Weighty themes are the subject of Charles Taylor’s literally weighty new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In a world of ever increasing disciplinary specialization, Taylor’s work defies easy summation, ranging across everything from the philosophy of language to political theory and the sociology of secularization. His concern with the disenchantment of the modern world unites his entire oeuvre. Even though modernity brought so much progress in technology, science, literature, and the arts, Taylor notes the accompanying experience of loss and meaning. Many critics of modernity pick up on this loss, arguing that the West has become selfish, decadent, and nihilistic—a Karmazovian free-for-all where everything is permitted because nothing matters. Modern life has no meaning but is reduced to being just another form of matter in motion. And human purpose has no higher end to pursue but needs to content itself with the gratification of pleasureless pleasure. “Distracted from distraction by distraction,” as T. S. Eliot put it, is the best we can be. Modern poetry, argues Taylor, can be seen as one effort to overcome this loss by recovering a sense of “cosmic connection.”
Among the sources of disenchantment in the modern world has been “scientism,” the insistence that all existence is merely mechanical. Any sense of higher meaning ascribed to the world is nothing more than an individual’s subjective sense of what is beautiful or ugly, good or bad. For many, even if the allure of scientism were apparent, so too was its ugliness and potential amoralism. Indeed, Romantic (and other) poets insisted that such scientism did not do justice to the full breadth of human existence. Taylor reads these poets as offering alternative “vocabularies which are validated or not in hermeneutic terms, where progress involves making the best sense we can of actions and emotions.” They wanted to not just understand what or how the world was, but why it was. To do this modernity required the language of poetry.
Much of Taylor’s book is taken up by deep and wide readings of poets like Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Eliot, and Mallarmé over many hundreds of pages. Taylor finds in all of them a unified passion to “capture the meaning of an interspace—the situation of a human being before a given scene, in relation to nature, or even, more generally in relation to time and the world—in such a way as to encompass and convey a powerful sense of its meaning for our purposes, our fulfillment, or our destiny.” Romantic poetry used language to capture more than a static representation of the material world. Instead it sought to describe the integration of the self with nature, and of nature with some higher metaphysics.
Take Taylor’s commentary on Baudelaire’s poem “Le Cygne” as one example. When Baudelaire ruminates that “… the old Paris is no more (the aspect of a town changes more swiftly, alas! than the heart of a mortal man),” he captures how his impression of the city seems more solid and real than his lived experience. This brings to the fore a sense of the “deep time” which exists between memory, the present, and the future, along with the transition between them. Baudelaire’s encounter with Paris is stretched across time and emotional resonance comes from living with the disjunction between a past fondly remembered and a present filled with loss.
Even nature can imbue the world with a sense of deep time. Taylor describes standing at the edge of the forest in late summer, where one feels in contact “not just with this immediate scene, but with the whole cycle of seasons, how the wind in winter sounds so muffled, because only the evergreens are responding, but this rich sound will recur, next year and in all subsequent years.”
This has much in common with early 20th-century philosophers like Heidegger and Bergson. They stressed how a deeper sense of meaning and authenticity could be achieved by moving away from perceiving the world through “clock time”— a series of independent moments, each one occurring and fading in linear sequence. The problem with clock time is the alienation it induces. Individuals come to see their private experience of the “present” as the only reality. This disconnects them from the past which constitutes the present, and ignores how everything we do moment to moment entails projecting our hopes into the future. Feeling deep time connects these strands of life together.
But deep time also enables us to step outside the narrow pursuits of our private selves and recognize our participation in a wider human and cosmic story. Giving a sense of this deep time in static, written, words is exceptionally difficult, since it requires that the poet do much more than simply describe what is at any given moment. But a great poet is capable of the kinds of integration Taylor describes. In their depictions of alienating urban landscapes like 19th-century Paris and early 20th-century London, both Baudelaire and Eliot critiqued the anomie of the modern world and its hollow idols. They connected the decay of their settings to a more significant history while projecting (diming) hopes for the future.
In fact, Eliot’s own hopes and longings were traditionalist. Eliot in particular developed an “original way to create a picture of cosmic order, theologically centered, which is light-years away from the invocations of order of the early Romantics…” He wanted to return to a (moderately) conservative Christian world whose echoes still resonated in the decay of modern culture. Poems like “The Wasteland” tried to “portray, invoke, this lack of or distance from fullness, in order to trigger the insight into what it would be like, and the sources which could make it flourish.” This flourishing life would require a rejection of modern metaphysics and culture and a return to a “very traditional notion of order—Christian, Catholic, and underpinned by an ‘Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of Being.’” Such a return would enable us to once more see the eternal in the transient, elevating the world into more than a wasteland where everything that is becomes what is not and fades away.
One can’t debate the poetic accomplishments of Baudelaire and Eliot. What can be debated are the conservative philosophical and ethical conclusions they arrive at. Taylor’s book climaxes with a long digression on the “history of ethical growth.” Aligned with their metaphysical reservations about scientism, many of the poets Taylor describes were motivated by the deep rooted sense that there was something deeply wrong with liberal (and socialist) modernity. Not coincidentally a significant number turned, like Eliot, toward a conservative politics – reject modernity and embrace tradition as the meme goes. Taylor has long been sympathetic to many critiques of modernity and famously accused the worst forms of liberal capitalism of promoting “atomism” – a social vision where each individual is regarded as an entirely independent world unto themselves, seeking the gratification of their private interests and owing nothing to anyone. Taylor’s work draws insight from recalcitrant opponents of modernity like the poet Eliot and the philosopher Heidegger. But he is emphatic in rejecting the conservative argument that modernity constitutes a “decline” from some nostalgic past.
Of course, Taylor’s refusal to try to recover a nostalgic past is not new and comes explicitly to the fore in Taylor’s early theory of “social imaginaries.” As defined in Modern Social Imaginaries, an imaginary is a “way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” Pre-modern social imaginaries were thoroughly religious or spiritual and had the virtue of providing a sense of order and cosmic connection for human beings. And though the right tends to nostalgically lionize them, Taylor thinks pre-modern social imaginaries contain serious flaws. They were matter-of-factly hierarchical, with a settled social order: animal before man, man before God, woman before man, serf before lord, and worker before owner.
Cosmic Connections closes by insisting that modernity is actually characterized by ethical progress rather than decadence and decline. To the extent that modernity broke this hierarchical social imaginary, the reactionary’s sense of nihilistic defeat is an eminently fair price to pay for the enormous advance of recognizing our fundamental equality. As Taylor makes clear, what modernity rejects is the idea that the “cosmos is ordered with higher and lower levels, and that this rank ordering is related to the hierarchy in the social order and the hierarchy of ethical actions.” The emergence of a more egalitarian social imaginary, which has roots in the Christian insistence that all are equal before God, made possible liberalism and socialism as political doctrines. Taylor admires the modern social imaginary for its insistence on the fundamental equality of all human beings and the importance of each individual life going as well as anyone else’s.
Modernity aspires to a higher goal of a world where authority is submitted to because it treats each person’s life as morally equal and can only be legitimated through respecting the equal rights and interests of all. This goal is further complicated by the modern need to respect the deep pluralism of ethical views out there rather than trying to subsume them in the name of achieving cultural homogeneity and faux moral certainty. This is obviously an enormously difficult challenge that reflects the higher ethical aspirations of modernity compared to pre-modernity. The often enormous gap between this high ideal and the very imperfect reality of existing modern societies is experienced as painful and alienating. But Taylor would emphasize that we experience this gap between high ideal and imperfect reality as painful precisely because its aspirations are set so much higher than what came before. By contrast, beneath the right’s nostalgia is an insistence that we can only be content by reconciling ourselves to far lower ethical ideals.
Some readers might be saying to themselves: “This review started by talking about poetry, then time and ‘deep time’ ala dense philosophers like Heidegger, and now all of a sudden we’re talking social theory and politics. What is this book really about?” And the answer is: all of it. Since Taylor is a remarkably intelligent and learned man it’s impossible not to be impressed, even awed, by such an integrative achievement. Not least since it is pulled off with a rare degree of humility and ethical seriousness. But Cosmic Connections is undoubtedly cluttered and sometimes frustrating to go through. At least part of that frustration is due to an ambiguity about the practical implications of its political and ethical ruminations.
This is where a more Marxist approach is required than Taylor provides. Marx would have agreed with much in Taylor’s left-Hegelian critiques. He’d have been especially sympathetic to the argument that the alienation of contemporary culture can’t be explained by crude, conservative theories of cultural decline and superior persons losing their once-enjoyed status. Instead the alienation has to be understood as a failure of existing social circumstances to create the conditions where individuals can break out of their atomistic self-interestedness and form meaningful solidaristic relationships with others. This alienation is doubly painful because it runs against the ethical ideals to which our societies aspire but often fail to embody. Where Marx would be very critical of Taylor is the latter’s propensity to focus too much on the realm of ideas rather than material practices. Ultimately the solution to the modern world’s problems won’t come about through poetic reconciliation or philosophical contemplation. It will come by solving the world’s problems through changing the world. And there is too little in Taylor that helps us think through what practical changes are required beyond intellectually deepening our understanding.
Cosmic Connections is a beautifully messy book and a labor of love. Taylor says he has been working on it for decades, and it shows. Insights, wisdom, and even profundity abound; it’s a worthy swan song for the now 92 year old philosopher. That the book is occasionally dissatisfying is not a knock against Taylor because the worlds he describes so eloquently are in many ways dissatisfying. Our goal must be to change that.
Matt McManus is a Lecturer at the University of Michigan and the author of The Political Right and Equality (Routledge) amongst other books.
