Technology of Enchantment

My investigation of 19th century psychology and its relation to romantic art and music on the one hand, and modern AI on the other, is raising a particular issue to do with 20th century art and society. In contrast to the 19th century, the 20th century was marked by a desperate disenchantment with the world, marked out by conflict, and rationalistic scientism that gave us many wonders of modern technology, but also the atom bomb and the knowledge that we could destroy ourselves. 

The love triangle that connects Clara Schumann, Brahms and Robert Schumann stands as one of the great examples of the opposite of this disenchanting tendency. Its not that the world wasn't a miserable place in the 19th century - for many in the world, it clearly was - but that for the leaders of art and music, beauty remained an ideal deeply connected to love, and that love and the human spirit was a guide deeply connected to scientific advance. Music, particularly, is (and certainly was then) a language of love.

This connection was partly lost in the 20th century. Of course this is not to say that 20th century music is deficient. Quite the opposite - some of the greatest art and music belongs to that tortured century, just as the greatest drama belongs to Shakespeare's police state England. But the 19th century had something different that was lost when the dreams went sour in the 20th. Put simply, it was the possibility of enchantment, and a tangible awareness of a "higher power" - whatever that is. 

Occasionally we ourselves glimpse this. When people fall in love, or you hold a new baby, we see it briefly. We also glimpse it in music. There is a power beyond the day to day which reveals itself. In our rationalistic modern mindset we trivialise this. The reason why we trivialise it is connected to why we don't take music seriously in the first place. But the 19th century romantics understood something deeper. What did the 19th century psychologists make of it? Perhaps the question might be what they made of it before Freud came along and (to some extent) debunked it all.