ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the prospect of a “perspectival” understanding of disenchantment and reenchantment to argue that reenchantment is best understood in terms of attention. The first part of the chapter clarifies that the experience of disenchantment is a result of our capacity for detachment; that is, it results from our ability to transcend our current point of view and to look at our beliefs, desires, and experience of the world from the outside. It is shown that this ability entails the phenomenon of disenchantment, because we realize that the world of meaning and value is not mirrored in the picture of the world that is provided by a strongly detached point of view. The second part argues that ethical inquiry requires a capacity for attention rather detachment. Following Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, attention is presented as a way of perceiving the world that is both morally qualified (it seeks to perceive the world patiently, justly, and lovingly) and careful (it seeks to represent the world as it is). That is, attention involves a reenchantment of the world not in the sense that it repopulates the world with “spooky” or “queer” entities, but in the sense that it reveals what was there all along but was removed from sight under the influence of the detached point of view – in casu, value. Attention, the author concludes, is therefore vital for our ethical attempts to find out how to live and what to do.
