Getting significance

The music moves us very strongly, because it is moved, as it were; it captures, expresses, incarnates being profoundly moved. (Think of Beethoven quartets.) But what at? What is the object? Is there an object?” (p. 355). Nevertheless, we can't quite shake our feeling that “there must be an object.” And so, Taylor suggests, even this disembedded art “trades on resonances of the cosmic in us” (p. 356). And conveniently, art is never going to ask of you anything you wouldn’t want to do. So we get significance without any ascetic moral burden.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 75