Re-enchanting the World

on Charles Taylor's 'Cosmic Connections'

@revolvingstyle

There is a sad post millennial reality in the world of publishing: Very few people are reading books, and, if they do read books, people want books that are desperately simple in both their content and their style. Perhaps most importantly, since the attention span of much of the public is approximate to that of a hummingbird, a book written in the 2020s must be short and sweet. There are a few exceptions to this sad situation.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is among the figures who are allowed to write as little or as much as he wants. Taylor was first known as a scholar of Hegel and modern philosophy as well as a theorist of multiculturalism and pluralism. He is also exceptional in that in he is, like the late Alasdair MacIntyre, a progressive public intellectual in the Anglophone world who is also a practicing Catholic.

Taylor’s major work is his 2007 A Secular Age in which he chronicles the rise of secular modernity. In a work that has appealed to thinkers across the political and theological spectrum, A Secular Age argues that the rise of what Max Weber termed “rationalization” and what Taylor himself calls “neo-Stoicism” created the modern world, disenchanting both Christianity and the remnants of paganism from the West. As the West became more efficient, materialist, rationalist, and cleaner, Taylor argues, so too did it become less religious.

Some thinkers, such as Steven Pinker and the late Christopher Hitchens, have argued that this rationalism and secularization have been a boon, creating a world that is (at least potentially) more peaceful and civilized. However, for Taylor, such a world is less interesting and ultimately desiccated and lifeless. His recent work, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, attempts to provide a corrective to the boring and lifeless secularism that has suffocated modernity. Cosmic Connections may surprise readers, for the Catholic Taylor’s answer to secularism is not necessarily Christianity per se.

Much of the book consists of commentary on a host of Romantic, Late Romantic and Post-Romantic European poets and philosophers. When those in the Anglo-American world hear the term, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth invariably come to mind. But Taylor presents focuses on the German thinkers of the 1790s, centered around the universities at Berlin and Jena. These German thinkers drew from figures like Goethe and Spinoza, although, as Taylor notes, the German Romantics should not be viewed as doctrinaire Spinozans: While Spinoza’s mechanistic worldview was derived from Descartes, the German Romantic’s presented a pantheistic vision that held that the world was a living organism.

Moreover, Taylor notes that like the more conservative-minded Goethe, the Romantics were reacting against the very secularism and rationalism that Taylor had chronicled in A Secular Age. They wanted to grant a place to wild emotions that had been shuttered away by Enlightenment rationalism and reintegrate the human person into the world from which he or she had been cut off from by Enlightenment materialism. Art, according to the Romantics, thus helps facilitate a reunification with nature. They also held that nature is an a state of evolution, and thus humans are too in a state of development, attempting to reach their potential, which is activated in a state of freedom (an idea later important, in variant form, to Hegel, and, in a certain sense, Nietzsche). Humanity and nature also realize their potential together.

This process is (potentially) achieved through the exzentrische Bahn or “spiral path.” Moreover, this process may never be complete or achieved, but one should strive nonetheless—this rebellious striving is, of course, one of the key hallmarks of the “Romantic hero.” Taylor argues that these German thinkers are the wellspring of Romantic thought, and their ideas were spread by figures like Germaine de Staël to France and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to England.

The rest of the book, which forms its bulk, explores the attempts by Romantics to re-enchant the world. Taylor provides lucid and detailed analyses of the works of the Romantics, and readers across the political spectrum will delight in revisiting the “school boy (or girl)” poems of Wordsworth, Rilke, and T.S. Eliot.

Conservative readers, however, will largely be disappointed with the last section in the work, which includes the chapters, “History of Ethical Growth” and “Cosmic Connection Today—and Perennially,” which are focused on Obama-liberal pluralism and multiculturalism. Taylor argues that humans have grown and developed morally throughout history, although he does note that the mass executions of the twentieth century might suggests otherwise. In his discussion of human ethical evolution, he draws from Aristotle and the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin. Taylor seems to be arguing that humans are evolving toward what they truly are. This is an interestingly progressive Hegelian vision that clashes radically with the Traditionalism now popular on the right, which suggests in Nietzschean fashion that humans are in a state of decay and degeneration.

Taylor points to the “Axial age,” made popular in recent years by Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. The Axial age marked a change in human religion and culture around 500 BC in which Greek philosophy, Confucianism, and elements of Buddhism and the Hebrew prophetic tradition developed. Taylor sees a second period of growth in the period of Enlightenment liberalism and the development of human rights, which created a sense of the importance of the individual human being. Another level of supposed human development is the practice of nonviolence by Gandhi as well as the insurgency against Marco in the Philippines as well as twenty-first century color revolutions.

In his discussion, Taylor does note that various developments in human ethics can trigger unwanted consequences, e.g. Bolshevism as an offspring of Enlightenment liberalism. He further notes, in a similar key to Patrick Deneen, that Enlightenment social engineering breeds and anti-liberal attack on freedom. He further sees nondiscrimination and inclusivity movements as another alleged step in human freedom.

Taylor takes shots at President Trump (for his alleged nativism), the American Right, American Republicans, Russian aggression, Mitt Romney (for his alleged elitism), etc. He also feels as though the idea of a special relationship between European settlers and American identity is “horrifying.” He holds to the decidedly liberal view of nationhood, adopted by Habermas, called “constitutional patriotism,” or the notion that the ideas and values of a people in a nation, not the people themselves, are what is important. In all fairness, Taylor seems to be sympathetic to the historical struggle of the Quebecois people in his native Canada.

Nonetheless, Taylor argues, in a reference to immigration policies, that interactions with other cultures enrich human life. Taylor is proposing an anticipated step in human evolution, a “non-Hegelian” form of dialects in which interaction and cultural exchange will advance humanity to another ethical level. With respect to Taylor and his impressive life’s work, this argument is completely off the table on both the populist right and the radical left. Indeed, the radical left does not even use the argument for Obama-era pluralism anymore, but seeks the eradication of Western nations and cultures.

There are many good and reasonable arguments against extreme elements of Traditionalism, which idealizes the past, puts too great of emphasis on ethnicity and identity, and rejects too much of modernity. Nonetheless, there are also many elements of Taylor’s progressivism that could come under critique. Taylor assumes that progression further into liberalism is somehow an advancement in human thinking. Indeed, if humans are proceeding toward their telos, then the physical, emotional, and cognitive deterioration of humans in the modern and postmodern era would somehow be progress. Finally, Taylor seriously misreads the times. The liberal project is over. Populism is here to stay on the right (and, in fact, seems to be intensifying), and the left is consuming itself with the “burn it down” project. Despite clear developments in technology and science, we are not getting better but rather are still “human after all.”