Social Science Research Council
Buffered and porous selves
posted by Charles Taylor
Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.
This is not a mere “subtraction” story, for it thinks not only of loss but of remaking. With the subtraction story, there can be no epistemic loss involved in the transition; we have just shucked off some false beliefs, some fears of imagined objects. Looked at my way, the process of disenchantment involves a change in sensibility; one is open to different things. One has lost a way in which people used to experience the world.
Disenchantment in my use (and partly in Weber’s) really translates Weber’s term “Entzauberung,” where the key kernel concept is “Zauber,” magic. In a sense, moderns constructed their own concept of magic from and through the process of disenchantment. Carried out first under Reforming Christian auspices, the condemned practices all involved using spiritual force against or at least independently of our relation to God. The worst examples were things like saying a black mass for the dead to kill off your enemy or using the host as a love charm. But in the more exigent modes of Reform, the distinction between white and black magic tended to disappear, and all independent recourse to forces independent of God was seen as culpable. The category “magic” was constituted through this rejection, and this distinction was then handed on to post-Enlightenment anthropology, as with Frazer’s distinction between “magic” and “religion.”
The process of disenchantment, involving a change in us, can be seen as a loss of a certain sensibility that is really an impoverishment (as against simply the shedding of irrational feelings). And there have been frequent attempts to “re-enchant” the world, or at least admonitions and invitations to do so. In a sense, the Romantic movement can be seen as engaged in such a project. Think of Novalis’s “magic realism;” think of the depiction of the Newtonian universe as a dead one, shorn of the life it used to have (as in Schiller’s “The Gods of Greece“).
But it is clear that the poetry of Wordsworth, or of Novalis, or that of Rilke, can’t come close to the original experience of porous selves. The experience it evokes is more fragile, often evanescent, subject to doubt. It is also one which draws on an ontology that is highly undetermined, and must remain so.
Indeed, “enchantment” is something that we have special trouble understanding. Latin Christendom has tended more and more to privilege belief, as against unthinking practice. And “secular” people have inherited this emphasis, and often propound an “ethics of belief,” where it can be seen as a sin against science or epistemic decency to believe in God. So we tend to think of our differences from our remote forbears in terms of different beliefs, whereas there is something much more puzzling involved here. It is clear that for our forbears, and many people in the world today who live in a similar religious world, the presence of spirits, and of different forms of possession, is no more a matter of (optional, voluntarily embraced) belief than is for me the presence of this computer and its keyboard at the tips of my fingers.
So it must have been for the Celestine, in Birgit Meyer’s Translating the Devil, who “walked home from Aventile with her mother, accompanied by a stranger dressed in a white northern gown.” When asked afterwards, her mother denied having seen the man. He turned out to be the Akan spirit Sowlui, and Celestine was pressed into his service. In Celestine’s world, perhaps the identification of the man with this spirit might be called a “belief,” in that it came after the experience in an attempt to explain what it was all about. But the man accompanying her was just something that happened to her, a fact of her world.
We have great trouble getting our minds around this, and we rapidly reach for intra-psychic explanations, in terms of delusions, projections, and the like. But one thing that seems clear is that the whole situation of the self in experience is subtly but importantly different in these worlds and in ours. We make a sharp distinction between inner and outer, what is in the “mind” and what is out there in the world. Whatever has to do with thought, purpose, human meanings, has to be in the mind, rather than in the world. Some chemical can cause hormonal change, and thus alter the psyche. There can be an aphrodisiac, but not a love potion, that is, a chemical that determines the human/moral meaning of the experience it enables. A phial of liquid can cure a specific disease, but there can’t be something like the phials brought back from pilgrimage at Canterbury, which contained a miniscule drop of the blood of Thomas à Beckett, and which could cure anything, and even make us better people; that is, the liquid was not the locus of certain specific chemical properties, but of a generalized beneficence.
Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are “in the mind.” They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm. But formerly it was not so. Let us take a well-known example of influence inhering in an inanimate substance, as this was understood in earlier times. Consider melancholy: black bile was not the cause of melancholy, it embodied, it was melancholy. The emotional life was porous here; it didn’t simply exist in an inner, mental space. Our vulnerability to the evil, the inwardly destructive, extended to more than just spirits that are malevolent. It went beyond them to things that have no wills, but are nevertheless redolent with the evil meanings.
See the contrast. A modern is feeling depressed, melancholy. He is told: it’s just your body chemistry, you’re hungry, or there is a hormone malfunction, or whatever. Straightway, he feels relieved. He can take a distance from this feeling, which is ipso facto declared not justified. Things don’t really have this meaning; it just feels this way, which is the result of a causal action utterly unrelated to the meanings of things. This step of disengagement depends on our modern mind/body distinction, and the relegation of the physical to being “just” a contingent cause of the psychic.
But a pre-modern may not be helped by learning that his mood comes from black bile, because this doesn’t permit a distancing. Black bile is melancholy. Now he just knows that he’s in the grips of the real thing.
Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded, buffered self and the porous self of the earlier enchanted world. As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me,” to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term “buffered” here and in A Secular Age. This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it.
These two descriptions get at, respectively, the two important facets of this contrast. First, the porous self is vulnerable: to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. And along with this go certain fears that can grip it in certain circumstances. The buffered self has been taken out of the world of this kind of fear. For instance, the kind of thing vividly portrayed in some of the paintings of Bosch.
True, something analogous can take its place. These images can also be seen as coded manifestations of inner depths, repressed thoughts and feelings. But the point is that in this quite transformed understanding of self and world, we define these as inner, and naturally, we deal with them very differently. And indeed, an important part of the treatment is designed to make disengagement possible.
Perhaps the clearest sign of the transformation in our world is that today many people look back to the world of the porous self with nostalgia, as though the creation of a thick emotional boundary between us and the cosmos were now lived as a loss. The aim is to try to recover some measure of this lost feeling. So people go to movies about the uncanny in order to experience a frisson. Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane. You can’t get a frisson from what is really in fact terrifying you.
The second facet is that the buffered self can form the ambition of disengaging from whatever is beyond the boundary, and of giving its own autonomous order to its life. The absence of fear can be not just enjoyed, but becomes an opportunity for self-control or self-direction.
And so the boundary between agents and forces is fuzzy in the enchanted world; and the boundary between mind and world is porous, as we see in the way that charged objects can influence us. I have just been referring to the moral influence of substances, like black bile. But a similar point can be made about the relation to spirits. The porousness of the boundary emerges here in various kinds of “possession”—all the way from a full taking over of the person, as with a medium, to various kinds of domination by or partial fusion with a spirit or God. Here again, the boundary between self and other is fuzzy, porous. And this has to be seen as a fact of experience, not a matter of “theory” or “belief.”
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September 3rd, 2008 at 1:08 pm
This also reminds me of Carlos Eire’s lectures on eternity and the impact of the Reformation on time. By segmenting space between a heavenly realm and and earthly one, time was also segmented or “buffered” into the temporality of human living and the eternal space-time, if you will, of God.
Thus, it seems that the proposal that the human self is buffered in this way is inextricably regulated by the understanding of how the human self exists and is conditioned within space and time.
September 5th, 2008 at 5:36 am
I can see what you mean by the Reformation dualism of time and eternity. Whilst I nor you can know how the pre-Reformation world was experienced, we do know that it was the reverse of Reformation dualism insofar as the whole universe was sacred, and so was the setting for God’s kingdom, the basilea. The basilea began on earth and was completed after (viz through) death, whilst for the post-Reformation and Renaissance, human heaven was a wholly ‘other’ dimension, hence the loss of enchantment. The presence of the divine was displaced by the ‘absence’ of God, leading to diseased theories like Nietzche’s death of God. Augustinianism was conveniently adopted by Renaissance humanism by a puritan Protestantism.
September 5th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
The Reformation has a lot to answer for—some good some bad—good because, in an odd way, it rescued us from sheer superstition, and helped us prepare for the scientific mind set—and bad, because it created an insulated conception of time and space and a scientific fundamentalism which, thankfully, is gradually being turned on its head by quantum physics.
Both the New and Old Testaments (as do many if not all the religions of the world) recognize the reality of the ‘numinous,’ and the ‘immanence’ and ‘closeness’ of the divine—like that old Palmolive ad to convince you that its washing liquid is good for your skin: ‘you’re soaking in it!’ the expert says to the bewildered interviewee who’s been conned into dipping her hands in what she thinks is a new kind of moisturizer. Similarly, but for different reasons (!), we look up with puzzlement when we realize that notions such as ‘over here’ and ‘over there,’ ‘up’ and ‘down,’ time and space, are relative, and that looking for ‘God’ is therefore a curious exercise, because ‘in ‘God’ we live and move and have our being (so the ancients postulated)—hence, the much needed notion of ‘the porous self.’
With Quantum positing up to twelve dimensions that exist side by side like slices of bread (to use Green’s analogy), separated only by a thin membrane (into which particles may disappear and then reappear again), I think the time has come for fundamentalist science to give up its material gods, and recognize that the sacred interconnectedness of things is far more complex than such ‘opaque’ and ‘non porous’ materialism will allow.
The arid and desiccated legacy that scientific materialism is bequeathing the next generation is to be decried. At least Richard Dawkins is honest enough to allow for ‘awe’ in his cosmology, and as he knows, this is not the monopoly of religion! It’s a porous universe after all, with truth defying the limits with which we would enclose it.
Great article! Thank you Charles Taylor!
September 8th, 2008 at 2:01 am
What about the idea that a porous boundary could be forced, via recognition of the nature of ideas, and the reflexive properties of thinking and willing?
September 9th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Thanks for this great article. I’m wary of epochal proclamations, but by highlighting the experiential nature of the shift/loss/transformation in modernity, it seems to me that you’ve made some excellent points.
I wonder, however, whether the sharp demarcation between self and world that you describe, and the disenchantment that Weber described so long ago, represents an actual shift in the nature of human experience, or whether it has instead become an alibi for much more powerful forces. Is the modern self truly nonporous, territorialized, and closed? Is the cybernetic metaphor of control all that is left to us? Or are we just as enchanted, just as confident in the mystical power of our science and our tools, as we were millennia ago?
When we “disengage” from the world by embracing a metaphysics of control and direct causality, I’m not sure that we are truly doing so. Our technologies, perhaps what Foucault would have called “technologies of self” in an earlier biomedical era, in fact open us up to all kinds of interventions and blur the boundaries between self and other, culture and nature. But could it in fact be argued that bodily technologies—drugs, prosthetics, medicine—require an intimate, even porous engagement with the world around us?
There seems to be something different about the experience of difference and boundaries in modernity, but I’m not sure we are any more demarcated or set apart than we were long ago. Thanks again for such a thoughtful piece.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:47 am
It is the science and the technology reinforced by the therapeutic state that chain us to modern and postmodern psychoses and make a fetish of power and control, and it is these factors that embed and sustain the buffeted self. The transformation that is needed can only be found in a new natural and human ecology rooted in a shared spirituality. Given that there are different and diverse spiritualities and different and incompatible ways of life (not lifestyles, which is a neo-liberal commodity fetish), the ecosystem must play a definitive part in any future notion of self. I find Taylor’s ideas of porous self and buffered self very helpful, and from a Roman Catholic perspective I would develop these in the context of Thomas Merton’s “true self.” The transformation required today is as drastic and thoroughgoing as the calamity we face, though there will inevitably be some historical continuities.
September 16th, 2008 at 7:19 am
I originally posted this comment on the Somatosphere blog, but I’ll re-post it here:
This is an interesting line of thought, but I’m not so sure that it’s altogether true. The work of Paul Rozin and colleagues shows clearly that modern westerners still harbour behaviourally important ideas about the moral significance of inanimate matter. In essence, a lot of “moderns” implicitly think along the lines of sympathetic magic, such that, for example, clothing worn by nominally evil or bad people are perceived to “magically” take on some of those moral qualities. Check out his website for references.
September 16th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Most stimulating article. Reminds me of Julian Jaynes’ “Bicameral Mind” concept.
We moderns question, and buffer ourselves. Perhaps our questioning and empiricism have given us enough explanations of natural phenomena for us to question even those phenomenon that are unexplained, such as God experiences that still haunt us.
Terrence McKenna posits a whole realm of biological intelligences that communicate with us through chemicals. It may be that we have buffered ourselves from interactions with the biosphere well enough to ignore it except by choice through ingestion. Certainly, the world is now, and always has been, dominated by organisms of one cell and smaller. To assume they have no influence on consciousness denies our known experiences with phytochemical hallucinogens.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:21 am
What about the knowledge that faith brings, imagination, sensibility, insight,
apprehension, feeling? There is an undeveloped cosmos in all of this meta-scientific knowledge, the mystery of God and humankind!
October 14th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Dear Professor Charles Taylor,
I am tempted to say the following, with the greatest respect: I believe you are mythologising the past. We do live in an enchanted world. Today’s enchantment is different, to be sure. Does it make sense to make such a general claim?: “we live in a much less enchanted world.” Enchantment has simply changed, dear professor. It remains with us in all too recognisable a form.
All the best.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Ezequiel da Silva either knows something most of us contemporaries don’t, or he/she is mythologising the present, that is offering us the presentist re-rendering of “the end of history.” Since the neo-liberal presentist myth is now in the shards of its own ruins, where is the enchantment da Silva talks of? It is simply incomprehensible to talk of enchantment as though such a state can be constructed or invented or “changed” by us! The real in-itself viz. God cannot be constructed, but can be discovered. As to whether we can truthfully “represent” it as “the holy” or “sacred” is an interesting question. Religion has always held within itself a “surplus of meaning” overspilling the sacred container of representation which emerges in everyday life and worship. However we cannot simply “change” such enchantment, no matter how immanent nor transcendent!
October 20th, 2008 at 7:38 am
Perhaps I should just add that enchantment is wonder at being here at all viz. that there is something rather than nothing, and as such is the gift of what is called in theological circles ‘prevenient grace’. We can discover this as co-creators in the exposition and unveiling of beauty in the world. That ugliness is the product of vice and beauty of virtue is something that is staring us in the face in our artificial world. The view that enchantment ‘remains with us in all too recognisable a form’ is obscure to say the least! Is this pure immanentism, rationalism or what?
October 20th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Modernity distanced us from immediacy of our experience? Does not the post-modern critique distance us from immediacy of our certainty?
There are gaps in the world again. Post-modernism is flawed in being non-constructive, except that it releases us. Yes, the release is exaggerated, but the post-modern critique has enough force that we cannot return to Positivist certainty.
Very nice article, until the diagnosis of the present.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:53 am
Postmodernism evades the moral problem of the Common life and the Common Good, the dimension that situates the longings for immortality as exposed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. Taylor tries to avoid the extremes of Modernism and Postmodernism, and his ontology of the self goes some way to addressing the trap of the Cartesian self-enclosed consciousness that continues to lock us out of Paradise or any shared hopes of it! I found Taylor’s A Secular Age indispensable in continuing the unlocking of rationalism, but there is much further to go!