具体描述
A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?
Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.
By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
作者简介
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm is associate professor in and chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College. He is the author of The Invention of Religion in Japan, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
目录信息
A Note on Texts and Translations
Introduction
A Philosophical Archaeology of the Disenchantment of the World
Reflexive Religious Studies: The Entangled Formation of Religion, Science, and Magic
Overview of the Work: Europe Is Not Europe
1 Enchanted (Post) Modernity
Weird America
Haunted Europe
Conclusion: New Age (Post) Modernists?
Part 1: God’s Shadow
2 Revenge of the Magicians
Francis Bacon and the Science of Magic
The Philosophes and the Science of Good and Evil Spirits
Conclusion: The Myth of Enlightenment
3 The Myth of Absence
Nihilism, Revolution, and the Death of God: F. H. Jacobi and G. W. F. Hegel
The Eclipse of the Gods: Friedrich Schiller
The Romantic Spiral: Friedrich Hölderlin
A Myth in Search of History: Jacob Burckhardt
Conclusion: The Myth of the Modern Loss of Myth
4 The Shadow of God
Spirits of a Vanishing God
The Haunted Anthropologist: E. B. Tylor
The Magician and the Philologist: Éliphas Lévi and Max Müller
Theosophical Disenchantment: Helena Blavatsky
Conclusion: Specters of the Transcendent
5 The Decline of Magic: J. G. Frazer
The Cultural Ruins of Paganism
The Golden Bough before Disenchantment
The Departure of the Fairies
The Dreams of Magic
The Lost Theory: Despiritualizing the Universe
Conclusion: A Devil’s Advocate
6 The Revival of Magick: Aleister Crowley
The Great Beast: A Biographical Sketch
The God-Eater and the Golden Bough
Disenchanted Magic
Conclusion: From The Golden Bough to the Golden Dawn
Part 2: The Horrors of Metaphysics
7 The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival
Degeneration and Mysticism: Max Nordau
Kant the Necromancer: Carl du Prel and Arthur Schopenhauer
Hidden Depths: Sigmund Freud
Conclusion: The Cosmic Night
8 Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical Theory
The Cosmic Circle
Magical Philosophy and Disenchantment: Ludwig Klages
The Esoteric Constellations of Critical Theory: Walter Benjamin
Conclusion: The Magic of Theory
9 The Ghosts of Metaphysics: Logical Positivism and Disenchantment
Philosophical Technocracy: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
Revolutionary Antimetaphysics: Positivist Disenchantment and Re-enchantment; Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath
Positivists in Paranormal Vienna: Rudolf Carnap and Hans Hahn
Conclusion: The Magic of Disenchantment
10 The World of Enchantment; or, Max Weber at the End of History
The Disenchantment of the World
Weber the Mystic and the Return from the God Eclipse
Conclusion: Disenchantment Disenchanted
Conclusion: The Myth of Modernity
The Myths of (Post) Modernity
The Myth of Disenchantment as Regulative Ideal
Against the Tide of Disenchantment
Notes
Index
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读后感
用户评价
这本书的阅读体验，与其说是知识的吸收，不如说是一场与作者之间持续的、充满张力的对话。作者的论点层层递进，构建起一个宏大而精密的思想迷宫，但令人赞叹的是，他总能提供出极其精准的、如同手术刀般锋利的小案例来切开那些庞杂的理论迷雾。我特别关注到作者对某些传统哲学观点的颠覆性解读，那种打破砂锅问到底的勇气，以及在看似无人问津的角落里挖掘出惊人史料的功力，实在令人肃然起敬。在咖啡馆里翻阅的那些日子，我发现自己对周围环境的感知都变得不一样了，那些日常生活中看似随机的现象，似乎都折射出了作者在书中探讨的某种底层逻辑的幽微之处。我甚至开始怀疑，我们所感知的“真实”，是否不过是一系列被集体接受的、精心编排的叙事罢了。这本书要求读者全神贯注，任何一丝分心都可能导致错过关键的转折点，但正是这种高门槛的要求，才造就了它无与伦比的阅读价值。
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同事特别不喜欢他，然鹅我得用这书分析战锤。战锤太奇妙了……学战锤的修真40k也很奇妙
同事特别不喜欢他，然鹅我得用这书分析战锤。战锤太奇妙了……学战锤的修真40k也很奇妙
同事特别不喜欢他，然鹅我得用这书分析战锤。战锤太奇妙了……学战锤的修真40k也很奇妙
同事特别不喜欢他，然鹅我得用这书分析战锤。战锤太奇妙了……学战锤的修真40k也很奇妙
