PREVIEW-Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. The question for episode 77 is what is it? To appreciate beauty, we read the Sense of Beauty by George Santayana from 1896. You can join a discussion, get a free version of the text, and read loads of supplemental material@partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:32 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:37 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:40 Mark: Gang's all here. Shall we do some ground rules? We haven't done that in a while.

0:44 Seth: Somebody actually commented somewhere that they'd listened up through episode 45 and were wondering if any of us other than Mark ever do the ground rules. To which a bunch of people chimed in that Mark often challenges us and taunts us and forces us to do the ground rules. But it all has to do with not having some snarky book title to throw out there in response to name dropping rule. None of us ever seem to prepare that in advance.

1:12 Mark: Why? I've had one here. You'll know what episode I prepared it for when we get to it. Somebody want to give Rule number one

1:18 Seth: we do not assume that the audience has read the text or knows anything about what we're talking about.

1:24 Mark: Number two don't name drop. Just make your point. Don't say you would understand me if only you had read Mommy and Baby and Object A the new Lacanian rom com.

1:35 Dylan: The third one is we'll be rigorous and exact. Everything that we say unless doing so otherwise is a lot more funny. Close enough, close enough.

1:43 Mark: It makes it sound like we're actually funny. Oh, okay. The formulation I have is potentially more amusing, so it's not a guarantee.

1:52 Dylan: I apologize for not being properly self deprecating in my rule.

1:56 Mark: Alrighty, righty righty. So I've been looking forward to this one for a long time because I love them aesthetics discussions and actually the chief thing that delayed this was I was determined that we would get another celebrity like a big time rock star or artist or something like that. But I don't know any of those. We have lots of listeners that are very accomplished but to actually who raking the new people to get their fans to become our fans. That was the idea. However, after sending this particular book link to a bunch of folks like that and then revisiting the book myself in preparation for this, I began to understand why they might read two pages of the book and say, no, I don't want to do this, because he doesn't get around to talking about art for a little while, like specifically about art.

And I know this also because we had this as a. I did this as a not school group. So some other listeners a couple months ago read this book or parts of it, and it advance and they're all like, why is he obsessing on the difference between morality and aesthetics? Like, we know that's different why, but that's the tradition out of which this came. That in the old timey Greek time, it's not even clear whether there was even a concept of beauty, specifically just aesthetic beauty abstracting from any notion that it was also morally good. So if you look at Plato, you get the forms, the beauty, the one, the divine presence, whatever, as it's all the same thing.

The idea of something that is decadent but yet beautiful doesn't really come up. That's considered briefly within our Gorgias episode. We talked about the pastry maker. You know, someone who just pleases the senses but is not actually pleasing you spiritually is scum is not. So that would not be true. Beauty a priori, the sort of conceptual distinctions that we make ourselves all the time are ruled out in advance. Nonetheless, I think he, even though he's coming out of that tradition and he read Hume and Kant and other folks, it's a surprisingly modern to me, from what I read about Santayana.

He was a naturalist before naturalism was cool. It was one of the things. So he thinks that all these things are human activities. It's not that objective. Beauty is the traces of God lying in the earth or something. No, he wants to do something like a modern psychological examination of what it is to appreciate beauty. The only difference is, of course, it's 1896. The idea of what the proper methods of psychology are is of course pretty different than now. He thought raising, like, what experiment could we do to figure out whether this theory I've just put forward is correct?

It's more or less phenomenological. It's more or less reporting on your carefully observed experience. Not in terms of I'm entering a reverie and I'm going to look at now I'm contemplating the beautiful thing and what's going on in my head. It's not that kind of direct, but it's just psychological speculation of a pretty attractive sort, I think. What did you guys think?

4:37 Dylan: So the beginning of the book, when he talks about why are we going to consider beauty? And he wants to set out the possibility that our understanding of beauty is not exactly a sixth sense, but it's a determination of the soul based upon value. And he wants to explore what that is and how that works. And he's trying to do something that's pretty attractive in that he wants to ground it in terms of value, but not have it lose the sense of judgment about beauty. And so he has, especially at the end, a kind of big defense of the notion of beauty and the sense of beauty as being discoverable and understandable and in fact a part of us as human beings operating at high levels, part of the fulfillment of what we are as human beings alongside contemplation that he would maybe associate with straight up philosophical thinking or along Aristotelian lines or something.

So that's his goal. And he, after setting that out at the beginning, wants to break it down, as Mark said, pretty phenomenologically looking at how material and form and then expression, which are pretty traditional categories for talking about aesthetics, work in this way. The cant is not to try to appeal to how every form or every material is a reflection of some ideal that is not there. He wants to try to articulate how that ideal comes out of our experience, but grounded out of the immanent activity or immanent experience with the thing. So there is for him, all tied up in it, the experience that we have with it.

But I kind of. I want to use the word objective, but he refers to objectification in a very specific way. So I want to use the word something like absolute or referent or all those other words which he would qualify because he wants to maintain this sort of value centered relation in it. I found it pretty interesting. I really liked the way in which he sort of delved into experience and talking about individual shapes and forms and stuff. I found it a little bit tedious at times, where I always kind of hopscotching around a little bit, I guess,

6:53 Mark: yet skimmable, luckily that everything's broken up into nice little sections.

6:57 Dylan: Yeah.

6:58 Mark: On the other hand, it's not always obvious like where the big payoff is going to come. You're just reading this part that doesn't seem that exciting. And then, whoa. There's like some really astute observation in there that you wouldn't necessarily have noticed if you were just skimming along.

7:11 Dylan: I did feel a little bit like I was sifting for gold at times and that it would go from being, you know, okay, interesting to having, as you said, very astute observations. It wasn't clear to me if it all came together really well because by the time I get to the end, his admonition about the moral character of aesthetics and wanting to separate from that, he wants to hold on to something of that that's not exactly moral, but again, has to do with maintaining value. So here's the way I was thinking of it. He wants to maintain the idea that you can have corrupted taste and that you can be ignorant of beautiful things, and the idea that working to hone your taste is a valuable thing and it is part of being a human being, and you can not just have corrupted taste, but just have really crappy taste.

And that that's a perfectly legitimate judgment. And in fact, that there's a way in which you can say that about aesthetic judgments in general. So it is value laden and in some important ways relative. But it's not relative in the way you would typically think of it is

8:21 Mark: that it's all relative, man.

8:25 Dylan: Yeah, it's not the case that he would say, you can think whatever you want to think about that piece of art and whether or not it's artful or whatever. I don't think you would go that way. But understanding exactly how that argument works, I can't say that I found it easy to understand the argument exactly.

8:41 Mark: Seth, Wes, Opening statements. Did you like the book?

8:44 Wes: Yeah, I liked what I read of it. I didn't get through the whole thing.

8:50 Seth: But yes, his prose style is very attractive. He writes in that kind of turn of the century or pre turn of the century way where sometimes I have to read sentences twice because there's a cadence to the language that you need to be able to connect to in order for it to make sense. But this is, I would say, more, I want to use the word polemical, but only in the sense that this is not an argument in favor of his point of view. It's an articulation of it.

9:20 Wes: Yes.

9:21 Seth: And it's not a problem to me. But for people who maybe are very connected into the Danto Goodman way of looking at these things, it could be a little off putting. So that's my initial reaction.

9:34 Mark: Well, speaking of. So Arthur Danto, the guy that we did our first aesthetics podcast on, had contacted us and told us how much he liked it. And when I let him know that we were covering this book a couple years ago, when we decided to do this book, he said, oh, yeah, you know, he met up with him at some point and Santayana had some things to say about this, and I was floored. I mean, I know Danto is 81 or 82 years old now, but still Santayana. This is 1896, he wrote this book. But actually, if you just look on Wikipedia, under the Sense of beauty, in an anecdote retold by art critic Arthur Danto of meeting with Santayana in 1950, Santayana is reported to have said, they let me know through the ladies that I'd better publish a book on art, of course.

So I wrote this wretched pot boiler. So the story of this book, which I have a little more information on, because I have. I picked up his giant biography, Persons and Places, which is also a very skimmable book. And it won a bunch, a lot of awards for being like a really great autobiography. And also gives the dirt on William James and Bertrand Russell and all these other people that he dealt with and what it was like to be at Harvard. William James was actually one of his professors. And you can actually see that sort of throughout this book, just the form of naturalism, that all these concepts, like the ideals like Dylan mentioned are things that are human invention.

You know, maybe that's going back to Hume, but that's something that's very much of his era. So he started. He was an undergrad at Harvard. He took over teaching because William James pushed on him this course on, I believe it was Hume and Locke and somebody else. So he did that. And then he did as his second course, an aesthetics course. And he was sort of pressured to specialize. He had very wide interests. He wanted to write his undergrad dissertation or something on Schopenhauer. He was actually discouraged from doing that and wrote on Lotze or some totally forgettable figure.

So he taught this aesthetics course for a couple semesters. I've got just a paragraph from Persons and Places where he talks about this. I was a kind of poet. I was alive to architecture and the other arts. I was at home in several languages. Aesthetics might be regarded as my specialty very well. Although I didn't have and haven't now a clear notion of what aesthetics may be. I undertook to give a course in that subject. It would help to define my status. I gave it for one or two years and then I wrote out the substance of it in a little book, the Sense of Beauty.

The manuscript of this book went from local publisher to publisher and was rejected. Right? And it was eventually accepted and it did not prove a financial loss to the publisher. Although it had neither a large sale nor a warm reception from critics. My sham course in aesthetic had served its purpose. And so I had my little book and then Talks about how it enabled him to basically do more steady teaching. And make a little more money at Harvard. So this was not a book written out of passion. This was a book written out of professional obligation.

Which I think explains why it seems to drag in points like, oh, I got it right. But nonetheless, he's such a brilliant, interesting guy. And there's so much just creeps its way in here. The reason I think you would call it a sham course in aesthetics. Is because there's so much in here that is not about aesthetics that this stuff about ethics, stuff about. Not comprehensively about metaphysics. But establishing this sort of naturalism that I mentioned. Yes. There is an overall structure that sort of makes sense. It's really a psychological analysis.

We're going to do this analysis of what the sense of beauty, if there is such a thing. Is how reactions of somebody finding something beautiful occur. And we'll do that through looking at these categories of what could feed into that. Is it the matter of the thing? Is it the fact that it has pretty colors and bright sounds? Is it the form of the thing? Is it the relations between the objects? That's the one that he actually thinks is sort of beauty proper? Or is it expression, the fact that you're talking about pleasant things? And he has a whole section of the book that says expression, pretty much beauty is all about really form.

He's already established in this, in the second big chapter. So in the chapter on expression, he says, this can help. It helps. If you're writing about angelic things, it's not necessary. But if you are writing about something ugly, writing or painting or whatever, it's beautiful in spite of the negative subject matter. It's never the scary, horrible thing that is itself beautiful. It's always just the fact that it's set in a nice way. And this is part of the way he's going to analyze what makes good taste in art. That if you rely too much on expression, too much on pathos, too much on comedy, too much on showing things that are supposed to be morally upright.

Then you have basically bad taste. You're not really recognizing beauty where it is, which is in the form anyway. Even though the book as a whole is set out in those categories. I don't know if he had this fundamental theory that imbues the whole thing so much as well. This seems like a good enough scheme to then be able to talk about a lot of individual insights.

14:12 Dylan: That makes sense, I think, for accounting for why there's like a little bit of a heap sense to the book, rather than a, as you said, a formal argument, sort of a stating of his point of view. In the introduction, I think he summarizes sort of something like his twin goal of the book. One of it is to explore the function of aesthetics and beauty itself, and then also to really explore the basis of our preferences, which I think he says that that's what beauty is all about. There'll be a sort of theoretical exploration. Then it also, he says, insight into the basis of our preferences, if it could be gained, would not fail to have a good and purifying influence upon them.

It would show us the futility of a dogmatism that would impose upon another man judgments and emotions for which the needed soil is lacking in his constitution and experience. And at the same time, it would relieve us of any undue diffidence or excessive tolerance towards aberrations of taste, when we know that there are broader grounds of preference and the habits that make for greater and more diversified aesthetic enjoyment. So that's an interesting set of claims that you have to be prepared to appreciate beautiful things. That's the first part.

And the second part is you ought to not tolerate terrible taste in the sense that being insensitive to it. So a separate question of what you should do about that, but you should be able to recognize and understand that not only is there bad taste and unbeautiful things, that you should have a taste for beautiful things is that you should also understand what they are. I'm still a little bit uncertain about how that cashes out in the end, except for stating that it's a fact. I mean, what I would be inclined to think that it can't help but amount to a certain kind, a certain version of a standard in making that judgment.

What amounts to beautiful things. I think he's fairly abstract about it.

16:02 Mark: So I listened in preparation to this, to this series of aesthetics lectures that I'll post online. But it just gave quick introductions to Hume and Kant and Aristotle and some others. And he's keenly aware of his predecessors of Hume and Kant in particular in this book, but he seldom talks about them by name. He mentions them when there's a specific claim that somebody made that, you know, like Kant is famous for saying beauty is disinterested, right? It's like finding pleasure in something that you observe, but it's a particular kind in that you don't actually want to consume or have the thing. Right? So if you just are looking at a beautiful woman because you. You want her, that's not appreciating the beauty. It's only when you are already satiated or not inclined that way or something that maybe you could appreciate the beauty in itself.

16:52 Wes: And.

16:53 Mark: And so he has an argument against that in particular, the reason I bring this up is because the conversation that he's entering into was all about, on the one hand, is beauty subjective or objective? So he's giving a specific. It's sort of a hybrid between the two is where he's going to come down. And then there's also the question of should you be able to convince other people when you find something beautiful that in fact is beautiful? Those are obviously very related. If it's an objective thing and you are correctly observing the beauty, then you should be able to what, educate the other person something to bring them into this.

But for instance, the way Hume cashes it out is kind of like you would expect, given our, if you listen to our Hume on Ethics chapter, that his comments about aesthetics are of the standard of taste is his famous work are pretty similar, but they have to be based somehow empirically. In other words, we can tell what is beautiful if it is something that would please everybody who is educated enough to get it right. So it's not just that it pleases everybody. You're not just doing a survey mill in our utilitarian episode on higher and lower pleasures.

And it's a very similar kind of consideration. Well, he wants to Santayana, he wants to say it's the futility of a dogmatism that would impose upon another man judgments and emotions for which the needed soil is lacking in his constitution and experience. So in other words, he's saying finding something beautiful is kind of like this, in some ways inexplicable chemical reaction. It's just this brute between you and the thing. Now, it's not totally inexplicable because we can break down again into this form and matter and expression and look at what it is about your character that might make you appreciate this and might make me not appreciate it.

But ultimately, that's the expression. Either you find something beautiful or you don't. It's kind of silly to try to say this is objectively beautiful because that's not a proper description of what's going on.

18:39 Seth: But why is that not a proper description? I mean, he takes some trouble early on. He uses the language of judgment and he says judgments of beauty are not the same thing as judgments of fact or judgments of science. And he says, well, they're more like moral judgments. What do I mean by that? And that leads into what you were just describing. You know that he's going to go down and talk about the subjectivity of the phenomenon and the immediacy of the phenomenon. And it's an important point for him. Judgments of beauty have a feeling associated with them. So I think part of what's important is talking a little bit about that distinction that he makes. And whether we want to talk about a faculty of judgment or about judgments. It's important to kind of lay out that distinction.

19:29 Dylan: He says in the second section, which is subtitled, Preference is ultimately irrational.

19:37 Mark: Yep.

19:37 Dylan: The very beginning says we may therefore at once assert this axiom, important for all moral philosophy and fatal to certain stubborn incoherences of thought, that there's no value apart from appreciation of it, and no good apart from some preference of it before its absence or its opposite. So at that point, all value has to do with appreciation. And on the next page he says values spring from the immediate and inexplicable reaction of vital impulse and from the irrational part of our nature. The rational part is by its essence relative. It leads us from data to conclusions or from parts to wholes.

It never furnishes the data with which it works. If any preference or precept were declared to be ultimate and primitive, it would be thereby declared to be irrational, since mediation, inference and synthesis are the essence of rationality. So I think he's making a pretty strong point here, that values are at the level of data and that they are unbreakable pieces of things. You wouldn't speak of elements of data as having parts that you're going to compare. The act of rationality is on those parts, that is those parts of data and relations among them.

Values have to do, and the judgments that come from them. You're working on the very bits themselves, and those values are judgments that are. He calls them irrational in a very technical way, that are not about comparison. They are about the value of the thing. And in the end, that value is a trained thing. I think maybe it would be better to say it can be trained, but it is a sensibility.

21:16 Mark: Yes. It requires being able to observe things in certain ways. He has a lot of comments in different parts of the book about how sort of a refined character will be able to find beauty in this sort of situation, whereas a brute will not. But the experience itself is primary. How do we. It sort of makes me just think of that. This is him stating one of the corollaries to Hume's is ought distinction, that just by looking at facts you can't derive a value from them. Another way of interpreting that is there are sort of primitive value facts. That is primitive, like you were saying, data of experience, where values are just given in experience.

21:57 Seth: I'm not ready to commit to value facts or an ontology of values. I was under the impression that what he was trying to put out here was he was saying if you take a fact of science or a fact of mathematics or simply an empirical fact, you can make a judgment about whether or not that is true or false, or make a judgment about whether or not it's raining or the cat is on the mat, whatever you want. And you can do that without passion. There's no feeling associated with it. There's no value in that judgment. It is or it is not. What he's trying to say here is he says, look, when you make a preference, not just that that a cat is on the mat, but that it comforts me that a cat is on the mat, or it disturbs me that a cat is on a mat, then you bring value into the equation.

And what he means to say when he says it's irrational, I agree with Dylan that he's using it technically. What he's saying is that that preference is a feeling. He's maintaining some kind of more traditional, rigid distinction between reason and feeling or reason and emotion. And he's essentially saying, when you make a judgment and there's a feeling or an emotion attached to it, then you are making an irrational judgment. That was the way I read this.

23:11 Dylan: So in the end, he would have to have two categories of judgments. One would be these kinds of aesthetic judgments. Another would be analytical judgments, which end up being not judgments as much as conclusions. So from a process of rationality, of combining parts and wholes and making comparisons, and rational, in a very technical sense, of taking a ratio between things, then you would have a conclusion as a result of that kind of calculus.

23:40 Wes: I think you were right, Dylan, to associate the irrational with data. The rational is about the relations between data, let's say, or drawing conclusions. It's use of the word irrational is to say it's primitive, it's data, and in some sense the data. The reason why we hesitate to call it objective goes to the sort of Humean point, which is that when we talk about anything normative, when we talk about values, aesthetic or moral, the facts that we're concerned with are really facts about human nature. We are so constituted as to respond in certain ways to certain things. And there's your that basic constitution or habit of reacting in A certain way is what grounds all of this.

24:22 Dylan: Later he'll go on to say that, well, if we had different kinds of eyes, if we had compound eyes, or if we had a sense of smell that was multi dimensional and gave us another way of understanding space the way our sense of sight does, we would have to adjust our understanding of aesthetics based on that. What we talked about as beautiful things would change as a result of that.

24:48 Wes: Right.

24:49 Seth: Can I read a passage from that same section?

24:52 Dylan: Please do.

24:53 Seth: It is evident that beauty is a species of value. And what we have said of value in general applies to this particular kind. A first approach to a definition of beauty has therefore been made by the exclusion of all intellectual judgments, all judgments of matter of fact or of relation. To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of a pedantic and borrowed criticism. If we approach a work of art or nature scientifically, for the sake of its historical connections or proper classification, we do not approach it aesthetically.

25:27 Wes: Right. So, for instance, the critic who, when talking about Shakespeare, probably had professors like this, you wanted to appreciate Shakespeare, but they were all caught up in cataloging dates and times and giving you basically all the literary facts because that's a safer and easier place to go to get into the actual aesthetics. There's much muddier water.

25:48 Dylan: You guys have seen the movie Dead Poets Society, right?

25:51 Wes: Yep.

25:52 Dylan: What you just said reminded me exactly of that movie. And the scene at the beginning in which Robin Williams character John Keating has the students rip out the introduction to the book of Poetry because it has this grotesquely analytical description of the beauty of poems and how to ascertain what's a good poem and a bad poem and what its form was. And then, of course, at the end, we're brought back to this with the headmaster of the school forcing this down their throat.

26:23 Wes: Yeah, except I think that introduction that they rip out, I think that was a structuralist sort of introduction. So in a way that's right up Santayana's alley. It's very focused on form, analyzing literature in terms of form and leaving out, you know, they called these guys the new critics at the time, leaving out biography and politics and sociology, the kinds of things that are quite popular now in literary criticism. They call it new historicism, where they go on and on and on about, say, the history of Shakespeare's time. Well, I think Santayana is saying here that he would rather he's sort of giving a structuralist or new critics an endorsement of that approach, where you.

It's not against being analytical per se. But it's about focusing on these loosely related historical or sociological facts as opposed to getting right into the meat of it and saying, why does this sonnet work or not work? For instance, what is it makes it a good poem or a bad poem? Those are aesthetic judgments. But if you want to talk about, yeah, Shakespeare is born at such and such a time, or in this poem, we see the influence of a previous poet. Arguably those can sort of feed into aesthetic judgments. You'd have to make that argument. But they're not aesthetic per se, they're historical and sociological and so on.

27:41 Dylan: One thing that I thought at this point was, what does it mean for something like conceptual art, where everything is sort of a concept and a symbol and it's arranged in a way. Well, I've never felt like you could come to a piece of conceptual art without being told what it's supposed to be doing. Then you can make some judgment about how it's doing it and whether it's doing it well. But you have to be told the scene, the concept that it's trying to bring off. This section made me wonder. Conceptual art itself ends up falling off the end.

28:17 Mark: It doesn't fall off the end. It's in expression. It's in the category of expression. So if you're talking about the avant garde stuff, you know the urinal. So you see the Duchamp urinal in the museum. Well, if it was a really beautiful urinal with a beautiful form in itself, Santayana still might think it was legitimately beautiful. But there are the good things about expression. If it sort of expands your mind, the fact that that makes you think of a new thing and question what art is like, that's a good thing. But ultimately the work is not going to have a lot of value, because really good work for him is one that you just keep coming back to and is just inexhaustible in its beauty. And that is more like a gimmick. It's more like a joke.

28:53 Wes: Yeah, yeah. We should distinguish between conceptual art, you know, art, which is trying to sort of make a statement like a urinal or something like that. It's self referential in some sense.

29:02 Dylan: Yeah, like John Cage's, and just abstract

29:05 Wes: art, which might offend us. If we think that art ought to be mimetic, if we think that it ought to represent something, be a picture of something. So I think abstract art, though, could arguably, especially since it's very focused on form, you could just have a very primitive aesthetic experience in relation to that. And that's you know, I think it would qualify, right?

29:27 Dylan: I think so.

29:28 Wes: Santayana's view.

29:29 Mark: Yeah, yeah. Luckily or not, this was written before the avant garde art revolution. So he doesn't really have to consider that even though this is more about beauty rather than what is art. It's just a different discussion than the one we had in the Danto episode challenge that comes from the avant garde. People were doing some crazy things. We'd gotten into the romantic period and beyond by his time. And so he has a lot to say about. For instance, he has some screed. He goes on against indistinct art. So, like abstract poetry or, you know, and this would apply to a lot of modern abstract expressionism in painting, that if the value of the art is you're supposed to see something that's kind of an incomplete image and you're supposed to fill it in yourself, he's going to say, well, that's really cool.

And in that it creatively juices you, but ultimately it's not worth that much because you're the one that's doing all the work. And it's not going to present some enduring thing of beauty that you're going to be able to come back to again and again. And certainly it's not going to be something that's open to anybody that does not already have the creative spark within themselves. He would much prefer a finite, beautiful form. The Mona Lisa, something like that.

30:41 Dylan: Yeah. So he just would say that it's not beautiful. It might be doing something else. It's not that it doesn't have an activity or maybe even an artful activity, but in the hierarchy of beautiful things and in developing one's taste for beautiful things, you wouldn't tune it on that.

30:59 Mark: I mean, this is where the distinction between matter and form comes in. So, like, if you've got an abstract, a lot of song lyrics are like this, where song lyrics, because you're just grooving to the music, they don't even have to have a clear meaning. So it's very much. You could be reading this very abstract thing, and what you do is get absorbed in the sounds of the words themselves. And that's all a matter of the matter for Santayana. And that's a legitimate part of beauty, is having a really nice guitar sound and really nice recording quality.

Of course, I'm thinking of rock and roll, always going back to that. But what's going to really make it awesome is the form. So that's what happens if you have an indistinct things or you're just like looking in the clouds, he talks about. And, you know, I can see a ducky, I can see a tree in the clouds. It's beautiful because the matter itself is beautiful, because clouds themselves are pretty damn cool. Or the words used in those lyrics have a nice sound when the singer sings them. But that's only part of what a work of art can offer. It's the least part, according to him.

32:05 Dylan: Yeah, A beautiful stone would be one sort of beautiful thing. But to have it rendered, you know, real sophistication and combination juxtaposition and the resonance of those different features of beauty is what makes things even more beautiful.

32:21 Mark: Yep. Apperception of form talks about a lot, which is a creative act, which is. This is where education really comes in, that people, the crude people, they cannot apprehend form. So he says, even early on in the book, something about. For the hoi polloi, the appreciation of nature is something that's only done on holiday when they're removed from their regular duties and concerns. And then they can say, oh, wow, this is actually a pretty landscape. But the true artistic soul can apperceive the forms that are all around him now. It's not that everything is beautiful.

He has a section. Is everything beautiful? It's not that far. It's not John Cage, like any random noise you could interpret as music, but it's an active process, this apperception of form. And he's got an interesting section, even on landscapes, that we think a landscape is sort of the paradigm of beauty, but actually in itself, it's just too chaotic, that it's only us approaching it and selecting certain elements to focus on. And how do the parallel sections of the trees look against each other and interact with the leaves and the different color?

You know, it's only because we pick out these certain things that a landscape itself becomes beautiful. And so when you have a painting of a landscape, it is always. It's never just a photographic description of a landscape. It's emphasizing certain details and that's what makes it beautiful. Getting you to apperceive certain forms where apperceive is just a fancy word for perceiving with form. Right. So in that Kantian word.

33:50 Wes: Yeah, and we saw that in Sartre as well. I mean, it sounds like it's a reflective form of perceiving. Right. Well, what we're doing is we're unifying and that we're synthesizing, we're unifying, we're doing the ordering ourselves. It's meant to get at that so something chaotic. You know, you might compare the landscape to a Kantian manifold. The apperception is that act of ordering all of that cognitively.

34:14 Mark: If I can bring it back just a second to this analysis, we're talking about value as an. As an immediate thing. But then you were just saying apperception is reflective, that it seems like that's not an immediate thing. But he just wants to emphasize. And this is very Jamesian. William James described experience as a buzzing, blooming confusion out of which then we pick all these things. You know, that sounds very much like what I just said about Santayana's how we see a landscape. And so, of course, in this whole book, Santayana is doing an analysis of what is going on when we perceive beauty.

But in the experience itself, like you were saying, is not an inference. It's not. Seth used the example of the cat on the mat pleases me. It's not that it makes me feel comforted, and I like feeling comforted, therefore I value it as good or something. It's not like we go through a process of reasoning like that. It's just an immediate preference and all these things, the assessment of the appreciation of the materials, the pretty colors, the cat is soft fur and is so cute, and the form in itself, if there's something pleasing about that, that and the associations, the expressions that come with it, all those are just there in this very complicated, immediate experience.

So he just. He doesn't want to be a reductionist about value. He doesn't want to say we only find things valuable, aesthetically valuable or otherwise valuable, because they help our subsistence or something like. He doesn't want to reduce it in the way that even though he talks about pleasure a lot, it's very much. I don't think it's like one of the utilitarians talking about pleasure that all these things please us because they bring us pleasure. It's no. That they primarily please us first. And then we could analyze that and we might figure out that, oh, let's.

Let's analyze this as pleasure.

35:57 Wes: Well, it's its own sort of pleasure, right? There's a difference between I like something because I can. You know, I like this tool that I have because I can use it to make my Ikea furniture, for instance. And that gives me. That's the pleasure of that. But then there's just the pleasure of the fact that the tool is aesthetically pleasing. So, I mean, pleasure, I don't think we're going to get away from pleasure. It's just a Matter of how we frame. Right. Because his definition is beauty is pleasure regarded as a quality of the thing. So in a way, beauty just is this idea. It's pleasure that we are objectifying. In some sense, we're sort of projecting it out into the object. It's very focused on the object. Not what the object is going to do for me, not any sort of utility it has, but just the pleasure of that aesthetic experience of the object.

36:47 Mark: Although utility can itself be beautiful.

36:50 Wes: Everything. I mean, there's a lot of great stuff in this first section. Where the political implication of aestheticizing general principles, for instance, and the way that leads to dogma.

37:00 Dylan: I want to read the paragraph that comes right after what Wes just quoted. The last section of the Nature of Beauty. West said, beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. This definition is intended to sum up a variety of distinctions and identifications. Which should perhaps be here more explicitly set down. Beauty is a value. That is, it is not a perception of a matter, a fact or of a relation. It is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody. A beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms.

37:40 Mark: Yep.

37:41 Wes: So. And then the utility, you know, that we were just talking about. That's the next paragraph. So this pleasure must not be in consequence of the utility of the object or event, but in its immediate perception. In other words, beauty is an ultimate good. Something that gives satisfaction to a natural function, to some fundamental need or capacity of our minds. I think, Mark, that's the point you were making when you said, he's not going to reduce it. It's not going to get reduced there. It's sort of an end in itself.

38:10 Dylan: It's always a pleasure and a positive direction. We're always drawn towards it. It's not that for him, there's no pleasure in the ugly.

38:21 Wes: Right.

38:22 Mark: It can be a source of amusement.

38:24 Seth: But it's not possible to have an aesthetic experience of the ugly. What you have is a moral experience, is what he says, which is a curious thing to say.

38:32 Wes: Say one of his distinctions between the moral and the aesthetic. Right. Is that moral judgments are, in a ways, focused on the negative and on avoiding suffering, for instance. Whereas beauty is generally focused on the positive. The judgments aren't really.

38:51 Seth: He says it's always focused on the positive.

38:53 Wes: Yeah, but now I'm kind of confused about. Our primary judgments are not about ugliness. Right. In a sense, we're more indifferent it's not like ugliness generally causes us pain in the way that beauty causes us pleasure. I think that's the point.

39:07 Seth: That's right. It's in section three, which is called contrast between moral and aesthetic values. The relation between aesthetic and moral judgments between the spheres of the beautiful and of the good is close, but the distinction between them is important. One factor of this distinction is that while aesthetic judgments are mainly positive, that is perceptions of good, moral judgments are mainly and fundamentally negative. Or perceptions of evil. Not sure I agree, but that's what he says. Another factor of the distinction is that whereas in the perception of beauty, our judgment is necessarily intrinsic and based on the character of the immediate experience and never consciously on the idea of an eventual utility in the object.

Judgments about moral worth, on the contrary, are always based, when they are positive, upon the consciousness of benefits probably involved. Then he goes on to elucidate that. But the point you make, Dylan, is, and Wes you bring up there is. He's saying that a judgment that something is beautiful is always attended by a positive feeling. It's a positive judgment. And you can't have an esthetic judgment of ugliness. In other words, ugliness is not the opposite of beauty. Instead, what he says is if you have a judgment about something that's ugly and you have revulsion or disgusting, that's actually really a moral judgment.

And we may just be semantically quibbling here where, you know, he's just said, okay, well, aesthetic is positive and moral is negative. But I think he's trying to say something stronger, namely that an aesthetic reaction to a thing or having an aesthetic judgment is a species of purely positive experience or species of purely positive immediate relation to a thing.

40:53 Wes: Well, he gets at this idea that it would be absurd to say there's an obligation to enjoy yourself. A moral maxim will say you must do X or you must not do X because the consequences would be suffering, basically. Or that's one way of looking at it. But it's not like you must do X because you are morally commanded to maximize pleasure. It doesn't have that positive quality. That's the negative thing that he's trying to get at with morality, but with aesthetics it's all about pleasure. It's all on the positive side of things. It's not like when I make an aesthetic judgment, I am saying that it's merely something related to the avoidance of suffering.

It's really a surplus kind of value. Once my day to day needs are taken care of and I've avoided Suffering. And he mentions holiday life. Right. So beauty and its embodiment in the arts, activities which beyond belong to our holiday life, when we are redeemed for the moment from the shadow of evil and the slavery to fear, and are following the bent of our nature where it chooses to lead us. We see some of this kind of similar types of talk in nature. Right. We're used to this idea of the aesthetic being on the side of overflowing or something that we have when we have excess energy to use beyond our daily survival.

42:11 Dylan: Even though the sense of beauty is a positive value and that it's a pleasure, it's not the case that all pleasures are perceptions of beauty or values of beauty. It doesn't go both ways.

42:29 Mark: Right. If he says the definition is that it's pleasure objectified, pushed as a property of the object, then he really does say a lot of things like what is our attraction to democracy or whatever, the ruling political ideology of the day? We take aesthetic delight in it. It become beautiful to us precisely because for that reason that it goes beyond any rational assessment of how well it serves our needs or anything.

42:55 Dylan: Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with that. I think that's. That's exactly right. But it's not the case that just because you find pleasure in it, that's a judgment of beauty.

43:03 Wes: Right, Right. Not all pleasure is aesthetic pleasure, but we do see aesthetic pleasure cropping up all over the place.

43:10 Dylan: Yes.

43:11 Wes: Even on our relationship to truth, which he goes on about. Right.

43:14 Mark: With the IKEA example, that even though. Yes, normally it's not that we make a calculation of utility and say, oh, this is useful, so therefore it's beautiful. In fact, he brings up an argument from Xenophon, who's another guy that wrote dialogues about Socrates, where Socrates says, you know, Socrates was famously ugly. And he says, my nostrils are so huge, so they're so useful for smelling, so they must be beautiful. And he says all these things out. You know, he argues, he says this is a reductio ad absurdum against the idea that the useful is beautiful. But yet one of the things that's really cool about, say, an IKEA tool.

43:50 Wes: Right.

43:51 Mark: Wes's example is how well it works. So it's very much this positive quality judgment that we got in our Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I don't know if you can say that what he considers quality is the same thing as what's going on here, but I see a lot of parallels. It's not restricted to the kind of visual beauty or something that has to be a work of art to be beautiful.

44:12 Wes: Yeah. You could look at a. Like an IKEA tool. There's form to it. Right. It's obviously been crafted. And then there's something beyond thinking about the utility of actually putting something together. You just. You might think that it. There's sort of an expression of power in that form. Right. It can do something in some vague sense.

44:30 Mark: It's even also just how well it fits into the little thing and puts it together. Right. That's what I was trying to say, that utility itself.

44:35 Wes: Right. And that whole experience. Right. Can be aesthetic. The experience of putting something together can have lots of aesthetic components to it.

44:42 Dylan: Yeah. So this idea of fittingness. He never uses a word like that. And I think you guys are right that he gestures in this direction. I was wondering what he really would want to say about it. He has these tantalizing pieces where he's talking about the aesthetic judgment of democracy, which made me think of that justice, in the end, is going to be a kind of aesthetic judgment about the way in which things line up in human interaction. And that fairness is going to be also a kind of aesthetic judgment in the way that justice might be. And in this case that we're talking about with tools or with other kinds of activities, the fittingness that they would have.

And I mean, this would immediately be the case. The way in which scientific or mathematical judgments that are really deeply aesthetic have to do with this kind of fittingness, this more abstract sense of form and the way things come together.

45:40 Wes: I thought that he wanted to keep those separate. So even though our relationship to truth, for instance, is in part aesthetic, he doesn't want to say the beautiful is the true, or something like that. Right? He doesn't want to.

45:53 Dylan: Yeah, but that's not the part that I was referring to with mathematics. I was thinking of like in the process of making a mathematical demonstration, or that you would say, apart from whether or not it was true, you would be using its fittingness as a guide. Just the way in which you have the conceit that the simple is closer to the true. You might have the conceit that the aesthetically beautiful is closer to the true. And I think that you're right that he would want to keep that separate. He wouldn't want to say that that aesthetic beauty is an indicator of the true.

But I thought that he would say that the sense of value that we have, that the mechanic or the mathematician or the poet, you know, the wordsmith, that those judgments of value that they're making that are aesthetic are as beautiful. That they're making choices that they're attracted to because they're beautiful. That those are aesthetic judgments of all the same sort.

46:49 Wes: In the case of the section 6, the aesthetic consecration of general principles. I mean, that in a way, is a lesson in the way in which aesthetic judgments can actually lead you astray. Right. They can lead you away from fairness. So, for instance, it's because a monarchy has a certain esthetic value to it that even if it's sucks in terms of fairness, you know, people will stick to that. So then, you know, when you get revolutions and reforms. I like this phrasing that he uses. Every human reform is the reassertion of the primary interests of man against the authority of general principles which have ceased to represent those interests fairly, but which still obtain the idolatrous veneration of mankind. And they obtain. They have that veneration for aesthetic reasons.

47:31 Dylan: Yes.

47:32 Wes: So the aesthetic can be dangerous in that sense. And then you get, you know, he applies it also to. I like the example of the miser, for instance. Yep. The glitter of yellow gold. And then also to the concept of self sacrifice. This is sort of one of the kind of recurring themes we get in our political philosophy. So for Nietzsche, this idea of self sacrifice was at the core of the generation of the kinds of values we have. I thought it was very interesting that Santayana is going to explain that as a sort of aesthetic attachment. This idea of the tragic part that you would play in self sacrifice.

48:06 Dylan: Why wouldn't you be able to be led astray by even fundamental beauty in the sense of just being attracted to it, as opposed to becoming obsessed by the aesthetic beauty of general principles?

48:19 Wes: He is saying you get. You can get led astray, Right?

48:21 Dylan: Yeah. You get led astray by.

48:23 Wes: Is it by beauty, you know, saying

48:25 Dylan: that you can get led astray in general by beauty? And that is particularly a problem for the case of the esthetic attraction of general principles. Or it's the case that that general principles, their, you know, aesthetic qualities or the beauty that we find in them is a special case of leading us astray.

48:46 Mark: Well, there's this whole thing about general principles. And again, I'm brought to mind the discussions we had in the William James and Pirsig episodes that if general principles are always created historically by societies over time, and they sometimes can screw us up and falsify things. And so one of the quotes you were just reading makes us seem like we have to go back to the immediate experience we need to see does that general principle actually hold? You know, he's very against aesthetic rules in the sense of if you come up with general aesthetic rules, it's because you've beheld beautiful things and sort of generalized from that.

But you can't then take the rule and say the rule is primary. And that will determine if I see a new thing, whether it's going to be beautiful or not. So there's, on the one hand, there's that sort of get back to the real experience that sounds very much exactly like Pirsig in his advocation of quality. But on the other hand, the general principles, the associations infect immediate experience. So you can be led astray. You can find something that Santayana would say is ultimately tasteless. You can have a great admiration for it. You can think it's immediately beautiful.

So it's not the case that every time you go back to your immediate aesthetic apprehension that there's something correct about that.

49:53 Dylan: But in Santayana, he seems to go as far as saying that it's not just that your aesthetic judgment was just not his. There would be a kind of aesthetic argument to be had. It's a strange way to say it, because of the way he understands value, but that you would say that the appreciation of X, Y and Z is vulgar or debased or corrupted or unsophisticated and all those kinds of pejoratives.

50:22 Seth: It would be.

50:22 Dylan: Your judgment of ranking one thing as more beautiful than another would be wrong.

50:26 Wes: Right.

50:27 Mark: So he's got to have an explanation for his elitism. The Stanford Encyclopedia article about beauty talks about Santayana as saying, oh, it's just all subjective. It doesn't say a lot more about that. But I really saw this as much more complicated than that. But since so much of it sounds subjective, then you have to explain how elitism is possible. It's fundamentally not a different strategy of type from that Mill makes about higher and lower pleasures. You know, somebody who's more educated about these things, who's experienced a wider variety of stuff, is just going to be a better judge.

And it's not only breadth, it's also depth. You know, at one point he says, the ultimate beauty of something is not how many people enjoy it, but the depth of love that the people who really enjoy it have for it. That determines how beautiful it is, because that determines what pleasure one can take from it. So I think that there's a sense, and this is very much agrees with my gut on this, what I always preach is that the connections you make with things are Always authentic that if you think something is really beautiful, you're right. However, when you compare it with other stuff, you may well be wrong because you don't really have that kind of connection with the other stuff that you're discounting.

So that's when somebody's being tasteless, it's because they're missing out on these deeper, richer experiences that only maybe somebody with greater cultivation and wisdom can have and just going for the cheap stuff. So one example he gives, you know, he really thinks that the best kind of beauty is pure, that it's not mixed in with suffering, with the ugly in any sense. Now, you can have beautiful experiences that involve a beautiful depiction of an ugly subject matter or something like that. That's possible. But still, it would be better if that person drew, instead of pictures of monsters, pictures of angels.

If you actually compared them and had the requisite experiences, you would prefer the angel pictures. And so one of the positions he's arguing against there is the idea that life is tragic and suffering and that there's a beauty in that. So, you know, you see these movies and stories about the beauty that can be found even in the concentration camps and stuff, and he would say, yes, there can still be beauty in that setting, but it would still be much better if there was no suffering. The suffering doesn't make it more beautiful. It actually screws up the purity.

So that would be one kind of thing that, like, you could be led astray into this. It's just that suffering is such a constant part of life. So so many of the experiences we have of beauty are of beauty that is involved suffering, that we might not even realize that sort of beauty without suffering is even possible. But once we get that through our heads and see the requisite artworks that expose us to that, you know, the more angelic sort of stuff, the most beautiful, pure Bach cantatas or whatever, then we will understand we were being tasteless before.

I guess, on that subject, what you were saying about truth before, that's one another reason why we could find something that is a very sad story, beautiful because it rings true. Because we do have a will to truth, that truth is a pleasure in itself. So something that otherwise is ugly, the fact that it seems true to us or actually is true, could add to the aesthetic value. I mean, he still says one of the ways to tell whether that's what's really going on is imagine if the same subject matter, the same true subject matter were presented free of artifice, free of flowery language or beautiful textures or good cinematography.

Or whatever. Would you still find it beautiful? No, you wouldn't actually. So therefore it was not that the suffering was beautiful in itself.

53:54 Dylan: We should move on to some of the particulars, the issue of form and how objectification and the distinction of things works with beauty and our sense of beauty. I mean, there's this argument that he makes saying that when we see things that are beautiful, that is inextricably associated with the objectifying activity of the understanding. So this is one of the reasons why our sense of sight is paradigmatic of understanding beautiful things. Because it allows for separation and in this case spatially, in a way that the sense of sound, he'll argue, in the sense of smell, do not allow for that.

And this characteristic of separation and distinction is fundamental to the aesthetic value. I found that pretty interesting that the process of objectifying things, and again, it's a technical use of the term, that we turn things into objects, that we turn the landscape from just a smudge of color into trees and a meadow and leaves. Or that we turn the still life into oranges and peaches and a bowl and a tablecloth. That that's intrinsic to this notion of beauty.

55:10 Wes: Yeah.

55:10 Mark: His comments about form sort of seem the most old fashioned. He has a little bit of description of why some forms please us. It's physiology of the perception of form. That the shapes our eyes make when we're surveying an object with a nice form are pleasurable to us. Like that was not particularly convincing to me. But just the idea that things of balance, the beauty of a form is just in the fact that it has a bunch of parts and they're related in a cool way. And I don't think he can say a lot more because he doesn't want to be dogmatic in stating rules in the way that the medievals did.

That like what is beautiful is having proportions where the. In the human form, the arms are exactly as long as the legs or something like that. Now, there's a lot of historical background for certain forms being beautiful. But the funny thing about it is that those standards changed over time. Different epochs would say, oh yes, we love symmetry. But their idea of what constitutes symmetry changed over time so that they're not even talking about the same thing. It's beauty of form. But what form in particular? Well, again, there's something sort of primitive about that.

56:12 Wes: Yeah.

56:12 Dylan: Well, he also has a section on the influence of the passion of love, which basically means he wants to talk about how sex has to do with our notion of beauty and inclination. And you know, this rings right along with Plato's Symposium. That it is our capacity of love that gives contemplation. That glow without which it might often fail to manifest beauty. And the thing that I always end up thinking about. When lining up love and sexual attraction with the. As quintessential desire, which maybe it is, but it's a notion of foundation for beauty.

Is thinking about other kinds of inclinations that we have. And other kinds of physical cravings or directionality, hunger. Or any other physical thing that you feel like you have to do. Like giving birth or something that you're overcome with. And that you are somehow feeling subject to. And it's not clear to me that those are exactly just different versions of sexual inclination or sexual desire.

57:17 Mark: Yeah, I didn't get the sense that, like Freud, he was reducing things to sex. But he was trying to give an explanation. He knew Darwin. He talks about Darwin. A little bit of why through natural selection we could have this susceptibility to beauty. I'm on section 13. If anyone were desirous to produce a being. With a great susceptibility to beauty. He could not invent an instrument better designed for that object than sex. Individuals that need not unite for the birth and rearing of each generation. Might retain a savage independence. For them, it would not be necessary that any vision should fascinate.

That any languor should soften the prying cruelty of the eye. But sex endows the individual with the dumb and powerful instinct. Which carries his body and soul continually towards another. Makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion. And joins to possess the keenest pleasure. To rivalry the fiercest rage. And to solitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?

58:09 Wes: The closest he comes to sounding Freudian is when he says the capacity to love gives our contemplation that glow. Without which it might often fail to manifest beauty. And the whole sentimental side of our aesthetic sensibility. Without which it would be perceptive and mathematical rather than aesthetic. Is due to our sexual organization remotely stirred. Which sounds like another way of saying when you find something aesthetically beautiful. You're to some extent sublimating sexual instincts. At least to the extent that it has this quote unquote sentimental side.

58:42 Mark: Strangely enough, that discussion is in the Materials of Beauty chapter. So he's talking about color, he's talking about taste, and also about sex. Like he didn't know where else to put that. So that's before the form chapter where he gets around to saying why a medium sized face is more beautiful than a face with a big nose or with a pointy nose, or has these pictures. This beauty of materials, which is this passion that finds an easy outlet is not the whole thing. It's not the fancy pants kind of aesthetic appreciation, but it's there. So on the last page of the materials chapter, section 18.

Taste, when it is spontaneous, always begins with the senses. Children and savages, as we are so often told, delight in bright and variegated colors. The simplest people appreciate the neatness of muslin curtains, shining varnish and burnished pots. Blah, blah, blah. Noise and vivacity is all that childish music contains. And primitive songs add little more form than what is required to compose a few monotonous cadences. These limitations are not to be regretted. They are a proof of sincerity. Such simplicity is not the absence of taste, but the beginning of it.

A people with genuine aesthetic perceptions creates traditional forms and expresses the simple pathos of life in unchanging but significant themes repeated by generation after generation. When sincerity is lost and a snobbish ambition is substituted, bad taste comes in the essence of it is a substitution of non aesthetic or aesthetic values. To love glass beads because they are beautiful is barbarous perhaps, but not vulgar. To love jewels only because they are dear is vulgar, and to betray the motive by placing them ineffectively is an offense against taste.

The test is always the same. Does the thing itself actually please? If it does, your taste is real. It may be different than that of others, but is equally justified and grounded in human nature. If it does not, your whole judgment is spurious and you are guilty not of heresy, which in aesthetics is orthodoxy itself, but of hypocrisy, which is a self excommunication from its sphere. There you go. What bad taste is. It's being pretentious in the sense of

1:00:44 Wes: pretending to like something you don't really like.

1:00:47 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:00:48 Seth: Would that cover irony?

1:00:50 Wes: Are you thinking about hipster irony?

1:00:52 Seth: Of course I am. I live in Austin.

1:00:57 Mark: It depends on your analysis of irony.

1:00:59 Wes: So you're talking about a specific kind of irony where someone will wear a garment of clothing that they might otherwise think is in bad taste, or is ugly, is out of fashion or ugly. But they're doing it self referentially, right? Almost like with quotation marks, that they know what they're doing. And so it's.

1:01:19 Mark: Whereas I intend to interpret irony positively as you do something that's really out of fashion, but you do it because you actually think that it's cool. But you're saying, fuck you, fashion. I think this is cool. So that's a different kind of irony.

1:01:33 Dylan: Yeah. Well, certainly not hipster irony.

1:01:35 Mark: Right.

1:01:35 Dylan: It doesn't have contempt. That has. You're talking about irony only as sincerity, but irony certainly also often involves contempt.

1:01:44 Seth: I don't know that hipster irony involves contempt, but I get what you're saying, Dylan. I just would. I'm not going to buy into that linkage just yet, but go ahead.

1:01:53 Dylan: This reaches back to our comedy discussion. There's a lot of comedy, actually, that involves the comedian having genuine contempt for all sorts of things, including their audience.

1:02:04 Mark: Right. And Santayana has a discussion of comedy near the end in the expression part. And it's very much follows the pattern of the other things that I've talked about in there. That insofar as the comedy is delightful and it's pleasant people that you sympathize with doing funny things, then that's fine, that's beautiful. But if it is the kind of thing that you're talking about, then no.

1:02:25 Seth: Yeah, well, he pulls apart and he separates out the comedic and the tragic from the beautiful, and he falls back on comedy and tragedy are part of that moral economy. God, I just starting to sound continental. Comedy and tragedy are part of the. Nowhere does he say morally comedy, but they're definitely. Your judgments about the comedic and the tragic are moral judgments, not aesthetic judgments, according to him.

1:02:53 Mark: Yeah. It's just that in that immediate experience of aesthetic pleasure, there's always going to be all this stuff mixed in. So that moral approval of the thing is actually going to make it more beautiful by expression. It's not a pure kind of beauty in the beauty of the form itself, but it adds to it. In fact, he has a section I thought was the kind of funniest one in the. In the expression section on cost that we think about cost, just that quote about finding jewels valuable because they are dear is bad taste. But if we actually focus on what cost means, like, if you're evaluating a rock, and I'm told this rock is really expensive, you know why it's expensive?

Because it came all the way from a bottom of a volcano in Madagascar and then was carved out by the Native people over 50 years and was passed down from generation to generation, like. So all that stuff would then go into the cost, would explain why this thing is so rare and so special. And when you're actually thinking about all that stuff, that actually does make it more beautiful. So when cost is thought of in isolation from those Things that might give it its value, then, yeah, it is vulgar. But when it's actually interpreted in terms of what might lead something to cost that much, the very craftsmanship that went into it, then that can.

It can't create an aesthetic experience out of nothing. If something is an overpriced piece of crap, it's an overpriced piece of crap. But it can add to the appreciation of a beauty that's already there in the form and the matter.

1:04:24 Seth: Well, that's interesting, because this brings me back to mind of Dylan's point about modern abstract art, where you needed to know something about it for it to have any aesthetic value. And without that context, when you're looking at something that. Like the readymades or something that's found art because it's an ordinary object, you're not conditioned to have an aesthetic experience of it. But it's only in having all of this context and knowledge about the history and the reason and so on and so forth that it becomes. And I understand that we're crossing over into that line between talking about what's beautiful and what's art, but I'm not sure how to separate the two.

And by the way, that's also marketing. I get this email from a wine distributor in California, and it's a thing in the wine community about telling the story of where the wines come from and how the season was this particular year. And we can't just share this with anybody. We have a limited case. And it just so happened that, you know, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds in a certain way. There's something about telling that story which generates desire. And I'm wondering if Santayana's analysis. I realize he's talking about this immediate positive feeling that's tied to perception.

And there's definitely a difference between me seeing a work of art and my very strong emotional reaction to that thing and a kind of sense of desire. But somehow these things are related, and I'm not sure how to pull them apart.

1:06:07 Dylan: So I guess the question is, when does the more subtle understanding of the object or the thing or whatever it is lead to a deeper, genuine aesthetic experience? And when is it either corrupting or vulgar? And I think Santayana would say it's about the aesthetic beauty when it is always about the thing itself at some level. So if those things go towards enhancing it in itself, then that's fine. Your appreciation of it is appreciating its beauty. But to the extent that it is about things other than that thing itself, then it doesn't an example comes to mind is Shackleton's whiskey, which I've never tasted.

Seth's comment about wine made me think about this. Like the Shackleton, the Shackleton. So he took a big case of whiskey with him down to the South Pole, and of course he died at the South Pole. And this case of whiskey was left there and eventually it was found. And there's this discussion about how that whiskey was a. It's so old so that it's particularly good, which is a silly thing because whiskey doesn't get old once you bottle it. So there's this kind of a funny factual thing that's not like wine that ages in the bottle. It doesn't even have that possibility.

It tastes exactly the same as it did the moment that Shackleton bought it in the store or his servant bought it in the store in London. That's how it tastes, even though it's been in the Antarctic for a hundred years. And then the other thing is that it matters a lot that it has this sort of tragic story surrounding it. So it seems to me impossible to talk about actually tasting that whiskey, knowing it's Shackleton's whiskey, and making a judgment about it that involves the whiskey itself.

1:08:03 Wes: Right?

1:08:04 Seth: It might even be impossible because your experience of it is so over determined by the desire, the feeling of being a part of something unique or special or. I mean, that's one of the things about experiences, right? People want to have unique experiences. They want to do something that only that few people can do or that few people have done. But I think that points to a type of identity association that is more psychological and might fall into something that Santayana talks about in part of the book that I didn't read. But I mean, Santayana's description is that this judgment of beauty, this aesthetic experience, is immediate and tied to perception.

So if in the moment of tasting that whiskey, there was this sensation that gave rise to this pleasurable feeling and it was immediate and present, it sort of blocks out or brackets out all that stuff you talked about, the history, the story, the background. Now the question of whether or not your experiences can be over determined by your knowledge beforehand of an experience. Like if I say to you, if you're traveling with me and we go to the Vatican and we're waiting in line and I'm spending 30 minutes before we even go into the museum telling you about my emotional connection to Laocoon and the pure tragedy and artistry and rhythm and beauty of the sculpture, then there's no doubt that when you get there, you're going to be influenced in your judgment of the piece of.

The question is, are you judging it that way because you want to please me, or are you judging it that way because you're actually having that immediate perceptual experience?

1:09:50 Mark: Yeah, I think he thinks that's not going to be obvious. That you have to sort of reflect deeply and repeatedly on that over time.

1:09:56 Seth: That's exactly it.

1:09:57 Mark: That moment you won't know, but you have to go back to it later and contemplate it more.

1:10:01 Seth: If you keep coming back and you keep having that experience, I think you're allowed to disallow the idea that you've been influenced or that you've.

1:10:08 Mark: That influencing was cultivating. You actually gave me the tools to appreciate it that I didn't have before.

1:10:13 Dylan: Or it acted as a gateway for you. There's something about the dramatic effect of that story either on your friend or in general. The sensationalism of it got you in the door. But in the end, your appreciation of it isn't predicated on that sensationalism.

1:10:28 Seth: I'm an art pusher.

1:10:30 Dylan: Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the way a lot of art gets sold to kids. Right. There's this whole idea of trying to get people in the door, of appreciating something.

1:10:39 Mark: Right.

1:10:39 Dylan: What's the gateway drug for you aesthetically?

1:10:42 Seth: Well, a lot of times that's knowledge of the story of the artist or the production of the piece or its survival through time.

1:10:50 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:10:50 Dylan: You go to the William Tell Overture. Right. You take a kid to see William Tell Overture. Right. Not some fancy pants French piece that you don't even know who wrote it. That requires a lot of work to listen to. You're not going to get them to take the time to appreciate classical music. You're not even going to do it yourself.

1:11:08 Seth: No. What you do is you show them Looney Tunes.

1:11:11 Dylan: Yeah.

1:11:11 Wes: Yeah.

1:11:12 Mark: Show them. Amadeus movies are a great gateway to kinds of music that you didn't necessarily consider before. Like something that's actually. I'm not just sitting there listening to a cd, but like it's presented to me in the easiest possible way with nice cinematography and I get some biography and understand why this is a compelling story, then, wow, this music really seems awesome.

1:11:34 Seth: We might as well sort of take a little side jump over here into music right now. Mark, you know how there are bands and musicians that are described as musicians? Musicians. There's something off putting to me about the idea that I need to be educated in order to aesthetically enjoy something. I Get that understanding more about context and history and placement in the evolution of whatever field something's in. It increases my appreciation, but I believe I should be able and allowed to have an aesthetic experience, a pure aesthetic experience in front of something without all of that stuff.

1:12:14 Mark: But you're not describing a musician's musicians. You're describing a historian's musicians or a critics musician. A musician's musician is somebody that you appreciate more because you are familiar with the process of writing music, because you're really into it, because you live it. And I think that it's more a matter of appreciation of form. It's the kind of thing that Santayana would say. Yeah, that is the kind of thing you have to be educated about. It's not a matter of additional facts that you don't know.

1:12:42 Dylan: An example for me would be not just music, but in performance. So you go watch a juggler, and you could see a juggler who juggles three clubs or, you know, juggles fire or whatever. And then you have some guy comes up and he juggles 12 balls. And you can find all over the web examples of these guys who perform these amazing, intricate series of feats. And if you don't know anything about juggling, you will find it much more boring than the guy who's juggling three flaming clubs really dramatically. And that first guy is a juggler's juggler. The guy who.

You get a room of jugglers around him and they'll be cheering and gasping when they see him. Do you know he puts one extra turn into this flourish that he throws these balls up in the air and they all gasp because they all know that that's the first time they've ever seen that and may never, ever see it again. That he juggled seven balls and did three twists.

1:13:41 Mark: That's not a matter of appreciating form either. That is a matter of association, which is expression. The fact that you know how hard it is to do that, that's like you're a guitarist, guitarist. Because you know how hard it is to play that thing on guitar. That's the same thing. That is the kind of vulgarity that Santayana would not like. Yeah.

1:13:57 Wes: Maybe a better example is, say, coming to Bach's St. Matthew Passion with some music theory under your belt, as opposed to without. Which is not to say you can't have aesthetic enjoyment of that without music theory. You know, someone who knows nothing about music theory or classical music would listen to St. Matthew Passion and enjoy it. But the idea is that you can heighten and Cultivate and educate your sensibility in such a way without necessarily knowing. Right. The historical facts. Mark, that's what you were getting at. You don't need to know history necessarily, although that can help too. So if the ability to compare St. Matthew's passion to other works and across time. And so I think that can help as well. But something purely formal like music theory. Yeah. You hear new things and you understand the music in a way that Newbie just doesn't.

1:14:42 Mark: Couldn't you get a lot of that out of just sheer repetition too? If you listen to that Bach enough times and don't just let it float over you while you're falling asleep, but like really sink your ears into that and analytically approach it and approach it from every different side, then you're going to, I think, be able to. You won't have the language of music theory, but you'll appreciate what the music theoretical facts that people think are so cool are. You won't know it's called a Plagal cadence, but you'll. Oh, that thing that, that was.

1:15:08 Dylan: Yeah, but, but, but you're going to have essentially done something like that. Right. There's this music show that's on in the evenings. I think it's on once a week. And last night I was driving home from my soccer game and he was hosting about Tristan and Isolde from Wagner. And there's this very famous chord called the Tristan chord, which I couldn't really describe to you

1:15:29 Wes: anyway.

1:15:30 Dylan: Wes can describe it.

1:15:31 Wes: That's the best I can do.

1:15:32 Dylan: The host did this awesome thing where he went through and with the piece playing and played the notes on the chord, describing what they were by name, but then articulating how they played together. And then in this one hour, it's a four hour opera. But he went through in an hour going through how the story was progressing and telling you a little bit about what was happening in the background. So you could, you know, the opera's in German, so you know, unless you know German, you can't really understand it, but you can experience it musically.

But then also described how that chord happens not just at the beginning at the end, but it has a dynamic progression throughout the whole opera. So that in some ways it begins at the beginning of the opera and progresses into a resolution at the end, just in the same way that the chord itself progresses and has resolution at the very beginning in the very first measures of the opera.

1:16:23 Wes: Right now.

1:16:23 Dylan: That was awesome. That was really interesting and enhancing of the beauty of that piece.

1:16:30 Seth: I've heard Lectures about pieces like that. Maybe of the three of you, I'm the most musically illiterate. And just this past weekend we were in Houston and a friend of Shannon's was able to get us tickets to see Il Trovatore, which is an opera that I was not familiar with. And my ability to aesthetically enjoy opera is almost exclusively immediate and perceptual and emotional or emotive, because I'm not a musician. And the music, I can't tell. I have no doubt that the Houston Grand Opera musicians are some of the best musicians in the world. And that's what her friend the sound engineer was telling me.

And we were sitting next to another friend who's a musician slash rock star teacher, and I could see that his engagement with the music and the opera was radically different than mine. And yet I wouldn't want to discount my experience of what happened, my aesthetic experience of the opera versus somebody who's much more informed, educated experience. Is it possible that it's not a question of degree on a scale, but that we're appreciating different things or that we're having aesthetic experience of different things? Just because you're aware of more stuff happening doesn't mean that being aware of less stuff happening somehow diminishes your.

The validity of your aesthetic experience. Particularly for Santayana, for whom this is irrational and ultimately subjective.

1:17:56 Wes: You're like the savage Seth.

1:17:58 Dylan: Yes, yes, you're savage Seth.

1:18:01 Seth: Well, that wouldn't be the first time somebody said that about me.

1:18:04 Mark: You like the fact that they're so visually striking and in tune, they turn you on by their matter and maybe their expression that reminds you. I mean, that's most of what rock music is. Are they cool? In other words? Does it have good associations, good expression for you? Does it have a James Dean sort of vibe or whatever the modern equivalent of that is? That's all expression. And then is it high fidelity and have good guitar sounds and a pure American Idol like, or Bon Jovi esque or whatever your preference is. I know, Seth, your preference for voices is.

1:18:41 Seth: I'm not a Cookie Monster lyricist kind of. I'm not a Cookie Monster vocal kind of guy. Give me melodic metal.

1:18:47 Wes: Give me Marilyn Manson.

1:18:49 Seth: Well, Marilyn Manson's fine. But I mean, I'm not a Lamb of God Cannibal Corpse kind of dude.

1:18:56 Mark: Okay. But anyway, those are all. The quality of the voice, those are all the matter. But there's going to be form. It might be just kind of a primitive form. The fact that there's a repetitious beat like, that's form right there. That's appreciating the fact that there's a backbeat. Now, if you can appreciate a song that's in seven, eight time. That's a little more sophisticated form. That takes a little more work to sink your teeth into. I think we should read a little of the form chapter. Because we haven't done that just to get this out there.

Like section 23. Form is the unity of a manifold. So just the fact that it has a bunch of parts that fit together. If it really was all you just hear it as a sound, as a singular sound. Then that's a sensation. That's not a perception. That's actually why he says tastes. Back to the vodka, the whiskey example in section 15. The objectification of musical forms is due to their fixity and complexity. Like words, they are thought of as existing in a social medium. And can be beautiful without being spatial.

1:19:51 Wes: Right.

1:19:52 Mark: Most things that have beautiful forms are because you see the relation in space. But tastes have never been so accurately or universally classified and distinguished. The instrument of sensation does not allow such nice and stable discriminations as does the ear. The art of combining dishes and wines. Although one which everybody practices with more or less skill and attention. Deals with a material far too unrepresentable to be called beautiful. The art remains in the sphere of the pleasant. And is consequently regarded as servile rather than fine.

So tastes are but a beauty of form. Back to section 23. Here is what specifically appeals to an aesthetic nature. It is equally removed from the crudity of formless stimulation. And from the emotional looseness of reverie and discursive thought. The indulgence in sentiment and suggestion. Of which our time is fond to the sacrifice of formal beauty. Marks an absence of cultivation as real, if not as confessed. As that of the barbarian who revels in gorgeous confusion. The synthesis, then, which constitutes form. Is an activity of the mind. The unity arises consciously.

And is an insight into the relation of sensible elements separately perceived. It differs from sensation in the consciousness of the synthesis. And from expression in the homogeneity of the elements and in their common presence. To sense. All right, but then most of what he actually has to say about form. Is like the most boring parts of the book. Like, why do we find a circle beautiful? It's not because it expresses circularity. Just because it's a beautiful form. Or even the straight line. That's a much less interesting form. But we certainly don't find it beautiful because we think about if that was a Road.

That would be the quickest way to get from point A to point B. That would be a matter of expression. He says the form is not reducible to expression any more than seasickness is reducible to the fear of shipwreck. I like that analogy. I'm not completely sure what it means, but you're sick. It's not because you have a thought that you might crash. It's just that you just feel it. That somehow form is something that we just are able to apprehend. It's not that somebody tells us that the form is there and so say, okay, I guess it's good, so cultivate yourself.

Anyway, as much as that appeals to my aesthetic snootiness, he also some points against my general approach to music and other things, which is against eclecticism. That he says in a couple places that even if in the abstract there are a wide variety of stuff that's enjoyable and you should try to enjoy it all. He says somewhere I think, you know, nobody can be a specialist with their whole heart or something like that. Fact is that you might recognize that there's a variety of beautiful things, but you have not actually done the work and put in the time and gain the experience to develop our relationship with all those things so abstractly respecting the great variety of beauty that's out there and saying, I'm so open minded.

I'm into every kind of music, I'm into every, is just as hypocritical as extolling the latest fashion or what your professors have told you is good without actually feeling it yourself. So it's better to be very skilled in one particular specific art form to develop your talent rather than try to be a dilettante. Which is funny coming from him, given that, you know, he started out as a poet. His first book was published poetry. But then he didn't. He was more into philosophy for the rest of his life. He only had one actual novel which was very well received.

But he seemed very much the wandering dilettante philosophically and geographically, frankly. After he put in his time at Harvard, he retired at age 48 and they begged him come back and teach some more. And he was offered positions at Cambridge and Oxford.

1:23:12 Unknown speaker: And he.

1:23:13 Mark: No, he wanted to be a writer. He wanted to basically live like a student. It sounded like, from what I read, just like reading a lot of stuff and experiencing a lot of stuff and not feeling like he had to be the public, social face of philosophy or something like that, a dilettante. Are there big things in here that you Found especially cool that we haven't yet talked about.

1:23:33 Seth: Well, there's a lot of suggestive things in here about a metaphysics of beauty that I don't know that he fully develops. Again, I didn't read the whole thing, so I can't say, but just a couple things that came out to me. You know, it seemed to me that he was tying passions or emotions to the aesthetic. And it reminded me of basically saying that value judgments that have an emotional content or a feeling content are aesthetic or moral, you know, as opposed to fact or judgments of fact. And it reminded me of the Hume Smith bit about moral sentiment and the idea that emotive content was somehow necessary to impel one to action.

So I wondered if there wasn't some kind of Humean thread that underlied this, that maybe he saw a connection and bought into the human thing about moral sentiment in moral judgments and was able to export that into aesthetics. And that might be something that would be interesting to explore. He talked about having the desire to have others confirm our aesthetic judgment, that it simultaneously sort of reinforced and justified the idea that aesthetic judgments were subjective, but also made it part of our psychological makeup and social fabric.

1:24:50 Mark: Your plane of immanence.

1:24:51 Seth: Yes, exactly. Your. Your plane of immanence. And then I wondered about. In the section on form is talking about symmetry and lines, hard lines versus curved lines, suggestive. And then he dropped that line about democracy and an aesthetic appreciation of kind of a political station. It made me think about the symbols of different types of political structures. And I recall many, many years ago, it might have even been back in college, somebody I know doing kind of an analysis of fascist symbols and pointing out how they always have a symmetry with an anchoring point in the center and there's hard angles, and that this type of symbolism is the sort of thing that represents an attachment to status quo and so on and so forth versus asymmetry and curves, which are more progressive and typically associated with more hippie type things.

And also even the Danto piece about representation versus abstraction, which we've already sort of touched on. The one thing I wanted somebody to help me understand was the idea of uniformity and multiplicity. I have an interpretation of what he was talking about, but I'm not 100% sure that that's what he meant. Does anybody even remember reading.

1:26:09 Mark: Well, isn't it just that first he says uniformity, that that's the best way to appreciate the matter of something is if the form is uniform. So if there's a really luscious Blue, then the best way to appreciate that blue is just by having a big blanket or a flag or something that's just all that color that's just solid. You get the purity of that. So that's the simplest kind of form, is uniformity. But then the next simplest is periodic multiplicity, columns regularly displayed, or stripes. And that's where the democracy comes in. Which I did think was kind of funny in that context. That the aesthetic appeal of democracy comes from the same place as the aesthetic appeal of stripes. That there's just one person, one vote, one man, one vote. That it's not a melting pot. Democracy makes things uniform in a pleasing, abstract way. The citizens are all equal.

1:26:57 Seth: When he was talking about that, I was thinking in terms of. He talks about art, but he also talks about nature. And I was thinking of something like a vista where you were looking at the sea or clouds, you know, in the sky, or a field of grass, where the overall impression was uniformity, but there was multiplicity in the details. And I wrote down pointillism, the painting style. And it turns out, I think that they might have aligned in historical time. They might have been happening at the same time. But I wondered if there wasn't some. If it wasn't applicable not just to nature, but to man, produced, you know, visual art which might very well have carried him over, might legitimate this as an approach to the abstract art of the 20th century that he, I guess, lived to see some of, but not all of it. Not the development in the latter half of the 20th century.

1:27:47 Mark: 1940s, he died. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think he talks about Impressionism somewhere in here mostly, I think to denigrate it in the way of if something is indistinct. He doesn't like that. He likes forms that are fully determined so you can appreciate it in itself and, again, don't have to sort of fill in the details yourself. I think he refers somewhere into it the kind of Impressionism which is supposed to just capture just a brief glimpse, you know, when you just look at something for a second. So it's unnatural in the way it freezes something.

And he says, there's a certain appeal of that, but what's better is when you can really sort of sink into it and feel all the different sides. And I think you kind of can do that with Impressionist painting. So I don't know if that's such a good analysis. In fact, that's the kind of. The point is you freeze something and then you can feel your way around it in a Way that you can't. If it's just a passing glance. I'm going to use your point to dovetail into the point that I wanted to make sure to make before we get out of here. Both in the end of the form chapter and in the end of the book, he is very adamant about how a form has to be sort of finite and understandable to be perfect, to be the best aesthetic thing that it can be.

Earlier he talked about symmetry is good when you can see it. So symmetry in the columns of a building is great. Symmetry in the streets of a city is boring because you can't unless you're in a plane, which he didn't know about, of course, then you can't see the city as a whole. So all that means is like, it seems really, oh, my God, another right angle, another right angle. You know, he would not like the way that us cities are laid out. He moved back after he retired from Harvard. He just went and lived in Italy. He liked the places with little curving streets and stuff like that.

That kind of effect only works on a certain scale. And so the corollary to that is raging against Romanticism, which looks at the idea of perfection not as a finite thing, that you can say this is a perfect form, like the Mona Lisa or these classical Greek sculptures are the things I think he would point to. But in the infinite. He thinks the infinite perfection, aesthetically, is a contradiction in terms. He brings up religion a couple times in here. He notoriously. He was raised Catholic, but then became, I don't know, agnostic or something, you know, very naturalistic about really thought people were too overly religious.

But he really thinks it's great as a cultural phenomena that these religious edifices that we've created aesthetically are beautiful and really make life wonderful. That the way that the Virgin Mary was deified and the image that was built around somebody about which there's so little actual factual, historical information that could have gone into the imaginative creations around this figure. That's one of the examples he gives of perfection in a character, that a character in a. In literature is a type of form that can have a perfection to it, as opposed to the perfection that the Romantics might appreciate, which is of the infinite.

That as soon as you open up to the infinite, there's not parts of it that you are relating into a form. You're not apperceiving anything. So there is not perfection in there. That's just empty, pretentious bullshit.

1:30:54 Seth: Explain to me how the Romantic part plays into that Romanticism.

1:30:58 Mark: The idea of romanticism is kind of losing yourself in the whole. It eschews finely detailed creations in terms of emotional expression. But again, expression for him is going to be sort of crude. And if you say in this open ended modern artwork, I'm expressing my connection to the infinite or something, he's not going to have a lot of sympathy with that. Like, that's not something you could actually even represent. Like, it seems that he is tied to something like the. Well, I was going to say the representational theory of art. But it's not a matter of how well are you representing the thing you're trying to draw. But it has to be a distinct form.

1:31:36 Seth: No, it's the expressionist piece. I mean, I think that's ultimately the heart of this theory. Whatever you say about the form and the rest of it is that art expresses something. And when it says express, what it means is that it inspires that emotion in you or inspires that experience in you. It has to somehow provoke you into having this experience. Art is provocative in that way. But he doesn't think of it as provocative in the sense of getting a response of disgust or surprise or anything like that. Art has to provoke an aesthetic response.

1:32:08 Dylan: The beautiful.

1:32:09 Seth: I don't want to talk about art. Sorry. The beauty. Yes, yes, I'm sorry, I get.

1:32:12 Mark: Yeah. An aesthetic is associated with the beautiful. That's why Danto doesn't like to call the subject matter aesthetics. Because he, as somebody who appreciates Andy Warhol and writes books on him, thinks that art is not about just inspiring beauty, that it can have elicit any number of emotional effects and those are all legitimate functions of art. So we should just talk about philosophy of art and not talk about aesthetics at all.

1:32:32 Seth: But Santayana doesn't agree with that, right?

1:32:35 Mark: He's before that revolution.

1:32:37 Dylan: Well, at the very least, he's consciously talking about aesthetics and beauty. And whether or not he would think that there's art that's worthwhile that was not beautiful would be another question. I suspect he wouldn't have much time for art that wasn't beautiful. I don't think that his goal in the book is to articulate our notion of beauty. So I think the Marx distinction of that question from the question of what is art is correct.

1:33:06 Mark: In the Stanford Encyclopedia article on beauty, as opposed to the separate one on Santayana, it says, it is worth saying that Santayana's treatment of the topic in the Sense of Beauty 1896, was the last major account offered in English for some time. Possibly because once beauty has been admitted to be entirely subjective, much less when it is held to rest in a sort of mistake. Right. We're imposing, we're saying the pleasure is in the thing itself, when clearly it's in you. There seems little more to be said. And the 20th century also abandoned beauty as the dominant goal of the arts, again, possibly in part because this trivialization in theory led artists to believe they ought to pursue more real and more serious projects. This decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto's book the Abuse of Beauty from 2003.

1:33:47 Dylan: It all ties together it's beautiful, Mark.

1:33:50 Mark: But what that means is it's funny that. So Santayana sort of was the definitive, at least in English, treatise on beauty for a long time, it says. There's been a revival in interest in both art and philosophy in recent years, and several theorists have made new attempts to address the. Anyway, beauty is on the upswing now, this article says, in the past decade or so, but the winds were changing, and I think avant garde art certainly had everything to do with it. It seems hard to me for me to believe that the avant garde artists were reading Santayana and thinking that he so trivializes beauty, I must try to do something else. Maybe it actually is true that he had a lot of. Like T.S. eliot and Robert Frost were among his students. There are at least some of the names I recognized. He had some. He was widely read at the time, these ideas on beauty.

1:34:38 Seth: Well, as he said in the beginning of the book, very few people have given it any attention since Plato, not hard to make waves.

1:34:47 Mark: Yes. He doesn't want it to be, as in the case with Kant, a footnote in someone's metaphysical. He describes it, yeah, we can put beauty in there somewhere, but you only can understand it. And we'll read the third critique sometime, Kant's third critique about beauty. But it only makes sense. It will only make sense to you because you've listened to the Kant episodes on his theory of knowledge and his faculties and things a little obscure. I'm very interested in what these other kind of things that art can pursue. So in particular, can ugliness itself be not just something that we tolerate because it's presented beautifully, as Santayana thinks, but actually have some positive aesthetic value in some way?

And a lot of the ways this has been discussed in the historical literature is in the sublime, that the two expressions of beauty were in the beautiful, which we've discussed, and the sublime, which is like when you behold a raging sea destroying ships in a storm, and you say, oh, My God, that's. The majesty of it overwhelms you, even though it's a horrible thing. If you like the kind of music where they sing like Cookie Monster, then probably it's not traditional beauty you're. You're after in your aesthetic appreciation. So if we want to say there's something legitimate about what you're doing, we have to give some other account in Santayana's.

1:36:06 Wes: Well, I think his. His notion of expression, though, would. Would help with that, because you're associating

1:36:11 Mark: nice things with Cookie Monster.

1:36:14 Wes: Yeah, anything can, you know, through association. You could, you know, as he says, make something indifferent, beautiful, but yes, something seemingly ugly. And, you know, there's a meaning, it signifies something. There's obviously a way to explain someone's attraction to metal as beautiful.

1:36:34 Mark: You can explain it in Santayana terms, but you would say that the person is a brute, a savage, a somehow doesn't understand what real aesthetics is about. It seems like it's a little too. Come on. There must be some way to be a positive metal head.

1:36:49 Wes: Yeah. There's form and there's.

1:36:52 Mark: Okay, so if it's very technical metal with odd time signatures and cool stuff, you could be appreciating the form.

1:36:58 Wes: Well, what's wrong with 4? 4?

1:37:01 Mark: There's a symmetry there. Yes. Yeah. I don't know. I kind of buy it in the abstract that some people can appreciate form better than others. And form is something that you get when you listen to something a lot. And it's just. It's something that our surface level culture overlooks too easily. You know, why more people aren't into classical music and opera or jazz is not just because of the fashion of the time, but it's because they focus too much on is the recording quality good. The fact that everybody has to have a fucking pitch correction on their voice now that the standards are so high, and it's always been that way with radio, that there's a certain sheen that things have to have in whatever decade you're talking about to be pop in that sense that the rest of us can appreciate.

But it is the enjoyment of the savage. There's things I like about it and there's things that I don't. Because ultimately he doesn't give that much. You know, he says a little about the sort of mathematical things that would make a form appealing, but so much of it is still unexplained. It's just. You see the relation of the parts to a whole, and it seems cool

1:38:06 Wes: somehow, and it's so generic. That it. See, it's. Even though, you know, you're saying that pop music today might seem savage by Santayana's standards. Although, again, he doesn't diss that. Right. He says that those primitive forms of appreciation are sincere. But it's unclear to me what category it actually would fall into. And I think even on Santayana's grounds, you could give a defense of any given pop music. So in the sense of application, it's hard to say whether you could really apply this and, say, distinguish between something which is supposed to be higher and something which is supposed to be lower. Let's say it's even unclear in the

1:38:43 Mark: case of music whether form has to be spread over time or whether it can be, you know, as long as you can distinguish the points that you're hearing. So, like, if you hear a chord, let's say I hear a ninth chord, is it beautiful just because it has a certain sheen, a certain feeling? Or is it beautiful because I can pick apart the root and the third and the. And the fifth and the. The seventh and the ninth? Because I can hear all those elements and they form some beauty in the way they're connected? Because, you know, if you allow for simultaneity, then, yeah, you know, even rock music, especially very well engineered rock music, like, you could look at.

Oh, look at the way the toms are panned from left to right across the audio field. It just sounds. It's not just a matter of the pretty matter, like a pretty blue. There's a formal element to it, too, in the way that if you EQ the bass just right in the guitars so they don't run into the keyboards. And I just think that the form and matter mush together.

1:39:44 Wes: Yeah, a lot of great music is about orchestration. And that goes for pop music, say later Beatles stuff, where you get all these layers. And with, say, someone like Tchaikovsky, where if you get into the guts of the music and the theory, it's almost disappointingly uniform and simple, Right. You have diatonic scales. I mean, there's only so much you can say. It's like the complaint. Well, rock and roll's all 1, 4, 5. It's just three chords. There's a complaint like that. Well, music, in a sense, is simple, technically like that. And all of the interesting diversity that we hear in music has a lot to do with the matter.

Things like the way it's orchestrated. So there may be the same, exact same chord progression over thousands and thousands of different songs. And in some sense they have deep formal similarities or even, you know, arguably are identical, but they're radically different pieces of music. So, yeah, it's a difficult.

1:40:44 Mark: And the associations too.

1:40:46 Wes: And then of course, yeah, the expressive.

1:40:48 Mark: Wow, you threw in some salsa there. Wow, that's crazy for a Metallica song. Throw in a little samba. Neat.

1:40:57 Wes: Yeah.

1:40:57 Mark: You're so eclectic and cool.

1:41:00 Wes: Yeah, yeah. The meaning of it. Yeah.

1:41:03 Mark: Thanks, guys. Any closings from people?

1:41:06 Wes: We'll count that as my closing.

1:41:08 Dylan: I'm good.

1:41:09 Mark: My closing is this was a feel good read, even though it was boring in some points. Maybe he resented having to write the whole thing in a certain period of time, resented having to teach the class in the first place just because he was a poet and people thought he would should have a specialty. But I generally really enjoyed it. In fact, the first time I read it was right when I got my iPhone and I downloaded the Stanza app and I looked for public domain things. That's actually how I found this. It's public domain philosophy things. The Gutenberg free text library.

And so I just read it on my phone like over the period of a year, a few screens at a time, while waiting in line for something or whatever. And even though I didn't retain anything from that go through, I had to reread the whole thing in preparation for this. It really. It was like reading an insight a day. It was very nice in small doses by contrast with the good vibes all over this reading. For next time, we will read Ayn Rand's introduction to Objectivist Epistemology from 1967 and her essay the Objectivist Ethics from 1961. And if you don't agree with her, you're corrupt and an asshole.

That's the feeling I get reading her.

1:42:18 Seth: It's.

1:42:18 Mark: It's really kind of hurts my soul a little bit. And I want to announce a new initiative which is to get more listeners that play instruments and have access to a recording setup to help me with some of the songs that go at the end of this podcast. The one you're about to hear is called Sense of Beauty, written while reading this book and then recorded very quickly with the help of listeners. Sean Saul on bass, John Jughead Pearson on electric guitar, Eric Schumann on keyboards, and Sean's bandmate, Brett Siegel on drums. So thanks very much to all of them.

If you want a nice shiny high bitrate mp3 of the song, go to partiallyexaminelife.com it's free. Anybody that wants to contribute in the future, please do contact me. I'm open to all instruments, other voices. Just tell me what you can do. We are supported by your donations. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. There's a donate button. Big donors. Since our last recording, I've included and there are a lot because I didn't read them last time. Michael Rissman, John Goggin, Matt Harrington, Douglas Matthews, Corey Moeller, Leland Gregory, Robert Clark, Ilona Hart Hayes, Josie Nielsen, John Jughead Pearson, Charles Wisotski, Tony Gilkerson, Jessica Thanos, Aaron Barry, Hans Gutbrod, Wayne Schroeder, Nadia Chic, David Bennett, Phil Vergo, Evan Sophos, Andrew Schieff, Jordan Vessel, Scott Wells, Gordon Reed, Timothy Fanning, David Purvis, Nathaniel Sheehan, Matt Miller, Willie Robertson, Michael Murray, James Canary, Simon Kringas, Darren Inmuon, Jack Cunningham, Maurice Frank, Robert Hart and Jeffrey Young.

Thanks so much, everybody. And there are many other people that have joined be a pel? Citizen. What? You don't know what that is? Why if you donate $5 recurring donation to us or it's $50 per year, then you will become a pel citizen. And you can join these not school groups which have each have a message board and they all have a schedule for a reading and there's a dozen or so of them going at any given time. Why don't you go check that out? Too cheap for that. We have a Facebook group you can join right now for free and there's discussion going on day or night.

You post something, probably somebody will respond to it within seconds. It's insane.

1:44:19 Wes: Yes, and the response will probably be insane.

1:44:25 Mark: We have a twitter feed. We're always twitter socializing with all the big names like Lucy lawless and two other people. There's a the blog partially examined life@partiallyexaminedlife.com that you should subscribe to and get our daily email updates. And if you've got time, we'd appreciate a nice review on the itunes store page if you enjoyed this episode. Thank you and good night.

1:44:46 Wes: Good night.

1:44:47 Dylan: Good night.

1:45:04 Unknown speaker: Well, you can take all that you can make? You can burn it to the ground and you can break everything that's fake? You can seize and shake and pound and why not? You can preserve most of what you have? Or you can blow the wad in fly you deserve it when your wife is mad? Or you can buckle and survive? Well, it's not too late to untwist your fate? But don't lose your sense of beauty? You can debate everything you hate you can even help keep score? You can berate all the clouds you skate? You can taunt yourself some more?

1:46:07 Mark: And why not?

1:46:10 Unknown speaker: You can forget everything you said? Your plans and schemes and goals? You can regret everything you? Your love and rock and roll? But it's not too late to untwist your fate? Just don't lose your sense of beauty? Run like a dog? Run like a dog on your feet? Run like a dog? Spring like a dog? On your knees? No one's holding a grudge? They won't see you coming? Take aim and be judged? Just don't stop running? Cause it's not too late to hunt? Twist your fate? Just don't lose your sense of beauty? And it's not too late to refuse the hate? Just don't lose your sense of guilty? It's not too long to admit you were wrong? And use your sense of beauty?