In my previous post I introduced Charles Taylor’s general philosophical concerns and outlined what I take to be the two large arguments presented in his massive new book Cosmic Connections. Again, there is a philosophical argument about the nature and characteristics of the common space of human interaction, which Taylor here calls the ‘interspace’; and there is a much longer argument about Romantic poetry and poetics as a response to the loss of the sense of a shared, stable order of the cosmos in modern times, and then the presentation and analysis of post-Romantic poetry as an ‘epistemic retreat’ from some of the strong invocation in Romantic poetics of a reconfigured cosmic order in favor of kinds of poetry that focus upon the interspace itself, especially in its temporal dimensions of lived time and history. It seems to me that there is a great deal in the book of philosophical interest as well as engaging, but I cannot imagine that any reader would find the book easy going. Aside from the sheer length, there is a great deal of repetition, summarizing, shifting of terminology, invocation with little explication of others’ concepts and analyses, and (to my mind) peculiar emphases, such as the great length at which Baudelaire and Mallarmé are treated (about 90 pages each) while, say, Rimbaud is barely mentioned. For myself the hardest part was the idiosyncratic matter of taste: there’s little overlap between the poets Taylor considers with my own comparable list of ten or so key figures from roughly 1800 to 1990, which would be something like William Blake, John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Akhmatova, Federico García Lorca, Wallace Stevens, and Paul Celan. I’ll proceed by considering in a bit more depth what seem to me the most intriguing aspects of the book: the concept of interspace; and the idea that an artwork implicitly presents a cosmos. On account of the difficulty of the issues (and the consequent length of this bit of blogging), I’ll hold off until the following post discussion of Taylor’s accounts Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, in particular of Hopkins and Rilke, and of his claim that contemporary poetry can no longer maintain the metaphysical dimensions of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, because our distinctively contemporary sense of nature allegedly does not permit poetic presentation or embodiment.
1.Interspace: Taylor introduces the term ‘interspace’ casually in the course of a discussion basic kinds of meanings, and as part of an attempt to establish that there is a distinctive kind of meaningfulness in human life that is neither ‘merely’ psychological (as in “I like roses, not peonies”) nor simply ‘life meanings’, something related to objective, biological relationships between human organisms and their environments (“I need air, water, food). Taylor asks: “Are there human meanings which are founded on facts about the interspace between human beings and their ecological niche, comparably “objective” to the facts which found life meanings, but different than these?” He immediately answers to question with what seems to me a fundamental conceptual move in the book: “There seem to be: for instance, the joy we take in spring, in life, in nature; our sense of being (more than biologically fed by the life around us. But can we define the need/meaning here more fully? This is something we might try to with the term “resonance”: some movement of sympathy between us and our niche” (p. 50); and Taylor goes on to endorse and cite at length the account of resonance given recently by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa. It seems to me that Taylor here slightly under-characterizes Rosa’s conception, although he relies upon all of its major characteristics. What, according to Rosa, is resonance?
2. Resonance: Rosa introduced and explicated his conception at great length in his major book Resonance, published in 2016 in German and in 2019 in English, and gives a summary account in his more recent short book The Uncontrollability of the World. Rosa begins by accepting a set of very general characterizations drawn from phenomenology and philosophical anthropology for conceptualizing human life: human beings exhibit various manners of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Martin Heidegger), are ‘world-open’ (Arnold Gehlen) or exhibit ‘world-openness’ (Max Scheler), and are fundamentally characterized by ‘eccentric positionality’ (Helmuth Plessner; that is, they are never wholly subsumed within any environment, as their technologies, social structures, and self-consciousness provide a partial transcendence of and independence from their environment). There are three major points embodied in beginning in this manner: negatively, to reject from the start a social ontology that treats as fundamental isolated subjects; positively objects, and environments, which are as it were subsequently related in various ways; positively, social ontology instead begins from the thought that subjects, objects, and environments are always interrelated, and developing a social ontology involves describing and analyzing of various kinds of interrelations of the complex subject-object-environment; and finally (following Plessner in particular), on this understanding together with basic facts about self-awareness and -consciousness, a human being “is compelled to distance herself from herself and from her relationship to the world and, in a way, to observe herself from the outside”(Rosa 2020, p. 30). Rosa then proposes that there are two great classes of ways subjects relate to themselves, other subjects, objects, and their environment: resonance and alienation. The analysis of the conceptual and historical characteristics of resonance and alienation requires several hundred pages, but for our purposes it should be sufficient to recite Rosa’s brief summary. ‘Resonance’ refers to a kind of relationship wherein (a) a subject is affected, that is, experiences herself as marked, typically including emotionally marked, by something or someone other than herself; (b) the subject responds to this affectation in an individualizing way, typically experiencing herself as ‘having a voice’ or ‘having agency’ in her reaction to an affectation; (c) the subject thereby experiences both herself and the other thing or person as having adapted themselves mutually in being transformed; and (d) the entire experience characterized by (a)-(c) is marked by a sense of ‘uncontrollability’, that is, there was nothing rigidly determined or wholly foreseeable about the trajectory of the mutual relationship (Rosa (2021), pp. 30-8).
Taylor’s key conceptual move is to fold the concept of resonance into the interspace. For Taylor the interspace, like all phenomena in human life, is marked by at least the possibility of a ‘strong evaluation’, that is, a judgment as to the role that the phenomena plays or might play in a good human life. So such-and-such an action is not just successful or unsuccessful at achieving some conceptually prior goal; it is further subject to culture-specific evaluations such as noble or base, graceful or clumsy, good or evil, etc. Some strong evaluations might be thought to be transcultural and transhistorical, such as courageous or cowardly. In Taylor’s philosophical anthropology, the pair resonance/alienation in strong evaluations is another such human universal. In historical analysis one notes that different cultures and different periods consider and arrange their typical resonant experiences in different ways. Rosa refers to any society’s characteristic rituals, practices, and institutions that typically stage the regular possibility of resonance as ‘axes of resonance’. There are three broad classes of axes of resonance: horizontal axes involving social relationships such as family and friends, and extending to political relationships; ‘diagonal’ axes of relationships to things, a heterogeneous category including work and particular relationships to bits of nature, and which is institutionalized most prominently in schools and sports; and vertical axes involving “relationships to life, existence, or the world as a whole or totality perceived as existing above or beyond the individual, in which the world itself maintains its own voice” (Rosa (2019), p. 195). In modern times the prominent vertical axes are religion, nature, art, and history, and, relevant Taylor’s book, poetry is among the arts, and so a prominent formation of the vertical axes of resonance. In a key passage Rosa characterizes the resonance distinctive of modernity as follows: “art emerges from the conflict or conversation between the capable and forming subject, who has at her disposal instruments, knowledge of form, and expressive abilities, and the independent source that confronts her. Art is a precarious call and response between these two authorities . . . the event of art is nothing other than an event of resonance: a precarious responsive relationship between two independent voices that are constantly contradicting, often diverging from, and transforming each other in creative struggle” (pp. 282-3).
Rosa’s fascinating account of art as a modern vertical axis of resonance richly merits fuller exposition and consideration, but it is considerably more detailed than what Taylor takes up, and with the basic points stated we can move to Taylor’s use of them. Like Rosa, Taylor adopts an account of modernity pioneered by the sociologist Max Weber, with two major historical claims: (i) a distinctive feature of modernity is the ‘separation of the value-spheres’, whereby major dimensions of modern life (politics, economics, religion, art, law, etc.) develop their own distinctive institutions that embody their own distinctive aims, procedures, criteria of quality, sense of fair and foul, etc., and so exhibit a kind of relative autonomy vis-à-vis each other; (ii) modernity also is a process of ‘disenchantment’ wherein human institutions and environments no longer seem to embody transcendent or authoritative values, nature becomes things for use, and space and time come to be seen as homogeneous and featureless fields of mechanical and (merely) causal relations.
Within this structure of concepts and claims, Taylor’s next moves are inevitable: a central cultural task in modernity is to ‘re-enchant’ the world; the primary sites and institutions wherein this re-enchantment is attempted are in the modern axes of resonances; and so major poetry of the modern period attempts re-enchantment by soliciting, invoking, maintaining, etc. relations of resonance.
3. Cosmos: Taylor opens the book with a ‘hypothesis’ from his philosophical anthropology: there is a “human need for cosmic connection; by “connection” I mean not just any mode of awareness of the surrounding world, but one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration. My hypothesis is that the desire for this connection is a human constant”, and that this desire manifests itself in historically varying ways (Taylor (2024), p. ix). Throughout the book Taylor understands ‘connection’ on the model of resonance, but what does he mean by ‘cosmos’? Why should the connection be cosmic, rather than say with one’s fellow humans or family or dog? He initially writes that ‘cosmos’ is an older world for what people talk about now in terms of ‘Nature’ or sometimes ‘wilderness’ (ibid.). In Taylor’s account of pre-modern history the key feature of ‘cosmos’, aside from seemingly referring to something like ‘everything that is or exists’, is that it implies a structure “which distinguished higher and lower realities” (p. x). Although there is certainly a degree of stipulation in Taylor’s conception of cosmos, it seems revealing in terms of his purposes that he ignores further characteristics that might plausibly be thought central to the conception of cosmos, in particular the sense that the higher and lower realities exist is some ordered relationship to each other (see the classic account by Charles Kahn (1960) of the emergence of the explicit concept of cosmos through the Pre-Socratic Anaximander’s statement that the elements or entities within the cosmos come-to-be and pass-away ‘in accordance with the ordering of time’); and further that it is certainly characteristic of seemingly global conception of the cosmos as consisting of three tiers—below the ground, on the ground, above the ground—and that there are entities (snakes, birds, and shamans inter alia) that pass between and among the tiers. None of these latter points show up in Taylor’s account.
4. Cosmos in pre-modern art: Taylor very largely focuses on poetry, although there is also occasional discussion of music. Poetry is characterized as a linguistic utterance that “affects us, moves us, on many levels” that for purposes of analysis we can group in three levels: “speech as sound, and its rhythms, meters, as well as its periods, and recurrences: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and so on”; ‘image music’, which involves “a music of thoughts or images, which is carried by the semantic force of the words, or other words they remind us of, and their multiple associations, in their combination and mutual impact”; and the semantic level of a poem insofar as it consists of “an assertion or series of assertions” (p. 81; surprisingly, Taylor makes no reference to Ezra Pound’s well-known and substantively identical account). Now Taylor is primarily interested in the new characteristics of emergent Romantic poetry at the end of the eighteenth-century, and so gives only the briefest characterizations of pre-Romantic poetry. This is typical: “Whereas previously, poets and artists in general drew on (what were seen as) ontically firm realities, as described by history, theology, philosophy (with its pictures of cosmic order, The Great Chain of Being, etc.), the new languages [of Romantic poetry] invoke entities whose ontic status is not clear. Earlier works invoked simply what was understood as a firm underlying account.” (p. 61) As with Taylor’s conception of cosmos, this strikes me as markedly under-describing the cosmic dimension (that is, that which invokes a culture’s broadest conception of what there is) of pre-modern poetry and the arts. This has been much studied, and so can perhaps be best seen, in architecture. A much attested feature of major works of pre-modern architecture is its placedness, that is, the sense that the work is sited in ways so as to invoke a larger order, to render that larger order available in highly charged experiences, and to induce a sense of participation in that larger order among those who experience the architecture, especially in ritual contexts. The manifest features of that larger order include astronomical phenomena (most famously at Newgrange and Stonehenge), features of the surrounding landscape (from ancient Greek temples (on Vincent Scully’s classic account) to Machu Picchu), to the more abstract features of points of the compass (see among many Paul Wheatley’s account of the early Chinese city or Stella Kramrisch’s magisterial account of the Hindu temple). It is no great leap to think that a vast range of pre-modern poetry, particularly in its ceremonial dimensions, participates in something like the kinds of meaningfulness evident in the architecture (consider, for example, the prominence of addresses to the sun in Indo-European poetry, as considered by among others Calvert Watkins). Taylor’s account restricts itself to consideration of the passage from pre-modern to Romantic poetry as (simply?) a matter of the status of the invoked entities and their ordering as high or low. It seems to me this restricted conception will come back to haunt Taylor’s account when he comes to consideration of contemporary writing.
In the forthcoming Part 2b of the review, I turn to consideration of Taylor’s concrete account of the course of modern poetry.
References:
Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World (1988)
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)
Charles Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (1960)
Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (1946)
Helmut Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (2019)
Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading (1934)
Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019)
-----The Uncontrollability of the World (2020)
Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos (2009)
Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (1969)
Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (2024)
-----‘What is Human Agency?’ (1977) in Philosophical Papers 1 (1985)
Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetry (2001)
Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’ (1915) in From Max Weber (1949)
Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (1971)