… modern views give a crucial place to our own inner powers of constructing or transfiguring or interpreting the world, as essential to the efficacy of the external sources. Our powers must be deployed if these are to empower us.
Continuing through Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor (1989). This chapter is ‘Visions of the Post-Romantic Age’:
… There is a kind of piety which still surrounds art and artists in our time, which comes from the sense that what they reveal has great moral and spiritual significance; that in it lies the key to a certain depth, or fulness, or seriousness, or intensity of life, or to a certain wholeness.
… The moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision.
… what we can’t escape is the mediation through the imagination; we are always articulating a personal vision. And the connection of articulation with inwardness remains for this reason unsevered and unbreakable. Just because we have to conceive of our task as the articulation of a personal refraction, we cannot abandon radical reflexivity and turn our back on our own experience or on the resonance of things in us.
Thus in one of the most successful of his New Poems, “The Panther,” Rilke beautifully evokes the animal pacing in his cage through its own inwardness: “It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.” The images which can enter him from this alien surrounding run through the “tensed stillness of his limbs,” but “cease to be” when they reach his heart. Rilke has indeed taken us into the panther, but this turns out to be inseparable from making the panther an emblem of our own alienated inwardness.
… This idea of nature as a great reservoir of amoral force, with which we must not lose contact, is one of the important bequests of the post-Schopenhauerian period to twentieth-century art and sensibility. We find echoes of it in a host of places, in Fauvism, Surrealism, D.H. Lawrence. But it is also a moral vision; and this too has had its effects, some of them catastrophic on a world scale.
Another important legacy, and here there is a convergence with the other negations/continuations of Romanticism, is the enhanced sense of our own expressive powers. It is through the articulation of the creative imagination that the will is tapped and transmuted into beauty. The power of the human imagination to refract and transfigure reality emerges magnified out of the Schopenhauerian turn. And in this is pushes in the same direction as the art of anti-nature and even ultimately as the transfigurations of realism. In different but parallel ways, they emphasize that the epiphanies of art involve a transmutation of what is there: despiritualized reality, or fallen nature, or the amoral will; rather than the revelation of a good which is ontically independent of us — even if it needs us to come to epiphany. This is not true of the Baudelaire who speaks of the ‘correspondences’; nor is it true of Schopenhauer himself, who sees the artist as contemplating the Ideas. But it is true of those who followed in their wake, as these vestiges of (neo)Platonism disappeared, encouraged in part by some of Baudelaire’s own poetic practice.
The temptation thus grows to an epiphanic art which will primarily celebrate our own powers, the self-centred and subjectivist art I spoke about above.
… We face an issue today which doesn’t have an exact precedent in earlier times. It is the issue of what I want to call self-affirmation.
… the world’s being good may now be seen as not entirely independent of our seeing it and showing it as good, at least as far as the world of humans is concerned. The key to a recovery from the crisis may thus consist in our being able to “see that it is good.”
… this idea may but doesn’t have to be given an atheist formulation. Whether it does or not depends on whether we go on seeing ourselves as dependent on God for this transformation. But those who affirm this dependence, like Dostoyevsky, just as those who do not, like Nietzsche, have a thoroughly modern conception of what the transformation involves. This conception has its roots in the post-Romantic notion of the creative imagination, which helps complete what it reveals.
… one of Dostoyevsky’s central insights turns on the way in which we close or open ourselves to grace. The ultimate sin is to close oneself, but one’s reasons for doing so can be the highest. In a sense, the person who is closed is in a vicious circle from which it is hard to escape.
We are closed to grace, because we close ourselves to the world in which it circulates; and we do that out of loathing for ourselves and for this world. But paradoxically, the more noble and sensitive and morally insightful one is, the more one is liable to feel this loathing. It is one of Dostoyevsky’s noble and deeply moral characters, Ivan Karamazov, who most strongly expresses this rejection. He wants to give God back “his ticket” to this world of unacceptable suffering; and he wants this so firmly because he has the moral sensitivity to feel that the ultimate happiness of the whole of mankind isn’t worth the tears of an innocent child.
… Dostoyevsky’s rejectors are “schismatics” (raskolniki), cut off from the world and hence grace. They cannot but wreak destruction. The noblest wreak it only on themselves. The most base destroy others. Although powered by the noblest sense of the injustice of things, this schism is ultimately also the fruit of pride, Dostoyevsky holds. We separate because we don’t want to see ourselves as part of the evil; we want to raise ourselves above it, away from the blame for it. The outward projection of the terrorist is the most violent manifestation of this common motive.
What will transform us is an ability to love the world and ourselves, to see it as good in spite of the wrong. But this will only come to us if we can accept being part of it, and that means accepting responsibility. Just as ‘no one is to blame’ is the slogan of the materialist revolutionaries, so ‘we are all to blame’ is of Dostoyevsky’s healing figures. Loving the world and ourselves is in a sense a miracle, in face of all the evil and degradation that it and we contain. But the miracle comes on us if we accept being part of it. Involved in this is our acceptance of love from others. We become capable of love through being loved …
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… Nietzsche wanted to put behind him the doctrine of aesthetic transfiguration which he drew from Schopenhauer, and which marks his early work. He wanted to go beyond “justifying” the world through its manifestation in art and really affirm it. But some aspect of aesthetic transfiguration remains. What in the universe commands our affirmation, when we have overcome the all-too-human, is not properly called its goodness but comes close to being its beauty.
… Part of the heroism of the Nietzschean superman is that he can rise beyond the moral, beyond the concern with good, and manage in spite of suffering and disorder and the absence of all justice to respond to something like the beauty of it all. Hence the affirmation cannot be fully separated from an aesthetic transfiguration. Zarathustra is inseparably visionary and poet.
… One could say that seeing good empowers, and that it thus functions as what I have been calling a moral source. We have here a further step in the process I have called the internalization of moral sources. Alongside the sense of our dignity as disengaged, free, reasoning subjects, alongside our sense of the creative imagination as a power of epiphany and transfiguration, we have also this idea of an affirming power, which can help realize the good by recognizing it.
Of course, none of these powers need to be seen as exclusively within. In particular, the second and third are frequently understood as related to nature as a source or to God. But unlike previous conceptions of moral sources in nature and God, these modern views give a crucial place to our own inner powers of constructing or transfiguring or interpreting the world, as essential to the efficacy of the external sources. Our powers must be deployed if these are to empower us. And in this sense the moral sources have been at least partly internalized.
My most recent previous post from Taylor’s book is here.
-Julie
