UC Santa Barbara

Only a hundred years ago, Max Weber argued that the process of rationalization has caused the disenchantment of the modern world. When rationalization eclipses all mystery and wonder, then what remains is a disenchanted world ready for exploitation. Recent authors have suggested that re-enchantment could prevent the exploitation of nature that is associated with rationalization. However, by challenging the notion that the modern “rational,” instrumental relation to nature is necessarily opposed to wonder, I develop an hermeneutic of enchantment that makes visible the implicit enchantment of modern rationalization. I argue that the experience of ontological wonder both reveals the modern invisible enchantment and yields care for all beings, thus challenging the domination of nature.

In Part I, I elucidate Weber’s disenchantment thesis and explore its contemporary interpretations in Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment, and Joshua Landy and Michael Saler’s The Re-Enchantment of the World. Taking seriously Weber’s identification of value spheres as modern gods, I demonstrate that, contrary to the widespread interpretation, Weberian disenchantment does not signal a lack of enchantment, but instead describes the struggle of competing forces of enchantment. Then, based on Dialectic of Enlightenment, I study the entanglement of enchantment and disenchantment, and use the notion of domination of nature as the standpoint from which I can assess these different sources of contemporary enchantment as they relate to the ecological crisis.

In Part II, I focus on Martin Heidegger’s work in order to develop the concept of ontological wonder. When attuned by ontological wonder, we do not marvel at what something is, but are instead struck suddenly by the obvious but usually unrecognized fact that beings are. Contrary to Heidegger’s doubts regarding wonder’s capacity to reveal Being in modernity, I explore the capacity of wonder (articulated together with anxiety) to disclose beings in their concealed strangeness. Following Heidegger’s counterintuitive logic according to which Being reveals itself in its refusal, I propose that modern nihilism makes the highest revelation of Being possible. Thus, reading Heidegger against himself, I articulate a “positive” reading of modernity in which the experience of Being is available precisely in its unavailability. Crucially, this “positive” reading deconstructs the simple oppositional structure with which I started. Rather than being opposed, ontological wonder and the rationalized domination of nature share the same root: Being.

To conclude, I define two functions of ontological wonder regarding modern enchantment. First, ontological wonder interrupts our implicit sense of worldhood; the disclosure of ontological thatness thus brings the world’s otherwise invisible enchantment to the fore. Although there is no assurance that ontological wonder stops the enchantment of rationalization, it makes the latter patent thereby exposing it to possible critique. Second, I claim that wonder has an ethical role: the insight into the thatness of beings breaks the logic of instrumental rationality. While there is no strictly necessary link between this insight and an ethical care for beings, I claim that this link is possible and is, in fact, a path frequently traveled. While ontological wonder happens often, the problem is that we lack a language for welcoming it and thus for recognizing its ethical possibilities. A crucial contribution of my dissertation is to make sense of these experiences in order to cultivate a readiness for them. Through my reading of the meaning of Being as the thatness of beings, I conclude my study of ontological wonder by distancing it from Heidegger’s tendency to ontologize and mystify vulgar prejudices and geopolitical views.