This is a work about enchantment. Enchantment, today, is something we lack, something which even children miss out on, and it is in fact being extirpated from childhood by the aggressive and domineering mass-culture industries. Not just children and young people lack enchantment: so do adults. Enchantment, however, is something that the soul cannot do without, unless it is to starve. In “first-world” countries we are rich in every conceivable way, except the way of the soul, which is what this book is about. One in five people suffers mental illness in the land of plenty; but, in places where one might expect people to snap under real hardship and hopelessness, we find mental illness scarce, mental and physical obesity non-existent, and that, incredible to us, people are relatively cheerful. To the soul-starved westerner, this seems the wrong way round. A book cannot even hope to redress a cultural situation so far gone, and, anyhow, the situation is so complex that it is all but impossible to diagnose in any authoritative way. However, I am impelled to talk about enchantment.
This book is particularly about the experience of enchantment. Enchantment is something most of us can remember from childhood and indeed associate with that period of our lives. We find our own children enchanting, at a later stage, and then our grandchildren. However, enchantment, although perhaps the prerogative of the child, is nothing childish. Our artistic heritages are rich in enchantment and they try to teach it to us. They try to do this not by didactic methods—didactic art is bad art—but by initiating us. Art is an initiatory experience—at least, we may say this of good art, which is art that stands the test of time. Through art, as adults, we can experience enchantment in a new way that is richer than that experienced in childhood because, as adults, we are more conscious and appreciative. Art therefore gives us something, and one of the gifts it can bring—that of enchantment—is a gift of great importance. It is life enriching. Yet, we cannot experience enchantment unless we have receptive ability, and this is where culture and education come in. We stand bored and uninterested like children before artworks if we have not cultivated within ourselves the power to appreciate, to receive what great art has to give. Our approach in this book will be to cultivate and mediate the possibility of initiation present in great works of literature, picking on a very limited range. These are great because of their uncontested power of initiation, and they are of special worth when it comes to enchantment. These are works associated with the following names: Adorno, Proust, Rilke, and Goethe.
Enchantment is not a trivial subject by any stretch of the imagination. Enchantment is bound up with literature, art, philosophy, and religion—and subsidiary studies in psychology, sociology, and culture as well. I could go on. Enchantment is not for the “specialist” in any of these studies, but for everyone. The whole point of it is that it is quintessentially human. The trouble is that most of us lose touch with it after a certain age, so it is consigned to children’s books; and we imagine art has to do with something else. But of course when we look at a lot of contemporary art, it often does have to do with something else. Art is sick. Culture is sick too. When art has lost its charm, even a perverse charm but a charm nonetheless, it is sick. In a culture where “charm” is an archaic word which no one uses—and other more commercially viable values take its place—and where codes of practice replace manners, culture is not well either. But of course art and culture interplay and feed off each other. This is where critical theory comes in: it “critiques” this situation, unmasking it, trying to revolutionize it, ultimately for the good, if that is possible. At the center of this critique (if we may call it that), is not a new theory, but a defense of the humanities, of philosophy, religion, art and, in this book, of beauty, as the major criterion of the true and the good.
Enchantment, essentially, is the possibility of being captivated by the beautiful. But this is because enchantment is the desire of the soul.
But before we can be captivated, we must recapture the experience of enchantment; this is what this book is trying to enable us to do. Enchantment should be an essential part of our story—not the missing ingredient of life. Enchantment is what raises our life out of the mere drudgery of “existence.” Enchantment is beyond the mere definition of the word. Enchantment, as “being captivated by the beautiful,” deliberately defers the meaning. But this does not worry us. What we have in this book is a movement from start to finish, from beginning to end, in various stages (chapters), in which enchantment is held before us indirectly. This is the only way to approach it.
The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides wrote a famous and now classic work of religious philosophy called Guide for the Perplexed. All religion could be said to be a guide for the perplexed of some kind or another. The “consolations of religion” (or of philosophy, for that matter) refer to the capacity of religion (or of philosophy) to put an end to perplexity and provide the comfort that answers give in the form of beliefs and accompanying ways of life and community. However, it also remains true that every worthwhile perspective is a site of perplexity; otherwise, it merely spells ideology and dogmatism. For many of us, religious beliefs (or philosophies) raise more questions than they answer—and this is no bad thing. Questions will lead more readily to enchantment—enchantment, you see, gives rise to them!—than answers. Unphilosophical, “artless,” or unreflective religion displaces enchantment in the sphere of the spirit as readily as does commodity capitalism in the material sphere. I will have more to say on this later. Enchantment is not a subject that can be enclosed, fixed, or fixated in ready-made one-size-fits-all answers without destroying its magic, which is always the magic of a moment. That is why I did not define enchantment earlier, but deferred to beauty. It is also why, in following the movement of the showing in this book, I will be suggestive, rather than conclusive. My purpose is to orient my reader, not enchant him/her. It is art—not the commentary on it—that exists for enchantment.
Enchantment in an artwork has something to do with being partly in another world while still in this one. What I have called “the work” of enchantment—by which I mean the activity that leads us to it and trains us for it, namely, reading, listening, and gazing—is our way of access to this other world while still in this one. The “other” world, of enchantment, accessed through the work of enchantment, enriches this. We instantly feel this “other” world, as we shall, shortly, when I will quote the French novelist Marcel Proust, writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, just a few lines, but instantly we feel his world and it enters ours. Every world that enters ours affects it, to enchant it or otherwise. Reading, listening, and gazing are then of enormous importance as acts which have the capacity to change our lives into “enchanted lives,” in the real sense, not the kitsch sense, and the difference will emerge through these pages gradually as I will endeavor to provide the ability to discern the difference.
As I hinted already, our contemporary culture is not one that naturally lends itself to enchantment. Our “developed” society, as we call it—in contrast to “developing” societies, which presumably want to be like us, at least with regard to wealth and capital—is a hectic, active, competitive society that “never stops,” as we sometimes boast. The philosophy that governs such a society, which is unwittingly present in the way we do things, the way we see things (and given in what we do not do and do not see as well), is the philosophy of pragmatism. This, in a nutshell, is the “can-do” philosophy, which, while it started from the United States and is most strongly associated with Americans (according to the sociologist Max Weber [1864–1920] in his now classic study, which links the Protestant ethic with the spirit of capitalism1), takes us back before the founding of America. Of course this “Protestant ethic,” by which Weber means the work ethic essentially (and the purely business-minded mentality), was born in Europe and only exported from there to America. In any case, it is true to say that pragmatism is inherently utilitarian, that is, it consists in an attitude where the means do not always justify the end, but, if it makes most people happy, then these means surely do. Pragmatism, at the same time, puts a premium on individual liberty. The individual is (seemingly, anyway) released to “get on with it” and make themselves happy in whatever way works for them; and it is therefore “up to them,” as we say. If the individual’s happiness is too much at the expense of others, it can be problematic; at the same time, the unhappiness of others is often invisible, because it is in the interests of those who are most successful at carving out their “careers” to keep it this way—and it is also within their power to do so. Of course, a basic moral code prevails, under-girding the pragmatism, more or less—a moral code relating to happiness as people discover, for themselves, what Aristotle said long ago, namely, that it is impossible to be happy and immoral: the two just do not equate. People make this discovery for themselves, one generation after the next.
Weber used the word “disenchantment” in an essay on the practice of science and it became a coinage associated with his thought—one, in fact, fundamental to it. Science explains the world to us by quantifying the world and intellectualizing the results of these quantifications. Weber argued that quite different cultures know the world the way they know it, differently from us, and they may even know it better. For example, a traditional man may know his tools, whereas we do not know our fridges, computers, cars, and so on; we know only how to use them. We have the feeling that, if we wanted to, we could know about these things because both our tools and the world to which they belong are all ordered and planned. We live in a world of total calculation which allows us to say we could know about x or y if we wanted. But this possibility does not really make us any more knowing in fact. The Anglo–Celtic Australian knows less about the outback when it comes down to it than the Aborigine, although we can mine it, measure it, and so on. “The increasing rationalization and intellectualization do not, therefore, indicate an increased general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives.”2Science—this calculative mode of being in the world and experiencing the world—pushes out non-scientific explanations, spiritual or philosophical or religious explanations, and this, says Weber, “means that the world is disenchanted.” In a society which is basically a planned economy, reading, listening, and gazing come to be about technical matters “that count.” In this way reading, listening, and gazing are themselves disenchanted and part of the “work ethic.”
I am saying all this, sketchily, in order to make the point that, in our developed society, reading, listening, and gazing, as part of the work of the arts and humanities, go by the board; they get pushed to the side as incidental, something to do when you have “got time,” or to “pass the time,” or when you have not got something “more important to do.” The words I put in double quotes here (and often elsewhere) do not mean to be ironic, but to capture expressions and attitudes in words that govern us from the inside out; yet they are words that reflect values we hold most strongly, even if we do not know we hold them. Learning to read is important if we are to “get on” in life, in a competitive can-do world—and to swim, not sink; but this is not the reading I am talking about. Reading signposts, instruction manuals, and internet sites is not the kind of reading I mean. What I mean by reading is best given by Marcel Proust in his little essay “Days of Reading.”3 The author is sure that he has never spent days more fully than those he spent with a favorite book. Everything else, which most people considered important, “I pushed aside as a vulgar impediment to a heavenly pleasure.”4
I do not doubt that this whole book is hardly more than an expansion on that line by Proust.
Most people would think of reading in the same way as young Marcel’s Great Aunt Léonie in Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past:
While I read in the garden, something my great-aunt would not have understood my doing except on Sunday, a day when it was forbidden to occupy oneself with anything serious and when she did not sew (on a weekday she would have said to me, “What? Still amusing yourself with a book? This isn’t Sunday, you know,” giving the word amusement the meaning of childishness and waste of time)… 5
Here, reading is creative soul-work, done half in secret. It looks passive and ordinary enough, from the outside, to Aunt Léonie, but to the one reading, from the point of view of the inside, the reader exists in another time, not the time of clocks, but the time of the soul and the slow time—or “timelessness”—of soulfulness, in which one is filled with other life, garnered from the pages of a book. Such reading is “psychoanalytical” in the proper sense of an activity that sorts through our thoughts and feelings, unraveling and unknotting our imagination and our soul—if the book is worth reading. In a book, that other world, of which the pages tell, enters our world; but first we must pick up and read (tolle lege). A book can be a dangerous prospect, an exciting prospect, a wonderful prospect, and an enchanting prospect. Here, a book is more like Kafka’s idea of a book as “an axe for the frozen sea inside us,” something that stirs us up and is fundamentally transformative. Reading that not only fills our days to the brim, but changes our outlook and our prospects.
Listening, too, is transformative. Listening is something we do all the time; it is central to functioning in society and keeping up with it. But this is not the sort of listening I mean. We can hear something but not have really listened. One philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, has said that in our culture “listening” has too often, and wrongly, been collapsed into the meaning of “understanding.” But listening has its own touch, which is not the grasp of understanding. Listening can “let be” as is, rather than “take in” and consume by “understanding.” To understand is to turn what is listened to into words, perhaps on a page, without a sound in their printed form, or into sound which is completely and utterly different, if spoken, from what was listened to at first. Listening takes time and training, just as developing “a musical ear” or a sense of timing does. To listen is not just to “tune in” to whatever it is and get on the “same wavelength,” but more seriously, for enchantment, listening is an attunement with what is essentially other; it is not the same as the words we might translate this other into in speech or writing. Listening is a way of receiving.
Gazing too is transformative. At school we were told by the teacher not to gaze out the window or into space, but to “pay attention.” We went on school trips to museums or art galleries and there we were permitted to gaze at what we liked. Today some people spend massive amounts of time watching television or computer screens, but none of this is proper gazing. Gazing is an absorption. To gaze is to absorb oneself or be absorbed by what one is looking at; one can “see” and “look,” but not, in our sense, gaze. Gazing needs one’s time absorbed in it, so that you forget time and the time you spent gazing becomes another time without space. Gazing absorbs your being, and time vanishes into the gaze. But gazing is not gawping or staring (as at a screen); with a gaze, a true gaze as we mean it here, our sensibility is being nourished and elevated; at something which is merely entertaining (although it might be absorbing in some sense too) we do not “gaze,” rather we are “taken in” by it. In gazing we are not “taken in” but between my gaze and that at which I gaze, the distance is infinite, however intimate the moment. This is the wonder of gazing.
Lastly, by way of introduction, while I am aware of other books on enchantment, for instance the work of Bruno Bettelheim, which I esteem (despite the posthumous controversy about his political incorrectness), and works by others (who will remain unmentioned by name) because I am in fundamental disagreement with either their New Age view of enchantment, or their ideological view which wants “re-enchantment,” thereby tying enchantment to a pragmatic project. This book is not about such other books. In every chapter that follows, I go to the matter itself: enchantment. This is my method, which, in philosophy, is called “phenomenological.” However, I have not followed the jargon of philosophical phenomenology, or invented my own new jargon to replace it; rather, I am following the older “ordinary language” tradition which really goes right back to Aristotle and upholds a fundamentally truth-bearing ordinary language, where it already exists, or works philosophically for it, where it does not. This is my approach. For this reason, I have approached enchantment through literature, which of course is written in ordinary language at a popular, or at least at an optimally communicative, level. While most of this book is taken up with discussion of extracts from works of Proust, Rilke, and Goethe, the book is not about them (or, more precisely, their works), and neither is enchantment, of course. Rather, Proust, Rilke, and Goethe have iconic status, in that it will be through their words, as through windows, that we will be able to learn what this work of enchantment is all about. It is an indirect and non-theoretical approach. This is my method. Therefore, my “theory” of enchantment, such as it is, will be suggestive, rather than stipulatory and dogmatic. The work of enchantment ultimately lies with us; enchantment must start with our own work of reading, listening, and gazing; and this work is never a mere matter of “getting the information” or “having the low-down.” Enchantment is a philosophy of life and it is a kind of life; in this book it is the kind of life in which art plays a significant role. We come to enchantment through art, and we come to art through the work of enchantment: reading, listening, and gazing.
Notes
1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1905), trans. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin, 2002).
2. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Essays in Sociology (1922), ed. H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1970), 139.
3. Marcel Proust, “Days of Reading,” in Against Sainte-Beuve, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1988), 195–233.
4. Ibid., 195.
5. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1, trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin, 2003), 102.