Ep. 207: Herder on Art Appreciation (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 207 is something like, what is aesthetic taste? And we read three essays by Johann Gottfried Herder, the causes of sunken taste among the different peoples in whom it once blossomed. From 1775 on the influence of the belles lettres on the higher sciences. Does painting or music have a greater effect? A divine colloquy, 1785. And we also read the sections about music and dance from the book Critical Forests Fourth Grove, written in 1769. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, my genius pursuing bad ends with bad means in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:45 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:47 Wes: This is Wes Alwan climbing the craggy and precipitous cliffs of Taste in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:53 John: This is John Pearson, leaping from the weighty to the frivolous in Chicago, Illinois,

0:59 Mark: Jughead, if you will. How's it going? Pretty good.

1:02 John: I'm very nervous to be talking with you guys. Just so you know. I've been a fan for about seven years.

1:07 Wes: Tell us how you got here.

1:09 John: Well, I did Mark's podcast for my band even and Blackouts, and we just sort of got chatting and I think he's been trying to get me on here for a while and. And trying to dig up some sort of essays on aesthetics to include me, and he found an interesting one.

1:27 Mark: Yes, the two things were coincident. You're our third kind of rock star guest that we've had on here, and I try to look for practitioners when we come back to aesthetics, if possible, since I want to have people that have really dipped their noses in this kind of stuff in the practice of it. But I always also find it amusing. You were telling me, like, can we talk about surrealism? Can we talk about Something in the 20th century, something modern? I actually have a connection to that. And we should mention that you're not only a musician, but also a theater guy, experimental avant garde theater, a writer, multiple books, et cetera. You are as widely practiced as Herder is in terms of his writing.

2:03 John: Yes. I have about 30 records under my belt and about 30 performed and printed plays and three novels. Wow. My company, the Neo Futurists, actually is probably the thing I'm most known for around, like, internationally. We have a company in New York and one in Chicago and one in San Francisco.

2:21 Seth: When you say company, like a company of jolly Actors or.

2:26 John: Yeah, we produce. There's one show called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which we've been doing for about 30 years. And then we have a regular season where we write four new plays every year.

2:36 Mark: And you should tell them what your current gig is, your acting gig.

2:39 John: Well, my current gig I'm going back to. I've been doing it for the last four years. I'm an Ollivander in the Harry Potter world in Osaka, Japan.

2:49 Mark: So telling kids in Japanese about their wonderful wands and what they'll do for them.

2:54 John: Yeah, I had to learn Japanese and just thrown into it, we were the first cast that did it in Japanese and it's a one on one experience too. So I have to pick a kid out from an audience and start talking Japanese to them.

3:07 Wes: Wow.

3:08 Seth: I'm sorry, I don't know anything about the Harry Potter universe. What is Ollivander? Is that the name that you said?

3:13 John: Ollivander is the. Basically he's the one who sells Harry Potter the wand. His first. So I basically bring a kid through that whole sort of show where they get a wand and it fails. They do a bad trick and a bad trick and then they get the wand that fits them because the wand chooses the wizard.

3:30 Mark: I'm sure we can draw a comparison between that and. There's so many things in Herder of fittingness and the poetry that fits the culture and the music that fits the culture. And if you try to do something that doesn't fit your culture, then you monumentally fail. So if you try to imitate the Greeks and your soil is not the same as the Greek soil, then that's just bad. Is just a special application of that principle.

3:54 John: Yeah, I've been pretty much all over Europe and then Japan was my first Asian country. And I did realize it's like they say, the culture is so different, it takes a little while to get used to. I mean, they just see things so differently. But luckily I studied a little philosophy, you know, difference between Eastern and Western philosophy just to get a little grip on how I would be treated there.

4:15 Seth: Like a conquering hero, like a reigning God. What?

4:19 John: Yeah, well, for instance, you know, it's mostly in the language about how they, you know, where we focus on the object, they focus more on the action. So it actually comes out in how they treat you as a person. And just their idea of that community is above individuality and all the problems that causes. To think that way, you're a cog in the wheel. If you're down on the totem pole. It doesn't matter if you're an actor or pushing around numbers.

4:44 Mark: John, I pushed you into this. We've only spent about the last two weeks fretting over this guy. I gave you more warning than that. Do you want to kind of start us off a little bit? Like, is there a running theme? Or do you want to have a little bit of background information to start with?

4:57 John: You know, I didn't know anything about him, and it turns out there's not much actually translated. But he has. I feel like he's had more of effect as an inspiration to many people during the day because, you know, he was friends with Goethe and supposedly he sort of changed his view on his writing and he was taught under Kant, so he had an effect from that. And then I think he had an ongoing sort of love and hate relations with him for his whole life. He was in a period that was going from the Age of Reason tinkering towards Romanticism. I think he was caught in the middle of it because I think he didn't believe any one or the other was right.

And it kind of shows that he was friends with Kant and Hamann, who I didn't know anything about, but Hamann was more of like a punk rocker in rebellion against prog rock music. You know, he was a rebellion against the Age of Reason and was trying to push people more towards relying on their senses instead of reason. So it seemed like a lot of his work just sort of seems to be about trying to balance those two forces.

5:58 Wes: This is the first time I've read Herder, and it's not what I expected. When you speak of balancing the two forces, they're kind of present in the way he writes. It's very ornate and emotive, let's say. There's lots of exclamation points and question

6:11 Seth: marks and italicized phrases.

6:14 Wes: And yet, I guess in the end, I'm thinking mostly about the essay Sunken Taste. But he has good things to say about reason, for instance, in taste, but also the ways in which reason can go overboard. So he's asking for some sort of balance in ways that sometimes seem reminiscent of Nietzsche, although I think he seems to have different tastes than Nietzsche. And he also has a very interesting idea, ultimately, about the grounding of taste and sort of the vital public concerns of a people or a culture. So, anyway, it's not what I expected from, hey, this guy was a student of Kant. That's just not what I came into this. And I think you put it perfectly, John this sort of is in transition to Romanticism, but it's not a rejection of reason per se. It's really hard to describe Herder until

7:04 Seth: you've looked at him Stylistically. The word I would use is lively. And again, we don't know how much is this translation. I would love to look at the German if I could still read it as well as I used to. But the prose is poppin. It's lively, it has energy, it moves itself forward. And he's witty and adroit in turn of phrase and not afraid to level criticisms and pass judgment, but not in an overbearing, obnoxious way. And so I liked that it was not a tedious slog. But he's making constant reference to the past. I mean, I think one of the things that's kind of a key, especially in the essay that Wes mentioned, is this callback to historical epochs.

And he even suggests he's going to do a survey of the entire history of taste in the West. And the themes I saw coming out of this were there's a tension between the creative force of genius and reason. And there's this notion that reason itself is not sufficient. There needs to be some kind of compelling creative energy to move things forward. That reason is not sufficient, that knowledge, just for the sake of utility, knowledge for the sake of utility. And isn't knowledge really at all? There has to be the freedom to explore creatively inside of an epistemic structure.

But also, the last thing that kind of came out to me was this tension between his kind of reverence and call to go back to the Greeks, like we have to go back to the ancients. And yet each age has its own taste. Each age can, I should say, have its own taste. Assuming that the seeds and the fruits and the environment and the politics and the social and yada, yada, yada, all come together in the right way so we can talk about what he characterizes, like the Roman taste versus the Greek taste. I thought that was a really interesting thing.

8:59 Mark: Yeah, we should start with the causes of sunken taste among the different peoples in whom it once blossomed. Just before we do that. So the reason I picked this author is just because I had an aesthetics lecture as an undergrad and we read some short thing by him. I cannot for the life of me remember exactly which it was. I didn't particularly recognize it among these things, but I found this collection, Selected Writings on Aesthetics from Gregory Moore. So he's the translator. He gives about a 30 page introduction, which is what I used to figure out, like what of this massive 400 page tome, what we should try to take on.

And so the Sunken Taste and the Belles let, in other words, pretty words on the higher sciences. They weren't written right next to each other, but Moore describes them as they could be companion pieces. So one is about why is there good taste in certain eras? And then why does that inevitably decay? We had a similar thing in Nietzsche's the Birth of Tragedy, where he talks about how early Tragedy Sophocles and before that Homer, how those are so awesome and by the time you get to Euripides, like, things have really gone downhill. And so we get a similar account here.

One of the things I did remember, I think from Herder, from this aesthetics course, is just him talking about genius. And I actually thought Herder was a straight up romantic. And so I just. We had never had an episod on genius before. And that Sunken Taste thing does address apparently genius very often was a big topic of discussion in Germany around aesthetics at this time. And one of the things I got of the intro that I had no idea was just that aesthetics was probably a more important part of philosophy in this time in history and in this country than anywhere else.

You know, it's very peripheral as far as our coverage of it on this podcast, it's like once a year or less. And that's mostly just because I really would like to do more of it. But here, this is really, as we'll get into it, this was kind of seen as somehow set up, I guess. We saw this. There was a Combat and Classics episode that Dylan and Wes appeared on, on Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. So that's one of the things that Herder is reacting to. I don't know how much he specifically talked about taste in there, but there was definitely a big concern with artistic education, how that relates to overall education.

Right. And parts of these essays that we're going to get into sound very much like the Allan Bloom that we just covered this year in terms of.

11:25 Wes: I thought of the same thing. I thought about Mill, Allan Bloom, Lucretius.

11:31 Mark: Yeah, it's so funny just to see something that could have come right out of Allan Bloom's pen from 1785 or something crazy.

11:38 John: I know that usually you want to stick to the text but not really talk about the history around it. But I think he. Even all of his writing is all over the place. It's about the history, it's about anthropology. So I actually, I was confused about. About Germany at that Time. And the little I know is that they were all like these independent states and they were trying to nationalize more. So I think that's a little bit of good information for him because he felt like that Herder didn't feel like they had any natural culture or any arts of their own. They were going through a dry period. All they had was philosophers. So I think a lot of his work was to try to invigorate the creativity, sort of the nationalizing of Germany.

12:21 Seth: Oh, but what philosophers they had, John? What philosophers they have?

12:26 Wes: Well, there's also Goethe and Schiller and, you know, Beethoven.

12:31 Mark: So, yeah, I was just looking. Critique of Pure Reason. Kant's came out 1781. And the stuff that we just covered on the Enlightenment, his what is Enlightenment? Essay and the one by Moses Mendelssohn were from 1784. So. Right, just overlapping. Right. This is 1770s. Yeah. The sunken taste is 1775. Kant hasn't written his third critique. The way that Moore tells this story is that Kant's third critique, his assessment of artistic value and his way of talking about art just completely blasted every. You know, it was so popular, he was already such an established figure that it really redefined how these things are talked about.

So Herder was definitely, even though he was familiar with Kant and reacting to part of what Kant had written, he hadn't got to that point of spelling out that particular theory about, you know, beauty is the disinterested appreciation. At the same time, you can see in Herder some things that are just directly against that. Just the whole concern with aesthetic education and moral education, how those are kind of one in the same thing. We should say Herder was. He was a Lutheran minister. So that's going to be lurking in the background. The origin of music, for instance, will get in, as in basically screaming like, that's the first music.

Just people emitting cries of pain.

13:49 Wes: There's a lot of weird stuff in here.

13:52 Mark: Art has a utilitarian aspect to it. You know, we use it for purposes. It is morally improving in itself. So I don't think he would, for instance, agree with Kant that, oh, you know, to really have an artistic appreciation of something, you have to be totally. Not morally attached to it. You have to be totally uninterested. And I think he just sees the human being as a more unified thing than that and is not going to make these fine distinctions perhaps between aesthetic appreciation and other kinds of appreciation.

14:21 Wes: Yeah, we used to say, when we're saying disinterest here, meaning a non appetitive relationship to the art object. Right. So as in the painting of the apple does not induce the appetitive desire that you would get if you wanted to eat a real apple. Schopenhauer, of course, will pick up on that with his idea of the aesthetic, which we've covered, where it's something that lifts us above the travails of will. It's something that takes us out of that particular relationship to things. But it's hard in Herder, there's nothing direct in this that interfaces with any of that.

I don't know if there is elsewhere, but that's one of the things that surprised me. Given his relationship to Kant, he's not writing abstractly about what it means to make judgments of beauty or anything like that. And I think, as all of you guys have pointed out, when it comes to describing changes in taste, it's going to be a kind of historical account.

15:19 Mark: Well, let's start in on the causes of sunken taste among the different people in whom it once blossomed. An award winning essay, his second award winning essay. His second award winning essay from the Berlin Academy of Sciences and Letters. Four years earlier, his essay on the origin of language had won, and this one won as well, even though he said it was a belletristic school exercise. I've never seen the word belletristic before, but I don't think it's a positive.

15:45 John: No, I read something about a little bit later about the belles lettres, and eventually it became known as what we would call like our pop culture, sort of. But I think he's using it more to mean literature. We'll get into that here. There's like a higher and a lower literature, but.

15:59 Mark: Well, just that he was writing this as an exercise.

16:02 Wes: To him, his opinion on belles lettres is complicated, as we'll see in the next essay, though you can write finely and artistically and still do it about things of substance, let's just put it that way.

16:13 Mark: And as the editor, translator Moore says, this was in part a reaction to Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. That was from 1750, right? This is 1775. No, it's funny, really. The aesthetics was invented as its own genre of philosophy in this period, apparently.

16:33 John: Yeah, Baumgarten, he read a lot of him, which was, I think, just earlier in the 18th century. Yeah, I don't know. I'm gonna throw these names out here. I don't even know. But just from reading it, there was a man before him, Wolf, who was about everything is cognitive. And then Baumgarten was Rebelling against him saying that there is a sense language and a cognitive language. And then I think Herder was shooting off of that.

16:57 Mark: Right? Yeah. So that's kind of, as you were saying, him balancing the two. And this is going to be an overall way of understanding him balancing the senses with reason throughout all these essays, this one in particular. So Rousseau was one of the first people, I guess, to attack the idea that the good taste that arts brings was a good thing for society. And the reason I'm saying aesthetics was not its own discipline is because issues of taste sort of extended over just what should your manners be? It was very hard to distinguish good manners from good music, strangely enough, that these were inevitably. Well, you can just think back to Plato, that Plato is evaluating music in terms of, you know, which modes were likely to make you weak and enervated and which ones were likely to stir up your spirits.

17:43 Wes: Something that Bloom picks up on to condemn rock and roll.

17:47 Mark: Yes. So I thought Rousseau had kind of, you know, something in that general tradition.

17:52 Wes: For Rousseau, civilization in general sucks. He has a lot of bad things to say about it, including the arts and sciences. So he's trying to be provocative and saying how the arts and sciences had made things worse, whereas Herder is going

18:06 Mark: to respond more or less to that in these two essays by kind of taking the older position. It's not a simple relation between having good taste in artistic productions and having a good virtuous character, but they're definitely related.

18:20 Wes: I like this way of putting it. Sunken taste. Right. What that's ultimately going to turn out to mean is just that there are certain periods in history where things seem to be culturally firing on all cylinders, and there are geniuses. And as a whole, good taste predominates. And that's followed by periods of imitators and hacks and amateurs. And as we'll see, it kind of goes in a cycle that he thinks is necessary of good taste and bad taste, although I don't know if you would put it that definitively. And so the question is, well, what leads to that? What's the reason for that cycle? What causes good taste? What causes it to go out for a while and come back in to begin with? He's going to go over a few different possibilities, which he's ultimately going to reject in favor of another explanation.

19:13 John: It's hard to deny through his writing that he puts the Greeks, it seems like, above all of the different movements that had taste just from the writing. It seems like he thought they balanced it better than any other Time period, sure.

19:27 Mark: So part of this is going to be, as Wes was just saying, he's considering different theories about what goes into good taste. And I find the most fascinating part of this to be right near the beginning where he's talking about genius and how this relates to the soul and things. But then the second half of the essay is he really laboriously goes through these examples of Attic, Greece, as you were just saying, John, and then Rome under Augustus and the Renaissance and the reign of Louis xiv. And apparently those were just considered in the French scheme of writing essays, the four times in history where there was the most geniuses, the most good taste going on.

You know, those weren't his choices. He's just considering these. But you can just see, looking at that, like the Renaissance. Why is it the Renaissance? Well, it's people calling back to ancient Greece and Rome. Right. Reviving those texts, reviving those ways of doing things. So, of course, on what we've just been saying, Herder is going to think that those guys are imitative hacks compared to the actual ancient Greece. And then he, even within ancient Greece, he's going to have something that really reminded me of the whole, again, the birth of tragedy story in Nietzsche.

You know, a very snobby thing about like some of the Greek stuff being really awesome and some of. Even within those few hundred years of being just imitative trash and they just spoiled everything that was good about tragedy in the later plays.

20:47 John: I also like this take on Egypt that they made things too big to be tasteful.

20:55 Wes: Yeah, the colossal, the monstrosities. Yeah, that'll be interesting, though. So do we want to go over some of this beginning stuff, get some quotes out here?

21:05 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

21:06 Wes: So he's going to be thinking about the relationship between taste and genius and then taste and reason and then taste and morality. And what's interesting early on here is he gives this definition of genius, which will be important, and it is that. This is on page 309. Genius is generally a mass of intensively and extensively striving faculties of the soul. Taste is order in this mass proportion, and therefore the beautiful quality of those striving powers. So in themselves, taste and genius are never opposed.

21:42 Mark: Yeah, so that's supposed to be directly arguing against some other unnamed person's position that genius was very much touted in German society at the time as being opposed to the simple taste that all the aristocrats claim to have taste. And that that's just something. There's something small and petty about that. Whereas genius was, you know, individuals was Beethoven producing this awesome thing.

22:05 Seth: Yeah.

22:06 Wes: He talks in one place about newer generation coming along and saying, look, we're doing all this dangerous, innovative stuff and you're. You're just a bunch of old people lying in bed. That's what I refer to in my opening. And yeah, it's not as simple as that.

22:21 Mark: So let's just look a little more closely. Genius is a mass of intensively and extensively striving faculties of the soul. So in other words, genius is a natural thing within individuals. It's just them being really energetic and creative. Taste is order in this mass, proportion, therefore, the beautiful quality of those striving powers. So you can see right there, that kind of genius is the creative part and taste is the editing part. And of course, those don't necessarily have to take place in the same person. A real genius is hopefully going to have taste in order to sculpt his or her creations such that they will stand the test of time. But that's not necessarily the case. There's ways that geniuses, as he spells out in here, can go wrong.

23:05 Wes: Think of genius as pure impulse to expressiveness, right? But there has to be some medium in which that's to be expressed. You know, it might be music, for instance. And for it to be more than screaming, right, the expressiveness has to come out in some sort of formal, ordered thing. And anyone who's ever played music knows that there's a lot of structure. And that structure can be confining. It can sort of damp down genius if one's not careful. And so you need this, right, balance of letting go and letting those striving faculties do their thing, but also not letting it come out as pure chaos, in some sense structuring it. So I think that's related. I'm not sure that's exactly what he's talking about here, because he is thinking when he says taste is order in this mass. Well, no, maybe I've put that right. I don't know. What do you guys think?

23:59 Mark: Is it just basically the Dionysian versus the Apollonian in Nietzsche? So he says right below this same page, genius is an aggregation of natural forces. It therefore issues from nature's hands, capital N, and precedes the formation of taste. The Orient, the fatherland of human civilization, was the land of rude, robust, sublime genius long before Greece arrived and roused beauty from its slumber.

24:22 Wes: And then in Greece, monstrous experiments. He's giving examples here of genius prior to taste, what it looks like in its experimental phase. So long before Greece arrives and roused Beauty from its slumber. You know, the suggestion here is that what issues from genius is not necessarily beauty per se. You need taste to rein it in or to sublimate it.

24:46 Seth: Maybe, let's say on page 311 he says taste is namely the rudder steering the powers of genius on the desolate sea of chance. That every man can choose a path and strive on it with fervor is the work of nature. That he can choose the right path and on its strives towards noble, attainable, useful ends is the work of trial and experience. In another place he talks about, I think he combines genius taste in moderation. Is it moderation? That's not the right word. Mediation. So basically, taste is the thing that shapes genius, but it shapes it according to this broader set of cultural influences that he talks about prevailing.

And those cultural influences reflect two things. A kind of balance in a series of virtues that exist in the society and, well, the virtues and the balance between them. So he clearly thinks that taste somehow comes externally. It's a function of influence on the individual genius whose creative power comes out of the individual. So taste is the channeling of some kind of broader influence to shape the activities of the individual genius. That was my reading of.

26:05 John: Made me think of. I don't know if I should go here now, but I didn't know this, but he was the first one to use the term zeitgeist.

26:11 Seth: That's funny, I thought of that word earlier. Yeah, yeah.

26:15 John: He uses it for genius actually. So I don't know whether in the German text he would be using zeitgeist. But I got the feeling that he was sort of saying that genius sort of takes in all of the spirit of the times. But it's almost like watching someone who's too spontaneous. If you have friends that are just changing their minds all the time and they're just living in the moment, there's no sort of organization. It's chaos. It seems like the sort of taste helps rein that in of someone who's like directly connected to the spirit of the time, you know?

26:44 Mark: Yeah, that was one of the things I was wondering. So he talks about genius is the matter over which taste overlays. 3, 10. If taste can only arise through geniuses, I.e. through natural powers that operate quickly and vivaciously, then taste also must desire to persist in them. Otherwise it is nothing but a reverberation in the air in an echo. Taste requires the matter to live in geniuses he makes the connection to. You might want to tend a garden. Yeah, right. After what I read, page 310, an abundance of trees, plants and meadows makes a garden.

And once the garden exists, then order, taste and landscaping can develop. But without a garden, we cultivate the air. We are want to make a distinction between genius and taste, as if genius had no need of taste, as if genius were its own compensation for taste were greater than it. If only the mind deficient in genius were obliged to console itself with taste and so on, dispensing with all such speculation, we must ask, if taste does not exist for geniuses in the widest sense, then for whom does it exist? He says that nobody, the dunderhead, can neither use or comprehend it.

Taste is only order in the application of powers of genius. So you might think that the guardians of taste are just kind of the regular people. The critics. Like, that's how taste would decline is because, like, the critics get in their heads that this is the way you do something. They contemplate Shakespeare and they come up with rules from Shakespeare and say, this is the way you write plays. And then they try to impose that in judging all future works. And like, that is the sure way to hell, to bad taste. Like, you need actual genius to. That's sort of an inauthentic relation between taste and the populace, really.

It has to ride on geniuses. You need more geniuses to kind of replenish.

28:25 John: I feel like he's setting up that you need the people of taste. And that's why there's sort of this nurturing of their intellect from childhood that sort of sets up their ability to. Not just through logic, but through experiencing it, they're able to relate more to the creation. And with that harmony between the two of them, then it starts building something afresh. Whereas if they don't have the knowledge, they can tear it down. And you're right, then a genius will go off the rails or feel like they're on the wrong path.

28:55 Seth: I'm not sure I agree with this distinction between the geniuses and the people, you know, like critics. My read of this is that he's essentially saying that genius and taste are so intimately related that only geniuses have use of taste and only geniuses can corrupt taste, that everybody else is just a spectator.

29:19 Wes: That wasn't my impression.

29:21 John: Well, I think he says earlier that genius can't be the only holder of taste.

29:24 Wes: I'm pretty sure, yeah.

29:26 John: I was gonna ask something like that, Seth, though, because I didn't know whether taste is actually a critic. Or is he setting up something more general or universal than a Specific person, like a critic.

29:38 Mark: That was exactly my question. And then you're bringing up Zeitgeist John makes a lot of sense here, because just like in Nietzsche, when he's kind of talking about trends within a society, like, well, who are you talking about exactly? Are you talking about the individual genius? So here he doesn't do, like a phenomenology of how a genius creates something. He says genius, not a genius. But genius is an aggregation of natural forces. It issues from nature's hands and precedes the formation of taste. So it's not even clear whether it's channeled through one person.

He does say geniuses feed on each other. So I think he is kind of assuming that there's individual geniuses that are the great man theory of history. But then if you only have one or two of them, then they're crying out in the wilderness. If you get three of them together, then you've got a society and you can have some mutual influence and interplay. And that's enough maybe, to get a taste established through the communication. Maybe they're influencing and even checking each other. The response of one composer to another could essentially say, yeah, you took that a little too far.

You should. You should tone down that. You see how I do it.

30:45 Wes: And we'll get a better idea of the origins of taste, I think, in his positive account, as a function of the vital interests and freedom of a society where the public is intimately involved. But it's kind of unclear here, I think, in this first part, how you make this transition from genius to taste. Right. Because he does use that metaphor of genius corresponding to the chaos at the beginning of the world before harmony, which is the taste part, is applied to it. And so how does harmony ever come about in the first place? I don't know. Was there something in here before his positive account that says how that transition occurred? I just thought he assumed that the transition occurs and then he goes on into his account.

31:28 Mark: Right. I'm just looking through my notes. I feel like we've kind of made all the points from the next couple pages already here.

31:34 Wes: Well, the false ends and the false means.

31:36 John: I think the one element that I liked in this first section here on 310 at the bottom, it's someone else's quotes and then his own quote with asterisks. So taste in one art rouses taste. In every other art, there was, so to speak, a harmonious atmosphere in which the similarly tuned strings of all the different instruments vibrated and resonated at a single Touch. I think in a lot of this stuff, he's really trying to combine all these different elements. I really like that section about how one art can affect another art, and you have to be open to that sort of thing happening.

32:07 Seth: Yeah.

32:07 Mark: You kind of picture, you know, New York City and certain periods where it's a hotbed of artistic expression and it's not just music and it's not just avant garde, Andy Warhol stuff. It's like everything is influencing each other and all the barriers between the different arts go down. That's what this taste in one art rouses taste in every other art makes me think.

32:26 John: It reminded me of the Algonquin Roundtable with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, where all the critics and artists would actually get together and they were all fueling that sort of scene in the. Was it like the 1920s? Sorry, that's an outside reference.

32:41 Mark: That's fun.

32:44 Wes: No, no, no, it's good. It's not that we're not allowed outside references. This rule has undergone many revisions. Its level of taste has been refined over the course of the podcast.

32:56 John: Well, I bring that up, Wes, because I was thinking when I was reading this, when I was thinking of the Romantics, I always acquaint that time period with, as an artist and a theater person, the one time in history where critics and artists seem to be working together or against each other. And then I think the other one was again in this Algonquin circle. And nowadays we just deal with more people being reviewers instead of critics, sort of helping the art. Instead they're just telling people whether to go see it or not. So I thought it was really important to sort of understand that this was sort of a leading into this idea of critics and artists working together.

33:32 Seth: Yeah.

33:33 Wes: I had a lot of occasion to think of what sunken taste times we live in, reading this and thinking about better times, which, of course, the Herter would probably have thought of as completely tasteless.

33:45 Mark: But I think it's difficult. We don't have a unified culture at all. And maybe that just would rule it out for him completely. We have no chance.

33:54 John: Well, here's where he says in 311, he says a genius had a noble and true goal before him, but had no guide to take him there. So it's all about, once a genius is on the wrong path, there's no getting back.

34:06 Seth: Yeah.

34:06 Wes: This is where he's talking about the extent to which geniuses alone ruin taste. Right. The people who have the greatest effect on a culture within an art because they have these powerful faculties at work and they're productive and they're doing things. But of course, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily the font of taste and they can actually corrupt taste. And then he gives this whole false ends versus false means as being the two ways of doing that, where the false ends is passing beyond. Does he say concretely, did anyone get a good idea of what it means for. Because, John, that's where you just read from the.

34:46 Mark: You know, that was the false means that he read. The false ends is really short before that. It's just a metaphor. If a vessel is already full and yet more water is poured in, then it flows over. If the mind that is full of power and has already attained its goal wishes to continue, then in passing beyond the goal, it enters the land of unnaturalness and false taste in ends.

35:06 Wes: So we might think about maybe the monstrosities again or the colossal statues of Egypt. The idea, for instance, that let's go create this massive pyramid, man, that's going to be so cool. Obviously there's a genius to that and obviously there's an aesthetic power to that. But. But the idea here seems to be that. That kind of thing. I don't know if you would say that specifically, but something. There are things like that which can just be excessive and maybe a pyramid is one of them corrupting. It's not the same as ancient Greece where you're doing these finely proportioned, genuinely beautiful statues.

Right. If you had to compare an ancient Greek statue to a pyramid, I think we could acknowledge that they do very different things aesthetically and that the statue is the more refined and legitimately beautiful thing. It's a little weird even to say that the pyramids are beautiful. They are beautiful, but sublime. Maybe more beautiful by way of power and awesomeness.

36:07 John: Yeah. And I wonder if he's sort of. This was reading into it, but if he's against that sort of idea, the word hubris came up. There's sort of a moral reaction to the pyramids being like one man's, one emperor's ode to himself. Maybe it's hubris that he dislikes.

36:23 Seth: Well, I think that's the key point is that there's no way in which the pyramids represent the mores and the values of that society. It's a manifestation of ego and it's a monument to an individual. And I think maybe that's one of the issues with Greek culture, is that the Greek governmental system obviously was not. It doesn't necessarily have to be democratic. But when he talks about Rome, he mentions how Rome develops its own taste. He doesn't consider it as compelling or as noble and as worthy of study, I guess, as the Greeks. But it only persists as long as Rome is a republic.

And as soon as Rome becomes a monarchy or a tyranny, whatever you want to call it, taste just completely crumbles and the whole. In fact, it's not just taste, but genius dries up. And so I suspect that his criticism of Egypt along the same lines, that the society itself just wasn't in a position to give birth. Taste in that respect was elite, aristocratic and what have you, which has its own aesthetic. But ultimately you want to talk about something that contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, which I don't think we've touched on too much yet, but that would clearly be an example of that.

37:37 Wes: Yeah, we'll find out. The taste definitely cannot be simply the confines of the court. And it has to reflect, in a way, the aspirations of a people, of a polis, maybe even. But, yeah, that's a great point because it links us up to the positive account that we'll get to.

37:52 John: That's why I can't help but feel, like I said once again with the history, that he was sort of not only talking about art, part of it is about what are they gonna set up their society as? And definitely he doesn't want Egypt in Germany.

38:06 Seth: No, but he's. I mean, again, the style and translation at least, is so kind of of light that it's hard to say. But he's making a very serious point about the fact that culture and society is cyclical. Not even cyclical. That's not the right word. It's finite. It's limited. It's limited by geography, it's limited by a number of things. And it turns over. Cultures rise, cultures fall. It's just the nature of things. And he's connecting the notion of. Of an aesthetic to the notion of a culture. I mean, a culture in the sense of Greece or Rome or the Renaissance or something like that, or maybe even more specifically like the Italian Renaissance. And so he's inventing, essentially inventing aesthetics and historicizing it all in the same motion, which sounds very anti Kantian, and it's a pretty remarkable and bold move, I think.

39:05 Wes: So are we jumping to section 2?

39:07 Mark: Roman numeral 2 is 312 is reason set against taste. And you can just imagine, given the definition he's just given of taste being the moderating thing against genius, then no, of course reason is not going to be opposite taste. In fact, reason Is kind of like if you're doing architecture, you would have to employ a lot of reason to make sure your building doesn't collapse. And that's kind of part and parcel of. Of making sure that your piece of art is internally coherent. Like the things that make something beautiful, that make something tasteful, you could point at them, you know, whenever people say, oh, I see the. The essence of geometry in this, or whatever, they're pointing at something that would have been included using reason, not just based on inspiration.

39:51 Wes: Say, yeah, and I think it's kind of clear why someone would think that reason is set against taste, as in making things arid and bleaching them of their passion and their artistic quality or something like that. Or having the feeling that it's really hard to be creative when you're in that rational mode. But yeah, once again, he's thinking of these two things working together. So he's thinking of the nobler, the genius, the more he must show accurate, comprehensive reason in the most rapid firestorm of activity and sensation. So in a way, the more genius there is, right, the more rapid firestorm there is, the more potential for chaos.

And so the more you need something to order it and structure it. And once again, I think of music where you could be really letting yourself go. You could be even improvising, but still caught up within a certain kind of structure, which you've learned by habit, right? You've internalized by habit. And without that, again, it could just be something like the screaming or just something so purely emotive and chaotic that it doesn't even rise to the level of what we might think of as aesthetic.

41:02 John: On 3. 13. I really like this section where he A difference between true reason and pure reason. So when reason is supposed to have promoted false taste, then one really means unreason, subtilizing sophistry. For otherwise it would mean either that one weaned oneself from sensuous objects for the sake of pure reason. And our true reason never does that, for we are not given to float above the stars. Or that one has misapplied one's reason to sensuous objects deliberated where one should have felt separated, the distinguishing marks of an object where one should have connected them.

I just like this idea of pure reason. I think another important background of him is that pretty much everything he does is about being an empiricist. He wants there to have to be sensual stimuli. So he's going to be anything that's against just pure thinking. So I think he feels that you can't get any kind of genius from just a priori ideas.

42:01 Wes: Yeah. This is where some of the Kantian influence seems to come in the sort of synthesis of empiricism and rationalism. Right. And Kant's famous dictum, perception without conception is blind, conception without perception is empty. You see that in his demand for the sort of union of the sensuous, and we see this throughout these essays, that the union of the sensuous and the rational in relation to the aesthetic.

42:27 Unknown speaker: Right.

42:27 Mark: And that was what he was reacting from. John had mentioned Wolf, a rationalist, Kantian. I thought he was associated with Kant. Maybe I'm wrong about this. I've never read any Wolf, but that's one of the people that Herter did not like. And he was all about doing aesthetics by top down rulemaking. You know, this is what beauty is. And you could come up with any number of philosophical. The beauty of music comes from geometry. This is one that he's going to take on specific specifically later. Like look at how the octaves, you can measure their wavelengths and their mathematical relationship between them and why the triad works.

And it's all because of beauty. And it's the same in architecture. And it's these regular forms, like that's what makes beauty. And if you just have a rule like that, even if you got it from sensation in the first place, and then just apply it uniformly to then condemn things that don't follow it, like that's what I was referring to as the pernicious work of a critic. Though he does not actually make that. I guess he would think that that would be one of the traps that genius could fall into is kind of taking its own rule and going crazy with it and getting detached from the actual sensuous products and sort of more conceptual art that is unrooted from its sensual beginnings.

43:37 Wes: Yeah, down on the end of page 313. Without sense organs and drives, reason is but an idle spectator. And if these are opposed to it, then discord ensues and taste will never reach maturity. All right, moral powers, taste and virtue

43:53 Mark: are not identical, but they do have something to do with each other.

43:57 Wes: Yes, they do.

44:00 Mark: He says, continuing this to page 314. Taste is only the order and harmony of certain sensuous powers harnessed towards or inhering in a work of art. Virtue is supposed to be the order and harmony of all our powers harnessed toward the great work of life. So hey, creating a good work of art is kind of like a subsection of creating a good life. It's Just like the one thing in your life, this artwork, this is gonna be the one thing that's good. The rest of me is gonna be a total freaking mess. The typical operation of artistic genius. Yeah.

44:29 John: This comparison between virtue, it really confused me. So it might be nice to hear someone talk me through it.

44:36 Mark: Yeah. Does he really give an example?

44:38 Wes: He talks about taste assisting and the maintaining of manners.

44:42 Mark: Right. That is the tradition that, you know, Rousseau initially was arguing against is because all these aristocrats are, oh, if you have good taste, then you have, you know, setting it up as an aristocratic thing. And Rousseau was saying, no, actually, your taste and your pomp are actually what is corrupting you. So the sort of synthesis of those two things. Yep. Is what we're seeing here a little bit higher up.

45:07 Wes: His talk of the work of art being limited is really interesting because the idea that the faculties can be confined to it in such a way that other higher active powers remain disordered and lifeless, which I assume. Well, I'm not sure exactly what that means. And then, by contrast, being drawn into a work of art in such a way that the passion that you have discomposes your other powers, and then you're in this rage of taste. And then other works can demand a passion of the kind that is artistically but not morally good. So what does all that mean?

45:44 John: I don't know. This might be throwing us off track, but remember, I did the reading on the origin of language, and he uses the same example of a bee, of this idea of the animals are sort of confined to their one skill. That's all they can see. And that the difference between the human's mechanisms in the brain is that they're born without any skills, basically, so that they can put concepts together and choose. So I thought he was sort of going off of that idea that I'm not sure exactly why, but I felt like that fit in, that this idea of being able to not be stuck in one path, having those blinders on.

46:19 Mark: I guess I'm trying to connect this back to the point of that quality in one art influences quality in the other arts. And I think you could see that as within a society or within an individual. I think why we're having such trouble and why the talk of the Zeitgeist is appropriate is because he's not really being very clear of, like, how much of this is one person thinking versus how many people. Do you need to make this a plurality versus the whole society? Or is it the critics? Is it the geniuses? He's talking a Little more abstractly than that.

I think typically, as I was saying, if you really concentrate on one work of art and you put all your energy into that, then that's probably not going to lead to you treating yourself as a work of art and making all your faculties harmonize. But I think he thinks they are similar skills. Right. That it's actually a misuse of genius, perhaps, to go overboard and you should, in fact, let one art, the art of the thing you're working on, influence the other possible arts, the work you could do on yourself and learn from that. The harmony that you're creating and setting up a nice painting or a nice song is not entirely unlike the harmony that you should be creating out of your own faculties.

47:27 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think this is helpful. Like this whole talk of A and B. The idea seems to be that you can be interested in art to the exclusion of anything else in such a way that you have compromised yourself morally or something like that. And then C, you could just be. It's not a matter of compromise, but it's a matter of the aesthetic. Maybe it's a matter of subject matter that is, well, artistically, but not morally good. They want a tempest, but not the clear light of day. Brutus was no Cicero and Socrates, no Pericles.

48:03 Seth: See, when he throws out all those references, I can't do anything with that.

48:07 John: Yeah, I know. I was also confused because it seems sometimes he's arguing that genius can exist outside of morality. But then sometimes it seems as if he's arguing that you need to move towards virtue for it to be a true genius.

48:20 Wes: Oh, I see. So the states in which the finest taste flourished were not the most virtuous. And for all its taste, Athens was no match even for Sparta. Okay, so he's thinking of refinement and artistic and philosophical advancement versus politician and men of action and deeds and things like that. So certain works demand a passion that is kind of as artistically but not morally good. And so, yeah, I think he's thinking of that contrast here.

48:48 Mark: It throws one off just because he puts Socrates in the place of the artist.

48:51 Wes: Artist.

48:52 Mark: Why he's putting Brutus in the place of the artist, I have no idea. I don't get that one. He killed Caesar is all I know about Brutus. But Socrates, Herder specifically says, is basically a student of Homer. He considers the philosophy of the sort Socrates was doing and art to be kind of one in the same endeavor, for whatever reason. And not that Socrates is on the side of the politician, the person bringing order to A society. Do you not agree with that interpretation?

49:21 Seth: Isn't the thread still here that like this is where we're looking to try to understand where he's like, oh, taste and genius are separate. No, they're not. Oh, reason and taste are opposed or reason is often set against taste. And some think they know how the former has contributed to the decline of the latter. This is just false and confused. And then in this section three, he's saying, well now we're looking gonna look at moral powers. And it is claimed that now devoutness must entail good taste and now corrupt rough to taste brings with it godlessness. With what justification? So all he's trying to say is that reason is not opposed to taste, genius is not opposed to taste, virtue is not opposed to taste. And it's not like there's any one to one correlation between those things.

50:03 Wes: Well, lack of virtue is not necessarily opposed to taste. So. Right. Corrupt taste brings with it godlessness. And so.

50:10 Seth: Correct. There's not a one to one correlation where you can have taste without genius and genius without taste. Nope. Reason can corrupt taste because reason is. Nope. You have to have virtue in order to have taste. Nope. Those are basically, that's what this whole section is about.

50:28 Wes: He then modifies that to say, yes, you could use that as a model to cultivate the soul and one's whole life to taste. And that would be virtue. As he puts it, Art in a way is adjacent to morality. But this entailment, this back and forth entailment doesn't hold. And then he goes on into the manner stuff and that's one of the ways in which they're adjacent.

50:48 Seth: That's telling. But I want to just circle back for one second about this is that we talked about taste being the rudder, right? Genius is the creative power, taste is the rudder. Then he uses the term reason, but I would love to go back to the German because it feels to me like it's more about judgment. And we have to think about probably a historical section and what Herder knew or didn't know. He's not talking about a faculty of reason. And when I see that word, that's what I'm thinking, right, the faculty of reason. But I think what he's saying is there's an element of judgment in the application of the taste that comes out of the zeitgeist, right?

The cultural milieu. There's an element of judgment. It's not just blind, culturally driven boundaries set on the creative power, that there's still reason being employed by the and in my case, I think this is the individual genius to shape the creative powers, to articulate the taste of the times or to press the boundaries a little bit. And you can do that poorly or well. Right. And then this, to me, about the moral powers is just separated somewhat from that previous discussion in the sense that he's just sort of. Let's move on to the next thing.

But where he talks about in section two, it is undeniable that where manners are most profoundly corrupt, taste must also be corrupt. And that is perfectly natural. Taste is only a phenomenon of reason, genius, the sensuous powers and desires. If the worm now gnaws at these from within, then their external appearance will also be shameful and ugly. And that means bad taste in the widest sense. Where there's extravagance, weakness, bondage, and lustfulness, not one faculty of the soul will still have noble ends or noble means. Oh, God forbid. Lustfulness.

You can't have any art with lustfulness. My inclination is to read these things as categories or faculties and think in terms of more absolutist, transcendent terms. You know, the faculty of reason and the creative natural force of genius. Right. And the cultural bounds of taste but. But I think what he's trying to say is you have to look at the whole picture, and you look at the individual creator and the individual inside of the whole picture. And there are cultural considerations that will make it impossible for somebody to positively channel their genius, make good judgments and apply taste.

They're just. In certain circumstances, it will be impossible for there to be good taste. In other circumstances it will be possible. But there are many variables that will determine whether good taste is actually manifest. Part of it is, is the creative power there? Part of it is, does that individual exercise good judgment? Has that individual been exposed to all the appropriate things in the society that articulate the virtues of that society? And then is this society itself fertile grounds for the articulation of good taste?