In 1784, Johann Georg Hamann wrote an essay about the philosophy of his friend Immanuel Kant. In the “Metacritique on the Purism of Reason,” Hamann asserted that Kant’s effort to purify reason did not and could not work. Human beings, according to Hamann, may not entirely transcend the customs, beliefs, and habits of their community. Language is “the only, first, and last organon and criterion of reason.” In this unpublished essay filled with references to David Hume, the Bible, Greek mythology, rhetorical questions, and puzzling phrases, Hamann helped launch the project of Continental philosophy.

In a lifetime of scholarship, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has explained to analytic philosophers, empirical political scientists, and Kantian political theorists what they are missing when they ignore Hamann’s insight that we think in language. In The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, published in 2016, Taylor showed how philosophers have expanded, refined, and altered Hamann’s critique of the view that pure reason may transcend the impurity of language. In that book, Taylor staged a debate between two camps of philosophers. On one side stood Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and post-Fregean analytic philosophers who maintain that the human mind uses language as a tool to convey pre-existent thoughts. On the other side assembled Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Continental philosophers who maintain that philosophy always emerges from a historical, earthy milieu and that language shapes thoughts in the process of expression. Taylor argued that the first camp accurately described a role of language, particularly for the hard sciences, but that the second camp also performed a vital role conveying the sense of experiences such as joy, shame, and pride that elude precise description or measurement.

In The Language Animal, Taylor promised a companion volume that would explore how poets from about 1790 to the present have resisted and envisaged an alternative to the instrumental view of language. Taylor has delivered that book in Cosmic Connections, and the first thing to note is that it is a remarkable accomplishment for any author, but certainly one for an author in their tenth decade of life. The first chapter of Taylor’s magnificent 1975 book Hegel is on the “aims of a new epoch,” and scholars may rejoice that Taylor has written two books explicating the expressivist thesis he outlined there. The expressivist thesis, in a nutshell, is that human beings are not merely saying out loud their individual thoughts when they speak. Rather, the expressivist thesis is that human beings are doing something of cosmic importance when they create new things in poetry or other artistic media. The Language Animal told a history of the role of expressivism in the history of philosophy since Hamann; Cosmic Connections shows how poets have performed and reflected upon their role as expressive agents since the Romantic era.

Here is the broadest outline of Taylor’s history of the modern era told through commentary on its poets. In the medieval era, Europeans believed in a Great Chain of Being in which language revealed and was connected to the structure of the Cosmos. The scientific revolution—led by scientists and philosophers such as Galileo, Newton, Descartes, and Locke—disenchanted the world. In the modern scientific outlook, Nature is inert and freedom means controlling it. In late eighteenth-century Jena, philosophers and poets shared an ambition to “reenchant” the world. The German Romantics wanted to recover the medieval feeling of harmony between the world, human beings, and language, but they also valued the modern ideal of the autonomous individual. Romantic poets such as Hölderlin and Novalis invented a mythology that signaled both that human beings are a part of a larger Cosmos and that they are creative heroes in that cosmic drama. Still, the Romantics knew better than to claim scientific status for their poetic inventions and thus performed what Taylor calls an “epistemic retreat.”

Over the next few centuries, Taylor explains, poets have shifted the balance between the poet as spokesperson for the Universe and poet as describer and creator of spaces of enchantment. In chapter 9 of Cosmic Connections, “Epistemic Retreat and the New Centrality of Time,” Taylor provides a schema to organize the poets of the past two-plus centuries. Poets such as William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Rainer Maria Rilke seek to recover the medieval sense that there is a deep order to the universe that poetry may disclose. Over time, poets such as John Keats and Goethe pay more attention to how humans feel than what is out there in the world. The gap between poetry and science widens, until we reach a point where symbolist poets avoid any determinate existential claims.

One of Taylor’s arguments is that human flourishing depends on an effort to (re)connect with the Cosmos, and he asserts that creative science-writing may not look like poetry but it still enacts a spiritual journey. The forerunner of this approach is Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth-century Prussian scientist, explorer, and author of Cosmos, and it continues up to the last author discussed in Cosmic Connections: Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

The great strength of the book is that it constructs a canon of authors who express dissatisfaction with the cold, instrumental view of nature pervasive in our technological society. Stated positively, Taylor makes a compelling case that philosophers need to broaden their reading lists to include poets and philosophers who write in a poetic style such as Heidegger or Henri Bergson. In a generous move, Taylor does not reveal which of the poetic approaches he most favors: his argument rather is that Western civilization needs to create space for thinkers, in whatever genre, who use language to reconnect with something larger than our atomistic selves. Contemporary political theory is dominated by Kantians such as Rawls and Habermas and an analytic style that prizes rigor over beauty. Taylor makes a powerful argument that political theory needs to create space for “ethical” investigations into “the fulfillments which our nature as human beings prescribes for us” (257).

The book falters, I think, in explaining the political consequences of Taylor’s history of modern philosophy and poetry. Taylor notes, for instance, that democratic self-rule requires a common identity or, more precisely, “ethnically unified peoples” (571). I wish that Taylor had squarely faced the charge that Romanticism’s reliance on poetry short-circuits reason and thereby opens the door to irrational nativism. As I write this review, there are places around the world where one ethnic group is violently clearing the land of other ethnic groups. Taylor, like Hegel, seems to think that it is possible to reconcile the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Hamann, but his espousal of ethnic self-determination suggests that that may not be possible.

Cosmic Connections is a masterpiece that sheds light on why a poet such as Kurt Cobain speaks to us even when he sings cryptic lyrics, why the environmentalist movement expresses a kind of spirituality, and why analytic philosophers should read Continental philosophy and Romantic poetry.