Rousseau And Marx Can Be Seen As Critics Of The Disenchantment Of The Essay

Rousseau And Marx Can Be Seen As Critics Of The Disenchantment Of The World. How Would They Propose To Re-Enchant The World - Essay Example It was on this, finally, although possibly differently phrased, that the great proto-sociologists, Rousseau and Marx, as well as the founding fathers of the discipline, paid attention to. This revered tradition has been continued on this continent in the form of modernization theory and afterward, somewhat euphemistically, theory of development. The "disenchantment of the world" that modernity launches establishes the experience of hubris at the center of our condition--but without our having to foresee the once unavoidable punishment by the gods. The experience of disenchantment becomes critical for Marx when he is able to see within it the seeds of our capacity to experience a restraint that cannot be surmounted. For Marx, the insurmountable limit that we encounter in disenchantment is none other than our own mortality. It is the experience of a limit that is internal to the contemporary experience of unrestrained agency in which we feel ourselves incapable to remake the world in our own image. Marx's account of disenchantment, thus, does not involve degeneration into a re-enchanted universe but rather remains within the sphere of modernity. (Marx, pp 67-71) In the experience of disenchantment we are delivered into a universe that is approximate to the universe of the Greek tragedies, in which the heroic striving to surmo unt all mortal limits finds its collapse in the very unruly and fickle course that it sets in motion. Rousseau's and Marx's disenchantments, for example, regarding the relationship between the human and the natural not only of their disenchantment experiment itself, but also of his loss of faith in Rousseau's vision of nature and the possibilities of human accomplishment or fascination within it. Nevertheless, one could argue that it is not so much a matter of Kant having cast off Rousseau's visions as of his having come closer to some of the more worrying or vague aspects of that vision. (Watkins, p-15) Like Kant, Rousseau found the relationship between the natural and the human to be disenchantment, arguing that sublimation and repression, the price we must pay to enter human culture, take their toll in fire, war, and other manifestations of violence and aggression. In the ninth chapter of his On the Origin of Languages, for example, Rousseau contemplates the question of what could have driven human beings to exchange a life of nature for a life of language and culture: "the earth nourishes men," he writes, "but when their primary needs have dispersed them, other needs come to pass, and it is only then that they speak, and that they have any motivation to speak". But why, he asks, would they ever quit a life of nature, especially when the "life of language and culture" unavoidably leads to despair and crime: how could they "ever be enticed to give up their ancient liberty" and create a society that "leads to property, government, and laws, and steadily to the misery and crime that are indivisible from the knowledge of good and evil". Such a movement for Rousseau is inseparably associated with the prohibition of incest, the need to