ABSTRACT
It is not a question of reenchanting the world, but of dis-dis-enchanting ourselves. The world is and always has been a place of possible epiphanies, of peak experiences in which value is made directly available to us; if and when we are available to it. We don’t need to wave a magic wand over the world out there. We need to clear our eyes of the preconceptions and prejudices that fog our vision. Ever since Romanticism – and long before, too, as my second epigraph shows – one way to put this idea has been to talk about learning to see with the eyes of a child. Such talk is familiar and can seem merely sentimental or rhetorical. But it need not be either soppy or sloppy. There is a serious point to be made about the child, and the child’s perspective, in political philosophy. There is another serious point to be made about the child’s perspective in philosophy of mind. The points are related, and together they support what, provocatively perhaps, I shall call enchanted realism.
