Ep. 319: Schiller on Experiencing Beauty (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. 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 319 is something like, what is artistic appreciation? And we read the rest of Friedrich Schiller's on the Aesthetic Education of man in 1795. More information place see partially examinedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer ordering a filled Infinity with a side of garlic fries. Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Wes: This is Wes Alwan looking forward to living in the artocracy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:39 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey passing through zero in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Mark: And Seth's birthday is today, and his present to himself was to not show up. So thanks, Dylan, for catching up. You were not on last time, but yet did you feel comfortable jumping in halfway through?

0:56 Dylan: Honestly, I think I got the best part.

0:59 Mark: Sure, sure.

1:00 Dylan: Because reading through the last two 14 and 15, and then listening to the episode, there's a lot of good stuff in this last half.

1:10 Mark: Yes. Here we actually get his aesthetic theory. I mean, really his point, the question really is the same as last time, is how can art make us better people? How can artistic education therefore transform us as human beings and transform government? But the first half was a little heavier on the straight political philosophy sort of question. And here we're getting. It's still pretty abstract, but insofar as we have an actual aesthetic theory. And Wes, you were totally right. He does line up insofar as he's giving an aesthetic theory pretty much exactly where Kant's theory was in terms of this disinterested pleasure.

1:47 Wes: He does, but he's going farther, and this is going to lead directly into Schelling and Hegel. They really actually picked this. I've been reading, looking at some of the history of this a little bit in the secondary literature, and they really pick up on this, what he's doing here, and ultimately Schelling. Right. I'd forgotten about this from our Schelling episode, but we'll talk about early Schelling. We'll talk about the aesthetic relation to objects is the only way that we can actually be in touch with the absolute, because it can't be conceived of by concepts.

The absolute as being the thing that sort of the underlying reality that is more basic than subject and object will actually unite them. So we can't even get at that without art and early Schelling kind of changes. That is important in Hegel as well. And some of this sounds straightforwardly like Hegel, with determinations and limitations and all this stuff. And that is ultimately because he's trying to tell us how aesthetic education, or the development of the aesthetic side of human beings, reconciles these two other drives, these two other impulses, which, left to their own devices and if they become extreme, can themselves be harmful.

Right. Not just our physical desiring nature, but rationality. And even censorious morality in its censorious form, as he calls it, can be damaging to us. Those two things need to balance each other out and annul each other in a way, and be sublated into aesthetic drive. And that is really key for Schiller. And in fact, the aesthetic also serves as a bridge between animal man and moral man in a just political state. Right. There's just no way even to get from the material impulse and being animals and fulfilling all the physical needs to something higher, like morality, without this intervening stage.

And that's an account in here that I found really interesting as well.

3:37 Dylan: I want to be a little careful about glossing whatever Schiller's saying into whatever Kant says or whatever Schelling goes to, because I did find his account of how this balance is formed seemed to me to be different than the way Hegel would talk about it. Significantly less of a dialectic back and forth oscillation and more of a image of a scale in which you had two different forces, the moral and the rational, that were then.

4:08 Mark: Those are the same. Sorry.

4:10 Wes: Yeah, it's the ethical rational. Rational versus the sentience.

4:15 Dylan: Well, I guess we'll go back and look at it, and I could be completely wrong.

4:19 Wes: Sorry, just to clarify, the rational faculty, right, gets divided into the theoretical and the practical, famously by Kant, and then it persists through the German idealists, and it's this conflict, right, which is the big problem through the whole history. Dylan, I think what you're pointing out is actually important to this whole line of thought, the conflict between the theoretical and practical, even though they do fall under the rubric of reason, let's say theoretical rationality and practical rationality. Schiller's a little bit confusing because he's often talking about those two things in the same breath and then opposing them to the sensuous or material drive. I don't know if I'm getting at what you were actually trying to say or not, but it may be that

5:00 Dylan: I'm confused about the scope of the rational in terms of the practical and where the sensuous is distinct, his account of balance. And let me just put aside the fact that maybe I'm using the balance between the wrong things is significantly different than Hegel to Me, because it involves a simultaneous weighing between two things. There's double work being done, which to me seemed very different than a oscillation back and forth. And the work of the aesthetic was, in a way that I had not seen before, trying to bridge the distinction between the moral and the. I want to say the rational. I want to say the rational. But if you guys say that it's moral is part of the rational, then we say the practical and the theoretical. That's fine.

5:49 Wes: Well, no, the. The rational and the sensual. Right? The practical and the theoretical being both part of the rational. The reason why I was mentioning Hegel is just because Schiller is talking in these very fancy ways about these two different things that are contradictory and null each other and somehow are reconciled and balanced, but yet the gap can't really be bridged between them by beauty, because one of them is the infinite and one of them is the finite. So you get something like a concept of sublation, because you get the annihilation of both of these moments, and yet also their preservation.

He even has a little footnote where he talks about these moments being preserved in every act of judgment, which is really interesting. So it's not just about civilizational development. It's not just about psychological development, let's say. But these moments are important to every act of judgment. But I think this will be clarified. We'll get some clarity, Dylan, on what you're saying. If we just jump into the 14th letter mark, is that where you were thinking of starting?

6:45 Mark: I had a question going into this regarding these two drives. So you're right. It's all the way back to, like, the 11th letter or something, where he's introducing this idea that we have these two impulses. That's the word that he uses, right? The sensuous impulse is to turn yourself into matter, alteration, reality occupying time. This is where the content is sensation. And then you've got. The formal impulse comes from a rational nature. It strives to set us at liberty, bring harmony to manifestation, to maintain the person. Right. This transcendental ego through all the changing circumstances.

In saying that these are both impulses, I'm kind of confused, because by definition, the sensual is where causality lies. So if impulse meant some sort of causal push, that shouldn't actually be allowed from the formal side, from the spiritual side. So it has to be like a final cause or something. In other words, the teleology, the internal logic of the system. In other words, that we as a system have a dual nature and the logic of half of that is regular material causality. And the logic of the other half, is this some sort of call to transcend that?

7:54 Wes: Yeah, it's. Remember in rationality it's a one way impulse in a sense. That's what makes it the absolute as manifested in a particular human being. The absolute is just right. The buck stops there. There's determination or determined cause beyond that. So in some translations, I think they're called drives. Right. So the form drive, the rational drive, the way that manifests itself in reason is through theoretical reasoning, the application of concepts to particulars and then decision making. Right. We reason when we make decisions and in autonomous moral decisions we are giving reasons to ourselves.

Rationality produces those reasons and that's how morality works for Kant and Schiller. And so you could call those drives in a sense, but they are self causing in a way. The matter side is meant to account for a lot of different things. It's meant to account for our desiring nature. Right. The way in which we are impulsive and instinctual. But it's also an account of sensibility. Right. In this early part he's talking about sensibility and our receiving sensations and impressions from the outside. And then we get pushed around by that. Right.

And we in a way are an empirical level, are part of that material domain. We are determined beings and passive in that sense. So our sensibility and the perception of sensation is associated with this passivity. That means that we don't have any free will. It seems like at the empirical level rationality must intervene. So these in Kant are these very. These are separate realms. And Kant never fully explains how you reconcile them. Right. You have this noumenal realm where freedom is possible and in the empirical realm where it's impossible. The Romantics and German idealists are obsessed with this problem and it's manifested here.

And the bright idea is, ah, the aesthetic is actually one way of trying to reconcile that contradiction that Kant introduces.

9:48 Dylan: So in the 14th letter there are three impulses. The material impulse, the formal impulse and the aesthetic impulse. The aesthetic impulse is the one that helps resolve the tension between the material and the formal impulse.

10:02 Mark: Yeah, the two kind of combine themselves combined with each other.

10:06 Wes: Yeah.

10:06 Dylan: To the playful impulse, which is associated with the aesthetic. So I confess I'm finding myself confused about whether we're talking about Kant or Hegel or Schiller. Just tell me, material impulse and formal impulse, which are they associated with? The rational, the moral?

10:23 Wes: The formal is the rational and the rational bifurcates into theoretical and the practical.

10:27 Mark: It's exactly Like Plato, that you've got your material stuff and the forms must come from above.

10:35 Dylan: So the material is the sensual and the formal is the rational.

10:38 Wes: He has so many different synonyms for these that it's confusing. He goes in between physical, sensuous, material. What are some of the other words that he uses for the exact same thing?

10:48 Mark: Content.

10:49 Wes: Content determination. Yeah. And there's a lot of others. Yeah.

10:53 Dylan: My sole confusion here has been then mistaking where the moral ends up being right.

10:58 Mark: Because this is just what he's inheriting from Kant, that moral has to come from pure rationality. And so the whole question is, how can we, given that we're beasts just being pushed around by our impulses, how could we possibly open ourselves up to the siren song of rationality? And, well, here's the intermediate step as well. Push him a little. Make him enjoy art for art's sake. Make him enjoy even just something that is not. You know, the material is all about necessity and desire. And once you start, like, decorating. Superfluity was a good word that was introduced in the second half of the design.

Yeah. Once you start to introduce anything extra, just fancy it up a little. I mean, you could still say, if you're an evolutionary biologist, well, you know, that's done for survival purposes, to attract mates or whatever. But that's not how it seems to us. Like, there are things that seem to us like, I just want to get the food, I just want. But then I would say even just wanting, like, really tasty food, anything that's not strictly for survival. Even if you could give some sort of background backdoor evolutionary explanation or causal explanation, of course there's going to be some explanation for all this stuff.

But that's kind of the point is we are going to be inevitably causal creatures. How do we Jerry rig this machine, that is us to actually want the transcendent stuff?

12:15 Dylan: So at the end of page 51, I'm in the Penguin. So this is middle of the 14th letter, he says, hence the playful impulse in which both of these impulses work in tandem, that is, the material and formal constrains the soul both morally and physically, since it annuls all contingency and therefore nulls all constraint and sets man physically and morally free. So morally is formal and physically is material.

12:42 Mark: Right. And each of them seems to impose a certain kind of necessity. I mean, the causal necessity is obvious. But the fact that for Kant, if you're thinking morally, I mean, you're free. Right. But you will think according to the laws of logic, the laws of reason, like you are actually very tightly constrained, whereas once you enter the aesthetic range,

13:03 Dylan: he goes to great lengths at the end to explain how even with all of this balance, you're not going to know what's true. So there's this whole open question in Schiller about whether it's doing the work that he thinks it's doing. Kant just says it's going to work. Schiller feels to me like he hopes it's going to work. He has this metaphysical theory that he's accounting for, but he goes to great pains to say that you're not going to know what art is good and you're not going to know whether what you're doing is good. But there's a kind of gesture.

So this is how it's working. But I think there's a big question about how it cashes out. He's going to say, effectively, that a free human being is more beautiful and a flourishing human being is more beautiful and more right and more just and more desirable. All those things, basically, is going to line up all those things because the aesthetic is going to do the work of making us more free and choosing things that are more beautiful that way. And it's also going to make us choose governments that are more aligned with those things. I think that's the underlying conceit.

But it's not clear to me that it does all that work. I'm not even sure it's clear for Schiller that it does all that work. He's hoping that it does what does what work?

14:13 Wes: That rationality does the work of making us free.

14:16 Mark: That art will push us all the way.

14:18 Wes: Oh, that. You don't think he's sure that the aesthetic.

14:20 Dylan: I think that's the argument that he's making. But he has, towards the end, he takes a lot of pains to make it so that it is not. Maybe the causal isn't quite the right word, but it is not going to be that becoming more sensitive to the aesthetic will make it so that we always do the right thing.

14:39 Wes: We could get to that.

14:40 Dylan: Yeah.

14:40 Mark: Hopefully we'll get to that.

14:44 Wes: So I wanted to say. I think this is that opportune moment for me to say, I think there are two varieties of freedom here. There's the free will. And he says as much in a footnote that I'll find if I have to. But the freedom that he's talking about with respect to the aesthetic is a bit different than the freedom that he's talking about than simply Kantian free will. It's more like Psychological freedom that involves the integration of these drives. And this is something that comes out really, you know, much more explicitly in Nietzsche. Right.

So Nietzsche at this point has abandoned the idea of metaphysical free will, but still wants to talk about autonomy and very similar terms to Schiller, which is a. Psychological autonomy, psychological freedom. What I think Schiller is saying here is that psychological freedom. We don't have to continue to use that phrase, that's my phrase. But that this sort of aesthetic freedom is a bridging mechanism to moral, rational freedom.

15:40 Dylan: I think that's exactly right. But I think the way in which it is unconstrained is exactly the question of whether it's doing the work. I agree with you that he's. I mean, he's written this for a reason, and I think he's optimistic in that way, but it's importantly, not deterministic in the way it constrains those things. Right. And it has to be. But that ends up being something like. It's the characteristic of the action of the aesthetic, of aesthetic freedom, that it gets exercised in a particular way. Right. Again. That the more beautiful is, the more just, the more right, the more desirable all those things.

16:20 Wes: Yeah. He emphasizes that there's a determination in a way, to what reason is doing. The paradox is that we're free. And this is before Khan, this is in Leibniz and other early modern people as well. The only way to freedom is through a different type of constraint. Instead of being constrained by our impulses and desires, we are constrained by reasons. And the only way out of that paradox is if we give reasons to ourselves, which is, you know, again, very confusing the. In this talk of the absolute. So Kant's third critique, in a way, provides a much more seductive vision of what freedom might mean, as in the free play of the faculties and the aesthetic experience.

And here it's an elaboration of that idea, this freedom that we get in his account, the mutual annulment and reciprocity of the rational and the sensuous. Schiller is very concerned. Right. About the excesses of rationality. Historically, philosophy has paid attention to the excesses of the sensuous, but he's just as worried about the excesses of rationality and. And the ways in which that can ironically make us less free. Maybe this is. I don't know, Dylan. Maybe you were hinting at this, but.

17:34 Mark: Yeah, so the setting us free, both physically and morally. We've talked about how the tyrant seems like totally free, can do whatever he wants, but he's a slave of his desires. He's a slave physically, but he's free morally because he doesn't recognize any. Any moral constraints. Whereas the Kantian saint is entirely constrained in what he does by reason, but is free from paying attention to his physical desires. I mean, Kant's going to say one is bad, one is good, but we can recognize both of those kind of would feel constrained if you were actually acting like this.

You know, maybe if you're the Confucian sage. Well, it's because you've internalized all this stuff. It feels. It still actually feels entirely free. But as a practical matter, if you really devote yourself to duty full time, it's going to seem like, God damn, I'm very constrained in what I do. I'm not going to. It would be very difficult to be completely happy there. Aesthetic Realms gives us a chance to. Because we're not actually creating something that is in reality. We're not like saying, presto, this is a real society that people are going to have to live in.

And no, it's. This is the world that I'm making up through my poem, through my song, whatever. That gives us the freedom from physicality. Right. Our imagination can go this way and that, but it also gives us freedom from strict adherence to moral guidelines. I want to compare this to what he says a little later. One of the things that our guest Marcus said last time was a kind of a danto sort of later aesthetic theory where like when I'm teaching classes about making music, hey, just clap your hands, make it blah thin. There's, that's music, you're doing it.

And the Kantian. Anybody who believes that form is necessary for music is going to deny that. Right? He's going to deny this sort of postmodern John Cage Any sound is music. You just have to interpret it as, you know, because like that's the first freeing thing. Like it's superfluous to my needs that I'm making this clapping noise right now. That's great. You've gotten some sort of freedom. But now you have to have the logic of the work come in, right? That once you start writing a poem, it's something like laws. The internal logic of it will make it so that if it's good, it will be the best poem of its sort that it can be.

So you're. It's actually a pretty rigorous discipline to be a good artist to like get what is the quote unquote, right note. You know, there might be multiple ways of pitching that. So it's not like there's one most beautiful artwork or something that everything is pointing toward, as somebody like Plato might make you think. At the very least, it's submitting yourself to a very rigorous form of rules to be a good artist.

20:12 Wes: Yeah. He talks about bad taste. I think that's in the last chapter, right? You focus on the charms, or you focus on what's exciting and stimulating versus the aesthetic, where you're introducing the realm of the spirit into the realm of the physical. It has to be a manifestation in a sense of human freedom. And so you can't just lapse onto one into one side, right? When you have bad taste, you're lapsing more into the material. Those two things have to be well balanced in the aesthetic object. And that's where freedom. It's in that balance that we get freedom, right?

So the determinations, the ways in which rationality determine us and the ways in which. Which impulses determine us, those two things, in a way, they cancel each other out. And then aesthetic freedom is emergent on that cancellation, interestingly enough, not only, as Schopenhauer thought, are we freed from desire and the will and the appreciation of the aesthetic object, which Schiller says the same thing here. We get our faculties working, right? The understanding and feeling. Those things are working within us. They're powers, and we can feel their power and their energy.

But they are not simply serving the purpose of, you know, rationality is not trying to just get me something I want or fulfill a moral norm. It's not just there to impose concepts on objects and all this stuff. But it is working. It's working freely without being determined by any particular object. It's working because it has been set to work in the presence of beauty.

21:50 Dylan: All right.

21:50 Mark: Should we get to probably a 16, finally, just what beauty is as the eternally only something indivisible, unique. There can exist only one single equilibrium. Somehow it's this equilibrium between the two impulses.

22:07 Wes: You're in the 16th letter.

22:08 Mark: Yeah, I think so. I mean, unless there's anything we.

22:10 Wes: He said earlier on that beauty can either attenuate or activate either side of the dilemma, Right? The sensuous side or the formal side. But we're kind of in a bind with that, and sometimes we need that, right? So there are people who are too material in their orientation. And the formal can kind of balance them out, and art can give them that. So, for instance, he's talking about liquefying and releasing or Liquefying.

22:40 Mark: Yeah. Melting is liquefying in our translation, which

22:42 Wes: I'm just going to call attenuating and then activating is the. Is what I'm going to call the other one because I. I find less weird.

22:50 Mark: But energizing is what we have.

22:52 Wes: Energizing, Right. So the danger of just giving into the formal impulses, which is something like the Apollonian in nature, the way it manifests itself in art, is that you suppress the dynamism. You suppress the vitality of what you're doing. You suppress the energy of that. But if you try to give that back, the positive side of that is you make people more sensitive. You enhance their receptivity by getting some more of the material back into the picture. But you also might just make people savages. Right. There's the negative effects of revving up that material side of us and just leading us back to the impulsive. So in either case, attenuating or activating either side, we can bring ourselves to one form of excess or another. We might get too formal. We might get too material.

23:42 Dylan: Second paragraph. Right. He's summarizing this. He's saying what he's written so far. We might expect from the beautiful an effect of both of release and of tensioning, a releasing effect to keep both sensuous and formal impulses within bounds, and a tensioning effect to maintain the powers of each, which is sort of what you were explaining. And then he then introduces this concept of reciprocity by virtue of which both parts simultaneously and necessarily condition each other and are conditioned by each other, the purest product of which is beauty. And so it's this back and forth. And he introduces then this liquefying, would you call it attenuating and energetic components of that activity.

24:23 Wes: The point is that in experience, we don't get that perfect reciprocity. So we get these imperfect balancing outs.

24:30 Dylan: Sure.

24:31 Wes: One side predominating over the other.

24:33 Mark: And.

24:33 Wes: Yeah. And then he goes on to describe the dangers.

24:35 Mark: I feel there's been a cheat here, that the two drives were supposed to be coming from two distinct realms of experience. From the material, the sensuous, and then from the formal, the heavenly, the transcendent. And now we've got what the heavenly transcendent is. Just this melting beauty, this liquefying beauty, this attenuating something that tells us chill out. Like, it's true that if you're too animal and worked up, then you're not going to be able to pay attention to a math problem or the ethical problems of, you know, anything that reason. But that doesn't mean that the tendency toward abstraction, toward transcendence, is equivalent to Soft angelic music and other things that will cause you to. To chill out. Like that's weird to me.

25:22 Wes: I want to distinguish. The attenuating and the activating are not lined up with form and impulse. There's a four way grid here. So the attenuating can act on either. He'll say this explicitly. The attenuating can act on either the formal or the material, and the activating can act on either the formal or the material.

25:45 Mark: Beauty and idea is something eternally. I mean, I'm just. This is part of what I started to read before. Beauty and idea, then, is eternally only something indivisible, unique, since there can exist only one single equilibrium. Beauty and experience, on the other hand, will always be twofold, since through oscillation the balance may be destroyed in a twofold fashion on one side or the other. And you would think that the sides should correspond to these two drives. Like that's what we've been talking about all along, is how.

26:11 Wes: So let's go to page 62. This is the very bottom. Fluid beauty, it has been said, is for tense souls. Energizing beauty for relaxed souls. Now, tense souls can be tense in either domain. They can be tense in the physical or they can be tense in the material. Tense in the formal, however. And he's going to say that here. However, I call the man tense, both when he is driven by sensations under the unilateral power of the material impulse, and also when he is driven by concepts under the unilateral power of the formal impulse. All exclusive domination of either one of his basic impulses is for him a condition of compulsion and force. Liberty consists in the concurrence of his two natures and the harmony of both necessities. This took me forever to figure out.

26:54 Dylan: So the man, unilaterally ruled by his feelings or led by his senses, is therefore released and liberated by form. A man unilaterally dominated by rules or led by intellect, is released and liberated by matters.

27:06 Wes: So you get this confusing four way deal.

27:10 Mark: The melting or liquefying thing is actually a good. Because it just breaks down whatever mode you're too trapped in.

27:17 Wes: Firstly, its tranquil form will calm the wildness of life. Secondly, as a living image, you will arm the shrunken form with sensuous power,

27:25 Dylan: guiding the concept back to intuition and rule to feeling. So it gives feeling to the rational. Right?

27:32 Wes: It's a little bit weird because, you know, when you attenuate one side, it seems like you necessarily activate the other side. That's the Reciprocity. It's like, why does he really want to do this confusing thing, this, this four way thing? I'm a little bit unsure, but, you know, this all goes back to savagery and barbarianism. Right. An example of someone who's too slack, I think he brings up these kind of effete rich people who, you know, they seem to be interested in the aesthetic, but they're really philistines, essentially.

28:02 Dylan: Yep.

28:03 Wes: Yeah, I'm not actually, you know, I don't have a good explanation of how all that fits together.

28:06 Mark: In 16, he says tenderness can degenerate, not infrequently into softness, plainness into platitude, correctness into emptiness, liberality into license, lightness into frivolity, calmness into apathy, and the most despicable character side by side with the most splendid humanity. So the things that are supposed to civilize us could end up leaving us, as he says, Barbarian through the 17th letter. He's still concerned then with, you know, melting the taught man, energizing the languid one. What this involves, and it seems like there is a perfect kind of what beauty is supposed to do, is to strike a balance between those two so that it doesn't just chill you out, so you fall asleep, but it does not hype you up so much that you stop being able to think clearly. It just like energizes you in a calm way and makes you just, I'm ready for anything. I'm now ready to take that test.

28:55 Dylan: So, Mark, you've done something a couple times which makes sense to me, but surprised me in its absence. In Schiller, you've given examples where taking seriously the notion of aesthetic here having to do with things that I would normally think of, like writing a poem or doing art. And I couldn't figure out if he really meant that, that I would be going through and in my aesthetic education, that I would be making art or whatever. To me, it felt way more abstract than that, that he was calling for, pointing to this aesthetic impulse, this playful impulse.

But it's link to art in terms of typically, what we think of as fine art or creative acts, that we think of typically as acts like drawing or sculpture or writing poetry. That link was not at all clear to me. It seemed to me that he was maybe purposefully just never mentions it. I mean, like, there's this mentioning once of a sculpture at one point or something like that.

29:58 Wes: But he brings up poetry in the last letter.

30:01 Dylan: Yes, but the limitedness with which he brings it up to me is striking. And So I found myself just naturally thinking of all kinds of activities as being aesthetic, as it being a kind of disposition with respect to them, a kind of playfulness with respect to all these concepts and these parts of activities.

30:20 Wes: I think he sees it everywhere. Right. He even sees it in the swarming of insects. There's a freedom there. And the lion roars. And I can assume he would if you thought about Cubs playing. That's the play drive. There's something inherently aesthetic about that. It's not just meeting an immediate need.

30:37 Mark: Well, proto aesthetic.

30:39 Wes: Yeah, proto. Okay. Because I do think he thinks that least the highest manifestation of the aesthetic is in fine art, which is actually different than Kant. Kant thought it was in nature. Right. We are talking about creative activity, but we're also talking about the judgment of beauty. That's primarily what the aesthetic is about. The experience of an object as beautiful, which is. We think about it, is a really weird thing that that's even possible. As opposed to just having pleasure or fear or whatever, but. Or cognition, plain cognition. Adornment. Right. Beautiful swords. When people have that impulse to adorn themselves and to make these practical objects beautiful, that's whether either aesthetic or proto aesthetic, whatever you want to call it, that's on the way to fine art, which I would see as the highest manifestation.

31:22 Dylan: In the previous episode, Mark brought me up in terms of pointing to beautiful mathematical proofs, for instance. But I think that sits right here, like that you would choose one proof over another as a more beautiful way of demonstrating some kind of mathematical truth or even the arrangement of the proof, much less the choices that you would make regarding judging the higher likelihood of a given account of the physical world as being more likely true, turning on its relative beauty to you. And you would break down that beauty into simplicity and universality and all kinds of things that you would also associate with fine art.

32:05 Wes: I hate to disagree again, sorry. Because I think he takes pains in the 27th letter to say, in the general sense, the aesthetic is preparatory for truth, but in specific truth judgments, it actually doesn't play a role. So this is the letter where he's going to basically say the aesthetic is not actually dangerous to truth. Right. He's much more modest than Nietzsche about all of this, and he doesn't. He wants to distinguish aesthetic appearance from lying appearance, whereas Nietzsche wants to kind of conflate them in a cheeky, challenging way. 27th letter tells us not only is the aesthetic not a danger to truth, but we should be more concerned in a way about overweening rationality than we should be concerned about the aesthetic getting in the way of our truth seeking.

32:51 Dylan: The 27th letter is what I was thinking of. Where he's attenuating the force of the aesthetic in terms of cashing it out as providing specific solutions for us.

33:02 Mark: We were surprised in the first half of this book that there wasn't, especially since I brought a musician on to talk about these practical matters, that there was nothing practical. And Dylan, that you got the idea, even going through the end of the book, that there was nothing practical. That talking about artworks or really the beauty of anything in particular. It's always just beauty, capital B. This transcendental thing that we know must exist because of our experience of freedom or something like this, you know, such that, you know, we have these two drives and they must be able to combine in such a way.

And so even though we can't really understand any of this, therefore there must be this beauty. And we can therefore look for the pointers toward that beauty in our actual experience of artworks, our experience of nature. But something's always going to fall short. So this makes it seem very Platonic that, you know, there must be some absolute beauty. That's the perfect balance between the melting and the strengthening. I did have a quote that I found here in near the end of the 17th letter. Luckily we can kind of speed up a little bit through some of these.

Because he's still just talking about what we.

34:08 Wes: The point we've already made 17th IS.

34:10 Mark: Yeah, melting beauty for a taught nature and the other for energizing. Energizing.

34:16 Dylan: Relax.

34:17 Wes: Right.

34:17 Mark: For the other type, firstly as quiet form. Actually, this whole paragraph is about melting beauty. And I'm just reading the second half of the second to last paragraph. As quiet form, beauty will soften savage life. And pave the way for the transition from sensations to thoughts. Secondly, as living shape, she will furnish abstract form with sensuous power. And will lead back conception to contemplation and law to feeling. We're getting there. The first service she renders to the natural man, the second to the artificial man. So the artificial man is like the barbarian who's just all, la, la, la.

You got to bring it to feeling. But since in either case she does not control her material quite freely, but depends on what either formless nature, capital N, or unnatural art, capital A, offers to her. She will, in either case, bear traces of her origin and become lost at one point more in material life, at another point more in sheer abstract form. Where you're saying that Kant says. Really, though you can talk about artworks and contemplating the picture of grapes and things like that. It's ultimately from nature. And I think we got this in the Kantian antecedents that we covered more in Shaftesbury.

And you know, that. That whole string where really nature ends up being the fundamental thing. And I actually think, you know, we didn't read the part of Kant's third Critique where he talks for about half the book about teleology. But that's where, like I remember us reading Shaftesbury, if I'm remembering which of these three guys this was, where what we're really in grasping artistic beauty is God's wisdom in creating something that seems so purposeful. Right. So Kant is sort of running with that in saying aesthetic appreciation of nature is seeing it as if it was made for our senses.

You know, it's seeing purpose in things. So nature is, in this text, on the side of the sensuous, whereas unnatural art is on the side of form. It's right. People just drawing stuff or making tones. There's no direct reference to nature. So both of these things, you know, that's where beauty would show up in these two sources empirically. But for Schiller, those things only point at some sort of transcendental beauty, which would be midpoint between the two. I don't know. Have all the good points of each.

36:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean, he does describe it as a happy medium. Right. In the 18th letter between form and matter. But then he talks about, in different ways about this. He talks about each side annulling each other in a certain sense. And in this letter in particular, he talks about philosophers kind of siding with one part of the opposition of others. So. Right. Some people are worried, and this is again, the opposition between form and matter. But if we get too rational, we dissect things. And then if we get too synthetic and grandiose in our speculation, then we destroy its. Destroy its position. So he's going to say, you know, philosophers were not rigorous in the sense that we are, because we are going to undertake this project of finding the synthesis.

37:20 Mark: Right. Synthesis, I think, is important because it can't be just a midpoint. Right. It's the 18th. Through beauty, the sensuous man is led to form a thought through beauty. The spiritual man is brought back to matter, restored to the world of sense. It appears to follow from this that a condition must exist midway between matter and form, between passivity and activity, and that beauty transports us into this intermediate condition. This is the conception of beauty that the majority of people actually form for themselves as soon as they begin to reflect upon her workings. Really? Do you guys agree with that?

37:48 Wes: That.

37:48 Mark: Oh, it's just. This is actually intuitive that this is. And all experiences do point this way. But on the other hand, nothing is more inconsistent and contradictory than such a conception. Since the distance between matter and form, between passivity and activity, between sensation and thought, is infinite, the two cannot conceivably be reconciled. I would say more. It's kind of apples and oranges here, you know, between the finite and infinity, there's no midpoint. Right. It would just still be a very big finite. Right. They're two, categorically two different kinds of things.

38:17 Dylan: But I think that he agrees with you, which is why beauty ends up dealing with these contradictions. I agree with you. There's probably got to be some kind of synthesis. But he doesn't seem to use that word.

38:28 Wes: He uses the word uniting.

38:30 Dylan: And it's an aesthetic activity. Right. Beauty connects the two contrary conditions of sensation and thought. And yet there is no intermediary between them. The first is secured by experience, and the second directly through reason. And beauty is having. This is in this sort of dual activity.

38:46 Wes: Right.

38:46 Dylan: Beauty is acting on our sensuous side. And beauty is also acting on our reasonable side.

38:54 Wes: Yeah. In the 19th letter, we get this. And I don't have any huge desire to go through all the steps because what we're talking about is so paradoxical. And he talks about it in so many different ways. And this sounds very Hegelian, you know, where you get this kind of evolutionary account. And it begins with, you know, beauty can't actually bridge the infinite gulf between the passive and the active, between feeling and thinking. It gives us a pathway, in a sense, but it doesn't bridge the gulf. Because one is finite and one is infinite. And the way this letter starts, we get this vision of a mind that is before any determination, right?

So there's almost like a hypothetical before we've ever had a sensation. Because that's what the determination would be. The first type of determination, a limitless capacity to be shaped. Nothing is really ruled out to the imagination. And he calls that empty infinity. And then we get the senses, and they fix one actuality. Out of an infinite number of determinations, we gain content with perceptions, but that has to happen. And so that's a negation, right? Because we also need something positive on the other side to have the determination. So, for instance, we get the paradox that space doesn't exist unless we define a place.

But we can't get place unless we already have Absolute space, same things with time. You know, the moments versus all eternal time, Parts and wholes, passivity and activity. Right. So you get this very Hegelian idea of the determination of a thing resting on this negation against something positive, which is to say all its relationships to other things. And then the conclusion of this is that even though. Well, it's not the conclusion actually. Even though beauty gives us a pathway from feeling to thinking, it can't actually bridge that infinite gulf it leads us to, from matter to form.

But how? I don't know. How does it do it?

40:49 Dylan: In the 19th letter, isn't he pointing towards will in a kind of way that Schopenhauer would do? This is the 2/3 of the way. He says something kind of funny, which I wanted to point out, where he's talking about these two opposed tendencies. He says establishing the degree to which two such opposed tendencies can exist in the same being is a task that can baffle a metaphysician. But not a transcendental philosopher.

41:14 Wes: Well, the transcendental philosopher eschews metaphysics.

41:18 Dylan: Exactly.

41:19 Wes: It's paradoxical. But hey, there's the noumenal, there's the phenomenal. I'm an empirical realist, right? I'm just a. I'm a transcendental idealist. We can't know anything about that, but we're not going to deny they exist. Dylan. I think, as you've complained before, it's kind of a way to do metaphysics on the sly. On the sly.

41:38 Dylan: That's exactly what it is.

41:40 Wes: We're not metaphysicians, but we can't rule it out.

41:44 Dylan: So on 70, this is where he was pointing to the will, which it seems like it's trying to do. That work. He says each of these fundamental impulses, once developed, necessarily seeks its own satisfaction. Since, however, both are necessary but seek contradictory objects. These dual compulsions cancel each other out. And the will has complete freedom of choice between them. It is therefore the will that relates both impulses as a power, which is the basis of reality, while neither of the two impulses can act of themselves as a power against the other.

42:18 Wes: Right. So to give that example, you know, if you have an impulsive, a truly impulsive person, free will is not going to just reign that in.

42:25 Dylan: That's right.

42:26 Wes: And if you have what's the other? He gives an opposing example, which I forget. So they can't really act on each other in that way. Which seems right from personal experience. Trying to just will oneself to do things doesn't work. So you already have to have something else going on. Right. So the will already has to have a certain comportment to the world before. Well, I don't know what I'm saying.

42:51 Dylan: Well, it's interesting that you say that, because I agree with you that our will can only go so far. But he seems. I took him as saying that our will was actually the source of all this. He says there is no power in man other than his will, and he can be robbed of his inner liberty only by that which robs him of his existence, death and all loss of consciousness. So I took that to be that the will is the active force that motivates both of these impulses. And it is through acts of will that is the core of our aesthetic drive.

43:26 Mark: My impression was that when he's talking about will, he's talking phenomenologically. Right? We always seem to have a choice whenever we reflect on anything. It doesn't matter how strong your desires are, doesn't matter how strong your moral compunctions are. We always have Free will is just something that's given in our experience. And so it is one of the things that these philosophers like following Fichte here, you know, just take as absolutely essential. We have to be able to say we have freedom of the will. That doesn't mean that will is in the background, like maybe Schopenhauer or somebody would say that, like being a causal force in giving us desires, in giving us the pushes of one thing or another in the causal order.

And on the other hand, it's not determining behind the scenes like the moral imperative. It's merely something that lets us guide ourselves between these two sort of what seem to us pre existent orders of being.

44:21 Wes: I think we're back at this idea of the psychological version of freedom. The evidence for that is in the footnote to this letter which I had mentioned before. Right. So he says, to avoid any misunderstanding, I should note that no matter how often I hear talk of freedom, I do not mean the kind of freedom that is necessarily a part of man's intelligence. Right? Metaphysical freedom. Freedom which can neither be given to him nor taken away, but that freedom which is based upon his mixed nature, which I'm taking to be empirical or psychological freedom.

The fact that a man only acts rationally evinces a freedom of the first order. And the fact that, constrained by materiality, he acts rationally and acts materially according to the laws of reason, evidences of freedom of the second order. So what I took this to mean is that in a way we have free will supposedly metaphysically, but we're not always. Often we're not acting according to that. Right. Because we can be immoral and we're often. We're just simply pushed around. So just having it doesn't mean having it always.

45:16 Mark: We have the potential for it or something.

45:18 Wes: And what makes it possible to act on that innate capacity for metaphysical free will? Well, we need psychological free will. Right. We can't just be acting under psychological compulsions. If I'm an intemperate person, Right. We need a little Aristotelian virtue ethics to kind of shore this up to make it truly possible within the empirical realm. If I'm intemperate, I'm not going to be exercising my metaphysical free will. How do I have temperance? Well, I need drive integration, let's say.

45:46 Dylan: Well, the same thing would go true for other kinds of what we would think of as more external constraints. Right. If I'm starving, right. I'm going to have similar kinds of constraints.

45:56 Wes: Need, as he puts it in my translation. Yeah.

45:59 Mark: Yep. So that seems like a good place to wrap up the first half of the conversation. Here we've kind of gotten to recapping the overall social point is that art is going to free us to be able to actually make intelligent choices and create a rational government and doing all this sort of stuff by just freeing us up from the tyranny of any other particular, seemingly pre existent system.

46:22 Wes: The artocracy, the aestheticocracy, which he gets to at the very end, that's a real thing that he's talking about.

46:29 Mark: So part two of this discussion will take us to the end of the book. Folks who are PEL supporters can just look for the next thing in your feed. If you're not, go to parcel xamanlife.com support and sign up. We also then recorded a part three that supporters will get next week. And anybody else that wants to dive that much farther into the reading will have to again sign up to become supporters. See ya.