Let’s take a break from politics, shall we? I’m back to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and I wanted to focus on this important idea about how the redemption of language is the path to the redemption of experience:
. . . in the post-Romantic context, the complaint is often made that language as we ordinarily use it has been flattened, emptied. That is, the ordinary use of language in our age operates with it as though its only function were the instrumental one of designating already recognized elements. The constitutive, revelatory power of language is totally sidelined and ignored or even denied. This understanding of language-use is correlative with a stance in which we treat things, and even each other, in purely instrumental terms. . . .
This is often spoken of as a flattening, or impoverishment of language, and not simply as an inadequate understanding of language on the part of (some of) its users. . . . Through language in its constitutive use (let’s call it Poetry), we open up contact with something higher or deeper (be it God, or the depths of human nature, desire, the Will to Power, or whatever) through language. Poetry can be seen as an event with performative force, words which open up contact, make something manifest for the first time. But what is this event?
Outside the most subjectivistic interpretations I reviewed above, it has an objective side: something language-transcendent is manifest, set free. But it also has an inescapably subjective aspect. This reality is made manifest to us, who speak this language, have this sensibility, have been prepared by previous speech or experience. So this new word resonates in/for us; that the word reveals what it does is ALSO a fact about us, even though it is more than this. It could in principle eventually resonate for everyone, but only because they will have been inducted into the language and the human meanings with which it can resonate. . . .
Unlike the references of earlier poems, which were guaranteed by established public meanings (the Chain of Being, Divine history, and the like), modern poetry doesn’t rely on already recognized structures. It opens new paths, "sets free" new realities, but only for those for whom it resonates. ASA, p 758.
I will first assume that most of the readers here understand and agree with the basic assumption Taylor is making about the flattening of language and of its potential for opening up new experience. If you don’t buy that, I understand, but my concern here is not to defend the idea, but to explore its implications.
I think the flattening trend in language correlates with a flattening trend in our souls. The fact that so many educated people are incapable of responding to poetry is a symptom. It’s as if we all slowly went colorblind, but because everyone else is going through it, it seems normal. And when someone comes along who describes what the world looks like in color, we’re bored by it because we don’t know what he’s talking about, and who cares anyway? Where’s seeing in color going to get you in a world most people see in black and white? And pretty soon people forget altogether what color is and they start to think that people who talk about color are crazy and just making it up.
This, I think, is a fairly apt analogy to our condition as moderns in relationship with a whole range of experiences that are not sense based, not the least of which is spiritual experience. The established public meanings for these experiences has collapsed. Traditionalists want to retain those older established public meanings because they fear, correctly, that their collapse results in an impoverishment of the soul. Our current condition is analogous to the situation of the child with musical talent born into a family of musical ignoramuses as contrasted with the child born into a family of talented, accomplished musicians. Which child is more likely prosper musically? Our spiritual potential, like the child’s musical talent, has a far greater chance of being fully realized if it develops in an environment that recognizes it, is enthusiastic to nourish it, and knows how to nourish it. Even aborigine societies do a better job at these three than modern societies. And yet moderns think they are in every respect superior.
But what traditionalists don’t realize is that because the meanings have already collapsed, pretending that they haven’t is counterproductive and harmful. This pretending results in the zombie traditionalism that I’ve written about here in the past. Zombie traditionalism is analogous to colorblind people going around telling everyone they can see colors, when all they’re doing is imitating the talk of people who in the past did in fact see colors. Their dishonesty is obvious to anyone with a shred of common sense, and they set back the cause of recovering color-sightedness because such a project becomes associated in the public imagination with this kind of delusional or dishonest stupidity.
The best kind of religiosity at this point is the kind that would be akin to the colorblind recognizing that they don’t see colors, but showing an eagerness and openness to learning how to do it again. So the task now is one of slow recovery, and it starts with the recovery of language and its multi-dimensionality, and that is the task of poetry and mythopoesis. It starts with our attempts to recover how language reveals dimensions of reality that are not given in our ordinary experience, and it expands to a recovery of a way of reading everything in world as having dimensions that are not available to our ordinary experience, but which have the potential to be opened up, to have their interior multi-dimensionality revealed.
For the way we look now at nature with the eyes of the scientific materialist is exactly the same as the way the fundamentalist looks at the Bible. Both see only the surfaces, both try to extract the rules and laws that this surface reading seems to indicate, which has a certain usefulness, but ultimately such exercises in abstraction lead us into a kind of alienation, which in turn insures that we utterly misunderstand that which we are seeing.
Modernity is the story of progressive alienation, and Taylor is one of its finest chroniclers. The postmodern task is to recovery. And at its root this recovery while it is a recovery of what has been lost is most deeply a recovery from our alienation. And that recovery will be achieved when all of us no longer live in a soul-flattened and language-flattened world.
(For other posts on Taylor’s book, see here, here, here, and here.)
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