Ideas - This Way to Re-Enchantment, with Philosopher Charles Taylor

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor speaks to Nahlah Ayed about his life’s journey, from growing up in Montreal in the 1930s, his 1991 CBC Massey Lectures, and why he turned to Romantic poetry to re-enchant our sense of the meaning of life in his book, Cosmic Connections.

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This is a CBC Podcast. Why not? Okay. Hahaha. There is no place that is not true to the Don Thon announcement. Only those small questions that are loud. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. A pure day. Then the steps of the Lord. Call the steps of the Lord to the dream temple of the future.

We're listening to a man who's been enchanted by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It's nice to hear it though. Yeah. It'd be unusual if it forecast a longer German. It would be nice to do it a little bit. It's always the first time. Yeah. Okay, one more. The reader is Charles Taylor. At 93 years old, the Canadian philosopher has a new book out. Enchantment is his topic, along with what Taylor calls the Age of Disenchantment. and the forces that unfold. Not only the paths, not only the meadows in the evening, not only the clear evening after late thunderstorms, and not only the nearing night and a evening evening, but the nights, but the heights of the summer,

nights, but the stars, the stars of Rilkes' poem. Oh, in the spring would understand, annunciation would echo everywhere. First, those small questioning notes, which a clear confident day would surround with heightening silence. Then up the calls, up the flight of steps, to the dreamt-of temple of the future. Then the trill of the fountain, whose jettison through its own falling as in a union of promise and play. And up ahead, summer.

Not just all the summer dawns. Not just how they changed today and glistened with Genesis. Not just the days which are mild around flowers and above around the full-formed trees, forceful and strong. Not just the calm relevance in these outspread powers, not just the paths, not just the meadows as evening deepens, not just after late thunderstorms the pulsing clarity, and not just the approach to sleep in a twilight, a premonition, but the nights, all these towering summer

nights, and the stars, the stars of Earth, ought to be dead one day and then know them forever, all the stars, for how, how, how to forget them. And then, after all that, I think thing is summed up by, hios aen is hewak, to be here is glorious. So you get a sense of that night sky, it's shining for you, it's got, yeah, it really is. The cosmic poet at his best. Yeah. Charles Taylor has long been Canada's most famous philosopher.

He gave the Massey Lectures back in 1991 on the malaise of modernity. His major books are listed among the most important philosophical contributions of recent decades, works like Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. Writing in The New Yorker, fellow Canadian Adam Gopnik calls him a hard thinker to pigeonhole, at once precise and prophetic. I mean, the great thing here is the sense of someone looking at the sky, looking at the earth, and feeling a sense of exultation, just exultation, exultation. It's this, the sense of glory shining through is what you get in the passage that, as it were, climaxes in Hylsine's Tchaolini. Tell me. Taylor's latest book is Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.

It's a story of how poets, beginning in the Romantic period, found a new avenue to pursue meaning in life. The poets were responding to huge changes in society linked to scientific discovery and industrialization. We have this new category, I would argue, after the 18th century of something which powerfully evokes something very powerful, in this case what we would use the word glory, glorious, but would powerfully evoke that without making a claim. This is how it really is.

Not claiming to tell you how things really are. The poem is humble in that respect. In other ways, it's infinitely ambitious. Charles Taylor sees something profoundly important going on in a poem like this one by Rilke. It's something hard to put into words, but still, it's more important than all the disputes in Western philosophy. And Taylor feels it's key to how humanity must respond now as we face new causes of disenchantment. For one of the world's most celebrated philosophers to come to this conclusion does take some explaining. That's why Cosmic Connections is a very thick tome, 598 pages. I wonder what your early thoughts were

about the most important thing about living a full human life. Yeah, I have to sort of reconstruct backwards. To see where Taylor's coming from, it helps to start at the beginning. It would have been music, poetry before these big political questions and these big civilizational questions.

I am curious if you remember what the first poem was that you fell in love with. Well, I don't know exactly for it, but Keats was to me one of the most remarkable. Why? Oh, just the music. I met up with Charles Taylor around the corner from his home in Montreal. He's lived in the city off and on since 1931. I had a wonderful teacher in, I suppose high school,

and he was English, a poet himself, and he sort of, this is the beginning of a lot of things, he taught us the Romantic Beat Radio. And it's through that poetry that I got. And it's just kind of full circle. Yes. Do you remember that teacher's name by any chance? Do I have to what? Do you remember that teacher's name by any chance? Yeah, Patrick Anderson. He was an Englishman. and he taught at Selwyn House, my school.

Selwyn House is an English-speaking private day school for boys. Historically, it's been the school of choice for the sons of Montreal's Anglophone elite, the Molsens, the Bronfmans. Charles Taylor was born into that elite, more or less. His family lived in Outremont, at that time a town just outside Montreal. It's since been swallowed up by the city. His father spoke only English and ran a steel company. But Taylor also belonged to an important French-speaking family.

My mother's family was a Beaubien, and the Beaubien dominated outlaw in those days. That was my horizon when I was very small, right? So what did you speak at home? Well both were circulating, which is a great advantage actually. What was it like growing up in Montreal in a bilingual family? The thing is when you're very small, that's just the nature of the universe, right? No, I became aware later on that they were unilinguals on both sides. And you straddled the middle. Well, yeah, I mean, actually, there's very, I think, there was maybe too lofty a view

of our vocations family. We always try to explain the English to the French and the French to the English. And if you're in that position, you have moments when you're with purely trangopons and moments when you're with purely agnopons, and they talk about the other. And if you're in our kind of position, you say, well, this is wacky. Do we shut up? No. It's trying to explain.

No, that's not what Michael was all about. It's almost like a diplomatic position. Well, I kind of just get annoyed after a while that these totally fictitious ideas circulate. Did you feel like you made it you you changed someone's mind? Well, this is a small number of individuals, but the going Stereotypes were just so powerful How much of that duality do you think kind of informed what you what you became who you are? Oh, it's absolutely central Absolutely central. I mean this you gotta have to have two ways into the world, or three

or four and so on, you know. In its politics, Taylor's family was bleu, or blue, not rouge or red, meaning they valued Quebec's confederation with the rest of Canada as well as the province's historic links to Britain and France. They believed in the duty Quebecers had to the old countries in times of war. And then of course the war was there, the issue of conscription. The family was fairly, they voted conservative. My father voted conservative because of conscription and he fought in the first world war.

And there was of course a very strong anti-accommodation with Hitler in Mussolini. It was appeasement. So everybody in the family was agreed on that. My father, because he was a British Empire patriot, and my grandfather, because he had this tremendous love of France. One of the most marking emotional moments was the day that France surrendered in June. I remember, beautiful day, and you felt like going on a picnic, but there was the end of civilization that occurred as far as my grandfather was concerned. I mean, he was, you know, the reaction was so powerful, you really felt that something really

big, terrible tell her what happened. Charles's own political views would soon turn sharply away from his family's bleu traditions. Maurice Duplessis was the head of Quebec's conservative Union nationale, and Duplessis' campaign strategy involved stoking fears about threats to Quebec identity. In particular, supposed threats posed by Jehovah's Witnesses and Jewish refugees. This outraged the young Charles Taylor. I was absolutely horrified when I got to be adolescent.

I was utterly horrified with that. Actually my first political commitment was really to the Provincial Liberal Party, right? Because I really wanted to put an end to it. And that has deeply seared me. I mean, that's, you know, the idea of running your campaign against a minority religion in order to get a terrible policy. Well, it's déjà vu for me. He's referring to today's politics in Quebec, Bill 21, the secularism law brought in by Premier François Légo. I think of Légo as a kind of Dupacy reincarnate.

It was kind of providential that I had that role with the commission and then, yeah. Which we'll get to as well. Conversation with Charles Taylor presents the challenge of keeping up with his references, their range and their number. He'll weave Quebec's political history in with the politics today. He'll nod to literary works in English or French or German, and he can rarely resist a quick chuckling aside to acknowledge a cliché or a joke or a slogan that was popular at some point over the decades. And then there are all the philosophers. He

spent his life reading and arguing with hundreds of them. Taylor began his university career in 1949. He studied history at McGill. Then he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he took the combined degree in politics, philosophy, and economics. Philosophy wasn't a bigotry subject. You had to take some papers in all three, right? Economics was new, but I welcomed that.

I want to fill it in. But the philosophy I just found was so very flat-footed and it's very very at that point positive and anti-metaphysical and I really thought this is so narrow and dense. The fashion in those days was to try to make philosophy more like science. Knowledge should be verifiable, confirmable. Questions must be answerable in one way or another, or else they're just bad questions. There are views of this kind, scientific views, but there are other views and I find them more convincing. But the idea that the whole thing,

all your teaching should be concentrated in this small corner, with an immense amount of contempt for people who didn't have this opinion. So I guess that got me going because I suppose I had to prove to myself or to that my negative reaction was quite justified. And in that I didn't get any help in Oxford, but a friend of mine, a student, came back from Paris once and said, you know, I hear you talking all the time, I have a book that will probably interest you. And it was Merleau-Ponty, film d'Avril-Sypion.

And I read it, wow! It got me going on the line that I've really been mining ever since. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote Phenomenology of Perception in 1945. There was a significant difference between the way Merleau-Ponty liked to think compared to Charles Taylor's professors at Oxford. This is an example of what's often called a great divide in Western philosophy between the continental and the Anglophone or analytic varieties. Now, it's perilous for a non scholar to try to encapsulate in a sentence or two the causes of this divide. In fact, even some of the 20th century's greatest minds never really saw what the fuss was all about. They included Charles Taylor's close friend, Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-British

liberal theorist, advisor to world leaders, a man described in the newspapers of his day as the world's greatest talker. I liked him a lot and I re-admired him, but he was in a very interesting way, I don't mean marginal in that he wasn't influential or something, but marginal to this movement. He sort of, it was really like this, he was kind of convinced that they were right or at least that trying to do something more than physical was wrong. What?

They being who? They, really the positivist majority, right? And he knew Freddie Ayer and all these people from the 1930s, but he was—but frankly, it bored him. So as a matter of fact, he made a kind of great statement. He went into war in the British embassy in Washington, then he flew back, and that gave him not only the occasion but even the compulsion to rethink his academic life. And roughly, it's this. Poes' division is right, but boring.

Like 1066 and all that, you know, the Puritans are right but propulsive, and the others are wrong but romantic. Well, they were right, but utterly boring. So what really interested him was making some well-known, or at least very important, figures of European thought live again so that people can get a sense why they were into that, right?

And so he did that brilliantly. He gave these lectures where he really could invoke people like Herter, like Vico. He loved—of course he was Russian, so he loved Herzen, you know, the 19th century revolutionary. So that's what he went like talking about. And he's spellbinding. When he got into that, even sort of very positivistic-minded people were just riveted. But he, how to put it, he—we hit it off, so we spent a lot of time together. I learned a lot from him, but not in the direction that I was trying to push the subject.

So where do the roads diverge? Well because the whole phenomenological movement really interested me. I remember several times, as I would say to me, tell me about Heidegger. I thought, oh, God. So he really wanted to know, right? So I started explaining, and gradually his eyes glazed over. And after about 15 minutes, 20 minutes of this, we were—he let us be interrupted. Obviously, it was some relief.

So he really wanted to know, right? But he didn't really have the equipment, I mean the background to see the point. It was a matter of sheer curiosity. It's a very interesting phenomenon at this time. Utterly opaque philosophy, doesn't seem to be saying anything, but a lot of people, very intelligent people are saying to you, you must read these authors. I could be his conduit in there, but I utterly failed. Maybe if I tried now, I'd find a way of doing it, so I'm reaching across

the… But it just seemed to me that there were all sorts of interesting issues about human beings. Why they even have a very strong sense of meaning, what it is to have a sense of meaning. What are the various avenues to be… how your life, people's lives, work out as they begin to explore a certain vein of use of mining expression of meaning and maybe in some cases interrupted and so on. But what draws them in the first place? So what was the mission that you set yourself on as a scholar? Well, in a way, clarifying these issues, and I, you've got to go off and run a relief organization or political – which I did lots of commitment to. But if somebody said, you can't afford to waste your time working out these ideas, it's

not important. Right? writ large, what was the mission? Well, written large, it was exploring—philosophical anthropology would be a big word for it—what it is to be a human being and what are the things that you, in a way, are not developing in order to grasp what human life is really all about. No small question. Yeah. Well, it limits this question in a certain way.

I mean, I suppose one way of thinking of it, talking about it, is meaning. There's a sense of meaning, the meaning of the word, linguistic meaning, and so on. But there's a sense of meaning when people use it. That is real meaning for me. My life is without meaning. When I got to the contact with this, then my life began to take on that sense of meaning. I mean, the positivists were very fast with the word meaningless. They meant that linguistically, right? These sentences don't mean anything. But what lies behind taking those stances

against the kind of stance I take is the sense of meaning in life, whether that just is a private matter of how you feel or whether there are real issues here. See? So I was convinced at the second that there are real issues here. That is, that's a question which can be totally off your agenda. In all, I mean, any kind of discipline, you know? You can do history, you can do politics and so on with awareness of that issue and interest in it and a belief in its importance.

Or you can do history the way, well later on when I was in the political science department, the kind of standard American originating comparative politics. I guess as a non-area expert I'm curious at that time, how you even begin to approach answering that question? Well, I mean, there are all sorts of phenomena of people finding, as they say, this meaning and this meaningful and so on. And so you can start asking yourself, what's going on here? What is the issue?

What it would be to say yes or no here? There is such an issue. And not only that, but it's one of the most important things to resolve for yourself or to resolve in general, or the opposite. If you have a very empirically oriented, almost natural science type modeled notion of sociology or a notion of political theory, that is sidelined. Or it's understood to be the emotions people have, right? And it's not worth trying to understand as an actual issue. people have, right? And it's not worth trying to understand as an actual issue. On Ideas, you're listening to This Way to Re-Enchantment with Charles Taylor. We're a podcast and a broadcast, heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca.com. Subscribe to ideas on Spotify or whatever podcast app you choose

to use. I'm Nala Ayaad. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned your political activities. In the 60s, you returned to Montreal and you started teaching at McGill and the University of Montreal. And you threw yourself wholesale into politics. I mean, you ran for office four different times. Yeah.

Why didn't you ever win an election? Oh, it wasn't propitious here. You know, we could have. I don't think I would have had. But the party in 68, if Pierre hadn't come along. By the party, Charles means the federal New Democratic Party. And the Pierre he's talking about is Pierre Trudeau, who ran against Taylor in 1965 in the Mount Royal riding. Trudeau won the seat. He really changed,

something that done, you know, of the politics in Quebec. Absent Trudeau, Robert Clich would probably have made it in DuVernay, but not very many other people. And with Pierre entering the scene, the whole thing was, yeah. Do you think it's possible for an intellectual to be a politician? Are the roles too far apart? No, I mean there are terrible strains and there are big issues of time and so on, right? So if I'd actually got elected to parliament, it might have been a disaster for me.

So there would have been a huge problem, a priority there. But what is it that drew you to a possible political career? What motivated you? No, I really wanted this party to take off. The place it had least taken off was Quebec, right? Then later you get this great orange wave with Jack Layton, but it was just almost unthinkable. So my goal was, let me spend a few years trying to get the party, as it were, become an acceptable alternative.

So I'd had these two goals in life. I mean, one of them hit a brick wall, but the other didn't, so that that the shape of my life is kind of dictated by that. Charles Taylor's career as a politician never took off. He now looks back on that fact with relief. As he just noted, it might have been a disaster for his career as a scholar if he had won that seat in parliament.

But he never left politics entirely. He stayed on the board of the New Democratic Party, and his name is on a prize for excellence in policy research, handed out each year by the Broadbent Institute. And even when Taylor is writing about philosophy or romantic poetry, matters of politics are never far away. It's something like how his bilingual family once saw their role bridging the two solitudes. Taylor finds himself explaining the intellectual world to the political and the political to

the intellectual. It's a really difficult time for democracy. It's being questioned, you know, at all levels of society. In the states, there's a majority of voters who feel that it's under threat in their country, and it's certainly easy to see that from the outside as well. And the polls are showing, of course, a decline in the value that young people place on the democratic system. What are your feelings these days about the goodness of the liberal democratic model as a way of organizing society? Well, I mean, it's more comes across to me

as the badness of the negation of these basic values, because terrible atmosphere is created, terrible suffering inflicted on some people by others, terrible disenchantment will break out even among the Trumpians. They'll eventually see what this involves. So the alternatives are really stark. Do you think there's enough awareness that the alternatives are really stark? No. I mean there is certain awareness, but the big issue in all our Western democracies

is, is there something horrifying here or is this fine? The polarization is around that issue. It's not that people in the lab disagree with not enough money is being spent on medical, etc. It's not details like that. It's really something deeply horrifying. Quite fundamental. Yeah.

But is it fine? I mean, what's your sense? Is it fine? No. We have to get over this. We have to get beyond this. We have to get beyond this. We have to see what's terrible here. What is it going to take for us to see that?

I don't know. I mean, yes, I do. In detail, I know the kinds of coalitions that have to be built, but I don't know the key to success. I mean, I would have thought after January 6, after a whole lot of other things, that the comeback really would have a ceiling to it, right? Do you think there's something about our time that made it inevitable for us to question this way of organizing ourselves?

No, but I mean you can see that a certain kind of intellectual and elite and so on had awful attitude to the mass of the voters. I mean, not really identification with them at all, a certain amount of contempt. You can see that building up. Do you see a way out of, a way back from the the disillusionment and disenchantment with liberal democracy? Or is it going to have to be reinvented for people to believe in it again? Well, I think it will have to be reinvented, but in the meantime there are coalitions that can defeat that.

The thing is, now the big issue has become for Trump too, but all across Europe, the big issue has come with the refugee. Now when you look at the conditions, the growth of this huge refugee stream was obviously, you know, had to happen and couldn't be stopped, right? Because it's driven by war, global warming, but also by the fact that people who are living in much poorer countries now have media that tell them what it's like here in Europe.

So there's no way the refugee stream can go but up, up, up, up. There's no way the refugee stream can go but up, up, up, up. Newcomers, immigrants, a tide of refugees, tolerance of minority groups was the issue that first awoke Charles Taylor to politics back when he was an adolescent. And this was the issue at the heart of Taylor's biggest contribution to Quebec politics. In 2007, he joined Gérard Bouchard, brother of Lucien, and they toured the province together. The Bouchard-Taylor Commission, it came to be called, its official title, the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences. The project was aimed squarely at opening up public conversation in Quebec in a healthy way,

encouraging people to speak their minds about the place of Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, and other minority groups in Quebec society. Taylor and Bouchard traveled from town to town, village to village, inviting locals to their public hearings. What was the experience like for you? Oh, it was just so revolutionary. I mean, I got a depth understanding of how these people felt.

And so you can see them in the context or a cadre of, it was done in four-way and so on. But you can also see them with the element of panic. Esquce qu'ils vont nous changer? That's the question that came. That is a terribly crucial question in Quebec. Est-ce qu'ils vont nous changer? Are they going to change us? And the answer was? Well, the answer was, you know, that's what we fear. And what we tried to do with the report is give another view, and that they change immensely, change a lot more than you change when they're here for a while, and particularly when their

kids get brought up in the schools, they change just totally. So there's going to be people quite far down the tube emerging from this because the parents brought them here and they went to the schools and they became North Americans in many, many respects. But, I mean, you need to have that faith that that's going to happen. And of course, the kids understand this. See, my grandchildren were going to Francophone schools through this, and they buggered like that with what they're saying about these people. You know, my friend, Ali, in school, it's nothing like that.

They really couldn't understand it, yeah. Looking back from today's perspective, when it comes to seeing a back from today's perspective, when it comes to seeing a cultural threat from newcomers, it's the fragility of people's fears that still stands out for Charles Taylor. In the short run, tensions over cultural differences can be at their worst in areas close to a major city.

For instance, the two most raucous meetings that we had were Saint-Gérôme and Longueuil. These are towns just outside Montreal. We nearly broke up a fight, had to break up a fight in Longueuil. Over what? Well, some very aggressive woman said to the people who were vocal on the other side, you know, you're totally closed minds, you're idiots and so on. And a very, very aggressive guy was getting up to her feet. We rushed back down the aisle.

We were supposed to just have an inquiry. Very dramatic. Yeah. So there was a lot of anger. Whereas when you're way up in like that famous place, Ejovide, right, that kind of thing, they were lambs. I mean they had all these very deep prejudices and so on, but they didn't feel personally threatened by them.

Whereas the people around Montreal in the Bonn-Yu, they had all sorts of aggravation of the existence of these people here and very much worked up by having a debate in a big assembly where obviously the people who were chairing the discussion, namely us, had a very strong criticism, a criticism which we didn't, we tried not to ram down their throats, but they sensed that and then there was always a vocal minority like this woman, you know, young woman, really telling it like it was. That's why she's concerned about it. You don't like to be told that, particularly by a younger woman. Dramatic standoffs, potential fistfights.

The risks of speaking to each other must be weighed against the long-term danger to society when people don't articulate what matters to them. Throughout much of Charles Taylor's latest book, it would be easy to forget the political backdrop. He talks mostly about his favorite poets, Wordsworth, Malarmé, T.S. Eliot. These cosmic poets, in Taylor's view, come as close as anyone could to expressing what's most important, what's really going on in the human desire to come to terms with the cosmos. It's not a topic that lends itself to easy or quick expression. A lot of human beings, sometimes all in a given society, but even when there's division

of what this, of law of people, have a very strong sense of the meaning, powerful meaning of our relation to nature, the planet, but I'm using this cosmos as a general term for it. It's a very important part of meaning of life for lots of people and perennially, but in this bewildering way with great changes. One of the greatest changes in people's sense of cosmic connection happened in Europe between the 17th and 18th centuries. An older, dominant way of connecting with the cosmos seemed to give way. For centuries, most Europeans felt themselves belonging to an ordered universe, something like Aristotle's description of a great chain of being. It

put humans into a hierarchy that included the divine and the natural world. By the middle of the 18th century, for many people, this feeling had vanished. But, Charles Taylor believes, their desire for cosmic connection remained. The dominance in some ways, socially, politically, philosophically dominant view of cosmic order would be Newton, not the great chain of eating. I read the cropping up in a lot of arts, but particularly in poetry, of this kind of invocation of cosmic order as a compensatory move. There has to be something that carries this. It's epistemically differently placed because it's not on the side of reigning philosophy or reigning science, emphatically not, right?

But so it's, that's why I talk about it as something that's only invoked, but with what I call epistemic retreat. That is, the retreat is not making a claim about what's absolutely there and for itself, but it's how it necessarily, powerfully appears to us. So the invocation, you get a very strong not in the role of that's what it absolutely is. So you get very interesting phenomenon in the 19th century in English literature that everybody loves Wordsworth, yeah, but a lot of people that do shrug off the fact that they're not taking this literally, right? Five years have passed, five summers with the length of five long winters, and again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur.

This is Wordsworth's poem, Lines a few miles above Tintern Abbey. Once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day has come when I again repose here under this dark sycamore and view these plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts, which at this season, with their unripe fruits, are clad in one green hue and lose themselves mid-grows and copses. Once again I see these hedgerows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

of sportive wood run wild, these pastoral farms green to the very door, and wreaths of smoke sent up in silence from among the trees, with some uncertain notice, as might seem, of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods or of some hermit's cave whereby at his fire the hermit sits alone." I have to move along. Wow. Yeah. Now, this is the key passage.

Maybe we can move a little bit back. Well, he talks about the love he had as a boy and so on. And that time is past, and all its aching joys are now no more, and all its dizzy raptures. Not for this faint eye, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts have followed, for such loss I would believe abundant recompense. And this is now the really key. For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing often times the still sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue. And I have felt a presence that disturbs thee with the joy of elevated thoughts, 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." So you begin to get a powerful sense of movement here, it's moving towards you, but also all objects of all thought and rolls through all things. See, very powerfully invoked. And that is the way you have to see a lot of poetry. So then you get someone like Rutger, where there's no, it's not on the map whether this

is a scientific truth or so on, but you can see the poetry is straining to express some sense of this movement in reality and the great success is the elegies which start off not being able to say it, not being able to say it, right? The angel could say it but I I'm struggling but I can't do it and then the climax of the seventh is absolutely superb, Hino-Zionist His tail is, to be here is glorious. Yeah. Yeah. There's something just blowing away to me in that.

What do you believe is the most important consequence of disenchantment today? Oh, most important, just concatenation of consequences. One of them is what we're doing to the planet. And most important, just concatenation of consequences. One of them is what we're doing to the planet, we aren't even noticing it. I mean, it's really consequence of the relation to the planet of instrumental use, taking over for lots of people as the most important.

And for lots of people, it's really serious stuff, don't give me all this touchy-feely stuff, and this is the really important relationship. That, all the consequences that we see today come from that, including the good stuff, which is the science, which can tell us how to get out of this. It's astonishing, though though that people are ignoring that to an incredible degree. Charles Taylor says,

it's a symptom of disenchantment when we collectively treat the world as something to be used. This industrial attitude emerges from the science of Isaac Newton and company. And now we find ourselves with runaway carbon emissions. In our disenchanted society, when push comes to shove, we spurn Wordsworth and his communion with nature, his sense of a magical spirit running through all things. That's seen as mere touchy-feely stuff, as Taylor says. But it would be wrong to blame all this on the scientists, especially because in recent decades,

it's been the voice of science pushing hardest for change in how we treat our planet. And meanwhile, there are plenty of people who view the world in a mystical light, but who are far from being environmentalists. One very important demographic, which is voting for Trump, is people who are Christians of a certain kind. So they have a very narrow view that those particular doctrines and particular rules

of behavior are what really matters, right? So he's going to make sure that they're put into legislation. That's all that matters to them. And he started off saying climate change is a hoax, right? Can anybody believe that for a minute? But exactly the same people who are being swept away by hurricanes are going to vote for him. Now part of that is that it's so scary if you let yourself be alarmed that you'd rather bury your head in the sand. But there are people who supposedly religious grounds not just like an oil executive.

You know, we're going to stop now. I mean, all this money is just about to oil executive, you know, we're going to stop now. I mean, all this money is just about to be made and you want us to stop. What do you think you're doing, right? Taylor's call to us is certainly not to restore religion to the place it held in pre-scientific Europe. He hopes we collectively find our way back to enchantment, but the leap of faith he proposes is the same one his old philosophical colleagues at Oxford refused to take, regardless of their religious beliefs. It's the faith that unanswerable questions can be worth asking, and that the vaguest of notions,

the meaning of life, is worth reaching for. That mission that you set for yourself after you finished your PhD, I wonder if you could describe how much progress you think you made in actually accomplishing that mission. Well, I, progress is maybe the wrong, I mean, you know, what I would consider really helpful here is finding languages to talk about that. And I still haven't, and maybe you can't, made a lot of headway.

I mean, it's clear that one way is through works of art. But it in a sense only moves the problem another space, right? Because if somebody says, yes, I find this work by Beethoven very, very, gives the sense of what I'm talking about, and you use something like the notion of resonance, it resonates with that. The interlocutor may come back and say, well, try to explain to me, I don't get that, tell me why. And then you're just as inarticulate in the face of that as you were at the beginning. And so you try to be helpful and move this poem or this quartet by Beethoven, you know,

up in the front. And your face was the same question. What is it that makes it so hard to articulate? Well, all the things we use to articulate are susceptible to being read differently, felt differently by different people. So there are obviously some people who with poetry for instance are going to read this and say, yeah, it says that to me and I can see why. But then there are obviously going to be people that are left unmoved by this. How can that tell you? So they want declarative sentences, subject or predicate, making assertions which can be verified. And all they're getting is they're

being moved from medium to medium. It's a philosophical medium on this page, but then they're being referred on to the poem or they're being referred on to the music. And this is not useless because a lot of people do get it, so it's very important, but it's possible that other people are just as perplexed after you've given them this resonant work, just as perplexed after you've given them this resonant work, just as perplexed as they were when you started. What is at stake, I guess, in how well we can articulate what's most important in a human life? Well, you've given the answer, you know, some people are going

to get it, some people are going to have woken in them, the sense of the real importance of this, they're going to get it. Some people are going to have woken in them the sense of the real importance of this. They're going to look on the drama of our present age and global warming and so on in a new light. Because, I mean, nobody in half a brain can fail to see that we're risking our lives. Or at least we're risking the lives of lots of people. Not everybody's gonna be unlucky, but the islands that are gonna be flooded off the sea, if they're ignited by reading some of this poetry, for instance, then it not only becomes a weirdish obligation that you stop this,

but you actually feel it's rewarding in itself. If these are very deeply meaningful or paths into something very deeply meaningful for human beings, you have a fuller and more enriched life. So, I mean, that's a primary justification. Though the other one is some people, I can see the point, is more important, mobilizing people. It's not a disadvantage that it also can help

mobilizing people to save the planet. Charles Taylor, thank you very much. Okay, thank you. You were listening to This Way to Re-Enchantment with Charles Taylor. The producer was Tom Howell. Thanks to Megan Thurston, Frank Rupp and Elena Petrovich at McGill University. Taylor's recent book is Cosmic Connections, Poetry in an Age of Disenchantment.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.