Ep. 246: Susan Sontag on Interpreting Art (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: I like that addition that Ortega y Gasset makes of, you know, it doesn't seem very likely that I'm going to really look at a nice painting of a pear and want to eat the pear. But yes, obviously when I see a film, I'm going to get Sucked into the dramas of the characters before, and maybe even instead of marveling at the cinematography and the other strictly aesthetic aspects. So Sontag is with Ortega y Gasset. Right. That there should be. I was gonna say distance, but that's actually what she's against in a way. Right. Against interpretation and are over intellectualizing culture in general, is that certainly there are some forms of art that she's going to talk about.

She has a very famous essay on camp, and I was listening to her online talking about pornography as a literary form. And these both involve some sort of removal of yourself from the action in a way that maybe this Ortega y Gasset would approve of. So there's. We want a certain distance from what's actually going on, but we want to be completely immersed, completely connected with the artwork. Qua artwork, which means with it as this style, slash, content combination. Right. A removal from strict content so that we can be connected to. Directly adjacent to what the artwork as a whole involves.

1:17 Wes: So she mentions that a lot of what's stimulating to us, a lot of the vitality and the expressiveness of the thing, what it's producing us, it does that. And I'm. By producing in us a knowledge of some content that you could get at descriptively. Right. It does that with its form, and so it does that with its style.

1:35 Mark: Yes. And I like this quote on page 27. She's quoting from Raymond Bayer. She says, what each and every aesthetic object imposes upon us in appropriate rhythms is a unique and singular formula for the flow of our energy. Every work of art embodies a principle of proceeding, of stopping, of scanning an image of energy or relaxation, the imprint of a caressing or destroying hand, which is the artist alone. So this is partly that she's trying to say what is style? But just. I focused on the words singular there. Whereas for Aristotle, we are appreciating the plot, the story of what's happening, sort of as a general principle, as an example of the kind of stuff that could happen, the kind of way that life is like, which seems to go against Sontag's recommendation that we engage with the singular thing that is this work of art.

2:30 Dylan: For her, every work of art is its own individual thing that ought to be engaged with. And one way of looking at the problem of interpretation is you remove that individuality out of the piece of art and thereby that's part of the act of killing it. And she's adamant about preserving that. So there's a way in which it's just a huge multiplicity of Things, each of which gets engaged with on its own to maintain its life. But then you have this question of something like transcendent ideas or just ideas in general, like style, that would unite those individual things.

I guess I'm pointing at more of a commenting on a kind of challenge that's there because she wants to insist on addressing each work individually. But I guess I'm brought back to the problem of just the sheer act of trying to understand it involves. Even if you're engaging with it individually, you're always bringing things that are not treating it individually.

3:31 Mark: Yeah, you're relating it to other things. She was saying in the other essay that what criticism should provide is a new vocabulary of ways of describing style, which, of course, we have that in a lot of arts. We have genre connections. And that is, for me, one way that people use to kind of dismiss the individual work. Oh, that's country music. You know, whatever kind of music you don't like that much, the sound turns on and it just reduces itself. It translates itself to that singular genre term. And that's all you hear. You're done with it. So clearly that's not the way she wants those terms to be used.

They need to, Oh, I didn't know what this was. But now that you've explained to me what zydeco is, and I've listened to some other zydeco, now I can hear within the genre of zydeco, what is singular and unique about this. It's just unclear to me that for most artworks there really is going to be something that's really unique and singular. Right. Everything is by definition a singular artwork. But to say everything is unique. No, there's so many works that are so derivative and generic that probably the best we could do, wouldn't you think, is to, oh, it's another one of those action films.

Maybe I'm not completely appreciating it because I'm not focusing on how this Fast and Furious 12 is different than Fast and Furious 11.

4:50 Seth: So I thought we were going down the concrete, you know, in the universal or the particular and the universal path, which I can't remember if that takes us into the other essay or not, But, Mark, what you're just saying. She says a number of things in the several essays where, you know, style is historical. There's no such thing as no style. Right. Or there's more style and less style. That the attempt to take multiple artists and categorize them, it's a violation in the sense that it tries to create abstract and absolute totalities or collections or abstract concepts out of the particular instantiation or the particular expression of style in a particular work of art by a particular artist.

And so not to go too far the other direction and say, you know, everybody's a snowflake and everybody's a unique individual and all that, and, you know, unique. She's trying to say that the work of art as an artifact generated by the individual artist is a thing, and is a thing which demands a certain kind of attention from you without necessarily having to fall into some conceptual categories, like, oh, that's art deco or that's post. Those are historical, like after the fact frames that we put on people and that you should instead engage directly with that particular concrete thing that is the work of art.

6:20 Wes: So she's going to say the ambivalence towards style is not rooted in simple error. It would be quite easy to uproot, but in a passion of an entire culture. This passion is to protect and defend values traditionally conceived of as lying outside art, namely truth, morality, but which remain in perpetual danger of being compromised by art. So she gets us back to the whole Platonic question of whether we allow the poetry into the city and worries about whether art, because its content can include such horrible things, will undermine the morality of a society or citizenry.

And the arc of the rest of the essay is to get us to focus on the fact that art indeed has an ethical function. But that ethical function has nothing to do with content. It has nothing to do with inserting moral platitudes into works of art. Its ethical function is to she calls it. It gives an intelligent gratification of consciousness in such a way that consciousness and the ethical capacities of consciousness are nourished by that. And ultimately I'll just tease what comes later, but ultimately it comes down to a re education of the will. This is something that sounds very Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean.

Even what's communicated in art is various. And in various types of styles is various types of willing. The ethical function of art involves the re education of will. And she'll even use the word it objectifies the will. Art objectifies the will. Again, very Schopenhauer, in a way that arouses the will of others and expands our self consciousness by naming and describing what we long for and other aspects, I think, that are related to our will. But I think it starts here. You know, we start going down this road here on the sixth page of the essay, where we find out that this concern about distinguishing form and content, or style and content is a result of these ethical concerns that have been around since Plato.

8:23 Dylan: And she calls that problem of art versus morality a pseudo problem and that the distinction is a trap.

8:29 Mark: Yeah, say more about that because there's a lot packed into that. I feel like she's just restating something she got from Nietzsche here.

8:35 Dylan: The next section she goes into sort of talking about morality. I mean, in the end, there's an interpretation of what morality is which is going to be aligned to the notion that there is no such thing as absolute morality. And that's directly aligned with the notion of there isn't an interpretation even if there is the act of interpreting. She'll say at the beginning of page seven of the essay, it's the next section after what Wes was reading. Morality is a code of acts and judgments and sentiments by which we reinforce our habits of acting in a certain way, which prescribe a standard for behaving or trying to behave toward other human beings generally as if we were inspired by love.

Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices. If morality is so understood as one of the achievements of human will, dictating to itself a mode of acting and being in the world, it becomes clear that no generic antagonism exists between the form of consciousness aimed at action and which is morality, and the nourishment of consciousness, which is aesthetic experience. She's taken aim at not just that the distinction between art and morality is a trap, but part of that is not a misunderstanding of art, It's a misunderstanding of morality that both are aligned as aesthetic experiences.

9:50 Mark: Right. If she wrote an essay just on morality, you could see something comparable to the against interpretation, where if you just have a code, oh, morality is just a set of laws. They're handed down for us, or maybe we use reason to generate them or. Or whatever it is, but it's something that is established and never in question. And then we look at specific actions and we judge them against this code. That's what a lot of people think that ethics is, but not, if you're a Nietzschean, that we have general guidelines. She mentions loving and openness and things that we want to enliven the world rather than deplete it of energy. Those are general parameters within which we make aesthetic and ethical judgments. But sort of beyond that, you actually have to look at the singular and act as a live creature in reaction to that to have some authentic response.

10:41 Dylan: So if we understand our morality in the singular as a generic decision on the part of consciousness, then it appears that our response to Art is moral insofar as it is precisely the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness. For it is sensibility that nourishes our capacity for moral choice and prompts our readiness to act, assuming that we do choose which is a prerequisite for calling an act moral and are not just blindly and unreflectively obeying. Art performs this moral task because the qualities which are intrinsic to the aesthetic experience, disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, the awakening of feelings and to the aesthetic object.

Grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness, are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life. I mean, she's basically saying that if you are attentive to interpretation in the right way of engaging in the world as a contemplatively and attentively awakening your feelings to it, you also be a moral person. But she's not making that judgment about morality where moral. I'm using the word moral as being good or bad. She's saying that that activity is the same activity as making moral choices.

11:58 Wes: It nourishes our capacity to do that. Right. So, yes, I think it bears repeating or emphasizing. I think when most people think about, if they're focused on the relationship between ethics and art is whether there's a bad message in there or whether some, more popularly today, whether some group of people is maligned or misrepresented. And as Sontag points out, the work of art itself could be about the most immoral and horrible of things. But any ethical effect that the arts have on us has nothing to do with simply being handed over our morals as pieces of descriptive content from the work of art itself.

This is sort of analogous to the whole Platonic conception of education, which cannot involve, right, someone pouring knowledge into us in the way someone might pour wine in our mouths. We cannot simply be filled up with a kind of content. It has to affect us functionally and structurally, let's say. It has to affect us formally, let's put it that way. If ethics is about habits and forms of acting, the soul has to be affected formally and structurally, and it's affected that way by aesthetic form.

13:10 Dylan: But that's effective playing right into the hands of Plato there. Right? Because that's exactly why Plato would be so attentive to the activity of art in shaping people's souls educationally. So the mere fact that art affects your soul means that it's very important that you attend to. To the way in which it does that. And that's exactly why he's so concerned about the role of art in a public light. It's not for the censorship because it's content, it's bad. It's because it shapes the souls of the citizens poorly.

13:43 Wes: It gives a content related laundry list, though, of why it affects one of them is just that, you know, you see all the gods doing bad things. And so that's a classic sort of content objection. But the other thing is he just thinks that the identification that's induced in the audience is bad because you learn to empathize and identify with all these pathetic people on stage in tragedy, for instance, all these irrational people, and you become more irrational yourself. So one of the criticisms is along the lines of emotional contagion. And that's where Aristotle's Poetics is kind of a response to that.

Aristotle says, no catharsis. We can have a more sophisticated idea of identification catharsis in which you are experiencing pity and fear vicariously, and yet you can be morally elevated through that. Again, you don't simply imbibe them, you don't simply internalize them whole cloth. They do something to you structurally that can be morally elevated. So it's not a content transfer in this section.

14:40 Seth: What I thought of when I read this was actually our discussions around the theory of moral sentiment. I agree that if you get caught up in the discussion of the content of the work of art and that it's, is it teaching a moral lesson or what have you, then that's the false dichotomy that would put it in opposition to an ethics. And I think what Sontag's trying to point out to me feels like it's more along the moral sentiment line, which is, you know, art can perform a moral task not by telling giving you a lesson in morality, but by inspiring you to actually act on what you know is right from, you know, your education.

So I think, Wes, what you're talking about with Aristotle's notion of catharsis, that's one particular thing like art can move you to have a cathartic experience so that you can purge some kind of experience that allows you to function more competently as a citizen or, you know, as a moral being in that group. But I also think that part of the sensibility of art in Sontag here is that you. It adds to the knowledge aspect. It adds to our we know this is the right thing to do, or we know this, and it gives you an emotional component to that which would give you the motivation to actually do or act as well.

Or at least perhaps it puts color like, you know, you get handed the Ten Commandments, but they're not charged with any emotional content for you. And art can help you to. When you see stories of infidelity or murder or what have you. That it can then bring the knowledge to life. By giving it a certain kind of emotional content. I guess I already said that.

16:25 Wes: Yeah. So whatever it's doing, you know, I think, how does this all work for Sontag? She does mention the word identification, for instance. So art induces not excitement, but contemplation. Identification. Excitement, as in more typical form of gratification and interest. But there's gotta be, she'll say, a detachment to it. Right. Or a kind of emotional freedom. Something that's beyond indignation or approbation. That's the point where she'll say, information being transferred. It's about the experience of qualities or forms, quote, unquote. Experience of qualities or forms of human consciousness.

Or another way. I like the way she puts this. Art gives us models of consciousness. I want us to get onto that track. Because I think if we think about my comparison to Aristotle and catharsis might mislead us. Because if Aristotle does really mean purgation. Then we need something much more complicated than that. We really need to flesh out and elaborate on how art is doing what it's doing. And it's got to be more than purgation. There are too many problems with that. So I think Sontag does a little bit of that here. The word identification is important.

But also this idea of being given models of consciousness with which to identify. Because, again, ultimately, the idea is that the will can be educated by these experiences.

17:50 Dylan: And, in fact, great art induces that kind of education. This is on 8. All great art induces contemplation. A dynamic contemplation. So there's this activity of educating the will that is part of the aesthetic induction that comes from. One of the things that's interesting to me about this Is that in both Plato and Aristotle. You have the agreement, basically, that art affects your soul. And she completely agrees with that. But she's pushing us. And I think this is what you were wanting to do, Wes, is to say. Well, there's a kind of conclusion that Aristotle has.

That's a refinement or a distinction from what Plato does. But it all still has to do with understanding a particular way in which it's working. And if anything, she's objecting to there being that kind of directedness to art. Or having an educative function that is particular. And you get some of this on nine, when she points to. It's just a very short section, the hyper development of style. And for example, Mannerist painting and art Nouveau is an emphatic form of experiencing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, but only a particular emphatic form which arises in reaction to an oppressively dogmatic style of realism.

And then she gets into a more general conclusion. All style, that is all art, proclaims this. And the world is ultimately an aesthetic phenomenon. That is to say, the world, all there is cannot ultimately be justified. Justification is an operation of the mind which can be performed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to another, not when we consider all there is. That's the distinction between where she's going with it and I think Nietzsche going with it, as opposed to Plato and Aristotle, that the justification is not outside of the world.

It's of one thing with respect to another, but that you can't have any ultimate justification. There's no ultimate catharsis or something like that.

19:52 Mark: Sounds like we want to bring the third essay into this. It seems like if we don't do it now, we will not do it. Should we do that? And then we can still talk about the latter part of On Style as well. Or do you want to keep. Is there a next thing in onstyle?

20:07 Dylan: The only thing is, I didn't know if there was more to say about the way it was working with the will. She has this stuff about art is the objectifying of the will in a thing, provoking or arousing of the will. Maybe we've said enough about that, but that seemed to be sort of like the meaty end.

20:22 Wes: She quotes Bayer as. There's a great quote from Bayer. Each work of art gives us a schematized and disengaged memory of a volition. What I'm trying to point to, I think the word identification is very important. And we get. Improving our comprehension of aesthetic experience means elaborating on that idea. So Plato had a particular idea that entered into his critique of poetry and Aristotle's conception of catharsis expanded on that. But I think these ideas around the identification with the willing of others as they're objectified in art is extremely important for understanding how it works and understanding how art can have an ethical effect by some way other than ethical content

21:10 Seth: transfer, let's call it the way it can do that is. Sorry, I'm not trying to interpret you, Wes. I apologize for reducing you or transfiguring you in that way. If the work of art is the as an act of individual will, it's formally no different than standing in front of another human being and having them say or do something right, that you're having an interaction directly with that individual. You're already in an. You're in an aesthetic and an ethical relationship with the individuals that you interact with on a daily basis when you are personally in their space, dealing with them face to face.

And I think the art is, in a sense, kind of an echo of that, where it represents this will. It challenges you to interact with it as an act of will, the output of an act of will of an individual. But it has that notion of being disinterested and what have you, simply because the other individual's not there. And I just think this ties really nicely together. It's very thought provoking and provocative to me that it's kind of articulating to me yet another way to engage with art that's different and interesting compared to some of the more formal or purely experiential intellectual.

But then I think to think of the art as representing an individual's will is itself also really interesting because then it draws you into a dialogue about the production and the intent and all that too, which she doesn't mention in these essays and probably is a scary place to be, but it opens up another. Like another richer vein of interaction.

22:48 Wes: So let me just read a little bit before we go on to the tragedy essay. So this is on page 12. Art is the objectifying of the will and a thing or performance and the provoking or arousing of the will from the point of view of the artist. It is the objectifying of a volition from the point of view of the spectator. It is the creation of an imaginary decor. For the will just gives you an example of how like, relentlessly brilliant her writing is. Indeed, the entire history of the various arts could be rewritten as the history of different attitudes towards the will.

Nietzsche Spengler wrote pioneer studies on this theme. And then she goes into a more recent attempt. But art is seen as the naming of emotions. Emotions, longings, aspirations, by thus being named, are virtually invented and certainly promulgated by art. For example, the sentimental solitude provoked by the gardens that were laid out in the 18th century and by much admired ruins. We're meant to get the idea that the style and formal elements of a work of art can convey a certain kind of attitude toward the world, or a certain way of knowing, or a certain form of consciousness that we can identify with, that we can be affected by, and that has Ethical implications for us.

And I think that's true. We're ethically affected by these works, but it has nothing to do with whether they tell us to be good or bad.

24:13 Mark: So can we use this Schopenhauerian framework to sum up why the style content distinction is not really legitimate? It sounds like another version of mimesis to say that a style represents or exemplifies a motion of the will. Right. Just. That sounds like the excuses we were giving at the beginning of our Aristotle episode. Like, okay, well, a picture is of something, and so it's mimetic in that way. But what about a piece of music? Well, it sounds like she's just saying what Aristotle said or what we were reading into Aristotle, that a piece of music can represent a certain, you know, emotional dance.

And, yeah, everybody dances differently, so the work can have the style of There. But if you bring in Schopenhauer, you know, how will is a representation or how a piece of music could be. It's not that it, like, refers to will in the same way that a picture of a landscape refers to that landscape because of the different way that you're interacting with it. Because you look at the picture of the landscape, and if you're doing it wrong, at least you see through it, and you see the landscape. Right. You're interpreting the content as its mimetic object, the thing that it is an imitation of.

But you're not doing that when you engage with a piece of music. Or by extension, she's kind of saying the other arts are actually more like music than you think. In this way that even a still painting, the style in which you're invited to groove along with it, you're not invited to grasp the landscape that it's a picture of. You're invited to groove along in the same way, you know, have your faculties jump around in a pretty way, just like the. The style of the painting.

25:53 Wes: I was loving the way you put that until you. I like to groove along with it, but not to jump around in a pretty way.

26:00 Mark: I was trying to bring in Kant's dancing faculties.

26:04 Wes: Yeah, the free play. The play, yes, the free play of the understanding.

26:10 Mark: I'm hoping that in looking at this last essay that we can say whatever still needs to be said about her attitude towards mimesis. I think we've said quite a lot about it, but now we're actually dealing with something that is a direct response to. Well, if not Aristotle, then the many, many writers who were warning about Aristotle kind of in the same way. That we were like. It sounds like Aristotle saying tragedy is such a central part of aesthetic experience, but yet it's hard for us to see how modern works of art, even depressing ones, even like Camus the Plague, they don't have that form of tragedy. Yeah. So what's her response to that?

26:49 Seth: They're right. They don't have it. So in short, tragedy requires characters that are not self conscious. And all modern literature, and by modern I mean, you know, the last 600 years or whatever it is, is all about characters who are self conscious or aware and questioning that they're mulling over their own experience. The introduction of the distinction between a public Persona or public world and a public life and a private life has made drama about that private life. And in her mind, it's not possible to have tragedy in the traditional sense as defined when you have people who are agonizing about their own internal states.

27:36 Wes: So this is her review of a book by Lionel Abel. Right on. Metatheater. I'm pretty sure it's his book, A New View of dramatic form from 1963. She gets critical towards the end of the review. But much of this is just a positive approval of some of his ideas to the effect that even many of Shakespeare's so called tragedies are actually meta plays. So just reading here from her essay. Thus it is the metaplay plots that depict the self dramatization of conscious characters. A theater whose leading metaphors state that life is a dream and the world a stage which has occupied the dramatic imagination of the west to the same degree that the Greek imagination was occupied with tragedy.

So even for the most part, Shakespeare and Calderon are not going to count as tragedies, even if they're traditionally categorized that way by this standard. What does the self consciousness criterion mean here exactly?

28:32 Mark: I was trying to figure out if we discussed this Abel book before.

28:36 Wes: I don't think so. We discussed Metatheater a little bit in our Calderon.

28:40 Mark: Right, right. And so is Thomas. Austin O'Connor's is the Spanish comedia metatheater. And he brings up Abel. He and I think some of the other. Obviously the Abel book must be a pretty central text in the area of talking about metatheater.

28:54 Wes: Yes. Yeah, it is. Yeah.

28:56 Mark: So why does he think like Hamlet if we want to get at what the self consciousness is? Just the fact that Hamlet has that all the world's a stage kind of thing in it. That's not actually in Hamlet, but the sentiment is that. Right. Whereas in Oedipus and Antigone they just don't have these monologues wondering if life is a dream kind of thing.

29:17 Seth: Hamlet's burden is himself, his subjectivity right at the expense, as she says. As I've suggested, the diagnosis presupposed in Metatheater that modern man lives with an increasing burden of subjectivity at the expense of his sense of the reality of the world is not new. But the concept of tragedy that we struggled with when we were reading like Aristotle's definition and then Tymeccanier is this sort of external forces which are beyond the control of the actors. And I don't mean actors like stage actors, but the agents, external forces beyond their control that don't necessarily make sense.

Like there's no justice, no meaning. Like bad things happen to good people sometimes, right? That's ultimately tragedy. And you know, the Shakespearean, the play within the play and the fact that his characters go into disguise frequently for long stretches of the play is just indicative of the fact that they're not struggling with the externalities of the world imposing some kind of burden on them or bad things happening that they're trying to understand. Instead they're wrestling with their own decision making. And you know, in fact, we talked about this in our discussion of Lear.

It's like, why are you making this decision? Right? We aren't lamenting that something bad is happening to the characters, like, oh no, it's the French Revolution or whatever. It's like, why are you making the decision? Why are you treating your children this way? Why are you do. At least that's my experience with a lot of Shakespeare, is just like, why are you doing that? Like, and that's not tragic, at least not by her reckoning.

30:56 Wes: So this is page 95. So she's referring to Abel. He's quite right, for example, in arguing that most of the plays of Shakespeare, which their author and everyone else since have called tragedies, are not strictly speaking tragedies at all. In fact, Abel could have gone even further. Not only are most of the putative tragedies really meta plays, so are most of the histories and comedies. The principal plays of Shakespeare are plays about self consciousness, about characters not acting so much as dramatizing themselves in roles. Prince Hal is the man of perfected self consciousness and self control triumphing over the man of rash, unselfconscious integrity, Hotspur, and over the sentimental, cowardly, self conscious man of pleasure.

Falstaff. Achilles and Oedipus do not see themselves as, but are hero and king. But Hamlet and Henry V see themselves as acting parts. The Part of the avenger, the part of the heroic and confident king leading his troops to battle. So there's something about the unself consciousness of ancient Greek tragic heroes versus the self consciousness of, say, Shakespeare's heroes and heroines that creates this divide, this distinction.

32:06 Dylan: I think that you can see in that description why Macbeth is a tragedy and Hamlet is not. In those that, like Achilles and Oedipus, you see actors acting. The actors acting, meaning that Achilles and Oedipus are heroes and kings, not people who are acting out the role of a hero and king. That's what it's meant by them. They're not being self conscious. They're just doing what they do. And Macbeth does the same thing. He just does what he does. Whereas Hamlet is very, very conscious of himself acting in a role. And I think it goes as far as a kind of modern point of view of being conscious of who yourself is. Achilles doesn't wonder about who he is, but who his self is.

32:52 Wes: To fight or not to fight, that is the question.

32:54 Seth: No.

32:54 Dylan: Yeah, that's not part of the deal. And Oedipus, I guess this gets over into the second section. But notice that tragedy fundamentally is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. That is not the implacability of values which is demonstrated by tragedy, but the implacability of the world. And so you have a character like Oedipus who in the deepest sense is innocent. He's wronged by the gods, as he says. And that is what is manifest in tragedy, is the individual character doing what they do.

33:27 Seth: It's tied up in this notion of fate. I don't think we have an analog in the modern conceptual framework to an ancient notion of faith that you're fated to be wronged, or, you know, the gods make a decision that they're going to punish you for some reason or no reason. And then the tragedy is the working out of this fate and not an examination of your role in either facilitating it. The Oedipus story is not about looking at the actions he takes and thinking he could have acted otherwise. That's not at all in the cards when you're watching that. And it's definitely tied up with an idea of fate.

34:04 Wes: Yeah, I like this. The story of Oedipus is tragic insofar as it exhibits the brute opaqueness of the world. The collision of subjective intention with objective fate. And then later on, more to the point of what we're talking about, tragedy says there are disasters which are not fully merited, that there's ultimate injustice in the world.

34:22 Mark: She calls King Lear a failed tragedy. Could you extrapolate that based on your reading of that, from what she says?

34:29 Seth: Since we talked about Lear, we should probably spend a couple minutes on that. Which page?

34:32 Dylan: It's at the very beginning, the very first section where she goes through the list of plays.

34:37 Mark: So that's page 95 of the overall PDF.

34:41 Dylan: Tragedy is simply much rarer than has been supposed. The Greek plays, one play of Shakespeare, Macbeth and a few plays of Racine. Tragedy is not the characteristic form of Elizabethan or Spanish theater. Most Elizabethan serious drama consists of failed tragedies. Lear, Dr. Faustus or successful metal plays, Hamlet and the Tempest.

35:02 Wes: I'm not sure why one would think Lear is a. Is a failed tragedy except by this criterion of self consciousness. Right in the beginning, Lear seems to be completely lacking in any sort of self consciousness. And then as soon as he's booted out by his daughters, he just becomes a font of, you could call it self insight, except that a lot of it happens under the rubric of madness. But it's still. He goes from being a very highly unreflective character to being a font of reflectivity. Maybe that's the idea, I don't know.

35:37 Mark: So she wants to characterize what Aristotle was arguing about tragedy. She wants to argue about Metatheater, but she doesn't really say much about that. We can kind of tell from what she said about in the previous essays that our society's Western culture at this point is overly intellectual, overly self reflective, you know, has lost touch with the instincts in the way that Nietzsche would and did argue against Metatheater expresses this situation that is really a malady according to Sontag and Nietzsche in modern psychology.

36:08 Seth: Yeah, that sounds right.

36:09 Mark: And then she spends the rest of the essay, you know, she turns to Brecht because she's considering this hypothesis that Abel had put forward, that part of the lack of self consciousness is having a firm value system to be self conscious. It seems. You know, following Nietzsche and following what she said so far would seem to be to. To have an ethics that is in question. That certainly a way of not having self consciousness. I'm not sure about this. Let me just throw this out. Is again, you know, you've got your ethics that's been handed down to you and you look at new situations and merely mindlessly, you know, there's some judgment involved, but you're not doing any meta reflection.

Certainly applying that moral code to the new situation. Is that an ancient way of applying ethics? In other words, you can point to something, say, unclean. That's the old kind of ethics. And according to Abel, that's the only reason. It's because the ancient Greeks had that kind of thing, that tragedy made sense to them. And she wants to argue against that.

37:06 Seth: I agree with that. And this goes back to. It's not that there's implacable values, but there are implacable motive forces in the world that urge things along, that churn. So I think this goes back to. I think all you need for a conception of tragedy is an idea, is fate. You don't need to have a value system associated with that. And in fact, she says in that same page, what are the implacable values of Homer? Honor, status, personal courage, the values of an aristocratic military class? She says, but this is not what the Iliad is about. It would be more correct to say, as Simone Weil does, that the Iliad, as pure an example of the tragic vision as one can find, is about the emptiness and arbitrariness of the world, the ultimate meaninglessness of all moral values and the terrifying rule of death and inhuman force.

Remember, that's Achilles. Great speech. A man does the same whether he's done much or nothing. Why am I even doing what I'm doing? What's the point?

38:01 Mark: I think maybe to have a metatheater, maybe you do need to have. She at least wants to divide these two things, right? Having a firm value system and having an idea that nature is implacable. I think that the Calderon play we read does have kind of a firm value system in it, even though that's metatheater. So a metatheater is in fact compatible. Not only is having a value system firmly not sufficient to give you tragedy, it's not even necessary.

38:27 Seth: So to be clear on this point, she doesn't think that you need an absolutist value system for tragedy in the Greek mold. I would question. Well, she says a little further down. She says it's also untrue that Western culture has been, on the whole, liberal and skeptical post Christian Western culture, yes. But when you think about Paul, Augustine, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, were they skeptics? You know, she's saying that you do not need some kind of system of absolute values for the classical form of tragedy. It's sufficient for there to be cultural values that can be contrasted with fate. So certain types of individuals, you know, you want and expect them to experience certain sorts of things, but they don't always do.

39:10 Unknown speaker: It.

39:10 Seth: And that doesn't always happen, and that's what's tragic. But when you talk about a post ancient Greek and like let's call it a post Christian culture, then yes, we do have this system of values and it doesn't really matter so much which one of those values are. But it's almost as though you flip the tables and say that you can't have meta theater, you can't have the self conscious character without the possibility of some kind of absolutist framework in which and against which the individual can struggle. Does that make sense?

39:45 Dylan: I think it does. The implication is that you can't have the individual. Well, this self consciousness outside in a genuine sort of nihilistic point of view. In this paragraph on it's right after where you were reading Seth, where she's talking about. As everyone knows, there's no Christian tragedy, strictly speaking, because the content of Christian values is inimical to the pessimistic vision of tragedy in the world envisaged by Judaism and Christianity. There are no freestanding, arbitrary events. All events are part of the plan of a just good providential deity.

Every crucifixion must be topped by a resurrection. Every disaster or calamity must be seen either as leading to a greater good or else as just and adequate punishment fully merited by the sufferer. This moral adequacy of the world asserted by Christianity is precisely what tragedy denies. Tragedy says there are disasters which are not fully merited, that there is ultimate injustice in the world.

40:42 Mark: I think she just isn't giving us enough of the story about Metatheater and why it is positive. And I'm kind of imagining how this relates to the kind of art, for instance, that she says in the earlier essay is in flight from interpretation and how this connects exactly to the kind of artistic distance that she likes versus the type that she is against. So yeah, just raises a lot more questions than it answers for me.

41:11 Dylan: This is a review and this section that I was just quoting from is the second of three sections in which she is disagreeing with Abel. So in this section she's saying that she basically he oversimplifies and she says indeed represents the vision of the world which is necessary for the writing of tragedies. She accuses him of not taking seriously enough that the Greek tragic vision, and in fact she would say what the tragic vision of the world is, is it's nihilistic and that he doesn't take that seriously enough. That's her criticism of him. And in that she presents an interpretation of. I have a vision of the world of as essentially nihilistic.

41:54 Mark: What do you guys think of that just diagnosis of tragedy as saying the world is nihilistic. And I'm also thinking of if nihilistic just says the world ultimately doesn't make sense, bad things happen and there is no good explanation for it. That sounds like absurdism, you know, or at least one of the aspects of Camus absurdism. So therefore the plague could be a tragedy. But the plague clearly, as we just discussed, is not nihilistic. Right. It is only nihilistic from the point of view of the values absolutist, the Christian or other that says if you don't have that pre established values, then you have nothing. No, the existentialist. Yeah. Always wants to add.

42:33 Wes: You can think of tragedy as a response to the nihilistic predicament. I mean, there's a difference between the aesthetic response and the predicament itself.

42:40 Seth: And you know, existentialism is also a response, or at least Camus style. Existentialism is also a response to that sort of nihilism. But to me, this actually helps me understand the Aristotelian notion of catharsis a bit better. Like if bad things are just going to happen and there's no explanation for them and there's no avoiding them and you need some kind of training for how to deal with them or to relieve the anxiety of knowing that it's about to happen. If tragedy helps you to experience those emotions and then purge them, both to relieve your current anxiety and to prepare you for the future experience of living through those emotions, then that makes a lot of sense to me.

It doesn't seem to matter how many years I live and how hard I try not to be Aristotelian. I just somehow always end up back there. It's fucking annoying. I don't want to spend the rest of my life just reading his stuff. And he just seems to constantly get things right.

43:37 Mark: Well, good luck. Good for you. Because

43:41 Seth: nice segue. Yeah.

43:43 Mark: For next episode we are reading more Aristotle, the rhetoric to get all of our liberal arts. The stuff that's left of Aristotle beyond that is like his logic and his straight up metaphysics and his physics and things like that that are much more

43:58 Dylan: left brain and his biology stuff. Books and books and books of biology.

44:03 Mark: If we did De Anima, that is more than enough as far as what we will ever read, I'm sure. So any final thoughts on Sontag here?

44:12 Seth: I feel like I say this frequently with a lot of these writers that we're all experiencing for the first time or discover. But if you're listening to this, go read these essays. They're short, relatively speaking. They're really well written, they're entertaining. Some of them have some laugh out loud comments. Don't deprive yourself of the experience just by listening to us use this as a gateway.

44:37 Wes: Great writer also, as you guys have mentioned, very erudite and unlike a lot of literary types who when they mention philosophy, it's clear that they have a passing acquaintance. She has all the. The evidence suggests that she is very well, philosophically well educated and knows what she's talking about. So really, really wonderful, really, among my people that I idolize as writers.

45:05 Mark: One of the loose ends for me that I like to mention in the closings here of like I threw in the comment, the reference, when she's talking about the way that we should be engaged with Art of the Live Creature, which then I had to look that up. That's from Dewey, from his Art as Experience and to reflect a little more on what sort of distance we're supposed to have from a work of art. That even part of what she's objecting to about Ortega y Gasset's essay here, which she largely agrees with. But I don't know if I really want to have a whole episode on him.

We probably should. Ortega y Gasset because he's so relentlessly, depressingly aristocratic. So whenever I've read any of his political stuff, it's just like, oh, the masses are just a bunch of fools and we need to protect culture from them. And that's kind of what's going on in his aesthetics here. It's a little more contentful and interesting in that essay we read than that. But still he's following, like I said, the Kantian having a proper distance from the aesthetic object so that you're not falling into the dramas that that's the dignified the way that the man of culture will appreciate these things.

And Dewey's response is actually the opposite, is that he wants to see, you know, us to see the artistic aspect of our everyday existence, just our going about our activities that we would not normally consider artistic, how we do them artistically. So I also think this also reminds me of Pirsig's idea of quality.

46:35 Dylan: Oh, I literally was rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the same time. In fact, I just finished it yesterday. And it is the idea of quality and what she's talking about.

46:48 Mark: Yep, yep. So I think Sontag really nicely brings together those two seemingly opposed views of on the one hand, have a distance from art, be dignified about it. On the other hand, no, no, no, throw yourself into art. Life is an art. She definitely seems like if you need to put her on one side or the other, on the side of Nietzsche and living as an art. But the fact that that can involve maintaining an artistic distance in, you know, and understanding the forms of things and not just liking movies because you like the characters, etc. That kind of stuff that is of interest to me.

So I want to follow up with that and read the Dewey. I want to thank everybody that participated in the drawing for the book A Philosophy of Clothes. I'm contacting the winners individually and if some of the winners don't want the book, then coming up with more winners. So I will issue a blog post@PartiallyExaminedLife.com with a full list of the winners when they are available. Our closing song today is called Mora. It's by Julie Slick from Nakedly Examined Music, episode 115. I invite you, as Sontag recommends, not to interpret it, just immerse yourself, have an immediate experience.

And if you want to hear more of Julie, go listen to the interview@nakedlyexaminermusic.com all right, thank you folks. Go and tell us what you think we should read to fill in our gaps on partiallyexaminedlife.com you can comment on the blog post associated with this episode, you can tweet at us, you can get on Facebook or email us@peltiallyexaminedlife.com we always love to hear from you and we would love if you would give us a nice rating or review on the iTunes store or wherever you listen to this. Thanks everybody. Good night.

48:20 Seth: Good night.

48:21 Wes: Night Good.

48:31 Unknown speaker: These are the voices in my head these are the noises in my head these are the noises that I heard in my head. Hello hello hello. These are the voices that I heard in my head these are the noises that I heard in my head these are the noises that I heard in my head these are the noises that I heard in my. Head these are the noises that I'll hear to these are the noises that I heard in my head these are the noises I will hear till I. Try to sleep Only dreams try to sleep. Sam.

50:38 Wes: Ra.

51:18 Unknown speaker: These are the voices that I hear in my head these are the noises that I'll hear to my these are the noises that I heard in my these are the noises I will hear till I will I sleep Wish to stream. Wish to dream.