The brilliant 92-year-old Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has a new book out — Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.
In it, Taylor explores the Romantic and post-Romantic poetic responses to the excessive rationalism, individualism, and scientism that are in his view integral components of the Modern Age.
A self-styled “philosophical anthropologist”, his vast oeuvre evades classification, especially when considered in relation to the tired and increasingly irrelevant political paradigm of “Right” and “Left”.
Offering a critique of liberalism without ever leaving the liberal tent, he is perhaps best understood as one of the leading thinkers of the almost forgotten tradition of Canadian idealism, which includes thinkers as diverse as Tory George Grant (Lament for a Nation) and Marxist leaning C. B. Macpherson.
Many of Taylor’s ideas about liberalism and its unintended consequences underlay the conceptual infrastructure of my current project, Moorlands, that tells the story of our widening disconnection to the land through the lens of my mother’s former family farm at the edge of Toronto.
Well known writer, fellow Montrealer and ‘small-l liberal’ evangelist Adam Gopnik recently reviewed Taylor’s new book for The New Yorker. Though I believe he has misunderstood and/or simplified Taylor in several key respects (objective truth, enchantment, and the necessary link between Romanticism and toxic nationalism) the piece nonetheless deserves a close read — feel free to agree or disagree, and leave me your comments!
