on the Enlightenment. M & D-related, I say: 'banning the spiritual; world had become like a machine [that duck]; scientific explanation; vast material depot."

[Mark Kohut]

>From a books' review in the LA Review of Books.

But beyond this negative consensus — namely, that the Enlightenment was not
what we once thought it was — there is little agreement as to what it was,
when it was, and where it was. Of course, it was the intellectual movement
that privileged the powers of reason. But the men and women of this era had
better reason to praise reason than we do three centuries later. Charles
Taylor has recently described this collision as “The Great Disembedding” —
an awkward but powerful phrase. This “disembedding” was, in part, social.
As Taylor notes, the sort of self-questioning we now take for granted had
no place in this earlier world. It was, he asserts, as inconceivable for
medieval or early modern men and women to ask themselves “What would it be
like if I were someone else?” as it is for us *not* to ask ourselves this
same question. Life then was collective, not discrete; its “purpose” fixed
by tradition and religion, not individual aspirations or efforts. That we
now not only ask such questions about our lives, but that also the question
of identity has become so central to our lives is, for Taylor, “the measure
of our disembedding.”

This led to a more radical, though more elusive, kind of disembedding,
marking our banishment not just from a coherent and cohesive society, but
also from a meaningful and purposeful cosmos. In Max Weber’s celebrated
distinction, the “enchantment” of our ancestral world evaporated, leaving
behind the dust-dry landscape of disenchantment. The causes of this
spiritual drought were many, but the relentless light of philosophical
reason is certainly chief among them. Once it was enlightened, the world
banned the supernatural; the world had become a machine, liable to
scientific explanation, just as it became a vast material depot, condemned
to commercial exploitation. As for the torch of reason, it not only
threatened to consume a world that has been transformed into an object, but
also to consume itself.