Weird Studies/Charles Taylor and Disenchantment

31 Jan 2022 - 15 Oct 2022
Open in Logseq
    • On Charles Taylor and Disenchantment
      • Cartesian self with hard boundary, as opposed to enchanted self that was more involved with the world. Disenchantment equated with limiting mind to self and removing it from world.
      • the "buffered self" vs the porous self
      • mentions Jeff Kripal
      • Jacqus Ellul, christian anarchist, Laity (?), secularization, The New Demons
        • "we live in the most religous state ever" (state, technology, etc are transcendent, and so default we don't notice them). Myths of History and Science (which have nothing to do with the practice of history or science)

    • JFM: there is no such thing as atheism, there is only deification of anthropos. Modernity is the magical procedure by which this is accomplished.
      • Later: less impressed with their arguments against atheism and that humanism is worship of anthropos...ok, maybe know what they are getting at, but this dualism between the transcendent and the immanent is the sign of a braindamaged philosophy mind. They aren't opposed! They coexist! It's stupid to argue for or against the transcendent. I mean, they are defensive because of people like Dawkins and Pinker, can't really blame them.
    • JFM disdain for Dawkins, natural selection, memetics. What is the one thing that cannot be a meme? Natural Selection! Darwin as Christ...this has elevated the human mind to a point not subject to evolution.
    • OK he has this exactly backward when he thinks atheists put the human mind outside of nature. Hmm...ok well I think I could interpret this so it made sense to me. He's saying, roughly, that the process of doing science (or atheism or materialism), even when it purports to explain mental things, necessary involves taking a standpoint outside of nature. I am willing to grant this is a valid critique of scientific materialism, you can see traces of it in the various cults that spring up around tech.
    • PF described his process of awakening (he didn't use that word) as gradually having his illusiorry bubble-wrap layers stripped away until he was an entity among other entities. A kind of gnosis, but of something that is already early, prior, like enlightenment you already have it (maybe it is the same thing).