Charles Taylor and Christian Wiman have come out with new books.
As a prequel to the Cathedral Lectures, I wrote more than most of you wanted to know about Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. If you understood the argument I made during the Cathedral Lectures, you also understood how important Taylor’s work is for laying its foundation. Those posts are always there for you to go back and reread.1
In May Taylor has published another major work entitled Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. Adam Gopnik recently wrote a very interesting review of the book in the New Yorker entitled, “How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Cure the Ills of Modernity.” Here’s Gopnik’s thumbnail bio of Taylor for those of you unfamiliar with him:
A hard thinker to pigeonhole, Taylor has long been a mainstay of Canada’s social-democratic left; he helped found the New Democratic Party, running for office several times in Quebec, though losing, inevitably, to the Liberal Party and the charismatic Pierre Trudeau. He’s also a Catholic and a singularly eloquent critic of individualism and secularism, those two pillars of modern liberalism. He worries about the modern conception of the self—what he has called “the punctual self”—which he takes to be rooted in Enlightenment thought, and about the primacy it accords to autonomy, reason, and individual rights. By wresting our identities away from a sense of community and common purpose, the new “atomist-instrumental” model was, he thinks, bound to produce our familiar modern alienation. We became estranged from a sense of belonging and meaning. We experienced the attenuation of the citizen-participation politics we need. We wanted to be alone, and now we are. With this analysis, critical of the foundations of liberalism without betraying liberal values, Taylor manages to be at once precise and prophetic. He may be the most well-regarded philosopher in the English-speaking world, having snatched most of the big prizes, including the million-dollar Berggruen Prize, in 2016. There are now books about his books, study guides and Web sites dedicated to indexing his œuvre.
Taylor is a completely different kind of Catholic from the ones I was writing aboutearlier this week, although there core concerns are very similar. He understands the ailments of the Liberal Order and the crisis of meaning that accompanies it, and yet he does not reject Liberalism, but rather, Hegelian that he is, he seeks to absorb and transcend it. That’s how I see what I’m trying to do as well. I don’t want to reject Liberalism, I want to go beyond it and add to what’s missing from it.
But Taylor realizes this is not a task for thinking alone, but rather for a transformative practice and enactment. There are different practices, but the one that interests me most, because I think the most broadly accessible, are the transformations that are effected by art—both the creating of it oneself in some form of transformative engagement with the world, but also in the engaging with the truly great artists, i.e., those who have been effective in breaking through the “matrix” to the mystery of the Living Real in a way that is significant for the broader culture. And the key to the latter lies, not surprisingly, in the retrieval of Romanticism about which I spoke so much in my classes and in the Cathedral Lectures. I have been convinced of this since reading Owen Barfield’s Romanticism Comes of Age and What Coleridge Thought years ago2. Only later did I come upon Taylor who makes the same argument but from a different angle. Here’s Gopnik—
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.”
BTW, A podcast that explores exactly these themes is the recent Know Your Enemyinterview with Chris Wimans, former Editor of Poetry Magazine and winner of many poetry awards for his own poetry, and now on the faculty of Yale Divinity School. The podcasting duo Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell have a wonderful conversation with him about the intersection of art and religion. You can find a link to the podcast here. I am in the middle of reading his new book Zero to the Bone, which requires its own post later this summer. But do try to find the time to listen to the podcast.
In the podcast, there’s a discussion of the sacred, of ritual and liturgy, of how language has this capacity to go beyond propositions and to “cast spells and enact rituals”. What they say there is very much reflected in the discussion of Taylor that Gopnik provides here:
The last fifty pages of “Cosmic Connections” pivot decisively from the intricacies of poetic imagination to the specifics of contemporary American and Canadian (and, secondarily, European) politics—toward the social interspace, so to speak. A long section turns to questions of white supremacy, civil rights, national identity, the rise of Trumpist populism, and so on. A successful self-governing republic, Taylor believes, requires a community of shared purpose and a common space of deliberation. Antagonistic groups must go beyond the narrow aspiration of winning a contest against adversaries and come to one another with a sense of mutual recognition and regard. And the people best able to make this case, in Taylor’s view, “are people who are deeply rooted in their spiritual sources, often religious.” These are people who, at least culturally, have retained a sense of the sacred. Overcoming discrimination becomes not just an abstract advance in justice or an instrumental strategy for minimizing conflict but a “source of deep fulfillment.”…
This is so freakin’ important, and it’s the reason so much of what passes for social justice activism these days fails. It cannot succeed as an exercise in moralism.
Gopnick goes on:
The link Taylor wants to make between his readings of poetry and his civics lessons has affinities to the proposals made by a number of writers—many of them Catholic, significantly—throughout the modern period: the meticulous remaking of ritual (which you find in Chesterton and Tolkien alike), the love of the local, the revaluing of ceremony and communal spirit as things essential in themselves rather than leftovers from a barbaric past.
The wrong kind of politics, Taylor implies, arises from the loss of a cosmic connection which the Romantics first sensed, and which now is part of the unhappy inheritance of our civilization. Alienated and disconnected, the Trump voter, the Brexiteer, the Le Pen supporter turns to theatricalized reassurances of fascist-style unity, predicated on the demonization of the nearby other. Taylor celebrates Pope Francis’s encyclicals on extended families, with their sense of the common good, and those Native religions which get their sense of the sacred from a specific place of dwelling. He turns again to the interspace, now lofted to become not only the theatre of reception and communication between artist and audience but also the implicit space of political community.
It should be pointed out that much of the the last paragraph could be written about Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari, the right-wing communitarian Catholics about whom I spoke in my last post. The difference lies in that the latter don’t think this kind of communitarian social imaginary is possible in a pluralistic, cosmopolitan society. They think that it must be imposed by people like them through political power.3
The issues at root here those I identify in the first paragraphs of the first Cathedral lecture:
Before we dig into the topic tonight [about AGI], I’d like to frame it by identifying two critical issues. Both have a lot to do with our current social and political turmoil: homogenization is pulling us one way, and tribalism is pulling us in an another. The intensifying of the second seems to be a reaction to the intensifying of the first. So two related questions arise:
1. Is a rich pluralism of values possible without regressing into tribalism?
2. Are universal values affirmable without extinguishing particularity?
I think the answer to both questions is yes, and the three lectures are my extended argument why. Nothing is more important for the future than our find a way to yes here. And in this as in other ways I’m in sync with Taylor:
Taylor is inclined by his experience to think that the communal and the cosmopolitan can coexist. You can belong to a tribe and still belong to the people. The “politics of recognition” that Taylor has recommended gives weight, accordingly, to the demands that communities—ethnic, religious, or otherwise—make on the state. Given Taylor’s emphasis on the embodied dimensions of social meaning, it seems significant that he was reared in a bicultural household; his mother was a Francophone Catholic, and his father an Anglophone Protestant. McGill is a great English-speaking university in the midst of a French-speaking city, and though its autonomy and financing is threatened from time to time by the provincial government, it has survived through even the most extreme independence-minded administrations. Montreal is a very good place to nourish the belief that communities can supply meaning without fomenting mayhem.
It’s important for us as individuals to find a way to hold the transcendent in tension with the immanent/particular, but the bigger question is whether we humans are capable of doing it on a culture-wide scale. It’s been done before, but it’s not so easy to get it back once it’s lost.
People are so deeply alienated and angry because they have lost a particular way of life, its customs and rituals, and now they seek to compensate for that loss in ideological abstractions. That cannot work, and inevitably produces a cure that is worse than the disease. Only a counterfeit transcendent is found in abstract propositions; the real thing is found only in the particular. Chris Wiman is very eloquent about that in his books and in his conversation with Sitman and Adler-Bell. Please listen to the podcast.
So regardless what happens in November, this frames, at least for me, how to understand what the cultural political task is going forward. We’re talking about a shift in the culture that, if it is to happen, will take a couple of generations to take hold in any significant way. In the meanwhile we do what’s in front of us to do. There will be bumps on the road, moments of despair, and freak-outs galore like the one we’re going through now about Biden’s debate. But we must stay clear about what grounds us.
1.Here is the link to the archive. The Taylor posts all appeared in December ‘23 through January ‘24.
2. I met Barfield and his wife, Maud, in the mid 70s when he was a visiting lecturer at SUNY Stony Brook. I sat in on a bunch of his classes. He had a severe stutter that by comparison makes Joe Biden seem a silky Cicero, but he was enormously impressive, and he opened things up for me then in ways that have been enormously important for me ever since. A good introduction that situates Barfield’s place as a 20th century thinker is R. J. Reilly’s Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien. Gary Lachman’s discussion of Goethe and Barfield in Lost Knowledge of the Imagination is also very good. They are all barking up the same tree that Taylor is.
3. There is hardly a thing I disagree with in Ahmari’s anti-Neoliberal polemic, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty–and What to Do About It. But this guy in his misguided populism still seems to be in the tank for Donald Trump. And he’s said things in the past that inclline me to think that he’s probably on board with Project 2025. But I don’t know that.
Deneen is no fool, and he has no illusions about Trump, but he seems to be drinking from the same punchbowl that Amy Coney Barrett is. Is it a Notre Dame thing these days? BTW, Matt Sitman (the podcaster referenced above) was a student and protege of Deneen’s at Georgetown until he took a left turn that correlated with his coming out as a gay man simultaneous with his converting to Catholicism. Life in all its particularity is quite messy, isn’t it? I don’t think, though, that he would fit in the world that Ahmari and Deneen would deliver us into.
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