Myth, synchronicity, and re-enchantment

Excerpt - Roderick Main

The disenchantment of the world

Max Weber (1864–1920) described modern culture as characterised by capitalism, rationalisation, disenchantment, subjectivist culture, and democratisation (Scaff, 2000, pp. 103–107). These features of modernity are intimately interlinked in Weber’s thought, and any one of them gives access to the overall problem of modernity as he saw it. In this chapter I shall focus on the feature of disenchantment (Entzauberung, “de-magification”), described by Weber as a condition in which “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather … one can in principle, master all things by calculation”, and in which, therefore, “[o]ne need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits” (Weber, 1918, p. 139).

The Weberian scholar Lawrence Scaff neatly elaborates: The disenchantment thesis holds that modernity represents a loss of the sacred sense of wholeness and reconciliation between self and world provided by myth, magic, tradition, religion, or immanent nature. It ushers in the disruptive sense of disengagement, abstraction, alienation, homelessness, and the “problem of meaning” that begins to gnaw at the vital core of modern experience and social philosophy. (Scaff, 2000, p. 105)

In what follows I shall explore one influential attempt, of a kind foretold and observed by Weber, to re-enchant modernity: the psychological model and related theory of myth of the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung (1875–1961)…

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