**4. Disenchantment: what it is and what it does**

One of the most insightful philosophical examinations of the concepts of enchantment and disenchantment comes from the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. In *A Secular Age* [4], Taylor asks a simple question—How was it that in sixteenth century Europe, it was almost impossible not to believe in God, whereas by the twentieth century, it is at best difficult and at worst impossible to believe in God? This question could well be applied to Africa except in reverse form—How is it that in Africa it is almost impossible, to this day, not to believe in God? What happened in Europe that changed the habitus of Europeans, and what is it about the habitus of Africans that makes it impossible not to believe not only in God but in spirits, ancestors, and an animate universe. Taylor answers the question by posing the idea of the porous and the buffered self, with the porous self- inhabiting an enchanted world and the buffered self a disenchanted world [5].

Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, the European habitus became disenchanted through the complex processes of secularization. The enchanted world, says Taylor, is the pre-modern world of spirits, demons, and moral forces. The everyday experience of people in such a world is one in which interaction constantly takes place between the seen and the unseen world, and spirit possession is a frequent occurrence.

*Indigenous Religions as Antidote to the Environmental Crisis: Surveying a Decade of Reflection DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105209*

Taylor explains the differences between the porous and the buffered self through the rubrics of meaning, agency, boundaries, and vulnerability ([5], pp. 236–239).

In the enchanted world, meaning exists in the thing itself, not in the mind of the observer. A thing "can communicate this meaning to us, impose it on us … by bringing us as it were into its field of force" ([4], p. 30). Meaning, therefore,

*[C]an no longer be placed simply within; but nor can it be located exclusively without. Rather it is in a kind of interspace which straddles what for us ["moderns"] is a clear boundary. Or the boundary is, in an image I want to use here, porous ([4], p. 33).*

Because meanings are attached to things outside the mind in the enchanted world, they can have agency, they can impose themselves on us, be communicated to us, bring us into their field of force, penetrate us in some kind of way. The deepest feelings within us can be perceived as being under the control of an outside force to which we may succumb. This force may be associated with a spiritual being because the enchanted world is filled with such beings. In the disenchanted world, on the other hand, there can be no "charged" objects outside the mind and "causal relations between things cannot in anyway be dependent on their meanings which must be projected on them from our minds" ([4], p. 35). If the source of the feelings and thoughts that we have are simply in the mind, then their influence can be restricted and controlled. If they originate outside of us, then our control of them is limited. They can weaken us or invigorate us, depending on their origin. If they are negative, then to counteract them we will need to use other positively charged objects to counteract their force and protect, heal, or deliver us from them.

A crucial feature of the enchanted world is "a perplexing absence of certain boundaries which seem to us essential" ([4], p. 33). There is an apparent absence of boundary between personal agency and impersonal force, between mind and meaning, individual and community, person and world, experience and belief. If the enchanted world is defined by the absence of boundaries, the disenchanted world is defined by their presence. There are clear boundaries between the material and spiritual worlds, the self and others, individuals and society, causes and effects, mind and body, subjects and objects, religion and society. The separation within being, between beings, and between beings and the world around them, exists at the profoundest of levels. "There is," says Taylor, "something in the move to the mind-centred view [where thoughts only exist in individual minds] which has given us a fatal sensitivity to atomistic theories" ([4], p. 34). This is partly because the buffered self is able to disengage from things across the boundaries it has created between itself and the world in order to take itself out of the world and objectify it, giving the world, and the self, its own autonomous order.

On the other hand, the porous self is profoundly vulnerable to the surrounding world. You are vulnerable to the thoughts and feelings of others who might want to harm you; you are vulnerable to the forces attached to the meanings of things that you have limited or no control over; you are vulnerable to possession by the spiritual beings that roam the cosmos; you are vulnerable to substances that are charged with causal forces. Vulnerability, says Taylor, "extends to more than just spirits which are malevolent … it goes beyond them to things which have no wills, but are nevertheless redolent with evil meanings" ([4], p. 37). It goes without saying that the disenchanted condition brings to the buffered self a far greater sense of invulnerability and power. Disengaging oneself from anything that exists outside of the mind and imposing on reality your own order of things creates at least the illusion of invulnerability if not

the reality. The point that Taylor emphasizes here is that a set of conditions that places all reality outside of oneself effectively objectifies reality puts one in a situation of control over reality and allows one the possibility of defining everything in terms of how one can use reality to one's own advantage. As a buffered self, I have the feeling of being able to dictate the terms of the relationship with the world outside, whereas the porous self cannot do this because meanings, objects, etc., have their own agency. And since you cannot impose your will on them, the best thing to do is negotiate with them. Indeed the spatial geography of things, that which is on the inside of the self and that which is on the outside, is by definition a matter of uncertainty in the enchanted world [5].

The emergence of the buffered self, according to Taylor, took place over several hundred years, produced profound changes on psychological, spiritual, sociological, economic, esthetic, and political levels, and resulted in a substantially transformed person living in a substantially transformed world that we call modernity. Taylor's use of the expression "to seize the self" probably best epitomizes this process since it denotes the central, existential shift of agency that is at its heart—where the decisive locus of influence, the command center, as it were, no longer exists outside the self but inside the self. Taylor describes the various processes of transformation as taking place interactively and simultaneously, each reinforcing the other in the journey toward secularism. His description of three of these processes encapsulates the shift that took place—"the rise of the disciplinary society," "the great disembedding," and the formation of "the immanent frame." The disciplinary society, among other things, was associated with the autonomization and disciplining of the self, the autonomization and domestication of nature, and a new emphasis on human agency in the world. There was a move away from ritualized toward more personalized religion, and a manipulable universe could now, with the help of a transcendent and disengaged deity, become ordered.

To understand what Taylor means by the great disembedding one has to be reminded that in the enchanted universe, there could be no separation of the individual from the socio-spiritual matrix and religion from the whole of life. There was not even the possibility of the notion of such separation. The "great disembedding" involved, among other things, the removal of the individual from the socio-spiritual matrix, deity from the world, and religion from the whole of life. The immanent frame speaks to the emergence of a self-sufficient immanent order or constellation of orders in the cosmic, social, and moral universes that has sloughed off the need for an imminent God and prepares nature for exploitation in the Baconian mold and therefore for the scientific revolution that was to follow. The enchanted world without becomes the enchanted world within in the Jungian and Freudian sense. Where there was possession by spirits, there are now psychological symbols.
