating magical neo-Marxism. Im not sure if thats a thing.
Thank you, @Jamal
In the 19th Century they had a far more apt name for economics. They called it "Political Economy". And that's what it is, no matter in how much in mathematics you disguise it, it is political and part of politics. It's basically a straight lie to try to make economics to be something like a (natural) science and somehow apolitical. It simply isn't that. The dominant questions have been the same since Antiquity. The story of the Grachi brothers tells that the question about redistribution of wealth isn't something we started thinking about thanks to Marx and the 19th Century socialists.
For me, the simple reason why there can be "enchantment of magic" is that these questions are moral, not something objective, which using the scientific method can give us the right answer. If it's subjective, why not have some magic in it?
Thank you ssu, much appreciated.
Quoting ssu
Absolutely.
Quoting ssu
I half agree with this, but I tend not to divide things along those lines. I think we can describe things objectively without describing them on the pattern of natural science.
What would you say is this 'self'? Is that I that posits?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Do they? What are they made of? You see I think they are things that exist in the mind. And as soon as we stop thinking about and talking about and identifying with a nation, it ceases to exist.
Quoting Jamal
I did. Nice pulling together of many threads within the thread.
Certainly not you. In my philosophy, only you speak for you, and "self" would be a surreptitious way of sounding authoritative if I were meaning "self" to refer to you. "self" is a generalization that doesn't really refer to anyone at all, like in the everyman plays of the medieval period. Perhaps there should be another word used, but I'm thinking along the lines of what people mean when they say "we're all like that." -- it's certainly magical, at least with respect to the dis-enchanted perspective I imagine.
Perhaps I should say, in this conversation, there's a you, and a me, and a self, and a spell. There can be other somethings, these are just the named somethings. I named two things to try and make sense of the transition from enchanted to dis-enchanted (or, thinking again along of rule 1, we were dis-enchanted and have become enchanted by the modern world) -- but I'd be more than happy to adopt other somethings.
And, as always, it's a pleasure to find something to get a conversation going between us.
I must admit when I read the OP my first thought was "Get out of my head!" :D
Magical neo-Marxism is now a thing, I think?
As for symbolic form, symbols, such as talismans and amulets, are used to convey, embody and invoke powers and states. In secular culture they turn up as logos and signs of cultural identity, but in traditional cultures they are invocations of the sacred.
Obviously many of these themes are writ large in counter-cultural philosophy and environmentalism - James Lovelock's Gaia theory is a return to a kind of magical thinking.
I've just noticed there's a book: Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination by Andy Merrifield. Also, Mark Fisher and hauntology might fit.
Let's say a spell is made of words, or maybe possibly a picture, some communication I assume that; you can correct me. What is a self made of? My inclination is to say that a self is a narrative self also made of words, images associations, identifications'.
[quote=Wole Soyinka]A tiger doesn't proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.[/quote]
By which I understand that my unenlightenment is a proclamation, whereas the tiger's tigritude is his pounce. Just as the enlightenment was/is a mass proclamation, and not an act (of what? Compassion?).
Here's another proclamation:
[quote=R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise]We have all been processed on Procrustean beds. At least some of us have managed to hate what they have made of us. Inevitably we see the other as the reflection of the occasion of our own self-division. The others have become installed in our hearts, and we call them ourselves. Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other, just as the other is not himself to himself or to us, in being another for another neither recognizes himself in the other, nor the other in himself. Hence being at least a double absence, haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self, no wonder modern man is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.[/quote]
:ok:
I can't help but also notice the resonances with Heidegger's 'presencing'.
Outside the web of discursive thought and conceptualisation.
Cool.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and Kant had a version of it too of course, the thing in itself, although I suppose the difference is that for Kant, it exceeds our grasp (almost) entirely, not only intellectually. Philosophers, using thought, are always trying to get beyond thought (except Wittgenstein, who said stop trying).
Unrelatedly
Quoting Jamal
It occurs to me that things are even worse than this. Maybe people are increasingly escaping the spell of ideologyits just that there seems to be nothing they can do about it.
I think Russia is a good example of this. There is very little trust in authority in Russia, whether at the federal or local level, and yet authority is unchallenged. The attitude is not critically engaged so much as cynically disengaged. The people are to a significant extent under no illusions about the situation, and its the fact that they do not feel themselves to be political actors, citizens of a polis, that prevents any change. They made a deal with the State years ago: ensure stability and prosperity and stay out of our lives, and well let you get on with it.
On the other hand, the Russian media, which since last year has been cleansed of its critical, independent elements, spreads the ideological orthodoxy every day, and for those who are disengaged it must become easy to accept it.
I agree. Objectivity isn't limited to the scientific method used in natural sciences.
With an engineer, who designs a machine for some intended purpose and the machine works flawlessly doing that, it's a bit hard to argue that she's totally wrong, she has had the wrong ideas when designing the machine and in overall her thinking in engineering doesn't work. She can just point to the machine and say it works.
But with economics! We can argue all the above. We cannot even decide what is happening. It's not only the complexity, it's the vagueness of the concepts we use to describe the economy. What actually is gross domestic product and what is it's validity? What actually is inflation or stagflation? We can only find some definitions, but the reasons behind or the validity of the terms can be argued about.
Because without the magic, there is only the bald monkey? 'The naked ape does not (any more) proclaim his naked-apeitude, he throws his shit about.'
Disenchantment seems to be done in one of two ways, though. This looks like the other way:
Whereas the naked ape eats when not hungry, and lies awake when tied.
1. Enchantment. The magician, or the enchantress, tells you that you are Mummy's special little boy, or God's beloved creation, or a terrible sinner, or whatever, brave or cowardly, smart or stupid, rich or poor, a Roman or a Jew. You believe.
2. Disenchantment. The magician, or the enchantress, tells you that you that The Enlightenment has happened and you no longer believe anything except the truth. You believe.
3. Enlightenment. There is no you, no belief, no enchantress or magician, and no enlightenment, and yet there is sleeping and waking and eating. The narrative has stopped.
A particular self is an existential bundle of powers: what we do, collectively, provides examples of the self beyond anything we might say about our self. The self is this third-person imaginary model that's never the same as any one instantiation into a self, where I think it begins to make sense to speak of powers (some can walk, some can speak, some can hear, etc.). Powers can be developed or lost. The third person notion of a self is merely the narrative boundary: what can be said at all while still making sense, and so isn't definitive of any one self, and is also a fluid boundary being created in the conversation, rather than a transcendental condition. We modify our conversation to accommodate individuals rather than modify individuals to accommodate our conversation (this all happening within the conversation, still -- exploring the power of narrative between us).
Quoting unenlightened
Attempting to use my little set up above in interpreting your summary:
Enlightenment is achieved when a self stops exercising their power of narrative in favor of eating when hungry, drinking when thirsty, and sleeping when tired. In a conversation it can only ever be a theoretical end-point, due to the description of a lack of belief.
Disenchantment and enchantment are the same kind of spell -- in either case there is a magician or enchantress, who use their magical power to influence a self to instantiate a self's powers in particular ways -- perhaps this is what it means when a self adopts some kind of belief.
In the story towards enlightenment it seems dis-enchantment is a necessary intermediate step, because it's a dis-spell meant to sent an enchanted one on a quest or path which will unfold the original enchantment which set the need-for within us. In the place of Mom-God-Sin-Good-Virtue-Tribe the grammar slips in Truth as something over and above these individual enchantments, another end to pursue, another attachment or belief: And that quest pulls the threads apart of the original Enchantment. However, coming to experience a change in enchantments, so the enlightened path warns us, is not the same as becoming enlightened -- something we might call, in the language of belief, True Enlightenment, or True Disenchantment. As long as we keep talking we're still enchanted and have yet to achieve the goal of enlightenment.
So one of the unnamed somethings that's still part of a self, I'm seeing in the above, are needs construed as anything. The enlightened one manages not just beliefs, but also their needs, so that they are satisfied with nothing more than eating, drinking, and sleeping. Magical spells, perhaps, operate on needs, make them more enticing or less enticing, in order that a self is inclined to use their powers in particular ways. That might be a sufficiently rich enough ontology to discuss the phenomena: selves as bundles of powers and needs, and spells as a power of particular selves.
[quote=Harold Stewart]Those few who took the trouble to visit Japan and begin the practice of Zen under a recognized Zen master or who joined the monastic Order soon discovered that it was a very different matter from what the popularizing literature had led them to believe. They found that in the traditional Zen monastery zazen is never divorced from the daily routine of accessory disciplines. To attenuate and finally dissolve the illusion of the individual ego, it is always supplemented by manual work to clean the temple, maintain the garden, and grow food in the grounds; by strenuous study with attendance at discourses on the sutras and commentaries; and by periodical interviews with the roshi, to test spiritual progress. Acolytes are expected to develop indifference to the discomforts of heat and cold on a most frugal vegetarian diet and to abstain from self-indulgence in sleep and sex, intoxicating drinks and addictive drugs. Altogether Zen demands an ability to participate in a communal life as regimented and lacking in privacy as the army.[/quote]
From here
Quoting Moliere
Not really, the way I'm telling it. Which is that 'disenchanted' is the identification of the 'gritty realist' who stalks the boards explaining to us primitives how our beliefs keep us detached from reality. Instead of examining their own beliefs 'Life has no meaning' as a meaningful fact. It is a step off the path, rather than a step on it, like Bunyan's Slough of Despond. But everything one reads about a real enlightenment suggests that there is no path. One requires a disciplined intention to strip oneself of unnecessary baggage, but the step out of oneself is a single step, not a journey; a step that one cannot take oneself, but that is given by grace, or comes as a sudden insight, unexpectedly when the ground has been prepared.
[quote=Bob Dylan]In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I'd become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
[Refrain]
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now[/quote]
The attainment of youth, you see, is the real cure. One dies every day and thus remains Forever Young.
I've filled in some details and gone too far in my description then. And come to think of it it was foolish of me to outline a path to enlightenment when I'm not enlightened, even in sketch form. There is this seeming that dis-enchantment is enlightenment. And that could go some way to explain the prevalence of our gritty realists meaningfully declaring that there is no meaning -- it feels like enlightenment.
I wonder why? What is this feeling of enlightenment? And surely it can go in reverse, too, though perhaps they aren't the exact same spell, then -- but they both end in belief. It's that belief which is important, and seen as important. Which is what you said, but I'm just tuning into it now. (I'm afraid I wanted to put too fancy a conceptual bow on top in my first reply)
The move you describe -- when one tells another that their belief detach them from reality. That's at least a philosophical move. And at times it could function as a spell, because no one has authority over reality itself, and yet that way of talking is claiming authority on the real -- at least enough authority to be able to tell you that your beliefs detach you from reality (thereby knowing enough about how beliefs work, how you work, how reality works, and the relationships between all those three all through some internet posts -- seems quite the stretch, when you put it in rational terms, that anyone could possibly know that much. But disenchantment is more my bag after all :) )
Quoting unenlightened
Nice :).
I interviewed for admission to the Zen Buddhist monastery on Vaughan Road in Toronto in 1990. I was invited to dinner (vegetarian lasagna) and invited to join in the washing up, then chatted with the teacher. It is certainly a rigorous discipline.
:up:
Quoting Jamal
It'd be odd if we weren't. Are magic spells heroic tales ? The return of the king ? The return of the hero who goes under to return ? You left out art (strictly speaking, taste) which can be thought of as one way the ruling class mystifies itself and others. Have you seen Bourdieu's Distinction ? How does an elevated soul interpret the world ? With taste, which may float very high indeed above a world enjoyed as spectacle. Bordieu himself floats even higher, looking down on all this looking down, suggesting tacitly (to me Elvis-suspicious elevated mind) that philosophers too manifest Taste. For they bathe more often even than the soldiers.
Perhaps philosophy 'is' not-necessarily-false conspiracy theory. Whose narrative is most inclusive and plausible ? Whose narrative, probably by incorporating rivals, affords a sustainable enchantment ? Self-devouring criticism (us) is the last god, the last hero. (?) Doesn't 'Taste' come back in now ? The theories are tales of heroes and dragons. Nuanced blah blah blah puts us to sleep, can't cut through the noise of the 'clickbait industrial complex.'
:up:
I like to think of this (esp. in the USA ?) as the meta-religion that governs religion proper. That they are a matter of personal taste is not itself a matter of personal taste. It's the condition for the possibility of pluralism, a sort of matrix of self and freedom in which options hang like ornaments. Of course this is fragile.