In this and in two subsequent posts, I’ll attempt a critical review of the eminent philosopher Charles Taylor’s new book, a 598-page consideration of philosophical aspects of some major poetry of the past two centuries. A book of such length and sustained intellectual seriousness would be more than a lifetime’s achievement for most of us mortals, but it is hard to fathom how a 92-year old could write at this length in the eight years since his last major book, The Language Animal, a seemingly definitive statement of his central philosophical concerns of language, action and its explanation, and expression. The new book is explicitly presented as the often-promised companion study to his previous book, although Taylor only rarely refers to that earlier work, and Taylor’s thoughts on poetry should be, it seems to me, readily intelligible to anyone familiar with just a bit of Taylor’s thought.
In this first post I’ll informally introduce some of Taylor’s core concerns, then summarize what I take to be the central argument of the book. It seems to me that Taylor’s philosophy, from the early-mid 1960s to the present, centers on the following claims: 1. There are pervasive aspects of human thought, expression, action, and language that do not admit of reductive explanation. Rather, phenomena embodying these aspects must be understood as intersubjectively emergent in on-going human life both individually and collectively. 2. These phenomena are context-dependent, where ‘context’ refers variously to a heterogenous range of features that are typically non-evident or non-focal in one’s experience of phenomena, including (a) human embodiment, space and time, and (b) place and history. 3. There are two decisive and orienting historical moments in human history which together make up the broadest historical context (claim #2) for humanity. The first is the so-called Axial Age, a global period c. 500 BC where universalist ethics and religions emerged in China, India, the so-called Near East, and Greece. The second is the period around 1800, where (at least in Europe) the traditional underlying cultural order of the so-called ‘Great Chain of Being’ (a fixed catalog and hierarchy of all that exists in determinate relations) was abandoned; this previous kind of broad ordering was replaced by an obscure, difficult, and internally contested ordering characteristic of Modernity. One way of thinking about the relationship between Taylor’s two recent books is that the earlier one deals primarily with #s1 and 2a generally, and the recent one with #s 2b and 3 with regard to poetics. Taylor occasionally uses the term ‘philosophical anthropology’ to refer to his project; and this term (usually associated with the German philosophers Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen) seems to collect any and all philosophical investigations that take up and reflect upon the materials involved in the three claims.
I suspect that those who have not read Taylor’s work from the past quarter-century will be surprised to find in these two more recent books very little use of or even reference to prominent concepts from his writings of the 1970s and 1980s such as humans as self-interpreting animals, hyper-goods, or strong evaluation; in Cosmic Connections, for example, the term ‘strong evaluation’ is used only a couple of times in passing and in an unmarked manner (pp. 52 and 54) simply to indicate a judgment that some phenomenon is of exceptional significance is living a good or full human life. Still, conceptual points and problematics in the recent books will seem familiar to those who’ve read any one of his large books through A Secular Age, or his major essays from the twentieth-century. To introduce Taylor’s central concerns, let’s consider an example that I vividly remember Taylor himself presenting in his Hegel class at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s. Imagine this: two people are sitting across from each other in the compartment of a train during a hot summer’s day in Spain. Both are red-faced and sweating profusely. For some time they glance at each other, each noting the ever-widening semi-circles of sweat under the other’s armpits. Now, Taylor asks, what do they know of each other’s awareness and state? A knows that she herself is hot; B knows that B himself is hot. A knows that B is hot; B knows that A is hot. A knows that B knows that A is hot; B knows that A knows that B is hot. And so on. Finally, A says “My God, it’s hot!” What has changed? It cannot plausibly be thought of as an attempt to communicate some information; A knows that B knows everything A knows about the heat. Taylor derives three points from the example: 1. Something emerges that cannot have been simply derived or foreseen from the co-presence and co-awareness of A and B; they now have an incipient relationship, something that may be taken up and developed in an indeterminately vast number of ways. 2. Accordingly, A and B have transformed themselves, and transformed each other. They are now related. 3. The utterance establishes, or at least contributes to the establishment, of a kind of space within which A and B are related.
With the summary of Taylor’s central concerns and the example, we can now state the new book’s central arguments. The first, a shorter argument presented in the second chapter, is a piece of social epistemology; the second, much longer (approximately 450 pages) argument is a philosophical history, both conceptual and diagnostic, of major instances of modern poetry. First, Taylor calls the emergent space of the example an ‘interspace’, and characterizes it generally as “human agents in situations” (p. 62). Interspaces are saturated with meanings, both potential and actual, with the qualification that the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningful’ exhibit “a certain polysemy” (p. 76) that includes linguistic meanings such as reference, description, and semantic phenomena generally, but also non-linguistic senses of significance and felt emotional qualities. A background assumption from philosophical anthropology asserts that human beings generally aspire to live (relatively) full lives, and this implies more specifically that there is generally and trans-historically a human aspiration at work to articulate the meanings within and of interspaces. The central claim of the first argument is that certain interspaces “carry meanings which can only take shape for us, and hence fully enter our experience, thanks to their articulation in a work of art” (p.62). So along with poetry, Taylor also considers much more briefly some instances of music (Chopin mostly) and the visual art (Cézanne especially). Recapitulating and summarizing his contention at the beginning of the third chapter, Taylor writes that “a crucial power of poetry is the ability to capture the meaning of an interspace . . . in such a way as to encompass and convey a powerful sense of its meaning for our purposes, our fulfillment, or our destiny.” Poetry has a “revelatory and connecting power”; that is, revelatory of our potentials and meanings, and ‘connecting’ in the semi-technical senses of connecting people with aspects of themselves, with others, and/or their physical, biological, social, and/or metaphysical contexts. (p. 85)
In barest outline, the historico-philosophical second argument goes as follows: Like many others, and as noted above, Taylor asserts that around 1790 with the beginning of the so-called Romantic Era there was a major transformation (at least in Western Europe) in thought and sensibility (pp.3-4). This transformation expressed itself saliently in both philosophy and poetry, with both human beings and nature (or the cosmos) itself grasped as evolving in the direction of realizing their full potentials. A central imperative of the new sensibility was to give creative expression to their potentials (p. 5); further, since nature (or the cosmos) and human beings are inextricably linked, the sensibility secreted an ultimate ideal of full and mutual realization (or ‘reconciliation’) of the two. In poetry this imperative was most fully worked out by Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis, where the connection between human beings and nature is grasped as lost, or at least threatened with loss under modern conditions, and this (re-) connection is something that must be made anew in poetry. In the service of this task poetry deploys (uses and itself embodies) ‘symbols’ in a sense initially developed by A. W. Schlegel, where something non-evident and otherwise inaccessible is disclosed through some communicative medium, and this disclosure is a creative act of some subject. In Romantic poetry this disclosure can take two forms (p. 96): in Hölderlin, Novalis, and also Wordsworth, what is disclosed is some very broad structure or force (nature, cosmos); in other instances, such as with Goethe, poetry offers an epiphany wherein some novel expression carries a peculiarly resonant and intense meaningfulness, but the larger context is indeterminate or unarticulated, at least in comparison with the full-blown expressiveness of the first form. After this initial phase of Romanticism, Taylor sees two great themes in post-Romantic poetry. The first he calls ‘epistemic retreat’, where poets as it were withdraw the claim to characterize nature or the cosmos, and instead focus on the interspace itself wherein the poetry is written and situated. So Goethe (and not the central Romantics) as it were points toward the future of poetry. Second, the Romantic concern with nature or cosmos is replaced with a concern for temporality, both the everyday passage of time and history. After a brief consideration of Keats and Shelley, Taylor over nearly 400 pages successively considers Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, and (a bit surprisingly) Czesław Miłosz. The book ends with a consideration of the idea of ethical progress (the relevance of which to the foregoing is unclear to me), and a conclusion that seems to suggest that poetry can no longer address the sorts of metaphysical concerns expressed in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry because our contemporary sense of nature involves interacting and evolving orders and places that come to more effective expression in scientifically informed prose writing, and even in consideration of spiritual traditions and indigenous religions.
Taylor’s two arguments obviously involve a pretty much unsurveyably vast number of claims, conceptions, analyses, and proposals. In my following posts I’ll pick and choose what strike me as the most interesting aspects of this sprawling book. In my next post I’ll consider one aspect of his philosophical anthropology (as yet unmentioned here) given through his adoption and use of the sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s term ‘resonance’. Then I’ll consider in what sense the arts can present a ‘cosmos’ through consideration of aspects of religious architecture as well as in the tragedies of Aeschylus. Finally, I’ll present more fully and interrogate some of his accounts of the poetry, including Hopkins on ‘inscape’ and Rilke on celebration.
References:
Arnold Gehlen, Man, his nature and place in the world (1988)
Helmuth Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (2019)
Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019)
Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (1964)
-----Hegel (1975)
-----Sources of the Self (1989)
-----A Secular Age (2007)
-----The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (2016)
-----‘What is Human Agency?’ (1977) and ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’ (1977) in Philosophical Papers 1 (1985)