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

0:00 Mark: So this seems like a good transition to part two of the essay, the Causes of Sunken Taste among the Different Peoples in Whom It Once Blossomed, to give some historical examples that I think we can hit pretty quickly. And then the companion essay that was written 60 years later on the belles lettres is really an outline of an aesthetic program. It kind of starts exactly where this essay stops. An aesthetic program for his own society or, you know, recommended for any society. What would be good artistic training, Training in the humanities to make somebody a good citizen, to get all the virtues that the art should bring you.

0:35 Wes: This will be his positive account of what grounds good taste in this society. And you can see right from the start he's talking about ancient Greece and the fact that for Homer, the heroic exploits of the Greeks at the gates of Troy were an object of national concern. This idea of something being an object of vital concern to a society is something that we're going to see over and over again in this section. And there's a lot that's really interesting here about that sort of grounding. So he says, similarly in part two with Greek drama, the stage was a vital concern of a public such as Athens was Aristotle's intention. Entire rule book is taken from the mouth of the people. And the Greek. Greek drama was a natural flower of the time, of the causes of the taste then prevailing.

1:21 John: Well, can I backstep for a second? Because there's a. In that Greek part, there is a section where he does talk about the corruption of it. Even the Greek language became corrupt when it migrated to other lands, to Asia and Egypt, where so much enthusiasm and sweet poison sprouted forth. I just wanted to state that he does sort of talk about how the taste gets corrupted too.

1:40 Wes: Yeah, he will. And he will ultimately relate that, right? To tyranny, to sort of top down control which prevents free expression.

1:48 John: Cool. Now we can go back to Rome.

1:50 Wes: A lot of this sounds like you need free citizens freely engaged with things that are actually really important. A lot of it sounds like you have to have something to say. You have to have something of vital importance to say. You can't just be bullshitting for the sake of doing nice flowery stuff. There must be an important preoccupation and an urgent necessity to say something.

2:11 Mark: Right. The kind of disinterested art that Kant and then Schopenhauer are going to say are really the most pure, the best kind of art is going to be just escapist for someone like Herder.

2:20 John: Yeah, I think there's something I read in that introduction where one of the disagreements he had was that he didn't believe Kant was as much into art as he was. So I think he just feels much more passionate than a lot of the other, or at least conspecifically, about art and the aesthetics.

2:36 Seth: There's a point here to be made about. So in that first section, and I'm glad you brought us back to this, John, he says the heroic exploits of the Greeks at the gates of Troy were an object of national concern. Like the voyage of the Argonauts, only brighter, sharper, closer in time. Essentially, those exploits form the Basis of Greek values. Homer becomes the father of Greek taste, he says, in the most natural way. Because the Homeric values become the codex of morals, laws and aesthetics in the city. And it was just this confluence of circumstances.

It was the importance of the Greeks being engaged on this military exploit that brought their society together and created a moment, created a thing that could be the wellspring of this set of values and made possible, essentially, given the subject matter, for the genius of Homer to act. But what's secondarily important, right, is that it's not just poetry. In the case of Homer, you have drama that springs out of it, rhetoric and art. All of these things flow from that national situation which is articulated by Homer, which then gives rise to all these things.

So I think he has a sense that it's. That Greece is this weird paradigm, paradigmatic case of just the right things all coming together at the right time and the right geniuses being in the right place to articulate and embody and channel their genius according to the taste of the time. Obviously, this is not unique to Herder. Right. There's plenty of people that talk about the golden age of Greece and think that because, let's face it, they invented philosophy and perspective and, you know, the mathematical relations of music. There's a lot of stuff that happened in this time.

But he's trying to say that there was just this immense confluence of things, but that it all was sort of underpinned by also a very specific set of geopolitical circumstances as well.

4:52 Wes: Yeah, he talks about the natural spirit of the Greek Republic in that section three, it's the circumstances, but it's these very specific circumstances again, of this shared object of national concern. Or what I take as something that is to be spoken about with some sense of care and concern and urgency. And then in the Greek rhetoric. So in each of these sections, we're getting kind of a variation on the same theme. So in the case of rhetoric in the republics, it was a civic institution and mainspring public spirit. Open consultation. Commerce and freedom were its element.

And it might be somewhat surprising to see freedom there and commerce. This is the sort of thing that made me think of Mill and the extent to which a kind of freedom of expression is necessary for him, for genius as well, for people who are not complete conformists to do their thing. The whole upshot of Mills on liberty, right, Was the necessity of those grounds to real deliberation and real artistic and intellectual progress. And so there's something similar here. There's a lot of stuff going on at the time. But I think there's something here about the political and civic structure of things lending itself to all of this.

6:07 John: Yeah. It says in the next section, with the Romans, Roman taste lay in history. Earnest legal eloquence, deeds. Just as with the Greeks, it had been carefree activity, beautiful sensuality and harmony in everything they did.

6:20 Wes: Yep.

6:21 John: I think he sort of introduces the idea that he definitely has opinions of lesser than and greater than in Rome. He sort of introduces this idea of imitation and whether that is a genius or not. I think it occurs more later in essay, but I think it's sort of introduced here with Rome.

6:38 Wes: Now we get a look at some of the things that lead to sunken taste. Who is it who sings outside of his element? Apollonius. He set sail on the ship of the Argonauts. But how did he arrive there? Had he been there himself? Could anyone climb aboard after him? Did anyone wish to? For this task, his age gave him neither manners nor language, neither content, nor ear, nor purpose, nor feeling. Hence he became a frigid imitator. He sang outside his element. And then later on he'll talk about the subjects for the stage being exhausted and inferior themes being chosen.

And then mere imitation instead of the adaptation of the material. So he says, these imitated instead of adapting the material freely. And a soul torn between freedom and servility never works concerted or nobly. A taste dwells only in the undivided genius who operates without constraint. And so naturally, the Greeks strayed ever farther from taste the more they aspire to it. Through frigid rules and prejudices, the circumstances of the people were altered. What before was a public concern became a pastime pursued without moderation. So it's when the interest becomes frivolous rather than of something of this really profound concern.

And also we get a taste here of the way in which the seeds of its own destruction are sown. The moment of taste and genius. The seeds of destruction are sown because once that kind of greatness is manifested, then the natural proclivity is try to try and bottle it. And so it right to try to capture it and control it, and to do that with rules and with imitation. And what that does is it hampers one's freedom. It hampers one's ability to be loose and creative and sort of work out of a kind of autonomy. Instead, you're just constrained. And he uses this word, servility.

8:37 Seth: I read that section as if you think about the Homeric tradition in Greece. It's a myth, but myths only Exist insofar as they're retold, insofar as the stories that can be crafted out of them, whether it's an epic poem or a tragedy, you know, a play, whether it's represented in art pictorially or what have you. And when you think about Athens and the founding myths of Athens around the transition. Athens essentially being the society that drags Greece from an era of retribution and. And omerta and the law of power, the Homeric virtues, right into this state of laws. And Athena, right, The transition from the Fates to Athena and all this. And that there is art in the form of Aeschylus that articulates all this. The issue is when Athens ceased to be a great society, when it no longer was doing anything in quote, unquote, real life.

9:45 Wes: The people's spirit of enterprise and freedom disappeared. And that's when the stage lost its element. That's when rhetoric. He speaks repeatedly of freedom, but go ahead.

9:54 Seth: That's exactly it. That the artists can only create art. You can only create political structures. You can only create rhetoric on a strong foundation of actual deeds and accomplishments. And when those things disappear, then. And insofar as societies come and go and cease to accomplish things, then you're going to see that same decline. That's where you see the decline of the Greeks and the rise of the Romans. The Romans just had a very different organizational structure. Where the founding mythologies of Rome, it didn't require those same myths that needed to be articulated. And art was not central. Art and rhetoric and so forth was not central for the Roman narrative, the Roman mythology, as the same way it was for the Greeks. This is all standard stuff.

10:43 Wes: It's interesting. I'm reminded of Durkheim and our episode on suicide because there's like three things going on here. One is the mythology, almost this institution which really, really tightly knits people together and gives them a shared object of concern. And then there are like, the institutional effects of that, including what he's calling freedom. And maybe that's not actually the institutional effect, but there seems to be some relationship between those two. And then finally taste. And when the shared national concern starts going away, then you lose the spirit of freedom and imitation creeps in. And that's when taste is compromised.

11:22 Mark: So he's trying to address why we normally tell the history of this is like, well, Greece had a huge influence around, right? I mean, Alexander went and conquered, basically spread Greece all around. So it should seem like that greatness should have just gotten bigger and better and in more places. But he wants to say, just like John was pointing out before, I didn't quite understand his including the language in this, that as Greek language got passed around. Herder doesn't seem to like when different elements mix together, you know, the whole melting pot thing.

11:58 Seth: Well, he is German.

11:59 John: Once again, there's harkening back to his essay that all language is thoughts. He even thinks artistic thought is still language.

12:07 Wes: There is some grounds for this because we know what happened to Latin. Right. It basically, as Rome conquered the barbarians, let's put it that way, a lot of the Germanic tribes in other places, and there's a local mixing of cultures. Latin for most of the populace became. Became Vulgar Latin. And it was stripped of all its complexity, like all the endings and things like that. And this tends to happen to languages anyway, you know, as time goes on. It's really interesting. I've been listening to like a language podcast about this.

12:36 John: Yeah, I was looking at one too, Wes. And let me add to that. I think the other word for that is romantica.

12:41 Mark: Right.

12:41 John: Or romantico, like the bastardizing of the Latin language. So that I thought that was sort of interesting that that led to the Romantic movement eventually. But he sort of of rails against that period himself, though.

12:52 Wes: Yeah. And we get the Romantic. I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but that's where all the Romantic languages come from. I think about 700 A.D. for instance, one of the branches of Vulgar Latin is now legitimately Spanish. And the Romantic languages we have today are nowhere nearly as complicated as Latin. And it's not completely outlandish for someone to think that that sort of simplification means that we've lost something.

13:17 John: The one thing I learned is that he's considered a classicist. Is that what you would say it? Where he values more the Greek days than the medieval days. And the Romantics sort of moved more towards, you know, they started liking the kings and the knights and all the stories from that area. And what I learned from the languages, calling them the Romantic languages or whatever the equivalent was, was actually a degrading term.

13:39 Wes: The Romance languages.

13:42 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

13:42 John: So I think he even is referring to that sort of as the decay is these Romance languages.

13:48 Unknown speaker: Hmm.

13:48 Mark: We can use that then as an analogy. He says page 319. Greek taste was the beautiful national flowering of their free activity. Their genius drunk with beauty, their bright, keen understanding. When this beautiful flower lacked soil, SAP, nourishment and ether, and ill winds began to blow, it died. So as you're spreading, Greece was doing pretty well. They thought they were in a time of prosperity, that they were kind of at the height of civilization. But according to Herder's analysis here, because they didn't have the freedom that they had, and because exactly what you're talking about, the sort of attempt to spread Greek ways of thinking through soils that were not equipped to take it on, it's going to be a rare soil that democracy will flower in even now,

14:35 Wes: and let alone back then, to try and graft that. Yeah.

14:38 Mark: Yep.

14:39 Wes: Spread in democracy.

14:41 Mark: So there you go.

14:42 John: All right.

14:42 Wes: His stories about Rome are very similar. Yeah.

14:45 Mark: It is interesting when he starts talking about the Italian Renaissance and just about the Italians in general. This gets into the stuff in 4th Grove about the origin of music, that some people just have more musical languages than others. So just what you're saying about Romance languages. You know, it's funny that he's favorably comparing the musicality of Italian to German. And so in talking about the Italian Renaissance, that's. It's just the Italian language itself is so mellifluous that its song just naturally boils right out of it. He gets really explicit about the mechanics of that in the Fourth Grove selection, where he's, like, contrasting sound, which is kind of chaos, with tone.

The purity of tone is the essence of sound. So if you're used to hearing German, then the kind of music you're gonna like is gonna be big chord clusters and like this kind of stuff that Wagner was doing. Whereas if you're Italian, then the kind of thing you would like the best is stuff that's more like the pure melody, which is what, ultimately, Herder is going to lean very heavily on that. That's actually what the essence of beauty is. And I bring that up here just because beauty as simplicity and naturalness, I think, comes right out of here.

And you can even see this in Homer Said, the kind of stuff he did very, very naturally, there was no artifice to it. I mean, there's art, there's taste, there's moderation. He wasn't just a font of chaotic creativity. We can apply all those things we were just saying about taste to this.

16:12 John: Yeah. I think he's really into this idea of language being musical. There's an essay where he talks about translating and that you have to be very careful not to disrupt the musicality of a language. So I think his sort of fascination with Italian is that it's more primal and it's closer to the emotional screams than the very harsh German.

16:33 Wes: One of the key things he says about the corruption of Roman taste is the Advent of tyrants and the effect of that on freedom. So when this spirit receded and republican Rome sank beneath the yoke of monarchy, then for all the high praise lavished on the flowers and laurels that adorn this yoke, there was just as little an elegant Augustus and a trifling Maecenas could do with all their patronage to replace that from which the Roman spirit had sprung. Everything sank into a slavish fear of tyrants and their favorites. True history held its tongue and was obliged to do so and so on.

17:09 Mark: Yeah, I think anything that is going to constrain the natural progression of art and genius and kind of leaving it to its own, I want to say dialectical flow, you know, that's kind of one genius playing off another one if they're given fruit. But as soon as any, whether it be economic forces or political forces, zoom in, that would constrain that. And like, no, no, this is our favorite kind of thing, you know, whether it's the populace saying this is the only kind of thing we like, or if it's a tyrant saying, you better not come up with types of art that are impious or that offend me personally. Like, those are all going to be just the death of art.

17:47 Wes: Not just that, though. So the way he puts it, lifespan in commerce, the cultivation of the individual for the republic, the honor and self worth of a man derived from the prosperity of the nation, his right to talk, deliberate, persuade and act in its name, all this civic stuff and what Seth was talking about as far as deeds, as people who are sort of actively engaged in life, it's when that stuff gets squashed down too, that taste fades. So we're not just thinking of censorship, we're thinking of sort of the contraction what tyranny does socially and what it does to civic life.

18:23 Mark: I'm trying to compare this with, you know, he's ultimately going to say at the end of this essay, you know, what do we learn from this? Like, what can we do to make taste kind of substantial? Well, we need to create the conditions in which good taste could prevail. And it sounds like what you're describing have a good amount of freedom, political freedom. But at the same time, if he holds this basically cyclical, pessimistic picture, is it just that he thinks that. That even political movements are going to, you know, you could establish a consistence of freedom, but eventually the winds are going to shift and so that taste is going to die down, or is it really just.

Even if you were able to control the political Factors, for instance, just inevitably, the conditions. This seems to be a natural law that he's laying down. The conditions that make for good taste are the same conditions that make it temporary.

19:11 Wes: Yeah, he says that.

19:13 John: Agreed.

19:13 Mark: So there is no solution to devising conditions that will allow your society to permanently have good taste. There's always going to be be something that will screw it up.

19:22 Seth: That's because there's no conditions for determining making your society permanent. No Thousand Year Reich.

19:28 Mark: Well, I'm just thinking about, like, if you think political freedom is the thing. Okay, well, we've got hopefully pretty well established political freedom now in our society, but yet economic forces, pretty obviously, as we've talked about in several different discussions, what Adam Smith might have been a liberal and talking about freedom through capitalism, but it has taken its own, perhaps natural route of development. And now that's about as artistically squashing a force as you could desire. If you have to create things according to the tastes of a market.

Right, which is obviously not restricting on every kind of genius. There are lots of artistic artists now and artistic geniuses that aren't doing that. But if you want to say for society as a whole to maintain a good level of taste, it requires freedom in this way, then those mass culture forces, it just seems inevitable that they're going to coalesce.

20:27 Wes: He speaks to some of this in section 3 here. One of the things, by the way, that he focuses on is just classics, right? For there to be taste, we need kids to grow up studying the classics. Shouldn't forget that. But in section three, but ultimately, of course, the greatest, the best school of good taste is life itself. And then he says how servility oppresses the soul, how the desire to acquire riches poisons taste. Mark, this speaks to what you were just talking about, how finally the hunger for bread tramples and crushes all that is noble into the dust. So I think there's a tension there when he's talking about commerce and freedom and things like that. And when one wonders about their elements of servility and constraint that go along with the things that we might typically think of as free.

21:15 Mark: So then pushing that forward, okay, you could have a politically free society that is also economically well off enough that people are not driven by the need for bread. Maybe we've all been freed from our jobs or whatever, if we can focus on our arts. Is there going to be then a next thing? Is there always going to be just a next thing that would end up being the thing that would knock taste off of its current Level of success.

21:39 Wes: There's always going to be that desire, right, to bottle it and control it. There's an anxiety associated with those peak moments. And I think there is for us individually as well. How do we recapture that? If we've done something that we think is great, creatively great, let's say I

21:55 John: could bring that into the music scene too, which, as a musician who sort of helped form a new genre, there's always a lot of pressure to try to repeat yourself, to make it the same. And sometimes it becomes like. Like shadows of itself. You end up, like, imitating instead of creating new works. Maybe this is more in history later, but more, I think artistic movements came from the pressure of a dominating government. Like the German Expressionism came out of that sort of frustration with the time periods. And I think in Czechoslovakia went through that with puppetry, where the strong government actually forced this new art to. In rebellion against it, to surface. So is that contrary to that or is that not. Am I getting that wrong?

22:38 Mark: That's what I'm not sure about. Because it seems like he says each of these periods of widespread good taste had its own unique causes, unique situations. So I don't think we can necessarily generalize from the case of his analysis of ancient Greece. And even though he says things like we need the freedom, that it might not be uniform, there could be be other circumstances in which I guess he's going to analyze something like the avant garde, oppressed puppeteers as not exactly creating. They would be voices crying out in the wilderness. They would be geniuses who then could give rise to a widespread great taste, could be drawn upon after the fact.

But unless like, that really led to that whole country, it seems like it's a local success rather than a national success. Does that seem correct? You could just say all success of scenes really is local. And I guess this is getting to the larger question of given that we live basically in a pluralistic society now. I mean, there's so many nasty things that people can say and do say about American taste. But if all you need are three geniuses communicating over the Internet, there's so many subcultures, given our freedom, given our power to communicate, even if the widespread culture does have a flattening effect again, there are so many people that ignore that or maybe are oppressed in certain ways, just like you were describing, John.

And so are driven to create in ways that react to that, you know, that express their vital concerns. It just seems like there's a whole. Once you have a pluralistic society or a global Society, there's just a breakdown in the historical paradigm whereby Herder is describing these phenomena. Could you even possibly have an era of good taste now that there's no localized eras of the specific size that he's concerned with? Or am I overstating the effects of globalization in communications at this point?

24:34 Wes: I mean, it's hard to say. This idea that we need some sort of object of shared concern and importance. And for Herder, it seems to be national. Right, but why is the unit necessarily national? Why not, say you could have smaller communities that share the.

24:49 John: Yeah, I wondered if the core of the idea is the same too, that you just. These things spring up out of the Zeitgeist and they sort of create a community around them and then people start imitating it and then it, you know, decays again.

25:01 Mark: Yeah. It's just a question of what unit does the Zeitgeist rely on? John, you were just saying there was no Germany, so. Yeah, the German cultural thing was not even national. It was a cultural unit rather than a national unit.

25:14 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

25:14 John: And in fact, what I learned from reading the. Once Goethe brought Herder to Weimar, that's where this sort of. It started sparking this more centralized Germany and became stronger. So they started using, I don't know, the lore of Goethe and the new literary explosion there to sort of help formulate the country.

25:33 Wes: Do we want to get into the influence of the belles lettres on the higher sciences?

25:40 Mark: Yes. So we're getting right into what on the Causes of Sunken Taste ended with recommendations for why all the kids should read the classics. And this is basically, you know, a long form elaboration of that through this essay.

25:54 John: I'm sorry, Just let me read something from the end of that last one first and see. Then we'll let it rest there. Taste is in a bad way. As soon as it can be and is allowed to be merely the taste of society or the court, it grows feeble, and when it ought to march at the head of the public, it brings up the rear instead. I just want to read that now we can move on.

26:16 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important.

26:18 Mark: Yeah. No, I'm trying to connect that directly to this. It wants to start us off on this essay. We can return to these themes as we get into it.

26:24 Wes: Here the young are prone to setting aside the ancient authors who are the true exemplars of the beautiful. And then he complains of the belletrists and Beaux artistes of the kind we would gladly do without aesthetic. Poet preachers, witty lawyers, painter philosophers, versifying historians, hypothesizing surveyors and physicians. The frivolous has triumphed over the weighty, the imagination has usurped the understanding. And we'll get a lot in here about the way in which the necessity of the understanding.

26:56 John: I think he's basically at that section, getting at that there is good and bad art or literature, and that we need to distinguish between those before I introduce what we do to create our good taste.

27:08 Mark: Yeah. And so many of this sounds so much like Plato of the difference between the creation of the bakers, the cake makers, as opposed to the output of the philosophers, that is food for the soul, that I think he's just very Platonic. But whereas Plato just really wasn't into art, just wasn't into music, didn't see how it could be valuable. He just thought, overall, okay, there's some kinds that are okay and there's some kinds that should be absolutely forbidden, but mostly you should just probably ignore it. Like Herder is just way more into it than that.

And he really wants to emphasize the positive effects it can have and so that there can be again, he called Socrates a student of Homer, that he is basically a poet of some sort, that there's still a distinction between sophistry and the real deal, but that's not a distinction between the beautiful is just surface level versus something more substantial and abstract. No, there can be, within beauty, within art, more beautiful stuff and stuff that is. Has a shiny glossy outside, but is just a piece of crap.

28:13 Wes: And so that's what he's objecting to. He thinks there can be the stuff that's shiny on the outside and genuinely beautiful. But he says dust and ashes inside.

28:22 John: I like that part. Right before the fashionable literature of our age is often a garden filled with apples of Sodom.

28:29 Seth: Yes, I had to tweet that one. That was one of my favorite phrases.

28:33 Wes: Outwardly beautiful, but inwardly full of dust and ashes. But yeah, as we'll see. He thinks that you can have. It need not be that way. Right. You can have art and belles lettres that does have substance and that's the way it should be.

28:47 Seth: It has a role when in the presence of the weighty classics and the meaty things. It's when it's not reacting to and underpinned by those things that it's problematic.

29:02 John: I felt like off what you were just saying there, that I thought he was completely condemning them. But he talks about their usefulness, so I can agree with you, but I don't know where it is.

29:11 Wes: Well, in the beginning he seems to condemn them. And then we get the more sanguine account.

29:16 Mark: So his redefinition of what belles lettres refers to, right? Is that what that you're talking about?

29:21 Wes: We get the transition, you know, there's belles lettres without the substance. And then he gets to the question of what influence this is on 338. What influence do the belles lettres, properly understood and properly practiced, have on higher forms of knowledge? And then he gives an account that's very positive. They cultivate the so called lower faculties of the soul, sensuous cognition, the wit, the imagination, the sensuous appetites, enjoyment, the passions and inclinations. And then he's going to make an argument that we need these and that they exert the finest and best influence on the higher science.

29:55 Mark: So he's answering this question because I was trying to find in my notes, like, who is asking this? Definitely he was responding, just like in the previous one, to a particular call for essays on this question. He would not use that term. Pretty words. That's what it literally means. It could be referring to the literary fiction of the time. He wants to interpret it as like the classics, but it seems like the question itself leaves that ambiguous. Is that right?

30:23 Wes: It's literature, but read for the sake of purely aesthetic pleasure, let's say. So it's just I'm writing and I'm reading, but it's not necessarily because I have something to say. It's just I want to make something pretty or I want to enjoy something pretty. That's the idea behind that. So he's rejecting it on the one hand, if it's unattached to anything of substance, but then he's arguing that it has its place ultimately, if it's properly understood and practiced, as he puts it, which means it's in support, in a way, of the sciences, the higher sciences, which include philosophy and so on.

30:53 Seth: I thought that the belles Lettres was more accurately the notion of a critic. This genre encompasses critical essays about cultural themes or about art.

31:05 Wes: It can just be art, it can just be fiction or whatever, as literature as well. But it includes criticism. Okay, because he'll give examples that are obviously not just criticism.

31:16 Seth: So what would it mean to be a writer of fiction in this sense that was not anchored. What does that mean?

31:25 Wes: Well, I mean, yeah, it's up for argument, right? I mean, I would argue that, yeah, most of what's done today falls in this category. There's very little substance to it. Most writing of fiction and poetry is not done by people who are. This sounds so snobby, but have this deeper education and, and Shakespeare is an extreme example, but the kind of depth that you would find in that, I think someone might argue, well, just take an example of even literary fiction that's maybe trying to do something a critic like Herder would say lacks any heft or bottom. And partly because there's no urgency to it, there really is nothing that has to be said. And if you examine it thematically, you can see a kind of tacked on theme where the writer thought, okay, well I have to be trying to say something.

32:10 Seth: But I mean, basically he's making an equivalency here between bad writing and.

32:18 Wes: But it could be good writing.

32:19 Seth: Okay, well that's fine. I mean, the point is either you study the ancients and that somehow informs your art and that's good, or you don't, and that's bad.

32:28 Mark: With the qualification, as he made at the end of the previous essay, which I think he makes in here too, that the way that the ancients get off the. And taught. It kind of depends how you teach the ancients. This really made me think of the Allan Bloom that we read. It's. You have to have an authentic direct connection with them. Not read the quotes, not listen to this podcast about it.

32:50 Seth: Yeah, no shit.

32:52 Mark: Okay, well you can't just read wiki quote. How about that?

32:55 Wes: Exactly, exactly.

32:57 Seth: So it's not just that you have to study the ancients, you have to do it in a way where you somehow authentically. Oh God, please don't use the word authentically. Internalize. You are supposed to get in touch with Greek taste. If we're just going to boil this down to what he must be saying in this book, Greek taste has been lost. If you're going to authentically encounter them and internalize that in a way to recreate taste in your own time, you have to try to connect with what Greek taste was for the Greeks at that time.

33:30 Wes: Even if we reject that, although I think there is something to that, hey, I'm not disagreeing.

33:36 Seth: This is what gets me in trouble with everybody who's younger than 30.

33:39 Wes: It's only because I study ancient Greek and Latin that otherwise I'd say that's bullshit. But you know, I think even if we rejected that, I think what this comes down to is you should at least be widely educated. Right. Including the sciences. I think we'll get some of that. If I remember correctly later in the essay, there should be more to do than create beautiful language. And ultimately what he liked about the ancients, of course, or how he explains their depth comes out of the relation to deeds and to shared concerns and a sense of urgency.

And I take that as the more fundamental critique here. Having something urgent to say, being connected to some sort of cultural concern that's shared by others, that's really, really thought of as important. And then being broadly educated, not simply being cut off from the sciences, broadly speaking, which could include any other discipline, including philosophy and so on. And maybe it's a way of saying that there need to be ideas there. There need to be some real train of thought going on. I forget who someone wrote a book. I think it's called Shakespeare as philosopher.

And the way I've read Shakespeare's plays, I always identify a line of thought. It's as if he's thinking something through. And maybe, and this is me, I'm just foisting my own thing onto Herder right now. But as a way to make sense of it. Maybe the idea here is that these sorts of things should also be a thinking through a beautiful work of art, but also a thinking through.

35:08 John: Looking at how he writes his essays is a big into this idea that he's sort of anti systematic. I think he feels there's no emotional or sense connection to something that is just stating the facts. Like that railing against that pure reason again, that if you just get what that novel is about by someone telling you you're not getting the same thing as experiencing the sentence to sentence and the different journeys it takes you on. I felt like that's kind of what he was talking about, that a lot of teaching that they were doing in the schools was just here's the topics, here's the things you learn instead of having them experience them, you know.

35:46 Seth: Yeah.

35:47 Wes: He says it's foolish to cultivate the higher sciences without the belles lettres.

35:50 Mark: It's funny to hear you say John, of him being anti system because before, as we were running up to this episode, you were like, well, I think you have to know about his theory of language to understand that. It's just like everything touches something else in his system.

36:03 John: He does say that he is for the systemizing of arguments. He just doesn't feel like it needs to be all completely clear. Like this point leads to this point leads to this point. As you can see, there's a lot more passion in the way he's writing and it sort of skips around a bit and brings in history and it brings in other elements. I think he's just railing against the very sort of stale point by point. But he does believe in some sort of systemizing something.

36:27 Mark: Yeah, maybe it's that if you have an overweening system, then probably there's a priori reasoning going on in it. You're not actually opening yourself to the details of every individual piece of your system. So this is again, kind of what the 4th Grove thing was about, was trying to distinguish between. He mentions somewhere in one of these, we read Burke on the sublime. And he says Burke had a lot of great things to say about sight, about the beautiful and the sublime when it comes to beholding something, but was not so great about analyzing the difference between the different senses.

So you really need a science, an aesthetic science of each of them in order to get a whole system using one of them. Just impose it on everything else. Then that would be the bad kind of oversimplifying system. Maybe. So I want to bring it back to this essay on 337. He brings back this thing. The highest science of all is undoubtedly the art of living. And how many people the belles lettres have robbed of this one and only, this divine art. And he says, why romance novels don't tend to lead to spiritual fulfillment. A fickle youth hastening after pleasure.

How can he become a man, A worthy husband and father, A hard working, untiring guardian of the commonweal, an inquiring, fair judge, a meticulous, supportive physician, an industrious sage, a seeker of truth, and a benefactor of the human race in his sphere of activity. All this requires cultivation, education, art, effort, a true heart, sound understanding, an honorable goal, and the will and strength to achieve that goal.

37:58 Wes: This is where I wrote Closing of the American Mind in the margin.

38:03 John: Yeah.

38:04 Mark: So if there's a system, it's a system of having a virtuous character.

38:08 John: There's a section right here. It says. I think this is on 342. In general, the belles lettres impart light, life, sensuous truth and richness to the higher sciences, as all the classes and examples I've mentioned show. I think he sort of feels like the introduction of these in a young age sort of inspires you to be more excited about these higher arts.

38:29 Wes: Well, he wants you to balance out the rationality part. He's thinking of the sciences. So on the previous page, that includes philosophy. So he says on 3:41. The entire course of history testifies to the connection between the belles lettre and philosophy. They both flourish for as long and as often as they remained friends. Once they became estranged and inimical to each other, they both went to their grave. So then he talks about the Scholastics and their in the abyss of barbarism spun words and picked apart mere echoes. What became of their logic and metaphysics?

Only when the fine arts returned did a light dawn on the abstract sciences. Not only did they begin to live in companionship with one another, but often a single mind was an inventor of both. Both all the brightest minds in philosophy, from Bacon to Leibniz, were also friends of the delightful and the beautiful. Then language, just clear like the spirit, and even their amusements became monuments to truth. And leading up to this, the justification for some of this is just in the sense in which we have to honor the senses, the sensual and the passionate and the empirical, and balance out the rational with that side of things.

Even though he begins this whole thing talking about the dangers of. Of belletrism divorced from substance, most of this essay is devoted to saying why they are absolutely necessary to the sciences. We can't do without that union between the two.

39:53 John: One of his overriding themes, it says right here, unity is perfection in the sciences as well as in the faculties of the human soul. In content as in form, in thought as in expression. He definitely is searching for this way of like uniting different forces together, like where people want to sort of tear it apart and side with one side or the other. I think he's trying to find unity within the whole.

40:16 Wes: Yeah, I think that kind of sums it up.

40:18 Mark: Yeah, that's why I was saying the system is the system of the virtuous person. So I don't think the people who asked this question were thinking that the belles lettres would correspond with what he calls on 338 these so called lower faculties of the soul. Sensuous cognition, the wit, the imagination, the sensuous appetites, enjoyment, the passions and inclinations. Is not this very definition sufficient proof that they therefore exert the finest and best influences on the higher sciences, which concern themselves with judgment and understanding, the will and conviction. All the powers of our soul are only one power, just as our soul is only one soul.

40:50 Wes: And then a sound understanding is impossible without sound and well ordered senses.

40:55 Mark: We're back to the theme that we started with, which is the connection between reason and the senses. You wouldn't think that reading popular novels is a training for the senses, but at least this is part of it. Another part of it would be like art classes for kids, even telling jokes, coming up with imaginative stories. Just all these things that we do to try to not just slam a bunch of facts into kids as they're learning, but to engage their imaginations, their creativity and that, even though that seems like that's kind of beside the point to being serious and responsible. Like you need these free faculties in order to. He's just saying they're a foundation. But does he say why they're a foundation, really?

41:41 Wes: Yeah, but you do that by having them read the ancients.

41:43 Mark: Mark, a sound understanding is impossible without sound and well ordered senses.

41:47 Wes: Exactly. Maybe let's try and cash that out, because that is very generic. I mean, it sounds nice.

41:52 Mark: I mean, I guess the well ordered senses. Like, again, what I was just describing is like, how do you get the sparks of genius going in the first place? Right. You have to give the child a playground. You have to give them incitements, you have to give them examples and get them creating. But clearly he's also talking about the application of taste here. That would make the well ordered. So you have to develop your capacities, which means both getting the engine roaring and getting the editor tamping things down and making them well ordered.

42:21 Wes: So when he's talking about the sciences, I think primarily he's talking about. Or one of the preeminent examples is philosophy. So what does it mean to be doing philosophy if you're not exercising your aesthetic faculties in any sort of way? And he gives the example of the nitpicking medieval philosophers. You have to have some sense of what's important.

42:43 Mark: You're looking for an example. I think this is why we read the 4th Grove, the sections from that and the specific things he has to say about specific arts. So. So what he's demanding out of a science of aesthetics, of music is to understand, he says, like physicists and mathematicians of his time had a lot to say about acoustics, and they have a lot to say about the shape of the ear, you know, so how tones reach us, how physically different volumes are realized. But he says we need to add the phenomenal picture. We need to add what happens after the tone gets in our head.

Having a science of that sort, an aesthetic science that is not focused on the externals, but leads us to understand the human element, how the physiology transforms it into an actual sensation that brings pleasure. That's the thing. Like what makes for a pleasing tone is his big question in this section here. As opposed to just a random sound. To understand that would be to understand how to order our senses on that level. I might be mixing up the analytic project and the educational project. Maybe these are quite different things.

43:54 Wes: We would separate those. But it's relevant. Yeah.

43:57 Mark: In other words, if you don't understand the analytic project, if you don't understand how tones actually make us happy, then you don't understand how best to teach music to a three year old. He said, you know, you want to surround young people with beauty. You want them not to be distracted by. This is at the end of the Sunken Taste, he has a quote something like, it's really hard to raise people. Give young people a sense of beauty in corrupt times, because they're always going to be distracted by crap that's being foisted upon them in various ways.

Assuming you could control all of the inputs that go into a young person, what would be the optimal one that would really give them a foundation so that they've kind of mastered all of their senses in a way that will then provide the optimal foundation to them being a philosopher or a responsible adult. So I don't think he really fills in the gap here. It's just, it's more a theory. Like, shouldn't we pay more attention to aesthetics, to beauty as being a. Like think about this anyway?

44:57 Wes: Yeah, but I think there's a lot to be said about the importance of just being able to write well and appreciating literature, you know, as a philosopher, just to take that example specifically. But of course, it's the kind of thing that Nietzsche has preoccupied as well. And the concept of gay science, not letting things get overly rational to the point of disconnection from the human.

45:20 Mark: Maybe not to be one sided in any way, even if you had a cultivated sense of visual art, for instance. And then, you know, we often hear philosophers criticized for relying too much on visual metaphors. So like, that's exactly the kind of thing he's responding to. No, we actually have to have a aesthetic science of touch, not just music, but touch and smell. And like that kind of would make us closer to being a whole person and really founding, you know, in a way that doesn't cut parts of us off from other parts of us.

45:50 Wes: I think I'm onto something different just because I'm thinking not about the theory, aesthetic theory, but about actually being educated in the arts or literature and having that be a part of your life and the importance of that to doing things which are more rational kind of trivial. Example, think about reading Mills on Liberty, which is full of life and it's animated and it's well written. And then what you might expect from the average philosophy journal if someone were writing about free speech, which would be much more careful, it would go through all the very, very tiny subdivisions of each argument in great detail.

But you lose a lot that way, right? It could become unreadable, but it also could become disconnected from the human in the sense that sometimes you see in some of these philosophy papers, they want to go down every branch of an argument. So they go down branches which are just kind of not relevant or far fetched. Here's another way to put it. In grad school, the feeling I often got is this is so divorced from any sort of effective or emotional part of life, it makes me crazy trying to read it. It's that sort of thing. So I don't know how else to put it other than that.

I think that's part of what he's getting at here also.

47:05 John: I've read too, that Baumgarten, who sort of introduced that idea, the free play of the senses, and then he talks about viewing sculptures, that there's a part of your cognitive brain that also is remembering the idea of touching. So when you're seeing, you're actually experiencing touch. So I think it's really important for him for children to experience all these levels, whether it's just reading about all these things or it's actually getting out there and touching things and hearing things.

47:32 Mark: Yes, Aesthetics as the science of sensuous cognition. That is Baumgarten and that is one of Herter's big influences here. So if you were to come up with a kindergarten. This is not just about the theory that we want theories of the aesthetics of touching, but we want in our educational program to have lots of touching.

47:51 Wes: Sorry.

47:51 Mark: Yes, yes, exactly.

47:54 John: Which we don't want.

47:55 Wes: Now, now there's just a no touching sign on the wall.

48:01 Mark: We should say a few words about the divine colloquy, because that was kind of the most fun thing that we read.

48:07 Wes: Yes, it was.

48:09 Seth: And it was totally right.

48:11 Mark: Well, tell us about it, Seth. Does painting or music have a greater effect? A divine colloquy? What's going on in this one?

48:19 Seth: My read on it, it seemed like music got the better of the argument. Okay, I guess we should talk about what it is.

48:25 Wes: They came out equal, Seth. Oh, God, I'm just kidding.

48:28 Seth: I'm biased.

48:29 Wes: They did seem like they kind of came out equal in the end, but

48:32 John: I feel that too. I think music got the upper hand, okay?

48:34 Seth: And deservedly so. Fucking painting. No. So the. The premise of the divine colloquy is that the music muses. Well, there's Father Apollo, quote, Father unquote, Apollo and the muse of poetry, who, if I remember Correctly is oratio or aretio. And then there's the muse of painting and the muse of music. And Apollo proposes, there's a discussion, which one has the greatest effect on humans? So they proceed to have an argument, and they go through a series of iterations where it's pointed out that they're not talking about the effect that they have, but of other things.

And essentially comes out that painting appeals to the understanding and music appeals more to the heart. And they're arguing their various. Their supremacy against each other. And poetry comes in and says, well, actually painting comes in through the understanding but touches the heart. And music comes in through the heart and touches the understanding. And I think it's supposed to end up kind of in a draw, but from my reading, music got much the better of it, and deservedly so.

49:48 Mark: I thought, actually poetry kind of gets nominated by Apollo to be the referee. And then poetry basically says, the only reason you guys each have your effect is because you come close to me like music. Aren't you so much more effective when you have poetry? So this is getting back at the. It's not that pure instrumental music that Kant ends up loving that is the best kind of music. No, it's the clear melody. You know, harmony is just dressing. Harmony is just frills. It's not spiritually nourishing necessarily, but it's the good old simple, catchy melody that is used to, you know, with one note, just drives right to your heart.

And it's more effective when you put it explicitly with the ideas when you're actually saying something. So basically a rock song, the thing that is closer to the barbaric yawp but has a nice tune to it, is the purest kind of music is what I'm gonna read out of this.

50:46 Seth: Yeah, that's exactly what she's saying.

50:48 John: Yeah. Well, there is that element that I started thinking along those lines, Mark, too, about where I think about when I'm writing a song about the form matching the content. Like, you want the music to sort of of match the lyrics. Like, you can have good lyrics, but if the music doesn't support that, you know, ugh. I'm not. I'm not putting lyrical music above, like, orchestral music. I'm just saying if you're combining the two.

51:15 Mark: Seth just likes music where

51:20 Seth: you're just saying if music has lyrics, then the music is subordinate to the lyrics. No, hey, John, that's cool. I get it. Whatever. That was facetious and joking on my part, so don't take it seriously.

51:31 John: No, I actually. I like to work in both realms of the music being more important than lyrics being more important. It depends on how I approach it, if I have something to say or if I just want to play around. There's a thing I read about him where he clarifies the three aesthetic things to approach. And the one is the plastic arts, which is the images. The other one is energetic art, which is music, dance and poetry. But the one that he thinks in, why I think Poetics is on Apollo's lap and almost has the last word, is that I think he feels that this has this thing called force, which is more than just the music does, that poetry actually uses all of the senses.

52:06 Mark: Yes.

52:07 Seth: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. When you think about. Poetry has some aspects of musicality. It has meter, it has rhythm. Right. I assume the Greeks at least would have sung. There's no such thing, I think, as, like, spoken poetry. Like in the sense of what we think of poetry as now. It would have been more choral or at least melodic in that sense. And I like that. But my interpretation of it was music says, oh, painting, you're just two dimensions, right? You're just flat. And your whole goal is to be representational. And so insofar as your representation of reality, you get closer. You can stimulate the understanding to say, like, oh, this is a landscape or this is a tree, or this is a bloom or whatever. But your ability to move the soul and to express emotion and truth and to move the viewer, to stimulate them into some kind of an emotional reaction is somewhat limited.

53:08 Wes: Yes. Apollonian, Dionysian.

53:10 Seth: Yeah. And music where it's not. These are two very traditional views of what these mediums represent too. Like, pictorial is representational and music is non representational. The idea that music moves the soul, it speaks directly to the heart and is uplifting. Or. And after watching, just recently, coincidentally, I had been binging on this English composer named Howard Goodall, who did a bunch of BBC specials on the history of music and how music works and all this. So I've got all this stuff stuck in my head, but what poetry was saying was, you're enriched with my addition. And it's not that poetry somehow comes out superior to both or somehow encompassing. It's that poetry is the extra ingredient that actually makes the things efficacious. Now, if Herder had had the notion of like a movie, you could attach.

54:07 Wes: Wait, say more about poetry being the extra ingredient.

54:11 Seth: So poetry being combined with music. She talks about the combination that music is great on its own, but it has limitations just in the same way that pictorial representation, you know, painting is limited, but in conjunction with poetry, when you combine words and music, that that's what unlocks the full power of moving the human understanding and the human heart in conjunction with each other. And I completely buy that.

54:42 John: Yeah, There's a section of that that I think supports that where the slam against music, where it was actually could only be understood by the gods because

54:51 Mark: it's a form of language ultimately.

54:55 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

54:55 John: I think there's one section where it was the comeback after that where the images can actually portray what the humans are going through. The music was too lofty or too obscure.

55:06 Wes: Yeah. It comes from heaven.

55:08 John: Yes, yes. It comes from heaven. That's the term.

55:10 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. Can anyone say what tones mean to express? Do they not speak the most confused tongue of half sensations? Yeah. So there's a lack of clarity in music precisely because it's non representational. What is it actually saying? What is it doing?

55:26 Mark: To which again, part of the response is, well, crappy music is. Is unclear. But really the best kind of music is again those simple note by note melodies. And like that is as clear as anything that's on the clearest painting. It's just these mushy, this mushy music,

55:44 Wes: but it's still not clear in the sense of being representational. It's emotional and if Schopenhauer is right, right. It will have something to do with the will and the movement of the will. But I don't think we ever escaped that limitation like the way it ends. I think the limitations of both are acknowledged by poetry. Right. Yu painting produced with your art the brightest, most beautiful, clearest, most enduring representation. You, music, however, possessed the magic wand of real and direct influence on the human heart. You stir the feelings and passions, though in an obscure manner and require a guide and elucidator who will at least enable you to have a more determinate effect on man's understanding and delight, not only his physical but his moral sense.

56:30 Mark: Isn't there something in here praising painting about possibility of it sort of setting fire to your imagination and you seeing more in it than is actually there? Is that something I made up or is that in there somewhere?

56:41 Wes: I don't remember that. The seeing more than it's there.

56:44 Mark: This is at least what I was thinking about like that. What makes you know, she says, look, what is most inspiring in a lot of paintings, this is definitely brought up in the dialogue, is that it depicts divine themes. So basically it depicts something that then makes your soul fly away. Because you're so caught in the representation of the God or you know, of course, in Herder's own time, it would be all these pictures of Jesus and Mary and you look into their eyes and you see their souls and you. So it's power is in, in fact not in its ability to represent as clearly as possible because then it would be, you know, as music says, pretty much, yeah, you could be the best, you know, depiction of a sunset, but just look at the damn sunset and that's better like that you're always just going to be a pale imitation.

An imitation. But no, but actually what's good about painting is that it freezes it and it kind of lets you take flight from it in a way that seeing the actual thing wouldn't.

57:45 Seth: It's persistent, right?

57:47 Mark: Because it's frozen. And I think if you paint in a skillfully enough manner, you spark the imagination in some way. This is what I ultimately I'm worrying about because it. Cause it seemed like, Seth, you were saying before that. Well, it's just they didn't have movies like. So if you could have perfect representation, you're not only your great cinematography, but your perfect CGI or whatever kind of things to fool you visually and in fact could make it better than anything that you could see in real life. Perhaps if you screw with the color, you could do all these things with it and put music on top of that. Wouldn't that be the best possible thing? Is that part of what you were, you know, according to this analysis, pointing at.

58:26 Seth: Yeah, no, I. What I was saying was being able to put poetry on top of it, like being able to put, put words of spoken narrative on top of a visual representation. So think about this like if you put words and music together, AKA poetry and music, or if you put words and pictures together, ultimately the emotional part, the thing that moves you to care, the thing that engages you and drives your experience, your engagement with a work of art. For me, it's much easier to be motivated by music, to have an emotional experience, listening to music, engage with music, amplified as it is by lyrics, by poetry, compared to painting, which I do think is much more an engagement of the understanding.

And there are paintings which move the heartstrings, but it's indirect through the understanding, whereas music can genuinely move you directly through the heart. I bought the argument. I bought it and I sided with music.

59:34 Wes: I think it's hard for us to evaluate painting in this day and age because we're so inundated with representations. We live in a mass Reproduction, whether it's TV or photography or we're inundated with visual representation. I think it's much harder for a lot of people to go to a museum and look at a painting and appreciate it than it is to listen to a song. You know, popular music is a. Is a big deal. If you want a popular visual medium, you have to go to movies. And that, of course, is a combination of all three. I think the appreciation of something like sculpture or painting calls for a state of mind which is more reflective and less agitated than we are prone to these days. I honestly think we're not as capable of going into that place where one can appreciate. As I get older, actually, it gets much easier for me to really appreciate paintings.

1:00:34 Mark: Let me temper something I said about music, because he talks about the origin of music basically being in. Yelling, expressing. But think of again, the genius versus taste. So good music for him. He would not consider your screamy metal band to be good music. He would be wanting something that's more like what you're describing, Wes. This reflective. I mean, I'm thinking of a particular scene in the movie Amadeus where Salieri is listening to this, you know, and the oboe comes in and it's single note. Like that's what he has in mind. Like these tones that are just. They're pure and they come slowly enough that you can really soak them in. And yes, their movement, but they're much more contemplative. In just the way Wes is describing

1:01:22 Wes: painting, there's still an immediate emotional. I mean, I think it is harder for us to appreciate classical music as well. But if you're used to it, you put on, say, Bach's Goldberg Variations to get at something which is. Yeah, it's more abstract, let's say, and formal and less immediately visceral than the popular music that we're probably all more used to. But for me, if you're receptive, there's an immediate emotional punch to that. Me going and looking at whether it's a Mondrian or whether it's a painting of some martyr with arrows. Is that St. Sebastian? Over and over and over and over and over again.

1:02:03 Seth: Oh, God. We should have started the conversation with

1:02:07 Wes: this because the religious context is absent, partly because it's just not that impressive anymore. It's harder to get the same emotional punch, I think, out of. And this is where I think this colloquy is right. I mean, I think in the end, there's just no denying the fact that you can't get the same emotional Punch out of painting. And as I learned to enjoy painting, it's almost like having a body high on marijuana versus just being drunk and disinhibited. It's more a meditative than uninhibited state. Maybe that's the way to put it.

1:02:41 Mark: You've gotten me to do an image search of paintings of St. Sebastian. There's a lot of naked chests.

1:02:47 Seth: I'm ready to just fucking let loose on this. But I want to. I want to create the space. I want to create the space for John. So, John, do you want to go for it?

1:02:55 John: Well, I feel like I have some thoughts and I can't get them all concrete because I do agree that I actually just went to the museum two or three times this week. I love the move in art with Duchamp, where it made this move to being more intellectual and that there' sthey couldn't compete with the movement of photography or what was going on. That they started to create this idea of movement in photos, in the paintings. Like Duchamp did a lot of stuff over time and he actually released a box of notes with the painting. So you're more engaged on an intellectual level, which also gives me an emotional response to it.

Duchamp was born in the end of the 1800s and worked all the way up until like 1950s. But a lot of that interesting move came from like around 1916, 1918, where he started doing his anti artwork. And this idea of the futurists were about trying to put movement into still photos. So I think a lot of the appreciation did move into more of this intellectual game, which also gave you sort of a some emotional response to it also.

1:04:03 Seth: It does make sense. But again, the emotional experience of visual art is always secondary. Okay, so we have five senses, right? And ever since we've learned how to walk upright, we've prioritized sight. And it's the fetish of philosophers. We got to penetrate, we got to see. We have to come to understand. All of the metaphors of understanding and awareness and consciousness and all that stuff are related to sight. But if you think about what it is that spurs memory and emotional experience, it's smell and sound, right? Or taste. It's like, oh, God, that reminds me of my grandmother's cooking, right?

Nobody ever looks at a Duchamp and smell. Ah, that reminds me of my grandmother's house. Like in the mountains, right? We have prioritized sight over the other senses. And sight is associated with the understanding and sight is associated with philosophy. And I think the fact that you can close your eyes and you can have a visceral experience of listening to music or of inhaling scents and all that. And John, there's things you don't know about. Like my, my wife owns a spa, so we have this whole thing about tactileness and touch and all these kinds of things.

And so what I think is that when you're presented with, and I have to talk to this about St. Sebastian, the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. So on the subject of counterpoints to what I just said, Yukio Mishima, who was an artist and a filmmaker and all this in post war Japan, essentially he ejaculated in seeing that when he first encountered one of the depictions of St. Sebastian. And he was kind of a screwed up dude to begin with. But that's like, okay, well, you can apparently have an emotional reaction to a painting, right? I guess in a way that you don't with music.

But I just felt like this little dialogue captured. It really crystallized the idea that visual representations and sight appeal to the understanding because sight is the primary fight or flight sense for Homo sapiens. And the idea that music doesn't appeal to your sense of truth or validation or anything like that. It is much more core to your heart. And I appreciated that. And the idea that poetry in conjunction with music. Music, which is why, sorry, another background thing. I have a 10 month old daughter and everybody was like, oh my God, if you don't expose her to classical music now, she'll never be able to like hear, you know, she won't have perfect pitch, she won't be able to do this, she won't be able to do that.

Well, she won't understand music. So it's like, oh shit, I gotta play. So every morning when we get up together, I play classical music or I play jazz, I play opera. And these are all things that I used to love and I've just sort of forgotten about and now I'm kind of reconnecting to. And opera is like one of my favorite things ever. Which is the perfect combination of poetry and music, I think in that sense to articulate a story. But who gives a shit about the plot, right? All opera plots are boring. It's like misguided love. Oh, angry parent, whatever.

It's about carrying you through the journey emotionally, right? And that's what's beautiful about it. And it's all just words and music and no pictorial representations when you listen to it over the radio. Sorry, okay, I'm done.

1:07:41 John: I don't think I disagree with you.

1:07:42 Unknown speaker: At all.

1:07:42 John: I was just giving the case that art sort of had to move into a different realm because it wasn't getting the effect it was anymore. It moved more into the intellectual. I agree that music is more emotional. One of the things I thought about is with my band, I constantly get pictures or like Facebook messages of people sending me pictures of their little kids dancing, you know, like one year old moving to the beat. So there's something very instinctual in us in general to feel rhythm and to hear music.

1:08:15 Wes: Yeah. Try to show your toddler a Vermeer.

1:08:21 Seth: Hey, doesn't he say something like that? He talks about the blind and the deaf.

1:08:25 Wes: Yeah.

1:08:26 Unknown speaker: Yes.

1:08:27 John: I can't remember at all, but there was a study done that he had just read before writing that article about.

1:08:32 Seth: Basically, it's better to be blind than deaf, I think was the subtext.

1:08:36 Mark: Last part of 356, the last part of the essay we're discussing. If you desire to see the effects of your art at their purest and without descending into disputable words, then observe a blind man and a deaf man and consider what both left lack. The deaf man's sight and discernment may be infinitely more refined, but in society he's always dumb and inwardly a man without joy. He lacks the sense and the art that speak directly to his heart. The blind man is a poor man. Perhaps he's also wanting certain fine distinctions, forms and dimensions which are granted only to the sense of sight. Nevertheless, he has the string music of all sensations and passions within him. He can let it ring out when it pleases him. In his dark solitude, create for himself a world full of harmony and joy.

1:09:13 Seth: Ways.

1:09:13 Mark: I think that's unnecessarily slighting of the death.

1:09:18 John: Yeah, I don't. I didn't agree with when I saw it, but that's a good way to know what he's trying to get at.

1:09:23 Mark: Hey, something really effective.

1:09:25 Seth: Close this episode by unnecessarily slighting the death.

1:09:31 Mark: Because they're the only ones that can't hear us say it.

1:09:33 Wes: I was gonna say this episode's sponsored by Herderism or whatever it is.

1:09:38 Seth: Yeah.

1:09:38 Wes: No, now Herder can take the blame.

1:09:41 Mark: I just want to bring up one more thing. It sounded like he was like, oh, the best music is the kind that is explained with lyrics. And the best pictures would be the kind that would be even more representative. Would be moving, would be three dimensional, would be like basically a big Hollywood movie. Would be the best kind of thing. But the new. I mean, you hopefully see Where I'm going with this is that the imagination then and doesn't have any room to play. You know, I was saying that what makes a really great painting is not just one that is very, well, representative, but it actually sparks your imagination that you're seeing, you know, the soul of the subject, of the art.

You're seeing St. Sebastian's divinity, not just it's a dude strapped to a cross or something with no shirt. And likewise, why music without words might even be better is because it kind of lets you fill in the blank, attach your own emotions, emotions to it, rather than the story the person is trying to tell. So I would think that then poetry would maybe steal it away and say, hey, I'm the best of all, because I can use symbolism. I can really get your imagination going. You have to picture the entire scene that's going on. Pure poetry in that way, reading, basically, as opposed to watching a big Hollywood movie, which one is the more spiritually nourishing?

The one that is the most sensorily engaging and. And can move you to tears the quickest or the thing that most captures your imagination and I guess even intellectual engagement?

1:11:09 Wes: Is that your closing?

1:11:10 Seth: Sure.

1:11:11 Mark: Give us your closing thoughts and we'll get out of here. On anything else from Herder or things you have not yet articulated.

1:11:18 Wes: Yeah, this was fun. Like I said, Herder. It wasn't what I expected. It was nice to kind of think through some of this during the podcast, especially give some more thought to my experience of painting versus music. But he is very general for someone who talks a lot about the senses and the sensuous, there's not a lot of concrete examples. And so this is one of the things that reminded me of Bloom. It's critical, but it's also often quite generic in its descriptions. And you could argue that his sort of descriptions of historical Greek periods are really just stereotypes and not very complex ones that give it, you know, an easy ad hoc framework for making the sort of interpretations he's making about taste.

I mean, it's not a new thing for people to think. Ancient Greece and what was going on back then in that place was just the best thing before sliced bread. But in general, yeah, I guess the larger takeaway from me is this relationship between the seeds of taste sort of lying in a certain kind of civic situation, not just in sort of a generic idea of what's going on culturally at any given time, but that there's something political, there's some sort of political foundation in how free people are. And then the implications of that for their ability to think freely and to be creative and all that stuff.

So I found that very interesting.

1:12:48 Seth: All right, so first off, you guys probably can't see this. So this is a cartoon from the New Yorker, probably from 25 years ago that I cut out. And it's the All Muse team and it's taking the nine muses and making a baseball team out of them. So it says not an easy out in the lineup and on the mound. Erato, daughter of Zeus is a left hander with a sneaky fastball, a withering overhand curve and a screwball she'll throw to the right handed batters to keep them honest. I have kept this like a sacred document for years. So the fact that the divine colloquy was a discussion between the Muses thrilled me to no end.

So I hearder, interesting guy in translation and beautiful read. Historicizes the concept of taste by tying it to culture, as Wes pointed out. Critical interesting, particularly in relationship to Kant. It might be interesting to try to do some kind of a juxtaposition and look at the two of them together. He has a number of really interesting criticisms of contemporaries and of people who are putting forward theories around the concept of taste that I think are valid. He's absolutely right about music, particularly in relationship to the representational arts.

And I had a lot more fun in this discussion than I thought I was going to right before it happened.

1:14:15 Mark: I'm sure a lot of that is thanks to John. John, do you have any final words for us?

1:14:19 John: I emailed a lot of my friends in Austria and Germany and I just, I said to them, what do you think when you first hear the name Johann Gottfried Herder? And I didn't want to say he's a philosopher or anything. And most of them actually came back poet. Some thought he was poet philosopher. And I just thought that was really interesting that he's seen as someone who used language like a poet or like music.

1:14:45 Wes: Well, he was a poet as well.

1:14:47 John: Yeah, he crossed all the boundaries. And my friend Mark had said in response to that. He goes in response to calling him a poet. I guess Germany also has a lot more hardcore philosophers, so we can afford to split hairs about it.

1:15:01 Seth: Do we need to talk about you having all these friends in Austria and Germany that you can just source first?

1:15:07 Mark: Well, I didn't.

1:15:09 John: But my first band, Screeching Weasel, is actually world famous. So I actually can go to any country basically and meet people and I could just. It's really nice having a amount of Fame where I get to stay in places all over the world and visit people. But my last thought on it was I went into this with lots of trepidation. Is that what they call that? Because, you know, you can't really go to YouTube for herder. There's only one thing on there that was in English. All of the rest of it was in German. Or was those computerized voices basically just saying the biography?

So once I dug in and learned a little bit about the history, I really got into this idea of Herder being more of a. I call a Bull Durham, where they actually don't become the famous one. They're the one that sort of supports and inspires other great artists. I kind of feel like that's what he's talking about in a lot of this, is this setting, the grounds to inspire genius. And I think he does it fairly well.

1:16:11 Wes: Well, thanks for coming on. It was great having you.

1:16:14 Seth: Yeah.

1:16:14 John: Oh, well, thank you very much.

1:16:16 Mark: I'll say, this did inspire me to think about one future episode. The last essay in this was on fables. And just reading the intro more talking about apparently the Germans. There's apparently a very rich literature of people talking about fables and what makes a good fable. You know, after I kind of pilloried on our Marcus Aurelius episode, our guest for relying too much on stories of virtue that are supposed to inspire you, I thought that actually turning to the most elementary kind of ethical story, the fable might be a good future episode. All right, next time we're going to return to Epicurus.

We're going to read some of his collected sayings. We're going to read some more things about him so we could talk about the ethics more directly and read some of that Nussbaum's therapy of Desire to go along with it. Before we go, here's Avi Leventhal with an update on Partially Examined. Life's not School.

1:17:09 Wes: Want to partially examine your Life with other PEL listeners? Head to the website at partiallyexaminelife.com and become a citizen. As a citizen, you can join or create not school groups to study philosophical or fictional texts with other listeners. Each group is supplied with its own forum where members can schedule meetings and discuss philosophy. Currently, PEL members are partially examining the likes of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. And a new group will begin to study Hegel and analytic philosophy.

1:17:38 Mark: I also want to remind you to get a 2019 wall calendar. Domestic shipping is now free. Take a look at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. Go comment@partiallyexaminedlife.com follow us on Twitter Follow us on Facebook thank you so much and good night everybody.

1:17:54 Wes: Good night.

1:17:54 Seth: Good night.

1:17:55 John: Good night.

1:17:56 Unknown speaker: Hello, this is John Jughead Pearson. I was asked to select one of my songs for the end of this podcast. I chose the song Dear Resonance from

1:18:04 John: the record Zeitgeist Echo.

1:18:06 Unknown speaker: The word Zeitgeist has always stuck with me, since I heard it once as a child. It was a pleasant surprise to learn through my readings that Herder was an original user of this phrase. For this record, I use the term as a call to action for myself to try to be truly aware of the present tense and to try to create based on the spirit of the times we are living. This is more difficult since I feel in general we often absorb what we think is happening in the moment, but it is often a safe distillation of what has already been thought or created in the past.

I think it is extremely difficult to interpret our current moments honestly, and what becomes popular in the mainstream, what becomes a trend, is more often than not an echo of the past instead of an interpretation of the present. The song Dear Resonance uses this concept in a similar way. Often the terrible events of the past, both social and personal, have a longer lasting effect on on us than we are aware that actions vibrate through time in ways that are difficult to contain and diagnose, leaving us vulnerable to the misinterpretation of our own choices that we believe to be purely of our own making.

If this type of analysis sounds interesting

1:19:17 John: to you, you can hear me and

1:19:19 Unknown speaker: Mark talking through a few of my songs on the Nakedly examined music episode 58. You can find that@nakedlyexaminemusic.com thank you. And now here's Dear Resonance from my current band. Even in blackouts.

If resonance both our life bend Contemplating the effect of this resonance. Dear resonance it's a distance real Dear resonance It's a distance we all there's guilt of the past that's so past that it's still present in its horridness in the humor applied to ridicule to keep what's dreadful in the distance. Mysteries of figurines are fresh in the minds of babes who were never witnesses but must be lived as consequences in the fiber of their day Today. When I thought of these Internet and when I thought about this happening then I was thinking of the now.

It's from our lifespan Contemplating the effects of his resonance Resonance Dear resonance in the distance real Dear resonance in the distance real of war and actions that resemble such. And I dance in my club with the guilt of my apathy checking this indifference. And then I hear Lennon's Imagine and the generations around me waltz in mockery and irony. I want some distance. It hurts to know. History's closeness can flow a whole ride through your file without showing its face. The signs may be be constantly changing, Bob. But what does that mean to res.

A resonance in the distance real de resonance in the distance real dear Resonance is a distance real dear resonance. But what does it all mean when everything, everything, everything and all the particles in. A long time ago.