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i had this article laying around from this post (actually didn’t know who it was from until i finished) and yea i really don’t like it very much
bsky.app/profile/did:...
theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-wo...
definitely possibly i’m being grouchy and obtuse but the word that comes to mind is captivation, not enchantment, when describing that kind of attention. i understand we’re kinda wanting it to lead to more things like faith and less cold, more imaginative thinking
but i don’t think attention will get us there
one sec i have a meeting
like reality might not be what we think it is, and it certainly doesn’t have to be some dead inert scientistic thing, but that doesn’t imply enchantment, that just implies being more true to truth. and yea the model for attention is fine enough (although it’s left rather underspecified)
that’s what’s spent the largest amount of time on, and not so much the connection to enchantment, which i kinda thought was the main point of the article. it’s just posited and the relationship is left unexplored.
idk it mainly seems like the thrust of the point is “mundane things can be profound” and yea, cool. i don’t see how enchantment is doing much for you here.
“don’t be ashamed to be impressed by the little things” mmk thumbs up emoji
ig im also extra protective of disenchantment because i feel like thats actually really powerful of a contribution, and has direct meaning in the “de-magic” sense and also crucially as an elliptically temporal concept. it implies prior enchantment to be investigated!
these two senses are distinct, and enchantment / disenchantment could both be true, but because of how thin the former is, i’m not very compelled to entertain it, especially because it’s sort of trying to position itself as an opponent of disenchantment
(“re-enchantment” maybe? now that would be more interesting!)
although that would be a more fruitful line of inquiry, still, this is kind of being posited as an ethical project/ideal, and disenchantment is more of a descriptive analysis. i guess you could make a case like “in spite of disenchant one ought to fight the tide of history to experience enchantment”
which idk depends on a lot of other stuff and the specific understanding of disenchantment. frankly that seems like the motivation, retrograde return to religion. zzz