Belief in the Human
Belief in the Human
This chapter cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to describe the timeless process by which human beings believe in their own creations. As seen before, Europeans influenced by new ideas in the seventeenth century were freed to believe in spiritual objects in much the same way they believed in mundane ones, as acts of sovereign judgment. With the category so perforated, there was no intrinsic reason why belief had to remain bound to objects judged “true” in a transcendent or universal sense; it might also alight upon objects judged true in more provisional or instrumental ways. Crucially, this included the social world: ephemeral human creations, the ideas and things that humans themselves make.
Keywords: belief, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, spiritual objects, human creations, human beings, social world
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