Evelien Van Beeck

‘Enchantment as a life story’s catalyst: Ricoeur’s second naivety and narrative identity’ This paper builds on Ricoeur’s narrative theory, which points to the importance of life stories as a crucial basis for the narrative identity that human beings create for themselves, overcoming the discomfort of contingency by weaving a poetic common thread through their lives in the stories they tell about themselves. Unfortunately, this comes with the risk of self-deceit and manipulability, a challenge Ricoeur acknowledged but was never able to refute in a satisfying way. I wish to expand his narrative theory by focusing on a specific experience that helps preventing a life story from becoming arbitrary or random. It is the experience of enchantment, which – in the words of modern philosopher Jane Bennett – is both captivating and disturbing. It divides life in a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. I find illustration and corroboration of my analysis by diving into Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’. This literary monument was already touched upon by Ricoeur himself in ‘Time and Narrative’, but this paper follows a more idiosyncratic path. I conclude that the experience of re-enchantment combines the virtue of keeping a more critical distance (disenchantment) with an attitude of a ‘second naivety’, leading to a life story that is all but arbitrary. It is reflected, with a certain inevitability and it can therefore become the bearer of profound meaning.

Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007) reopened the debate about the possibility of “reenchantment,” presupposing that “enchantment” once existed, but got lost, such that we arrived at a state of “disenchantment.” However, the no longer marginal debate on the possibility of a “re-enchantment,” is in my view chaotic and lacks precise definitions. In this article the author tries to clarify the concepts involved and put some order in the debate and investigate the possibilities for a kind of re-enchantment. Firstly, she discloses enchantment, disenchantment, and reenchantment as factors in an intellectual scheme, rather than as concepts describing an historical reality. Secondly, she shows that these terms are not applicable to epoque defining sociocultural constellations, a common conviction, defended by Taylor too, which has awkward ideology-related implications. Finally, she points out, in an analysis inspired by Ricoeur, that it rather is the domain of the individual life where the loss and the recovering of enchantment may take place, in a dynamic between the individual and the “call of reality,” having the enchanting capacity to inspire possible lives and give our lives its beacons.

Enchanting Nietzsche: On ‘god is dead’ and new life For a long time, Nietzsche was considered by his contemporaries primarily as a literary man. In philosophy and theology, the death of God nevertheless found resonance in the secularization debate. In this article I take a different path and will introduce a similar autopsy in the dis-re-enchantment debate. To this end, I revert mainly to the literary metaphors in Nietzsche’s work, of course without ignoring its philosophical (and theological) value. First, I retranslate some echoes of Nietzsche’s word from the secularization debate into the disenchantment debate. Here I note that this retranslation requires a shift from cultural to personal history. This provides me with two new, unexpected echoes of Nietzsche’s word. It also places radical questions on the current disenchantment debate.