Art Gallery of Ontario November 30, 2016Mystical Landscapes Exhibition Toronto, Ontario

Religion, the Spiritual and Art

Charles Taylor

Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Political Science at McGill University, is the author of many books and essays, including Sources of the Self (1989), The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), “The Politics of Recognition” (1992), A Secular Age (2007) and, most recently, The Language Animal (2016). His continuing efforts to break down the traditional barriers between scientific and spiritual approaches to knowledge and understanding were rec-ognized in his receipt of the Templeton Prize (2007). Taylor has been honored with numerous other awards such as the Kyoto Prize for Thought and Ethics (2008), the U.S. Library of Congress Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity (2015), the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture (2016), and the International Grand Prix for Literary Achievement (2018).

In conjunction with the “Mystical Landscapes: Masterpieces from Monet, van Gogh and More” exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada, October 22, 2016 – February 12, 2017,1 Taylor considers how attitudes to-ward religion influence understandings of modernity and its culture. What connections exist between modern spiri-tuality and the rise of mysticism that influenced poets, composers, and artists at the turn of the century? What paral-lels can we draw between contemporary attitudes toward religion then and now?

TRANSCRIPT2

I wouldn’t want you to think that this is purely altruistic. I’ve been dying to give this lec-ture because I’ve been working on this for a long time. Well, not for a very long time but, really, it was supposed to be part of The Language Animal,3 except that my publisher got impatient and said, “Come on, now. Produce something.” So I produced The Language Animal. This lecture was meant to be woven into it but is now something separate – and it is precisely this issue of what changed in the romantic period in poetics.

The Language Animal is written around the theory of language started or created by the great thinkers of the 1790s in Germany: Hamann, Herder, Humboldt.4 They also, at the same time and in the same breath, created a new understanding of poetics. This is indissolubly linked for them, but it’s separated for us.

So that’s what I want to talk about tonight or, really, start talking about. I’m going to start by looking at the issue of poetics. I’d like also to look a little bit at the music which was interwo-ven with this poetry. But I want to come to a point where I hope I can say something relevant to this Exhibition.

But I have to make another apology. I’m not fully confident because I’ve thought about this a lot more in relation to poetry and music than I have in relation to painting. Now this dis-ability is to some large degree compensated by the fact that my wife is an art historian and has given me a lot of help in this. But I’m still not entirely up to speed. So, in a way, the lecture is a kind dialogue in that I’m coming up to the point of asking whether some of the things I’m saying about poetry and music have relevance to this Exhibition and relevance to art, and I hope in the discussion that will come out.

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So, I want to start off with what I think is the big turning point, or one big turning point, which begins in Germany in the 1790s and this great romantic generation which are all together, partly in Jena, partly in Berlin, exchanging with each other, philosophers and writers and critics, the Schlegel brothers,5 Schelling6 and, of course, Hölderlin7 and Schiller,8 and others. And al-though it turns out they influenced, later on, other poetic languages in Europe, in a way, the basic ideas I find in them were rediscovered in other forms.

So, let me start with what the shift involved, and then I’m going to move out from there in a whole lot of directions, and I hope I don’t get totally lost because there are a lot of moving parts. But I want to start there.

So, this change is brilliantly described by an anglophone critic, Earl Wasserman, with a book published 50 years ago called, The Subtler Language.9 And he gives it [that title] in connec-tion with the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) – “the subtler language” is a line from one of Shelley’s poems – and the English poet John Keats (1795-1821). And it shadows the basic idea which is worked out with a lot more, heavy German philosophy in Berlin and Jena in the 1790s.

So the story I want tell, the beginning of it, goes something like this. Not just poetry, a great deal of European art for centuries and centuries turned around history, sacred history, sometimes profane history, and also conceptions of the cosmos, a meaningful cosmos, the idea of the great chain of being, which Arthur Lovejoy10 speaks about, the different levels of being, the notions of kabbalah,11 the universe we see around us is ultimately related to the Torah. The uni-verse is, as it were, created on the model of the Torah. Or conceptions of the signatures in things, things around us like flowers, which link them to planets moving in the sky, a notion that Adam was taught or maybe invented an original language, which is the really proper language which links up with the very nature of things.

Now this kind of understanding was not just something interesting to people as interest-ing facts that might help on a trivia quiz or crossword puzzle. It was a powerful, spiritual charge – the cosmos seen in these terms.

And getting close to that, getting to grasp that, was not just, again, an intellectual gain. Getting to grasp that, coming into contact with that, coming into synch with it, being part of it, being reconnected to it, had a very powerful spiritual and moral force, what I called in Sources of the Self,12 a moral source – something that could help you, make you, motivate you, to be a better person.

The English Scene: Poetry’s Ritual Power

So if we look at poetry here for a minute, I’ll follow Wasserman looking at some of the great poets of the neoclassical period in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. Looking at the Eng-lish poet Alexander Pope’s (1688-1744) Windsor Forest (1713), for instance. Typical of this whole epoch, Wasserman sees Pope in the process of invoking some conception of the cosmos. Here, it’s the idea that the harmony we see is made up of a Concordia discours, 13 of two opposite forces coming together and being reconciled to each other. And he’s reading, as it were, Windsor

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Forest and the state of England through that lens. By immersing ourselves in that poem, we’re brought closer to, inspired by, and linked up with this order of things.

This is what changes toward the end of the 18th Century. It’s part of a great movement that people talk of in terms of disenchantment. In a particular case, this is disenchantment which affects religious faith, on one hand. But there’s a particular one that we see, which is undermin-ing these conceptions of the cosmos. In some ways, they become no longer believable. Obvi-ously, the development of a Newtonian science, a universe run by purely efficient causation with no specific meaning and so on is part of that process. But, in a certain sense, you can say these orders no longer become available for poetry.

So, what happens is the development of a new kind of poetry in its relation to order, one which doesn’t simply take an order as given and try to, as it were, make it shine forth. But a new kind of poetry which is related to an order, yes, but the order is merely suggested. It’s very [in-audible French (?) term @ 8:00], uncertain, tentative. It’s not something already there, but some-thing powerfully suggested by the poetry.

I’d like to give an example. Now this is an English example you’ll be glad to hear. The great German example, for me, in this period is of course Hölderlin. But I want to read a short set of lines from a longish poem of the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) called, for short, “Tintern Abbey.” Let me read this to you. This is him looking down over the Wye Valley with a ruined monastery:

… And I have felt A presence that disturbs me 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….14 

Now that, to me, invokes a very powerful sense of order in this sense: there is a force moving through everything, through us, through the world around us, through our thoughts, through our being and so on – and we are linked with that.

People are going to react differently to this. That’s one of the great issues we’re going to have to look at. But, for me, what this does is I have a strong sense of that force there and being – at this moment – linked with it, really connected to it.

But unlike Alexander Pope with Concordia discors, this is not part of any canonically ac-cepted doctrine. You can read it in the light of some canonically accepted doctrine. You can read it as, perhaps, “This is a way of nudging us towards an understanding of the creation of the world by God” and so on. But in itself, it doesn’t contain that.

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What it does then is something extraordinary. In a certain sense, it convinces you. You feel powerfully convinced there is something here of that kind. But you aren’t given any detail and you aren’t given any proof. The proof here – proof is the wrong word. The convincing power is the experience itself, that you have this powerful sense of the world in that moment.

Now here we have something very odd going on. Because the sense of connection is brought about by the poetry. It’s as though this poetry was something like a ritual power. That’s true of Pope’s poetry, too. Pope’s writing gives you a sense of connecting up to that order he’s talking about. It changes your relationship to this world, this cosmos. It also has ritual power. But here the only element convincing you there’s something here is this experience of ritual power. Now this kind of discourse, this kind of poetry, is therefore something very different from its predecessors, from poems like Pope’s. Because, in a certain sense, the sense of order is hanging there on the very words of the poem.

The German Scene: Creative Force of the Symbol

Now flip to the German scene, and we have this concept of the symbol. This you see in Schlegel, but it was taken up by Paul Ricoeur15 in our time in philosophy. The symbol here, in this sense, has this kind of creative force. It is something that connects you to a reality up there that you wouldn’t be connected to without it. It’s not as though you see something and you want to find a name for it, you want to find a designation for it, that would be due to the things around us. I see this and say, “What’s that? Well, that’s water. You tell me so.” Very useful, yeah. But rather it’s the symbol, in Schlegel’s sense, that makes it possible for you to see something out there, which you couldn’t without the symbol.

And precisely in that sense, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” is operating like a symbol. So, I want to get this special sense of symbol. It’s not an after-symbol. It’s a before-symbol. An after- symbol is I have some reality and I want somehow to represent it in a short and snappy way, like I’m Aesop writing fables and I want to represent various kinds of characters. I’m crafty as a fox and innocent as whatever [a few inaudible words @ 13:38]. That’s the kind of after-symbol when you already know what you’re talking about but want to give it a kind of snappy appearance. The symbol, in Schlegel’s sense, is what I want to call the before-symbol – without that, you don’t have access to this reality.

All right, so now we have poetry in the process of producing these kinds of Schlegel symbols hinting at these deeper realities – which are not spelled out.

We can already see the forecast of the relationship to the religious and spiritual develop-ments in the last two centuries. Nobody is going to stop talking the language of theology, the lan-guage of deeper forces in the universe and so on. But this becomes a second kind of discourse that interweaves with and plays against the first. And you can see how that kind of thing happens when you reflect. Wordsworth is a very good example of this. Wordsworth’s poetry immensely moved all sorts of people in 19th Century England, and it moves us today. But there were all sorts of people in 19th Century England who were terribly far apart in their deeper ontological commit-ments, either to religion or to antireligion. George Eliot, who was an atheist, thought

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Wordsworth was wonderful. All the people around Wordsworth, who ended up being very ortho-dox Anglicans, thought he was wonderful. George Meredith,16 and so on.

Underlying Stories

A whole lot of people could converge on being very moved by this set of symbols, in Schlegel’s technical sense, who were widely apart when it came to their understanding of what I want to call the underlying story. What story about the world and about God makes sense, to them, of this poetry working on them?

This involves, of course, going beyond the situation. What Wordsworth transforms is a situation – me in this Wye Valley. He doesn’t go beyond me in this Wye Valley to something be-yond that – transcendence or that which might be the cause of it or facilitate it. Let’s call that an underlying story. Or let’s call that for short, doctrine. So, you have this powerful symbol operat-ing in my immediate situation, the interspace between me and the Wye Valley, or whatever it is. And then we have attempts to understand, to explain, which invoke things beyond. Of course, there got to be in the 19th Century lots of other underlying stories that weren’t religious at all. Think of Arthur Schopenhauer,17 the power of the will which emanates in everything around us. And, of course, this gave Schopenhauer a basis for a theory of art in which the will is, in a kind of ideal way, portrayed in poetry and art but also in music. It is actually expressed directly in mu-sic. There, you get another underlying story, another doctrine. Friedrich Nietzsche18 has another doctrine, and we can go on like that.

But what we’re now living in, ever since that moment, is a kind of two-tiered set of lan-guages. The language of poetry, and I want to bring in music and I think this also applies to painting, on one hand, which is a language of the interspace of that immediate experience, and various doctrines which claim to explain, underlie, make sense of, this experience. But the power of the experience, the convincing nature of the experience, comes from the effect of the poetry, music or painting itself.

So, I think we can already see a kind of link-up to painting. I even made some notes here when I was reading the Exhibition catalogue, which is a fantastic, interesting catalogue, though it’s even more fantastic to see the paintings.

There was a quote by the American Modernist painter and essayist Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), one of the painters, which you’ll find on page 246 if you consult your catalogue. I think he had a theosophical background understanding. But he said, “No, I don’t paint out of that. That of course is very important and it’s obviously inspiring. But I don’t paint out of that. I must create out of inner feeling.” This is on page 240. Again, there’s another painter, page 250, who makes the same kind of point. Here, what he’s saying is just like what dictates the words for Wordsworth, or what will function as a symbol, which creates this powerful sense of connection. So, what determines the painting by Hartley is not reflecting on the doctrine but feeling the direct expression through the painting which opens up a certain sense of depth in the universe, if you like.

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So, it’s an age operating with two languages, two levels of language of different epis-temic qualities but connected to each other.

So these are, of course, the subtler languages of Wasserman’s title. The new languages

that these poets are inventing are languages which invoke an order – a deeper order – they don’t fully explain. They’re the subtler languages as against the canonical languages of cosmic order people like Pope operate with.

Now, I’m going to shift back and forth. I hope it doesn’t get everyone confused, includ-ing myself. But what continues, interestingly – if I go back to the poetic lineages here because there are many – is that almost all of them have this notion there are two kinds of language. There is the ordinary, everyday language we need to get on in the world, naming things, commu-nicating to people. “Pass me the water,” and so on. Or building bridges, or whatever, on one hand.

And, on the other hand, there’s the language of symbols, a language that has the power to open up this new kind of depth. So, Novalis speaks about the ordinary language which is just talking about things. And then a deeper language, which is language speaking itself. Stephané Mallarmé19 talks about Edgar Allan Poe,20 “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu,” “He made the words of the tribe purer.” There is a book about [? @ 21:40] or the orphic language. So, you can go on and on seeing this split between two languages, in theory. And what they’re always dealing with is the creative language, the language I’m calling the language of symbols.

Okay, so a lot of questions arise from here and I’m going to place them up there and, I hope, to get around to them. Number one people might ask is, “Well, why be convinced by this? It’s just being convinced by a powerful experience. That’s not very epistemologically kosher [Taylor clears his throat.]. Why do that?” And there are very deflationary explanations. Some people with a reductive view of human nature say, “Well, it’s just some kind of pleasure it gives us. And we misidentify it if we think it’s giving access to something profound.”

Steven Pinker,21 a fellow Montrealer, is one of these thinkers. His description of music is “auditory cheesecake.” [Audience laughs.] Okay, so you get the picture. Now, that doesn’t sur-prise you. That doesn’t convince me. I think there is something powerful here.

So, I owe, later on, references to ways you can argue for this. Not just telling you. There are ways you can argue for this. So I will have to leave that hanging there. And don’t let me for-get that it is hanging there.

Music

But I want to move laterally and, for a little bit, introduce music to this story. Because it’s like, but also unlike, language – and together they work in a very powerful way.

The interesting thing about music is that it can give you a powerful sense or feeling, in some general sense, about things. Mood is the wrong word. People use the term mood music but atmosphere, [as in] a powerful atmosphere, [may be a better term]. So, for instance, when you

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have a libretto part set to music for the opera, Lorenzo da Ponte22 is coming to the Austrian com-poser Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) and saying, “Wolfgang make this into an opera,” it’s obvious a certain kind of music would really fit, I mean really do something for the words that needs to be done and that other kinds of settings to music don’t. So, there is this general di-rection of feeling there in music, which is made more precise by music being used in an opera, in a mass, in an oratorio, etc., whatever the work is which involves words.

An interesting thing happens in the romantic period to this constellation. Whereas prior to that, people thought of purely instrumental music as incapable of the kind of precision of mean-ing music can have if it’s the score of an opera or of an oratorio, etc., you get in late Mozart, and particularly of course in the German composer Ludwig Beethoven (1770-1827) and the Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828), instrumental music breaking free and itself developing deep and rich, more specific meanings. So when you think of Beethoven’s symphonies and think of particularly the late sonatas and the late quartets, the slow movement, the Heiliger Dankge-sang of the Opus 132 of the Beethoven quartet, there is something going on, some deeply medi-tative state.

So purely instrumental music is beginning to break away and move towards its own clari-fication or specification of what it’s about. But, of course, it never does that completely. So, we therefore get the very common idea in the romantic period that certain of the most moving arts, like music, can never be totally translated into language explaining them. And we get this kind of back-and-forth, which [name? @ 26:29] talks about so very well, [der Schule mixed? @ 26:43], where you have, on the one hand, a work of art, and an interesting commentary by critics, on the other hand – other kinds of works of music and so on going back-and-forth.

But what you have here is a possible vector, which was indeed taken up. Because, in the case of music, I’m going to use a more technical philosophical expression, we talk about the in-tentional objects of an emotion. I’m sad, but I’m sad because my friend just deserted me. That’s the object. That’s what makes me sad. Or, I’m angry because this other person insulted me, etc. These are what people call the intentional object of the emotion. Now with music you can have a very powerful evocation of the emotion with no clarification about the intentional object, unless it gets linked with the music or the score in an opera and so on.

Walter Pater,23 when he famously said, “All arts should approach the condition of music,” was calling for a development in which the precision of the intentional object gets less and less until you are beyond any capacity of saying what it is. Note Pater says, “All arts should….” And in a certain important way all arts did. Certainly, painting did, particularly when you get to the level of abstraction. So that’s one of the things that is going on here.

But to turn back to the main line I was talking about, you can see in this new turn in mu-sic, Beethoven and Schubert, for instance, the possibility for new kinds of works where some-what enigmatic words get paired with somewhat enigmatic music and produce extremely power-ful, enigmatic work like Die Winterreise – Schubert’s music and Wilhelm Müeller’s poetry24 – where it’s not clear what’s going on. There are several interpretations of what is going on at cru-cial moments. What drives the protagonist on and on? What makes it impossible for him to stop?

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He would like to die, but not as he goes on, etc. What’s going on here? Well, you have here something which is very mysterious, and it’s created in both poetry and music working together.

So, this gives me another taking off point which is going to allow me to come back and ask certain questions of music. What’s new in this new age is there are these, in Schlegel’s sense, symbols – works of art, poetry and music – which are operating as what opens us to something we otherwise would not have access to. More than that, of course, it connects us to it. I mean the same thing as I said about the earlier notions of the cosmic order – that connecting to it strength-ens you, makes it possible to be a better human being and so on – is true of these invoked orders. The whole force of the invoked orders as you feel connected to something very strong and mean-ingful to you.

So, alongside the rise of the symbol, in that sense, goes the possibility of exploring other-wise previously unexplored meanings, unexplored significances of which whatever the Winter-reise is telling us is one. But it also, sticking with poetry for a minute, gives us the possibility of various kinds of reconnections with the world other than the one I invoked before with Wordsworth. There, it’s simply a matter of there being some force in the universe with which we become reconnected by this poem.

But in other cases, a connection with our world happens in another way. There’s a fa-mous – the most famous – poem in the German language by Johann Goethe,25 but I mustn’t start reading German poetry in Montreal. This is one about Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, above all the mountain tops is rest and repose and so on. And the very powerful way it ends is “soon you also will have rest.” There is a sense of an aspiration we didn’t quite know we had before, which we get at the meaning of by the experience of being in the mountain forest that he’s describing to us in that poem. So, here you get another kind of connection to the cosmos, something not terribly easy to pin down, but some kind of aspiration crucial to us, which we get from this experience of being in the dark in the night in a mountain forest.

And I think – although it’s too long to talk about now, but if someone wants to argue let’s talk about it later – Keats’s “Nightingale” is another symbol of this kind. But what’s interesting is that there are developments out of this in which poetry is doing something different for us that, in one way or another, reconnects to, or makes us reconciled with, our world. One very powerful example of this is Charles Baudelaire.26

Baudelaire and Lived Time

But we have to track back and look, for a couple of seconds, at some issues that arise in the 19th Century that didn’t arise before, issues about time. Because the development of modern natural science and so on introduces us to the idea of cosmic time. Cosmic time is something to-tally different from the way we live time, particularly when you see more advanced theories in physics and so on. There’s no question of living this time. It’s one of the many dimensions of the unfolding of the physical universe.

So, the issue of lived time, what it’s like to live time, and the issue of what’s it like to live time inhumanly or humanly gets on the table. And you get of course philosophers like Henri

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Bergson,27 and later on Martin Heidegger,28 who try to rehabilitate lived time and describe what it is. But you also get great senses of time dislocation.

One of the great things about Baudelaire is he starts off, in many of his poems, with a powerful theme of what he called spleen. We might call this melancholia or acedia and so on, a sense of utter flatness in the world and your life and you don’t even know, or even have a sense of, what’s causing it. That’s what’s deeply painful about spleen, or melancholia. If it was some-thing you could put your finger on, even if you couldn’t do something about it, at least you could rail against it. But you really can’t even understand, can’t even pinpoint, what’s making you feel so terrible.

But in Baudelaire’s spleen poems he has this magnificent achievement. First of all, he’s interpreting spleen in terms of a melody of lived time. It’s just one thing after another. It’s con-stant change and novelty – without any novelty – because it’s just a meaningless extra event which doesn’t relate to the earlier event. Walter Benjamin,29 in the 20th Century, picked up on that and said this is the experience of the people who have to work on assembly lines and in fac-tories. It’s just one gesture after another. There’s no meaning to it.

Baudelaire is interpreting and seeing what’s underlying spleen as a melody of lived time. So what’s really startling about Baudelaire and his poems of spleen is he gives a language to melancholy. He gives images: [Taylor provides three or so images in French @ 35:43]. He says it’s covering me like I’m being snowed on, and layer after layer of snow is falling on me. As time goes by, I’m getting deeper and deeper into this.

In doing that, he does two things. First of all, he gives you a sense of what melancholy is and, especially, what makes it most painful is that you can’t put your finger on it, or anything. Secondly, the very music of the poetry begins to lift you out of this.

I recommend Le Cygne (The Swan), the famous swan poem. Because it starts off pre-cisely as a complaint about this. Things are changing in Paris. His experience is of Baron Hauss-mann30 – if you remember right after the 1848 revolution – making these beautiful new boule-vards in Paris that are so nice to drive down but for Baron Haussmann the main point was stop-ping revolutionary workers from making barricades. That will never happen again after 1848. So you have a sense Paris is being deconstructed and constructed [Taylor speaks a sentence or two in French? @ 37:05]. And out of that comes a sense of links with other people [Taylor speaks a phrase or two in French? @ 37:16]. Before the river, she is weeping with a whole lot of other misfortunate or unfortunate human beings. You get moved along. This poem begins to move and, at one and the same time, you get this kind of lateral, naked sympathy with so many other suffering people; and, as the poem picks up the rhythm, you begin to move forward.

So there, you see some way of making us at home again in the universe of time and space. It’s not the same as being linked to the orders or the force through all things. But it’s an-other kind of thing.

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Hopkins’ “Inscape” and “Instress”

Another way of thinking about this connects with Gerard Manley Hopkins’31 notions of inscape or instress. Hopkins is talking about living beings. So the idea is of a living being that is kind of producing itself in its life. It’s forcing itself into existence. You get the sense of that élan, Bergson would say élan vital. But Hopkins is writing in the 1860s, which is well before Bergson. If you get the sense of that, you can get a sense of the creature and of the kind of creature that it is – and more than kind, the very individual, because Hopkins of course got this idea from the Scottish Scholastic and Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus (1266-1308) that every individual has its own nature. So:

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and stridingHigh there….32

He goes on like that. This of course anticipates 20th Century poetry by four or five decades. But you can see there the powerful way he is twisting the English language, creating new words in order to create this strong sense of the inscape, of the élan within the thing.

Rilke Putting You Inside

If you move on to Rainer Maria Rilke33 I think you see something – and this is going to permit, again, a speculative connection with visual art – in his Neue Gedichte, the New Poems period of the early 1900s, where he seems to be doing the same thing in “The Panther,” for in-stance, putting you inside the being, in this case, inside the animal, so you feel what is going on there. He was doing that when he was working with Auguste Rodin.34 He was inspired by Rodin. So this is partly an aspiration which is produced by somebody deeply impressed with a sculptor, with what a sculptor was doing. You can feel in Rodin’s sculptures the inner life, as it were, ris-ing to shape the outer shape. Is it possible to think of the French painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) in a similar light? I don’t know. But here are possible connections.

So, what I’m doing here is just offering certain particular, I want to say, applications. You might say particular transpositions of this symbol. From, you might say, its original use in Wordsworth and Hölderlin, which was sort of to connect us to a force running through every-thing. From that, to quite different uses which have this in common: they give us a powerful liv-ing link to the world around us. Either to the time and space world or to certain things that we can see into and feel connected to. There are many other examples I could give of this. And the interrogation I have in my mind tonight – and maybe some of you will say, “There’s nothing at all. No moments.” But if any of you have any ideas about how they’re analogous or different or done in different ways, I would be tremendously happy about that.

Religion and Spirituality

So, I want now to go and look at precisely the way in which all this connects up to the de-velopment in religion and spirituality we’ve been going through for two centuries since that time

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and, I think, is steadily increasing. I want to go back, therefore, to these two languages. The lan-guage of the symbol, powerful experience, connecting to something we feel we can’t deny but don’t understand; and, the level of underlying doctrine which is always playing off against – or not always but very often playing off against – strengthening or weakening that other language.

I think you can get at how these two languages work together – to alter to some extent the spiritual landscape of western civilization – precisely if you look at the famous distinction that people often invoke today – spiritual versus religious.

What do people mean when they say, “I’m spiritual and not religious”? Well, they mean something of this kind: “I have real aspirations to move on a certain path of insight and training which will in some way transform me, make me a better person, a fuller person, a more loving person, an awake person” – whatever the goal is.

So, there is some kind of path of self-transformation. “But I’m not religious” means there are these things this person is calling religion out there which have an authority in two domains around doctrine and dogma, on one hand, and, on the other, around what the practices ought to be. In other words, they also could be thought of as putting people on a path. But they’re telling them exactly what the path is like. And they’re telling them exactly what the hand-holds and what the foot-holds are that they should be using in order to get to that path. “And I don’t want that.” That’s what the spiritual but not religious person is saying, “I don’t accept that.”

I think the possibility of that, and the possibility of relating very differently to that, comes from the development of these two languages. Because there are all sorts of ways you can relate or not relate them. One way is – the spiritual but not religious way – simply saying we’re going to forget the underlying story, or doctrinal story. “Yeah, I may speculate sometime, but that doesn’t play an important role in my spiritual life.”

A powerful example of this in the 19th Century comes from music, the way in which the great concert hall became – and people often comment on this – big cathedrals of deeply mean-ingful experience, which people went to with the same kind of awe and were uplifted by Beethoven’s symphonies and so on. That’s my experience, too. I’m not talking from the outside. That’s very much my experience. But you could stop there.

Or, you could be very suspicious of this from the standpoint of an orthodox religious doc-trine and a set of paths and measures and think there is something dangerous and dubious about this.

Or, you can use your spiritual experience of symbol and poetry and music and art to ask yourself further questions about what you really believe – underlying.

Or, in the case of Hopkins, you can come around to a new kind of take on the faith you’re already in, which is exactly what he did when he joined the Jesuits.

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So, you get all these different ways in which people can work with these two levels. I mean refusing the deeper level altogether or maybe exploring it, or maybe really breaking through to a new version of it.

A Great Strain

But when you take the Hopkins kind of case, you see there’s a great strain. Because there is this older way of living Christian faith, which is the one that became normalized in Christen-dom, that is, Christendom when Christian faith meant under different denominations, whole soci-eties were inspired and informed by Christianity, or that particular confessional version of it. So there, it’s pretty well laid down how you ought to approach and practice this religion.

The poor Jesuit superiors of Gerard Manley Hopkins must’ve said, “What’s going on here, and what has this got to do with…?” And half the time Hopkins was torn because he wasn’t sure, and he didn’t know if he should be spending his time on this.

So, out of this you get the pattern I think we see in western spirituality and religion today, which I try to describe in A Secular Age.35 You get a pattern in which some people are not inter-ested in either spirituality or religion, yes. Some are pursuing a spiritual path but definitely don’t want religion. Some are trying to pursue that path further in order to arrive at some doctrinal po-sition. And some people have come in a new route to an older faith, like Hopkins, by, as it were, going right through this new world of symbols – once again, I mean in the Schlegel sense.

Now, this causes great disruption in existing churches. Because the idea is: there is only one road of access. But that often arises in settled forms of Christendom. “There is really only one road of access. The one we all know about. You got to take all this absolutely, totally.”

So you have, at one and the same time, one feature of our religious world is a great ten-sion between what people call religious conservativism, which is not exactly the right word, but people sticking to that model; and, people drawn to what I call searching, going on a path where they are going to see where it leads. And even if they intend, or would like, to get back to their historic faith, they’re going to do it their way. So, there is this tremendous tension we see going on.

Something New

But we also see something new among those taking the second path, who are spiritually exploring, if you like, which is largely done, of course, in relation to art in the broadest sense. And a new kind of ecumenicism grows up among such people unthreatened by the fact people are exploring different paths but genuinely desirous of finding out what it’s like. So, you get ex-traordinary exchanges going on today which I think would’ve been inconceivable a century ago. That is, people with a different faith, with different practices, or people, even including atheists, get together and say, “What inspires you? Try to make me understand,” which I think has tremendous – as you can imagine, I am very much in favor of that.

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But I think you can see a link between the general pattern I’ve been describing coming from the injection, if you like, of the symbolic – in this sense: poetry, music, art – into this world.

And then, of course there are many people in the Exhibition catalogue who want to con-tinue a historic faith but now have a powerful intuition that the ways of doing it are not connect-ing to people today. So, a number of interesting painters in the Exhibition, or at least in the cata-logue, are of that category and they’re trying to find new ways of, for instance, [name? @ 51:21], portraying the universe. Or is his name [name? @ 51:28?]. I haven’t heard of him before, a Catholic who was trying to find new ways of painting Christ and Christ’s life that can somehow connect to this work.

All these are different ways of dealing with what you might call the double-trackedness of our modern culture. The track of spiritual exploring through art in this sense with the symbol; and, the track of dwelling. Seeking and dwelling is a term I took from the American sociologist, Robert Wuthnow,36 which is quite good if you allow for the fact a lot of us are both. But dwelling is just being in the original house and continuing. Seeking is trying to move through a path of ex-ploration.

So all these are different ways in which the double-trackedness of our culture makes pos-sible – along with other things, of course, along with freedom, etc. – something like the reli-gious-slash-spiritual scene we live in today. I think we can see that as – you can’t say result. I mean cause and effect doesn’t work quite that way. But the development of this post-romantic poetics and then music and then art created the conditions in which the present scene – religious-spiritual coexistence, or non-coexistence – could arise and be what it is.

All right, before I go totally beyond all acceptable limits, I’d just like to say a few words about what’s coming to me about the paintings I saw both in the catalogue and right down stairs a few minutes ago. I think you can see a tremendous, clear analogy between that Wordsworth poem, on one hand, and a great deal of these paintings, on the other. Joseph Turner37 and French Symbolist painter Louis Weldon Hawkins and the French painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) in which, thanks to the painting, you can see – I mean the painting is there operating as a symbol you see – shining through the world around us something very much deeper.

But it is, like the Wordsworth force, something which is much under-described, some-times enigmatic, uncertain, and certainly not proven. But there’s a kind of striving, and you know that from Monet himself in his exploration of Buddhism. So there’s a kind of striving for something deeper.

There’s another feature of Baudelaire I should’ve mentioned earlier but I’ll mention now. I wonder if he has an analogue. Baudelaire, in the process of these magnificent poems on the spleen and Jean Racine38 and so on, does something which the British (American born) poet and critic T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) later very much praised.

Eliot wrote about how Baudelaire can describe to us the world of a very sordid, ugly ur-banizing universe. But he takes these images and he says he raises them to the first intensity so that you see through them beyond to possible transformation. In a way, Racine is doing that.

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Taking him beyond it, precisely by going through an intense form, these very ugly, negative im-ages of this ugly, negative reality. And of course – I mean “The Waste Land”39 doesn’t exist, “Prufrock”40 doesn’t exist, without that kind of a thing. Eliot learnt that from him.

When I was going through the Exhibition just a few minutes ago, and I was seeing these stark landscapes of the First World War, I was wondering is there something Baudelaire-analo-gous in these that seemed the most ugly, bare, stripped-down, destroyed world.

Maybe I’m dreaming. This is where I need your help to see how to read these paintings to see if there’s something analogous to that.

So, another connection that seemed to me powerful was another Baudelaire – I’m really Baudelaire obsessed – but this is the Baudelaire poem, “Correspondances,” which is quoted in the catalogue. There, of course, that’s a reference back to the earlier notions of order where there were affinities between things and so on. But he is describing it in terms of the wood of a forest in which winds are going through, and you have a forêt de symbols, forest of symbols.

This word, symbol, keeps recurring in its very specific romantic sense even by people who don’t necessarily read Schlegel. It also becomes part of the world, of the air people breathe.

So, it was quoted in the catalogue that people were pointing out a number of different paintings where there is the notion of a sacred wood containing everything. This is a dream of the integral world of a meaningful cosmos, which we know we’ve lost in which all these at-tempts at creating symbols are meant to – restore is the wrong word – recover some successor to, recover some experience like that.

Because this was a kind of disenchantment which always raises the desire for re-enchant-ment in a different way in our world. And one thing we have to – makes me very much want to – explore is that this is obviously something very deep and interesting about human beings which we really haven’t understood. When we go back and look at other societies, tribal societies, like the aboriginals in Canada, Emily Carr41 is now coming to mind, their sense of the world around them as living, I’m not saying this is correct. Nobody knows which the correct version is. But somehow this seems to me a working out in their world of what we’re trying to work out in Wordsworth’s world, in Monet’s world, and so on. So, I don’t promise I’ll solve this problem be-fore I finish my book, but it would be great if we could make progress in solving this problem.

Well, thank you very much.

Questions and Answers:

Questioner: I wanted to ask you of the three genres you had – poetics, art and music – it seems as if, as you’re describing, and I think the painting on the right is a good example of the direction toward a kind of modern art in which that isn’t really anything. You can’t really say what it is. But it draws an emotion for us. We get some emotional reaction just as you described with the music. I guess I’m wondering why do you think, at least in my perspective, that poetics

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was the last to this train? It wasn’t until the American poet E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) in the 20th Century that we got really abstract. Why did it take longer for that versus the art and the mu-sic?

Taylor: I wouldn’t say that it did take longer because, in a certain sense, poetry and music were maybe off on this track – if the track is defined, as I would define it, with the notion of the symbol. That is, that it’s invoking a view of an order that’s very unclear what it is, or whether it really is, as against an order that you already recognize and is already part of your cultural back-ground.

So, you find poetry and music doing this plainly very early on. I mean at the beginning of the 19th Century and the end of the 18th Century. Then, you get – you’re right – in poetry a series of ruptures of forms. So, you get [the Renaissance or romantic poets? @ 1:01:51] themselves as breaking up the heroic couplet, breaking up the forms of neoclassical poetry in order to be able to create their symbols. And you go on and on doing this. But the order and the pace in which this is done and the manner, and even in different European poetry traditions, is very different.

So, take someone like Mallarmé. I could talk for a long time about how there’s something really strange about what Mallarmé is doing in the “Sonnet en ‘-yx.” But he’s absolutely got a perfect sonnet form, a perfect rhyme form. Then, along came later symbolists in the later 19th Century, and Mallarmé was astonished – [Taylor quotes a few words of Mallarmé’s in French @ 1:02:54] – in one lecture he gave in Austria. “People have touched the proper form!” So, you get this tremendously inventive poet, mind-bendingly inventive poet, in one way, who is not neces-sarily literally touching and undoing the forms.

So, the whole process of dissolution of forms in order to say new things – well, the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is already doing this to a very great extent in the mid-19th Century. It’s very hard to know who is-behind-whom, is what I’m trying to say. Poetry isn’t a single thing when you move from the German context to the English context to the Italian con-text to the French context. And the manner in which they break out of forms in one way and not another way is something extremely hard to follow.

Questioner: You talked very much about people being on a spiritual path, seeking some

kind of transformation, and you use the word, “transformation,” a few times in the talk. I’m won-dering if you think it’s possible the poets, the artists, the musicians that can lead us with this un-derlying language to these experiences – these direct experiences – of this force you talked about – could it be possible that they have already had a transformation of consciousness that allows them to then let us see through the veil, in a certain sense, into this other world?

Taylor: Yeah. No, I mean that certainly is possible and it sometimes happens. I mean, look at the English artist, poet and mystic William Blake (1757-1827). It it’s not clear exactly be-cause we don’t know enough about Blake, but one suspects that there were some powerful expe-riences of visions he had that might’ve been lying behind his very [word? @ 1:04:53] work – both his visual art and his poetry.

But I think in many cases this isn’t so, and it wasn’t so in the case of Wordsworth nor is it so in the case of Mallarmé. One senses it’s the searching there. And I read a line in the catalogue,

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which was a very interesting quote from Evelyn Underhill,42 and this introduces the issue of two kinds of mysticism. There are kinds of mysticism when we want to speak of totally out of the or-dinary experiences you just couldn’t credit normally, and it’s even hard to credit when they hap-pen. Something like the Carmelite Christian mystic Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), for instance. And there, what they often give rise to is a kind of description, which is not about the power of the symbol at all, but just saying what happened. And in a lot of the cases where they have pow-erful symbols, they don’t grow from that.

So, probably, there’s absolutely no rule from here at all. But, everything is – all combina-tions probably exist.

Questioner: I’m a philosophy professor. German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche and Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce43 said one day religion will be replaced by art. I’m wonder-ing why do you bring two rival enterprises, religion and art, close to one another rather than keeping them separate and treating and talking about them separately?

Taylor: Well, because people are always moving back and forth between them. I mean some people, yes, they do want to refuse all of what they see as the underlying stories of reli-gious doctrines. People do that. Other people are searching. Other people move back and forth. The fact is that people are always talking to each other. But, once again, many people in the cata-logue or people on the wall, people like Emily Carr or the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) – these were people who were, on one hand, very moved by an underlying story. In one case, Emily Carr, orthodox Christianity. In the other case, theosophy, on one hand, but also powerfully moved to do those paintings, on the other. I tried to point out earlier, referring to a couple of those painters, these were separate operations for them in the sense that when they were moved in this direction of trying to, as it were, see the mystery in this mountain by their theosophical belief or by their Christian belief. But when they’re doing the actual painting they weren’t sort of running the doctrine through their minds. They were looking, looking very strongly at the forest. And symbols were, as it were, coming to them which would open up a depth channel.

I don’t see them as rivals, because so many people are working on both. And rivalry, I think, either comes from people who have a lot of dogmatic, anti-religious feelings, on one hand, or who are dogmatic and not very tolerant believers, on the other. Otherwise, they aren’t lived as rivals in the lives of lots of people.

Questioner: I just wonder if you agree with a position by George Steiner44 who says in a few words in his book, Errata, that words are a much better means of communication not only of meaning but even of emotions. They relate more to the human condition and, something I found surprising, in that sense they are far superior to music. So, I wonder what you think of that.

Taylor: I’m baffled. Baffled. [Audience laughs.] He’s a writer! [Taylor and audience laugh.]

Questioner: Towards the end, you said something along the lines of that process of de-en-chantment also begets a process of re-enchantment. And most of the painters and writers you

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were speaking about tonight are from the 1900s or 1800s. I’m wondering if you can speak to how that re-enchantment process is kind of being lived out today in our society.

Taylor: I think it’s the attempt – I mean it’s not a process that can be ever completed in the sense of recreating a world in which everybody accepted certain underlying beliefs and a cer-tain notion of what the depth of reality was. I think we’re totally outside that possible world, out-side Christendom, a civilization informed by this. So, what re-enchantment means is an attempt to increase our insight and – from this increased insight – to live more in symbiosis with, in con-nection with, these deeper forces. And this is something people are going to be trying to do in their lives as individuals but also certain groups. But it’s not something that I can foresee the whole society doing together. So, it’s something that is always starting up. So, these paintings, or the poems I was referring to, are going to remain as very powerful sources of inspiration for peo-ple starting out on this kind of path. I mean their religious and spiritual significance lies there.

Questioner: I was just meaning to remind you to hold to your promise to tell us about your counter-argument to the deflationary or reductionist account of how we experience art, mu-sic and stuff. So, basically going back to you. Thank you.

Taylor: I mean it’s a complicated argument but I’m glad you raised that because I really wanted to say if you look at what human beings do, obviously when they go out in the country for the holiday, when they go out in the mountains or the wilderness, they follow Thoreau in thinking that in wildness is the salvation of the world, when they garden, you know, mix their leaves with the growing plants, what are they getting out of that? And if you try to read that, it’s some kind of profound sense that that is a necessary completion, a necessary, if you like, a fun-damental potentiality of human beings that they’re carrying out. So, if you begin to look – I mean this is a hermeneutic argument. In other words, an interpretive argument. What’s going on? Or, from another point of view, what is going on when Baudelaire is feeling this profound spleen and then somehow getting beyond it, partly through his poetry. So, there’s some kind of felt-need here for meaningful, lived time. And, to me, my sense of what’s going on there is something very powerful and very deep – a kind of ethical demand of human beings. And therefore, not some-thing that can be simply dismissed in a way which has no implications for the world outside my skin.

I mean if it really is like “auditory cheesecake,” the whole thing happens inside this palate. But if this kind of reconnection is a really important human need and aspiration, it’s not a knock-down argument. There are no knock-down arguments here. But it’s a patient, hermeneu-tic, interpretive argument. And, from that point of view, that kind of remark is absurd.

Endnotes

1 Art Gallery of Ontario “Mystical Landscapes” Exhibition Overview: The years between 1880 and 1930 were marked by rampant materialism and rapid urbanization. Disillusioned with traditional religious institutions, many European, Scandinavian and North American artists searched for an unmediated spiritual path through mystical experiences. Orga-nized in partnership with the renowned Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Mystical Landscapes: Masterpieces from Monet, Van Gogh and more breaks new art historical ground, exploring the mystical experiences of 37 artists from 14 countries, in-cluding Emily Carr, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Georgia O'Keeffe and James McNeill Whistler.

Taking visitors on a journey through Europe, Scandinavia and North America, the exhibition features close to 90 extra-ordinary paintings and 20 works on paper, many of which seldom leave their home museum. Highlights include Vin-cent van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhone at Arles  from 1888, which prompted him to write about feeling “a tremendous need of —shall I say the word—religion...so I go outside at night to paint the stars”; Paul Gauguin's vivid Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)  from 1888, painted during his sojourn in rural Brit-tany; Claude Monet's Water Lilies (Nymphéas) from 1907, which he painted after hours of Zen-like meditation beside his Japanese water garden; Edvard Munch's The Sun, created to inspire students in the wake of his well-publicized ner-vous breakdown between 1910-1913; Georgia O'Keeffe's Series I - from the Plains from 1919, which shows the terri-fying power of an approaching thunderstorm in Texas; and a series of mystical lithographs by the recently rediscovered French artist Charles Marie Dulac, which illustrates St. Francis of Assisi's Canticle of Creation (Source: https://ago.ca/exhibitions/mystical-landscapes-masterpieces-monet-van-gogh-and-more; accessed 8/25/2018).

2 Unauthorized, Samuel C. Porter, Ph.D., transcribed and lightly edited Taylor’s talk for readability; and, added end-notes, headings and italics. Any transcription errors are Porter’s (Source: http://ago.ca/events/charles-taylor-religion-spiritual-and-art; accessed 9/7/2018).

3 Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

4 Johann Hamann (1730–1788) lived and worked in Prussia in the context of the late German Enlightenment. Al-though he never held a University post, he was respected in his time for his scholarship and breadth of learning aided by his fluency in many languages. His principal activity was as an editor and a writer. His central preoccupations include language, knowledge, the nature of the human person, sexuality and gender, and the relationship of humanity to God (Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hamann/; accessed 8/26/2018).

Johann Herder (1744–1803) German philosopher. He influenced Hegel, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Friedrich Schlegel, John Stuart Mill, and Goethe as well as various intellectual disciplines including linguistics and anthropology as well as biblical scholarship. Born in Mohrungen in East Prussia in humble circumstances where his father was a school teacher, Herder enrolled at the University of Königsberg where he studied with Kant who recognized his unusual intellectual abilities and where he began a lifelong friendship with Hamann. Herder is the author of numerous books and essays on philosophy, art, language and literature, humanity, Hebrew poetry, Shakespeare, the French revolution, Chris-tian writings, religion, and Kant. (Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/; accessed 8/26/2018).

Wilhelm Humboldt (1767-1835) German philologist, diplomat and man of letters. Close friend of the poets Goethe and Schiller, Humboldt’s life’s work encompasses the areas of philosophy, literature, linguistics, semiotics, hermeneu-tics, anthropology, education, political thought, the philosophy of language and statesmanship. (Source: https://plato.s-tanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-humboldt/; accessed 8/6/2018).

5 Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German philosopher, writer, literary critic. A bitter rival of Hegel, Schlegel was an important figure in early German Romanticism in a way that both countered and developed German Idealism. The youngest of five sons, Schlegel was born in Hanover into a prominent literary family. Friedrich’s essay, “On the Study of Greek Poetry” sharply distinguished between ancient and modern modes of literature. In Berlin, Friedrich connected with several important figures of the Romantic movement including Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), a theolo-gian with a Moravian Pietist background, and the poet, mystic and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) (1772-1801). Both Schlegel brothers, Novalis and Schleiermacher published the journal Athenaeum between 1798 and 1800. Schlegel's work on the grammatical connections between Sanskrit and the Indo-European languages, On the Lan-guage and Wisdom of the Indians (1808), marks an important development of the study of comparative grammar. Al-though Schlegel converted to Catholicism in 1808, which affected his political stance, his study of Hindu thought sig-nificantly influenced his religious thought as well. August Schlegel (1767-1845), Friedrich’s brother, was a great trans-lator of Shakespeare and a leading literary critic, too (Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/; accessed 8/26/2018).

6 Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) Along with J.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel, Schelling is one of the three most influ-ential thinkers in the tradition of “German Idealism.” He attended a Protestant seminary in Tübingen from 1790 to 1795, where he was close friends with both Hegel and the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin. Writing in a time

of change, he often changed his mind but was rigorously logical. Although his empirical claims are largely indefensible today, his philosophy opens up the possibility of an interpretive view of nature that doesn’t confine nature’s signifi-cance in scientific terms. His anti-Cartesian view of subjectivity prefigures Nietzsche, Heidegger and others in showing the thinking subject cannot be fully transparent to itself. His criticism of Hegelian Idealism influenced Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, a criticism Theodore Adorno and Jacque Derrida echo. In Jena in the late 1790s, Schelling engaged with the early Romantic thinkers, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Eventually, in 1841, he took up what had been, at Hegel’s death in 1831, Hegel’s chair of philosophy. In recent years, Schelling has been increasingly brought into contemporary debates about naturalism, freedom, aesthetics, epistemology, and ontology (Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schelling/; accessed 8/26/2018).

7 Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) German Romantic poet and philosopher. When he was two years old, he lost his fa-ther and then, again, his stepfather when he was seven. As a seminary student, he studied with Hegel and Schelling. Hölderlin left the church and worked as a tutor. With seminary classmate Isaac von Sinclair, Hölderlin was arrested for treason in 1805, declared unfit and institutionalized in 1806. Released in 1807, he spent the rest of his life with a foster family in Tübingen. His poetry incorporated classical Greek syntax and mythology while engaging themes of exile, di-vinity, and the natural world. Hölderlin influenced modern poets and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Rilke, Heidegger, and Celan (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/friedrich-holderlin; accessed 8/27/2018).

8 Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) German poet and dramatist. Best known for his immense influence on German litera-ture, he authored an extraordinary series of dramas, including The Robbers, Maria Stuart, and the trilogy Wallenstein. He was also a prodigious poet, composing perhaps most famously “Ode to Joy” featured in the culmination of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and enshrined, some two centuries later, in the European Hymn. In part through his cele-brated friendship with Goethe, he edited epoch-defining literary journals and exerted lasting influence on German stage production. He is sometimes referred to as the German Shakespeare.

Since his death, Schiller’s thought has steadily influenced some of philosophy’s most prominent debates. Early on, Hegel and Humboldt promoted Schiller’s aesthetic and political theorizing. His influence on British Romanticism, espe-cially through the enthusiasm of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was also substantial. Marx and Engels praised his revolu-tionary spirit and diagnosis of the modern age but criticized his perceived idealism. Schiller’s reputation suffered greatly from its deployment in the 1914 “War of the Intellectuals” between England and Germany and from misuse of his thought by National Socialists in subsequent decades. A divided post-war Germany saw Schiller’s fame employed in support of competing political philosophies in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. More recently, his vision of an “aesthetically permeated culture” has been cited as a predecessor to “modern mass-me-dia studies.” In short, his was a vision of the centrality of aesthetic experience to daily and political life that has res-onated through the centuries since his death and continues to shape philosophical thought today (Source: https://plato.s-tanford.edu/entries/schiller/; accessed 8/28/2018).

9 Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassical and Romantic Poems. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968. According to the publisher’s description, in part the book traces “the breakdown of cosmic assumptions and the foundation of private ones in the nineteenth century.”

10 Arthur Lovejoy (1873-1962) American philosopher and historian of ideas founded the discipline known as the his-tory of ideas with The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936, Revised Edition, 1976.

11 Kabbalah is the Jewish mystical tradition. See Jacob Neusner, Judaism: An Introduction. New York: Penguin Put-nam, Inc., 2002, Part III, Israel’s Story in Theology and Law, Chapter 7, “The Theology of Judaism: Revealing the Ra-tionality of Being,” Section 7, “Kabbalah: Esoteric Doctrine and Experience,” pp. 170-173. See also “Judaism (mysti-cism)” in Jonathan Z. Smith, ed., The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion. New York: HarpersCollins Publishers, 1996, pp. 585-589.

12 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

13 Concordia discors: Inharmonious harmony: harmony of discordant elements. Compare: Discordia concors: harmo-nious discord: harmony or unity gained by combining disparate or conflicting elements (Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ ; accessed 8/27/2018).

14 William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour,” July 13, 1798 (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798; accessed 8/30/2018)

15 Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) French philosopher. He spoke of the role of faith in his life as “an accident transformed into a destiny through an ongoing choice, while scrupulously respecting other choices.” From the earliest years of his academic life he was convinced there is a basic, irreducible difference between things and human beings as persons and as agents. Unlike things, persons can engage in free, thoughtful action. But Ricoeur never accepted any version of a substance dualism in the person as the Cartesian cogito and the Kantian transcendental subject can be read to require. He did, however, accept Kant’s doctrine regarding the antinomies of reason and the necessary distinction between theo-retical and practical reason. A major theme of his writing is philosophical anthropology. Ricoeur employs the term “ca-pable human being” to provide an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities human beings display, and to show how these capabilities enable responsible human action. Though the accent is always on the possibility of un-derstanding human beings as responsible for their actions, Ricoeur rejects any claim that the self is immediately trans-parent to itself or fully master of itself. Self-knowledge only comes through understanding our relation to the world and our life with and among others in time in the world. His academic training was in a French tradition that seeks to under-stand how the “I” comes to be aware of itself and of its thought and action starting from the lived experience of reflex-ive consciousness, our being aware of ourselves as existing, thinking, and acting. Influenced by Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur combines phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation, an approach that assumes whatever is intelligible comes to us in and through our use of lan-guage. While philosophical language always aims at univocal concepts, actually used language is always polysemic; it can have more than one meaning, so all uses of language necessarily call for interpretation. He emphasized we live in time and in history. His late writings reflect a more direct concern for making sense of selfhood and personal identity as something that goes beyond the epistemological subject, and for ethics at the individual as well as the societal and polit-ical levels, leading to his essays on the idea of the just and his last book on the possibility of mutual recognition and states of peace. His books include The Symbolism of Evil (1960), Freud and Philosophy (1970), The Conflict of Inter-pretations (1969), Oneself as Another (1992), Reflections on the Just (2001), and The Course of Recognition (2004) (Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/; accessed 8/27/2018).

16 George Meredith (1828-1909) English novelist and poet. Meredith is one of the earliest English psychological nov-elists and as an important experimenter with narrative told from a variety of shifting, unreliable perspectives, reflecting a modern perception of the uncertain nature of both personal motivation and of social or historical events (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/george-meredith; accessed 8/27/2018).

17 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) German philosopher. He was among the first 19th Century philosophers to con-tend that, at its core, the universe is not a rational place. Inspired by Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into an instinct-recognizing and ulti-mately ascetic outlook, emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natu-ral desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence. Of-ten considered to be a thoroughgoing pessimist, Schopenhauer in fact advocated ways — via artistic, moral and ascetic forms of awareness — to overcome a frustration-filled and fundamentally painful human condition. Since his death in 1860, his philosophy has had a special attraction for those who wonder about life’s meaning, along with those engaged in music, literature, and the visual arts. His books include The World as Will and Representation 1818, 1859. (Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/; accessed 8/27/2018).

18 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher. He published, mainly in the 1870s and 1880s, uncompromis-ing criticisms of traditional European morality and religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity. Many of these criticisms rely on psychological diagnoses that expose false consciousness infecting people’s received ideas. For that reason, he is often linked with other “masters of suspi-cion” against “traditional values” such as Marx and Freud. Nietzsche used his psychological analyses to support original theories about the nature of the self and provocative proposals suggesting new values he thought would promote cul-tural renewal and improve social and psychological life by comparison to life under the “traditional values” he criti-cized. As a student in Leipzig, Nietzsche met the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). His friendship with Wagner lasted into the mid-1870s. Their friendship – and its end – were key turning points in Nietzsche’s personal and professional life. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), was a controversial polemic and not well-received but contained striking interpretive insights (e.g., about the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy). Niet-zsche’s health, always fragile, forced him to take leave from Basel in 1876–77. He used the time to explore a broadly naturalistic critique of traditional morality and culture. Nietzsche’s research resulted in Human, All-too-human (1878), which introduced his readers to the corrosive attacks on conventional pieties for which he became famous, as well as to a style of writing in short, numbered paragraphs and pithy aphorisms to which he often returned in later work. Niet-zsche’s other books include Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Anti-Christ (1895), and The Will to Power (1901) (Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/; ac-cessed 8/27/2018).

19 Stephané Mallarmé (1842-1898) French poet. Mallarmé is one of France's four major poets of the second half of the nineteenth century, along with Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Although he was recognized as

such during his lifetime, much of his poetry was acknowledged to be difficult to understand because of its tortuous syn-tax, ambiguous expressions, and obscure imagery. Critics disagree as to the precise interpretations of many of his later works (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephane-mallarme; accessed 8/27/2018).

20 Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) American poet and storywriter. His stature as a major figure in world literature is pri-marily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influ-ential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the “art for art’s sake” movement in 19th Century European literature. Whereas ear-lier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work’s effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demon-strated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe’s poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th Century, who in turn altered the direction of mod-ern literature.

His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, the “heresy of the Didactic.”

Poe’s theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader’s sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in “tales of ratiocina-tion” or works evoking “terror, or passion, or horror.”

Psychological intensity characterizes Poe’s writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories—which include “The Black Cat,”“The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character’s psy-che. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “Ligeia” an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and also links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.  

Poe’s three tales of ratiocination—”The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detec-tive fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate.

His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as Lord Byron, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. 

In “The Raven,” Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven’s ominous repetition of “Nevermore” in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover. Charles Baudelaire noted in his introduction to the French edition of “The Raven”: “It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible” (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edgar-allan-poe; accessed 8/27/2018).

21 Steven Pinker (b. 1954)) is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is an experimental cognitive psychologist and a popular writer on language, mind, and human nature (Source: https://psychology.fas.har-vard.edu/people/steven-pinker; accessed 8/27/2018).

22 Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838) was an Italian, later American opera librettist, poet and Roman Catholic priest. He wrote the libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart’s most celebrated operas, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte.

23 Walter Pater (1839-1894) English critic, essayist, and humanist whose advocacy of “art for art’s sake” became a cardinal doctrine of the Aesthetic movement. He studied Greek philosophy at Oxford. Pater’s essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and others were collected in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). His delicate style and sensitive appreciation of Renaissance art in these essays made his reputation. In the concluding essay, he asserts art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and not for morality or utility. The primary influence on Pater’s mind was his classical studies, colored by a highly individual view of Christian devotion and pursued largely as a source of extremely refined artistic sensations. In his later critical writings Pater continued to focus on the innate qualities of works of art, in contrast to the prevailing tendency to evaluate them on the basis of their moral and educational value. Pater significantly

influenced the next literary generation, including Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes of the 1890s. (Source: https://www.bri-tannica.com/biography/Walter-Pater; accessed 8/27/2018).

24 Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827) German Romantic poet known for his lyrics, which Franz Schubert set to music in Die schöne Müllerin, Die Winterreise, and for his popular translation of Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus (Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/wilhelm-müller; accessed 8/28/2018).

25 Johann Goethe (1749-1832) preeminent figure in German literature, poet, playwright, and novelist. The child of an imperial councilor, Goethe had a thoroughly classical education before entering Leipzig University in 1765. Though he was there to study law, Goethe earned accolades for his poetry, written in the lyric and rococo style, and completed his first collection, Annette, a collection of love poems. One of his most famous works, the loosely autobiographical The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), also dates from this period.  Goethe continued to find inspiration in his surroundings. During the French Revolution, he was ousted from his home after the French army attacked Prussia. Torn between his support of democracy and his unwillingness to part with his bourgeois lifestyle, Goethe wrote Hermann and Dorothea (1797), an epic poem that examines the contrast between chaos and the complacent peace that accompanies a decadent lifestyle.  Goethe is most well-known for his epic poem Faust (1808), based on the legend popularized by Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus.  The poem depicts a young scholar who, frustrated by the limits to his education, power, and en-joyment of life, engages the assistance of the devil at the cost of his soul. In Faust, Goethe draws extensively from Christian, medieval, and classical sources, complicating the original legend’s dichotomous struggle between good and evil and questioning what constitutes ultimate human fulfillment. Goethe had a profound impact on later literary move-ments, including Romanticism and expressionism, and made important contributions to philosophical and naturalist schools of thought (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/johann-wolfgang-von-goethe; accessed 8/28/2018).

26 Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) one of the most compelling poets of the nineteenth century. While Baudelaire's contemporary Victor Hugo is generally acknowledged as the greatest of 19th Century French poets, Baudelaire excels in his unprecedented expression of a complex sensibility and of modern themes within structures of classical rigor and technical artistry. Baudelaire is distinctive in French literature also in that his skills as a prose writer virtually equal his ability as a poet. His body of work includes a novella, influential translations of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, highly perceptive criticism of contemporary art, provocative journal entries, and critical essays on a variety of subjects. Baudelaire's work has had a tremendous influence on modernism, and his relatively slim production of poetry in partic-ular has had a significant impact on later poets. More than a talent of 19th Century France, Baudelaire is one of the ma-jor figures in the literary history of the world. 

For Baudelaire, the love of Beauty and sensual love are two specific examples of man's capacity for original sin. In Les Fleurs du mal Beauty is a compelling but often terrible phenomenon described in terms of hard, lifeless matter. Even the woman of "Le Serpent qui danse" (The Snake Which Dances), a poem about movement, has eyes that are "deux bi-joux froids où se mêle / L'or avec le fer" (two cold jewels where / Gold mixes with iron), and Beauty of "La Beauté" (Beauty) is like "un rêve de pierre" (a dream of stone) that inspires love "éternel et muet ainsi que la matière" (as eter-nal and mute as matter). The power of this inhuman Beauty is terrible. "La Beauté" reduces the poet to a "docile" lover who is virtually chained to his idol. "Hymne à la Beauté" (Hymn to Beauty) concludes with the same helpless devotion to Beauty's powers of distraction and more explicitly articulates Beauty's dual nature: her look is "infernal et divin" (in-fernal and divine), and the poet is so addicted that he does not care whether She comes from Heaven, Hell, or both. 

Baudelaire's "Doctrine of Correspondences" suggests a belief of sorts in a pattern for the world and in relationships be-tween the physical world and a spiritual one. This view, probably influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg and viewed as an antecedent to symbolism, is presented in the poem "Correspondances." Nature is presented as a "temple" whose living pillars speak to man and whose "forest of symbols" (forêt de symboles) observe him. Baudelaire writes that "Les par-fums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent" (Perfumes, colors, and sounds interact with each other) like echoes in a "ténébreuse et profonde unité" (dark and deep unity). Although he does not include a direct expression of faith in God or gods in the poem, Baudelaire's profoundly mystical belief in the world's fundamental unity is clear. "Correspon-dances" epitomizes Baudelaire's complicated spirituality. Indeed, the subject of Baudelaire's faith has been much de-bated. Most critics agree that Baudelaire's preoccupations are fundamentally Christian but that in Les Fleurs du mal he fails to embrace entirely Jesus Christ and his power of redemption. Les Fleurs du mal is best read on its own terms, with a respect for its complexity. The constant thrust of the collection is to impart to the reader an awareness of tension be-tween the physically real and the spiritually ideal, of a hopeless but ever-renewed aspiration toward the infinite from an existence mired in sin on earth.

Even in his treatment of Romantic themes, however, Baudelaire is radical for his time. He imagines solitude not as a state of nature but as it happens in cities, presenting it in counterpoint to city crowds. The person who experiences en-

nui, as opposed to mal de siècle, is mercilessly self-aware and is troubled by original sin and a divided self. For Baude-laire the poet is endowed with special powers but is also a clumsy albatross ("L'Albatros") or slothful sinner ("Le Mau-vais Moine"). No longer mournful meditation in picturesque settings, introspection turns ugly with Baudelaire, a guilty pleasure to be squeezed like "une vieille orange" (an old orange), as Baudelaire asserts in "Au Lecteur." The infinite is no longer the divine perceived in stars; it is found in the expansiveness of scents, in the imagination, in poetry, in cold-hearted Beauty, in the desire to escape. Similarly, Baudelaire's use and mastery of traditional technique revolutionized French poetry by so clearly representing a unique sensibility. In "Le Cygne," a poem detailing the poet's thoughts as he walks through a changing Paris, Baudelaire sensitively communicates modern anxiety and a modern sense of displace-ment. The poem begins with an abrupt exclamation, "Andromaque, je pense à vous!" (Andromache, I am thinking of you!). A series of repetitions compounds the initial sense of urgency. The frequent recurrence of the verb je pense à (I am thinking about), though, also indicates the meditative nature of the poem; the repetition of words such as là (there)—along with a myriad of sharp descriptions—show that meditation interacts with the speaker's close observations. Syn-tax broken across stanzas conveys the reach of the poet's thoughts and observations as well as a sense of breathless haste. 

Baudelaire had achieved an important reputation in the literary world by the time of his death; writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Rimbaud openly sang his praises. In his correspondence Rimbaud called him a “génie, un voyant” (genius, a visionary). In articles written for the journal L’Art in November and December 1865 Verlaine cred-ited Baudelaire with writing poetry about modern man. Mallarmé celebrated Baudelaire in essays and took up many of his themes (Poe, escape from the physical world, and desire for the infinite). Baudelaire’s influence has carried over into the 20th Century and to other countries in the work of such writers as Pierre-Jean Jouve, Pierre Emmanuel, and T.S. Eliot. From Baudelaire’s personal, dark ruminations come epiphanies that illuminate even the 20th Century. His poetry is read for those moments when, as Baudelaire wrote in his notebook, “la profonder de la vie se révèle tout entière dans le spectacle, si ordinaire qu’il soit, qu’on a sous les yeux. Il en devient le symbole” (the depth of life reveals itself in all its profundity in whatever one is looking at, however ordinary that spectacle might be. That vision becomes the symbol of life’s depth) (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charles-baudelaire; accessed 8/28/2018).

27 Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was one of the most famous and influential French philosophers of the late 19th Cen-tury-early 20th Century. French thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lévinas explicitly acknowledged his influ-ence on their thought, but it was Gilles Deleuze's 1966 Bergsonism that marked the reawakening of interest in Bergson's work and showed Bergson's concept of multiplicity to be his most enduring contribution to philosophical thinking. That concept attempts to unify in a consistent way two contradictory features: heterogeneity and continuity. For many philosophers today, this concept is revolutionary because it opens the way to a reconception of community.

In 1903, Bergson published, in the prestigious Revue de métaphysique et de morale, an article entitled “Introduction to Metaphysics” (later reproduced as the centerpiece of The Creative Mind [La Pensée et le mouvant] in 1934). The first of Bergson's works to be translated in many languages, this article not only became a crucial reading guide for Bergson's philosophy as a whole, but it also marked the beginning of “Bergsonism” and of its influence on Cubism and literature. Through Williams James's enthusiastic reading of this essay, Bergsonism acquired a far-reaching influence on Ameri-can Pragmatism. Moreover, his imprint on American literature (in particular, Wallace Stevens and Willa Cather, who created a character called “Alexandra Bergson”) is undeniable.

In 1928, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1932, he surprised everyone with the publication of his last major book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, which gave rise to renewed debates and misunderstandings about his philosophy and his religious orientation. The final collection of his essays, The Creative Mind, appeared in 1934.

Bergson died on January 3, 1941 at the age of 81. There is a rumor that he had converted to Catholicism near the end of his life, but there is no document to support this rumor. In fact, in a letter to Emmanuel Mounier, Madame Bergson quotes her husband saying, “I would have converted [to Catholicism], if I had not seen over many years the great wave of anti-Semitism preparing itself to expand over the world.” Because of his fame, the Vichy Government offered Berg-son exemptions from anti-Semitic regulations, but he refused (Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/; ac-cessed 8/30/2018).

28 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phe-nomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contempo-rary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory, lit-erary criticism, theology, psychotherapy, and cognitive science.

Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Germany, a quiet, conservative, religious rural town. In 1909 he spent two weeks in the Jesuit order before leaving (probably on health grounds) to study theology at the University of Freiburg. In 1911 he switched subjects, to philosophy. He began teaching at Freiburg in 1915. In 1917 he married Elfride Petri, with whom

he had two sons (Jörg and Hermann) and from whom he never parted (although his affair with the philosopher Hannah Arendt, his student at Marburg in the 1920s, is well-known).

Heidegger's philosophical development began when he read Brentano and Aristotle, plus the latter's medieval scholastic interpreters. Indeed, Aristotle's demand in the Metaphysics to know what it is that unites all possible modes of Being (or ‘is-ness’) is, in many ways, the question that ignites and drives Heidegger's philosophy. From this platform he pro-ceeded to engage deeply with Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and, perhaps most importantly of all for his subsequent thinking in the 1920s, two further figures: Dilthey (whose stress on the role of interpretation and history in the study of human activity profoundly influenced Heidegger) and Husserl (whose understanding of phenomenology as a science of essences he was destined to reject). Out of such influences, explorations, and critical engagements, Heidegger's mag-num opus, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) was born. Although Heidegger's academic and intellectual relationship with his Freiburg predecessor was complicated and occasionally strained, Being and Time was dedicated to Husserl, “in friendship and admiration”.

Published in 1927, Being and Time is standardly hailed as one of the most significant texts in contemporary European (or Continental) Philosophy. It provided the philosophical impetus for Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, Hans Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, and Jacques Derrida's notion of ‘deconstruction’ as well as others who span the continental and Anglo-analytic philosophical styles such as Richard Rorty.

Heidegger's involvement with Nazism casts a shadow over his life. It would be irresponsible to ignore the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics. But it is surely possible to be critically engaged in a deep and intellec-tually stimulating way with his sustained investigation into Being, to find much of value in his capacity to think deeply about human life, to struggle fruitfully with what he says about our loss of dwelling, and to appreciate his massive and still unfolding contribution to thought and to thinking, without looking for evidence of Nazism in every twist and turn of the philosophical path he lays down (Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/; accessed 8/30/2018).

29 Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) Primarily regarded as a literary critic and essayist. In the 1930s, Benjamin's efforts to develop a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulus for both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht. 

An understanding of the intellectual context of his work has contributed to the philosophical revival of Early German Romanticism. One-Way Street and the work arising from his unfinished research on 19th Century Paris (The Arcades Project), provide a theoretical stimulus for cultural theory and philosophical concepts of the modern. Benjamin's mes-sianic understanding of history has been an enduring source of theoretical fascination and frustration for a diverse range of philosophical thinkers, including Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas. The ‘Critique of Violence’ and ‘On the Concept of History’ are important sources for Derrida's discussion of messianicity.

Benjamin was the eldest of three children in a prosperous Berlin family from an assimilated Jewish background. He be-gan contributing to Der Anfang (‘The Beginning’), a journal dedicated to the liberal educational reformer Gustav Wyneken's principles on the spiritual purity of youth, articles which contain in embryonic form important ideas on ex-perience and history that continue to occupy his mature thought. In 1915 a friendship began between Benjamin and Ger-hard (later Gershom) Scholem, a fellow student at Berlin. This relationship would have a lifelong influence upon Ben-jamin's relation to Judaism and Kabbalism, notably in his interpretations of Kafka in the early 1930s. Scholem would prove instrumental in establishing and, in part, shaping the legacy of Benjamin's works after his death.

By the early 1930s Benjamin was closely involved in the plans for a left-wing periodical to be entitled ‘Crisis and Cri-tique’, in collaboration with Ernst Bloch and, among others, the Marxist poet, playwright and theatre director Bertolt Brecht. During the 1930s the Institute for Social Research, by this point under the directorship of Max Horkheimer and exiled from its base in the University of Frankfurt, provided Benjamin with important opportunities for publishing as well as an increasingly necessary financial stipend. Theodor W. Adorno was instrumental in securing this support. An important consequence of this dependence, however, was the editorial revisions to which key essays in which Benjamin developed his materialist theory of art were subjected, such as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Repro-ducibility’ and those on Baudelaire and Paris that grew out of The Arcades Project.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Benjamin was temporarily interned in the French “concentration camps” established for German citizens. On his release a few months later he returned to Paris and there continued his work in the Biblio-thèque Nationale on The Arcades Project. The notes for his unfinished research were left in the safekeeping of librarian and friend, the writer Georges Bataille, as Benjamin fled Paris before the advancing German army in the summer of 1940. The last few months of Benjamin's life reflect the precarious experience of countless other Jewish Germans in Vichy France: a flight to the border and preparations for emigration by legal or illegal means. Lacking the necessary exit visa from France, he joined a guided party that crossed the Pyrenees in an attempt to enter Spain as illegal refugees. Turned back by customs officials, Benjamin took his life in the small, Spanish border town of Port Bou, on September 27, 1940.

Of Benjamin's earliest published writing his attempt in the essay entitled ‘Experience’ (‘Erfahrung’, 1913/1914) to dis-tinguish an alternative and superior concept of experience provides a useful introduction to a central and enduring pre-

occupation of his thought. Benjamin's concern with delineating an immediate and metaphysical experience of spirit is valuable in providing a thematic description of a conceptual opposition working throughout his thought. Filtered here through the cultural ideals of the Youth Movement, this contrasts the empty, spiritless [Geistlosen] and unartistic “expe-riences” accumulated over a life merely lived-through [erlebt] with that privileged kind of experience which is filled with spiritual content through its enduring contact with the dreams of youth. The influence of Nietzsche in these earlier texts is discernible, particularly, in the importance the young Benjamin places upon aesthetic experience in overcoming the embittered nihilism of contemporary values (although he is unable to articulate this cultural transformation here be-yond a vague appeal to the canon of German poets: Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Stefan Georg. (Source: https://pla-to.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/; accessed 8/30/2018).30 Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussmann (1809-1891) French administrator responsible for the transformation of Paris from its ancient character to the one that it still largely preserves. He embarked on an enormous program of public works, setting a precedent for urban planning in the 20th Century. Haussmann cut wide, straight, tree-lined avenues through the chaotic mass of small streets of which Paris was then composed, connecting the train terminals and making rapid and easy the movement across the city possible for the first time. The purpose was partly economic and partly aes-thetic and partly military. His success was partly due to the autocratic regime under which he served but eventually his handling of public money drew criticism among the liber opposition and the advent to power of Émile Ollivier’s liberal government in 1870 resulted in his dismissal. Haussman was a Bonapartist member for Corsica in the National Assem-bly from 1877 to 1881 but took little active part in parliamentary work (Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georges-Eugene-Baron-Haussmann; accessed 8/29/2018). 31 Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) English poet regarded by many as “one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian [and] … as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy” (Source: https://www.po-etryfoundation.org/poets/gerard-manley-hopkins; accessed 8/30/2018).

32 Gerald Manley Hopkins, “The Windover” (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover; accessed 8-25-2018).

33 Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, Rilke was unique in his efforts to expand the realm of poetry through new uses of syntax and imagery and in the philos-ophy that his poems explored. With regard to the former, W.H. Auden declared in New Republic, "Rilke's most immedi-ate and obvious influence has been upon diction and imagery." Rilke expressed ideas with "physical rather than intellec-tual symbols. While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the non-human world in terms of the human, Rilke thinks of the human in terms of the non-human, of what he calls Things (Dinge)." Besides this technique, the other important as-pect of Rilke's writings was the evolution of his philosophy, which reached a climax in Duineser Elegien (Duino Ele-gies) and Die Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus). Rejecting the Catholic beliefs of his parents as well as Chris-tianity in general, the poet strove throughout his life to reconcile beauty and suffering, life and death, into one philoso-phy.

Rilke's early verse, short stories, and plays are characterized by their romanticism. His poems of this period show the in-fluence of the German folk song tradition and have been compared to the lyrical work of Heinrich Heine. The most pop-ular poetry collections of Rilke's during this period were Vom lieben Gott und Anderes (Stories of God) and the roman-tic cycle Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (The Story of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke), which remained the poet's most widely recognized book during his lifetime.  In 1899 Rilke made the first of two pivotal trips to Russia discovering what he termed his "spiritual fatherland" in both the people and the landscape. There Rilke met Leo Tolstoy, L. O. Pasternak (father of Boris Pasternak), and the peasant poet Spiridon Droschin, whose works Rilke translated into German. These trips provided Rilke with the poetic material and inspiration essential to his developing a philosophy of existential materialism and art as religion. Inspired by the lives of the Russian people, whom the poet considered more devoutly spiritual than other Europeans, Rilke's work dur-ing this period often featured traditional Christian imagery and concepts, but presented art as the sole redeemer of hu-manity. Soon after his return from Russia in 1900, he began writing The Book of Hours; Comprising the Three Books: Of the Monastic Life, Of Pilgrimage, Of Poverty and Death, a series of prayers about the search for God. Because of this concern, Hound and Horn critic Hester Pickman noted that the book "might have fallen out of the writings of Chris-tian contemplatives," except that "the essential pattern is an inversion of theirs. God is not light but darkness—not a fa-ther, but a son, not the creator but the created. He and not man is our neighbor for men are infinitely far from each other. They must seek God, not where one or two are gathered in His name, but alone."

Whenever Rilke writes about God, however, he is not referring to the deity in the traditional sense, but rather uses the term to refer to the life force, or nature, or an all-embodying, pantheistic consciousness that is only slowly coming to re-alize its existence. Holding in contempt "all other more traditional forms of devoutness, which . . . merely 'accept God as a given fact,'" Rilke did not deny God's existence, but insisted that all possibilities about the nature of life be given equal consideration.

Rilke fixed his verse more firmly in reality in his next major poetry collection, Neue Gedichte (New Poems). The major influence behind this work was Rilke's association with the famous French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Working as Rodin's secretary from 1905 to 1906, Rilke gained a greater appreciation of the work ethic. More importantly, however, the poet's verses became objective, evolving from an impressionistic, personal vision to the representation of this vision with impersonal symbolism. He referred to this type of poetry as Dinggedichte (thing poems). These verses employed a simple vocabulary to describe concrete subjects experienced in everyday life.

By this point in his career, Rilke was reaching a crisis in his art that revealed itself both in New Poems and his only ma-jor prose work, the novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). These works express the poet's growing doubts about whether anything existed that was superior to mankind and his world. This, in turn, brought into question Rilke's very reason for writing poetry: the search for deeper meaning in life through art.

In one of Rilke's letters translated in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1910-1926, the author remarked that the most sig-nificant question in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is: "[How] is it possible to live when after all the elements of this life are utterly incomprehensible to us?"

Having discovered a dead end in the objective poetry with which he experimented in New Poems, Rilke once again turned to his own personal vision to find solutions to questions about the purpose of human life and the poet's role in so-ciety. Duino Elegies finally resolved these puzzles to Rilke's own satisfaction. The unifying poetic image that Rilke em-ploys throughout Duino Elegies is that of angels, which carry many meanings, albeit not the usual Christian connota-tions. The angels represent a higher force in life, both beautiful and terrible, completely indifferent to mankind; they represent the power of poetic vision, as well as Rilke's personal struggle to reconcile art and life. The Duino angels thus allowed Rilke to objectify abstract ideas as he had done in New Poems, while not limiting him to the mundane material-ism that was incapable of thoroughly illustrating philosophical issues.

Always a sickly man, the poet succumbed to leukemia in 1926 while staying at the Valmont sanatorium near Lake Geneva. On his deathbed, he remained true to his anti-Christian beliefs and refused the company of a priest. Hermann Hesse summed up Rilke's evolution as a poet in his book, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art: "Remarkable, this journey from the youthful music of Bohemian folk poetry . . . to Orpheus, remarkable how . . . his mastery of form increases, penetrates deeper and deeper into his problems! And at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesi-tant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear." Without his parents' religious ideals to comfort him, Rilke found peace in his art (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rainer-maria-rilke; accessed 8/31/2018).

34 Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) French sculptor, considered one of the most remarkable of his time (Source: http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/resources/chronology-auguste-rodin; accessed 8/31/2018).

35 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

36 Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

37 Joseph Turner (1775-1851) English Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, color, and at-mosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity. Turner was perhaps the greatest landscapist of the 19th Century. He anticipated the French Impressionists in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; but, unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes (Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-M-W-Turner; accessed 8/30/2018).

38 Jean Racine (1639-1699), French dramatic poet and historiographer renowned for his mastery of French classi-cal tragedy (Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Racine; accessed 8/30/2018).

39 “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot. A long poem, “The Waste Land” is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th Century and a central work of modernist poetry (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land; accessed 8/30/2018).

40 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. Poetry: Magazine of Verse, June 1915, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock; accessed 8/30/2018).

41 Emily Carr (1871-1945), born in Victoria , British Columbia , is one of Canada 's most renowned artists, significant as a landscape painter and a modernist. The most important BC artist of her generation, she is best known for her atten-tion to the totemic carvings of the First Nations people of British Columbia and the rain forests of Vancouver Island. In the 1930s she began devoting most of her attention to landscape, particularly the forest, as subject matter. The use of a new medium – oil on paper – allowed her greater freedom to work outdoors. These paintings are among her most im-portant contributions to Canadian art. They express her profound identification with the landscape of the province and her belief that nature was a tangible expression of God. By the late 1930s, having suffered a series of heart attacks, Carr found it harder to travel. She began to focus more of her energy on writing and produced an unusual and important se-ries of books, including Klee Wyck, a book of stories based on her experiences in First Nations villages, which won the Governor General's Award for Literature in 1941. She died in 1945, in her native Victoria, at the age of 74, recognized as an artist and writer of major importance (Source: https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/collection_and_research/emily_carr.html; accessed 9/1/2018).

42 Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) English mystical poet and author of such works as Mysticism (1911), The Mystic Way (1913), and Worship (1936), which helped establish mystical theology as a respectable discipline among contem-porary intellectuals. Underhill was a lifelong Anglican, but she was also attracted by Roman Catholic piety and reli-gious experience. By 1940 she had supplemented her earlier and more diffuse mystical attitudes with a greater under-standing and acceptance of institutional and sacramental elements in traditional Christianity, and she had come to centre her theology on an experience of Christ. A frequent lecturer at conferences and seminaries, she also conducted retreats from 1924 and gained a reputation as a leading religious counselor. She was a contributor to numerous journals and was the theological editor of The Spectator from 1929 to 1932. Among her other works are Man and the Supernatu-ral (1927), The Mystery of Sacrifice (1938), and two books of poetry, The Bar-lamb’s Ballad Book (1902) and Imma-nence (1913) (Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Evelyn-Underhill; accessed 8/31/2018).

43 Benedetto Croce, (1866-1952), historian, humanist, and foremost Italian philosopher of the first half of the 20th cen-tury (Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benedetto-Croce; accessed 8/31/2018).

44 George Steiner (b. 1929) Educated at the Universities of Paris, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, he re-ceived the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 1998 and in the same year was elected Fellow of the British Academy. He is currently Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cam-bridge University. The author of numerous nonfiction and fiction books and essays, including Errata: An Examined Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), Steiner is a regular contribu-tor of reviews and articles to journals and newspapers including the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supple-ment and The Guardian. Professor Steiner lives in Cambridge, England (Source: https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/george-steiner; accessed 8/31/2018).