“The Romantic rebellion continues undiminished, returning ever in unpredictable new forms—Dadaism, Surrealism, the yearning of the ‘hippy’, the contemporary cult of unrepressed consciousness. With all this surrounding us we cannot avoid being referred back to [Hegel’s] great synthesis which was meant to resolve our central dilemma; which failed but which remains somehow unsurpassed.”
Charles Taylor, Hegel (1975)
The major contributions of Charles Taylor’s long, rich, and variegated career might be roughly grouped into four areas: 1. an abiding interest 18th and 19th century thought, especially German thought, especially Hegel and his generation; 2. social theory; 3. the philosophy of language; 4. vast, sweeping narratives of the trajectory of modernity, with special attention to the topics of religion and the idea of the self. When faced with his latest book, the bulky Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (2024), we find all four strands present. The book deals with the Romantic generation of writers and their inheritors, with the possibility (or not) of “connection,” with the specific linguistic operation that is poetry, and with the grand question of the fate of religion, spirituality, and the gods in modernity. Further, and because of this, one might sense that this is not so much a side-quest as a magnum opus; less a late-career swerve into the literature departments than an attempt to draw from literary material the unity of everything he has written until now, to bear out Taylor’s own claim that, despite the incredible breadth of topics he has broached, he is ultimately obsessed with only one thing, that he is the “monomaniac” he has proclaimed himself before. This book is not that. It is something much messier and more uneven.
Published in the great Canadian philosopher’s ninety-fourth year, the book does show one underlying unity in Taylor’s work, the passion of single decade. Taylor has labored half a century now in the shadow of “the long 1790s,” (a phrase of another perennial obsessive of this period, Peter Linebaugh) chasing that elusive moment. I’m probably one of those obsessives too—though about sixty years younger than Taylor (and fifty younger than Linebaugh), I might well spend the rest of my life, whatever is granted me, returning to the “impossible history” of this decade.1 At one point, Taylor quotes Rilke’s line “Ich kreise um Gott” (“I circle around God”) – here we circle around the 18th Century’s transformative closing years, or if not circle, then spiral, in the path of an “exzentrische Bahn,” a phrase from Hölderlin that Taylor quotes repeatedly. (There is an agonizing amount of repetition in this book).
The generation of the 1790s is the generation of the Romantics. Romanticism is when the gods are displaced by revolution, which then, in turn, is displaced by vaguer, gentler gods. Taylor has been circling around this moment since its chiastic twin decade, the 1970s. Fifty years ago, the first chapter of his magisterial Hegel (1975) discussed not Hegel, but the dreams of the Romantics; this chapter is entitled “Aims of a New Epoch,” a title which is echoed a half-century later in Chapter 3 of Cosmic Connections: “An Epochal Change.” The 1790s feature crucially also in Taylor’s extraordinary grand recits Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007), where some of the exact same passages are quoted that are discussed in Cosmic Connections. And he has written capable and insightful essays on poets like Paul Celan, whom he traces, sure enough, to the same “stream” of the 1790s (Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections 56).
The chief aim of this remarkable generation is to reconstitute, somehow, a sense of “cosmic order” after its dissolution by the scientific, objectivizing world-picture of modernity, which drains the world of divinity and enchantment while reducing everything, including the jagged edges of human experience, to processes that can be rationally understood and controlled. In 1975, Taylor saw Hegel’s “cosmic subject” as the “ultimate contender” to heal this breach, but he now seems much more sympathetic to the Romantic poets who ended up Hegel’s adversaries and targets. A clue pertaining to this shift was already left in a fascinating footnote about Hegel’s youthful friend and roommate, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, on the final page of Taylor’s Hegel, intuiting poetry’s dangerous supplementary relation to philosophy’s conceptual armature. Fifty years later, Taylor is finally attempting to see out his own suggestion—to turn away from the philosopher and toward the poet.2
Taylor, in the broadest strokes (too often his own sole brushstroke), is not wrong—at least in his instincts. The Romantics really were attempting nothing less than the generation of a new spirituality, a new mythology, even, in the words Louis Dupré, in another late book on Romanticism by an important Catholic philosopher, “a new religion” (cf. Dupré, The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism). And Taylor is right that this struggle is an essential resource for our devastated world today, when the atomization of life and spiritual (if that word makes you nervous, go with “social”) desiccation intensifies, we have not gotten past, or caught up to, the vortex of the 1790s. The once-brilliant gods of capital are now lurching, growing weary, more stretched and friable than ever, though nothing yet seems poised to topple or replace them—the ancillary divinities lodged in meditation apps or the ersatz liturgies of QAnon speak to this hollowing out of communal life, though they serve only to prop up the reign of contemporary capitalism. Yet possibly a new religion or form of spirituality is indeed slowly approaching, something awful (in the old sense of the word), unforeseeable except in the faintest intuitions, wispy ciphers of a “coming God,” in Hölderlin’s enigmatic phrase (“kommende Gott”).
Taylor lays his cards on table on first page of preface: “The book is about (what I see as) the 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, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history, but that the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history” (ix). Unfortunately, he doesn’t really advance (beyond) this thesis over the next 600 pages, only restate it interminably. It’s also not easy to assess Taylor’s own analysis of poems, because there hardly is any. There is mostly summary, cascading clichés, and satisfied appreciations, when there is commentary (often there is none—he will quote stanzas that go on for pages and pages and offer perhaps a sentence or two before moving to the next pages-long block quote). Nor is there really a narrative, though there are the rudiments of one, tied into a set of philosophical arguments, which goes something like: Once upon a time we had a connection to the cosmos (or the divine), then it was lost, then the Romantics try to recover it in a different key, sometimes informed by science and wonder at the universe. That this recovery is creative, Taylor stresses, is what prevents it from being nostalgic or reactionary. Romantic (and post-Romantic) poetry’s chants of re-enchantment give us the feeling and experience of a deeper connection outside of ourselves, what Taylor calls “resonance,” even if this (re)connection is now more free-floating and vibey, definitively detached from the certainty of codified religious doctrines and rituals on a mass collective level. Great poetry brings us into an “interspace,” a kind of middle realm where human biological needs and deeper spiritual needs meet on a vague continuum and interact. Affirmatively glossing the Romantics, Taylor writes: “Philosophy can perhaps tell you how things relate, but only Dichtung, Poetry, Poesie (in a broad sense which includes other arts) can recover relation.”
Striving to outline “the full ethical force of the Romantic drive to poetic expression,” the book proceeds from the Romantics (Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly), through nineteenth and early twentieth-century post-Romantic visionaries (Hopkins, Rilke—the latter being the one chapter where Taylor truly comes alive), to modernists like T.S. Eliot and Czesław Miłosz, with occasional digressions into painting and music. Despite his professed claim that language is not a question of the transparent communication of dead objects or states, Taylor mostly reads poetry like a philosopher, which is to say, not really. This would be fine if the poetry became an occasion to spin something new and exciting into being. But instead we largely encounter inert pablum; his only comments on Hopkins’s magnificent “Wreck of the Deutschland,” for example, are hardly worthy of a thinker of Taylor’s caliber: “Hopkins’ novel and frame-breaking poetry, building on the Romantics, became a path back to the original faith which he saw England first, and then the modern world, as having deserted.” Note that this is not the introduction to a discussion of this poem, but the entire engagement.
This book probably should not have been published. Or if so, it should have been framed very differently. It is not, appearances to the contrary, another of Taylor’s grand narratives. It should, it might, have been called something like “a philosopher’s poetic notes,” a bedside notebook, a commonplace book, late scribblings and sentimental poetic reveries, a zibaldone from a great thinker and scholar of our time. It does contain an astonishing chrestomathy of quotations, especially in the interminable chapters on Baudelaire and Mallarmé (both clocking in at nearly hundred pages and otherwise mostly unsalvageable, replete with an atrocious treatment of Walter Benjamin). This book is like having tea with a sage who doesn’t have much to explain to you, but every so often sits back, closes his eyes, and recites reams of the most beautiful poetry put to paper, opening his eyes again with a wink and a sip from his mug.
Taylor claims that the Romantics understand the world as a living complex of signs, and that, for these writers, “seeing the signs correctly is re-connecting; and that this makes a real difference; an ethical difference”—but this must also be true of the incarnate signs named poems. There is indeed an ethics of reading demanded by these poems that Taylor too often shirks, seeking to decorate his worldview with poems rather than inhabit their strangeness, their anarchic tendency to overturn any and every order, to enjoin (and enjoy) rupture as much as connection.
Taylor considers Wordsworth and Hölderlin as representing two “poles” of “the felt intuition of connection.” But his treatment of Wordsworth is simply to recite the same passage from “Tintern Abbey” over and over—which was already the same passage he cited in A Secular Age (I wonder, by the way, what is at stake in the indefinite article there becoming the definite article The Age of Disenchantment in the subtitle of this later book), and which passage, indeed, he also cited in Sources of the Self. As someone who has also, more or less, dedicated my life to and through this poem, I do understand. But Taylor does not seem to have moved much closer to articulating what inspires him in this passage over the five different decades he has been quoting it. Perhaps this itself is something sublime—that “the burden of the mystery” (in Wordsworth’s phrase) has not been lifted. And yet even here in tarrying with the power of poetic language, Taylor neglects, or remains insensible to, the force of negativity in both Wordsworth and Hölderlin. He is attuned to a deep sense of loss in these poets, but the negativity infusing their work is not only loss, it is just as often a form of shattering and dissolution (as in Wordsworth’s “abyss of idealism,” or when Hölderlin draws near to uralte Verwirrung, “primeval chaos”). Taylor sees the loss as a moment of estrangement before reconnection, but often the shattering and dissolution in Wordsworth and Hölderlin (and other Romantics) comes precisely at the high point of connection with something like what Taylor calls “cosmic order.”
Disconcertingly, as humane, capacious, and generous a thinker as Taylor is, he does not seem to have absorbed or even considered any of the numerous critiques of his own previous work or of the familiar disenchantment narrative of secularization. The book is nearly innocent of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery, the terraforming social forces that bent the crooked timber of modernity into the deformations we live in, and that are now setting it on fire. These powers too are cosmological. As Fred Moten recently professed in a symposium on “The Anti-Zionist Idea”:
“I really truly do believe that the dominant cosmological thinking we live under is inseparable from the forms of political brutality that we find ourselves submitted to. But for Taylor there is no sense of how […]”
And there is no sense of how the cosmic connections, the “great ontological shifts,” sought and instantiated by (Romantic) poetry might abet the struggle against the forces that mutilate language, collective life, and the earth itself. Like negativity, rebellion is also drained from Taylor’s Romanticism. Taylor, then, is both too idealist and not idealist enough. If there is a cosmic order that makes a claim on us, it is surely one that does not align with the present order of things, and so its claim on us must involve the shattering of this regnant order. It is this force of what has been called “revolutionary Romanticism,” overlooked by Taylor, that is found in much of the poetry he discusses, from Shelley’s rebellious defiance to even the lush musings that voice Keats’s knotted ethical conundrums or Baudelaire’s sublime embrace of the mud.3 As the latter once scribbled: “Advice to non-Communists: everything is communal, even God.”
The penultimate chapter of the book, “History of Ethical Growth,” which feels awkwardly tacked on, is a foray into the philosophy of history. It is a cautious celebration of ethical progress, couched in the language of democracy, human rights, and coexistence, with obligatory mentions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi (who are, I think, the only non-white people mentioned by name in the entire book). Abolition becomes the sterling paradigm of historical-ethical progress, with no mention of the slave rebellions and desertions that were its greatest propeller (rebellions that were often explicitly supported by collective visions of the cosmos). Overtly central to the theory of progress here is the saintly defeat of the dragon named communism, the final boss of history. Indeed, while Taylor admits backward slippages in progress, great evils, and violence generally, the only times his gentle, sage tone rises to something like outrage, or even bile and fury, are when the question of communism arises.
Somehow both guarded and triumphant, Taylor’s cosmic connection is a liberal mysticism (his credentials as a communitarian philosopher notwithstanding). His repeated insistence that his faith in progress is definitely not like Hegel protests too much—over the course of a single chapter we read about this idea of ethical growth: “not in the Hegelian sense”; “It has a dialectical form, messy and thus non-Hegelian”; “it is not teleologically directed upward à la Hegel”; “the whole process should be seen more ‘dialectically,’ in a sense that even Hegel couldn’t conceive”; “That it is not Hegelian is obvious”; “the kind of noncumulative and non-Hegelian dialectic we see in our history”; you get the point. My “I’m absolutely not a Hegelian” t-shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Where does this leave us?
Language is inhuman, labile, cosmic, star-streaked. For all that, our dwelling in it is fragile. Currently, the exorbitant, ravenous appetite for and of LLMs (large language models, which give rise to the likes of ChatGPT) utterly yoked to capitalist accumulation threatens to devastate our habitat in language—and, not coincidentally, on earth, given the immense energy expenditure of these technologies. Poetry is an experience of language at its highest pitch of intensity and strangeness, and as such, it also instaurates the “renewing [of] language,” as Taylor asserts. And we are, indeed, “the language animal.” I come not to bury Taylor. His overall body of work remains an immensely important contribution, and if nothing else Cosmic Connections is valuable for turning us back to Romantic poetry, considering the movement and its literary inheritors as an unsurpassable moment for confronting modernity. But revolution is an irreducible element of Romanticism. Perhaps what will have been most precious in this corpus—and the experiences it continues to grant those who encounter it—are the intimations of cosmic connection tending toward a truly new and radical political mysticism still to come. Something like what Gustav Landauer detected in Hölderlin at the turn of the twentieth century, or what pulses in the concluding lines of these two poems by Novalis:
Dann fliegt vor Einem geheimen Wort / Das ganze verkehrte Wesen fort
[Then, there flies away before a single secret word / This entire inverted existence]
(trans. David Wood)
Und so soll dieser Tag uns sein / Ein Weltverjüngungs-Fest
[Therefore this day shall be our Earth’s / Glad Renovation-feast]
(trans. George Macdonald)
It may be high time to recover and forge a “political spirituality,” in Foucault’s phrase, forms suitable for an age of planetary crisis, or what Hölderlin called a “communism of spirits.” Today some talk (and do more than talk) of “uprisings of the earth.” There is connection; it matters what we do with it. Taylor’s vision is, in the end, mostly individualist—a question of what he terms “fulfillment.” But, as Benjamin wrote a century ago:
“Man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers.” (“To the Planetarium”)
At the end of his essay, Benjamin speaks of a specific form of cosmic connection, one named “the proletariat,” and what it augurs: “Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.”
- To crib from Saree Makdisi cribbing from Blake in the former’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. ↩︎
- The second half of Taylor’s concluding footnote in Hegel reads: “Hölderlin seems to open a perspective in which man’s freest expression follows the prompting of nature, bringing nature in a sense into the light of freedom. But this nature…remains inexhaustible and unfathomable, a constant invitation to the creative activity which brings it to light.
Hölderlin’s position is not easy to interpret. In any case it may be inaccessible to philosophical statement. And one senses that madness overtook him before his thought came to mature expression. Hegel alone was left to give definitive shape to the thoughts and insights which they shared at Tübingen and Frankfurt. But to those who want to resume the task of Hegel’s generation, his too-soon-silenced friend may point a surer way.”
↩︎ - For an account of Romanticism’s cosmological visions and collisions, including a framing of the colonial encounter as a “meta-cosmological” combat, we should instead take our cue from Jared Hickman’s Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (2016), no less a grand narrative and also informed by a critical account of Taylor’s A Secular Age, which reads a cosmic revolt in the very philosophy and actions of slave rebellion. ↩︎
Joseph Albernaz
Joseph Albernaz is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.