Moist Enchantment and Dry Disenchantment
More reflections adjacent to Nihilisms
This is the fourth instalment in a series of critical ponderings on Nihilism and “meaning”. For an introduction and index of all posts in the critique check out the Intro. Much like the Metamodern Critique all the pieces in this series can stand alone yet are thematically connected.
Enjoy,
James
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”
— Queen Gertrude, Hamlet
I’ve been thinking about enchantment a lot lately. Enchantment is a spell. It’s a spirit that inhabits you and drives you.
People are surprised to find out I haven’t read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I started it a couple of times over the years but I found the swelling tide of intoxication churning in me unhealthy; it appealed to my inferior side too much. Reading it, I wanted to run away to some isolated place and live simply and write.
Admittedly, it doesn’t sound so bad when I write it out like that.
But it’s the internal side that repulses me — the ego inflation of thinking I was on this grand quest for truth and that I was the seeker who would strike out upon the leading edge of human thought and think them dangerous thoughts.
Zarathustra was like a bellows inflating the parts of me that do not need inflating.
Enchantment
Enchantment is when ideas put us under a spell. If you think of ideas like Richard Dawkins then you can think of it as catching the ideological equivalent of a virus. I almost got infected by the meme of Zarathustra; Nietzsche himself went wild for it.
Or consider Jordan Peterson and the “Postmodern Neo-Marxists” or even the Woke Left and Postmodernists. Listen to Peterson talk about the Postmodernists and their evil plan to take over the world by infiltrating higher education and you’ll hear the ravings of a drunkard. But the spirit Peterson is imbibing isn’t the demon alcohol but an evolved memetic strain of Red Scare. The Postmodernists are just too important in his worldview — too conspiratorial, cabal-esque.
For a long time that led me to believe that maybe the Leftists were right about the Postmodernists (with the proper qualifications about the term Postmodernist — yadda yadda) and there was an exceptional value in their work, I was missing. Peterson’s declaiming these thinkers was like a Catholic priest denouncing sex — the lady doth protest too much. So, I studied Foucault, Baudrillard and Deleuze (as shallowly as any proud dilettante might) and fell in love with them.
Then I read a wonderful book from the early 90s by a couple of conservative French philosophers Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. They did an analysis of the so-called Postmodernist thinkers (gathering them under the less dramatic name “philosophers of 68”). It was an in-depth study of this group of thinkers — characterising the 1968 era of thinkers as antihumanists.
The content of the book wasn’t the most interesting part. What was fascinating was just how dry it was. It was positively Saharan and somehow that was liberating.
The Dry, the Moist and the Ignorant
The usage of the term dry here is quite interesting. The definition of this usage thrown up by Google is as follows:
“(of information, writing, etc.) dealing primarily with facts and presented in a dull, uninteresting way”
But that doesn’t quite capture it. Uninspiring is a better definition. Or in my terminology: disenchanted1. I believe this is an alchemical distinction; it goes back to Heraclitus with his:
“A dry soul is wisest and best.”
Dryness is sobriety. It is to be without intoxication. But it is also to be without soul. The moistness is what animates us. Disenchantment vs. Enchantment: Post-nut Clarity vs. Pre-nut Delusion.
What Ferry and Renaut’s book gave me was a dry look at the topic. That’s where our diagram comes in. Because I’d only have to ask my brother’s opinion on Postmodernism and hear him say “What? Nobody cares” and we’d have a good image of the dry-ignorant lower corner. That doesn’t tell us much about anything except that some people don’t care about philosophy (a fact that cannot have escaped anyone with the mildest interest in philosophy).
But what Ferry and Renaut offer is a disenchanted knowingness. Unlike the Pomo-loving Leftists who know and are drenched or Peterson who doesn’t know but is drenched, Ferry and Renaut know and are disenchanted/dry. Nothing breaks a spell quicker than that.
Back to me
I’ve been having a year of disenchantment. Maybe it’s been going on longer than that. I’m used to enchantments coming and going.
Initially, there was Nietzsche (or if you really want to go back originally there was Egyptology and then Theoretical Physics and then after a brief time of despair, Nietzsche). Then, much to my embarrassment in my early 20s I wanted to be the youngest ever Buddha (you can plot me at the extreme end of the Moist axis on that one). After a dose of heartbreak that table flipped, I fell in love again and at the same time, I discovered Carl Jung — the drummer whose beat saw me through my mid-20s. In my late 20s, this was eclipsed by the discovery of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, Metamodernism and the Sensemakers and a whole new era of enchantment ensued.
I’m an enchanted guy. I love enchantment. The Living Philosophy itself testifies to this — it’s not about dry vivisection (despite occasional appearances) but about the animating moistness of living. But somehow over the past year especially, but beginning in the past two or three years, I’ve found myself rather…disenchanted. It’s all becoming a bit dry. I’ll have to do a major overhaul of Jung’s thought before I can rest again in the truths he’s found; the same goes for Integral and Metamodernism. I still want to read more of the Postmoderns but that’s more of a childlike love of rich thought than a heroic possession. It seems there’s no tap I can drink from without a filter anymore as I once drank from Jung, Wilber and de Mello.
Maybe that’s not the worst thing. It gets me back to the second meaning of The Living Philosophy: the idea that the philosophy itself is living — something unfolding that must be cultivated. I’m fond of that. To write is to give birth to said philosophy. To write is to self-enchant; following the veins of inspiration wherever they appear is individuation. It is to give flesh to an implicit philosophy.
The scholarly process of the main pieces of work are too slow for this. And so this process of writing is about scouting ahead so that the scholarly work may follow (the Ganges guiding the Tortoise so to speak). That way I can hopefully find enchantment and bring rigour to it. Call it auto-enchantment or to use anti-spiritual spiritual writer Jed McKenna’s phrase “spiritual autolysis”.
Or perhaps the Buddhist terminological shrewdness vis à vis attachment is appropriate here and we should say non-enchanted
That's a nice categorization. Reminds me a lot of Guenon, who is a sage in that map, writing about incredibly big picture stuff.
Interesting distinction. Speaking of Nietzsche, you might really like his first book, The Death of Tragedy. Your dry/wet distinction could be a good description of his Appolonian (dry, lawful, rigid, heroic, 'yang' energy) versus Dionysian (wet, subversive, ironic, passionate, ecstatic, 'yin' energy) it's a short read and his early works read very differently then Zarathustra. I'm reading it now and find it really refreshing.