Lecture The Re-Disenchantment of the World: Thinking, Feeling, and Secularity

Charles Taylor once wrote that “everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of 500 years ago is that they lived in an ‘enchanted’ world and we do not.” But what does "disenchantment" really mean? And why do we so often insist that we are disenchanted? By re-evaluating the relationship between thinking and feeling, this talk opens the door to a new view of disenchantment—neither embracing Taylor’s story of decline nor dismissing disenchantment as mere “myth.” Rather than the eradication of feeling, disenchantment is a rearrangement of the way modernity feels. This calls on us to rethink how disenchantment fits in to theories of secularization.