The philosopher Charles Taylor once wrote that “everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of 500 years ago is that they lived in an ‘enchanted’ world and we do not.” What does "disenchantment" really mean? Is there a link between disenchantment and the ecological crisis? By re-evaluating the relationship between thinking and feeling, this talk opens the door to a new view of disenchantment—neither embracing Taylor’s story of decline nor dismissing disenchantment as mere “myth.” Rather than the eradication of feeling, disenchantment is a rearrangement of the way modernity feels. This calls on us to rethink how disenchantment relates to environmental destruction.
Bio
Donovan Schaefer is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Duke UP, 2015), The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, The Sciences, and the Study of Power (Cambridge 2019), and the award-winning Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke UP, 2022). His research and teaching examine the roles of affect and power in formations of the secular, religion, race, science, and material culture.