A Stuff Fetish

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor … may be the most well-regarded philosopher in the English-speaking world … [He] has stalked … a “naturalist” view of humanity which assimilates our minds and morals to a purely materialist and empirical program of study. We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. Art is not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.…

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 … 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. …

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 … with existence itself. Poetry and music do this by escaping the constraints of intellect, by going at things atmospherically rather than argumentatively. They convey a sublime atmosphere of sound, ineffable intimations of immortality, and so the apprehension of a “cosmic connection.” …  

Classical art, he argues, moves us by convincing us; Romantic art convinces us by moving us. … Taylor is challenging the belief that science provides objective truth, and art mere subjective feeling—that art produces sensations, and what you make of the sensations is all up to you. He insists that there is intrinsic, grounded human value in the experience of art. …

“Strong ethical insights are grounded in what I called ‘felt intuitions,’ … [We] experience them, … feel them as inspiring, and their flagrant violation as appalling.” We are convinced because we are moved. … Taylor escapes from the divide between subjectivity and objectivity through a concept he calls the “interspace”—not the inner space where I perceive and enjoy but some resonant atmosphere that exists between me and the world. …

When we listen to sublime music, then, our experience is not of pleasure but of an overwhelming feeling of encountering and exploring some truth. The music sculpts us, we sculpt the music, and to reduce this to mood misses the cosmic connection that the experience proposes and, quite often, provides. …

His are ideas that one assents to enthusiastically even while realizing that it would be hard to defend them to someone less inclined to assent. Indeed, one recalls the spiral of puzzled questions that apostles of the arts regularly encounter from the science-minded, who insist that when we invoke the ethical allure of music we’re just saying we really like those fuzzy feelings. (More)

I don’t see why minds made of atoms can’t be agents who make meaning, agree on purposes, connect with the cosmos, enjoy poetry they don’t consciously understand, are moved by intuitions, learn real lessons from their art, and face real constraints on their art. But clearly Taylor and others have trouble seeing things this way. For them it seems insufficient for meaning, morals, experience, and art to be found in patterns of stuff, e.g., in patterns of brain neuron firings; such things must somehow be directly stuff themselves. 

When I studied the sacred a year or so ago, I noticed that while as a social scientist I am okay with finding reasons why humans might have evolved a habit of treating some things as sacred, those most devoted to the sacred instead insist on the reason being that some things (e.g., gods) are actually distinctively sacred, and are thus naturally treated that way. And even though the evolved-habit theory I settled on predicts this very attitude, it doesn’t much persuade such devotees of the sacred. 

For example, if you are united with associates via seeing that particular tree as the sacred tree, it won’t do to see yourself as it seeing it that way merely as a social strategy to bind your associates together. No, to you it must seem that this particular tree has special sacred features that compel you to see it that way. 

And that story seems to me also sufficient to explain Charles Taylor and other romantics. They also aren’t happy with stories about why humans might have evolved to have experiences, purposes, moral intuitions, and artistic appreciations as patterns in their brains. Or as patterns in their brains plus local environments. It is instead important to them that such sacred things be first order objects in our best theory of what the cosmos contains. Experiences, meanings, morals, and art must really all be “stuff” at the same level as everything else that matters in the cosmos. Able to act on other things as directly as other primitives of the universe. 

Maybe the intuition is that patterns in stuff are just of lower status, less admirable, and less powerful than stuff itself. After all, patterns can more easily just end, their existence and features seem more open to interpretation, and they can only have force on other things to the extent that they can influence stuff. In our usual physics, patterns must first influence stuff in order to influence other patterns. So some think that we can’t truly respect experience, meaning, morals, or art if we see them as patterns, rather than stuff. Their deep desire to show respect for these things, and treat them as sacred, leads such people to this stuff fetish; they need to see such things somehow as stuff.