If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention

Pour qualifier cette rupture entre l’homme et la nature, le sociologue Max Weber parlait de « désenchantement du monde ». Jung appelle ainsi à un « réenchantement du monde », par la capacité à nous relier aux autres espèces vivantes et à ressentir dans toutes les dimensions de notre être (corps, cœur, imaginaire, pensée) notre appartenance au cosmo

But we’ve forgotten to be amazed that things are in the first place—that “a world is worlding all around us,” as Heidegger puts it. This fact—the fact that there is being, to begin with—is “the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes,” in the splendid phrase of the writer Sarah Bakewell. But instead, it almost alwa

She wants readers to adopt and embody an ethos that makes room for the vitality of matter. In her view, it’s a useful attitude. “Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy or inspiration to enact ecological projects,” she writes. We might find it hard to “contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously t

“I was suddenly seeing that the world is incredibly interesting. If you’re paying attention, everything in the world—from the nature of gravity, to a pigeon’s head, to a blade of grass—is extraordinary.”