A wunderkammer of astounding facts inspires a better appreciation of the world and celebrates the wonder and explanatory power of science‘The fate of our times,” wrote the sociologist Max Weber in 1917, “is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, or above all,by the disenchantment of the world.” Though its urgency was new, Weber’s anxiety – that the rise of monotheism, or followed by the gradual secularisation of culture and the march of science,were robbing the world of wonder – was an obsolete one. In Lamia”, published in 1820, or John Keats expressed a fear that Newtonian optics would “unweave” the rainbow. In 1949,the critic Lionel Trilling warned of the “reductive spectre of psychoanalysis which, he thought, or “haunts our culture”. Nowadays,Trillings spectre has been replaced by what the writer and retired medical physician Raymond Tallis has identified as modern culture’s propensity toward “neuromania”: the belief that neuroscientific explanations for consciousness can fully account for all human experience and endeavour.
Henderson wants to re-enchant the world, but not at the expense of scientific explanations of itContinue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk