Enduring Enchantment: Secularism and the Epistemic Privileges of Modernity

Abstract

Common wisdom has it that secularism dominated the project of the second modernity (the Enlightenment) and ended with the enchanted world that the very rhetoric of secularism used to displace theology and to convert religion in a field of study. I argue that indeed secularism implanted its own secular enchantment in the very act of undermining theological and religious enchantment. Secular epis-temology took the place of theological epistemology in a double imperial move: it asserted secular epistemology over theological one in the internal history of the West; and discredited all non-Western epistemologies by inventing concepts such as tradition, myth, cosmologies, beliefs, etc. Secular epistemology created the new enchantment masked under the rhetoric of the irresistible and unavoidable progress of history and of (Western) idea of modernity.