Taylor on Deep Time

‘Cosmos to universe’, says Charles Taylor in chapter 9 of A Secular Age, is how ‘the way the world is imagined changed.’

This change, which has taken place over the last half millennium in our civilization, has been immense. We move from an enchanted world, inhabited by spirits and forces, to a disenchanted one; but perhaps more important, we have moved from a world which is encompassed within certain bounds and static to one which is vast, feels infinite, and is in the midst of an evolution spread over aeons.

The earlier world was limited and encompassed by certain notions of cosmos, world orders which imposed a boundary by attributing a shape to things. The Platonic-derived notion of the cosmos as a chain of being is one such: the cosmos in virtue of what Lovejoy called the “principle of plenitude” exhibits all the possible forms of being; it is as rich as it can be. But the number of these forms is finite, and they can be generated from a single basic set of principles. However vast and varied the world may appear to the untrained eye, we know that it is contained within the plan these principles define for us. No matter how deep and unfathomable it may appear, we know that we hit bottom, that we touch the outer edge, in this rational order. [323-4]

Now we live in a disorienting, deracinating universe, unmoored amongst infinities of space, but also of time. This chapter is especially interested in those latter.

I want to emphasize that I am talking about our sense of things. I’m not talking about what people believe. Many still hold that the universe is created by God, that in some sense it is governed by his Providence. What I am talking about is the way the universe is spontaneously imagined, and therefore experienced. It is no longer usual to sense the universe immediately and unproblematically as purposefully ordered, although reflection, meditation, spiritual development may lead one to see it this way. [325]

I wonder what evidence Taylor has for this claim. It seems to me that not only do many people—a global majority, actually—believe the universe was created by God, but they believe it to be purposeful, designed, ordered. ‘I am talking about is the way the universe is spontaneously imagined’: spontaneously is a strange way of putting it—as if we have no choice in how we think of the universe, it just pops immediately into our head.

The change-over on the level of theory is easy enough to trace. It can be set out in two categories. First, the immense increase in the dimensions of the old cosmos, centring on the Earth, which was orbited by the planets and the fixed stars. Vast as this was to earlier imaginations, it reached its limit in the outer spheres, and the Biblical story set its earlier limit in time. But now the idea grows that our solar sys¬ tem is just the immediate surrounding of one star in a galaxy; and then later that this galaxy is also one among countless others. Already in the late sixteenth century, Giordano Bruno postulated this infinite universe of uncountable worlds. [326]

Sure; but we can see this not as a rupture, but an extension, the logic of ‘one, two, many’ that governs our to-hand, rough-ready sensorium expanded to take in more and more. Nor does it start with Bruno. It was debated in the Catholic middle-ages: Aquinas didn’t believe in an infinity of entities but William of Ockham did: Sed omne continuum est actualiter existens. Igitur quaelibet pars sua est vere existens in rerum natura. Sed partes continui sunt infinitae quia non tot quin plures, igitur partes infinitae sunt actualiter existentes. ‘But every continuum is actually existent. Therefore any of its parts is really existent in nature. But the parts of the continuum are infinite because there are not so many that there are not more, and therefore the infinite parts are actually existent.’ Because Taylor is interested in our idea of the universe, spontaneously occurring to us, I think this talk of infinitude is a red herring. We cannot conceive of infinities. It’s structurally beyond us to do so. The best we can do is imagine really big things. And here he underestimates

Reality in all directions plunges its roots into the unknown and as yet unmappable. It is this sense which defines the grasp of the world as ‘universe’ and not ‘cosmos’; and this is what I mean when I say that the universe outlook was “deep” in a way the cosmos picture was not. But much as we are overwhelmed by this opening onto unencompassable space, the extension in time has perhaps had an even deeper impact. From a contained cosmos of a mere 5,000-6,000 years, we come to see ourselves as issuing from what Buffon called “le sombre abime du temps”.

’Mere’? Six thousand years is hardly a cosy, comfortable, tidy little parcel of time, in which we can feel at temporal home. It’s an immensity, a gulf. It’s just a discombobulating as imagining an infinite stretch of time; and in fact more so, because ‘an infinite stretch of time’ is not something anyone can actually picture.

That’s not to say that I disagree with what Taylor argues, viz. that something changed in the way humans perceived, or conceptualized, time through the—I would say—18th- and early 19th-centuries. But I would frame things differently. Taylor is interested in the vogue of ruins that developed: citing Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681/1684) and Giambattista Vico

The mountains of the earth are for Burnet “the ruins of a broken world”. They show “a certain magnificence in Nature, as from old Temples and broken Amphitheatres of the Romans viz collect the greatness of that people.” Ruins are one of our routes of access to deep time; they connect us to an unrecoverable past, a partly lost world, existing in a kind of penumbra. To be moved by ruins is to feel the sense of loss, to savour what was great, but also its transiency. It is to be plunged into time with an acute sense of our incompleteness within it. These are the emotions which the Renaissance began to feel precisely around the “Temples and Amphitheatres of the Romans”. That this sense can now be aroused by the natural world is a sign that a new sense of deep time is at work; that there is a profound and moving truth in the construal of the world not as fixed but as evolving. In Burnet’s work this truth is articulated as a kind of Fall, a catastrophic reduction of our world as a punishment for our failings. A new cosmic imaginary is in the making, even if this articulation will undergo far-reaching change.

But this ruin strikes us in another way as well. We are over-awed by its greatness. In its mountains, deserts, oceans, we sense a vastness which is alien and strange, which dwarfs us, passes our understanding, and seems to take no heed of us. Now the arguments from design of contemporary apologetics concentrated on the way in which our world was made to suit us. They tended to portray nature as orderly, comprehensible and human-friendly, as garden rather than wilderness.

Taylor provides a decent-enough account of the sublime—he draws heavily on Simon Schama for this, which is fine, although there’s a lot of criticism and theorising of the sublime, the absence of which was a shame. There are wobbles.

The idea here is that our existence, or vitality, or creativity depends, not just on the inhuman outside of us—for instance, on the overwhelming power of raw nature which awakens heroism in us—but on the wild and pre-human in us which resonates to that alien external power. We have gone beyond Kant, where the sublime awakens our suprasensible moral agency, and where the “starry skies above” can be linked together with “the moral law within”, as two realities which fill us alike with “wonder and respect”. We are now rather in the domain of Schopenhauer, where our vital energy comes from a Will which is wild, unprincipled, amoral. [346]

I don’t know that Schopenhauer’s Will is ‘unprincipled’; better to say that it is the principle. But the main thrust here is clear. One thing is missing. Taylor’s focus is only on the backward and abysm of this new conception of time, what he calls ‘deep time’. But also, and I think more importantly, this period saw the opening up of a deep futurity. Paul Alkon’s influential study The Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1988) argues that nobody imagined ‘the future’ in any detail until, basically, the French Revolution: the first substantial ‘future history’ Alkon identifies is Louis Sébastien Mercier L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante, ‘The year 2440’ (1770); there really aren’t any future histories before that. According to Darko Suvin, the ‘central watershed’ of the development of SF as a futuristic fiction can be located ‘around 1800, when space loses its monopoly upon the location of estrangement and the alternative horizons shift from space to time’ [Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), 89]. Clearly, once human beings have started thinking about the future as a place that can be imaginatively explored, it’s a small step to imagining it as a place that can be literally explored, for example via Wellsian machine, which zooms its rider all the way to the year 802,701, and then into much deeper reaches of the future even than that. Part of this new drama of the far-future is reflective: Macaulay’s New Zealander visits the ruins of London in order for Macaulay’s readers to reflect on the passing of empire, the decay of things. But futurity is also sublime—what science fiction, the great literature of futurity, calls ‘sense of wonder’. Taylor is too backward focused, and his account of the opening of the cosmos into a universe too one-sided.