Overview

The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its controlling position in the consciousness of the West. He analyzes the holistic, animistic tradition—destroyed in the wake of Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—which viewed man as a participant in the cosmos, not as an isolated observer. Arguing that the holistic world view must be revived in some credible form before we destroy our society and our environment, he explores the possibilities for a consciousness appropriate to the modern era. Ecological rather than animistic, this new world view would be grounded in the real and intimate connection between man and nature.

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9780801413476

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Reviews

The malaise of modernity, its cause and cure: a historian of science vividly diagnoses the familiar Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian syndrome and convincingly - more or less - prescribes heavy doses of Gregory Bateson. Berman gets his title from Max Weber and his analyses of the disenchanted world from all over the lot. Blake attacked Single vision & Newton's sleep (i.e., a frigidly mechanistic approach to nature), and Berman quotes him. He cites Jung's rehabilitation of alchemy, and praises alchemists for their attempt to practice science erotically, blending the sacred and the manipulative, unlike the heirs of Descartes who champion nonparticipating consciousness and the fantasy-abstraction of the value-free, objective observer. Berman enlists the aid of Wilhelm Reich, R. D. Laing, and others in attacking ego psychology and its rationalist proponents, from Freud to Rollo May. For any sort of livable future, Berman argues, the Idol of the Head, the reified monster of angst-ridden Western individualism, will have to go. This paranoid construct (Lacan) is the basis of the frenzied competition, ecological havoc, dehumanized capitalism, and nuclear madness now harrowing us. And the best bet for a remedy is Batesonian holism, which doesn't separate fact and value, mind and body, subject and object; which views nature relationally, stresses the unconscious, prizes wisdom, beauty, grace over conscious, empirical control of matter. Berman is vague about how this humane epistemology might be translated into politics, but he makes, on the whole, a very strong case. If none of the components of his synergistic manifesto is original, he still shapes them and combines them with powerful lucidity - never drifting into the sentimentality of counter-cultural dreamers, even faulting Bateson on a number of issues. Some solid lessons in the history of ideas together with cogently presented radical cultural criticism: popularization at a high level. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Morris Berman is an Independent Scholar and Visiting Professor in Sociology at the Catholic University of America. His books include Coming to Our Senses, Wandering God, The Twilight of American Culture, and Dark Ages America.

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