Morris Berman’s The Reenchantment of the World (1981) extends and deepens the critique of disenchantment rooted in the Cartesian–Newtonian legacy. Berman diagnoses modern Western culture as profoundly alienated, emotionally and spiritually depleted, due to the dominance of mechanistic rationality and instrumental reason. This worldview, by severing human experience from its participatory and symbolic dimensions, produces a culture of fragmentation, ecological devastation, and collective amnesia about meaning and belonging.

Unlike a mere nostalgic return to premodern belief systems, Berman’s call for re-enchantment is a conscious, reflective, and culturally engaged project. He invites society to rediscover a participatory consciousness, re-integrating mind, body, and world in a manner that fosters ecological responsibility, artistic depth, and ritual significance. His vision includes the recovery of myth and symbolism—not as dogma, but as vital carriers of meaning and modes of embodied cognition.

Berman’s thought dialogues with both Kantian aesthetics and Romantic critiques of modernity, emphasizing that the disenchantment of the world is not irreversible but can be challenged through renewed cultural and subjective practices. He advocates for an aesthetic and ethical sensibility that transcends the alienation of scientific reductionism, re-enchanting existence by reclaiming the integrative power of imagination, ritual, and symbol within modern complexity.

Recent critiques have argued that disenchantment is itself a constructed narrative, pointing to the persistence of magical, occult, and spiritual currents throughout modernity and the continued fascination with enchantment in culture, art, and everyday life. While acknowledging these important correctives, IVOIRE insists that many contemporary experiences of wonder, awe, or the numinous are lived as passive anomalies—sporadic “glitches” in an otherwise flat ontology—rather than as gestures anchored in a shared symbolic order or sustained ritual syntax. What has been attenuated is less enchantment as such than the overarching context capable of receiving, interpreting, and extending such moments into a coherent form of life. In this respect, IVOIRE takes seriously the testimony of Kant, Schiller, Trahndorff, and the Romantics, who registered a profound transformation and loss in the modern relation between reason, art, and the sacred, and it does not presume to correct them as if they had misperceived their own historical moment. Instead, IVOIRE unfolds as a praxis that both incorporates contemporary critiques of the disenchantment narrative and radicalizes the Romantic insight: it seeks to articulate a conscious, repeatable Syntax of Enchantment through which those scattered intensities can be woven into a reflexive, living tradition rather than remaining isolated exceptions.