Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is a 2024 book by the philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor is a major Metamodern, Second Renaissance thinker and this new work is part of his ongoing contribution in this area.

Reflections

Relationship to Second Renaissance and Metamodernism

Taylor's account of Romanticism presents it as a precursor to metamodern and second renaissance thinking. The Romantics, inspired by Goethe and Spinoza’s pantheism, rejected the mechanistic and dualistic view of nature, seeing it instead as a living, evolving whole intertwined with human consciousness.

Art and poetry served as (sacred) means of communion with this dynamic cosmos and the transcendent. This vision prefigures many metamodern themes, including the role of irony in mediating the tension between aspiration reality.

Raw

I often read things—especially when coming across Taylor’s work as a key thinker of the Second Renaissance and metamodern thinking—and I’m struck by this section at the beginning where he talks about the New Romantic Road. He sets out seven theses of the Romantic generation.

I tend to look at intellectual history through a particular lens: I use it to understand how we arrived where we are—a kind of genealogy of the present—and to glimpse possible paths to the future. My earliest encounter with the Romantics was in high school, when I read about them as not exactly a reaction to modernity, but rather an alternate path. They were still influential, yet somehow represented a path not taken.

At the time, I never read Hegel—I found him difficult and obscure. Now I think of Hegel as a major precursor to the Second Renaissance: a kind of spiral thinker exploring the evolution of society.

What stood out to me in the book were those theses right at the beginning, which I found deeply resonant. They are inspired by Goethe and embrace a Spinoza-derived pantheism. The Romantics rebelled against mind–body dualism and against a purely instrumental approach to nature—a rebellion against the dead, mechanical view of the world.

Secondly, they held that our soul communicates with the whole—with nature—and that nature resonates in us, a resonance intensified through expression and art. Our whole idea of nature has undergone a modern shift: it is no longer static or ordered as a collection of beautiful forms, but rather thriving and developing. It is an evolutionary conception of nature—and of human consciousness—whose developments are interlinked. Nature or cosmos cannot reach its full form without our realizing ours.

This connects directly with modern, postmodern, and metamodern thinking: the idea that we are not apart from nature (as in the modernist or premodern view of “over-nature”), but part of its unfolding. History itself is seen as an evolutionary, spiral path—perhaps never complete. The sense of irony arises here too: we are always somehow falling short of our aspiration, and irony makes that bearable—allowing humility within aspiration. This, for the first time, helped me understand the metamodern sense of irony.

That part of the book really stood out for me—this is why I’m interested in all of this. I could see the importance of Romantic art and why art is so central. As Taylor explores later in the chapter, art holds a special role because, in striving toward the mystical or pantheistic sense of nature, we seek ways to touch it. Art, poetry, and language—especially poetic language—act as openings or conduits to that reality. They have a sacred quality in Romantic thought.

All this deeply inspired me. It felt like encountering another route into the genealogy of where we are today—and where we might wish to go—a rich early critique of modernity in its more materialistic, reductionist form.

Making the case for the good and beautiful as real

Taylor is confronting the modern reduction of value to mere subjectivity. In the post-Cartesian worldview, Romantic insights are dismissed as psychological, not ontological. Taylor — like Alexander and McGilchrist — seeks to recover an objective sense of value: the idea that beauty and goodness are real aspects of the world, not just projections of the mind.

Modernity treats physical facts as the only objective realities, while relegating aesthetics and ethics to personal taste. The Romantics, by contrast, saw art as revealing something truly real. Taylor’s challenge is to reconstruct this view within a disenchanted age — to show that meaning and value possess their own kind of reality, distinct from yet more vital than material objects, since they give life its sense and direction.

Raw

At the beginning of this section, Taylor is grappling with the problem of how, from the standpoint of the post-Cartesian separation of mind and matter, the supposed “insights” of Romantic poetry are judged to be merely “in the eye of the beholder” — in other words, subjective. This connects to the second way of dismissing the Romantic claim to order, which Taylor enumerates earlier: seeing it as a simple emotional reaction without epistemic content. Many of our contemporaries take this stance — Romantic poetry, they say, tells us about the psychology of the poet but nothing about the world the poet responds to. It reveals something about the creator’s or reader’s mind, but nothing ontological about what actually exists.

The opposition seems clear — subjective versus objective — but perhaps, as Taylor suggests, there is an undistributed middle here, worth exploring further. This is where I sense Taylor, much like Alexander or McGilchrist, is doing what serious metamodern or sacral philosophers attempt: reconstructing an objective sense of value. They aim to re-establish that the beautiful and the good are real in a way analogous to how we regard the physical world as real — the realm of extension, matter, and measurable stuff.

In modern science, everyone agrees that physical reality is objective: objects, shapes, and the earth itself are real and can be studied. But if you ask, say, a modern architect whether there are objectively better houses — not in the sense of energy efficiency or ecological performance, but aesthetically or ethically better — they would usually say no. They would insist that such judgments are subjective, matters of personal taste.

The Romantics did not think that way. They believed aesthetics matter — that great art touches something profound and real. Taylor’s earlier chapters emphasize that this Romantic sense of art was not a trivial or “magical” one, as in Kabbalistic or new-age thought, where knowing a thing’s “true name” gives control over it. Instead, the Romantics were pointing toward something subtler — something real but difficult to articulate.

Taylor’s project, as I see it, is to speak within an age that no longer believes this and yet to argue for it. Any attempt to move beyond modernity and postmodernity must, in effect, reconstruct the good and the beautiful as real — even though their reality is of a different kind from that of measurable physical things. The challenge is to articulate how this reality works: it’s not “objective” like a ruler’s length, but it is real in a way that deeply matters — indeed, more profoundly real, because it governs our lives. Meters and molecules don’t give meaning; meaning and value do. They are what make life significant.

This is difficult to express rigorously, since such realities always exceed language. Taylor, I think, is trying to point toward something that can only be gestured at — an order of being where beauty and goodness are not illusions or projections but dimensions of reality itself.

More on this TODO

There is a challenge of re-experiencing beauty and goodness as real in a culture that treats them as subjective or illusory. I recall my own confrontation with moral nihilism as a rationalist teenager — moments when destructive acts toward beauty like a friend ripping apart a rose felt wrong but I could find no compelling logical argument against it.

Later experiences of transcendence – in nature, psychedelics, and meditation – are compelling precisely because they seem as real, or more so, than ordinary perception. These experiences suggest an underlying grammar of value — a real structure of meaning through which art, ethics, and beauty can be discerned as better or worse, not merely matters of taste.

Philosophers like Taylor and Alexander seek to rebuild this bridge: articulating a worldview that integrates the rational and the mystical. The goal is not a return to dogma but an evolution toward the trans-rational — a synthesis where meaning and value are recognized as real dimensions of existence, grounding life beyond the nihilism of modernity.

Raw

The question was about how we might begin to see beauty and the good — often elided to some extent — as real in some way. In the society we’re brought up in, especially if one comes from an engineering or science background, that view is considered intuitively mistaken, confused, perhaps even dangerous. So, to drop into a space where these things are experienced as real — how easy is that to do? And what is one’s own experience of that way of seeing?

For me, it’s something I’ve moved in and out of. I think I used to be closer to that view when I was younger, though I was also curious and searching. In my early twenties, when my friend introduced me to Alexander, I was still quite rationalist — and as a teenager, I had been deeply confronted by moral nihilism.

I vividly remember being with a friend in his garden: he took a rose and began ripping it apart. There was something intuitively wrong about that — a kind of desecration of beauty. I asked him why he was doing it, and he replied, “Why not?” And I couldn’t offer a rational argument against it. If he wanted to do it and derived pleasure from it, what was wrong with that? From a utilitarian point of view — which I then found persuasive — there was no reason to object.

That group of friends later got arrested for vandalism. They could also be cruel to animals, for fun. I felt disturbed but couldn’t fully justify why. As a strong atheist and rationalist, I found myself trapped in the nihilism of modernity. I remember writing a school essay about the “purpose of life” — really wrestling with this sense that we are just atoms bumping into atoms.

Looking back, what grounded me were experiences that connected me to something transcendent. The most obvious were in nature — the feeling of being aufgehoben (taken out of oneself) in the mountains or under the stars: that sense of vastness, both humbling and enlarging. Later, psychedelic experiences, and then meditation and other practices, opened similar doors — touching something that felt deeply real.

What is striking about such experiences, unlike dreams, is that they feel more real than ordinary waking life. In dreams, you wake up and dismiss them as illusion. But with these, you wake up and think, “That was more real than reality.” It’s difficult to describe, because it’s an inner experience — not something one can reproduce or measure. Yet it feels profoundly true.

This is where I resonate with Temple’s idea of the grammar of value. We’re not saying there is one best house or that all taste is fixed. But there is an underlying order — a structure — that some works or actions align with more deeply than others. For example, work that touches the human spirit with joy and possibility is better than work that transmits despair and emptiness. Every child understands the dementors in Harry Potter: forces that suck out meaning and hope. Conversely, there are forces — like beauty, kindness, or even chocolate — that restore joy and life.

So the challenge, and what makes this work so difficult, is that we are trying to articulate something that both transcends and includes reason. Practices like meditation help by offering repeated experiences that confirm these dimensions of reality. Philosophers like Taylor and Alexander attempt to build a rhetorical ontology — to use the language of logic and reason to point toward the trans-rational. They combine careful argument with intuitive and mystical insight.

The bridge they are trying to build is between worlds: between the disenchanted rational modernity and a re-enchanted trans-rationality. To “drop into” this space is as strange for us as it must have been, centuries ago, for someone immersed in a Christian worldview to first imagine a world explained purely by science — without God or revelation.

The aim, though, is not to return to premodern faith or revealed truth, but to integrate reason and imagination, science and spirit — to move into a mode of knowing that includes the rational yet goes beyond it: the trans-rational.

This is not some abstract philosophical debate, but something of direct import to our lives and societies, something urgent

Taylor’s project here isn't some abstract philosophy. What he is seeking to show if taken on board would fundamentally alter how we live.

Recognizing beauty and the good as real has deep moral and ecological consequences. Just as when we deny their reality we lose direction and desecrate the world (as we are doing today).

Taylor's purpose is twofold. First, to change worldviews by enrolling us in a new transrational understanding. Second, through that, to help us develop the capacities to perceive and act in alignment with the good and the beautiful.

This is a major aspect of wisdom: sensing the good and acting toward it. Cultivating that requires both inner practice and collective engagement – forming a society that learns, together, how to become wiser.

Transcript

Ultimately, what you’re going to want to do is have this understanding inform action in our lives and societies. This isn’t just a philosophical debate in the bad sense, a "how many angels on a pinhead" kind of discussion. The kind of thinking which ignores the meaningful as he terms it actually destroys our environment and the beauty of our world.

If you don’t believe the good-beautiful is real (the meaningful using Taylor's terminology), if you don’t believe there is an up in the mountain — then you simply don’t care where you’re going, and you’ll probably end up going downwards.

So it really matters to create a grammar and a context for how we can talk about these things. It’s not a world of classic objectivity, where we can go out and perform precise experiments, but rather one where we cultivate certain capacities — capacities of perception, intuition, and discernment.

And of course, if we don’t even think these capacities exist, we won’t try to cultivate them. But if we do want a world in which we can sense what is good, and become more attuned to it — while recognizing how prone we are to self-deception — then we need skill, discipline, and community. It takes work, and it takes doing it together.

Such a society would be one actually becoming wiser, because to be wise is to sense the good and act toward it. That’s why Taylor (and others like him) go to such effort — not just to describe these ideas abstractly, but to enable use to sense them, to feel them.

Part of what he’s doing is trying to shift worldviews — and that can only happen one person at a time. You don’t exactly “argue” people into a new paradigm; you enroll them subtly. In the same way that, historically, people once worked hard to convince others that we should adopt reason and science and discard traditional religion, and that organizing society around religion was mistaken, Taylor is now trying to reverse a deep error of modernity and postmodernity which discarded the good and the beautiful.

In this sense, he’s engaged in a kind of memetic cultivation — spreading ideas that might restore meaning and value to our worldview. It’s not “memetic warfare,” which feels too adversarial, but rather tending an ecosystem of ideas.

And alongside this, like Alexander, he’s not just arguing intellectually — he’s teaching us how to cultivate the capacity to sense and touch these realities ourselves. To perceive beauty and goodness not merely as ideas, but as real presences that can guide action and regenerate culture.

Excerpts and commentaries

Chapter 1

This book is about (German) Romantic generation of 1790s

In my earlier book [Language Animal], I tried to work out the relevance today of the theory of language which was developed among the German Romantics in the 1790s.1 In this book, I want to explore the understanding of poetics which was implicit in (indeed, central to) this theory of language, and then see some of the consequences which flowed from this in the poetry of the last two centuries.

In this book, I shall be speaking a lot about “the Romantic era.” So first of all, a word about what I mean by this term. I am at first mainly concentrating on German writers of the 1790s, because I think that this generation brought about a veritable revolution in our understanding of language, art, and our relation to Nature. … a fuller account would not confine itself to literature and poetry, but also look at music, painting, and other arts. (And I will not be able to resist certain digressions and side glances as the argument unfolds.)

Key features of Romantic generation worldview

This multi-paragraph summary at the start of the first chapter summarizes the worldview of the Romantic generation which is the central thesis of the whole book.

🔥🔥

🔮 Importance for its relevance and resonance with Second Renaissance, Metamodern worldview.

The thinkers of the Romantic generation were a very diverse lot, and had a lot of quarrels and disagreements, but there were common themes and notions. I will try to set out their philosophical outlook, but this will be my reconstruction, which I hope captures its general shape and spirit. I will do this, with perhaps unbearable terseness, in seven interlocking theses.

The first is (1) that, inspired by Goethe, they embraced a Spinoza-derived pantheism. Literal readers of Spinoza might be horrified because this vision completely separated the seventeenth-century thinker from his Cartesian roots. Nature was not to be understood mechanistically. It was more like a living organism. In other words, the Romantics were rebelling against a dead, mechanical view of Nature. And they were also rebelling against mind-body dualism, and against a purely instrumental approach to nature. They rejected the one-sided emphasis on (a) the modes of discipline controlling impulses, particularly erotic; especially (b) disciplines aimed exclusively at efficacious control over the environment. They also wanted to dissipate (c) guilt over disturbing, especially erotic, impulses which upset (a) and (b). They longed for a unification of self, unity with our emotions, with nature in us, and with nature as a whole. In this regard, one of their primary sources of inspiration was Goethe (who was nevertheless uncomfortable with their more rebellious stances).

Our soul communicates with nature

Then (2) our soul communicates with this whole, with Nature. Nature resonates in us, and we intensify this through expression, art.

Nature is unfolding, evolving

Unlike mechanistic and fixed nature of modernity.

But (3) our whole idea of Nature has undergone a modern shift. It isn’t just a static set, or ordered cosmos, of beautiful forms; rather it is striving, developing; Nature is producing higher and higher forms. Spinoza’s natura naturans [nature doing as nature does] is seen as in motion, unfolding, seeking its adequate form.

(4) Hence, we, as part of nature, are also unfolding, striving, like nature, to attain a constantly evolving potential

Moreover (4), this is what we also are doing. We are striving to discover our true form through creative expression, moving stage by stage. This type of development might be called “expressive-historical”: at each stage we try to realize, that is, give expression to our potential; and this realization makes manifest how we fall short, and what further changes are necessary. Indeed, it is this new anthropology of serial self-discovery which lies behind the new view of nature as development (and perhaps vice versa).

(5) Thus there is an interlinked developmental evolution of cosmos and consciousness (humans)

One can see here, at least on this interpretation, how much the romantics are a source of both postmodern nature-based ideology, and, in this last part, of the developmental co-evolutionary thinking of metamodern, integral, second renaissance thought.

(5) The two lines of expressive-historical development, of the cosmos and humans, respectively, are interlinked. Nature or cosmos can’t reach its final form without our realizing ours. That is because the successive stages of the cosmos need continually advancing consciousness, of which humans are the locus. This shows that our “normal,” common sense of our predicament, the notion that the human subject stands apart from, and over against, the world of nature, is only part of the truth. On a deeper level, we discover that Nature is not static, but comes to its fullest realization along with, and through, our own self-realization as rational and free beings. This opens a new path to discovery; not just that of external observation, which issues in science, but also that of internal exploration (see Novalis). There is an important path to truth through the articulation of personal experience, of our emotions, which we explore through art, or poetry in the widest sense. In this search, imagination plays a crucial role.

This shows that our “normal,” common sense of our predicament, the notion that the human subject stands apart from, and over against, the world of nature, is only part of the truth. On a deeper level, we discover that Nature is not static, but comes to its fullest realization along with, and through, our own self-realization as rational and free beings. This opens a new path to discovery; not just that of external observation, which issues in science, but also that of internal exploration (see Novalis). There is an important path to truth through the articulation of personal experience, of our emotions, which we explore through art, or poetry in the widest sense. In this search, imagination plays a crucial role.2

NB: For common sense, he should write modern.

(6) Freedom is self-realization, as rational and free beings in the broad sense

Thus, we arrive at a new ideal, six, that freedom is self realisation – as rational and free beings in the broad sense. This is a much greater conception than that of (negative) liberty.

This notion of expression connects up to a new ideal of (6) freedom, as full self-realization; this goes beyond the notion of negative freedom, freedom from, which is one of the prominent modern understandings of the concept. It also includes, while going beyond, the new understanding of freedom as autonomy, which was both an ethical and political ideal. Kant is the great articulator of this ideal, followed by Fichte. But within the new anthropology of humans as self-developing, autonomy has to include full self-realization.

(7) We arrive at the idea, and ideal, of the reconciling of freedom and unity with nature, within and without via ongoing evolutionary spiral path

This even occurs through a spiral like path in which we first separate from nature and then reconcile with it reaching a new greater unity.

Commentary: wow! We even have the spiral! Think of how close they’re thinking is, at least in crude outline, with that of integral and spiral dynamics.

Points (3) and (4), together with (5) and (6), suggest (7) the ideal of the perfect reconciling of freedom and unity with nature, within and without. The progress to this is then envisaged through a narrative of history, the so-called exzentrische Bahn [spiral path], whereby we leave an initial state of harmonious unity between humans and nature, pass through a period of their opposition, as we develop our reason and increase our autonomy, to return to a higher unity. (This goal was often tersely defined as combining Fichte and Spinoza.) Hölderlin makes this point in his Hyperion Fragment, as does Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.3” [square brackets in original]

Schiller

Chapter 2

Here by meaning he means meaningful

Now the question: 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 from these? 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.

Full excerpt

But from the standpoint of the post-Cartesian, sharp separation of mind and matter, the supposed “insights” of Romantic poetry must be judged to be merely in the eye of the beholder, or in other terms, simply “subjective.” (This connects to the second way of not taking the claim to order seriously, which I enumerated above: seeing it as a simple positive reaction without epistemic content.)

Many of our contemporaries take this stance. Romantic poetry tells us something about the psychology of the poet, but nothing at all about the world this poet responds to. It reveals something about the (creator’s or reader’s) psychology, but nothing ontological about what exists in the world. The opposition seems clear, but perhaps there is undistributed middle here. I’d like to explore further what’s at stake in this debunking claim.

There are purely psychological meanings: I like roses, not peonies. This could easily change, you could even work on me to change it, but: we all agree that there is no right and wrong here; you couldn’t validly convince me to change my mind.

Contrast life meanings: I need air, water, food. This is not just a fact about me; all humans do. And it is not just a fact about humans; animals do. Moreover, even if I took it into my head to believe that I don’t need these things, I would just be wrong, demonstrably wrong. (And you would hope to convince me, before I died of my illusion.)

We might see this difference in kind of meaning as one of location. Liking roses is just in me, whereas these biological needs are facts about the space between animal and ecological niche. But there is also another difference. The biological meanings are decidable through hard natural science; the likes and dislikes aren’t; they are human meanings.

Now the question: 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 from these? 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.

The table with the four quadrants

Let’s make a grid with four quadrants. On the horizontal, we have human versus biological meanings; on the vertical, we have grounded (strong evaluation) versus ungrounded (weak evaluation):

Human Biological
Strong Beethoven, Médecins sans frontières Air, water
Weak Roses v. peonies Ice cream

In the lower right quadrant we have biological meanings which are just matters of individual psychology, like: I like strawberry ice cream, and you like vanilla. In the upper right, we have grounded biological meanings. In the lower left we have weak human meanings, roses versus peonies.

Question: Is there anything in the upper left quadrant?

Normally, we would concede that great music has a meaning which is in some way grounded; also another example: some lives are very meaningful, like dedicating one’s medical skills to helping people through Médecins sans frontières. But we have trouble saying what makes it the case that these are meaningful, a problem which doesn’t arise with biological needs, like air and water. Should that bother us?”

	Human	Biological
Strong	Beethoven, Médecins sans frontières	Air, water
Weak	Roses v. peonies	Ice cream

Shortly, after we have this section after the table

The sense of heightened meaning we experience in reading Romantic poetry involves some notion of my realizing an important potential, which is a constituent of a full human life, of a meaningful life, one worth living. It belongs to “ethics” in an important but often neglected sense, where this term designates the attempt to enumerate the crucial components of a fulfilled, or fully realized, human life.

So there is a strong evaluation underlying the experience here: not responding in this way is missing something important in the range of potentialities for a full life. It’s similar to the experience of great art, hearing Beethoven’s late quartets, or seeing King Lear. But is this intuition valid?

Note that objectivity, groundedness, strong evaluation can go along with variation. To say Beethoven’s last quartets are great music is not to say that people who are deeply moved by something else are misguided. The shape of meaning in music can be complex and varied. Something similar is true of meaningful lives: Médecins sans frontières is not the only such career. But also in the upper left are moral judgments, like: all humans have a right to life. There we don’t allow for variation. To say Beethoven’s last quartets are great music is not to say that people who are deeply moved by something else are misguided. The shape of meaning in music can be complex and varied. Something similar is true of meaningful lives: Médecins sans frontières is not the only such career.

But also in the upper left are moral judgments, like: all humans have a right to life. There we don’t allow for variation of positions: we rightly reject the idea that only superior people deserve to live. Lots of people, even those who would banish great art and meaningful lives from the upper left quadrant, want to plead for the groundedness of ethics.5 But often one can question the arguments they offer to back this up: for instance, utilitarian and Kantian theories.

NTS

"Concreteness" of poetry like concreteness of architecture. We are touched by something beyond ourselves, that is "real".
- e.g. wordsworth in Tintern Abbey
  
  "… 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 all thought, / And rolls through all things"
cf the section from Taylor

When we read the lines from “Tintern Abbey” about “a 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 all thought, / And rolls through all things,” we are not just noting that we humans exist in a larger context, even one which nourishes and sustains us. These lines bring on (what is felt as) an experience of this “motion” and this “spirit” which passes through our world and into us. This goes beyond, for instance, an experience of awe in the presence of a magnificent landscape, because what Wordsworth calls forth is our life now lived in a wider frame, whose constituent inner movements are felt as at one with ours.

…

“Because this connection is partly defined in terms of our experience, we can say that the poetry which reveals it (as a potentiality which already existed) also brings it about or realizes it.

Further notes

Preparatory: fact this stuff does make sense to me now (when its)
Acid of reason. Like acid that you use to distill ore. But also can be too destructive.
- Kant as example. Ever less to stand on.
  - Epistemological difficulties especially of the mind-matter separation
How can we reconstruct the true, good, beautiful. how do we reconnect to the transcendent.