The Enchanted Imagination: Part 2, The Teleology to Causality Shift

Another attentional change that facilitated Western disenchantment is a shift from teleology to causality. The story here is well told by scholars like Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue and Charles Taylor in A Secular Age. But let me offer a quick sketch.

Prior to the scientific revolution in the West, our understanding of the world was teleological. ("Teleology" refers to purposes and ends.) This view of the world was largely rooted in Aristotelian thinking, the idea that you could understand how a thing in the world worked if you understood its telos, its purpose and goal. Borrowing from Aristotle, the Christian imagination saw God as creating the world with a grand telos, with each thing in creation given its own unique telos that fit into the grander design.

The thing to note here is that this teleological vision of the cosmos was filled with purpose. Things existed--you existed--for a reason, for a purpose. More, teleology pointed you toward the future. You were going somewhere. That purposeful future was where your attention was focused.

With the rise of Newtonian Mechanics and Darwinian evolution this changed. Causality came to replace teleology. To understand something in the world we no longer asked about its purpose but looked, rather, at the long chain of prior cause and effect that brought that thing into existence. A future-orientation (teleology) gave way to a past-orientation (causality). And as we looked into the past, we came to see either a long, twisting history of chance and contingency (for example, Darwinian evolution) or the inevitability of a causal determinacy (for example, Newtonian Mechanics). 

Our turn toward causality via the scientific method has born great fruits. We are grateful for the benefits of technology in staving off disease, privation, want, and hunger. And yet, our Causal Turn has left us with an existential void. Aristotelian science may have been bad science, but its teleological framework provided us answers about the meaning and purpose of life. You existed for a reason, and your life had a purpose. Causality, by turning away from future purposes toward the accidents and contingencies of the past, gives us no answers about why we exist or where we might be going. Simply, the shift from teleology to causality rendered life meaningless and purposeless. As I shared in Hunting Magic Eels, Jean-Paul Sartre summed it up nicely when he said, "Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance." That's the existential fruit of the teleology to causality shift. Causality gave us technological power at the cost of existential despair. 

Disenchantment, then, results from an attentional bias toward causality. As attention obsessively fixates upon cause and effect the cosmos is increasingly evacuated of meaning and purpose. The music of the spheres goes silent. Life is experienced as random and directionless. Or devoid of meaning because of casual determinism. I once counseled a student for an entire year who was suicidal because he believed he had no free will. His attentional bias was so obsessively fixated upon causality he could no longer see any purpose or meaning in life. 

The enchanted imagination, by contrast, pays attention to purposes, reasons and ends. The enchanted imagination looks toward the future, the goal of your existence and life. Instead of chance and accident, you are here for a reason and a purpose. Your life is going somewhere.