Where Are We Going?
We once lived in an ‘enchanted’ universe of agreed-upon meaning and common purpose, where we looked at the night sky and felt that each object was shaped with significance by a God-given order. Now we live in the modern world the Enlightenment produced — one of fragmented belief and broken purposes, where no God superintends the cosmos, common agreement on meaning is no longer possible, and all you can do with the moon is measure it.
…(Charles) Taylor cites Steven Pinker’s provocation that music is “auditory cheesecake”), and who scoffs at the conviction of aesthetes and humanists that music and art contain a kind of knowledge. Most readers will respond to Taylor’s contagious excitement in the presence of Wordsworth and Rilke and Beethoven.
We could hardly go back toward ignorance — Goethe, one of Taylor’s heroes, participated in the modern world as a scientist — but we had to find a way to reënchant it. The best way to heal the wound is through poetry and music, of the sort that doesn’t offer propositions but casts spells and enacts rituals. The arts are not subsidiary places of secondary sensations but the primary place where we go to recall feelings of wholeness, of harmony not just with “Nature”…but with existence itself. Poetry and music do this by escaping the constraints of intellect, by going at things atmospherically rather than argumentatively…
