Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

by Charles Margrave Taylor

In the long-awaited follow-up to The Language Animal , Charles Taylor explores the Romantic poetics central to his theory of language.

The Language Animal , Charles Taylor’s 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was much more to be said. Cosmic Connections continues Taylor’s exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations in language.

Reacting to the fall of cosmic orders that were at once metaphysical and moral, the Romantics used the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence. They sought to overcome disenchantment and groped toward a new meaning of life. Their accomplishments have been extended by post-Romantic generations into the present day. Taylor’s magisterial work takes us from Hölderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and on to Eliot, Miłosz, and beyond.

In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life, the language of poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere. Rather, Taylor insists, poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature, poetry’s reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too moving―too obviously true―to be ignored.

Genres: Philosophy, Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Art, Nature, Sociology

640 pages, Hardcover

Published May 21, 2024

About the author

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Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic

Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book. At its core is an attempt to illustrate the critical need to reinflate our flattening ontology, driven by our steadfast adherence to Western epistemological and ontological concepts that took firm hold in the 19th century. Our inability to navigate our political and social commitments and the increasing incoherence in our culture stem from this totalizing adherence to the belief that only what can be measured is real, rendering everything else subjective and therefore impermissible.

The interspace Taylor explicates, the space through which we seek deeper connections with each other and our relationship to the cosmos, is a real, objective phenomenon that provides substantial and crucial knowledge. This knowledge must be reintegrated into our impoverished modern ontology if we are to have any chance of survival. Taylor mentions multiple times in his final two closing chapters that the stakes are this dire, and I fully concur.

There is a plea at the end for reincorporating indigenous spiritual ways of knowing and re-privileging local knowledge and ontological systems. This approach emphasizes our relationship to the world and our immersed, lived, sensual experience as integral parts of our world-system. Re-privileging local knowledge production and meaning-making is a crucial step in reestablishing the resonant connection between subject and world.

Taylor spends time exploring the concept of the symbolic in art, and I was a little frustrated as he essentially arrives at a description that aligns closely with Susanne Langer’s definitions in ‘Philosophy in a New Key’ and ‘Feeling and Form,’ yet never acknowledges her vital work in this area. It appears he has never engaged with her work, which would have enriched these parts of his book.

Overall, this book provides readers with the language and framework to push back against our modern condition, which I call The Great Flattening. In this age of AI, where AI-generated content is a firehose of decontextualized and de-temporalized incoherently recombined bits of data requiring humans to recontextualize and re-temporalize, Taylor's work stands as a vital counter-narrative to this suffocating, impoverished ontology, and a farmwork for enabling a reflating of our flattened condition.

[Michi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was long but fun. Its not really philosophical (except in the beginning and the end) but more an introduction to different poets. Taylor had talked about the need for reconnection with ourselves, others, and the world at large at the end of The Language Animal. Now he explores how poetry does not just describe or discover but evokes and creates such connections.
From the Romantic era to the present day, poets (mostly without making ontological/metaphysical claims) have sought to explore and capture insight into this fractured and enigmatic interspace of cosmic connections between humans and their world (and history) that are not mere subjective psychological feelings but a real part of human meanings without which we can’t make sense of the world, ethical growth and human flourishing.
I don’t know if I agree with all his conclusions but the general critique of the attempt to fully understand and grasp our world and our place in it through flat, disengaged, descriptive, scientific language is well founded I think. I also learned some stuff about Symbolism, the Axial Age, Identity and why music is so powerful. But mostly I got introduced to a lot of poets.
Here is a collection of my favorite shorter stanzas from some of their poems:

Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh
In allen Wipfeln, fühlest du
Kaum einen Hauch
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde
Warte nur; balde
Ruhest du auch. - Goethe

Denn weil
Die Seeligsten nichts fühlen von selbst,
muss wohl, wenn solches zu sagen
Erlaubt ist, in der Götter Nahmen Theilnehmend fühlen ein Andrer,
Den brauchen sie! - Hölderlin

Wir sind auf einer Mission. Zur Bildung der Erde sind wir berufen. - Novalis

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces. - Hopkins

I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and This Jack, Joke, poor potsherd, / patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond. - Hopkins

Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum
Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen still
Durch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will,
ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum. - Rilke

Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar
In uns erstehen? Ist es dein Traum nicht.
Einmal unsichtbar zu sein?—Erde! Unsichtbar!
Was, wenn Verwandlung nicht, ist dein drängender Auftrag? - Rilke

The true paradises are the lost ones. - Proust

But should a noise, an odor, already heard or breathed in former times, return again, be met both in the present and the past, be real but not just actually present, ideal without being abstract, immediately the permanent but habitually hidden essence of things finds itself liberated, and our real "I", which seemed dead, often for a long time, comes back to life as it receives the celestial nourishment which has been brought to it. - Proust

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. - Eliot

Don’t paint the thing, but rather the effect it produces. - Mallarmé

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many. - Eliot

And the unseen eyeball crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
…
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. - Eliot

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating,
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. - Eliot

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After a knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to enquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us-to know
Whence our lives come and where they go! - Arnold

Amid Thunder, the golden house of is
Collapses, and the word becoming ascends. - Milosz

It shall come to completion in the sixth millennium, or next Tuesday.
The demiurge's workshop shall suddenly be stilled. Unimaginable silence
And the form of every grain will be restored in glory.
I was judged for my despair because I was unable to understand this. - Milosz

[Benjamin Lipscomb · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is, as it advertises, a (long, heavy) pendant to The Language Animal. Its author is also in his nineties, and so the oddities that appreciative readers of Taylor have always had to navigate around (numbered lists within numbered lists, for instance) are more frequent than ever here.

Also, some chapters are conspicuously more finished than others; in some, Taylor offers highly illuminating close readings of his focal texts; in others, he just quotes uninterrupted pages of poetry, points at it and says, in effect, "well, there you have it." But having said all that: he's introduced me to half-a-dozen challenging poets I now want to read more extensively, and given me a frame through which to approach them. And I think I'm persuaded by the overall argument of the book: that the persistent, shape-shifting longing for connection to some transcendent tells of an inextinguishable human need.

[Matthew Richey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Secular Age and there were sections of this book I really appreciated, but on the whole there was a lot of meandering and wandering without conclusions. He will spend 100 pages discussing a poet and conclude that he doesn't know what he means but wishes he did.

Read for book club, mostly because we were looking for a Secular Age experience. The writing style is the same (but more extreme, less edited perhaps) but the reward is significantly less.

[alex angelosanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

a little flat at the end but Taylor's still got his fastball

[Karen Carlson]

Probably should read his Language Animal first, but this sounds more focused on my interests. h/t don curran's bluesky weekend reading thread,
https://bsky.app/profile/schizosemia....

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book enhanced my life.

[Greg Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Taylor's The Language Animal and was anticipating that this book would continue that discussion. So I was a little disappointed with his loooong historical/philosophical meandering through various eras of 'romantic' poetry. But maybe the payoff is worth it? The last 15ish pages distill some of Taylor's concern and certainly resonated with me.

His basic contention, as I understood it, is that humanity has always sought a deep or deeper connection with God through the world: "One could argue that cosmic connection has always been a human aspiration." [pg. 591]

Similiar to A Secular Age he offers a few suggestions for us in this direction as modern humans, so are striving is less "tenative and indirect".

[1] He points us toward "indigenous religions" in light of their i) connection to place, but also ii) their connection to place, and iii) the spiritual connection to place. The latter is where we see an explicit connection to his work Sources of the Self. He argues that their very identity is formed by this intimate relationship with the world. There is a certain reciprocity (maybe he'd even be fine with organic language) between God, the world, and man in this horizon.

[2] He argues that this cosmic connection opens us up toward "objective reality, beyond the subject." [pg. 595] This quote will stick with me:

"The great advances of the natural sciences over the last three centuries, which in recent decades have accelerated, have (understandably but wrongly) helped create a mindset which refuses to take any knowledge claim seriously which cannot meet the validation conditions of these sciences—unless they be about everyday validation conditions of these sciences. [pg. 595]

This kind of outlook has been portrayed as reductive, and he calls for a richer attending to these aspirations beyond the self that point to the objective.

[3] He argues that poetry calls forth the reality of this cosmic connection; hence the 500+ pages of poetry!

[4] He suggests perhaps Myth played the role of poetry in a prior era.

[5] Finally, he connects it to The Language Animal on the final page:

"On the one side, theoretically it makes visible the many ways in which language is crucial to human life, not just as enabling description and theory, but also as constituting the spaces of shared awareness, and the footings we stand on with each other, and the ways we navigate what is not full decidable, objectively, "scientifically"—through art, music, poetry—and makes these realities palpable for us. On the other side, it invites us to engage in this navigation, this attempt to articulate what is really of ultimate importance to us, in the full gamut of media available to us, including the poetry which has been central to our discussion in this book." [598]

Together with The Language Animal and perhaps more importantly his work A Secular Age readers are provided some conceptual tools to consider the pressures of the modern condition, and how it has "flattened" our reality to the subject. Taylor’s work serves as an essential counter-narrative to the constricting and reductive ontology of our time, offering a framework to re-enchant and elevate our diminished experience of the world, particularly as those creatures able to express our longings for connection in language.

[Brian Hanson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tough read, but well worth it. the book made me reflect on my own intuitions about the cosmos ("the universe considered as a morally relevant order") by considering how certain poets have explored our connection with it, following the post-Enlightenment breakdown of belief in a stable underlying order.

[Piet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erudiet boek dat onderzoekt hoe de poëzie sinds de romantiek tot en met Czesław Miłosz zoekt naar verbinding met de orde in en achter de wereld voorbij het instrumentaal rationeel denken. De Canadese filosoof blijkt een eminent kenner van de (post-)romantische poëzie. Het boek eindigt tot mijn vreugde met een pleidooi van het serieus nemen van inheemse religies.

[Michael N. Arnold · Rating 1 out of 5]

Waste of Time and Money

I read a LOT of serious books. This one should be marketed only to philosophers who already know as much as the author. He presumes absolutely everything! I gave up at page 34 and I NEVER give up on a book.