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The Reenchantment of the World
"Morris Berman's book addresses what I consider to be the most important topic at our present moment in history. He is searching for the underpinnings of a new world view that can give rise to a culture capable of relating gently and self-sustainingly to the earth." ―Frederick Ferré The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its controlling position in the consciousness of the West. He analyzes the holistic, animistic tradition—destroyed in the wake of Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—which viewed man as a participant in the cosmos, not as an isolated observer. Arguing that the holistic world view must be revived in some credible form before we destroy our society and our environment, he explores the possibilities for a consciousness appropriate to the modern era. Ecological rather than animistic, this new world view would be grounded in the real and intimate connection between man and nature.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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864 people want to read
About the author
Morris Berman
74 books118 followersDistinguished cultural historian and social critic Morris Berman has spent many years exploring the corrosion of American society and the decline of the American empire. He is the author of the critically acclaimed works The Twilight of American Culture, a New York Times Book Review "Notable Book," and Dark Ages America."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
July 17, 2011
One of the most important examinations of the underlying psychological structure of the West's neurotic obsession with Descartian rationality. This was for me one of perhaps five books that woke me from my intellectual stupor, and shook the truths of my heart. Agree or disagree with him, Berman's arguments are cogent and powerful, and provide a great food for thought pro or con. This book is not easily dismissed. One of my 10 must read books.
July 30, 2015
Modern science is grounded in a sharp distinction between fact and value; it can only tell us how to do something, not what to do or whether we should do it.
Reason is now completely instrumental, zweckrational. One can no longer ask, "Is this good?," but only, "Does this work?," a question that reflects the mentality of the Commercial Revolution and the growing emphasis on production, prediction, and control.
The ego is a persona, a mask created and demanded by everyday social interaction, and, as such, it constitutes the center of our conscious life, our understanding of ourselves through the eyes of others. The Self, on the other hand, is our true center, our awareness, of ourselves without outside interference, and it is developed by bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of our mind into harmony.
If you would have real control over your life, abandon your artificial control, your "identity," the brittle ego that you desperately feel you must have for your survival.
"The map is not the territory."
We search desperately for love and authenticity, but in the context of a world that has taught us to fear these very things. The results are, inevitably, mass neurosis and substitute gratification.
Reich's central argument was that what we call "personality," or "character," was itself a neurosis: "there cannot be a neurotic symptom," he wrote, "without a disturbance of the character as a whole. Symptoms are merely peaks on the mountain ridge which the neurotic character represents."
The "mountain ridge" to which Reich referred is the specific structure of the personality, which has a psychic aspect, the neurosis, and a muscular one, the character armor. Early in life, he contended, the spontaneous nature of the child is subjected to severe repression by its parents, who fear such spontaneity (in particular, the lack of sexual and sensual inhibition) and socialize it out of the child, as it was long ago socialized out of them. By age four or five, the natural instincts have been crushed or surrounded by a psychic defence structure that has a muscular rigidity as its correlate. What is lost is the ability to succumb to involuntary experience, to abandon control and lose oneself in activity; to obtain what Reich called "orgastic gratification." The orgastically ungratified person develops an artificial character and a fear of spontaneity. Whereas the healthy character is in control of his or her armor, the neurotic character is controlled by it. The emotions of the latter, including anger, anxiety, sexual desire, or whatever, are rigidly held down by this muscular tension, and the result is the stiff or collapsed posture and mechanical articulation of the body that is observable almost everywhere in our society. This neurotic character, or "modal personality," encased in character armor, might most appropriately be compared to a crustacean. Its entire character is designed to fulfill the function of defense and protection or, alternatively, acquisition and aggrandizement. It moves from crisis to crisis, driven by a desire for success and proud of its ability to tolerate stress. Its armoring is not merely a defense against the other, but against its own unconscious, its own body. The armor may protect against pain and anger, but it also protects against everything else. These emotions are held down by inverted values, such as compulsive morality and social politeness - the veneer of civilization. The modal personality is thus a mixture of external conformity and internal rebellion. It reproduces, like a sheep, the ideology of the society that molded it in the first place, and thus its ideology is essentially life-negating. In reproducing that ideology, the neurotic character produces its own suppression. Neurosis is not some adventitious accretion, some fly in the ointment. It is, Reich, argued, an icon of personality and culture as a whole.
Learning III is learning about Learning II, about your own "character" and world view. It is a freedom from the bondage of your own personality - an awakening to ecstasy, as William Bateson once defined true education.
Reason is now completely instrumental, zweckrational. One can no longer ask, "Is this good?," but only, "Does this work?," a question that reflects the mentality of the Commercial Revolution and the growing emphasis on production, prediction, and control.
The ego is a persona, a mask created and demanded by everyday social interaction, and, as such, it constitutes the center of our conscious life, our understanding of ourselves through the eyes of others. The Self, on the other hand, is our true center, our awareness, of ourselves without outside interference, and it is developed by bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of our mind into harmony.
If you would have real control over your life, abandon your artificial control, your "identity," the brittle ego that you desperately feel you must have for your survival.
"The map is not the territory."
We search desperately for love and authenticity, but in the context of a world that has taught us to fear these very things. The results are, inevitably, mass neurosis and substitute gratification.
Reich's central argument was that what we call "personality," or "character," was itself a neurosis: "there cannot be a neurotic symptom," he wrote, "without a disturbance of the character as a whole. Symptoms are merely peaks on the mountain ridge which the neurotic character represents."
The "mountain ridge" to which Reich referred is the specific structure of the personality, which has a psychic aspect, the neurosis, and a muscular one, the character armor. Early in life, he contended, the spontaneous nature of the child is subjected to severe repression by its parents, who fear such spontaneity (in particular, the lack of sexual and sensual inhibition) and socialize it out of the child, as it was long ago socialized out of them. By age four or five, the natural instincts have been crushed or surrounded by a psychic defence structure that has a muscular rigidity as its correlate. What is lost is the ability to succumb to involuntary experience, to abandon control and lose oneself in activity; to obtain what Reich called "orgastic gratification." The orgastically ungratified person develops an artificial character and a fear of spontaneity. Whereas the healthy character is in control of his or her armor, the neurotic character is controlled by it. The emotions of the latter, including anger, anxiety, sexual desire, or whatever, are rigidly held down by this muscular tension, and the result is the stiff or collapsed posture and mechanical articulation of the body that is observable almost everywhere in our society. This neurotic character, or "modal personality," encased in character armor, might most appropriately be compared to a crustacean. Its entire character is designed to fulfill the function of defense and protection or, alternatively, acquisition and aggrandizement. It moves from crisis to crisis, driven by a desire for success and proud of its ability to tolerate stress. Its armoring is not merely a defense against the other, but against its own unconscious, its own body. The armor may protect against pain and anger, but it also protects against everything else. These emotions are held down by inverted values, such as compulsive morality and social politeness - the veneer of civilization. The modal personality is thus a mixture of external conformity and internal rebellion. It reproduces, like a sheep, the ideology of the society that molded it in the first place, and thus its ideology is essentially life-negating. In reproducing that ideology, the neurotic character produces its own suppression. Neurosis is not some adventitious accretion, some fly in the ointment. It is, Reich, argued, an icon of personality and culture as a whole.
Learning III is learning about Learning II, about your own "character" and world view. It is a freedom from the bondage of your own personality - an awakening to ecstasy, as William Bateson once defined true education.
October 4, 2014
Probably one of the best books I've ever read. Immensely clarifying and hugely depressing because the we're more distant from a reenchantment of the world than when Berman wrote this book in 1981.
February 21, 2019
With its talk of gurus, cults, and psychoanalysis, this book is clearly situated in the malaise of the failure of the Sixties. And while Berman for the most part dismisses the woo and authoritarianism, he still falls for the trap of individual solutions for collective problems that were rampant at the time. More concisely, we're alienated because the material conditions of our lives are alienating. Outside of dropping out and actually changing daily life (maybe), no amount of individual readjustment is going to fundamentally alter that.
What's confusing is that Berman seems to know this. He cites the rise of capitalism in the 1500s as the beginning of the Cartesian worldview, which the whole book is an attempt to overthrow/negate. So far, so good. But if that's the case, then how does he think anything we do individually within this society will get us out of that? While he occasionally pays lip service to changing society, it's clearly not his focus, and I think he forgets the connection between an exploitative society and its objectifying/alienating worldview.
While I appreciate his critiques of science, they seem off. For one, he is confused by the double-slit experiment in quantum mechanics. No, our presence does not cause any change in particles. Probability, and not our presence in the experiment, is what determines where particles will be in this experiment. But hey, many people make that mistake.
Feyerabend's Against Method covers much of the same ground as this book, and does so within science itself. I recommend it over this one.
What's confusing is that Berman seems to know this. He cites the rise of capitalism in the 1500s as the beginning of the Cartesian worldview, which the whole book is an attempt to overthrow/negate. So far, so good. But if that's the case, then how does he think anything we do individually within this society will get us out of that? While he occasionally pays lip service to changing society, it's clearly not his focus, and I think he forgets the connection between an exploitative society and its objectifying/alienating worldview.
While I appreciate his critiques of science, they seem off. For one, he is confused by the double-slit experiment in quantum mechanics. No, our presence does not cause any change in particles. Probability, and not our presence in the experiment, is what determines where particles will be in this experiment. But hey, many people make that mistake.
Feyerabend's Against Method covers much of the same ground as this book, and does so within science itself. I recommend it over this one.
July 14, 2015
Like many of the other reviewers here, this is a monumentally important book for me. I would just like to add one interesting observation that people may appreciate. I'm a book dealer who specializes in alchemy and related subjects, scholarly and rare books mainly. Over the decades I've met quite a few very dedicated students of alchemy and Hermetic philosophy and among those people I've met a number of practical alchemists, i.e people who also do laboratory work. If you haven't read this book then you might laugh at that notion. But if you have read it you'll understand that alchemy is more than just a thought process, a psychological dynamic, more than just the history of an old science. It is also something that you do physically with your body to interact with nature. And many of those practical alchemists have told me that this book explains the truth of physical alchemy better than any they had encountered.
May 28, 2024
Morris Berman provides an interesting and well-structured dismantling of the dominant and supposedly indisputable truths defined by scientific rationality, mechanics, and quantification and provides plenty of reason to believe that most of the affliction and disorder plaguing man are rooted in the fundamental misapprehensions of Descartian thought. It results in a forceful and compelling refutation of the mind/body duality as the supreme foundational truth and singular modality of thought governing contemporary human life.
Quoting Octavio Paz in the epigraph, who says that “to think metaphysically will begin as a critique of science, just as in classical antiquity it began as a critique of the gods,” Berman provides the framework for the rest of his thesis, which is a metaphysically-motivated tract meant to dispel the superstitions of science and to return the antecedent modes of thought and ways of being, having been smothered out of conscious existence, to their rightful place in the cosmological continuum.
Berman, an MIT-educated mathematician, isn’t out to dispense with science or any rationalist way of thinking. His intention is to awaken the reader to more intentional and integrative mode of existing in the world- what he would call “participating consciousness,” which is essentially a way of merging and identifying with your surrounding environment as opposed to the rigidly demarcated and sovereign individual of today that fetishizes freedom but, by any metric of well-being or happiness, appears to be conspicuously alienated, not only from the fundamental sustaining force of the natural world but also from fully realized, sustained ,and therefore, intimate relationship with the self and other. “Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it.”
With the slow death of the phenomenal world and the experiential realities that accompany it starting sometime in the sixteenth century, man has proven desperately incapable of recalibrating along the rigid formulations of modern technics, being explicitly fragmentary to his very nature and the wholeness of his being. It was prior to the ascent of the scientific revolution that man was seen as an integral wholeness nested within a much larger cosmological totality. Religious impulses or gods aside, this was the defining ontology that structured his reality, and one that made him more readily adaptive to and synchronized with his environment. Imagistically, it creates an impression of our predecessors stitched into an undulating tapestry that still circumscribes their separateness but is only capable of doing so within an aggregate creation.
Circumscription in today’s world, however, being much more vulgar and disorienting, delimits along the lines of materialism, individualism, scientific rationality, administration, bureaucracy, repression, and blatant violence - none of which are linked by any kind of uniting force or corresponding set of values other than domination and control. Having been dispatched from the empyreal weave of human consciousness, man has come to imagine himself as a solitary world unto himself and he only has this new modern assemblage of technics as his existential building material.
Prior to this brave new world of psychological detachment the binary forces of subject (self) and object (other) were united in a holistic experience of the world. The “other” was absolutely indispensable to the constituted self and to the self-understanding of the individual rooted in a much larger whole.
Berman interestingly identifies alchemy, the forerunner to chemistry that was largely perceived as a pseudo-science, as a great analogy for the transformative pursuit of psychic wholeness. Carl Jung believed that alchemical practice, concerning itself with the transmutation of base metals into the prized and invaluable gold, was a mirror of the human unconscious or rather, was an outward manifestation of the desire for inward metamorphosis. It was “the last major synthetic iconography of the human unconscious in the West.” Or as Norman O. Brown put it, “the last effort of Western man to produce a science based on an erotic sense of reality.”
It is the dialectical nature of reality or the profound recognition that life is inextricably bound by opposite forces that are rooted in the same source. It’s the coagulation of these presumably antithetical modes or conditions, these opposite ways of being that presage fundamental change or the genesis of something radically different. Man goes about reconfiguring his conscious being by utilizing his once-neglected unconscious self. It is the admixture of the two, their slow and methodical assimilation forged in the vigilant fires of self-understanding and awareness that produces transformation.
Quoting Octavio Paz in the epigraph, who says that “to think metaphysically will begin as a critique of science, just as in classical antiquity it began as a critique of the gods,” Berman provides the framework for the rest of his thesis, which is a metaphysically-motivated tract meant to dispel the superstitions of science and to return the antecedent modes of thought and ways of being, having been smothered out of conscious existence, to their rightful place in the cosmological continuum.
Berman, an MIT-educated mathematician, isn’t out to dispense with science or any rationalist way of thinking. His intention is to awaken the reader to more intentional and integrative mode of existing in the world- what he would call “participating consciousness,” which is essentially a way of merging and identifying with your surrounding environment as opposed to the rigidly demarcated and sovereign individual of today that fetishizes freedom but, by any metric of well-being or happiness, appears to be conspicuously alienated, not only from the fundamental sustaining force of the natural world but also from fully realized, sustained ,and therefore, intimate relationship with the self and other. “Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it.”
With the slow death of the phenomenal world and the experiential realities that accompany it starting sometime in the sixteenth century, man has proven desperately incapable of recalibrating along the rigid formulations of modern technics, being explicitly fragmentary to his very nature and the wholeness of his being. It was prior to the ascent of the scientific revolution that man was seen as an integral wholeness nested within a much larger cosmological totality. Religious impulses or gods aside, this was the defining ontology that structured his reality, and one that made him more readily adaptive to and synchronized with his environment. Imagistically, it creates an impression of our predecessors stitched into an undulating tapestry that still circumscribes their separateness but is only capable of doing so within an aggregate creation.
Circumscription in today’s world, however, being much more vulgar and disorienting, delimits along the lines of materialism, individualism, scientific rationality, administration, bureaucracy, repression, and blatant violence - none of which are linked by any kind of uniting force or corresponding set of values other than domination and control. Having been dispatched from the empyreal weave of human consciousness, man has come to imagine himself as a solitary world unto himself and he only has this new modern assemblage of technics as his existential building material.
Prior to this brave new world of psychological detachment the binary forces of subject (self) and object (other) were united in a holistic experience of the world. The “other” was absolutely indispensable to the constituted self and to the self-understanding of the individual rooted in a much larger whole.
Berman interestingly identifies alchemy, the forerunner to chemistry that was largely perceived as a pseudo-science, as a great analogy for the transformative pursuit of psychic wholeness. Carl Jung believed that alchemical practice, concerning itself with the transmutation of base metals into the prized and invaluable gold, was a mirror of the human unconscious or rather, was an outward manifestation of the desire for inward metamorphosis. It was “the last major synthetic iconography of the human unconscious in the West.” Or as Norman O. Brown put it, “the last effort of Western man to produce a science based on an erotic sense of reality.”
It is the dialectical nature of reality or the profound recognition that life is inextricably bound by opposite forces that are rooted in the same source. It’s the coagulation of these presumably antithetical modes or conditions, these opposite ways of being that presage fundamental change or the genesis of something radically different. Man goes about reconfiguring his conscious being by utilizing his once-neglected unconscious self. It is the admixture of the two, their slow and methodical assimilation forged in the vigilant fires of self-understanding and awareness that produces transformation.
December 30, 2025
This book is life changing. It should be required reading for everyone. Let’s all read this, ditch the inherently neurotic and psychotic society that is our modern western industrial world, go out and reenchant the world with one another with beauty, love, and caretaking of this beautiful earth, our only home, as the central tenets of life.
August 9, 2013
It's amazing to me that a book published in 1981 can be so universal in scope, that in 2013, all the epigraphs feel stunningly and accurately important to contemporary issues.
The first epigraph to the opening chapter (Introduction: The Modern Landscape) is from William Morris in 1891
"You see all around you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives -- men who hate life though they fear death."
A passage from Descartes in 1637 opens the "Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness" could be spoken by the CEO of an energy company, or investor in a pipeline, or fracking operation.
What is the role of consciousness, what sort of relationships have we traded in since the 16th century?
There are two chapters for Disenchantment. The first (46 pages) starts with Weber's "die Entzauberung der Welt" , also called the "disgodding" of nature, delves into the Hermetic wisdom, alchemy and a brief history, which is often discarded as equally mad as Don Quixote's quests for significance. Our Western minds have been trained to balk at simultaneous truths, and this chapter will provide the background, which includes the role of organized religion. Disenchantment (2) starts with two faces of Newton and proceeds for 17 pages concluding that "modern science and technology are based not only of the hostile attitudes of science towards nature/environment and repression of the body and unconscious" that sets the background for the rest of the book.
What does it mean: to be a human being? to relate to another human being? to relate to a society that does not seemingly care about human beings?
Berman will provide ample sources to consider such questions and the later chapters call particularly on the work of
Gregory Bateson as he discussed "tomorrow's metaphysics" - which like disenchantment, is also discussed in two chapters.
I particularly enjoyed the illustrations, the tables and epigraphs for instance of Kabir, "The flute of interior time is played whether we hear it or not." And from Levi-Strauss, "A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man and the respect of others before love of self. This is the lesson that the people we call "savages" teach us: a lesson of modesty, decency and discretion in the face of a world that preceded our species and that will survive it."
An important book.
Berman quotes T.S. Eliot from Little Gidding -- which, sums up for me the idea of starting out with reading this book,
and feeling it is one worth reading again, each time discovering "at the end of our exploration will be the arrival where we started and know the place for the first time."
The first epigraph to the opening chapter (Introduction: The Modern Landscape) is from William Morris in 1891
"You see all around you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives -- men who hate life though they fear death."
A passage from Descartes in 1637 opens the "Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness" could be spoken by the CEO of an energy company, or investor in a pipeline, or fracking operation.
What is the role of consciousness, what sort of relationships have we traded in since the 16th century?
There are two chapters for Disenchantment. The first (46 pages) starts with Weber's "die Entzauberung der Welt" , also called the "disgodding" of nature, delves into the Hermetic wisdom, alchemy and a brief history, which is often discarded as equally mad as Don Quixote's quests for significance. Our Western minds have been trained to balk at simultaneous truths, and this chapter will provide the background, which includes the role of organized religion. Disenchantment (2) starts with two faces of Newton and proceeds for 17 pages concluding that "modern science and technology are based not only of the hostile attitudes of science towards nature/environment and repression of the body and unconscious" that sets the background for the rest of the book.
What does it mean: to be a human being? to relate to another human being? to relate to a society that does not seemingly care about human beings?
Berman will provide ample sources to consider such questions and the later chapters call particularly on the work of
Gregory Bateson as he discussed "tomorrow's metaphysics" - which like disenchantment, is also discussed in two chapters.
I particularly enjoyed the illustrations, the tables and epigraphs for instance of Kabir, "The flute of interior time is played whether we hear it or not." And from Levi-Strauss, "A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man and the respect of others before love of self. This is the lesson that the people we call "savages" teach us: a lesson of modesty, decency and discretion in the face of a world that preceded our species and that will survive it."
An important book.
Berman quotes T.S. Eliot from Little Gidding -- which, sums up for me the idea of starting out with reading this book,
and feeling it is one worth reading again, each time discovering "at the end of our exploration will be the arrival where we started and know the place for the first time."
April 6, 2013
I discovered this book recently and it spoke to me so strongly, was so consonant with my interests in and emerging understanding of history and consciousness and environment and science, that I wondered that I had never encountered it before. And then I had such a strong feeling of deja vu while reading it that I am half-convinced I must have read it as a teenager and completely repressed it, as I went on with my life to study and contemplate exactly these topics and explore these lines of argument.
Regardless, this is one of my top books / recommendations of all time.
Regardless, this is one of my top books / recommendations of all time.
February 18, 2013
I first read this one in the eighties, and have to go back to it every few years. A completely eye-opening, mind-bending book that explores the origins of the modern mind and the shortcomings of a purely analytical view of the world as opposed to a more holistic, experiential one. A book everyone really ought to read.
October 7, 2008
imprescindible para entender el mundo tal y como lo conocemos
January 8, 2014
I didn't actually finish this book in its entirety, but I was saturated with enough information from it that I feel like I have. It was beginning to make me anxious so I abandoned it. Plus a lot of stuff in it seemed pretty dated. I think we're already in the midst of the "paradigm shift" that Berman calls for, and though Bateson is cool or whatever, I think the real harbingers of change are women of color. I also think Berman's position discredits medical advances with real benefits for people, which is a bit ableist.
April 17, 2007
Reading Berman's methodical analysis of the development -- historical, biographical, and cultural -- of rationalism in the West and the concomitant downfall of what he terms "participating consciousness" marked the beginning of my intellectual life, at least as I know it.
March 25, 2010
I've been looking for this book for the last 2 years.. finally I've got it. this book emphasizies on the scientific revolution as the main cause of the disenchantment of the world (Weber's thesis). and.. I haven't finished reading it :)
August 18, 2011
Read this a long time ago, and was kind of impressed at the time. Can't remember too much about it except the author's rejection of a Cartesian world view. Might be interesting to look at it again and see what I think 20 years later.
January 3, 2015
I love this book. Although Bateson was a wonderful example of someone combining rationality and a vision of wholeness, I'm also a little surprised that he seemed unaware of the works of Krishnamurti and David Bohm. Nevertheless, incredible book.
November 15, 2015
Being an economist with heterodox background opened up my vision for our future planet. A must read book if you see the short comes of our modern lives. Hard to follow all the logics, it should be read couple of times, or discussed with peers.
December 31, 2007
read 05.22.86
Read
December 14, 2008This was an important book to me 15 years ago.
November 5, 2009
Ego is an aberration, but it might just have a place in the world.
July 25, 2012
Excellent work on how the Age of Reason and Cartesian/dualistic thinking has impacted our evolution, our society and our planet.
Read
February 21, 2014I don't think that the world can be safely re-enchanted. Really great book.
April 25, 2017
One of my favorite books analyzing Western culture's obsession with Descartes and the over mechanization of the world. Read this years ago in grad school and still one of the best.
June 4, 2019
Worth all the intellectual heavy lifting reading it necessitates. Brilliant.
January 17, 2020
Incredible insight!
April 29, 2020
Brilliant.
September 16, 2023
I came across this volume in the early 80's and it has been revelatory in retrospect. I no longer own this tome but it's content and premise have remained.
December 9, 2024
a veces no entendía nada pero nananana 10/10 el libro, gracias profe de filosofía por recomendarmelo
September 29, 2014
Wonderfuly written, excellent arguments.
July 20, 2019
essential
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews