“Cosmic Connections” by Charles Taylor

In this philosophical treatise, Taylor uses the lens of Romantic poetry to describe the human desire for a cosmic connection with the objects of nature and the world at large, as well as humanities place within it, across time and space. Taylor posits, “The human being is a microcosm, in which the order of the cosmos is repeated in miniature…. We need to understand the larger order to know ourselves, but we explore this order through the hints that we find in ourselves.” Taylor describes the tensions within modern society, “Our freedom required that we develop the powers of abstract reasoning, which objectifies our world, and obscures some of its meanings for us. This enabled us to develop a consciousness of radical autonomy…. But our complete fulfillment comes in a recovery of this contact on a higher level, integrating our gains of reason and freedom. This completes our self-realization…. The Romantic appropriation of these Renaissance theories moves the emphasis away from knowledge (scientia, episteme), in the sense of a clear, self-conscious (or self-aware) grasp of reality; it moves it away also from the kind of knowledge which enables control; it focuses rather on the experience of connection.” 

Taylor describes a realm of life that he refers to as the interspace, “the space of interaction between us and the world.” He continues, “Our attitude in the modern world toward earlier societies who saw themselves as living in an enchanted universe, where animals have souls, and sacred spaces emanate power, is generally one of dismissive condescension. These poor people were just deluded, projecting all sorts of wild features onto a dead, neutral universe. Once we grasp the independent status of the interspace, we can see that this condescension is misplaced…. We will not be ready to accept these earlier world views as literal truths, but we can now recognize them as earlier attempts to grapple with issues that we are not that good at dealing with, the more so in that many of us want to deny that they exist.”

Finally, Taylor invokes the concept of reenchantment with the cosmic powers alive throughout nature. “Post-Romantic poetry is a response to modern, particularly post-Enlightenment, disenchantment, in a broad sense. This broad sense covers more than the removal of magic forces and powers from the world (the original etymological sense of Entzauberung); it also can extend to a picture of the universe as the realm of mechanical causation, without intrinsic human meaning. Much of this poetry, and art in general, can be seen as an attempt to “reenchant” the cosmos.” Taylor concludes, “The “landscapes” of meaning we live by are never fully explicable by features of the world beyond our experience but have to be explained and justified hermeneutically. Many of the crucial meanings that our world has for us are only identifiable in what I have called here the “interspace.””