Fontenelle diagnosed myth’s appeal as indifferent to Enlightenment reason

Evidence

Enlightenment founders of mythology, such as Fontenelle, took this view of the beliefs of antiquity about its gods. Like many other cultivated men of his time, he regarded the study of myth as an occasion for reflecting on human error. “Although we are incomparably more enlightened than those whose crude minds invented Fables in good faith,” he wrote, “we easily reacquire the same turn of mind that made those Fables so attractive to them. They devoured them because they believed in them, and we devour them with just as much pleasure yet without believing in them. There is no better proof that the imagination and reason have little commerce with each other, and that things with which reason has first become disillusioned lose none of their attractiveness to the imagination.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 119

Categorization

• XREF: Fontenelle’s thesis that reason’s disillusionment leaves imagination’s pleasure intact is a usable mechanism for why ‘demythologized’ secular culture retains religious-type attachments — relevant to the secular-vs-religious boundary question.
• CANDY: A quotable Enlightenment figure observing that we enjoy fables more precisely because we no longer believe them.