Enchantment naturalised
Disenchantment and meaninglessness
“We have allowed ourselves … to become disenchanted with ourselves and each other, and with our lives’ yet ‘we’re yearning for meaning, for ways to feel at home in the world.”
Our age is often characterised as disenchanted because our scientific worldview has led to the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Max Weber’s ‘die Entzauberung der Welt’ literally means the ‘de-magic-ing of the world’). Once the boundary between us and the world felt blurry and porous, and the world seemed alive with animist, magical and immaterial spirits. Now this boundary feels sharp, separating and cutting us off from the world.
Our inanimate, materialist worldview means these spirits are deemed to be delusions or projections that live in our minds. However, these spirits have been a source of value that gave deep meaning to our lives, without which life can feel meaningless. How can we re-enchant the world so that life feels more meaningful?
Consciousness is contextual
“Enchantment ‘has nothing to do with fantasy, or escapism, or magical thinking’ but ‘to fully participate in the world; to be open both to its transparency and its mystery ... a feeling of identification with the world which is so intense that any sense of separation from it vanishes”
Enchantment is about rediscovering an intimate and porous relationship with the world. Neuroscience is revealing such a relationship as it revolutionises our understanding of the mind by challenging our intuitions about consciousness. It may seem that the world is revealed passively to our minds but the reality is that our brains actively co-generate how we perceive the world. Our model of the world- based on our background context of prior beliefs, knowledge and expectations- predicts our experiences corrected by sense data.
We are pattern seekers and we connect the dots using our model based on this background context.
For example, consider misperceptions, such as seeing faces in clouds. There is not really a face in the clouds; it’s just that we are so used to seeing faces that we expect to see them everywhere. Or consider visual illusions that seem strange because they play with our everyday expectations about lines, shapes and objects. And at the extreme, hallucinations occur when the normal mechanisms for sense data to correct our expectations are not working properly.
Art is contextual
The ‘Beholder’s Share’ is a concept in art history that stresses the role played by the viewer (beholder) to complete artworks. Look at how various art movements, such as Impressionism, Expressionism and Cubism, present us with disconnected brushstrokes, ambiguous shapes and disembodied colours. Yet we- the viewer, the beholder- connect the brushstrokes and make sense of the shapes based on our background context of prior beliefs, knowlede and expectations about objects and bodies.
I want to explore the Beholder’s Share through sound by exploring auditory misperceptions, illusions and hallucinations. How can sonic artworks illuminate and interrogate the background context that generates our conscious experience of the world?
Psychedelics are contextual
My interest in hallucinations means I’m curious about the huge amounts of money that are being invested into neuroscientific research that uses psychedelic drugs and brain imaging to illuminate the mechanisms of consciousness and develop new treatments for trauma, depression and other conditions.
Research participants are given white psilocybin pills made in a lab. While wondering what could be more material than a chemical, author Michael Pollan reflects in his How to change your mind: ‘what to my (spiritually impoverished) mind seemed to constitute a good case for the disenchantment of the world becomes in the minds of the more psychedelically experienced irrefutable proof of its fundamental enchantment … one of the gifts of psychedelics is the way they reanimate the world as if they were distributing the blessings of consciousness more widely ... in the process breaking the human monopoly on subjectivity that we moderns take as given’.
For Michael Polan, psychedelics are ‘meaning experiences ... it may be the loss of self that leads to a gain in meaning’. Interestingly, the connectedness experienced during ego dissolution- feelings of a lack of separation with others and the world- is a source of this meaningfulness and psychedelics’ therapeutic effectiveness.
Speculations on psychedelic futures
Some consider psychedelics to be ‘entheogens’ (‘inspired or possessed by god’)- a Classical term used to praise poets and other artists. They can trigger altered states of consciousness, such as mystical experiences. I’m also curious about their phenomenology, and the values attached to them. My MA graduate show project imagined a speculative journey at the core of Jewish mysticism- a journey through Solomon’s Temple 3000 years ago. It was framed as a brain stimulated DMT trip - an intense psychedelic - given entheogen theories of religion. In a psychedelic future, what should be our attitudes towards hallucinatory and mystical experiences?
Translating the soul back into nature
Confusions about consciousness are not limited to intuitions about perception but also subjective experience. Its unique, enchanting quality means we may experience our material bodies like a ‘ghost in the machine’. Yet this may reinforce a disenchanted feeling of separation from the world. Perhaps developments in neuroscience will dissolve these intuitions so that we view subjectivity just like our bodies. The ‘mystery of subjectivity’ may be where the ‘mystery of life’ was 150-200 years ago. The seeming gulf between the animate and inanimate meant that spooky vitalism was posited instead. But advances in biology and genetics have provided naturalistic explanations for the mechanisms of life (such as inheritance, reproduction, metabolism, growth and homeostasis) that provide prediction and control just like all other parts of natural science. Translating the soul back into biology and ecology could help to re-enchant the world by seeing ourselves as fully part of nature.