Enlightenment liberalism neglected the socially embedded nature of the self, Taylor contends, but the Romantics can tell us how to restore a shared sense of meaning and purpose.

Lyric poets and mathematicians, by general agreement, do their best work young, while composers and conductors are evergreen, doing their best work, or more work of the same kind, as they age. Philosophers seem to be a more mixed bag: some shine early and some, like Wittgenstein, have distinct chapters of youth and middle age; Bertrand Russell went on tirelessly until he was almost a hundred. Yet surely few will surpass the record of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who is back, at ninety-two, with what may be the most ambitious work ever written by a major thinker at such an advanced age. The new book, “Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” (Belknap), though ostensibly a study of Romantic poetry and music, is about nothing less than modern life and its discontents, and how we might transcend them.

(…)

Taylor’s new book is formidably chewy, with page after page featuring passages of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rilke, offered both in the original German and in translation. Long analyses of T. S. Eliot and Milosz arrive, too. But, though Taylor’s subjects are often severely abstract, his sentences are lucid, even charmingly direct, and his purpose is plain. We once lived in an “enchanted” universe of agreed-upon meaning and common purpose, where we looked at the night sky and felt that each object was shaped with significance by a God-given order. Now we live in the modern world the Enlightenment produced—one of fragmented belief and broken purposes, where no God superintends the cosmos, common agreement on meaning is no longer possible, and all you can do with the moon is measure it. “I admire the moon as a moon, just a moon,” Lorenz Hart sighed, with memorable modernity, adding, significantly, “Nobody’s heart belongs to me today.” Enlightened, we are alone.

Romantic poetry—the poetry of Shelley and Keats, in English, of Novalis and Hölderlin, in German—first diagnosed this fracture (the argument goes) and offered a way to heal it. Where neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope appealed to an ordered world, with clear meanings and a hierarchy of kinds, the Romantics recognized that this was no longer credible. The enchanted world had been replaced by the modern world. We could hardly go back toward ignorance—Goethe, one of Taylor’s heroes, participated in the modern world as a scientist—but we had to find a way to reënchant it. The best way to heal the wound is through poetry and music, of the sort that doesn’t offer propositions but casts spells and enacts rituals. The arts are not subsidiary places of secondary sensations but the primary place where we go to recall feelings of wholeness, of harmony not just with “Nature”—the craggy peaks the Romantics loved and the Italian lakes they lingered by—but with existence itself. Poetry and music do this by escaping the constraints of intellect, by going at things atmospherically rather than argumentatively. They convey a sublime atmosphere of sound, ineffable intimations of immortality, and so the apprehension of a “cosmic connection.”

 

Taylor reproduces lines from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (“And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; / A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of thought”) and tells us, “To let oneself be carried by this passage is to experience a strong sense of connection, far from clearly defined . . . but deeply felt; a connection not static, but which flows through us and our world.” Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is similarly effervescent in diction, similarly ethereal in effect. The lines “O for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth” cast a spell as much as they describe a feeling. Taylor writes, “The rhythmic flow between the features as recounted in the poem somehow encounters, meets, connects up with the flow between the features as we live it.” Classical art, he argues, moves us by convincing us; Romantic art convinces us by moving us. (…)

Quelle: How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Heal the Ills of Modernity

Here a link for another interview with Charles Taylor in June 2024: https://christianscholars.com/where-language-can-lead-ft-mcgill-universitys-charles-taylor-i-saturdays-at-seven-ep-36/

Todd Ream: Well, those efforts have certainly been well-received. And as one who was a grateful graduate student when you were working on your sources of self, and it already put your works on Hegel into circulation, I appreciated them I will say and many others are too. 

Want to transition now, if I may, to talking about some of your most recent works. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of Human Linguistic Capacity was published in *2016. And then just recently, your Cosmic Connections, which you referenced earlier, Poetry in an Age of Disenchantment was published. In the first of these two interrelated works, you proposed linguistic holism. Would you begin by offering an overview of that proposal and what you mean by it?

Charles Taylor: Yeah, well, there’s really, as I look back on that book, language book, there really are two senses in which you can talk about holism. Number one is that, in developed language, there is a sense when I use a word to describe something seriously, I’m not joking, I’m not caricaturing, that this is the right description, this is the right word. But you can only articulate, even raise the question, is that the right word, if you have all the resources of language at your disposal, right?

So, think of an argument that used to be yours, you’re characterizing that as foolishness or characterizing that as stupidity or in characterizing that as a bad faith description. You have an alternative in mind, and you are, what captures better that behavior, that situation, and so on. And you have to defend yourself against it, right? Because you’re making an implicit claim. So the whole of language, in a certain sense, is kind of prior to any particular argument about a particular description. That’s one sense of holism. 

The other sense of holism, and maybe I didn’t make this clear enough in the book, is that language has this important place in human life that it, it’s a mode of being together with others in which we bring up things for discussion or perception, which are recognized as not for me and for you only, but for us, right? A kind of sharing of that consciousness. 

And if I had to rewrite that book, I’m not going to try this in my life, but if I had to rewrite that book, I would make more of this, that the extraordinary thing is that I drew on people like Bruner. And I’m recently reading a book that I should have been, published before mine and that I should have been using but I didn’t know existed, which is by Greenspan and Shanker, about children and how they’re inducted into language. And you realize that their only way to induct children into language is by intense communication, intense sense of what children love and always looking for. 

They want their parents to talk to them, to play with them, to pay attention to them, and that gives them a sense of who they are and so on. So that it’s this being, I call it, for us, and not for you and for me, but for us. Language is always that kind of place in human life. 

I mean you can see this in certain very sophisticated situations where, let’s say some, some politician has actually been caught with his hand in the till, but it isn’t yet public knowledge, but the inside dopesters in Ottawa or Washington all know about it, so they’re all talking about it at a cocktail party in which there are other people that are not privy to this. And so they’re not raising it themselves. (…)

Todd Ream: In your recently released book, Cosmic Connections, you turn to poetry as an expression of language that could address at least some of these insufficiencies. Would you please offer an example or two of how poetry serves us in such ways? 

Charles Taylor: Yeah. Well, I think, yes. A lot of us have some sense that they, that nature or the, let’s say, the planet and all its differences and so on, that cosmos, as people might call it, right, that we live in, is something deeply meaningful for us. Or sometimes we think, when we look at the devastation of the planet by ourselves, we think it should be more meaningful for us, right, than it has been. 

Okay, but now we get the really crucial point in light of a point we made immediately before. What’s the language that you can find which will tell you what the meaning of the cosmos is? And here, I think that we’re in a very strange situation that looks as though it bars any progress, but I don’t think it does, but it looks as though. Why? Well, because there are various kinds of artistic expression, which help to articulate how we can feel about the larger universe that surrounds us.

But it’s very hard if somebody doesn’t get it. To say, okay, I’ll give you an alternative description, right? And what I wanted to do was to show that in the case of poetry of the Romantic time and what succeeds that, which everybody is deeply influenced by that Romantic term. So, how about, I thought to myself, how about if, I try to take some examples like Wordsworth, like Hölderlin, and so on, and do a reading of them, where you can see that what’s happening here, is you have a very powerful sense of cosmic order, but it isn’t one that you could defend in philosophical terms, but it’s very, very powerful sense that arises from that. 

I want the reader, in the end, to put all that into a context, even bigger context than the book, with the underlying idea that there’s always been some sense of the cosmos, which has moved people, and that in the 18th century and before, in the Renaissance period, it was these notions of cosmic order that people believed in philosophically, right, and then the philosophical belief was undermined by modern natural science, and the order of Newton was not like the order that Aristotle offered us. 

But the sense of wanting some kind of contact of that sort remained very strong. So artists, poets, composers, because I have side references to these, but particularly poets, stepped in a certain sense. But they stepped in with a different, different contribution because they aren’t telling you anything which will permit you to prove that’s the real nature of things. They just give you a very powerful sense that that’s the world we live in. Right? 

And so there’s a kind of, I call it epistemic retreat. They’re not trying to say this is the final correct description of things. So we can follow that through. And then other changes occur. You know, the whole sense of a continuing cosmic order really is swept aside by modern sense of the universe since the big bang and evolution and so on.

And then we get another kind of connection that people are finding in the dimension of time, in the dimension of what I call higher times. And there’s 20th century figures like Eliot and Milosz, yeah.