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

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 318. In part two, we've been discussing Friedrich Schiller's on the Aesthetic Education of Man. We've given a lot of overview and I think we are up to letter 4 out of 15 here.

0:23 Seth: Pick up the pace.

0:24 Wes: Yeah, I think the aesthetic part doesn't start until towards the end and it's complicated.

0:30 Mark: So some of it, even toward the end of our reading, he is laying out in a more systematic manner what right here in the fourth letter he is pointing at, which is this is going to revolve around some sort of analysis of human nature, that there is an empirical part of us and there is some sort of non empirical part of us, which is a weird thing to talk about. Eventually he, he's sort of using Kantian language. Well, it's the transcendental ego, right? It's the thing that has experiences. Right. How do I know that this experience now and this experience now are both mine?

Well, because there must be some changeless thing. And I'm not sure that he's really saying, you know, it's a Christian soul or something like that. That's not necessarily important. It's just this is about the structure of our experience that we have the flux and the things that go through it and then we have this pure form that sits and receives that. And so right here he's talking in the. Got the individual man and you've got the dignity of ideal man. So somehow this, you could say the soul if we want to use that. But the non empirical man, I think ends up being the thing that Kant is theorizing about and saying, you know, that's the self legislating part and is run purely by reason.

And we've had different ways of, you know, even back to Spinoza arguing that oh yeah, people are really immortal. It's not because there's a, there's a soul that's immortal, you know, like a substance that's persists after death necessarily. It's just that you're participating in the universal reason. And so therefore that's like this unchanging

2:07 Wes: immortal thing, you know, he doesn't get into the more metaphysical description till later with personhood and all that. And here the description is more psychological, which is very interesting. Right. He's saying we are of course creatures of time and the material world and we have all sorts of forces acting upon us within the causal domain. So he sets up the whole typical determinism account. We're subject to the physical necessity. And then there's something called morality. There's the practical sphere. The way he starts out this chapter, he says, we want to.

If we're going to create a ideal state, we need moral conduct and human beings to be reliable and famously right. There's laws of nature that can't be violated, but the laws of moral conduct can. And so we need to bring those together in some sense and make impulses coincide with reasons. We need to basically get people to want to do what's right. And that's going to be where the aesthetic ultimately comes in later. And then he gets into this account of what I've called a psychological account of the ideal man. Right. We kind of have this aspiration to act in a certain way, which by the way is related to the political right, because it has something to do with.

It's what we want to actualize in the political, in the quote unquote, objective unity of the state. We want to actualize the striving towards being the ideal person and having the ideal state. Those two things are importantly connected in part because bringing people under the rule of law is something like bringing all our subjective empirical psychology under the rules of moral conduct.

3:51 Seth: So I'm in the 11th letter, I'm assuming that's where fourth, where you all are.

3:55 Mark: We're bouncing back and forth.

3:57 Seth: Oh, okay. So this is really interesting, and I think this is actually one place where the Dover translator slash intro actually makes a point, is that in the 11th letter he says, since in man as finite being, person and condition are distinct, neither the condition can be derived from the person nor the person from the condition. And person here is that persistent universal, eternal thing, whatever. And condition is the vicissitudes of necessity of experience. This is an example of where you probably can't pin Schiller down on exactly what he means by person and condition, but at the bare minimum, personhood is just unity.

You could just see it as the unity of experience. The fact that all of the conditions, all the specific individual, particular time bound things that become and then are and then pass away are somehow associated with one thing or are tied together in a unity. And I would not want to get too critical on him as to how to define this, because really the only work that that has to do is to provide a lever for him to be able to say that there is a timeless or a non time bound, non conditional, non subjective aspect to our experience which gives us the ability to Connect to the transcendental and connect things ultimately reach some sort of ideal.

So at this point, I don't think it's strongly tied to reason as that being the mechanism for how you get there. But he just needs to throw this in to provide the basis for even having that conversation.

5:37 Wes: In pre Kantian philosophy, this was about the soul as substance underlying all change. Just like any general ontological account in pre Kantian philosophy, where you need some stable entity, if there is change, it doesn't make any sense to even talk about change unless there's something stable, a backdrop for that. So you get these substances and these attributes. In Kantian philosophy, this gets more psychological in a sense. So the Kant wouldn't like that word. And you start talking about the personal identity. Right. And the unity of experience over time.

The idea of a stable self underlying the flux is strongly connected and Kant to reason and understanding and the unity of experience. Right. In a way, I think, Seth, what you put very well is that it's in a sense what I think of as personhood here in Schiller and as transcendental apperception. Maybe in Kant, this really is about ultimately the unity of experience and becoming. So it involves the imposition of reason and these universals and something that tries to transcend time on something that's essentially temporal and material, form on matter.

He's all about this form matter distinction.

6:54 Seth: Right. I don't want to go too far deep into this because I at the risk of alienating Marcus as we get into the way in which the formal aspect of ourselves is the inward projected outward to, you know, and so on, but to connect it back to what we were talking about, the artist and his guidance for the artist. Right? The artist who's bound by their time that's unable to transcend is the artist that is caught in their condition and is unable in some respect to take their condition and impose the formal aspects of their personhood onto it in order to begin this process of trying to reach or transform, to get to something that is unconditional.

Right. Some aspect of an aesthetic experience or beauty that's not conditioned or bound by time and space and the conditions of their experience. And I assume this distinction between personhood and condition could also connect, and maybe he does a little bit later, to the whole barbarity versus savages, you know, the sensuous nature versus the rational nature, etc.

8:00 Markus: What do we actually know about the, say, the conditions in which these letters were written? Like the question that comes up for me and you guys, you Guys kind of like dive in. Right. But I'm asking the bigger questions. So to me, it feels a little bit like he wasn't really able to say what he was going to say, what he wanted to say, without actually having to write to somebody else. Sort of like removing himself, dissociating himself a little bit from what he's trying to say. And also, would there have been a problem with him just openly and publicly speaking his mind? Is there anything known about that about that time? Was there a reason why he chose this form? Do we know that?

8:44 Mark: Yeah, it seems pretty weird. I know one of the reasons that we went with this selection is because apparently he wrote letters 1 through 11 and then, like the last four in the book that were sort of his first pass, and they were for publication, but they were written as I'm trying to find the name of.

9:01 Wes: They were kind of commissioned by his benefactor, I think.

9:05 Mark: Yeah, they're not literally letters that were just mailed, they were sort of open letters.

9:10 Markus: Yeah.

9:10 Mark: There's no reference to you. There's no, you know, to the person he's writing to. So it is kind of a strange choice. But, you know, once he'd done this the first time, then he went back and he expanded them and he added a bunch in the middle and sort of gave us the text that we have today.

9:25 Wes: There's a good intro in my introduction. There's a good account of all this, which I, of course, have just entirely forgotten. But I think, you know, his benefactors, like him, were concerned about what went wrong with the French Revolution, and they want answers and they want to know how to fix things ultimately. And that's the beginning of this project. And it's essentially commissioned. Putting it in the form of letters, I think is just meant to be a more pleasing way of doing it. But it also acknowledges the fact that it's commissioned by this person, that he's.

9:55 Mark: That he's writing to the Prince of Schleswig Holstein, Augustenberg. That's all it says in Stamp, who's

10:02 Wes: essentially responsible for his education.

10:04 Seth: I think according to the intro in the Dover, actually Schiller was. Got very ill and the Prince was. They were close and possibly because he was responsible for his education, but he was his patron. And then the Prince put him on a. Basically a stipend for three years so he could recover. And so at the beginning of the letters, he says, if you had made this a condition of my stipend, I would have happily done it. But the fact that you asked nothing of me just gives me all the more joy to provide this to you. And I have to assume that the Prince himself was probably concerned that something like the revolutionary spirit of the times could infect his area. So, you know, Schiller's probably speaking to that. But I think our introduction also suggested that he redid the letters and they were reprinted later as well. So to answer Marcus's question, I even

10:52 Markus: read that they got burned or something.

10:54 Seth: The original drafts. Yeah, were somehow destroyed. It's kind of unclear, too. I don't know enough about him. I'm sure the information's out there, but I don't think he was saying anything that would have been difficult for him to say in public. And he circulated with other intellectuals that publish things. Just they're not popular.

11:12 Wes: So there's a lot of intellectuals who are basically, in the beginning, pro French revolution. And that did become dangerous for them, I think, whose wife got arrested? Mark, what's the book that you recommended that's about all these guys? There's a popular account of the biographies of Romantics. But anyway, it did become dangerous because then France went to war with Germany and that's just the beginning of a big disaster where it goes to war with the whole of Europe. But this is more about the failings of the revolution. So I don't know the answer, how dangerous it was to write this, but it was not as bad as being for the revolution in the first place.

11:48 Mark: The book you just asked about is called Magnificent Rebels, the First Romantics and the Invention of the the Self by Andrea Wulf, recommended by one of our listeners.

11:56 Wes: But all these guys, you know, his benefactors, are reformists. These are people who want to see the advances of the Enlightenment reflected in the political organization of society.

12:08 Mark: It is interesting that when his benefactor Prince sent him the. The letter, I mean, for the prompt was what does it sound like when doves cry and then she'll hurt this whole thing.

12:19 Markus: So in the 15th letter, which is the last one that we were supposed to read, right. He speaks about, like, in English, it's a living form. And I really liked that in the original, that is gestalt, right? The word that, I guess you know, the German word that you know, lebende Gestalt or living gestalt. It was funny to me that the word gestalten, the German word, which in English would be. Would be design. Actually, something like that, didn't make any appearance. I just find that. So I don't know how to say this. It is as if he's like talking about, like opposing views and he's talking about they need to be brought together in some way.

But then there's, at least from my point of view, very little allusion to, like, how can we actually do this? Doesn't even talk about practical things. I was looking for suggestions, you know, like ideas, how things could be put into practice. This was just like, my impression that there's very little beyond the philosophical.

13:17 Wes: I think the recommendation is to play. Right. And to engage in artistic activity. And that's supposed to be the thing that. So the playful impulse. This sounds very Hegelian. Right. In the 14th chapter as well. Right. There's the formal impulse. There's the material impulse. The formal impulse is seeking to unify, and the material impulse, in a way, gives us all this content. There's a famous Kantian saying, concepts without intuitions are blind. Intuitions without concepts are. Are what? I forget. Exactly. But empty. They need each other tasteless.

So these two sides of a. Yeah, these two sides don't make any sense without each other. But he's going to describe this playful impulse, which, in a sense, it's like a synthesis, or almost like thesis, antithesis, synthesis here. It's almost like a sublation of the two other moments, but it's also its own thing. He wants to insist that this is actually really a third drive within us. And it. It's a drive that helps the other two keep each other in check and not simply dominate our nature. Right. The other two drives are reciprocal. They need each other.

But they're also mutually limiting. But they can also encroach on each other's territory. We could become too rational at the expense of our imagination. We can become too impulsive at the expense of irrationality and play as satisfying this playful impulse by engaging in creative aesthetic activity is supposed to help prevent that. Right. So that we don't end up. Right, killing a lot of people. Because reason says, here's the ideal state. Reason says, this is what we need, and we're going to get there any way we can.

15:04 Seth: I'm so excited. Sorry.

15:05 Wes: The playful impulse says, no, we have to check reason with compassion sometimes. And reason can't become overweening. And when we're engaged in the arts, you prevent one side from encroaching on the other. And all the terrible stuff that results from that.

15:24 Seth: I want to directly address, indirectly address, what Wes just said, indirectly address what Marcus was talking about. It's like one of the things that's fascinating to me about Schiller is the only concrete examples that he gives, really, in the Sections we read have to do with sculpture or the only concrete way he talks about it. We're used to talking about when people. We study aesthetics episodes. It's almost always visual art, like painting or music. You rarely get sculpture or architecture rolled in here. And his paradigmatic case. So in that same letter, you're talking about a block of marble, therefore, although it is and remains lifeless, can nevertheless become living shape through the architect and the sculptor. A human being, although he lives and has shape, is far from being on that account, a living shape. That would require his shape to be life and his life shape. Right.

16:18 Wes: So you can be a person who doesn't have living form. In other words, you'd be better off as a sculpture, but go ahead.

16:24 Seth: Well, no, no. There's two other parts in the text where he connects to the notion of sculpture. One is where he talks about. We're not talking about people who have never been exposed to beauty, who have no concept of it. What we're worried about are the people who are critical who say that beauty has no efficacy or artistic. And even historically, if you look, art has never saved a civilization from degeneracy. And he talks about the Romans, even though they had these statues of the gods.

16:52 Wes: That's a position he. Right, he's setting back. That's the position of his critics that he's.

16:56 Seth: Yeah, so, but my. I'm just referencing that in there. He talks about sculpture and he talks about the Roman gods being there. The sculptures of the gods, even when they were forgotten and not believed in anymore. That those paradigmatic examples of beauty and art were in the center of the forum, but they didn't have sufficient efficacy to address the decline of the Roman.

17:17 Wes: Well, he's talking about sculptures of people like Commodus, right. Who were terrible, vicious emperors.

17:23 Markus: Then.

17:23 Wes: For the Greeks. I think for the Greeks, the point

17:27 Seth: is sculpture is the example that he brings up. That's what I'm trying to get to. And then he further has another place in the text where he says, you know, the block of marble to the mechanic or the technician is seen as a resource, but to the sculptor, it can be transformed into something else. So there's a sense in which. And this goes to his concept of form and matter, right. The transformation of the existence of the sensory of nature into something beautiful. And so sculpture, in a weird way, is his paradigmatic example. That's what I'm trying to get to. Music, as Mark and Marcus know, just gets created whole cloth, right? It just jumps out of your head full grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus, you don't need any natural materials.

18:10 Wes: You know, I respect your argument that it is a fairly magic example. He just want to be clear. He doesn't say that this is my. And he's a poet, of course, and playwright.

18:18 Seth: Well, that's the other thing. In what we've read. He. Other than the fact that Goethe is apparently omnipresent behind all of this, he never mentions language or poetry in that respect.

18:29 Wes: Part of the reason he's talking about sculpture is because he idealizes the Greeks and he sees them as a kind of unit, you know, way in which, like Nietzsche, to some extent, pre Socrates and Euripides. And when, before things went bad, they were able to combine the natural with the philosophical, with the artistic. They weren't divided by that. And the point about the statues with Romans is that you can create a statue of a horrible emperor, a vicious, terrible person that is beautiful. And that he's trying to say, give you an example the way in which art can be sustaining even when political corruption is really terrible.

This is important because he's already said that you have a bad state, you're going to have a lot of immorality. But he wants to make the claim in that earlier chapter that the aesthetic can always survive, even in a terrible state, and so can always be the kindling of possible political reform. And that goes even in a specific statue. You could have a beautiful statue that in a way is telling you something about the truth, even if it seems to be commemorating a dictator. And that's a kind of wonderful representation of what he's getting at.

19:44 Seth: But, yeah, we're at risk of going off. But he's also pointing out he's using that as an example of there's been beauty and art in every society, even as they were degenerate. So why should I believe that you can actually tell me that art can reform us and bring us to moral. There's been no example in the history of humankind where art has created a moral or helped to create a moral society. In fact, even the most degenerate societies had art, and it was not helpful. I think that was part of his criticism, too.

20:13 Wes: His argument is, we're just not there yet. We're on the way.

20:16 Seth: Of course not. We're on the way.

20:18 Wes: Spirit.

20:19 Seth: All right, let's get Marcus back in here. Marcus, give us some perspective. What's an example? If you were to take what he's trying to articulate, what's an example you would bring up to bring his point

20:30 Markus: home for Me, it's education, which I'm not sure where and when he mentions anything about education here, which for me would be the most important part, like how it is like any sense of anything being passed on to children. And he speaks of play. Drive der Spieltrieb. Right. Which is sort of like a very. It's a childlike thing, but it's also like children are best at it. So what I would find important is if you talk about like, like bringing senses and, and form together, do that in education, you know, start doing that with young people. I found that fun. Fascinating that at least I, you know, didn't find so much about that in this text.

21:14 Mark: Yeah, it's the title of the whole thing. And it's. And it's not mentioned until letter 10.

21:19 Wes: Well, we, we haven't read the whole thing yet, so we should keep that.

21:23 Mark: But I see even just searching my PDF, 36 instances of the words education in the entire book. You would think it would be more

21:31 Wes: what the education would do. It's not a policy guide on changing the education of the country. But when we say education, we should just be careful because what he's proposing is not didactic art. Right. He's not saying art can help us instill morality in people directly because it has the right messages. That is precisely what is not the case. Art exercises a certain type of faculty, and I'm not saying anyone was saying that, but art exercises a certain faculties in us that allow us to honor our instinctual side and not simply tyrannize it with rationality and with law and rules about moral conduct.

Give it some expression, but not simply give in to impulsiveness. Because that's not what art is about either. Right. It's not simply just all about hey, feeling then and blah, blah, blah. It's this interesting combination. So it facilitates ethical conduct, which in turn facilitates political reform. So the, the thing that improves us with art, in a way, it's precisely because it's not about moral messaging or political messaging. Right. It gets us in tune with our compassion. It can make us open minded, can make us something other than what de Beauvoir calls the serious man.

It can produce what Keats calls negative capability, the ability to do something in which we're not simply reaching irritably, as Keats puts it, after reasons or for the comfort of saying, I know this, I have a theory. Now we're doing something. I'm putting concepts on things and I'm controlling it. We get opened up to a state of mere curiosity, interest I think as Marcus puts it, and the state of play, whatever play is, we can talk more about that.

23:19 Markus: So you see in German, you know, sometimes things are not so clear. For example, the original is Menschen. So obviously like Mensch is not man. That's wrong. That's already wrong. Aesthetis is not aesthetical. Sorry to say that it could mean that, but it could also mean that the education itself should be aesthetic. And just as a German, I pick up these things and I'm wondering, okay, so what does he really mean? And it doesn't even both potential meanings of his title, they are not really being covered. And I just find that fascinating. So I'm wondering why he's choosing these words. I'm just sharing with you guys. I don't want any, any answer response to that. But it's really, it's really interesting, the

24:08 Wes: aesthetic at this point. I mean, I think it does have a pretty specific meaning. It's, it's something that used in what we now call aesthetics was called taste. Right. So when Hume writes about this, this subject called aesthetics, he doesn't use the word aesthetics because it didn't start getting used until it was coined by a German philosopher in like 7th to 1730s Baumgarten, I believe. Yeah, it's really a term of art. It's a technical term at this point. And it hasn't, you know, specifically means this.

24:34 Seth: I'm fascinated because, you know, I studied German and I'm interested in the language and I find it beautiful. Rather than go down that path, let me turn the question around now to Mark and Marcus. The musicians, right. Of the group agree to ask this question. So do you feel the experience of your creative aspect being. Do you connect with this idea of free play or play as part of the artistic process? Does that make sense to you? Do you feel more childlike when you make music? And in terms of, as Wes was saying, what the outcome, how art impacts us. When you're creating art, are you thinking about, you know, creating music? Are you thinking about elevating the human spirit or making it so that we are more liberal and refined in our tastes and these sorts of things and if not just more ethical. Does that mean if you're not doing that, are you degenerate and locked in your time?

25:34 Wes: Yeah. You are?

25:39 Mark: Yeah. I wanted to hear Marcus on this because not being super fast, I mean, I have certain connections between my fingers in my mind, but it's not a pure autonomy such that my writing tends to be kind of pre programmed, not unlike I'M writing an essay like, okay, I'll fiddle around and come up with a chord or a riff or a lick or whatever. But so much of what you do, Marcus, is improvisational and reacting immediately to other people and that it really just seems like this state of play. And I also want to point out you were looking for practical guidance.

Well, in section 14, this is not practical guidance. But he talks about the play impulse would aim at the extinction of time in time. I thought that was a very poetic like, wow, that's exactly. Even when you're obviously you're playing in time, it's not a painting. It's not like it's all just that one there and one. You're playing a piece that runs for five minutes or 10 minutes or three minutes, but yet you're trying to bring the listener to a state maybe. I mean, sometimes you're like, okay, now is going to be the climax. And now, you know, so it's very temporal, but sometimes it's.

It's a very Platonic, very peaceful, very like, let's establish this thing that seems like you are out of the regular flow of time.

26:52 Markus: For me, it's a double edged sword, you know, this word play and free play. I think, like, I could definitely say yes, like, it's great, it's wonderful if I'm able to play freely. But also I have found for myself that as long as I feel the need or the neediness to play, I'm not creating or not doing justice to the art form. For me, it's not about the need to play, wanting to play, or the childlike, like, you don't have a choice to play. For me, it's more about the timeless thing, like where you completely disconnect and you just sort of like even disconnect from the intellect.

And ideally the body just does the creation. There's like no intellect mediating between the ears, let's say, and the fingers. Right. So there's pure freedom is not a good word. Like, I don't even know how to describe it, but it's certainly not for me. It's not necessarily something that has the connotation of at least like what most people would describe as play, where it needs to be joyful or. I mean, probably this is not what Schiller is saying anyway. But for me, like I said, it's the double edged sword, you know, and

28:02 Wes: that's the nature of play, I think. And part of why he wants to say it's this third thing. It's this mixture. It's not without restraint. It's this interesting mixture of restraint and formality and impulse. It's not mere impulsiveness and inspiration. So even if you talk about it in animals outside of a domain which seems specifically aesthetic, right? When two tiger cubs play with each other, they're enacting violent activity, but they know not to be violent. And you can do it with your dog, right? You can mess around with your dog and it'll fake bite you, right?

Even an animal knows how to play bite, not hurt you, as it's engaged in whatever this third realm is. It's not the serious or earnest realm, as Schiller calls it. It's not actual survival, it's not actual violence, but it's also not mere formality. It's something else. And then the same thing of improvising and doing music, right? There's all these formal structures in music. You might be involved, you're going to be using a scale or harmony or whatever. And yet, Marcus, as you pointed out, you could sort of have this almost out of body experience where it's just you're inspired or it's flowing through you.

The same thing with poetry and poetic forms. If you're writing a sonnet, there are rules to the sonnet and there are rules to language. Anyway, even if you're not writing a sonnet, but the muses in some way, you know, are there to inspire you and act through you. So it's like impulse gets concretized. And this is. I haven't mentioned Hegel yet, but this is. Or maybe I did, but this is one of the ways in which this sounds also very Hegelian, because it's the sort of uniting of form and matter in the art object, or the concretization of impulse, let's say you sort of capture it in a bottle or something like that.

29:47 Markus: In Spanish, the word for playing, playing music is tocar, which is the same word as to touch. I always found that sort of like fascinating, at least in the field of music. You know, it's this.

30:01 Mark: I always felt like that that appellation was invented by somebody who didn't actually play an instrument. Like you're just picking up that guitar, you're just touching it, you're just whapping at it. Like the new term whapping at your guitar.

30:14 Markus: Yeah, but you know, at the same time, like when people stay playing music and they experience an orchestra playing a symphony, right? Like those people are not playing. Like that would be my argument. Those people are not playing, they are executing instructions. And there's very little of the original meaning of the word play in it.

30:32 Wes: An orchestra player might defend themselves by saying they have more serious constraints than someone who's engaged in composition or engaged in improvisation of any kind. So this is almost like a test case. Right. Let's maximize the constraints. Someone else has written the score, someone else is conducting, but there's still dynamics and there's still feeling. And the director, the conductor, doesn't control everything. In other words, what I'm trying to say is there's still autonomy and freedom of spirit even in that very constrained situation. Or at least that's the way an orchestra player might defend that.

31:10 Markus: So you think that that's what Schiller means when he talks about play drive, like an orchestra musician playing music? I don't think so.

31:18 Wes: Well, the paradigmatic case of play is to be a composer, be the sculptor, to be the poet, to be engaged in that act. Right. So if it is right, if we are engaged in play by being a member of an orchestra, it's a kind of edge case, or maybe a borderline case. I'm just saying one might defend that. It's certainly not the paradigmatic case for Schiller.

31:42 Seth: There's also the difference between performance and creation. Right. I mean, those are two different things we've talked about before. So I wouldn't want to go too far down this path. I think the question's interesting because this, to me, there's a lot riding on this. You know, not to get too pragmatic and political about it, but the idea that arts education, or an education which has art as a significant central component can act as a transformative social power is in no way trivial. And, you know, it speaks to the way in which our educational systems, across, at least in the United States, possibly in other countries, are set up.

But I want to believe in what Schiller's pitching. I do. I want to believe that we beat the creativity, the play and the beauty and the art out of our children as they grow up, and we replace it with hyper rationality, which has a strong connection to instrumentality, which is, you know, an integral part of the way that capitalist systems function to generate these large classes of disaffected people who in

32:50 Wes: turn, ironically, can make people more impulsive. Being hyper rational and being more impulsive actually go together.

32:56 Seth: He says, yeah. And so, you know, the idea that an artistic education and a commitment to the notion that there is something universal and transformative about the artistic process and about art that can be emancipatory, there's A lot at stake here. And that's part of the reason why I really enjoyed the reading and I want to continue on with it. But much of what we've read here is there's very little. It's almost like we have to connect this to a theory of beauty. Like we gotta go back to Scruton or whoever and find a way to do that as well as a pedagogic theory.

33:32 Wes: I mean, to fully explain this, we need a psychology, right? We need to say, okay, how do these specific. We need to be able to connect the experience of doing art in whatever way. And I think actually performance is very important, but. And I think composition in a way is a kind of performance, but we need to connect the experience of the aesthetic or even just observing, being an observer looking at a painting. Because, you know, there's plenty of aesthetic theories that argue that the experience of art recapitulates the creative act. We identify with the creative act in the artist. But anyway, the question psychologically is how would that be morally improving? Or maybe moral is even the wrong word. I mean, we need a broader, or at least have a very broad sense of what we think of as ethical or moral here. How does that improve us as people? I tend to think it does as well.

34:17 Mark: More purely a man is the way it's put it. We're only wholly a man when we're playing. If you want to say that we're only fulfilling our inherent ethical potential would be another way of saying that it's certainly not supposed to be gendered.

34:31 Wes: I'm trying to say at a psychological level, how do we explain that very abstract statement? And I believe this, right? I'm less inclined to be a fascist or to be de beauvoir serious man politically, or to be someone who's simply dogmatic. If I am engaged with the aesthetic, I believe that although we could point to many cases where that's obviously not true, where the artist is just an asshole. But anyway, how does that work? How does the aesthetic help us not get into that close minded, or whatever you want to call it, realm?

35:04 Markus: I think it offers sort of like a fundamental for communication. So if people are, and I have to use this word again, interested in the same subject matter, they have something to talk about. There is much less of a forceful state necessary if people talk to each other. And on that level, arts education or, you know, things like that do lead to better communication and possibly to sort of like a different way of being together. I think that's very simple for me.

35:37 Seth: Thank you. For putting that. Because that was just the thing I was about to try to point to and probably would be much less elegant and straightforward.

35:45 Mark: I think there is a social element that is missing here and I don't think we're going to find it in the rest of the reading that the way that you get to the universal, the way that you relate to other people is because we all have a common psychology. And so when you are speaking honestly from the heart, I also, incidentally, I'll point people at our Emerson episode because he was writing at about the same time and this also influenced by these German romantics. The idea that when you are being most creative, most idiosyncratically, you most true to yourself, you are actually expressing the most universal thing.

So that's the way that we relate to other people is by looking within, which is weird when it should be you're actually dealing with other people like acknowledging that there is true difference. So I'm jamming with you and we're learning how to react to each other. I'm learning what you regard as a legitimate, surprising, compelling riff or, you know, whether we're playing music together or we're just talking together. We've throughout the course of this conversation have been trying to get a handle on each other. This is why I like introducing guests because it throws an unknown factor that we have to kind of feel out each other and like, how are we actually going to talk about this thing?

And that is something you could never do, just merely trying to create on your own. And somehow I'm going to connect to other people in the world this way. Like maybe they'll be able to figure me out because they hear my art, but it's not going to be a true two way connection.

37:11 Wes: I think that this speaks to, you know, what I was trying to get at with curiosity and openness, right? Part of play is treating people non instrumentally and treating the world with non instrumentally as well. So which speaks directly, right, to being able to treat people as ends in themselves. This is something that not just Schiller, but the German idealist in general. This is the kind of connection they were making between morality and aesthetics. And that idea is not new when we approach the world materially or via desire impulse, right? It's just about the satisfaction of desire.

When we approach it rationally, it's about the satisfaction of a concept, let's say, right? What is the object for? It's. Let me take it here and put it under a concept. We want some other mode of being in the world and being related to the world, which is not instrumental in either of those senses, which just lets the object be what it is. Right. Which becomes a very big theme in German idealism. We want something which is expressive of profound and ultimate respect for the world without trying to strictly unify or strictly take into our bodies, because it's going to give us nutrition or whatever it is, destroy or unify.

And that goes towards being able to. He does talk about the alien in this. Right. Being open to the alien and others and other ways of life. It helps us to. If we have a more aesthetic relation to the world, then you can look at others, alien customs or people who are unlike us and see them not simply in terms of do they fit the norm that I have, do they fit my cultural norm? Or whatever the norm is. I can let them be what they are and respect them for that and see the beauty of that.

39:10 Seth: Yeah, this is a great point, Wes. This third way, as you said, trying to find this path. The third way is somehow it's a respect and a maintenance of the particular and the universal simultaneously. So. And he talks about particularity and diversity and multiplicity. That's the nature of sensuous experience, is multiplicity and individuality and particularity. And when you subsume it under the concept and you go full rational, you erase that. And this aesthetic experience, whether it's objects or people or what have you, is somehow being able to balance the universal, the timeless, with a respect and a maintenance of the dignity of the individual in the particular. Well, I mean, that's just absolutely right.

40:01 Markus: I'm still wondering about the. In the 11th letter, and you talked about that, like person and condition. And again, I had to look that up in German. I wasn't actually sure if. Because you were talking about psychology. Right. So is he talking about states and traits here?

40:19 Mark: I think both those would be conditions. States and traits would be conditioned.

40:22 Markus: Right.

40:22 Mark: Whereas person is supposed to be this primordial thing that has the conditions and states.

40:28 Wes: What's the translation for you guys? Personality. I think that's not a good.

40:31 Seth: It's person and condition.

40:33 Markus: Condition. But condition in German is zustand, and zustand is very clearly a word you use for the conditional, the state of a person. You would never use that for the environment or the conditions around you. No, it's the person itself. Zustand is very, very clear.

40:50 Wes: He uses condition as a synonymous with determinants. So he is talking about our determining material environment in the way that produces thoughts and feelings and desires in us. Condition is The. He's getting at the difference between subject and object, basically, or this transcendental realm of the autonomous person. Right. For Kant, this would be. We'd be at the noumenal level here, perhaps. So it's. This is a noumena phenomena distinction where, you know, he wants to make a distinction between the. The autonomous subject and then these material conditions outside of us which determine us as empirical subjects.

This is the weird duality that Kant emphasizes and that Schiller is getting at here. In a sense, we're just. We're natural beings and we're affected by all the conditions outside of us. In a way, we're products of that and we're not free in that sense. But then there's this other rational realm outside of that which paradoxically somehow provides us with the capacity for freedom, and that's our personhood.

41:56 Mark: I found it really hard to get the metaphysics, and I think it's only useful insofar as it's setting up what then happens in. So I've had this quote highlighted for a while from the 14th letter, these impulses. So from the conditions comes the sense impulse, insofar as we are right from the beginning of this whole essay, he says that people, to start with, when they find themselves in the natural state, in the natural government, that means they're part of the. Just like animals, just like a falling rock, they're entirely determined by their conditions.

They're just basically objects in the world. They're not even people because they're just letting themselves be pushed around. And so that is what the sense impulse. It says the sense impulse wants to be determined to receive its object. So it's right there just in our experience of our sensory world that when we look around that it's just like stuff is rushing upon us as if to determine us, as if to push us one way or the other. The base art, the techno beat, is just stimulus response, right? That my sense is picking up this thing and it's making my inner core, it's making my ass shake.

And I'm responding with that. You know that there's not enough. What you were talking about, Marcus, you know, when you're jamming and you're having this out of body experience, it's not because you're doing that. It's not because it's been debased down to sense stimulus response is because you have all this prior training that you've then internalized and so you don't have to consciously think about it anymore. But there's completely like all this formal work going on. And so the rest of the quote here, the sense impulse wants to be determined to perceive its object.

The form impulse wants to determine for itself to produce its object. So it's like the empty vessel that we are is going around just trying to shape stuff. And you can use Kant's epistemology here that he thinks that, you know, we have space, we have time, we have all the categorization, causality, that's all stuff that our mind, as you know, an empty vessel, is just looking to grab onto sensory stuff and make sense of it. To say, ah, this is not just a techno beat that I'm reacting to. It is, oh, what is the history of techno music and how is this?

I want to understand, I want to. I'm curious about the physics of the sound and why my body is responding. You know, it wants to intellectualize the whole thing. So the play impulse will endeavor to receive as it would have produced and to produce as the sense inspires to receive. So we've also talked in back to Aristotle of the importance in art of mimesis. Even when I'm just receiving the techno beat and dancing along, it's like I'm producing the techno beat back. So that's the way that our form making capability comes to the fore is it's like it's not just passively receiving the art, it is shaping it according to its own ideas.

And so it's like being really engaged in a work of art, being really active. We did a whole Sartre on literature episode where the more literary the less. Like receiving a techno beat, a book, you have to actually engage your whole self and write half of, you know, he's not explaining. You can't explain with every sentence all the connotations they're supposed to have. You know, you have to fill in all the blanks. So I know that started somewhere and ended somewhere.

45:16 Wes: So we're talking about aesthetic experience here as opposed to performance or production to

45:22 Mark: produce as the sense aspires to receive, right? So even when you're making art, you know, you are the first audience, right? You're putting out the ideas and you're instantly receiving them back and adjusting so that there's a feedback loop there as well.

45:37 Wes: And you're creating an aesthetic object, right? So what am I doing when I'm using concepts of the understanding to organize my experience, to create experience? Right? Because experience is inherently organized. I'm for Kant, imposing these categories on the manifold, on this raw data. So I think in the artistic act, if we're producers. We're not just producing phenomena in our heads. We're actually producing a new object out there in the world. That's one thing. And we're not doing it just in accordance with these prefabricated concepts. In a way, we create a new category along with the thing. The thing and the category are very closely connected. That's why it can be hard to actually talk about art and say why it's good or not good. And I'm trying to get at. Mark, the thing that you started with is this idea of producing as if we were. How does it go? Receiving.

46:30 Mark: Yes.

46:30 Wes: As it aspires to receive.

46:32 Mark: Yep.

46:33 Wes: Right. The new object. It's not simply something that we are receptive to and then, you know, apply our categories to. We create new conditions of receptivity in the object itself. Right. It's almost like we refashion our cognitive apparatus by creating the object. I don't know if that makes sense. Right. So it's not just, I have causality and I'm receiving sense data, and now here's the theory, and it's. I'm producing ideas in the object.

47:06 Mark: I just want to be clear here. You know, we're talking about how art is freeing. Well, the mechanics of this is, again, the sense impulse is all determinism. The form impulse is free creation. And somehow the art is supposed to bring those things together to sort of make. You know, as you were saying, Marcus, it's not like you're just playing randomly.

47:25 Markus: Right.

47:25 Mark: It's not that you have a free. This completely free play. It is the inner logic of the work. It's like the note that you just played writes the next note. And that's sort of the logic of the work is how it's a. So it's a form of determinism, but it's not real determinism. You could change your mind. You could make the piece go a different direction. So it's sort of. The play is not mere play. It is actually very serious. And the artwork could, like, it must be written this way. I. I can't even control my body. I must write it this way. You know, it can seem very much unlike play. It can seem like, in fact, a very draconian, effortful thing. Depending on the character of the work you're trying to create, it could destroy you.

48:06 Markus: Yeah. That's only one facet of creating art. You know, like, I keep saying to my students that you don't have to have any skill level in order to create. You can just, like, Make a sound, and that's the sound. You can make it. Now, it's not about acquiring anything. The play can happen right now. There's nothing needed in order to play. So that's why when we come back to the title of this, right, Aesthetical Education of Man, and we look at letter 14, like where some of you guys said that, like, Play Drive is maybe one of the answers. I'm wondering if, for the play drive, like if there's actually aesthetical education, if that's actually necessary or needed in order to cultivate Play Drive.

48:54 Mark: Yeah, he's definitely a snob.

48:59 Wes: Part of what I. And correct me if I'm wrong, understood you to be asking, is you could be teaching the sciences, for instance, and be involved in an aesthetic education. Or maybe I'm wrong about that, or that there's some play element in these other activities, which I think could be true, right? And as Mark said, Dylan might argue for the role of beauty in the sciences, and he might have also argued for the roles play in the sciences, but I think he wants to distinguish theoretical activity, right? What are we doing? If we create a scientific theory, we take in a bunch of data, we develop new concepts and theories and models to account for the data.

There may be that incredible moment, right, that insight that, aha. Or, you know, maybe Einstein imagining, saying, okay, what is it like to be on a. What if I were sitting on a photon. If we're thinking, trying to think about the way in which play transcends determinism. And so in a way, it's supposed to be a more kind of a sensuous example in the world of the kind of freedom that would be required for morality, for ethical contact, conduct, according to. I think you would think, for instance, about what it means to be composing a poem and to be under the constraints of.

Of the genre or the form, the poetic form, like a sonnet, or just under the constraints of language, you're very undetermined, in a sense, right? You determined by your theme and subject matter and by grammar to some extent. Or you could. You could play with that. But there's a sense in which the ultimate product can be novel in this very interesting way, right? In the end, the constraint for science is truth, right? The model is already determined. It's already there in reality. You know, it's going to reflect reality. There's one correct model.

There may be a few imperfect ones on the way. Maxwell's equations and then Einstein's modification, for instance, but it's not free in the same sense that Being a poet is free. And you think about some of the wonderful examples of poetic products, read Yeats or Sylvia Plath or whoever, and you think, how in the hell did they do that? How did anyone think to combine words in that way? Just, it almost seems inhuman. It seems to stand outside of any particular determination. It seems to be the ultimate act of freedom.

51:26 Seth: I've said what I had to say about the text in response to what Marcus just said. There at the end is there's a sense in which just that pure naivete of creation is in itself a connection to the free play because it's not bound by conventions. But I'll just go back to what I started off with, which is the notion that aesthetic appreciation is a cultivation of taste, which is different from the creative aspect of it. So there's, it's a two pronged thing here in Schiller of the artistic drive and the ability to connect to the free play in order to synthesize and come up with this third way of experiencing the world. But there's also a consumption aspect to it which requires appreciation and cultivation of taste. So it's like we have to have the artist, but we also have to cultivate and train the audience to experience it. It's a two pronged thing.

52:15 Mark: Thanks so much, Markus, for being our ringer today.

52:18 Markus: Yes, you're welcome.

52:20 Mark: Any final thoughts about this tech? Is this one you would recommend for every other musician, for instance, to pick up?

52:26 Markus: I like it and as I said at the beginning, it's very relevant. I find it strange the way that it's written because he already, he is an artist and he, he does have the language to say what he's trying to say. And here he's sort of like he's trying to be somebody else. That's what I, what I feel when I read this compared, you know, to his, his art.

52:48 Mark: I mean, it's so funny that he says in the very first letter that we really didn't really talk about, like, look, Kant was right about morality, but he didn't express. He expressed it in all his theoretical terminology. If you really understood it, you'll just understand that it's just like, it's just, it's what you feel. It's. This is, these are your ideals. And then he proceeds to give something that is just as hard to understand and just as full of terminology as what he read in Kant. So, all right, Wes and I were not satisfied with the amount of text that we actually got to go through in this discussion.

So we recorded just the two of us, a supporter only. Part three, you can only get if you go to partialexaminedlife.com support. You will not need to have listened to that to fully understand Next episode where Dylan comes back but Seth and Marcus are gone, and we take on the second half of this book. Thanks, folks. Good night, everybody.

53:47 Seth: Good night.

53:47 Wes: Good night.

53:48 Markus: Good night.

53:49 Mark: Thank you.