Nihilism and Re-Enchantment

History commits suicide by denying all transcendence. For history to be of concern to us, there must be something that transcends it: There must be something in history more than history. --Dávila 

I fear -- I dread -- a nihilistic narrative reaching it ineluctable nihilistic terminus.

That second sentence is how the penultimate chapter of All Things Are Full of Gods begins. It's one thing for an alienated adolescent to read Nietzsche and affect a cynical, nihilistic attitude. Society can tolerate a few Bill Mahers. But a society consisting of nothing but Bill Mahers is literally unsustainable. 

But then, I happen to know that there are no little Mahers on the way. And I guess that's the way the whole durned human comedy comes to a grinding halt.

Point is, a lot of people have to buy into the system in order for it to keep perpetuatin' itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time until --

Ramblin' again. But if our nihilistic assumptions ever truly arrive at their nihilistic conclusions, well then, game over? Could a truly nihilistic culture survive?

Aww, fuck it Dude. Let's go bowling.

A tempting offer. As Lord Henry says, "I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."

But even then, strikes and gutter, ups and downs. The fluctuating cosmic rhythm of contingency, turbulence, oscillation, and malicious novelty. 

That's still only half the story, because there is also creativity, upside-surprise, increasing vertical depth, etc. But modernity is well on the way to "a fully realized nihilism," that is, "the belief that there's no eternal scale or realm or horizon of meaning and moral verity..." 

But again, this is not a sustainable culture. Certainly it is not a culture fit for human beings and human flourishing. It is entirely

unencumbered by any sense of anything inviolable or sacred, or any sense of the self's dependency upon a higher order of truth.

Nevertheless, garbage in, tenure out: "It was inevitable"

that in time the mechanistic method should mutate into -- or perhaps be revealed as -- a metaphysics... and an ideology (Hart).

An ideology "not merely for investigating nature as if it were a machine, but also for actually transforming the world into a machine."

And here we are. 

As we've been saying, it's easy enough to explain why the world is not, and cannot be, a machine. But what to put in its place? It reminds me of an important aphorism:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible.

So, Christianity is not enough. Rather, we need a metaphysical whatchamacallit --

Praeambula fidei?

Yes, if that means what I think it means, we need a metaphysical account of the cosmos in which Christianity can be situated and makes sense, instead of it being in violation of the current vision. Of course Christianity is absurd in a materialistic cosmos. But so too is any other belief, including materialism.

A top-down vision?

No, I think we need a harmonious and more capacious vision that includes both. This would be a properly human environment, one that meets man's legitimate horizontal needs and mirrors his vertical aspirations. One that, in the words of Schuon, "does justice to the rigor of objectivity and to the rights of subjectivity." 

Such an integral vision is "anchored in man's deiform nature, without which life is neither intelligible nor worth living" (ibid.).

The current vision, thought through to its "ineluctable nihilistic terminus," proves life "to be nothing more than a somewhat more elaborate modality of death," just a statistically unlikely arrangement of matter. 

It likewise reduces mind to a "mindless realm of the quantitative," denuded of all the experiential qualities that make it mental, precisely: "intentionality, consciousness, unified subjectivity, rational thought, and immediate intuition."

We know that none of this is really real or rational: "None of it conforms to any reality that could actually exist in any possible frame of being." It's even a kind of Chestertonian "pure insanity" -- that of the man who has lost everything but his reason:

Systematic disenchantment is, as it turns out, a mad and destructive delusion, which sees everything as machinery and so makes everything into a machine...

"So many very special savageries and superstitions and practical evils follow from this uniquely modern form of 'rationalism.'"

Again, no one actually lives, or could live, this way, in a fundamentally lifeless and mindless world. But this chapter ends before offering any solution.

Actually, there was a hint of one in the comment about the systematic disenchantment of the world. Disenchantment. It is

the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society. [It] describes the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society in which 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."

I want my enchanted garden back. But is this the same garden from which we are permanently exiled?

As long ago as grad school I've been thinking about the "re-enchantment of the world," which is apparently a thing. According to wiki,

although disenchantment was the inevitable product of modernity, many people just could not stand a disenchanted world, and therefore opted for various "re-enchantment creeds," such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, phenomenology, [etc.].

Given the partial list of bad ideologies mentioned above, now I'm wondering if the appeal of ideologies in general is the faux re-enchantment they offer? 

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries. 

After conversing with some "thoroughly modern" people, we see that humanity escaped the "centuries of faith" only to get stuck in those of credulity. 

This one is important:

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores... 

This too:

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

This implies a mysterious vertical "enchanted" world, always intertwined with the horizontal one, and why not? We can only pretend to make the former go away, by suppressing, displacing, or denying it altogether. Besides,

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition, it is a perception of a special order of realities.

God is not an inane compensation for lost reality, but the horizon surrounding the summits of conquered reality. 

Well, we're not going to re-enchant the world in a single post. Rather, it will require at least one more.