Ep. 318: Friedrich Schiller on the Civilizing Potential of Art (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 318 is something like, how can art make people more ethical? We read letters 1 through 15 in Friedrich Schiller's on the Aesthetic Education of man from 1795. For more information, please see partially examinedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison. The Carrying within myself a pure ideal man with whose unalterable unity it is the great task of my existence to harmonize.

0:40 Seth: This is Seth Paskin living a degraded humanity beneath the tyrannous yoke of necessity in Austin, Texas.

0:50 Wes: Why am I not surprised you guys went exactly opposite directions. I'm gonna go for the in between. This is Wes Alwan, somewhere between savagery and barbarity in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:02 Mark: And we have a special.

1:04 Markus: My name is Markus Reuter, and that's who I am, really. I am my name.

1:13 Mark: I have this on my list of aesthetics episodes. We haven't done one of those in a few months. Dylan announced that he couldn't make it, so I went through my Rolodex of who among my music guests sounded like would be good. And Marcus, you've done your own podcast. Actually, was being on my music podcast. It seems like you started doing your own music interviews right after that.

1:33 Markus: I don't remember when that was, but yeah, it's possible. I love music, but I love life, right. And when Covid hit, life was taking a, like, a dent. And so I needed to start talking to my friends. And that was the reason why I started the podcast. And it was unlike your podcast, where there is a theme I left everything open to see, like, where does the conversation go? And it could be anything from music to philosophy to technology. And the funny thing is that the theme of this podcast. So, like, Schiller's thoughts on what really, that's something that I would like to discuss with you guys.

Really is very relevant today because he says something about the industrialization and how that sort of has had already back then, changed people. And I think we're really at the tail end of that development where people really have to become more human again and not see themselves as part of an industry or just a little part of a big machine. When you asked me like two weeks ago, I thought this is. This is a perfect topic to talk about.

2:36 Mark: Well, I felt a little bad as we were getting into it that he doesn't, you know, of these 15, what they're 28 something letters in here.

2:43 Markus: 27.

2:44 Mark: 27, okay. And we read about, about the first half of the book, and he brings up actual art on number nine. So he takes quite a while. It's all politics. It's all, what's wrong with the world today.

2:57 Markus: He talks about art before, right? He talks about the artist in letter nine. And that's sort of like, I find that relevant, you know, because an artist is not the same thing.

3:08 Wes: It is odd when you. When you first read it and you're thinking, oh, yeah, this is a huge political preamble. But he's, of course, setting us up for, in a way, the central argument of the book, right, is that the transformation. Progress in society and the transformation of the state in particular, which has not gone so well right. Recently with the French Revolution, which is something for which Schiller initially had high hopes, requires. It requires more than an appeal to rationality. It requires aesthetic education, which is a really interesting idea. So he's setting us up for that argument in a very elaborate way in the beginning.

3:49 Mark: Seth, opening thoughts.

3:51 Seth: So I did take the time to read the intro to the Dover edition, which is the PDF that we used. And at first I was a little concerned that it might have colored my approach to the book. But then when I got into it, I really started to enjoy the language he talks about, the way that Schiller mixes the philosophical and the poetic in the way that he speaks. And you immediately get a flavor of that in his writing, which is really attractive. And so that combined with the fact that, you know, these are letters to a prince or some sort of a ruler. So the emphasis on the state and what constitutes or how to make up a state, you know, I just thought of other philosophers we read who were writing books that were dedicated to their patrons.

So I gave it a little slack, and I did. I remember getting to the sixth and being like, okay, we gotta turn the corner here on the solution. But I've really enjoyed it, and I'm excited to not just have this conversation, but potentially go a little further. I have ambitious plans for the notion of an emancipatory aesthetic education, redeeming us from our ideological prison of symbolic language.

5:04 Mark: This guy Reginald Snell, who wrote this intro to the Dover version, he sort of tries to set the bar low that he says, look, Schiller is opponent poet. He's not really a philosopher. He's an amateur philosopher. He's ripping off a lot of other people. He says it is much a piece of feeling as a piece of thinking. So he's trying to say, take this for what it is, and he's not going to be consistent with his terminology. I wish I hadn't read that because

5:29 Markus: Same here, I was annoyed. I was annoyed at that text.

5:32 Wes: I didn't read that intro because I was using the Penguin edition, which it sounds like has a much more sober, scholarly introduction and less opinionated maybe about that particular aspect to Schiller. I didn't find it that way. If anything, that's written in a very. At least in my translation, a very elaborate, complicated style that both, you know, reflects Schiller's artistic abilities and also, you know, the influence of Kant. Right. And German idealism. So by the time we get to the end of the reading, he's making pretty complicated arguments. As far as I can tell, they're very speculative. But if the criticism of Snell is that it's. Well, this is all very speculative and high flying. Well, that's kind of German idealism in general.

6:15 Markus: But what do you expect from an artist to write about art? That's like the first thing that kind of, like, was kind of funny to me. How could there be any surprises in his opinion and stance on things? This was what I found interesting. I'm not a philosopher. I wouldn't even know what the definition of philosopher is. But he vouches for what he believes, for what he does. That's at least how I see it.

6:43 Mark: I would expect him to get to some examples or talk about specific poems or something that's a little more hands on. Is Schiller still lauded? Is he regarded like Goethe as a national somebody that you have to read growing up?

6:57 Markus: I hate to say it, but I left school when I was 19. That was 31 years ago. And I remember that we read Schiller in school, but I don't know what that's like nowadays. You know, like, people still know that Goethe and Schiller were friends and, you know, there are jokes about that and stuff like that, but I wouldn't really know.

7:16 Wes: I was listening to a podcast that was sort of making Schiller out to be like, still to be Germany's Shakespeare. And I didn't know if that was true.

7:24 Markus: No, I think that's Goethe. That's definitely Goethe.

7:27 Wes: That's Goethe. Okay.

7:28 Markus: Yeah, I did read the English text, I have to say, but I looked a little bit at the German version, and it looked to me as if he was trying to be less poetic than he would be in his role as a writer, as a poet, which makes sense that may also be the reason why the art. The term artist, like, first comes up in the ninth letter. He's not calling things art. He's using the word aesthetic. And also, I mean, did you guys find a definition of what he really means by that? What is this aesthetic for him?

7:58 Mark: Well, I think that's kind of the puzzle that he, at the end of our reading, is starting to unravel because the overall story here is based on the French Revolution. We're making this transition. And I should remind folks, we have an episode on Immanuel Kant's what is Enlightenment? Essay, which was right around the same time. And so that was part of a public debate about. It seems like everybody deserves rights, but can they handle it? From the French Revolution, it seems like the masses, even though you're absolutely right in demanding their rights and demanding not being oppressed and having a government run by force, the government should instead but run by reason and by popular acclaim.

But yet there's worry in Germany at least, as to whether that is really a feasible thing. And so that is what Schiller is talking about, that he's like, on the one hand, the people, the masses, are just still kind of like Hobbes was describing back, you know, why do we have society in the first place? Because without government, without force, life is nasty, brutish and short. Everybody's just a savage. But on the one hand, these upper class, like the French nobles that were being overthrown, it's not like they're, you know, have become philosopher kings.

No, they're, like, lazy, and they don't have a great sense of art, you know, are not worthy of their status. And the thing that Kant is trying to shoot for, where each of us is governed by our own law, which ends up being the moral law, because we're all run by reason. And so that's what the ideal democracy would be, is everybody gets enlightened in this way. So we've got this rift between the savages and the barbarians that seems like a weird. I think the Philistines would be better, but. Yeah.

9:44 Wes: So speaking of Kant, I just want to back up to Marcus's question of the definition of the aesthetics. Just to mention that Schiller is pivoting off of Kant's definition of the aesthetic. And this has roots in previous thinkers, some of which we've gone over. Who was that? Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and. But anyway, the idea is that the aesthetic involves a disinterested grasp of certain objects. Right. Disinterest in the sense, not uninterested as Mark pointed out recently, disinterest in the sense that we approach a particular object formally in a sense, and not according to our own appetites or interests.

Right. So the example I've brought up again and again in this podcast is seeing an app apple and thinking oh, that would be nice to eat, which is an appetitive non aesthetic approach to it. And then on the other hand thinking oh, that's beautiful. Which is. Does not mean I want to do anything with that object. But it involves some other puzzling relationship to the object which Kant ends up in the third critique, which we've also done an episode on describing as involving a free play of the imagination with those representations. Which just means that it's an unusual use of the understanding in which instead of it's still the understanding.

So it's. It's still something to do with concepts, but it's not our typical use of the understanding in which we take particulars and apply concepts to them. That's not what is going on in our aesthetic experience. So we can say more about that later. I just wanted to say that up front since this play impulse is really, I think pivoting off of that idea of the free play of the understanding, but it's going to make it more into an ontology, something about the object

11:26 Seth: that's going to be important because it's one of the things that I struggled with in just the part that we read here is what you said, Wes, about not taking the object as a particular and trying to subsume it under a universal concept. Also not treat it instrumentally, as you said, like you want to eat it. Those two things which are related in some sense and ultimately if you think about the connection between the instrumental use of something versus this notion of a free play is how you're going to get ultimately to some notion of being, you know, end versus means. And that's part of the role that this plays here that he's wanting to adopt.

12:00 Wes: But Mark, I kind of. You were introducing us to the political aspect of this, the two extremes, savagery and barbarianism, which. Which will correspond. Right. He's really ultimately through this whole thing talking about the two sides of human nature, right? The sensuous and the feeling and the corresponding to constitute faculties. Sensation slash intuition and then reason slash understanding. So and either of these sides can get over accentuated and that's part of the problem. So there's been a revolution. Supposedly it was going to be. It's the age of the Enlightenment, the rationalities, when it was going to be ascendant. And it ended up in a big bloodbath. And then the question is, what do we do from here? And how are we going to improve society if we can't simply say, okay, let's repress the impulses and be reasonable? That apparently does not work.

12:47 Markus: You guys are using words that I'm not super familiar with. You need to know that, right? But anyway, I'm kind of like human beings, right? They have a tendency. They want to believe we can say that they need some sort of. I'm not saying everybody, but they need some sort of reason to live that is of a sensual quality, right? And if that is looking at the apple or the painting of an apple, the painting of a scenery, this whole idea of Romanticism, which we apply that word to an epoch, right? But it's not really or an idea, but it's something that's always been present.

And as far as I understand it, the industrialization led to this possibility that the Romantic view is not necessary to survive. You could just go into a factory, you could work in a mine, and you would do that every day for 40 years. You would get money from the same person. You could live without having anything. That sort of speaks to the heart. That's not human. That's what I think is really the core point here, that in order to have some sort of interest, even in supporting the idea of the state, is that there needs to be some sort of happiness, some sort of satisfaction.

And without that satisfaction, we are savages. I agree. Be like animals, which we are like. I'm not saying. But there's. There's something human. There's something beyond what animals would do that is sort of what Schiller is kind of like pointing out. Obviously, in the historic context, this sort of makes sense. But from my perspective nowadays, he's just stating the obvious.

14:28 Mark: I mean, I think we should talk a little more about this, because savages are kind of easy to understand. But the barbarians. I like philistines. Or is it philistine or philistine?

14:36 Wes: So we're on the. The fourth letter. I just want to say. I don't want to just skip those first three.

14:41 Seth: No, no. I'm still in the early letters, but I've got a quote. So, by the way, Schiller, much in the way of, like, Adorno. This is like a quote factory. This thing is amazing. There's just some brilliant stuff in here. But to tie what Mark is talking about to what Marcus brought up, the two ways you can go wrong is to be Too extreme on the feeling, sensual side where you're not incorporating reason and you're animalistic. And that's the bloody French Revolution aspect of it. Right. In the state context. The other direction is you can be too rational and you give up the sensuous and the way that manifests in the state context that Marcus was pointing to.

So this is in the second letter because the first one's just kind of a preamble. But today necessity is master and bends a degraded humanity beneath its tyrannous yoke. Utility is the great idol of the age to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance in these clumsy scales. The spiritual service of art has no weight. Deprived of all encouragement, she flees from the noisy mart of our century. And there are multiple quotes later on that kind of reinforce and broaden this. But Schiller's basically saying the over indexing towards reason has created this.

He uses the term business later on. But it's essentially a market economy or a commercial kind of structure to the state, where if you're the watchmaker, we need you to make watches. I don't need you to make music, I don't need you to write books, I need you to just make watches. And it becomes who you are. And then it defines what the scope of your possibilities are. And that's a degradation of your humanity. Because the point in Schiller's is that we should all have the. I'm not sure if he thinks all of us, but at least the notion of what constitutes a fulfilling human existence is much richer and more round than that and includes aesthetic appreciation, the ability to access the beautiful and to live a life according to that and not just be stuck in your instrumental utilitarian role.

16:41 Wes: This is one of the things that sort of foreshadows. Right. There's a lot of things in here that foreshadow Nietzsche focus on the aesthetic.

16:47 Seth: Yeah.

16:48 Wes: This being anti utilitarianism. But of course this is a particular type of rationality. Right. This Kant was opposed to. Kant's deontology stands in opposition to utility as well. And what the second letter is trying to do, it's just trying to justify. Why even talk about art anyway? Right. We have much more urgent political problems and it's not even the fashion of the times. It's just not to value art in this type of way. Really. A philosopher might argue that. Aren't morality and political liberty more urgent? Essentially. But the whole point of this is he's going to argue that the aesthetic education and the aesthetic in general are essential to morality and political liberty.

We don't get there simply by skipping over that and focusing on morality and political liberty directly. The French Revolution was supposed to be the political execution of a rational project, like the rejection of the Church, the actualization of the Enlightenment. Liberty, equality, fraternity. Right. That's the motto of the French Revolution. So it's a bit complicated when that becomes a bloodbath. It's not just that, well, the natural savage impulses of the lower classes were too strong. It's that rationality had become too disconnected from feeling.

And that lack of unity, that dividedness, meant that even in this very rational project could be undermined by this eruption of the suppressed natural and the instinctual. And this is another way in which Schiller is like Nietzsche. He's a sort of advocate, a legal representative of the instinctual and the I, and wants to reject the idea that we can become moral ourselves, order our own lives or order the state by simply saying, okay, we're going to just create these laws of conduct that will keep the instinctual under wraps.

18:48 Mark: We've had a couple episodes related to totalitarianism where it is rationality that ends up being. You could say it's an incomplete rationality, it's a shallow rationality, but it ends up being the destructive factor. Because if you just say this is how society should be structured, then anything that doesn't fit into those boxes, well, you just kill it. If you actually have feeling, if you actually have a human being, you know, looking at this system, whether it be a governmental system or. Marcus, you were referring to the economic system. You can't just focus on the form of society we're shooting for and squeeze all the square pegs into the round holes to make that happen.

19:26 Wes: Yeah. What is at a psychological level? Right. Repression of the instinctual or the essential or whatever becomes oppression and even mass murder at the political level. Right. You have to keep the bad apples

19:38 Mark: down before we dive into the text. We're going to disappear into the text once we do this. So I've been putting off a little quotation, but can we at least outline, insofar as we get it this far into the book, what the actual solution is? So, I mean, we said art is supposed to make you feel. It's supposed to keep you from doing these dangerous things that we were just talking about. It's also supposed to have an elevating quality so that it will, you know, refine the savage. It's cutting somehow between. Toward the end of our reading, he, though, comes up against These are very reminiscent of the two strands in Plato about art.

So on the one hand, art is ennobling, right? Looking for the perfect version of this song, of this painting. I'm painting a picture of a bear. Well, I'm not just painting the bear as I see it. I'm painting the ideal bear or something like that. And so this is supposed to ennoble all of us. But on the other hand, in the Republic, Plato says, well, art is very destructive. And you can think about how it seems most of these ethical philosophers who write about art. Adorno, you mentioned, Seth, Would be against the kids today. In other words, their art is very much not bringing them up to a moral level.

It's allowing them to seethe in the lowest, basest impulses.

20:53 Seth: It's unclear to me whether Schiller would be yelling at kids to get off of his doorstep and his lawn. Okay, this is the tenth letter. We are indeed almost tired of having to listen to the assertion that developed feeling for beauty, capital B, refines manners, so that no proof appears to be necessary. Here we rely upon the daily experience which almost universally shows a cultivated taste to be linked with clearness of intellect, liveliness of feeling, liberality, and even dignity of conduct, while an uncultivated one is usually linked with their opposites.

So I was looking for. When does he introduce how art actually the mechanism of how art will transform? And this is the cultivation of taste. This is not the artistic sense that Markus was referring to earlier. This is not the creative artistic sense. So there's two sides to this. One is the cultivation of an artistic taste, which isn't necessarily the creative instinct. And then there's what you're talking about, Mark, which is some kind of awareness, education, enablement of artists to liberate themselves from the constraints of their time and of their station and of the politics of their time, so that they can transcend the particulars and achieve connection with that universal beauty, you know, to get to that level.

And so that's his criticism of artists who are degenerate, so to speak, to use an Adorno term, would be an artist that's just completely stuck in their time. And the work that they do doesn't somehow try to reach beyond and touch the universal human experience. And we'll get into what that means in a minute.

22:40 Wes: This 10th letter, right? He's posing a problem here, which we don't get to the full answer in our reading. His aesthetic theory is going to be the answer to this question, right? So he says, yeah, you know, we all Think the developed feeling for beauty refines morals. It's a very common idea, but there are some objections to it. Mark has alluded to those. One of the objections, well, first we'll say I'm not just talking about people with no artistic talent who envy artists. I'm talking about people who have some real arguments and that some of this is reminiscent of Plato.

Right. Art can be used to captivate people, to serve the ends of error, serve the ends of injustice. You could look at societies which in a way seem debased and corrupted by the focus on the arts, like Romans, quote unquote, emasculated through Oriental luxury. So the idea that he wants to counter is that beauty can be kind of enervating, to use the word that's used in my translation. And then he's going to say, all right, so now I'm going to start arguing against that. And to do that I have to get a little bit abstract. I'm going to have to talk about this ideal rational concept of beauty.

I'm going to have to do something like a Kantian transcendental deduction from the possibility of sensuously rational nature, which is to say, I am going to look at this duality in human beings that have both the sensuous and the rational in them. And I'm going to talk about how this higher concept of beauty follows from that. And it's going to take me into this realm of abstract concepts, but that's what we're going to do. And then the 11th letter on he gets very abstract. And by the time we get to the end of our reading, we don't really know yet how this is going to solve the political problem.

We do get right an introduction to the play drive or the playful impulse. But it's the beginning.

24:21 Mark: I think we got enough. So I wanted to have a reaction to. So I wanted to get something from Marcus. Before we get too far into this, as someone who does music for a lot of your time, how this struck you that if you just approach somebody and say, oh yeah, music education, that's good, you know, and you're arguing for that. Well, you're arguing for any kind of music. Just like you want them to be distracted. As you were saying, like, don't just focus on the skills you need for your job. It's like an argument for general liberal arts education. You got to be a well rounded person.

You gotta cultivate your feeling and stuff. But then the way Schiller drives it is because I feel like he wants to say that there's actually a lot of bad art that hurts people. That what real beauty is has to be in some ways non empirical, right? It's not just like the things that people call beautiful. It's like this Platonic beauty that somehow reason itself teaches us that there must be this beauty, even if we've never encountered it. It's like some argument for God or something. Marcus, as a practicing artist, what did you make of all this?

25:21 Markus: First of all, I don't see anything really that he says about good or bad when it comes to aesthetics. Right? It's really like in the fourth letter at the end, he speaks of the totality of character at the very end there. And I find that that is sort of like he already alludes to the solution that he's pointing to. If I only read that far. Okay, so my question is, like, how could we attempt gaining a wholeness of character for each individual? And so I see, like, for me, that would mean to instill the concept and the feeling and the joy of making discoveries, of actually being interested in the world.

And that is, to me, some sort of aesthetic kind of thing. Okay. Like, there is something that speaks to me just because I love that music, I love that car. There's the look of that car. I just love that. And just this idea of having an interest is, I think, like one of the main contributing factors to acquiring some sort of wholeness. That's sort of how I see it. And that's what music did to me. Music ignited that flame in me. To find beauty, to look for beauty, to get a sense of beauty. And then I remember, like, these different steps in my life where I discovered literature, where I discovered music first, literature, cinema.

And I think that there is sort of like this flame. Do I feel lost in this world or is there something that is joyful for me? And from that point of, like, I am joyful, I'm interested. That's why I go out there. That's why I see something that interests me. I talk to that person. I try to make contact. I want to read something about that painting. I want to understand how Bach wrote his music. I love this particular piece that Beethoven wrote. And I sit down and I study the score, and I want to kind of like understand what is the architectural beauty of this, you know, so you want to go deeper.

And in order to get to that point, you need to be sort of ignited. And I found myself reading through this text that this is something that Schiller had a hard time kind of like saying, because he's trying to be a scientist, where really his art would have had a much quicker and more immediate impact of a kind of igniting a person. Which is interesting that he's writing a philosophical text where he already has sort of, like, found his form of expression as a writer, as a poet.

27:49 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

27:50 Seth: It's really interesting because there's a way in which Marcus is talking about this right now that runs counter to the technical language that Wes introduced at the beginning about disinterestedness.

28:00 Markus: Yeah.

28:00 Seth: And Marcus is saying, actually, what's really interesting is that I get interested, but let me gloss and rationalize this for everybody.

28:08 Wes: Yeah, well, artistic disinterest is a form of interest. But anyway, go ahead.

28:13 Seth: There's two aspects of what Schiller's talking about that Marcus is touching on. So the first is Schiller makes the point. He talks about having to ignite a feeling. You need that sensuousness. There has to be some desire ignited as part of this process. It's that because the rational has essentially erased the thirst or the desire for beauty, that there's still an aspect of that needs to be ignited as part of his process. What Marcus is saying is, in essence, when he gets lit on fire by something, his desire to go deeper into it is to essentially explore that aspect of it that makes it not just connect to his sensuousness, but in a lot of ways, makes it more universal.

He's describing an individual experience that you have, but when you go and you say, I want to see the score. I want to understand the architecture, I want to understand how the medium was used, that's not directly connected to your sensuous experience so much as it is. You're looking for something that's more universal in the art that gives it beauty.

29:16 Mark: Yeah.

29:17 Wes: We should be careful to understand that this is not simply a call for the return to feeling and the sensuous and all that, which is a typical caricature of Romanticism. And actually, Romantics, including the poets Wordsworth are calling for. What they want to see is a synthesis. And this is Nietzsche. Right. As well in the gay science. They want to see this synthesis of the rational and the feeling. And that's why you need this third thing so early on here. Right. Schiller is calling it a third type of character in the second letter he's talked about.

Right. Physical character and moral character. Right. So the physical character involving desire and meeting needs and those sorts of things in the moral character having to do with, to some extent, regulating that and not just doing what we want. And then the question is, when it comes to reforming the state, we need a way to improve people that doesn't rely on the state because the state is just made up of people. And if people are bad, the state is bad and there's a vicious circle. So we need something that is both a third form of character that needs to be cultivated in people, that doesn't just depend on the state saying, here's the law, you're going to obey it, or we're going to focus on meeting your physical needs.

This is what we're going to do. And that third type of character is going to be the thing that's cultivated by the aesthetic. And it's going to involve a third type of impulse, right? The playful impulse of the play. Drive.

30:48 Mark: And you would think that the aesthetic would sort of have its own attraction, right? It gives us pleasure. Marcus, you were just describing, you know, that of course, if we're just cogs in the machine of working at a day job or whatever, then that's not going to be satisfying. We need to give something. So it seems like this should be part of, you know, the savage, really. The savage searches for not just sex and food, but excitement. So I guess the question then is, what are we adding? According to the intro, he had just read Kant's third critique. So he obviously completely has the theory of Kant that Wes was just talking about at the beginning in mind here. But whether he is actually going to agree that art is disinterested, I'm not sure based on what we read.

31:40 Wes: Well, this is not like a scholarly dispute. I mean, I don't know.

31:44 Mark: Okay, so you're saying the Stanford says that he. Or, you know, or.

31:48 Wes: Well, I think the word disinterest is throwing us. Right. Disinterested, you know, Mark, you, as you said, does not mean uninterested. It's a technical term. And all we need to keep in mind is that there's some. We're getting pleasure. Yeah, but it's not the type of pleasure that comes from appetite. Eating something or controlling it, over overpowering it. It's this weird different type of pleasure. You could call it a form of interest too. There's nothing wrong with that as long as we understand that it's not rational interest. It's not appetitive. Typical desiring interest. It's some third thing. And that's the point.

32:25 Markus: The way that I meant this actually, like developing an interest is completely open to any. You can put anything on that. You could be interested in rationality, you Develop sort of like a sense for like. Like it could be anything. So I see this as not interwoven with, how should I say, with any subject matter. It's aesthetic to study law. And again, like, maybe it's not. It's the wrong definition that I'm using here for that word.

32:51 Wes: Well, so.

32:51 Mark: But is it. Is it the beauty of the law? So, like, yes, every time we bring this up, like, if Dylan is on. Dylan is a scientist by training. And so he'll like, be the beauty of a mathematical proof, discovering something, coming to a rational conclusion, that that gives you a thrill. And that is absolutely an interest. And if you're interested in. Because it has some kind of beautiful form, like a beautiful proof, then that completely follows. Like the Kantian. We love beautiful forms. But I'm not convinced I like this broader definition. And maybe we got to read Dewey or something on aesthetics at some point, but Dewey talks about the live creature, that it is not even necessarily just grasping a beautiful form, but engaging in something that has a certain kind of feedback loop.

Maybe that's a better way of describing it. And so learning is a great example of that. But there are probably all sorts of other activities that we wouldn't necessarily consider artistic, but that provides really what is meaty, what is nourishing about art. Art is not just about sitting back and contemplating beautiful forms. It is about engaging in a certain feedback loop.

34:01 Seth: Yeah.

34:02 Mark: So I'm not sure how much I can impose that on Schiller. It's so abstract. By the end of this, like, he's not going to be the full on Platonist. That would be too rationalist. He wants to cut down the middle between the Platonist and everybody. Oh, just forget about the world, you know, because Kant was kind of a full on Platonist in this sense that he felt like the best kind of music is purely instrumental because it is about contemplating the form and the matter, how in tune the instruments are. You know, the. The tone of the person's voice. That's sort of less important.

Like it's important insofar as it has sort of microforms in it. He was a form guy rather than a matter guy. Whereas the crass music. I just like a big metal power chord with a big backbeat. Like that is all about the matter as opposed to formal structures. Right. A rock and roll structure is such a simple form. Boom, boom, boom. Actually, I'm doing techno here. But like, you know, these, you know that Kant would very much disapprove of that. So that's not actually Getting a beauty at all. But, you know, if you're saying Schiller's shooting for a middle ground between the sensuous and the reasoning, I'm not totally sure.

You know, he's certainly. The fact that he's a poet, he's not about pure abstract forms like Bach writing his concertos. Once you bring language into it, you inevitably are bringing in stuff that's related to our moral interests. Just the things that I think Kant would rule out.

35:30 Wes: You know, I gave a description of how this is set up, which is. The first one is, I want to talk about art. I'm going to do it with Kantian principles. That's speculative. Now I'm going to have to tell you why in the second letter, I'm not just immediately focusing on these more urgent political problems. I'm going to respond to that. Then we talked about, you know, utility being the idol of the age and all that. And he'll say in the end of that letter, he thinks that the aesthetic is far less alien to the needs of our. Of the age than to its taste.

Right. The taste of the age is less interested in the aesthetic. But in fact, we need this, for it is by way of beauty that one approaches liberty. And then that sets us up for this third letter in which we talk about this third form of character, which is meant to be the thing that's going to allow us to get beyond the vicious circle of needing a good state in order to reform people, but needing to reform people in order to get a good state. Right. The aesthetic is supposedly. Is going to solve this deep political problem of how progress is even possible.

It's not just possible by accentuating the rational or the sensuous. So I don't know. That's my invitation to say, do you. Is there anything anyone wants to talk about in the third letter?

36:46 Seth: Still, there's a nice one here which kind of harkens back to where we started. When the mechanic has the works of a clock to repair, he lets the wheels run down. But the living clockwork of the state must be repaired while it is in motion. And here it is a case of changing the wheels as they revolve. We must therefore search for some support for the continuation of society to make it independent of the actual state which we want to abolish. I thought that was interesting because it speaks to what I think is a really central. And you could say this about the individual as well.

If you're trying to reform your life or you're trying to change who you are, or overcome. You can't just stop, tear yourself down, become somebody else overnight. There's the aspect of a kind of reformation and an exposure and an education. And it gets to the notion of practice, which I think is going to tie, I'm assuming later on to. You don't come to the whole idea that you would have an epiphany and suddenly you'd be a completely different person. It's just the same way. You can't assume that the state would somehow undergo some kind of an experience and it would radically change.

So the program is going to have to have a very detailed. And it's going to require a very intentional approach.

38:03 Wes: I think he gets a little bit into what sounds like State of nature and contract theory. He's talking about the natural state and the way in which it stands.

38:17 Mark: In the natural state with a capital S. Right. That confuses me at first.

38:21 Wes: Right. The state, as in we're talking about the nation state. It doesn't sound so nasty, brutish and short. Right. He'll say it's consistent with the quote unquote, material purposes of physical man. And it has something to do with just focusing on meeting our needs in a practical way. Right. Meeting our material needs. And then there's probably a Hobbesian element because what it's opposed to is the moral state or the rational state. And that's the state in which we're following laws and we're focused on making our conduct moral rather than focusing on merely survival.

And Schiller's point is that when we do that, we're thinking about an ideal society. Right. We're thinking about this ideally moral society and how we're going to get there. But doing that is risky because the focus on morality comes at the cost of the focus on material needs. And that can be entirely self defeating. So we need to think about how we're going to undertake that transformation in a way that isn't completely self destructive. So I think there's some thoughts here about revolution. I don't know that he's identifying existing states with natural states.

That's a little unclear to me. But they seem to be more like a spectrum and they're more natural than not. Right. And we're on the way to the perfectly ideal moral or rational state. We may not be in a state of nature, but the state is more natural than not.

39:48 Markus: What he says is this natural state, as we may call every political body or organization, is ultimately based on force and not on laws. I don't know what that means.

39:59 Mark: Primordially, it's people conquering each other, and that's how we get a government. Even the practice of coming up with the idea of contract theory, I think he says, is progress because we find ourselves just in a state, somebody has conquered us and we are being ruled. But then when we sort of think about our interests as philosophers and we come up, hey, you know, it's actually in my interest not to be in the state of nature where everybody be killing each other all the time. I guess I actually do ascent. It is in my interest to be ruled in this way. Maybe now that I realize that I want to tweak things. I want to make it a Lockean contract. I want to be able to get rid of really bad kings. We're still in the same state, but we've gone a little direction just by doing the philosophy, right?

40:43 Wes: So there's a state of nature where it's all about force, individuals imposing their wills on others by force for the sake of their own needs. And then when we get to early states, Mark, as you pointed out, this is about. It's a rule by force in the sense of. You have a sovereign who imposes his will on the people by force, and what you're working towards is a republic in which the will of the people, this is Schiller's very Rousseauian in this sense, gets expressed in the actions of the state, and the laws are a function of the will of the people.

There's actual representation in this sense. And so, you know, at the point in history where Schiller is writing, it's ambiguous. And again, the French Revolution is supposed to produce a republic, but it didn't get there. It ended up. And ultimately, you know, after Schiller wrote this event, we ended up with Napoleon, right? We end up with the terror, which Schiller has already witnessed, and. And ultimately you'll end up again with a monarchy. So monarchy is more of an expression of this quote, unquote, natural state that rules by force. And the republic is closer to the moral or the rational state.

41:50 Markus: So is this choice of word natural, Is that something that you find in other texts in other places, or is that a Schiller invention here?

41:58 Wes: It's drawing on Hobbes, I think, and the state of nature, and also on Rousseau, who has a state of nature account which is not so harsh as Hobbes.

42:06 Seth: There's a thread in philosophy to talk about natural law and whether there's such a thing as a natural law and what's known as the state of nature. So pre civilization, which is this hypothetical construct called the state of nature, how do people interact with each other and what laws govern those interactions? And then the idea is that there are certain natural laws that are in play, but ultimately it's the war of all against all sorts of. It's really a question of force, but only the force of the individual against another individual. And you can't build anything, you can't own anything, because you're always at risk of having it stolen or, you know, being killed.

And so society comes out of a general consensus to join and agree to sacrifice some of your natural rights to a third party that will then apply those rights evenly and fairly across everybody. And that's how you get the birth of new laws and the state and all that.

42:59 Mark: We've done a little bit of Kant on politics. We've never actually done Hegel on politics, but it seems like all these guys end up not being for a straightforward republic. They're a little more Rousseau in. In that, like maybe a monarch who somehow embodies the general will, like maybe Napoleon ends up actually being the thing that we're shooting for. Somehow, you know, we're supposed to have actual participation. I'm not sure about that.

43:25 Wes: What he says about contract theory, right? So in a sense, supposedly we've left the state of nature, right? According to Hobbes, Locke, all the rest, those writers go into this hypothetical social contract that we've made. State of nature sucks. So we make an agreement, have a sovereign, have laws, all that stuff. Schiller is careful to point out, well, that never happened. Right? That's just a nice theoretical account. And it's a theoretical account that's meant to provide us with an ideal. But that ideal has never really fully been satisfied.

We're on the way to that, in a sense, but the contract is actually not really fully established. And that's why I think he can call the current state that's not ideal as in a sense, a natural state. There may be more representation, right? Legislative bodies are more powerful and the power of the monarch has been offset and blah, blah, blah. But really this is still about the imposition of the will of the sovereign on a society by force and on a society that doesn't have any say in it. And that's the way, of course, France was before the French Revolution.

And unfortunately, the Revolution didn't solve that problem.

44:35 Mark: Well, this seems like a good point to take a break and wrap up part one here. Folks who are PEL supporters can get part two already in your feed if not, go to parsexaminlife.com support and get that or just wait till next week. Thanks.