Ep. 288: Scruton on Ethical Art (Part One)

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2:05 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set out to do philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 288 is something like what is the relationship between beauty and morality? And we read chapters five through nine of Roger Scruton's book Beauty from 2009. For more information please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer with body removed from the sullying interest of Peeping Tom in Madison, Wisconsin.

2:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin expressing but not representing in Austin, Texas.

2:38 Wes: This is Wes Owen, trying not to offend against the autonomy of aesthetic experience in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

2:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, an embodiment and not merely a body in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

2:50 Mark: All right, so we are more or less continuing our discussion from last time we brought up in chapters one through four. He had gone through different kinds of Beauty and brought up different philosophical questions. Why we would want to think about nature or think about human faces as models of beauty rather than paintings, you know, which is where most aesthetics tend to start, with paintings and music and things. In this one, we started out chapter five on Artistic beauty. I kind of thought that the whole second half of the book was like, okay, all this stuff was prelude or the things that we normally don't talk about when we talk about aesthetics.

And this part is going to be. It's going to get down to it. But no, actually, chapter five, Artistic Beauty, was just kind of another in the series and was part of the good general overview of issues in aesthetics. He talks about representation versus expression, the what is art? Question, which we already addressed in the Danto Nightcap, and then the remaining chapters six through eight. Chapter nine is just four pages, but are kind of his argument. There's some more historical stuff that comes out of that, but it's mostly synthesizing stuff, connecting the dots from earlier in the.

In the book, maybe repeating some themes that we already discussed in here. This chapter seven, Art and Eros, revisits this symposium. But now we have chapter five, Artistic Beauty, things like that on the table. So even though he already talked about sexual desire versus artistic appreciation, well, now we can talk specifically about paintings of nudes and things like that. In his overall, I think bi concluding thoughts. He's like, this has not just been a survey of aesthetics. This has been a polemic where his renowned conservatism actually comes pretty clearly to the fore, that this is something against taste being relative, for things actually being not just aesthetically successful in some broad sense, but beautiful in a sense that is supposed to connote the religious, connote the sacred, to transcendence the ordinary humdrum world.

And, you know, he just has great problems with the profane character of modern art and current society and how that seems to be against what beauty is all about.

5:04 Wes: He ends by telling us that he, you know, that he hasn't told us what beauty is and just that he's rejected one view and ignored a lot of others. And the one he rejects is the Neoplatonist view. And the others are, you know, he doesn't discuss certain classic theories like Hutcheson's unity and variety thesis. And he also doesn't, you know, try to give us necessary and sufficient properties for beauty. But, you know, he does focus on this idea of our disinterested, empathetic attention on the individual. And the Art and Eros chapter is a good way to get at that Especially in the case of erotic art.

Because there's a tension there between looking at a body and being stimulated by that. And then paying attention to someone's individuality and subjectivity. So I. I think that whole Kantian paradigm underlies the entire theory of beauty. This idea of there being a connection to the ethical and it having something to do with ultimately, like a respect for the subjectivity of others.

6:10 Dylan: Like you said, Wes, he doesn't exactly want to present us with a theory of beauty, but more or less make the argument that beauty matters. And he does this in the joke section, among other ones, in the artistic beauty part is to basically try to convince you that beauty exists and it matters. The mattering part has to do with morality. That beauty, in the end, is tied up with the way in which we address things in themselves, particular human beings. So addressing human beings as things in themselves is the moral connection. And as we drift away from being concerned about beauty, we become amoral. Because we're no longer engaging in the world in terms of appreciating them or engaging with them as things in themselves.

6:59 Wes: There's a connection between seeing the world as meaningful and being able to find it to be beautiful.

7:04 Dylan: And part of seeing as meaningful is understanding that there is something that it is in itself. That's part of what you are extracting in terms of the meaning as opposed to its mere expression. Right? The way it affects you. Or is it being its soul? And I guess that's one of the interesting aspects of having something in itself, is it's something in itself that's not merely its own subjectivity. That gets expressed in its own local terms. But it's a connecting activity, right? It's a connecting effect.

7:35 Seth: It's hard to untangle or to understand this. I want to bring up something from the Taste and order page 142. In the matter of aesthetic judgment. Objectivity and universality come apart in science and morality. The search for objectivity is the search for universally valid results. Results that must be accepted by every rational being. In the judgment of beauty. The search for objectivity is for valid and heightened forms of human experience. Forms in which human life can flower according to its inner need and achieve the kind of fruition that we witness in the Sistine Chapel, blah, blah, blah.

It is not aiming criticism, is not aiming to show you that you must. Like Hamlet, for example. It is aiming to expose the vision of human life which the play contains. And it does not claim that this vision of human life is universally available. So there's something that connects the notion of transcendence for him, with the notion of value in itself, there's some relation between acknowledging subjectivity and also simultaneously transcending that into the universal, which makes aesthetic judgment what it is, I guess I should say. And the connection between what Dylan was saying and what this passage is saying is something that I'm not.

Not entirely clear I've puzzled out.

8:58 Wes: He'll say something at the end of this passage which is pretty telling, which is that the objection that aesthetic reasons are purely persuasive simply reiterates the point that aesthetic judgment is rooted in subjective experience. So is the judgment of color. And is it not an objective fact that red things are red, blue things are blue? So this sounds like his. There's the hint of his constructivism and his Kantianism, but he just doesn't go there in any detail. Right. So to say that there's a kind of objectivity rooted in subjectivity, you know, we've seen that kind of thesis before. That's just the details of what it means to be a constructivist he doesn't

9:38 Dylan: talk about, but it does underlie the whole thing.

9:41 Mark: I liked your, those two quotes from chapter six there. I can supplement that with a quote from the very end. So as Seth was saying, you know, he says in his two and a half page concluding thoughts chapter that he hasn't given a definition of beauty. You might go into, you know, classical. If we were going to read a lot more in the history of aesthetics, then there would be like, oh, beauty is all about symmetry. That just makes it sound like it's an objective thing that we can all agree on. And if I point out that there is symmetry there and call your attention to it, then the thesis is you're just naturally going to find that beautiful.

And the only reason you wouldn't find that beautiful is if you're just not seeing it. So it's just like any other sort of thing that science would discover. He's trying to avoid the dilemma of either Beauty is objective in that way. Objective and definable. Right. It's almost reducible to something else. Since he's taking from Hume here, Hume's thing about the is ought thing. Hume, as we're going to find out in our next episode where we actually read Hume on this. There's something comparable that happens with beauty that you can't just say, just describe non aesthetic features of something and say those are the same.

The beautiful is reducible to symmetry or reducible to something else. The beautiful has to be a sui generis thing that we discover. But that makes it sound like the other horn of the dilemma is that, well, it's just beauties in the eye of the beholder. We've said it's not an objective thing like the symmetry of form. So therefore it has to be subjective. Therefore everybody's judgment of beauty is equally valid. And that's his main enemy, that sort of relativism. In this whole book, this is 196. Does this imply his rejection of these definitions that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that there is no objective property that we recognize and about whose nature and value we can agree?

My answer is simply this. Everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded. It challenges to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find. Art, nature, and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the center of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this and still be free. To see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or as a source of transient pleasure is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives.

Is to fail to see that for a free being there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action. The judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it. It may express their pleasure and their taste, but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals. That's the end of the book.

12:25 Wes: There's a section right before the one that Seth was reading from called the Search for Objectivity. In this, he gives us the same sort of these ideas again. They're a little bit in tension with each other. And he doesn't explain it, but, you know, he'll say that if we ask the question of whether there are these kind of universal standards of beauty that are persuasive to all rational beings, we can point to a lot of considerations to the contrary. Just the fact that cultural contexts are not universal. And making aesthetic judgments about different cultural products really requires being plugged into that culture, right?

You gotta understand the conventions. You gotta understand the allusions. You gotta be able to really understand the aesthetic object by its own standard, by the standards of the culture. And what he'll say is, no matter what kind of argument a critic makes about whether a work of art is aesthetically successful, you can reject that argument in a way that you can't reject scientific and ethical arguments like you just read and say, yeah, I still don't see it. You're trying to convince me that Wild Strawberries is a great film, but I just don't see it.

Then there's nothing that the critic can say to that. And then finally, because of the element of play in art, if we were to talk about rules and precepts and symmetry and order and all that stuff, you have to say, well, actually the rules are there to be transcended. There's an element of freedom, right, that's fundamental to the aesthetic enterprise. So they're played with and broken in a way they're there, but they're not there in some, some easy way. But then, you know, finally he'll say, despite all those considerations, we still have to say that there are cross cultural human universals with regard to beauty that are rooted in human nature and rooted in our rational interests.

And then he goes back to the ideas of, you know, symmetry and order and proportion and harmony and all that stuff. All that, all that is real, that is relevant. It's just not so easily applicable that you can say, hey, here are the sufficient and necessary conditions to call something beautiful, right?

14:36 Mark: They're not prescriptive. Which I think is, we got from Santayana before on our episode on that is like, you can come up with all these rules after the fact. You, you look at great art and say, oh, that I see, this is what, this is what makes this art so effective for me. But you can't then say, now I've developed the rules for what makes great art. Let's apply that to new cases. You're always going to have to judge cases on their own merits, so to speak.

15:01 Dylan: And this is in direct alignment with Scruton's emphasis on the contemplative nature of the engagement of beauty and art. It's a cognitive interaction. And he's in this line where the fact that you have to make an argument for something doesn't mean that it's relative. And the fact that you can make different kinds of arguments doesn't mean that it's relative. And the fact that you could disregard an argument doesn't make the conclusion relative subjectivity without relativity.

15:30 Seth: So I can tell you that I don't find something beautiful that doesn't negate the proposition that it is beautiful because there's no logical relationship between the things.

15:42 Wes: And we could listen to you debate someone about that and you give a great argument about why something is beautiful and someone else not so great an argument. Or they just say, I don't see it. You could say, well, the average audience is going to understand that you're a good critic and the other person isn't, even if they don't see it.

15:59 Seth: This is what brings me back, then, to this question of objectivity and universality. So the mechanics of how this would work are really interesting to me because the claim that he's making about objectivity versus universality is that there's a way to talk about a work of art where you claim that it essentially transcends its form, transcends its medium and its form of expression, to speak to some kind of. I'm using the word transcendent. I really don't know if that's the right word. But transcendent values or experience or something that you could conceivably connect to subjectively.

The work is specific, but it addresses some kind of more general themes of human experience that you could potentially subjectively interact with in his terms. That's what makes it objective. But the fact that the generality that it is speaking to isn't universally applicable. It's not a story about every single person on earth. It's a story about Willy Loman makes it not universal. But simultaneously, not universal just means also subjective, which means it's applicable to some people and not applicable to others. So the idea that you could be saying here something like, hey, look, this is a story that's beautiful because it expresses some truth, some more general truth about the experience that's being related by those characters.

Just because you can't relate to that experience doesn't mean that it's not an objectively beautiful work, and also doesn't mean that your judgment, nor my judgment that it is beautiful, your judgment that it's not, are invalidated. That doesn't strike me as totally ridiculous.

17:45 Mark: I know we've been equating Scruton with Kant to some extent because he is this Kant scholar and, you know, betrays a lot of sympathy with theory. But I thought I recalled that Kant's epistemology switches those around. So color vision, for instance, is subjective, but it is universal. And so likewise, the same would apply to the artistic sense. I think it is something that goes on in each individual subjectivity. You know, it's not something that beauty's objectively in the thing, but at the same time, it is affects us all the same way. And so it is. I might be actually describing Hume's view more than.

18:25 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think for Kant, right, objectivity is not about comparison of the thing in itself or what's in the thing in itself. Right. So everything objective is subjective. You know, objects are our constructs. And when we talk about objectivity, we just mean that our application of concepts to those objects accords in some way with the way they've been constructed by us or the appearances. So, you know, when I say something is objectively red, it doesn't consequence. Say the thing in itself is not red, the thing out there. But objectivity doesn't have anything to do with the thing in itself.

It has to do with the correspondence between the phenomenon and judgment. So you. You can get a lot of mileage out of that with aesthetics, because you can say, yeah, beauty is a lot like calling things red and a lot of it. The way things reason why we can. There's objectivity between us is because our cognitive faculties work the same. Right. We both see things. I can say it's objectively red, and it's grounded in the fact that we both have the same types of minds and brains. That'll. Or we can agree on that and the same thing with beauty. You could say there are certain fundamental things about the human mind that are the same, and the objectivity of beauty arises out of those.

Something fundamental about the mind, but it doesn't mean it's not objective.

19:36 Mark: So then the term universal is not really. That's not a technical term of Kant's. So we can't really say the fact that color vision is probably more like spatial intuition than it is like number and logic and things. So it's not like all rational beings are going to have the same kind of color vision. That is something that is specific to. So is that a way to say that Scruton is actually using those terms the same way Kant at least could use them, that color vision is objective but not universal. Not every rational being would necessarily agree. And the same is going to go for judgments of beauty.

20:11 Wes: Yeah, I think that sounds right.

20:12 Mark: Okay, we can drill a little more into that when we actually read Hume next time. I mean, in the abstract. I like it. And I think our remaining task is sort of to give what are his supporting examples, what are his supporting concepts? Because to merely say it's not like everybody must identify with Hamlet. I just want to show that this is a legitimate. You know, as the art critic trying to convince you that Hamlet is good, I want to show you that this is a legitimate and like, deep form of life that is being exposed here. That is the kind of relativism in art that I really connect with because it's about connecting with particular works that your judgment that something sucks might not be that legitimate because it just means that you don't get it.

Scruton thinks that he really does understand a lot of the things that he thinks sucks. And he thinks that they suck because they're violating the whole purpose of art that there is in saying that this is a legitimate and deep form of life. In Hamlet, he thinks that there are other kinds of arts that just do not admit of that kind of depth, that they are, in fact, actively anti depth, that they, instead of making things sacred, that you can contemplate them, they purposefully debase. So, like, that's the kind of art which I think you would like.

Adorno, like some of the other snobbish figures that we've considered here, would be almost all the popular art that ends up being kitschy. It ends up, you know, so he doesn't like pretty much anything that would be on TV and also in modern art museums that, like that democratic, pseudo avant garde spirit that has captured the academy as far as he's concerned, as far as the fine arts go. He gives this analysis of, well, what the real modernists, like T.S. eliot were doing is, yes, they use weird forms like Schoenberg, but they were actually doing it as a conservative project to put beauty back in the world.

22:08 Wes: Yeah. And this is T.S. eliot's, like, explicit thesis about what he was doing, his own understanding. But, you know, I mean, it helps to, like, even before you get to the avant garde and to profanation and all that stuff, desecration, just distinction between imagination and fantasy, which I kind of talked about a little bit in the last episode, too. And Mark, this kind of came up in our Game of Thrones episode that we did where basically I was arguing that, you know, there's a difference between fantasy and daydreaming, which are essentially wish fulfillment.

And they're meant to gratify. Soap operas, do this, but, you know, gratify fantasies of power or sex or violence or something like that, and something aesthetic. So for Scruton, and this is an extension, you know, we talked about this last time, but it's an extension of this idea that the way he puts it is it creates, quote, a distance between us and the scene. It portrays a distance sufficient to engender disinterested sympathy for the characters rather than vicarious emotions of our own. And then he gives a great example of Bergman and talks about the way the situations and characters sort of.

Or he puts the situations and characters in light of our own sympathetic responses to them. Which is not to say that art can't be entertaining. It can be sort of hybrid, but it can't just be purely entertainment in the sense of wish fulfillment and fantasy. There has to be something of that distance. So even though he doesn't say that he gives these necessary conditions, I'd be strongly inclined to say that that's a necessary condition of the aesthetic. This kind of distance he talks about. Or disinterested sympathy. That's the phrase he uses.

23:49 Dylan: It would be core to the contemplative engagement. Right? That's right. In the lane of imagination and not fantasy.

23:58 Wes: You know, it doesn't give you a criterion of what's in the object. It's talking about human. The human mind or human psychology, in a way. And I think that's the thing you have to talk about human psychology if you really want to understand beauty.

24:11 Dylan: And just noting that there's a difference in the kind of engagement. And I guess, you know, at the end when he starts talking about profanation and Disney ification and kitsch and stuff like that, you know, my strong sense is that it's like the problem of advertising taking over everything. It's the problem of, well, I guess fantasy being the primary engagement we have rather than imagination. And it means that we lose what, an engagement with beauty, which he links with an engagement with sacrifice, with an engagement of basically making choices.

24:45 Mark: Yeah, let's say more about that sacrifice thing because the examples he gives are examples like within an opera of a character sacrificing themselves. But I think what he's trying to get at is kids today, you know, they don't understand the sacrifice that we just all took as a matter of course, when we all fought in World War II and stuff like that. And it's true, that is something that is anathema to not just the youth of today, but the people of today. That having, you know, at least in the west, in the US of having a draft or just the idea of we have to sacrifice and raise taxes in order to prevent climate change or any of that kind of stuff, that sacrifice has just become something that was regarded as a value and is not anymore.

But I didn't completely get it. Seemed like a little bit of a jump from the talk about how no beauty is a real and a transcendent thing to this sacrifice has something to do with that. I was not clear on that at all.

25:47 Wes: I have something to say about that, but it's kind of extraneous to the text. It's something I thought a lot about because I thought about tragedy and I did that review of Critchley's tragedy book. And it's also part of psychoanalytic aesthetics. But the idea is that why is it that we get enjoyment from tragedy from seeing basically people lose everything from that sacrificial element of it? The idea is that those losses correspond to aesthetic gains or ultimately to psychological gains in the sense of integration, which in psychoanalysis is strongly correlated with mourning, the concept of mourning and the concept of loss.

So there's a whole literature that connects these concepts of loss and sacrifice and what happens in tragedy to aesthetic experience in which we identify with total loss. It's not unrelated, by the way, to the idea of distance. And we got at some of this in Aristotle, I think. Right. So Plato's claim is got to kick the poets out because it's all just sentimentality. When we identify with those people in these tragic stories, losing everything, we're just learning to become sentimental. And Aristotle says, no, identification is more complicated than that.

This is about catharsis. And we can actually be, in some way we can be improved, maybe even ethically improved by identifying with all this loss. So anyway, yeah.

27:12 Dylan: By engaging with the notion and the experience in some way during the play of sacrifice without having to suffer it.

27:20 Wes: Yeah. So that's our poetics. I think I said Aristotle episode. I meant our poetics episode.

27:24 Mark: I can see him objecting to the. What he calls the Disneyfication which denies that tragedy occurs is necessary. I don't know that that is, you know, Bambi. There's a lot of tragedy, even in old style Disney.

27:39 Dylan: Yeah, I guess that's true.

27:41 Wes: Is it sacrifice though? It wouldn't be understood as tragedy in the genre sense. Like this doesn't mean. Just means something bad happens like Bambi's. It's a tragedy that Bambi's mother's mother died. That doesn't make it a tragic in sense of genre. And it doesn't make it a sacrifice in this sense. Sacrificial in the sense of redemptive.

28:00 Seth: I'm struggling with the sacrifice part of things. I don't understand the mechanism or the

28:05 Mark: reason with Bambi in particular. I remember reading an article recently of like what the original Bambi story was about was a Pre World War II something written by a Jewish author about antisemitism. And that the whole Bambi's mom dying and the whole thing was super depressing because it's like we Jews are like the deer running. So the fact that this was taken over by Walt Disney, who didn't understand where the story was coming from and made into this family friendly thing. That is a great example of. Even if there's something depressing that's happened, it has been Disney fied, it has been glossed over in a way.

It's. The thing that's stopping me is I can see why one would object to that as being sort of untruthful. Good art is supposed to be true art. But Scruton also objects to the kind of art that revels in unredemptive tragedy. That there has to be, yes, there is tragedy, but there's also the peak of divinity that shines upon all of us, the lens through which we can make tragedy make sense and sort of become beautiful to us.

29:08 Seth: We have to keep in mind that he's talking about a subjective experience. So if you have something which portrays potentially tragic situations but does not objectify them in the appropriate way that allows you to experience the actual trauma of the tragedy and presumably also the redemptive aspect of it, then that's Disneyfication. Or that's. We have to acknowledge within the framework Disneyfication or Disneyfied things are not beautiful. That's the point he's trying to make. But what I'm struggling with trying to understand here is he's essentially saying, I guess for a work of art to be beautiful, it is going to drag you subjectively in your experience through some kind of a process where you experience at a distance, as Wes said, right at remove.

But you're going to. You'll imagine yourself experiencing the loss that the characters, you won't fantasize about being the character getting, you know, St. Sebastian getting shot by arrows. You won't be Mishima, right? But you'll imagine at some remove what it would be like to be that person. And then you'll have that experience as some kind of subjective experience of loss and trauma. And then through that process, you'll come back to yourself with some kind of new awareness or new understanding. And art that doesn't take you on that journey is not beautiful.

30:40 Mark: It's just.

30:40 Seth: It's kitsch or it's Disneyfied, or it's something like that, but it's substandard to him. Of the three of you educated, well rounded, well traveled, have you stood before a work of art and had an experience as he describes, or listened to a piece of music and had an experience such as he describes, describes in

31:01 Wes: the sense of the aesthetic distance or which part of it are you that

31:05 Seth: you've had a subjective experience of being drawn towards some sort of higher order truth or reality of human experience that you've experienced at a distance, but experienced very vividly and then kind of come back to yourself.

31:22 Mark: It's hard to say. For me, I've certainly had transcendent seeming experiences with. It's just whether you see your own experience as transcendent is something that changes over time. I feel like as a very young person, every time I had a flush of warmth in the presence of, you know, in church, everybody singing together or just beholding a beautiful figure of a person that I was admiring. But, you know, I just have gotten much more cynical about that over the years. And so even though I can still be gut punched in that way, such that I really am feeling something, I just don't interpret it as a religious experience.

I interpret it as biological. And I think he's going to say that I'm corrupted by our current irreligious society, that he plays this game like the sacred, makes demands on us, that our ancestors reaching out through our culture and making demands on us. And we don't like those demands. We're afraid of those demands. We don't want to have to obey and to serve and to sacrifice. And so we respond by demeaning everything and saying, oh, that's just a bunch of hooey and we need to use reason and figure things out freshly for ourselves. Or I'm a badass existentialist and I'm not bound by any commandments of any sort that has been set on me before.

It's all. But I think those are positive philosophical advances, that we should not be dominated by tradition in this way. And it's not merely that I sneakily, underlyingly realize that actually there is a God, there is a tradition. There is these objective demands that I'm just too cowardly to meet. And so I dismiss them in a disingenuous way. That is his charge.

33:05 Dylan: I don't think that he goes that far. I think that you're feeling sort of self consciously guilty about his charge. In a funny way, thou doth protest too much in a certain way. I think that he goes a certain distance that direction. He definitely sees that the experience of sacrifice is as important. But it comes down to him saying that that's at the root of deciding that life is worthwhile, that things are better than others, that life is worth living more than it's not worth living. I think on 193 this is following in line with the kitsch thing.

He says Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost and therefore of its reality. Desecration augments the cost of feeling and so frightens us away from it. The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by the thing which they deny, which is sacrifice. The deaths that occur in real tragedies are bearable to us because we see them under the aspect of sacrifice. The tragic hero is both self sacrificed and a sacrificial victim. And the awe we feel at his death is in some way redemptive, a proof that his life was worthwhile. Love and affection between people is real only to the extent that it prepares the way for sacrifice.

Sacrifice is the core of virtue and the origin of meaning and true theme of high art. Sacrifice can be made also remain meaningless by desecration. What that made me think of, especially in the story of modern art and the theme of sacrifice and that life becomes meaningless. It made me think of stuff I've been reading about World War I and that the reaction of kind of modernism makes a lot of sense in the context of the utter desecration of life in the experience of soldiers and people during World War I. In which you just. There was just kind of this maw of just absolute meaninglessness about what their lives were being given for.

And that's the kind of what he means by desecration. It just annihilates what meaning there is in life. And that sacrifice amounts to meaningful giving up. And if it's not meaningful giving up, then it's just annihilation.

35:13 Wes: So I'm going to try to explain my take on this whole sacrifice thing again. Maybe it'll make sense, maybe it won't. But I think of this in terms of. In the case of a tragedy, when we identify with the total loss of someone in the tragedy, it's a recapitulation or what we're feeling is our own total loss, which we all have felt. We could even put that in Hegelian terms or Lacanian terms. It's the total loss of the intervention, of the symbolic order, of the way in which the fact that we use signifiers and our self conscious beings distances us from the real.

So what's lost is the real. And then you can also put that in more Freudian terms. In terms of the loss of the object of early childhood and that attachment and the resolution of the Oedipus complex, meaning that you give that up in favor of identifications. You start instead of being taken care of by an ideal loving caretaker mother, whatever you care, start caring about values. You start caring about morality, about aspirations, what you're going to do when you grow up. So those sorts of losses are basically associated with maturity. The idea is that the playfulness of the artist is a recapitulation of the crossing the threshold of maturity, of embracing loss for the sake of maturation.

And then that experience is reproduced in the audience. So that it's about. It's almost like the experience of the tragic. It's this kind of condensed, intense experience of psychological organization or integration. So you have this tremendous integrating experience. Focused with kind of more mournful feeling that you get in tragedy. And so that's why I think sacrifice. I think he's spot on, even though he doesn't explain it. And again, we see the element of sacrifice here. Just in the idea that we have to get rid of fantasy. We have to get rid of the appetitive part of this or abstract from our will and our appetite.

In order to enjoy things aesthetically. Which can actually be very boring. You know, like, Seth, you were talking about standing in front of paintings like, I get that more now. But, you know, in my youth, a lot of things that people would have considered high art. I would have just thought, well, that's. I don't have the attention span, and for that it's boring. But that's kind of what beauty is in itself. It's extremely boring because it's so distanced from our everyday appetitive concerns. And that's the sacrifice we make when we attend at the Beautiful.

37:43 Mark: Can I just read a quote here from 184 that I don't think I was over? Granted, I read this in conjunction with reading his book on conservatism. Which also talks about T.S. eliot. And there are definite ways in which these come together. That it's a single social project that he's trying to do. But this is literally in this book as well, that page 184. He's talking about the democratic attitude. In other words, everybody's taste is equally as good as everybody else's. That that is invariably in conflict with itself. It's impossible to live as though there were no aesthetic values.

While living a real life among human beings. So therefore, aesthetic judgment begins to be experienced as an affliction. It imposes an intolerable burden. Something that we must live up to. A world of ideals and aspirations that is in sharp conflict with the tawdriness of our improvised lives. It is perched like an owl on our shoulders. While we try to hide our pet rodents in our clothes. The temptation is to turn on it and chew it away. The desire to desecrate is the desire to turn aesthetic judgment against itself so that it no longer seems like a judgment of us.

This you see all the time in children, the delight in disgusting noises, words, allusions, which helps them to distance themselves from the adult world that judges them, whose authority they wish to deny. Hence the appeal of Roald Dahl. That ordinary refuge of children from the burden of adult judgment is the refuge, too, of adults from the burden of their culture. By using culture as an instrument of desecration, they neutralize its claims. It loses all authority and becomes a fellow conspirator in the plot against value.

39:10 Wes: I think that is absolutely spot on. And I think that the remark about the owl is probably the best line in the book.

39:19 Mark: He is a good writer.

39:20 Wes: Such a great metaphor. But, yeah, I mean, the beautiful is dangerous because it suggests that some people are more refined than others and that we have to do the work of that refinement. And that's part of what I talked about, being younger and not as refined in that sense, and not being able to see what I might now see in works of art. That's definitely the case. You have to cultivate.

39:41 Dylan: I don't disagree with this at all, but I do find it a little bit at tension with the notion that the beautiful is something that we're drawn to, which he talks about earlier. And I guess it feels like on one hand and the other, the beautiful as a manifestation of contemplation is it being a mode by which we engage. We have to cultivate our understanding of it in order to appreciate it. And in that cultivation, we have a higher order experience. And then there's also the notion of the beautiful, or the aspect of the beautiful as being something that is. Just draws us in, that attracts us in a way that we walk to it. Right. And so it feels that there's some tension there, that the things that we were talking about, how much work it is to appreciate something that's truly beautiful, so to speak, is where's the part that we walk to it? Why would we even walk to try to contemplate it? Right.

40:41 Mark: I think Wes gave a psychological answer to that. But, Seth, you asked the question, answer it yourself. Whether your experiences matches phenomenologically with what he's describing.

40:49 Seth: As I would have to say that much like my subjective experience with everything else that has changed over time. And I can remember being in my 20s and going to. I was studying in Europe and I went to museums. I saw all kinds of, like, art, like the triptych in Colmar and medieval stuff didn't get me. I didn't have the kind of subjective experience he describes when I was looking at 17,000 annunciations or, you know, Madonna and Childs. But when I went to the Vatican and I saw Moses and I saw the Pieta and I saw Laocoön, something happened. I had a subjective experience in front of Laocoön that I can't describe that was not similar to what it was in front of other things.

And part of that is me knowing the legend behind it. Part of me is maybe anticipating going to see that. But at that same time, I did not have any kind of similar subjective experience with anything that was considered, quote, unquote, modern art. Right. Abstract or whatever. And then just since I've been doing this podcast with you guys and we read Danto, and I started to go more modern art. I've had a subjectively objective experience in his description in front of Rothko, Cy Twombly, and probably one or two other things that installations, you know, weird kind of.

So I think what he's trying to give voice to is a type of subjective experience that art can move you to. And he's doing it in the framework of talking about beauty. So I guess maybe he's trying to determine. He is trying to come up with some kind of consistent mechanism or some framework for describing this that would describe the experience across different art forms and different genres and different times. But if you just think of it in terms of a work of art drawing you to experientially, not intellectually, not conceptually, not deductively, but you stand in front of a work of art and in front of it you have a subjective experience that draws you outside of yourself.

Let's just call that the sacrifice that you're being drawn outside of yourself into something broader and more universal, as opposed to being drawn inward into a fantasy, instead being. Using your imagination and being drawn outward and have this subjective experience that requires your imagination, I really gotta say, there's something to it. There's something, I think there. Yeah, I want to have a Pel event down here in Texas. And we'll all go to Houston and we'll go to the Menil and the Rothko Chapel and the Cy Twombly Museum, and we'll see the.

There's another installation there in that same place. The guy who does light installations with

43:51 Mark: colored bulbs and stuff when the last coronavirus is slain.

43:56 Seth: Well, we're at B2 of omicron B2. There's only so many More letters in the Greek Alphabet and then it's. It becomes harmless. Right.

44:05 Mark: So I guess any last points to wrap up part one here? There's a lot more that we can talk about, Wes, given that his initial distinction in chapter five between fantasy and imagination. So talking about more of what he means by imagination as opposed to this reality addiction is another way he talks about fantasy. And there's quite a long discussion going from discussion of various nudes to pornography. And he uses pornography of sort of his test case of what a degraded view, a desecrating view of human relations is. And we've kind of already talked a little about that in our previous discussion of this.

Just that he sees erotic love as not love of body parts that are just replaceable. I just want boobs. Bring me any boobs. I don't care who they're attached to. But, but you know, is appreciating someone human beauty like that their whole personhood is showing up as embodied. That that is essential.

45:09 Wes: They have to be in the boobs.

45:11 Mark: Yes, exactly. Who the boobs are part of is very important. They're not merely replaceable boobs. So yeah, supporters can, if you want

45:19 Wes: to hear us talk more about boobs that is available in a non pornographic way.

45:25 Mark: And he also addresses in that chapter four some, some of the more classical problems about representation and expression which he has. He's sort of summing up different views on that and just problems with the whole idea of what to express something is like. Because it sounds like that points at something external. And so that sounds like a form of representation that this expresses my sorrow. Well, just tell me about your sorrow in some other way. It sounds like it's just giving you information about the sorrow, but it can't be that. So that is something we can deal a little more with.

And I'm sure we'll find some other points how he relates this all to that fittingness that was the topic of the chapter right before we ended with last time. Everyday Beauty, chapter four. So he kind of brings that back which. That sounds from what we've said here pretty far flung from appreciating the God dripping through into tragedy and sacrifice and all. You know, this all sounds very elevated beyond the reach of normal everyday perception. But he really does want to ground this whole notion of beauty in again it being a social thing that we deal with on a moment to moment basis in looking at each other's clothes and saying how we're going to communicate with each other through our clothes and with our style and how we Arrange the feng shui of the furniture in the room and just every little thing.

The sense of beauty creeps in on us. So you'll hear all that in part two. Supporters can get that as the next thing in your feed, That refresh you've been putting off until the right deal came along.

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