ABSTRACT
The standard thesis of the disenchantment of the world appears as a self-referential claim maintaining something about the claimant. In a nutshell, it contends that we, moderns, live in a world that does not resonate with us, which is mute, indifferent, mindless, and therefore usable, exploitable, consumable, but not intrinsically worthy or meaningful. In my chapter, I discuss an alternative view of the relationship between self and world by taking three interrelated steps. First, starting from a first-person perspective, I wonder why the experiences of enchantment have to cave in and give way to disillusionment: is this an inescapable feature of the human condition and, if such is the case, what sort of inescapability are we dealing with here? Second, as long as episodes of enchantment do happen, I ask then what kind of human potential is embodied by them. Third, I inquire whether there are ways to account for the reasons supporting the two stances of enchantment and disenchantment without making them mutually incompatible by focusing on Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance and asking whether a resonant world can be plausibly described as a reenchanted world.
