Charles Taylor Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University. He is, of course, a renowned thinker whose writings are widely read, in fact, throughout the world.

His major books include sources of the self, the making of modern identity, and a secular age,

widely read volume in particular. His book, I mentioned to him off air, that his book from the

mid-70s, Hegel, which I read in graduate school, actually made that challenging philosophy much more familiar to me than it would have been otherwise.

So I thank him for that.

He has a new book entitled Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.

That is our topic today. Welcome, Professor Taylor.

Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Let's get right into the book, as we always do. First, give us a

definition of your fundamental term cosmic connection. What are you talking about there?

I'm talking about a sense that human beings have of the cosmos, but the connection comes really from two things. It's felt as a human

fulfillment to sense this connection, and this connection gives us some indication of how we all live.

I mean, the sense of getting closer to it or taking it some form of guidance.

Now, that means that there are absolutely classic cases of this in history, like the idea

of the great chain of being, these notions of the cosmic order that dominated the Renaissance Europe.

Well, these were the sense that the order in the cosmos somehow reflects an order of value and that we need to grasp this order of value in order, for instance, to organize our society

in a way that matches this cosmic order.

Now, the problem that arises in the romantic age is precisely that those earlier ideas of

cosmic order begin to be less and less believe, less and less

believable.

They're kind of replaced by the scientific cosmic order of Galileo, and particularly Newton, right?

So the sense of cosmic connection is, a certain sense threatened by a totally

natural scientific view and my thesis here is that poetry steps in poetry steps in by

...