Has modern humanity lost its connection to the world outside our heads? And can our experience of art and poetry help train us for a more elevated resonance with the cosmos? In today’s episode, theologian Miroslav Volf interviews philosopher Charles Taylor about his latest book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In it he turns to poetry to help articulate the human experience of the cosmos we’re a part of. Together they discuss the modern Enlightenment view of our relation to the world and its shortcomings; modern disenchantment and the prospects of reenchantment through art and poetry; Annie Dillard and the readiness to experience the world and what it’s always offering; how to hold the horrors of natural life with the transcendent joys; Charles recites some of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover”; how to become fully arrested by beauty; and the value we find in human experience of the world.
Has modern humanity lost its connection to the world outside our heads? And can our experience of art and poetry help train us for a more elevated resonance with the cosmos?
In today’s episode, theologian Miroslav Volf interviews philosopher Charles Taylor about his latest book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In it he turns to poetry to help articulate the human experience of the cosmos we’re a part of.
Together they discuss the modern Enlightenment view of our relation to the world and its shortcomings; modern disenchantment and the prospects of reenchantment through art and poetry; Annie Dillard and the readiness to experience the world and what it’s always offering; how to hold the horrors of natural life with the transcendent joys; Charles recites some of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover”; how to become fully arrested by beauty; and the value we find in human experience of the world.
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Charles Taylor: Human beings have always had this potential relation to the cosmos, which is profoundly fulfilling for them and in which they, I believe they actually perceive something, not just projection, right? But what's surprising What's disconcerting is that the form this takes is so tremendously different from age to age, culture to culture.
So this leaves us with a huge puzzle, uncertainty where to go with this, but it seems to me these two sides of my proposition. are equally true, that there always is this invitation to some kind of connection, but that the issuer of the invitation or the kind of form it takes and so on are just tremendously different and very often mutually impenetrable.
I mean, we had great trouble understanding, perhaps, the way it works out in another time. This book is an invitation to Explore further in this kind of way. And I think if we do, we will begin to understand how other peoples of the times have lived this to the great benefit of our relationship to them and their relationship to us as far as they still exist, but also to, you know, a very important part of understanding humanity.
I mean, the philosophical anthropology that we end up with. has to have a place for this, or it's obviously, you know, not doing its job.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
Any day is a good day to take some cosmic perspective.
You know, take that split second or a few deep breaths. Stop whatever busy work or performance that you're up to and just ask, how do we relate to everything else? How do we orient ourselves to the world outside of our heads? Now, maybe you shrug and move on, or maybe you stay with me for a few moments longer and get even more curious.
One possibility is that we just are a part of the cosmos, inextricably bound to it, dependent on it, indeed made of it, and someday going back to it. But there's also a little fib in our heads, I'll leave its origins and causes aside for now, but there's this lie that we can sort of float above or outside of this natural order, hitchhiking and train hopping on the back of technological feats and the horrifyingly elegant speed of digital life.
It's a kind of modern hubris, thinking that somehow detaching ourselves from the world It gives us the power to transcend it. But it is a lie. We're embodied and bound to the earth, bound and dependent, but also wonderfully resonant and connected to it. If we would just notice. Maybe you get that resonance taking in a breathtaking view on a hike.
Maybe you get it looking up close at the freckles and the iris of your child's eyes. Maybe like me, you get it when you're completely surrounded and sometimes held under, and you By the heave of the ocean. But articulating this connection to the cosmos seems to be getting harder. It's easier to articulate our autonomy, individuality, and independence.
That's what makes the 92 year old Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor so cool. In today's episode, Miroslav Volf interviews Charles Taylor about his most recent work, a long awaited book called Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In it, he turns to poetry, particularly romantic poetry, to help articulate the human experience of the cosmos we are inextricably a part of.
In the book, he writes, quote, We need a relation to the world, the universe, to things, forests, fields, mountains, seas, analogous. To the relation we have to other human beings we love and works of art where we feel ourselves addressed and called upon to answer together in this conversation, Miroslav and Charles discuss the modern enlightenment view of our relation to the world and its shortcomings, modern disenchantment, and the prospects of re enchantment through art and poetry, the readiness to experience the world and what it's always offering, how to hold the horrors of natural life with its transcendent joys.
Charles recites some of William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Gerard Manley Hopkins "The Windhover." They talk about how to become fully arrested by beauty, what that does to us, and the value we find in the human experience of the world.
Now, probably the best way to catch hold of what Charles is trying to do in Cosmic Connections is simply hear him recite and react to some poetry. Later we'll hear him read some Wordsworth, but let's jump in with his reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins poem.
Charles Taylor: I caught this morning, morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dolphin, Falken, his riding of the rolling level underneath him's steady air, and striding high there, how he rung upon the reign of the wimpling wing in his ecstasy.
Then off, off forth on swing, as a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow bone, the hurl and gliding were above the big wind, my heart in hiding stirred for a burner, the achieve of the mastery of the thing.
So this very, you know, irregular rhythm is meant to capture. What he calls the inskate, which is the inner force of every individual thing. There's a kind of theology behind that. It's a strange mixture of realism, I mean, in the medieval sense, but also Don Scotus has the idea that each individual thing has its nature, and that's what he's trying to What really excited, uh, you know, Hopkins.
And so he invented this extraordinary poetic rhythm, which really arrests you, constantly stops you, and sends you off again in order to, you know, make you feel. You can get a totally different relationship to this bit of the creation, which is, uh, A bird. You've got a different relationship to it if you're not just standing over against it.
looking at it, but also you're caught up. You can't help following the, the, the what? Well, the basic impulse here, and that of course fits his theory of everything is an inkscape, right? So you can think of it as revealing clearly the inkscape, this form, right? If you read it, you live that experience in a different form, and therefore connecting in a different way with the world around.
And It's very powerful and moving to me. So it's at once a look into the interior of things, what makes them act as they do, and something that deeply enthuses us, lifts our spirits, because we feel connected in a way that we weren't before. We stand over against it, it's just something moving. The sky is catching us inside.
Evan Rosa: Listening to Charles read this and explain what the poem did in him, it feels like witnessing exactly what he's trying to point to. You get the sense that he feels it in himself and is arguing from that experience, not just arguing from detached philosophical reflection. And that said, I hope you enjoy the rest of this conversation between Miroslav Volf and And Charles Taylor.
Thanks for listening today.
Miroslav Volf: Charles, it is so wonderful to have you on our podcast to have you discuss your wonderful book, cosmic Connections. This is the title of your book. The subtitle contains the word disenchantment, and the book is, uh, about loss of connection to the world and about attempts to retrieve it above all through poetry.
And the reason for the loss is signaled by the word disenchantment in the subtitle. Can you sketch for our listeners a little bit what you mean by disenchantment?
Charles Taylor: The basic thesis underlying the book is that human beings have always had this potential relation to the cosmos, which is profoundly fulfilling for them, and in which they, I believe, they actually perceive something, not just projection, right?
Yeah, well, the word, of course, refers to Weber's Ensemble, but it's caught on. And there's a big mistake in Weber, I think, which is unfortunately copied. So I used it with some trepidation because it includes too much, too many different things. It includes the decline of religion, for instance, but it also includes the fading of this thing I'm talking about, cosmic connections.
It includes the end of magic, which is really close to the etymology of the word, and in English as well as in German. And the thing is that There's a lot of good and bad in all of these disconnections, and if you take it as a whole, You're in danger of thinking they're all the same, and they're all either good or bad, and plainly the development of modern medical science is a very good thing.
But I would also say that the total insensitivity to the connection with the cosmos It's bad. It's a bad thing. And we, it's not only bad because it's a deprivation of a human fulfillment, it's bad because it's lies behind our terrible behavior, which are ruining our, not just the planet, but our very future and the tremendous difficulty we have in changing course.
around that. So I'm saying this because I've already had a couple of reactions to the subtitle. Does that mean I wouldn't go to a doctor?
Miroslav Volf: And in a sense, it suggested that kind of re enchantment might be the solution to the problem. And when I think of the word re enchantment, obviously you mentioned it has so many different connotations, disenchantment, but then also re enchantment.
When I think about I'm walking through the forest, I think about a Grimm's fairy tale about Hansel and Gradle, they walk through the forest and see this, um, that that's also a kind of pragmatic enchanted, uh, space. And they see this really wonderful house that is, that is beautiful and that's made up sugar and they want to eat it.
I immediately think about Adam and Eve in Paradise, the tree of life, good for food and delight for for the eyes. And I'm wondering, well, is Reen uh, a kind of safe, safe space to be, so to speak? But, uh, uh, you. You're speaking in some ways, uh, what I think maybe, but let me ask you, are you speaking what Lukács had in mind when he spoke about Verdinglichung, uh, a kind of thingification of the world, a world being rendered mute, a pure object, rather than there being any more personal kind of connection with the world?
Charles Taylor: Exactly. I mean, that's one of the many strands in what Weber has called disenchantment. Yeah. Ah. The reason why I doubts about it and now I feel remorse about using that in the subtitle is that it covers a lot of other stuff, too, and I took it for granted that somebody who read the book would see that it is very much aiming at a certain dimension of connection or disconnection.
But maybe it's a mistake to put something in the subtitle that requires that you read the book.
Miroslav Volf: No, but I think for anybody who does read the book, it becomes pretty clear what you're after. Hartmut Rosa, whose book, Resonance, you praise in your book speaks about the kind of feature of the modern world.
And I think he puts it under the rubric of acceleration, kind of the internal logic of always, always more that does not allow us to have this resonant relationship with the world. How much is something like that in the forefront of your view? Oh, very
Charles Taylor: much so. Yeah. I mean, because. The whole relation I'm talking about, the sense of connection, is a kind of art, looking at resonance.
I mean, I agree with you that the concept needs further elaboration, which he's trying to do with the concept of, well, there are different axes of resonance, and the axis here is the one of our relation to the world, in which, which is no longer resonant, that's not part of what the relationship consists in.
I'm being very general, but people who adopt this very much positive view of modernity and all its aspects, I think, you It is a relation which is more and more one of the things I'm thinking there was an object that can be used in various ways, and there's something disastrous in this. So I, in a certain way, I read Hartman's book, an earlier book, actually, which was exploring this.
But, you know, I left that. We're going to introduce people to what I
Miroslav Volf: want
Charles Taylor: to talk about.
Miroslav Volf: Part of this idea, I think, for Hartmut as well, but more generally, one side of it is kind of the muteness of the world. And one might ask, why is the world become mute? And some of it is, might have to do with us seeing the world through the eyes of sciences where it becomes sometimes perceived as an object.
Part of it may be because we look at it through the perspective of utility, and then the idea that the world is always an instrument. There's an instrumental relationship, and the inherent value is missing. To what extent do you think that defines the problem? This world not having, or things in the world, not having inherent value, but they're always seen in terms of instrumental value.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, I think that's absolutely essential. There's a very amusing anecdote in Tocqueville's Democracy in America, where he goes up to the, what's in the northeast and so on. It's very, still very wild. And he looked at these forests and these red shadow looking on it, but he meets some people who are loggers there and they can't understand.
They're very suspicious. I think he's trying to cut into their, and he tries to explain, no, no, no, that's not what it's all about, but they can't. get their minds around that that could be what it was all about. Now, I think that illustrates something very, very deep, which you, you can develop, you can develop intellectually a belief in modern science, et cetera, and that can be a, but you can build also in your practical existence.
This kind of a relationship where, you know, if you duly forget it, we want to chop this down in order to get stuff to building and make our living. And certainly, I think that's always a danger, but the whole modern mindset encourages people to carry on like that.
Miroslav Volf: Maybe we start from something with which people are familiar, namely Ann Dillard.
Charles Taylor: Yeah. What's surprising? What's disconcerting, and this is what I raised in the last chapter, is that the form this relation to the cosmos, to the inhabitant, takes is so tremendously different from age to age, culture to culture.
And that's why in the last chapter, I throw in a lot of things like, you know, contemporary like Annie Dillard, but at the same time, I speak about Aboriginal culture. Spiritualities, and so on. I mentioned some in the Canadian context, and so this leaves us with a huge puzzlement of uncertainty where to go with this, but it seems to me these two sides of my proposition are equally, that there always is this invitation to some kind of connection, But the kind of, you know, form it takes and so on are just tremendously different and very often mutually impenetrable.
I mean, we had great trouble understanding, perhaps, the way it works out in another time. Though this book is an invitation to that. explore further. And I think if we do, we will begin to understand how other peoples of the times have lived this to the great benefit of our relationship to them and their relationship to us as far as they still exist, but also to, you know, a very important part of understanding humanity.
I mean, the philosophical anthropology that we end up with has to have a place for this, or it's obviously not.
Miroslav Volf: So, at the very end in this chapter on, uh, that includes Dillard's, um, pilgrim at the Tinker Creek, you talked about her writings invite or lead us to something like readiness to resonate. with the creation.
And you distinguish this readiness to resonate with actual experiences of, of resonance. And so her writing, uh, prepares us for it. Can you articulate a little bit more this distinction between readiness and what does it take for us as we are today to become ready to see something that otherwise remains close to us?
Yeah,
Charles Taylor: it's this readiness. And there it is. Yeah, part of it is that it's something we're on the threshold of being prepared for. We've had certain feelings in certain moments that we didn't maybe follow up. Feelings of awe, feelings of wonder, feelings of connection, which we didn't follow up and try to follow up.
And you do transform these. These initial vague intuitions, you transform them, make them more powerful by identifying them. I mean, her, her picking out the light on the water and so on, you know, I imagine what that's like. And as I've had experiences like that, and it makes me stop and think about them, stop and look at them.
In a way that
Miroslav Volf: I wouldn't have before. So in some sense, also, what she does is maybe what a good photographer can do, freeze in a given moment, a particular form of experience of which one becomes an aware and is ready to recognize it again, and then actually resonate. Yeah. So when you talk about Dillard, and I'm going to ask now a question about her, but also more broadly about, about the book, what seems to be highlighted in her work, this arresting images that you have just described, the question then becomes, does that highlight an aspect of our experience of nature but hides something else.
And the reason why I'm going there is I have recently been immersed in Arthur Schopenhauer and his rather pessimistic reading of the world. And I might imagine that his response to Anne Dillard would be, which is what he says about some of the romantic descriptions of nature, it's like they think that's a peep show.
And so they highlight certain interesting features of it, certain aspects with which we easily resonate and forget what's going on actually in the nature itself. And you know, his example is you see the image of a lion chasing a gazelle and you can think of it as an aesthetic experience, but you can put yourself in the position of lion.
You can put yourself in the position of gazelle. And if you're in a position of gazelle, then suddenly this whole thing looks like a horror show. So, how does one integrate into these experiences of resonance with nature, kind of the horror that underlies this? Miloš has emphasized some of that in his poetry.
Charles Taylor: Yeah. I mean, well, that's a very interesting question. I don't think I really have the answer to it. I mean, the, the proper answer to it would be to be able to take on board those terrible features of the mind, yeah. And still be unshaken from the deep sense of resonance and tell the rich to take that on board, not to approve of it, to not be shaken in some way by it, but to have a sense that there's something there, which is there.
transcends that. And anyway, Schopenhauer, of course, has this notion of when you see a real work of art, you get a vision that goes beyond that, right? So in a certain sense, he's on this, you know, he has his own version of what you would otherwise criticize in others. But, but that demands a lot, I mean, that you be able to enfold in the same contemplation, in the same sense, in the same knowledge of both these aspects.
It's easy for the blood to wipe out, to sponge, but, uh, it would be a mistake to let that be covered over by, or set aside by, because there is some real connection here, potential connection, which I think is something deeply sought by us, therefore, the human fulfillment, and also which is a necessary condition of, though not sufficient, of the proper relationship to nature, the planet, life.
Miroslav Volf: In your brief comments on Dostoevsky, especially one of the speeches of Zosima, where he gives account of experiences of his brother, which became then an opening for himself to experience something similar, you speak about this, this larger, more serious sense of the need of almost inner transformation to be able to appreciate nature.
And I'm thinking of Zosima himself, then, when he speaks about loving, even the sinner's sin, and immediately after that goes loving everything in the nature or nature notwithstanding whatever is found in it that that may not be very lovable, but that's almost like a discipline that one has to have a stance toward rather than simply something being elicited in us by nature itself.
Yeah, that's absolutely
Charles Taylor: right. And I wanted to introduce that because I didn't want to make the book seem as if it was claiming that this kind of vision was always induced by poetry, and the contrary, it can be induced by something very different. I mean, in the case of the brother, it wasn't introduced by any poetic line to either he or anyone else.
But it is a really moral slash theological vision which crashed in on him, right? And that's what Tocino picks up, and then it's really one of the central messages of the book I take, and I read the brothers in that sense. So I wanted to make clear that I wasn't talking about all kinds of breaking in, breakings in of new visions.
I was talking about the particular ones. That are brought along by, uh, art and by particularly poetry.
And that's exactly how this poetry works. It's not a philosophical argument that there's a horse running through all things. But you have strong experience of that. And because it is so meaningful to you, you've got a sense of joy of being connected madly.
Evan Rosa: Another piece of poetry that Charles chose to read and work through was a portion of Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth.
Here's his recitation.
Charles Taylor: So this is the Tintern Abbey, right?
I have felt the presence that disturbs thee with the joy of elevated thoughts. The 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 thought, and rolls through all things.
Now, my claim is that here, you get to feel that, and a sense of that happening. As against I, Siboney, in a moment of course, say that there's a, you know, there's a force that's in, that builds all things, and you get a really feel for it, you see it coming at you. You are the mind of man, and it's running through all things towards you.
Miroslav Volf: So it's
Charles Taylor: a,
Miroslav Volf: powerful sense, but in some sense, even, even in, in poetry that came out, uh, especially in treatment of Milosz, but I have loved a poem of, by Rilke that you, that you quoted. And the last stanza of that poem is, I care. And in me stands the house. I protect myself. And in me is the protection.
Beloved that I became, on me rests the image of a beautiful creation, and then this stunning line, and weeps itself out. And so you do have this almost Zosima sense of the, or even in some sense Schopenhauer sense of creation that is groaning under its own suffering and weight. And the human being is not there simply to observe, uh, or to complain or to, uh, even do something, but, uh, but, but there first and foremost, to have compassion, to understand, to let the creation weep itself on, on one.
And I was struck by it. And I thought, wow, it's such a, such a different way of perceiving, uh, our relationship to the world.
Charles Taylor: And it's not the one that I associate most of the time with Richter. I mean, I think what we're really aiming at, we get in the, to me, crowning elegies, which I think are seven and nine, which is a kind of vision of And this is very close to another aspect of theology, vision of glory, right?
Elegy, right? And uh, I was questioning why reading something that I might later on, if I do, I want to read that passage in the seventh elegy. So there is, this is something that you don't just discover, but that you realize in poetry. And I think the elegy is striving for a place where, I think in the seventh and the ninth you have passages.
But there's no There's a sense here of compassion. There's a sense of heroes on this hill. I mean, to be here is glorious. Right, right. So, puzzled by that because a lot of Ritka is close to Christianity, and close to that kind of, that kind of, you know Invocation of Compassion is very close to Christian theology.
On the contrary, it goes in this other direction.
Miroslav Volf: That was completely, maybe I'm misreading it completely, what he's trying to do right here, but this innenwelt, the world within, uh, seems to carry with it at least this possibility. And maybe my imagination was triggered not just by Schopenhauer, but also recently I've read in Bruno Latour's book, After Lockdown.
And he talks there about, you know, after lockdown coming out, I suppose, and then not being able to relate to anything around with ease, except the moon. Because when he looks at the sun, he thinks of global warming. When he looks above the The fields, he thinks, why aren't poppies in the wheat? What have been done to these fields that they are like that?
And so it goes in introductory comments. And there's a kind of sense of guilt also in relationship to nature, to what we have done to it that requires stances that aren't simply a kind of Herrlichkeit and being taken into something of the beauty of the nature. Yes,
Charles Taylor: that's right. And, but I mean, paradoxically, I believe an absolutely essential instrument to fight against this kind of destruction of the planet is this kind of perception of an arresting kind of beauty that moves us very deeply, which we begin to cherish as part of our, our lives.
So I think that, you know, in a sense, if we could get into a kind of loop. where we were so horrified at what we're doing that we don't feel we have the right to feel anything but the horror, but that may be scoring an own goal.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Zosima actually might be interesting in this regard because he has almost this, this, uh, twofold vision.
One at the same time, but one can see the other religious thinkers where something of deep value has been perceived as a human being, but also the sin of that human being is recognized. Also, some kind of deep fragility, uh, and the problematic character of, of, of things. And one can affirm both. And in a sense that becomes a motivator to, to be engaged with, uh, with the phenomenon.
Charles Taylor: Yeah. And otherwise you are, if you just concentrate on the positive resonance, you're in a certain sense, uh, fooling yourself because that exists along with destruction, guilt, I mean, responsibility for destruction and all these. So, it's a real achievement, which the book doesn't claim any progress on.
It's a real achievement to take it all in and not have the rebaths of destroy your appreciation of the beauty. So, it's an achievement we ought to aim at because it's part of our, essential part of our getting over. a very sick and bad relation that we're in to nature and the planet and so on, but it couldn't look simply self indulgent and ignoring.
Miroslav Volf: I was so fascinated by this line from Milosh Living in the Rose. I think that, that, that seems like, like this both articulates, kind, kind of the, the pleasantness of this attraction to the beauty that it is, but also that there are certain reality and falsity about it, uh, at the same time. And he doesn't let you stay in the rows.
Right. You're shutting out all the best. Yeah. And. I'm not allowing
Charles Taylor: that it exists. Yeah, yeah. Um, O'Meal is a great poet of the 20th century. I think, astonishingly, he really had an effect. He really changed history. It's
Miroslav Volf: something very wrong. Do you think this, um, I mean, I'm going back to this dual vision that he has as well, both the tragedy, but also the possibilities that are there.
And then he thinks both at the same time. I find it in the Christian faith, but I also read folks like, I think you with Dreyfus and Kelly, you've probably seen their small book, um, All Things Shining. Yes, yes. Which I think is a, it's a wonderfully written book, but it has a kind of pretty radical critique of the Christian theology.
And basically, it's, its idea is, uh, God is the ultimate value, and therefore instead of God. kind of imbuing the world with value, God sucks it up, uh, sucks it away, uh, because, uh, you ought to value God rather than creation, so that there's this competitive relationship between God and creation that is identified.
And the same is true of my colleague here at Yale, Martin Heglund, In his book, This Life, there again is this competitive relationship as if the divine and the human and the created cannot be loved at the same time and love precisely creation because it's God's. I know. I mean, there's this
Charles Taylor: blindness, I think, to a lot of very central facets.
Christian faith, but it's also been spread and authenticated by the behavior. So, I mean, there's something really, to me, so totally wrong with taking these people as the spokespeople of authentically giving the demands of what arises from Christian faith. This just seems to me to be wildly wrong. But, uh, It doesn't seem to be possible to stop people who are outside the faith altogether from picking up the impressions by, um, that kind of politics as against from what you and I would say as being the proper dictatorship.
Description. Appreciated.
Miroslav Volf: And you point out in your analysis of Miloš also that there's a particular form of Christianity that he stands for and very self consciously stands for in contrast to other options available. Yeah.
Charles Taylor: But he really struggled with his Christian faith, and the struggle is always there.
That's really what, I mean, Father Homsky, right, is the one who gave religious instruction back then in the 30s, in general, right? His whole Christian faith seems to be, to be, seems to me to be constantly attempting to set that aside, break through that, and something more authentic, as he found.
Miroslav Volf: But as I mentioned to you, I wanted to talk to you briefly also about, uh, Hartmuth Rosa's.
Uh, work, uh, especially his concept of resonance and to what extent you find it helpful and where do you see the limits of the resonance concept?
Charles Taylor: Well, I think it has to be further developed, and the attempts that Hartman is making is his different forms of resonance, because plainly the concept is simply stretched too far if you include relationships in love with somebody else, a sense of glory looking at the universe, a sense, you know, other kinds of resonance.
What we're going to think about this concept, after we worked out what these different axes, as he calls them, have, maybe it's going to be a kind of capstone over the whole lot. But the important discoveries need to be made in these different axes, right? I think that certain axes really moved him, and the word resonance seemed to be the right word to use here, including obviously relationship to nature.
But, uh, you could say at the end of the day when we've worked out what these different axes are, what do we have to say about the overarching concepts of resonance? Will we still have the same, the same concept or maybe another word or further distinctions? And so I think it's, it's all this is a work in progress as I see it.
There is a Particular reason for I being very enthusiastic, which is one of the areas that the term covers that, uh, we're both members of a group that, anyway, used to be prior, well after reconstituted unsu being reconstituted after the, at the pandemic in May. So the critical theory, right? Mm-Hmm. . Now, greater part of critical theorists are followers of not so much marks now, but H Mass and so on.
Right. And there is no place there for, as was part of the cornerstone of the criteria of critical theory, anything but very, very important area, the area Relations within polity and relations that are defensible against exploitative and so on. Very, very, very important. What there isn't in that majority view is a sense of what I call ethics.
That is the something is the right thing to do and the right thing to be because it's a a deep fulfillment of what it is to be human, right? So, Aristotle was against cat. So, I'm constantly having arguments with with Juergen and others and so on about, about this, leaving out something tremendously important.
And, um, they say on all cat So, I can see in Hartman's, and Hartman and I are pretty much self analyzing these discussions when we got together in Prague. He wrote
Miroslav Volf: a dissertation on you, didn't he?
Charles Taylor: Way back, yeah. And with actually somebody, Dr. Fodder, that was very much in the Habermas realm, very interesting work too.
So, it's in that context, the context of that struggle, that I want to, in our conception of ethics and morals, I want I think this is a distinction. They are, we can use the two words separately. Morals concerns the rules of what we should do to each other and what we shouldn't do to each other. So the Ten Commandments of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are good articulation of morals, but there's something crucial missing here, including when we think of the goods concerned with human.
relations, because they, well, put it in theological terms, it's not just enough to treat people right. What you need is a powerful sense of real love for human beings. And there's something not only that makes you behave not fully morally, if you lack it, There's something to do with the fullness of human life, right?
So when I see people, when I, of course, when you see Christ in the New Testament, but when I see people around me who have this real sense of compassion for human beings and are activated by it, I see some real. important fulfillment that makes human life fuller, better, even regardless of the consequences, something guidable in and for itself.
And I think a lot of present day political discussion just marginalizes that.
Miroslav Volf: In the sense Rosa picks up aspects of it with resonances, would that be, would that be right? Yeah, that's right. That's his route into not being satisfied. So my question partly, partly about resonance was he, he theorizes it as episodic, uh, and but not as a kind of state.
And it would seem to me that some kind of relationship more than just, as you put it here, readiness, for something and experience something has to be also had in terms of resonance, they may must be levels of resonance when I think, for instance, when I go to my home, and if I like my home chair in which I sit, or whatever it is, the This is not really, according to his definition of resonance, this is not really resonance and this is not episodic.
I can anticipate it. I could come, I don't control it strictly, but nonetheless, I sit in that chair. I touched the chair and I feel I am somehow in sync in a, in a relatively low key kind of a, kind of a way. And it seems to me that that, that element needs to be there, both in relationship to nature. uh, and to the world at large, um, and to our particular, um, habitations or particular experiences that we have in the world.
Charles Taylor: So, I mean, that's one of the very important issues that needs to be worked out. Is the concept bias very resonant in a bias? What it invokes in us, narrowing it, that concept to the point where similar phenomena, which are also very important, get ignored. Do
Miroslav Volf: you think it is able to integrate, um, something like agape?
Something like the need to be with, notwithstanding the brokenness, uh, of, of, of that for which you have love?
Charles Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. And also the restorative power for both partners, for both Asians in this religion. Yeah. Restorative power. Yeah. Yeah. Now, what kind of Modification at the end of the day, would that involve for the concept of residence to, to incorporate that is a very good question.
I mean, it's, I still see it as a research program, research. I mean, I was thinking out of the program.
Miroslav Volf: And a very good one. I was so excited when I read the book, you mentioned your distinction between ethnic ethics and morality. I don't know whether you know that we here at Yale about 10 years ago have started teaching this class called Life Worth Living.
And it really is a kind of pluralistic approach to, uh, kind of the sense. What kind of life is truly worthy of our humanity? It's not simply about means to life. It's not simply about rules to life. It is about what constitutes us as human beings. And I think it was your terminology. How do we grow into the fullness, into the fullness of that?
How do you, how would you relate what you do in Cosmic Connection to this particular question? The question of human, human fullness or in our terms of life that is truly worth our humanity, worth the living. I think it's that kind of thing.
Charles Taylor: Connection is a paradigm example of a very important element or dimension of precisely this.
What's a really worthwhile, but what is a really full human life? That's another way of looking at the our ourian type of perspective. What is it? Is, is this a feature of the really full, fulfill the human life? And you know, I very much think it is. So that's a. That's one of the reasons for looking into it, because, yeah, we're at this length.
And I, but I mean, it's two things. It is one of those, and it's very much neglected by all sorts of people. I, I, I mean, the loggers at Tocqueville Met. What's important is furthering economic progress, but also earning money, feeding our families, and so on. The purely utilitarian relationship to the forest was all that really, uh, impinged on them.
It's really, really important. And what was another, another standpoint, it would be very influenced by Chateaubriand, a writer who wrote about, you know, the, the latches, his own journey to America, where the sense of awe and wonder is, is really of the Romantic period, very, very important for him, right? So, uh, I'm passionately for not Squeezing out this intrinsic fulfillment dimension from our understanding of what it is to be human, and what is it to be a good human, which is, I mean, it's a danger in that the two, the two mistakes, uh, the mistake of looking at the world purely instrumentally and the mistake of looking at our moral lives purely in terms of the issue of who does what to whom and what they have a right to do.
I think these are two mistakes that strengthen each other, that connect together. Do
Miroslav Volf: you think that part of the problem is, uh, what you've described in one of your earlier small books, a certain misconception about ethics of authenticity? a kind of sense that my good is my private simply good that authenticity can be defined by myself and therefore what I need always is a multiplicity of means in order to get to be able to do in the moment I need to live authentic life I can I can do or when the dreams that I have change I can always have resources in order to live that kind of a life.
I think Hartmut Rosbach has analyzed. The problem in those terms, he uses this in Resonance book, he uses this analogy of a painter who obsesses with means, with a studio, with paints and brushes and everything else and never really gets to paint and sees that almost as a kind of window into cultural predicament in which we find ourselves.
Charles Taylor: Yeah. But what I also want to say in that, I'm finding my own path. is not something I do completely on my own. It would just be impossible. But what I, what we all need to find our own path is sympathetic interlocutors who may have a totally different vocation in life or direction. But what we need is someone who can, I mean, I'm thinking today of a really crying need on the part of young people, teenagers.
particularly rendered worse by the pandemic, who don't have somebody to talk to, to sort of work out what's, what they'd really like to do. So they have this sense that there's something missing in their lives, but they don't know what it is. And what they need above all, there's a sympathetic, obviously older, would be very good, interlocutor that can kind of ask them, you know, what do you feel close to?
What kind of things interest you inside? Get them to be able to bring out and articulate. And that can make a huge difference. I mean, a great sense of pull over life, that there's nothing, I don't see where to go with this, nothing, excuse me, can be actually alleviated by that. What we need is more interlocutors that young people can speak to.
So, I mean, I'm going a little bit too far on the point, but the point being that, uh, it's not a kind of egoism or concern simply with my own inventions, which is involved in heredity and insight that people have different vocations, if you like. It's very much something which has got to be worked out.
Miroslav Volf: And as you have shown, actually in the act itself of formulating it for oneself, it already involves so much cultural dialogue that has already occurred.
But my question to you now, as you speak about this interlocutors, and it's relevant for the course that we are teaching. Don't we need to have a Right, kinds of interlocutors, because I can imagine interlocutors who are simply processing the dream. Uh, with the person without illuminating that dream in any significant way.
I think in particular of a person who was a student in one of our classes. Um, a girl from India. Uh, and who, after we first time taught the class, we wanted to find out how we did and because we wanted to teach it, uh, again, and then she said this in the class, this is the first time that I was given permission to take with intellectual seriousness.
The great question of what is the purpose of my life? Who ought I be? All the intellectual energy was always diverted for her to the important questions, apparently, that matter. That is to say, how do we achieve this or that goal that we are setting ourselves? How do we get proper means to achieve the ends that we deem somehow important?
But this, this, Other question was not even, not even asked. So our purpose is somehow to validate the intellectual effort to be placed in that. Uh, and of course your life is a testimony on how much intellectual effort is necessary and, and can be spent to explore just those kinds of issues.
Charles Taylor: No, yeah, but that's extremely important that giving, uh, done it at all, instead of probably giving the Right to speak to, are they, are they inviting them to speak for themselves and not creating an atmosphere, kind of fear or a sense in advance that they're going to be laughed at or dismissed or, well, I congratulate you for this class.
Well, you see, you managed to watch it.
Miroslav Volf: Well, in a sense also to, to expose them to various alternatives. To which people have devoted centuries of deep reflection so that they don't have to come de novo, uh, and invent something, but, but, but they can, they can learn from deep wisdom of various traditions that are, that are there.
As always, it's a beautiful thing and rewarding thing. Having a conversation with you. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us, but thank you also for taking the time to write this book and so many books before.
Charles Taylor: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this conversation too, very much.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Charles Taylor and Miroslav Volf. Production assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce this show.
For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu, where you can find all sorts of resources, podcasts, articles, books, and so much more that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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