Romantic Agenda

Cosmic Connections:
Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
by charles taylor
harvard university, 640 pages, $37.95

One way of telling the story of Western philosophy over the last few centuries is to present it as the rise and fall of a particular view of language. Gradually, piecemeal, the idea of language as primarily a matter of accurate naming and information-sharing has yielded to a recognition of language as what we could call a matter of orienting ourselves in our world—developing a range of diverse strategies for collaboration in finding our way around. The more complex the world we encounter (in introspection as well as observation), the more diverse and sophisticated will be those strategies, and the less they will have to do with carving up our environment into bite-sized pieces with definitive labels. Whatever a still over-confident popular scientism claims, coping adequately and sustainably with our environment requires more than a catalog of isolated substances with fixed attributes.

But what is that “more”? Charles Taylor begins this monumental essay by reminding us of what he has outlined elsewhere (in A Secular Age and The Language Animal) about the intellectual history of the early modern period. The “porous” self of premodern culture, orienting itself in relation to a richly imagined, meaning-saturated universe, has given way to the “buffered” self, standing at a distance from both other humans and the wider finite world—not to mention its maker. The problem is that there is no way of simply reinstating that lost immediacy: In modernity, we are all inheritors of a mythical picture in which an isolated inner mind receives transmissions from outside, enabling it to build up a more or less accurate picture of the facts it needs to grasp and deploy. An older model of participation or attunement gives way to a simple cause-and-effect pattern. Knowing our way around is no longer about sharing in a process of reciprocal life-giving that manifests a generous and harmonious order beyond the contingencies of time; it is about learning how this or that causal system works so as to use it.

But the loss of connection is felt as a constant ache and privation. The functionalism of the buffered self’s relation to the world leaves out of account a vast range of human sensation. What we learn from looking at the history of poetic practice and reflection from the late eighteenth century onward is that there is a constant pressure to resist “disenchantment” and rediscover a connection with the deepest energy of where and what we are.

Romantic poetry sets out the agenda, focusing on those dimensions of our experience of the material world that push us beyond the immediate conveniences of cause-and-effect thinking and draw us into a different “space.” It retrieves and values the idea of symbolic representation as opening doors that are not open to empirical description. This does not mean that it is a recovery of the lost sacramental world of earlier Christendom (the Romantic and post-Romantic understanding of “symbol” is very different from this), but equally it is not just—as a careless critic might think—a retreat to individual interiority, or the canonizing of private feeling. Romanticism is a poetics that seeks to do justice to the reality beyond the self, reality that in some way makes claims upon the self. The encounter with this reality changes what is thinkable for us as humans; crucially, it changes our apprehension of the passage of time. In contrast to the stale contemporary focus on purely individual sentiment and sensibility, romantic poetry insists on a connection with the real and with the demands of the real. “The site of the soul is there,” writes the great German Romantic theorist Novalis, “where inner- and outer-world touch each other.”

There is unmistakeably an element in this story of what Taylor calls “epistemic retreat,” a reticence or even anxiety about just what claims can be made for and by the real. The new sensibility is not “metaphysical” in an older sense. It evokes an “interspace,” a place shared with others and with the stuff of the world, somewhere to which poetry leads us, somewhere different to inhabit. The romantic ambition is to “locate” us in what is real.

Is there any map for that space, any pressure from it or within it to change our lives in a particular direction? Not clear; but the imagery is not vacuous, and it retains an ethical dimension. (Ethical in the strict sense, says Taylor: The “moral” has to do with our behavior toward one another, the “ethical” with the character we imagine and strive for in ourselves.) There is still an imperative here to become a certain kind of human being, and to step away from the acquisitive, unmindful, defensive patterns of behavior that block the path to full connectedness. And one area in which this imperative is most evident is a theme to which Taylor returns regularly: the further imperative to nurture the material environment that nurtures us.

This broad thesis is worked out in a series of extremely detailed readings of poets from Goethe to Eliot to Miłosz. Here, perhaps, the book risks foundering a bit; it will be a very disciplined reader indeed who can see the wood for the trees in the one hundred pages devoted to Baudelaire, for example, or the exhaustive commentary on a couple of Hölderlin’s works. Entire poems, sometimes several pages long, are reproduced in the original German and French as well as in translation. Those interested in the challenges of translating poetry will find much to fascinate them. (Robert Lowell’s renderings of Baudelaire, some of which are used here, are brilliant but startlingly free; a reader with limited French might need a warning.) But I am not sure that the decision to quote at such length consistently, and from both original and translated texts, helps the book’s argument. This is especially the case when, as in the chapter on Mallarmé, the commentary reads more like a set of lecture notes, or even a reader’s notes in the margins, than a fully developed analysis. A leisurely reader prepared to use the book almost as a tool for meditation would find it rewarding, but others may regret the way in which the energy of the work is to some extent dissipated in these enthusiastic but very diffuse treatments.

This aspect of Taylor’s presentation makes the gear-change in the last two chapters all the more jarring. After a brief but illuminating discussion of Eliot and Miłosz, we have a chapter rather bluntly titled “History of Ethical Growth,” addressing the question whether—with Steven Pinker and others—we can say that our modern ethical sensibilities are more refined than those of our ancestors. It is a valuable essay in its own right (Taylor concludes—rightly, I think—both that we hold ourselves to somewhat more exactingly universalistic standards than our forebears and that we are, as actual moral agents, no more impressive), but its precise connection with what has gone before is not at all clear.

The final brief chapter on “Cosmic Connection Today—and Perennially” combines a somewhat perfunctory summary of material more satisfyingly laid out in the opening section with tantalizing new themes, notably a brief consideration of how the obligations of “kinship” in premodern societies map on (or don’t map on) to our more self-consciously universalist ethic. Drawing on a recent study of First Nations social patterns, Taylor seems to suggest that the “civic” model of reciprocity between more or less independent agents acknowledging mutual obligation is not the whole story. For civic life to flourish as it should, we need something more grounded in time and matter. Kinship relations areproperly “asymmetrical,” as Taylor observes: We start by depending and receiving, we grow into a freedom to nourish the dependence of others, and so—rather than being held simply in a simultaneous pattern of mutual giving—we end up discharging our debts over a lifetime, “paying back” not only the individuals who have nurtured us but the entire ongoing communal life we share. This effort to connect the more impersonal models of modern universalism with a pattern of mutuality that extends over time in the context of a continuous shared life is an intriguing perspective to explore, one that needs more than the few sentences given to it here.

Criticisms aside, the whole work is nothing if not tantalizing. On page after page are telling phrases and casually dropped insights, reminding us of Taylor’s intellectual freshness and penetration. Most readers will, I suspect, forgive the structural oddities and imbalances of the book because of the plain wisdom it embodies. And, although Taylor is scrupulous in not bringing his theological commitments to the fore, this work will be, like his other recent books, a powerful praeparatio evangelica. (It is a matter for some real thanksgiving that one of the most creative social thinkers of the English-speaking world is such a doctrinally literate Catholic Christian.) As we have noted, Taylor does not believe that we can ring the bell backwards (to paraphrase Eliot): We cannot somehow reinstate the default setting of premodern belief, with its communally accepted lexicon of symbolic reference. Nonetheless, he wants us to be clear that once we have stepped out of the universe of the “buffered self” in the kind of imaginative attunement to a broader or deeper life in things such as the Romantic tradition explores, we encounter a reality we have not chosen or invented, a pattern of connection in the world we inhabit.

The recognition of our being “thrown” into a world not of our making in the poetry he discusses is sometimes very inchoate (not always; in Hopkins and Eliot it is plain enough). But the business of creating, in words and embodied practice (including ritual), a world that can be shared, a world in which the private ego becomes a cell of a larger living body, is always on the poet’s horizon. Not too far in the background are the linked visions of the eternal Word in whom all things cohere and the Mystical Body in which every organ simultaneously gives and receives the life that nourishes reconciliation and compassion. The reality we have not chosen turns out to be the gift and invitation of communion, sustained by the creative act of divine love.

These are the underlying rhythms of the universe as the Christian will both see it and inhabit it. The primal catastrophe of sin is the refusal to be nourished by gift, and the claim to decide arbitrarily for oneself what counts as nourishment. The primal error of what has been called programmatic secularism is the reduction of the world to the raw material of such pseudo-nourishment, the “fast food” of the soul. If Christians want to be engaged in the central intellectual struggle of the day, they need to follow Taylor in taking the battle, sensitively but firmly, into the humanistic camp, asking with him, “What does it mean that we seek connection in and with our world, over and above the world’s utility in satisfying our transient wants?”

Pressing this question in fruitful ways will require far more than irritable and uncomprehending denunciations of individualism, of “pick and mix philosophies,” or of unwelcome claims to the right of self-definition on the part of disadvantaged groups. Diagnoses of the diseases of modernity are legion. Cure requires patient disentangling of the desire embodied in some of the lyrics Taylor quotes from Goethe or Rilke—“Give yourself, yield, to every breath, / And it will love you, rock you gently” (from one of Rilke’s early poems). Our age needs to nurture the desire to be welcomed by what is real, and to be made alive in that welcome. Cosmic Connections lays out a range of poetic strategies that may bring us to the point of naming such a desire; and it hints strongly at something of what might meet this longing.

There are a couple of slightly surprising absences, or at least rather sketchy mentions. You might expect Coleridge to feature a bit more in the account of the background of English Romanticism—though Taylor might reasonably respond that he has gone directly to the fountainhead of Coleridge’s ideas in Schlegel and Schelling. And it is a pity that we have no mention of Jacques Maritain’s adventurous engagement with Modernist aesthetics and its fruits in various twentieth-century writers and visual artists, undertaken in his brilliant drawing-out of Thomist categories to make sense of their world. His own language of the artist’s attunement to what he calls “pulsions” in the finite world offers a suggestive complement to the modern poetics that Taylor expounds so lavishly.

Altogether, then, a book of spacious horizons, deep insight, characteristically generous engagement. It is a sign of hope in our broader intellectual landscape that the questions it raises are more and more being articulated by a notable number of artists and thinkers who are disenchanted with disenchantment.

Rowan Williams is a former Archbishop of Canterbury.

Image by Caspar David Friedrich, public domain. Image cropped.