Taylor and Lonergan

"Taylor and Lonergan: Dialogue and Dialectic" in Brian J. Braman, Meaning and Authenticity: Bernard Lonergan and Charles Taylor on the Drama of Human Existence. University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Art

Taylor discusses the "framing epiphany" as a way to the transcendent through art. He thinks of "human existence as a quest for meaning and significance" (75). Taylor wants to help modern people to find moral sources for living an authentic life. Epiphanies "manifest that which is other. They issue from the call of the 'world' understood as an independent matrix of meaning from which one's idea of what it means to be authentic is revealed. An epiphany discloses something beyond us that makes demands upon us, or calls us" (76). Taylor believes that this call is most evident in modern art and poetry. Modern art and poetry respects the human subject "without falling into an aberrant subjectivism" (76). The epiphanic event is more than our action, it "involves a transaction between ourselves and the world" (76). An epiphany releases from a mechanistic, instrumentalized world. An epiphanic event acts as a "source of authenticity because it enables us to see the good, and thereby empowers us to orient our life in terms of this ideal" (76).

Braman says in modern society there are no "publicly established references" (76). A publicly established reference can be considered as the "sets of beliefs and practices that are part of the 'tacit background of objects of reliance, of things that are ready-to-hand in Heidegger's language' (76)." Epiphanic art includes within itself some common beliefs and practices, but it is more subtle than traditional "public creeds" (76). Braman states that we know the poet is "pointing to something--God, the tradition--which he believes to be there for all of us. But we also know that he can only give it to us refracted through his own sensibility" (76).

Our current age does not provide a "common order of public meaning" (77). Pluralism and relativism is the default position in the modern age. But that does not mean poets cannot draw from the resources of theology, metaphysics, and morals. Taylor belies that "each of us has an aspiration to wholeness that is possible only to the degree that we commit ourselves to something beyond our own desires" (77). Epiphanic art can manifest to us how our desire for wholeness "depends on something noble, courageous, or holy that calls to us independent of our will" (77). "True freedom" requires that we must choose between different alternatives that will either help us move closer to our "ideal of authenticity" or move further away from it.

Taylor's discussion of epiphanic art is similar to Lonergan's own account. Lonergan defines art as "the objectification of a purely experiential pattern" (77-78). Art as objectification of an experiential pattern means that there is a relationship between the different parts in the object of art. The objectification of this pattern the artist has observed and "a pattern of the feelings that flow out of and art connected with the perceiving" (78). It is a pure pattern because there are no restrictions or the "experiencing that it orders is given its full range" (78). It is not being experienced for some instrumental end. The experience as pure allows it to "find its full complement of feeling. It lets experiencing fall into its own proper patterns ... So experiencing becomes rhythmic, one movement necessitating another and the other in turn necessitating the first. Tensions are built up to be resolved" (78). The pure pattern is then put into the work of art. "As objectification of this pure pattern, the work of art expresses what the artist has intentionally grasped as most significant, of utmost concern and value in the pure pattern of experiencing" (78).

Art as objectification is symbolic. Lonergan thinks of art as epiphanic too. Art compels "attention to the fact that the splendor of the world is a cipher, a revelation, an unveiling; it is the presence of one who is not seen, touched, grasped