Charles Taylor is professor emeritus in the department of philosophy at McGill University. Educated at McGill and Oxford, where he earned his doctorate in 1961, Taylor emerged as one of the era’s most influential philosophers, known for his explorations of the modern self, social science, language, and religion. His book Sources of the Self (1989) analyzed the history and implications of modern inwardness and individuality. With A Secular Age (2007), he turned his attention to secularization and the changing role of religion. His latest book, Cosmic Connections (2024), bridges these interests by exploring Romantic poetry’s responses to the “disenchantment” of the world occasioned by modern science. Taylor has received many awards, including the Templeton Prize and the Berggruen Prize, and he is a member of the Order of Canada. The following interview was conducted by email and has been edited for clarity and length.
Alexander Stern: Why don’t we start with the title of your new book? What exactly do you mean by a cosmic connection?
Charles Taylor: I think I can describe it as a sense of connection with the cosmic order, however conceived, which is felt as having normative force and as an important human fulfilment. This normative force can encompass a range of different things. On one level, our sense of this connection as an essential human fulfilment should lead us to experience it in a wide range of contexts, from the local (the fields and forests around us) to the monumental (in awe before great wilderness areas). But beyond individual fulfilment, on another, more conventionally moral level, our sense of this connection should galvanize us into particular political actions against the forces that are destroying the conditions of life on our planet (for example, the fossil-fuel industry and their political allies).
AS: As you write in the book, the sense of cosmic connection has historically contributed to robust but now discredited theories of cosmic order. Could you give some examples of how these orders have been defined through history?
CT: Quite well-known examples of this include ideas of cosmic order which were inherited from the ancients and recognized during the European Renaissance. For example, Aristotle’s geocentric notion holds that everything above the moon is pure, not material, and this hierarchical ascension is matched by an ascending value.
But a cosmic order can also be aligned to the political order, where the ruling power is higher than what it rules over. Any attempt to upset this order, to attack the summit (for example, Macbeth killing his king) threatens the whole order (on that night, horses rose against humans). So, the order is normative. Cleaving to it, upholding it, is connected to all human fulfilments, while violating it threatens to wreak destruction in human life.
We can also look for examples in “indigenous” religions—or religions confined to a particular local community. These religions tend to posit a notion of spirit as the force holding together the proper pattern of things. My basic hypothesis in Cosmic Connections is that in all ages, there has been among many people a sense of cosmic order in the above sense, bringing together normative force and human fulfilment.
AS: Obviously, we can’t know exactly how historical people experienced the world, but how would you characterize their connection to that order on an experiential level?
CT: It’s almost impossible for us to recover today what it felt like to live in a really “enchanted” world. But imagine being on the edge of a deep forest and sensing the power of the spirits of the wood, extending deep within it; looking at the clear sky, and seeing its adamantine beauty as the outer face of a purity unattainable on our earth; sensing on the edge of a wilderness area an immense alien power full of menace, but shot through with power from the Creator.
AS: When and how does this sense of connection and order begin to break down?
CT: We come to a breaking point in human history with the advent of modern natural science. A common understanding of modern science is that it gives the real nature of things. This invalidates all earlier understandings of the world, which we can no longer make sense of on their own terms. The whole web of metaphysical views that sustained traditional notions of cosmic order from Aristotle up to the Late Renaissance was challenged by the achievements of post-Galilean natural science. The knowledge gained in this way had a solidity and a certainty (not to speak of technological utility) that the earlier visions of order could not match. So “cosmic order” came more and more to be identified with Newton’s theory and subsequent developments and findings.
Pushed to what often seems to be its ultimate logic, the real science gives us a veridical picture of what is, but no ultimate justification of what we ought to value. So, there cannot be an authoritative standard of value, let alone one that can be shown to be an important human fulfilment.
Of course, the elimination of this standard does not, strictly speaking, follow from the findings of natural science, but many people respond to the findings by drawing this extra conclusion. Drawing this conclusion is the process which the sociologist Max Weber called “disenchantment” or Entzauberung. The problem with Weber’s concept is that it seems to put a whole host of different ways of thought and feeling into a single basket and declare them all invalidated. It sweeps away all religion, but also all senses of connection, which are invalidated along with different kinds of belief in magic. To be fair to Weber, his concept contains a reference to magic specifically (the Zauber in Entzauberung), but he left it open to being interpreted in a very wide sense. The new broom includes in its sweep all forms of religion and senses of cosmic connection.
A basic thesis of my book is this: Romantic poetry responds to the growing implausibility of traditional cosmic orders. How it does this is to awaken a powerful sense, a sensed experience of cosmic order, which stops short of making an ontological claim for the existence outside of experience of such an order but that leaves this question open.
AS: You say this step of disenchantment doesn’t follow, strictly speaking, from science. So why do people take that step? How do technology and industrialization and the changes they bring to human experience contribute?
CT: It is quite understandable that some people will lack the sensibility that opens us to the sense of cosmic connection, or that they can be induced to suppress this sensibility in the name of a more certain knowledge with such useful technological applications. But this suppression is not commanded by logic. In fact, many important figures in natural science have been open to the kind of reverence that a sense of cosmic connection brings (including Einstein).
AS: Before jumping into Romantic poetry, would you set up the Romantic movement for us? What was Romanticism and what views about art did its practitioners tend to share?
CT: At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a shift in the milieux of artistic creation in several European countries. In literature, Romanticism comes with the sense among many poets that the strict rules of “classical” order are stifling, that they don’t allow poets to say what they yearn to express. The authorities of classical order wrote in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: Pope and Dryden in England, Boileau in France. Famous poets who made the break in this crucial period were Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, Hugo and Lamartine in France, Hölderlin and Novalis in Germany. Early on, they became aware of each other.
AS: How does Romantic poetry establish its new mode of connection?
CT: Romantic poetry responds, I believe, to the growing implausibility of traditional cosmic order. How it does this is to awaken a powerful sense: a sensed experience of cosmic order, which stops short of making an ontological claim for the existence outside of experience of such an order but leaves this question open. That’s what I mean by “epistemic retreat” in the book: we awaken an experience of such an order with the two properties mentioned above (normative force and crucial fulfilment), but don’t claim that this is a truth about the world beyond our experience.
AS: As you write in the book, different Romantic poets awaken this sense of reconnection with a cosmic order in different ways. Could you give examples of the kinds of strategies these poets use and how they differ?
CT: Romantic poets, in evoking a powerful experience of order, are opening for us a depth beyond the visible surface of things. But this depth is understood in very different ways. Gerard Manley Hopkins makes us feel the “inscape” of things, the inner power that drives them to be what they are. Rainer Maria Rilke, on the other hand, while he had a period in which he seemed to be doing something similar (the stage of the Neue Gedichte [New Poems]), went beyond this to his breakthrough moment, which comes in the Duino Elegies, in passages of praise which appear to illuminate earth and sky.
AS: Another way you characterize the epistemic retreat involved in Romantic poetry is in terms of an “interspace” between purely subjective experience and objective, provable scientific fact. Obviously, those approaching spiritual experiences from a scientific point of view are inclined to see them as subjective only and generally discredit the idea that they point to something real “out there” in the world. Can you explain what exactly you mean by this interspace and how human meanings might be more elevated than mere subjective preference?
CT: What I’m calling the “interspace” in this book is the space in which cosmic connection is experienced in our post-Galilean, post-Newtonian era. As I’ve argued, what post-Romantic poetry invokes for us stops short of any claims about the nature of the objective natural world beyond experience. The poetry doesn’t pretend to tell us what the world in itself is like beyond human experience, but it gives us a powerful feeling of a larger order, so that we cannot help sensing that we are in such an order. So, there is a paradoxical reality here: a larger order is revealing itself, but there is no way we can find a language in which we can convince skeptics that this order exists. This raises a deeper question: What are the languages that (seem to) open us to such orders? Because the orders don’t come across as just subjective preferences. In this, they are like the intuitions of spiritual seekers, which I discussed in A Secular Age.
AS: I want to back up for a moment and consider the relationship between this book and its predecessor, The Language Animal, which is a companion to Cosmic Connections. That book concerns the theories of language that were developed by Romantic and pre-Romantic philosophers and inspired or informed some of the poetry you discuss in Cosmic Connections. Those theories hinge on a distinction between what you call designative and constitutive language. Can you explain the difference between those types of language and the theories of meaning behind them, and why constitutive language is so important to Romantic poetry?
CT: In my earlier book, I defined “designative” uses of language as those that serve to communicate information from one person to another, or, to include written language, ways of preserving information over time. Designative theories of language, which I refer to as the HLC group [after theorists Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac], hold that this is the principal and only fully legitimate use of language. Without denying this use, I want to argue that language also has “constitutive” functions that make possible human relations and experience that couldn’t exist without it. Paradigm cases can be seen in the way that language allows us to be together in our grasp or contemplation of the world. This “communion” is so important that it actually precedes language. Children learn to speak in an intense emotional communion with parents or caregivers, communion that small infants desire and earnestly seek, and that language develops and enriches. Our theory also must help us understand how this form of communion undergoes such radical changes as we grow up. Romantic poetry exemplifies another constitutive use that I’m trying to elucidate in this book—it opens us to cosmic connections.
AS: Why don’t we take a look at a portion of a poem now? It’s one that you cite a great deal in the book, “Tintern Abbey,” by William Wordsworth. Here’s one passage that touches directly on a few of the things we’ve been talking about. Wordsworth is writing on the occasion of rediscovering a beautiful spot in Wales that he had come across five years prior at a different stage in his life. Reconnecting with the scene triggers a spiritual experience that expands from its personal significance into something more universal.
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (93–102)
Can you talk a little bit about what you take the poem to be doing? What makes it a form of reconnection, and how can it foster reconnection in its readers?
CT: Wordsworth is not just communicating this “sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused,” but bringing us to share this sense, to feel it with him. Some who swear by science as the only gold standard for describing our relation to the world will see this description of experience as on all fours with statements like: “This tickles me,” “This pleases me.” But to me (and Wordsworth), it goes beyond this. It picks up on a relation of human beings to their world of another kind, in which there is communication, but of a kind very difficult to describe, or to prove a fortiori to skeptics. From the words “a sense sublime,” we are set in motion from setting suns, to ocean, living air, blue sky, and finally to us, the mind of man; we thus come to feel this spirit that “rolls through all things.”
AS: Another way that you discuss Romantic connection is in terms of “resonance,” which is a term that you adopt from the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa. Could you explain how he uses the term and how we might use it to understand what the Romantics are up to?
CT: “Resonance” is an attempt to provide a term for the relation I have just been talking about. And I think it provides us with an important step forward. But, of course, this term needs further elaboration, which Hartmut Rosa has been providing, both showing the great importance of resonance in our lives and also analysing its different forms. I came across Rosa’s work after I had started drafting sections of Cosmic Connections (I started in the early 1990s), but I immediately recognized on reading Hartmut’s work that we were exploring overlapping terrains.
AS: In your discussion of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, another element of the transition from older cosmic orders to the Romantic understanding of nature and reality comes to the fore: namely, time. Baudelaire writes in The Flowers of Evil about spleen: a condition of ennui or meaninglessness—or acedia, to use the more religious term. Could you talk a little bit about how Baudelaire’s poetry attempts to overcome spleen by a kind of reconnection to a different, higher kind of time?
CT: Spleen, for Baudelaire, is a malady of lived time, time felt as endless, meaningless repetition. In his “spleen” poetry, Baudelaire turns the tables directly: to meaninglessness, he responds with strong, living images; mere repetition is overcome by the music of his verse. But I argue also that the sense of time as meaningless repetition is overcome at a higher level in his magnificent poem “The Swan.” Section II gathers together a chain of exiles across immense time in a union of solidarity (the poem was dedicated to Victor Hugo, who had been forced to flee by Napoleon III). In this section, the poem creates a totally new atmosphere; it is no longer talking about past experience with the swan, denied a habitat in changing Paris. It shifts to the present tense, in which it gathers so many different suffering exiles into a kind of unity or solidarity, which both brings together different ages in an overarching time and makes us feel them as agents, not just suffering beings.
AS: Toward the end of the book, you discuss the work of the Polish Catholic poet Czesław Miłosz, which shares with Baudelaire’s an interest in time. Miłosz, though, conceives of poetry as capable of exploring, as you put it, “the possibility of an escape from history into nature.” He also writes of poetry’s potential to “save nations and people.” How should we think about the capacity of poetry, and perhaps other artforms, to inspire ethical progress?
CT: I think Miłosz’s poetry ends up being concerned not simply with escaping from history into nature (though in an early phase of his exile, that did concern him); rather, he had a powerful sense that history can offer new possibilities, if we know how to seize them. Poetry can help us identify these. As he puts it, “the poetic act both anticipates the future and speeds its coming.” The remarkable thing about Miłosz is that one can argue that his “poetic act” did these two things. Miłosz’s poetry did actually inspire nonviolent resistance to the Soviet Union, especially through the union of the Church and the Left.
AS: Do you see people in the present day as experiencing an even greater sense of loss or disconnection than the Romantics did? And do you think that Romantic poetry’s response to the problem of disenchantment remains relevant to some of the spiritual longing and experimentation we see today—what sometimes goes by the name the “problem of meaning”?
CT: I think that we can discern some affinity between this new way of invoking the experience of connection, and the culture of religious/spiritual seeking that we see in our present secular age. In both cases, we have people groping to find language to articulate some new intuitions that are at once powerfully felt and difficult to define. This search for an adequate expression is understandably often inclined to have recourse to the resonant images of art.
It would appear that, throughout human history, (at least some) human beings have sought some form of cosmic connection. What is remarkable is the great variety of forms this search has taken. Any adequate philosophical anthropology would have to account both for the continuity and the changes. We are still very far from such an account.
AS: Some of the poets you discuss in the book, like Miłosz, Hopkins, and Eliot, are Catholic, and others, like Baudelaire and Mallarmé, adapt Catholic concepts to their poetry. But, clearly, the experience of connection need not necessarily be paired with religious belief. You describe religious belief as a kind of additional step. Could you develop this analogy between Romantic poets and today’s spiritual or religious seekers a little bit, specifically in terms of the role of orthodox religious belief?
CT: There is a strong analogy. In both cases, one starts with a sense of inspiration or strong desire for connection—in relation to the Romantic poets I’ve called it cosmic, but I’ve elsewhere described it as a spiritual source. This is another mode of what I called in Sources of the Self a “moral source”: some reality beyond us with which we can connect and that can transform us ethically or spiritually. One tries to articulate it further in a number of different ways—in the religious domain, through prayer, meditation, liturgy. But in both the artistic and the religious case, our sense of these sources is accompanied by uncertainty about our own formulations or a strong intuition that these formulations are inadequate.
In both cases, as well, seekers often feel the need to communicate with others, even those whose formulations are quite different, or who—in the case of spiritual seekers—are relating themselves to different faiths. This accounts for the strong friendships we see growing between people of different religions today—an ecumenicism of friendship rather different from the earlier ecumenicism of mutual disarmament of the mid-twentieth century. This is something Tomáš Halík discusses in his book The Afternoon of Christianity. We are all on an incomplete journey; we all struggle with unanswered questions; and we have much to learn from each other.
AS: This book is being discussed as part of a trilogy with Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. What comes next?
CT: There are continuities between these three books, in that at certain points later ones draw on ideas in the earlier ones. What needs further exploration at this point is some further understanding of the language in which we can articulate our intuitions about cosmic and spiritual sources.
