Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment

This fascinating study takes as its point of departure the famous 1917 lecture by Max Weber Science as a Vocation, the argument of which helped crystallise a more widespread understanding of the disenchanted rationalist, mechanistic and materialist worldview. The German word is Entzauberung, which literally means demagification, already well articulated by Descartes in his rejection of the Hermetic worldview of the Renaissance Platonists later espoused by the Romantics – see my review of The Magnificent Rebels in the last issue and Sir Keith Thomas’ classic Religion and the Decline of Magic. Within the framework of Iain McGilchrist, Weber’s characterisation of narrow rationalism or rationality is a left hemisphere mode of operation. He explains (p. 549) that ‘Rationality is exclusive: reason is inclusive, balancing rationality with intuition, emotion and imagination.’ This is a crucial distinction. Roderick is surely right that this left hemisphere rationalism, intellectualisation and bureaucratisation has taken over the university system, which is one reason why there is little study of the work of Jung in psychology departments.

The disenchanted worldview strips out genuine mystery, inherent meaning and any substantive notion of spiritual or divine reality. Jung’s life and work is a reaction against this trend, as was the work of William James, especially his Edinburgh Gifford Lectures, Varieties of Religious Experience. Roderick told us in a lecture about his book that Jung had said that James was the only person to whom he could express his views unreservedly. Jung was much more than a scientist, although he liked to characterise himself as such as a way of maintaining his academic credibility – it was a precarious balancing act, as Peter Kingsley argues. He would surely have endorsed the Galileo Commission Report as well as the Call for Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities.

The book is derived from four lectures delivered in Zürich on disenchantment, mystery, meaning and metaphysics. The content draws on a wide range of academic sources and thinkers who have engaged with disenchantment since that time. Jung repudiated the implicit epistemological assumptions of disenchantment concerning the validity of mystery, meaning and spiritual reality. As such - and this is explicit in The Red Book - he had the courage to speak from the spirit of the depths rather than the spirit of the time representing conformity to the law and the letter. Central to his response is the recursive process of individuation, which Roderick analyses in terms of three phases: enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment, corresponding to the journey from ego to Self and the alchemical Mysterium Coniunctionis. Interestingly, Weber was sympathetic to authentic mysticism as the highest form of religious experience representing higher-order synthesis, which he might have developed further had he not died prematurely at the age of 56 in 1920. (p. 34)

The nature of synchronicity plays a central role in Jung’s thought within his psychoid understanding of archetypes, the relationship between conscious and unconscious, and what we call inner and outer within the Unus Mundus. The distinctions we make then pose the challenge of how to reconcile categories that are in fact embedded in a deeper order, which David Bohm would call Implicate. Jung had some striking personal experiences of anomalous phenomena at critical and emotionally-charged points in his life, including a detonating bookcase in the presence of Freud. He presents synchronicity as an overall framework of understanding (pp. 50 ff.), and Roderick shows how it falls short in a number of respects, for instance with respect to the objective existence of spirits. However, the approach does represent an expansion of the scientific worldview. In any event, meaning is central and present at a number of levels.

The final chapter addresses metaphysics and epistemology. Insistence on the adequacy of empiricism and reason depends on one’s definition of the former. William James proposed a radical empiricism to include the whole spectrum of human experience, while empirical rationalists limit themselves to the measurable. A central debate in which Mary Midgley was greatly involved concerns the status of metaphysics. The Vienna Circle claimed that science could dispense with the category, while R.G. Collingwood refuted this argument in his 1940 Essay on Metaphysics, pointing out that every discipline entails presuppositions – hence scientism is a metaphysical rather than a scientific position. Jung was wary of metaphysics and indeed of philosophy, although he was deeply influenced by Kant. His interests were primarily psychological and in some places he elides the image of God with the actuality of God, although not in his famous [deeply gnostic] statement in the BBC interview with John Freeman.

Roderick makes a good case for characterising Jung as a panentheist, which, incidentally, is the outlook of A.N. Whitehead, Rupert Sheldrake, Iain McGilchrist and the late Brian Goodwin (he told me this over a lunch). The Divine is both within and beyond. It is interesting to note that transcendental Theism where God is separate from the world leads to disenchantment – and to justification of human dominion. Synchronicity is a panentheistic idea underpinned by wholeness. Moreover, evolutionary panentheism along with Jung’s own work represents an affirmation of mystery, meaning and the existence of spiritual and divine reality in a way that reconciles science and spirituality, a view more evident in retrospect than it was at the time. This is an important and carefully considered study that should be widely read.