Participant: Colin J. Campbell
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: Paradigm, Recursion

I argue that the feeling that we ought to ‘re-enchant’ nature is present and active both within ‘ecological theory’ broadly defined (e.g. in Alister McGrath’s The Re-enchantment of Nature) but also in the broader environmental movement and even beyond it, in generalized ecological dreams and fears. The idea of a ‘sacred balance of nature’, a unity in which we are bound but that we have disturbed is an old one, but still fraught today with intense spiritual, moral and political anxieties. It is one that seems almost invariably to settle into dogmatisms on all sides.

Because of the immense complexity of an idea like ‘re-enchantment of nature’ I argue it is useful to consider it first in broad outline in relation to its opposite, the idea of the disenchantment of nature. This cannot be a hermetic or universally valid distinction – there are very few thinkers, practically speaking, who could be said to be ‘purists’ of either stripe – but it remains a meaningful delineation or ‘map’, a general rule or tendency.

I propose, to begin, when we dream about the enchantment or re-enchantment of nature, we aim to experience ourselves as inescapably participating in the natural whole. When, on the other hand, I take the side of disenchantment, I emphasize the perception of myself as separate, of nature separated into parts, and of human beings as separate from it and each other. I use the phrase ‘the togetherness of togetherness and separateness’ in order to indicate that the positions of re-enchantment and disenchantment are ultimately complementary and not only dichotomous – or that their dichotomy in truth takes the form of complementarity.

We could say that the ultimate goal of ‘disenchantment’ ought to be the demystification of every last dogmatism, including the dogmatism of disenchantment itself, placing the activity of ‘autonomous reason’ within its larger natural context rather than elevating it to a universal, trans-natural status. Reason, in light of its very own disenchanting activity, is forced to accept something like what Varela, Thompson and Ross have referred to in The Embodied Mind as the ‘enactivity’ of cognition, that cognition is invariably embodied in a natural context. Complementarily, the ultimate form of ‘re-enchantment’ is given in attention to precisely the particular differences we discover in analytical thought, that express in themselves the mathematical and experiential structure of nature itself (not in some unknowable spirit, substance, sacred balance or enchantment added to it externally).