The great disenchantment

— Re-enchantment is not the nostalgia for a past. It is the grammar of a present we have been taught not to see. —

§0 · A crack to begin with

You have noticed that you no longer know how to speak to things. Not out of ill will. For lack of linguistic tools. You can name an object, describe it, evaluate it, optimize it, share it on a network, resell it. You can no longer meet it. The word "meet" itself, applied to a stone, a cloud, a plant, strikes you as overblown, perhaps a little ridiculous. And yet, six centuries ago, this word and what it carried were the shared ground of all European culture. What died between the two eras has a name — disenchantment — and it has a precise genealogy. This article gives it to you. Not to make you feel guilty. To give you the exact coordinates of the way back.

Weber 1917 — the invention of the word

Max Weber, the German sociologist, delivered in 1917 at the University of Munich a lecture — Wissenschaft als Beruf, "science as a vocation" — in which he coined the term that would structure twentieth-century thought. Entzauberung der Welt — literally "the disenchantment of the world". The German word is precise: Zauber, is enchantment-as-magic, not enchantment-as-wonder. And Ent-zauberung, is the operation that removes the spell.

Weber describes, with no particular nostalgia, what this operation means. The old world — the one before modern science — was inhabited by forces, spirits, qualities, sympathies, correspondences. One did not know everything, but one knew that the world "wanted" something, that it "answered" our gestures. The modern world — the world of instrumental rationality — is a world where, in principle, everything can be calculated, mastered, predicted, reduced to mechanical causes. No one there believes in spirits. And it is an intellectual relief as much as an existential loss. Weber knows this. He does not judge. He names.

Merchant 1980 — the date of the gesture

If Weber named the event, Carolyn Merchant dated it. In The Death of Nature (1980), she demonstrates, with primary sources in hand, that the operation of disenchantment is not a slow drift — it is a civilizational event circumscribed in time. It begins around 1450 with the first great treatises on mining extraction (Agricola), accelerates with the Cartesian scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, and ends around 1700 with Newton and generalized mechanics.

Before 1450, nature was conceived as a living organism — often personified as feminine, as nurturer (Natura, Mother Earth, the European equivalents of Pachamama). This image was not only religious — it was cosmological, philosophical, economic. It imposed a restraint: one does not dig into the mother's breast to extract the metal without ritual care. Merchant cites explicit medieval texts — Bernardino Telesio, Cesalpino — that condemn deep mines as a violence done to the Earth-organism. This grammar would be methodically destroyed between 1450 and 1700.

The pivotal moment, for Merchant, is Francis Bacon (1561-1626). In texts little known to the general public — The Masculine Birth of Time, Temporis Partus Masculus — Bacon explicitly lays claim to the vocabulary of the inquisition for the new science. One must "torture nature so that she reveals her secrets", "put her to the question", "penetrate her". The parallel with what the judges did to women accused of witchcraft is not accidental — it is claimed. Modern science is born in the same tongue as the pyres, because it is born of the same gesture: to force the silence of a nature that spoke.

Federici 2004 — the human cost

The third angle was held by Silvia Federici, of whom we have already spoken in The trial of the plants and whom we must summon here in another dimension. If Merchant dates the gesture, Federici quantifies its cost. Between 1450 and 1750, in Europe, 40,000 to 60,000 women were executed as witches. Hundreds of thousands were tortured. Millions lived in terror of being named. And — this is the decisive point Federici adds to Merchant — the regions where the enclosure of the commons was most brutal are also those where the pyres were most numerous. The correlation is statistical, verified in the archives.

Disenchantment is therefore not a peaceful intellectual event that unfolded in the universities and the royal academies. It is, on the ground, an event of massive violence. The new mechanist cosmology needed, as the political condition of its spread, the physical elimination of those who carried the alternative knowledge. And it obtained it. That violence has never been settled. It is the repressed debt of all modern science.

Abram 1996 — what was lost, in lived terms

The fourth angle is phenomenological. David Abram, a former stage magician turned philosopher, wrote in 1996 The Spell of the Sensuous — subtitled: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. His own contribution is to describe what disenchantment cost us in terms of lived experience, in the flesh of ordinary perception.

Abram draws on Merleau-Ponty and on years spent among the Sherpa of Nepal and the Balinese sorcerers. His thesis: human perception is never the solitary operation of a subject upon an inert object. It is an exchange — a "perceptual reciprocity" — between a sentient body and an environment that is itself sentient. When you look at a tree, the tree, in its own way, perceives you too (through the fluctuations of air, through vibrations, through chemical presences). What modernity did was not only to separate culture from nature — it was to train us no longer to perceive that reciprocity, to hear only the outgoing half of our conversation with the world.

Berman 1981 — the possibility of return

The fifth and last angle is the most important for anyone not content with nostalgia. Morris Berman, the American historian of science, published in 1981 The Reenchantment of the World with Cornell University Press. The book became a quiet classic. His thesis: there is no question of returning to the medieval world — modern science brought irretrievable benefits (maternal mortality, hygiene, communication, freedoms). The question is to build a third cosmology that holds together modern scientific rigour and pre-modern participatory consciousness. Berman calls this participating consciousness — the consciousness that is not content to observe the world from the outside but knows itself to be inside it, in relation with it.

This third cosmology is not a fantasy. Berman shows that it is already beginning to emerge in precise scientific fields: non-local quantum physics (Bohm, Bell), systems biology (Bateson, Margulis), deep ecology (Naess), the philosophy of embodied consciousness (Merleau-Ponty, Varela). Forty years later, one can add plant intelligence (Gagliano, Mancuso), relational mycology (Sheldrake, Simard), the physics of consciousness (Penrose, Tononi). The movement is under way. It is rarely named as such — but for fifty years it has been tracing the contour of a post-mechanist cosmology that is exactly what Berman called re-enchantment.

The INFUSE word — to disenspell

At this point, a lexical clarification. In the INFUSE tongue, we say disenspelling rather than disenchantment. The distinction is not cosmetic. Disenchantment suggests a loss of wonder, therefore subjective, therefore surmountable by a change of attitude. Disenspelling stays closer to Weber's German Entzauberung: the active withdrawal of a spell that made the world legible. It is an operation, not a state of mind. It was done. It can therefore be undone — by an inverse operation, which is not a re-mystification but a re-weaving of the lost grammar.

INFUSE works at this re-weaving on the modest scale that is its own — that of the editorial language and that of the plants we trade. Not by proposing belief in new spells. By proposing to actively unlearn the lexical automatisms of disenchantment, and to relearn the grammars that precede it — animacy (Kimmerer), perceptual reciprocity (Abram, Merleau-Ponty), evidentiality (Whorf, Prechtel), participation (Berman). This is what the 5 layers of disenspelled language describe in detail. It is also what this article tries to embody sentence by sentence.

Three tiny gestures — that do not beg the past

No retreat. No new religion. Three tiny gestures, that one can begin today, and that do the work on condition that they are kept up.

Gesture one — change the verb. When you take a plant, say "I meet" rather than "I consume". When you see a tree, say "there is an oak" rather than "that is an oak". The "there is", an evidential form, restores presence without classing it. These micro-changes of vocabulary seem tiny. Day after day, they retrain the perception that matches them. This is exactly what Abram calls reopening the incoming half of the conversation.

Gesture two — greet one non-human being a day. A plant, a tree, a cloud, a bird, a stream. Not in thought — aloud, inwardly or clearly, it matters little. The greeting engages the body in the grammar of reciprocity. Kimmerer practises it under the name of naming the kin. Eliade would say: it is the minimal hierophany of the everyday. Berman would say: it is the entry into participating consciousness.

Gesture three — refuse one disenspelled formula a day. When someone tells you "plants are a resource", you correct: "plants are beings". When someone tells you to "open the chakras", you observe that this borrowed, poorly translated language is probably not the right one. When someone tells you "the ritual releases energy", you ask yourself: who says this, how, where? Not out of pedantry — out of lexical hygiene. Federici, Merchant, Abram and Berman remind us that the war happened first in the vocabulary. The defence begins there too.