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

0:07 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, episode 319. We are concluding our treatment of Friedrich Schiller's on the Aesthetic Education of Man. We had gotten up to letter 20 out of 28. Here we were talking about freedom.

0:22 Wes: We had mentioned that footnote which suggested that he was talking about psychological freedom. I mean, he is talking about free will too, but he's emphasizing for the purposes of aesthetic freedom, this, the psychological freedom. And he seems to be harping more on that point, I think in the 20th letter. So we, we begin this with idea that freedom is an effect of nature, not of man. So this is not the typical conception of free will as flowing from the unconditioned, from the absolute and from our own rational nature insofar as it protects of that some noumenal, transcendent thing inserting itself into the empirical realm.

1:02 Mark: And just say soul. Just say soul. That's the way.

1:05 Wes: Well, no, I mean, I didn't even think of that. I would have said that if I thought of it. Luckily, it's an effect of nature. There are natural forces that shape us as empirical beings that influence our psychology in the direction of freedom. With the aesthetic. Ultimately, right will turn out to be the mediator.

1:22 Mark: Right. The freedom can be promoted and hampered by natural means. It first arises only when man is complete. And both his fundamental impulses have developed. Must therefore be lacking. So long as he is incomplete and one of the two impulses is excluded. And it must be restored by means of everything that gives him back his completeness.

1:41 Wes: And then he does his history, where we start out with the only the material drive. And I love this phrase. I think he said in my translation, he says something like. Man has not begun at that point. But the way man begins is not simply the introduction of. Of the rational. I mean, ultimately, it's not how Batman

1:58 Mark: begins, that's for sure.

2:00 Wes: Ultimately, you say logical moral necessity. Have to take the place of physical necessity. Right? That is the path. But you gotta destroy the power of sensation before we establish that higher law. And then this is another very abstract passage in which he imagines, right, the destruction of the physical determination. So we get. Go back to this place of complete indeterminability, complete possibility. The thing that we had before we had any sensory impressions were empty of content. He moves on. And maybe one of you can explain it, but he moves on. This confusing way to this idea of the aesthetic condition is active determinability. So it's reminiscent of this indeterminate time before the material had set in this indeterminate state. But it's not the same thing. So it's not this empty state, but it's active determinability.

2:50 Dylan: He has this just before that paragraph at the end you referred to. He pulls out this image of a scale. He says, when its pans are empty, a scale balances, but it also balances if the pans contain equal weights. In this case, this activity, I took it to be working on both the sensuous and the formal, on the material and the reasonable.

3:14 Wes: Yeah, we get this idea of these two things nullify. He uses the word nullify in my translation, sense and reason nullify each other. And then that freedom again emerges out of that, and we get the aesthetic condition of active determinability.

3:29 Dylan: So this last paragraph says, the soul thus moves from sensation to thought through an intermediate disposition in which sense and reason are both active and for exactly the same reason. Their determining forces nullify each other and through their counter position, bring about a negation. When he's using words like nullify and negation, I take him to be referring to exactly the same effect of a scale balancing, that there's simultaneous activity.

3:56 Mark: I feel like we really need to make this more concrete because this is so abstract. I like the quote a little earlier. Man cannot pass directly from sensation to thought. He must take a step backward. It's only by the removal of one determination can the contrary one make its appearance. Right. So the taking the step backward is. Then the quote that you just read is this intermediate period, because you can't actually just remove sensation. So the idea is, we start out, it's the seafood diet. I see food and I eat it. In other words, whatever things, sensation just determines our action.

And we need to. Somehow, we can't just meditate. I mean, I guess you could meditate and try to blank out the senses, but that's not. The solution here is we need to put something in to counterbalance, you know, so I see food, but I, Instead of wanting to eat it, I just want to contemplate it. So that's the concrete thing is this disinterested perception that Kant already gave us as what art is all about. Or what aesthetic appreciation, I should say, is all about.

4:51 Wes: Yeah, it's not just that we. We have the two horses, right. In Plato's model, pulling either the. Trying to pull the chariot the other way. We start with desire, and then reason comes in and says, hey, I'm going to reign you in. It's not simply that conflict. There's a bridging component to that. We can't even get there without this intermediate aesthetic step. Although the aesthetic, in a way, is the representative of reason. It kind of brings it down into the physical realm so that we can even see the formal.

5:21 Mark: In a.

5:21 Wes: In a particular object.

5:23 Mark: So can we finish the analogy that. I mean, what is. Is the charioteer giving the horses some food to distract them from pulling or something? You know? In other words, the artwork, the perception of beauty is like, we still want the horses doing something, but we don't want them bolting off.

5:37 Wes: Well, the aesthetic is our first because it can induce Indifference to the actual object and what it can do for us, which is on the way to the moral right. If I'm going to be treating people as ends in themselves, as opposed to merely a means to an ends. The art object is similarly not a means to any end. That's my first experience of that. And I can get that even if I'm running around slaughtering peasants in medieval times because my sword has some ornaments on it. My sword is pretty. I've begun to understand that. And eventually I'll learn that I should not be slaughtering the peasants as well.

6:10 Mark: I mean, that's kind of funny that the way through them would be instead of just using other people as my slaves and my food or whatever my victims as just back off and treat them as aesthetic objects. And I'm thinking about these horrible Marquis de Sade, kind of like, I will do art that is twisted. You know, serial killers setting up their victims in artistic ways. But that's on the way. Once you can see. Once you just contemplate the person you're about to murder as, as a form and say, oh, that's you're so beautiful, then that is somehow a step to, oh, and they have now that I'm not, you know, I'm staying my immediate passion. Now I can acknowledge their inner life. No, like, it seems like this is not actually a good have to go.

6:53 Dylan: I somehow don't think that that's the right. To me, the posing of dismembered bodies as an artistic endeavor is a corruption of the artistic. It's like the corruption of reason that leads to autocracy. It's not an act of freedom along the way. Right. You're not recognizing the human being in themselves. You can't possibly understand the posing of a person that you've mutilated in some kind of pleasing form as a rendition of their flourishing.

7:26 Wes: That's not possible unless you're really creative interpretation.

7:30 Dylan: It's not possible because there's no way in which you can understand that they are acting and flourishing on their own terms.

7:37 Mark: Because it seems like you have to back off from people. You know that the first forms you would be thinking about is the grapes. Am I going to eat the grapes or am I going to contemplate the grapes? Oh, what a beautiful form the grapes have. Let's think about how the grapes, you know, have their own internal teleology. And then you could get back to seeing people that way. But of course, we know even a lot of people that are like artistic that can't actually deal with human beings that they would rather stick with the grapes and the abstract forms.

And so the leap from any sort of contemplation of surface details to authentically appreciating the inner life of something, it's a pretty big leap. And I could see why, Dylan, as you were saying at the beginning, you could hope that this would get you there. At least you're not trying to eat the people so that maybe you could apprehend their humanity. But it's sure not enough.

8:24 Dylan: My disconcertedness was exactly this mark is that Schiller was implying that if you're a cannibal, that is the way, the path on the way to appreciating people as flourishing human beings. You have to pass through cannibalism, sort of like the ladder of Diotima, but in kind of a weirder way.

8:41 Wes: He does say in the final letter, when he's describing this kind of utopian, aesthetic, political state, that people encounter each other neither as forces or as means to their ends, or as people who might treat them as a means to an end, but nor will they simply encounter them as autonomous subjects or ends in themselves, as in Kant's kingdom of ends. They will encounter them as, quote, unquote, free objects of play. This is kind of the. It sounds a little bit like the aesthete version of a post moral existence, maybe even Nietzsche. That sounds a little bit, I think, dangerous to some people. But anyway, so it's a very interesting idea because it seems to suggest that the aesthetic approach to people is not just a mediating moment to morality, but some sort of ideal as well. Not that morality goes away, but that we can go even farther in some sense in our comportment to other people.

9:39 Mark: And you can try to imagine if John Dewey wrote this text, that it would be just so much more concrete. And let's set aside all this transcendental nonsense and just talk about the fact that, yeah, like, kids are monsters and they're just me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, grab, grab, grab. And if you could make them stop and like paint a picture and do stuff like that, then that might be the key to empathy and getting them to not be monsters anymore and to be rational and good citizens. It's a pretty simple story.

10:12 Wes: Freud calls this latency, right? They go seven or eight or maybe six, I don't know. But they start doing their art projects and they become a lot more tolerable.

10:22 Mark: Schiller's still fun in this crazy ass way that he's doing this. Let's get back into it.

10:27 Wes: I mean, I could use more examples. Yeah, always. Like it's a thicket to me of language and it's poetic. Means a poet. It's poetic in a way, but. But also abstract.

10:37 Dylan: There's nothing practical about it whatsoever.

10:39 Wes: Yeah, just. Just has to be deciphered. And you have to supply your own examples if you want them. For the most part.

10:45 Mark: In the 21st letter. I don't have very much that's new here. Except at the very end where he calls beauty our second creator. It gives us our humanity. We have this predisposition, but he says we lose it with every definite condition in which we come. So beauty has to come and renew it repeatedly. That's a pretty broad, artistic, simple sounding statement. Beauty is our second creator.

11:09 Wes: As the aesthetic capacity restores to humanity this bounty.

11:13 Dylan: Yeah, I guess that jives within the middle. I found it a little confusing. He says beauty is nature. And man owes both its concepts and its resolutions only to himself. In aesthetic culture, the personal worth of a man or his dignity, insofar as this is something that lies within his power, remains completely undetermined. And no more is achieved other than the fact that thanks to nature, he can henceforth make himself what he will, that the liberty of being what he ought to be is fully restored to him. So when he says beauty are second nature and then he says beauty is nature, there's just the idea that this is. What does that mean?

11:55 Wes: He's describing a non transcendent empirical psychological grounds to our freedom that doesn't involve just saying, hey, we're rational subjects with this noumenal side. That's where freedom comes from. Nature gifts us freedom by giving us the aesthetic within the empirical realm.

12:12 Dylan: And that means just that this is part of who we are as human beings. This is part of what it means to be a human being.

12:18 Wes: Yeah, and it's not just about reason. And again, the soul numina. It's there at a psychological and empirical level. You know us as physical, embodied, largely determined beings. There's sparks of freedom within that realm that manifest themselves within that realm psychologically and in the aesthetic.

12:37 Mark: I know officially where this is supposed to be Romanticism, and I keep then wanting to relate it to Dead Poets Society or, you know, something that Americans would readily recognize as Romanticism. And that was exactly what is. These kids have been programmed. They've been put in their little boxes and told, this is what you have to do from moment to moment. This is what you have to do to be a respectable citizen. Being made into potentially Barbarians, according to Schiller's goofy terminology, civilization and poetry. Art frees you at least the right

13:05 Dylan: kind of poetry and art. Right? Because the beginning of the whole movie is forget Robin Williams character's name, but has them tear out the pages of their book.

13:15 Wes: It's Captain, my Captain.

13:18 Dylan: Okay, so Captain, my Captain. Very good.

13:20 Wes: Okay, that's not his name. They just call him my Captain.

13:24 Mark: DP for dead poet.

13:27 Dylan: It resonates with Schiller, I think, in that there's a sort of over rational way of understanding poetry, this sort of formulaic way that is too reasonable, too much reason applied to it, and it sucks the life out of it. And which is why he has him tear out all these pages, right?

13:45 Mark: Because the reason of a work should be imminent within it. Right. As you're creating it or as you are reconstructing it through being a reader, you are applying logical heuristics, or whatever you want to call them, to make it not just a bunch of random symbols, but to then have a guidebook that tells you this is how you do it. Follow the steps, 1, 2, 3. And this is how you understand poems. And now. Yeah, that's very wrong.

14:10 Wes: Yeah. In the 22nd letter we get this idea that the aesthetic is favorable to all functions, right? And it's favorable to all of them by being beyond their determinations. In other words, it's an unbiased. The aesthetic is unbiased. It's not prejudiced towards the rational, whether theoretical or practical. It's not prejudice towards the passions. It's this neutral arbiter of those things and allows us not just to lean on one of those things or another, right? Not to be hyper rational, not to be hyper impulsive or. But to be masters of both sides.

A master equally of the passive and active powers is the way he puts it. So seriousness and play, rest and movement, thought and abstract thought and intuition. It's interesting to me how this is part of what Romanticism was. But you know how worried the Romantics are about not letting rationality overwhelm the artistic side, but also not just throwing out rationality, but having this very balanced fusion which ultimately, again, we'll see that Nietzsche takes up that idea, you know, in the gay science and elsewhere, of this fusion of the two sides.

15:21 Mark: So in the second part of. It's still in the first paragraph here, I was kind of reading into this disposition which comprises in itself the whole wholeness of humanity, must necessarily include every individual expression of it according to its capacity. A disposition which removes all limits from the Totality of human nature must necessarily remove them also from every individual expression of it. Precisely because it takes no individual function of humanity exclusively under its protection. It is well disposed to every one of them without distinction, and it favors no single one, especially just because it is the ground of the possibility of them all.

15:52 Wes: That's what I was trying to paraphrase.

15:54 Mark: Okay, see, now I was. I was reading this in this. Like the fact that literature is supposed to be able to, at least according to one theory of literature, connect you to everybody else's. Like, it makes your experience universal, right? It enables you to get in the mind, in a sense, by making it aesthetic, you're enabling the reader to vicariously take on anything that is within the realm of human experience. So there is a identity politics sort of response to this, which is, no, actually, this is a very imperialist mode of thinking about art. That if I read about what it was like to be a slave or whatever, then it's like, I know now what it's like to be a slave. I. You know, that it enables us, everybody, to connect to each other. It makes art ultimately universally available to everybody, you know, because we all have this capacity.

16:41 Wes: And it also makes it didactic, which. This letter, the 22nd letter, if you had to sum it up, it could be rewritten as a culture war spiel against didactic art. And that means using art as a way for oppressed people to have something to identify with so that they feel more powerful or to give morals and lessons. You know, whether it's a Christian moral lesson, social justice lesson, or any lesson that you want that completely undermines the benefit of art. So what he'll say in the beginning of this letter is, yes, the aesthetic has implications for morality.

It can make us better people. But it doesn't do that with morals. It doesn't do that with any explicit entry of the ethical realm, invasion of the ethical realm into our aesthetic products. It does this psychologically, by the way. It affects our faculties in general. And in fact, ironically, it can't do that if we're trying to be didactic. It can't do that because the very nature of the aesthetic is to be without ulterior motives. It's not just about not having material motives, wanting to eat the apple as opposed to look at it. It's about not having ulterior political and moral motivations either.

If you reduce it to moral purposes, it's no longer aesthetic. It doesn't allow us to get to that point of indifference which. Mark, yes, this is the type of thing that would be criticized as imperialistic, as having its own ulterior motive to as exclusionary. Right.

18:12 Mark: I'm looking a few paragraphs down. As in actuality, no purely aesthetic effect is to be met with, for man can never step outside the dependence of his powers. The excellence of a work of art can consist only in the closest of its approximation. That ideal of aesthetic purity, with all the freedom with which we may enhance it, we shall always leave it in a particular mood and with a specific tendency. The more universal the mood and the less limited the tendency which is given to our nature by a definite type of art, by a definite product of the same.

The nobler of the type is and the more excellent such a product will be. So this is very much the Kantian abstract art is the best, just the play of forms. Because what I was describing before in terms of this literary thing, I'm thought in particular, Octavia Butler is a big name these days. And so I just read Kindred, which I think is of quite a good. It does this literary thing, it's like a time travel as to why, not only why slavery is bad, but how easy it would be if you lived in a slave owning culture to just be like, well, this is normal.

And like how even if you are a visitor from the future going to the past and hanging around in the past long enough, it would all start to seem very normal to you. So it's got a very didactic sense, but it has that what I take to be this is not a identity politics in that you can't understand what it's like to be a slave because it's actually saying in this book you can understand what it's like to be a slave. Read this book. And here is me, the narrator in this book. A person of the modern times is now understanding what it's like to be a slave by actually going back and living in this thing.

So it is a way of saying, yes, understanding is available to us all, but in literature at least, the power is to express the particular and to expose you to this particular. And therefore you have gained something, you've gained some point of connection. Whereas Shiller and Kant seem to be the less particular, the better.

20:05 Wes: It's not that art doesn't have non esthetic components, especially narratives. You have plots, you have things that are meant to charm us, to use Kant's word, to interest us. Maybe we are supposed to identify, maybe we are supposed to develop our empathy or be disgusted. Yeah, or just excited or whatever. Those don't constitute the Aesthetic effect on this theory. Those are part of what interests us about art. And even things that don't rise to the level of art, probably certain TV series. They're interesting, but they're not part of the effect that we would call aesthetic.

20:37 Mark: I mean, Dylan, for instance, what do you think of that?

20:40 Dylan: To me, it's glossing between aesthetic being an end, where I want to say something is aesthetic to aesthetic being a description of an activity or a power. And he seems to be talking about them in both ways, right. That we're making aesthetic judgments. Judgments of a certain kind relate to something about beauty. Right? And then there's also, you know, what is the best form of those things. And I find it much more interesting and more persuasive when we're talking about. We're making those kinds of judgments, judgments related to aesthetics. Then we're getting wrapped around the axle about aesthetic being the end, or like, it's beautiful.

21:19 Wes: So this is really. We're talking about the material side of the art object, right? Of the aesthetic object. And inevitably has a material side. Unless you're doing abstract and abstract painting, for instance, or there's still a material side that it's been minimized. But he talks about how you could have, like, this very seductive material side, like in tragedy, which will serve the purpose of pathos, and according to the Aristotelian theory, is inducing identification and catharsis and this very emotional response, which Schiller would say is not properly aesthetic.

And I think Plato wouldn't either. Right? Plato. This is really. Aristotle is trying to make an argument for the very sort of thing that Plato has rejected, as, you know, inducing all these unruly emotions in us. But as Schiller put it, if you do have all that seductive material, there is a triumph in overcoming it. So the art can be all the more perfect if it shields the quote, unquote, liberty of the soul, even after this violent emotional storm. So, in other words, there's something about being subjected to art that produces all these passions in us and then also produces that feeling of distance on top of it.

The contrast between those two things can create a sort of sublimity. This gets us into, like, psychoanalytic theories of aesthetics where this is right on point. And it goes again towards drive integration. It goes towards inducing this state of mind that is reminiscent of psychological integration. It starts out looking terrible. Everyone dies at the end of the tragedy. But there's a positive side to that which is actually related to the integration of our faculties and the kind of balance that I think Schiller is talking about.

23:01 Dylan: Well, I mean, at the end of the 22nd letter, he points to sort of bad versions of ways of people appreciating or interacting with art that aren't aesthetic. He says such readers enjoy a serious and moving poem as if it were a sermon and a simple and humorous poem, like an intoxicating drink. And if they were sufficiently tasteless to demand edification of a tragedy or epic, even if it weren't about the Messiah, they certainly would not fail to take exception to a song in the manner of Anacreon and Catullus. So those are. He's just.

23:34 Wes: This is the rant against didactic art. Yes, part of it. Yep. And I love that. And of course, today we are completely tasteless on those crops. We're trying to have messages in our art as if that's the edifying thing. It misunderstands what is actually edifying about art.

23:50 Mark: I kind of like this idea. I'm not sure if I agree with it in this letter that he says, the best kinds of each medium try to take on the virtues of the other mediums. So even the most ethereal music, by reason of its matter, has a closer affinity with the senses than true aesthetic freedom allows. Even the happiest poem has a greater share of the arbitrary and fortuitous play of the imagination, which is its medium, than the inner necessity of the truly beautiful permits. Even the most admirable piece of sculpture borders on severe science by reason of the positiveness of its conception.

These special affinity is, however, lost in proportion as the work of one of these types of art attains a higher level. It is a necessary and natural consequence of their perfection that without shifting their objective limits, the various arts are becoming increasingly similar to each other in their effect upon our natures. Music, in its loftiest exaltation, becomes shape. The plastic arts and graphic arts must become music. Poetry must become like musical art, you know, should take powerful hold of us, but at the same time, like plastic art, should surround us with quiet clarity.

24:53 Wes: In each of these things, you're trying to get rid of as much content as possible. You're trying to make it as formal as possible. You know, again, he uses that phrase, erase. Erase all the content.

25:03 Mark: Right. Going back to sort of Plato's concern about music in this mode is going to hype people up too much. Music in this mode is going to make them too languid, is going to put them in a stupor. He's saying that there's an ideal mood, that we should come away with that's, in a sense, totally neutral. That's just. I'm just ready for anything. I'm just open to the world, I'm at peace, but I'm not falling asleep. Like.

25:25 Wes: Well, it's a feeling of freedom.

25:27 Mark: Yeah. And that's just weird to say, you know, anything that isn't aiming at that is not true art. Right. It is something. It is something else. Where you might say, I mean, maybe this is just ultimately why Danto, for instance, doesn't want to call it aesthetics anymore. Because again, aesthetics aims at this very narrow thing called beauty. And maybe we could even give that to the formalists, but that what art is supposed to do is so much wider than that. And if this whole thing is an instrumental tract about, you know, how useful art is to making us into full human beings, I would think that the kind of art that is chock full of content and makes us actually sympathize with other people as independent entities is a much more direct route to getting us recognize others as ends in themselves. Right.

26:12 Wes: Wait, what's the more direct route?

26:13 Mark: This is the question we were having at the beginning of this part, is the best way to get me to recognize you as an independent human being with your own goals and desires and things. Somehow there's a median step of me seeing you merely as form, and that seems very weird. Maybe a better way is for you to tell me your story and use an artwork. Use something that will get past my

26:35 Wes: defenses to induce pity and sympathy, which is that autobiographical mode of writing, which is so nauseating and commenting. Sorry, pity me. Oh, look at my hard life. No, it's not interesting.

26:50 Mark: Well, okay, then have, you know, Sophocles come along and write the Ballad of Wes Alwan and make me pity you. You know, maybe there's something indecent about you expressing yourself in this way.

27:01 Wes: But if I die at the end, then, yeah, and then there's some transcendent aesthetic feeling that emerges upon that. Been good. Yeah.

27:09 Mark: Isn't the upshot. I mean, if we think Romantic art is what ultimately is going to come out of this and be justified by this, that is completely autobiographical expressing of my feeling. And how well does this work of art express my feeling? And all this stuff that's actually completely foreign to Kant and the Kantianism that's being expressed here.

27:27 Wes: The Romantics, they're concerned about the synthesis. So even a poet like Wordsworth writes about it in the poetry about this concern. So it's often caricatured as though they're on the side of feeling as against reason. But they're actually all about that balance. But, you know, I mean, a case in point, Schiller, I think the first thing he wrote after this was William Tell, a play about a Swiss marksman who kills a monarch, I think, or something like that. So I think he would think of this as a high art, right? That's what he's trying to do. Despite the fact that it's not anywhere close to the type of purity that he's describing as ideal. So yeah, we can enjoy our plot driven, emotion inducing, imperfect forms of art. I don't really want to just live in a world with just abstract art and no stories and maybe even pity, maybe even a little pity here and there.

28:22 Dylan: And in his time, right. I mean, what we think of as abstract art wasn't really even around, right.

28:28 Mark: Mozart's concertos, like. Yeah, abstract, but abstract music for sure.

28:33 Wes: Well, also, I think Kant is knocked for talking about like, he doesn't really talk about fine art in the third critique that he talks about wallpaper patterns or something like that. So that you could call that abstract art.

28:45 Mark: You're right, because there is a corresponding revolution in music to make it more abstract, right? More like abstract painting. Because there's something very manipulative. It's not just contemplating pure forms. Our enjoyment of a cadence in music that. That is getting our expectation up and letting it release in this, you know, very similar way that a tragedy that is building suspense and then lets the bomb drop or whatever. Like it's an abstract way of capturing those same things about the forms of the will, as Schopenhauer would put it.

29:18 Wes: This is why Schopenhauer thought it was this weird. Music was this weird case. Right? Art in general is supposed to divorce us from the will, but music gets us in touch with the will, which turns out to be the thing in itself, the one metaphysical reality. So, and he uses that metaphor of listening to music is like looking at your watch while falling from a tower or something like that. So it combines this detachment, this extreme indifference, this aesthetic indifference with being immersed in the emotional sturm and drang of yeah, even a cadence, right. As Mark said, you don't have to have any content to have those feelings.

29:53 Mark: Indifference is good. Undifference is bad. That's not a word. The 23rd, anything in the 23rd you guys want to pull out.

30:02 Dylan: The 23rd is another place where he's talking about there being no. Well, he uses the word no resultant. Beauty provides no resultant either for the intellect or the will. It Rather provides us with the capacity for both, but has nothing at all to do with the actual use of this capacity. And then he links it up with will in the. I guess it's the third paragraph. I mean, truth, excuse me, by the aesthetic disposition of the soul. Truth is not something that can, like actuality or the physical existence of things, simply be received from elsewhere. It is something freely created by the power of thought itself. And this autonomy, this freedom, is exactly what we miss in the sensuous man.

30:41 Mark: Yeah, we should explain that because it just seems to somebody who's not studied this kind of philosophy, like, yeah, truth is given to us. It is given to us. There is an apple in front of me. It is true that there is an apple in front of me. How is that anything that I need sort of independence from my sensuous being to grasp?

30:59 Wes: Yeah, but then we'd have to go into the Kantian epistemology and how we're constructing all this through. So objectivity involves our own active powers and construction, and we make judgments where we analyze what we already synthesized. So that's the idea. Truth belongs to our own spontaneity, it turns out. It seems like Fichte goes gangbusters with that. Right. And even the material is being produced by the pure, transcendent ego. There's not even this externality of data being provided by a non, non ego. But I think, you know, the next step in this argument is how do we get the autonomy of reason from sensibility?

Or in other words, how do the two connect to each other? Because we got to get the concepts and the particulars together. Got to get the concepts and the intuitions together, man. How do we get them together? That's through the aesthetic. So he's even giving this kind of interesting, abstract account of how we're supposed to reconcile these different faculties within the soul, these seemingly irreconcilable things. And in the end, it's easier, right, to go from. We can't just make the jump from physical or material to the logical and the moral.

It's not going to work. It's a. It's an unbridgeable gulf. Unless we can get some sort of manifestation of the logical or the formal within the physical as our jumping off point. And that's the aesthetic.

32:18 Mark: I'm still stuck on the sentence in the fourth paragraph here we start saying, truth is not something that can be received from the outside, like the actuality or the sensuous existence of things. It's something that the intellectual faculty produces spontaneously in its freedom and it is just this spontaneity, this freedom that we do not find in the sensuous man. But that's not what we are going for. The sensuous man does have if. Right. If you're saying through Kantian machinations we create the sensible world. Well, why would you call that freedom?

That would be a weird, like, super existentialist kind of thing to say. To say, like, it's free just to create whatever it wants. No, it creates according to determinate laws. And that's not the freedom that we're trying to get as human beings. If you want to call it a spontaneous act of my understanding, that's fine. That's your weird Kantian epistemological theory. But that's not the freedom that I want as a full human being. Right. That's a freedom of the will. That's not a freedom of the faculty. The understanding. Truth can't be received from the outside.

It is something that the intellectual faculty produces spontaneously in its freedom. Okay, so. And it is just this spontaneity, this freedom that we do not find in the sensuous man, but we do find that freedom in the sensuous man. The sensuous man is able to perceive an apple as an apple. That's not what we're going for.

33:31 Wes: So I think he's thinking of a hypothetical man devoid of all rationality and conceptualization.

33:38 Mark: Okay.

33:39 Wes: Which is why he says at various points, this doesn't really exist. These are just idealizations. Right. So there never really was a full, complete state of nature where we are. Unless we want to go back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees or further. Rousseau does a very similar thing in its state of nature. But, yeah, even animals, of course, have the ability to conceptualize, I think. But I think, you know, the understanding itself is supposed to be. Yeah, reason is a spontaneity is the freedom. And even the theoretical side is a product of that freedom.

34:05 Mark: So it must be then that by proposing the aesthetic to take us to this new, greater kind of human being, that he's not proposing something sort of new to world history. Of course, there are people that appreciate Kantian ethics already. Of course there are people that appreciate beauty already. It's, in fact, a very common experience. It seems like he's actually changing the content story to say that, as you were just saying, Wes, how do we get the concepts and the content together? The aesthetic has to come in, even in that early stage. And so, as we've alluded to before, he talks about animals playing and these other things that would be apart from.

Look at all these goddamn savages. We can't give them democracy. Hey, let's send them to art school or art appreciation school now they're worthy of democracy. Like, the only reason that that theory holds water is because in every single one of us at all the time, in order to become conceptual human beings at all, we've already been making use of the aesthetic. Those just seem two very different kinds of stories to me.

35:09 Wes: So arguably even animals, to the extent that they're capable of being conceptual, even if there's some kind of non language version of the conceptual, would already have to be aesthetic, right? Just this whole.

35:20 Mark: It's true.

35:21 Wes: No, it's true. I mean, he'll even say this in individual judgments. You can't have even a theoretical judgment without the aesthetic moment. So I think you're right. It's just that maybe we call that the proto aesthetic, like you did earlier. It's not aesthetic in the fullest sense. But then I think what you seem to be suggesting is that kind of forms also a hook or a basis for further aesthetic development. It's almost like, is this historical or is the impulse already there?

35:47 Mark: I think Kant is better than this in that Kant doesn't need the aesthetic at this point. It's just we have the data and then our minds, you could say, spontaneously put the data together into concepts. Of course, there's a lot of social stuff that goes into this, which concepts we choose, how we identify them to each other. All this, you know, it's becomes a very public thing. But then it is sort of, once we have the conceptual apparatus in play, maybe we do something a little advanced with it. As Kant says, we, you know, we fire the conceptual apparatus without involving particular concepts.

And that's what the aesthetic is. So in other words, the aesthetic is something that is beyond mere intellect, that we got sensation, we got intellect, and then we have aesthetics. And at least according to what we've been saying here is saying we've got pure content, sensuousness, and then the aesthetic has to come in to sort of give us the faculties in the first place. And only then can we use them to pick out logical concepts or even the general concept of dog.

36:47 Wes: You're right. That's a really interesting emendation to the Kantian story.

36:50 Mark: And it.

36:51 Wes: Yeah, because it puts the aesthetic before the rational in a sense, or it seems to, maybe that's. Schiller would obviously probably object. But it's the step of the stepping stone that makes the rational possible in the sense of. It seems that way historically as well. Right. He's saying that the historical account parallels the cognitive account. The historical account is we don't get to the moral rational state except through the intermediary of an aesthetic education, which. Mark, you're suggesting that. Yeah. Maybe we should challenge that and say, actually, yeah, I don't know.

37:22 Mark: It seems very surprising to me that we haven't seen whether in Locke, whether in Malebranche, in Hume, anybody, the sense that, like, in order to get from particulars to concepts, we have to have aesthetics in between.

37:33 Dylan: I don't see Schiller as presenting it in that hierarchy, though it's true that he's presenting aesthetics as being the one thing that connects to both. I mean, earlier, he has the reasonable as completely separate from the sensual. You know, the two sides of the scale and stuff like that. And beauty, sensitivity to beauty. The aesthetic is our faculty that is sensitive to both. So in that way, I think you're right to interpret him as. Our ability to engage with the sensual in the world through reason is mediated by the aesthetic. I think he would probably say, based upon what he said before, is that the same thing is true. The other way is that our affecting of the way in which. It seems kind of weird to say it the other way, though, but try it, try it.

38:23 Mark: Finish the sentence.

38:25 Dylan: Well, so to say, the first one is that our access to the sensual through reason is mediated by the aesthetic. So the other way would say is that our physical responsiveness to the rational is mediated by the aesthetic. That might not be so crazy.

38:41 Wes: He does make it sound like this process, though. Right. So in the 25th letter, he'll say, the aesthetic mediates this movement to freedom by way of detached observation. It's the first thing that turns the impelling object, the object that's just acting on us to make us do things into an object of thought, as in a theoretical judgment of the understanding or an empirical judgment. Because with beauty, we get this kind of contemplative act without quitting the sensuous world. This is where this very interesting footnote is, where he basically says these three moments.

Physical, aesthetic and moral. So let me just read the end of the footnote. The three moments that I listed at the beginning of the 24th letter, which are the physical, aesthetic and moral, are on the whole, three different eras in the development of the whole of humanity, with the aesthetic being the bridging and for the entire development of one single man. All right, so we now get an individual psychological development. But they can also be distinguished in every single perception of an object, and so are, in sum, the necessary conditions for all knowledge received through the senses.

So that really is speaking to Mark's point about this role of the aesthetic faculty and making the whole apparatus work

39:57 Dylan: properly, that makes sense. But he still seems to go in both directions. So in 97, at the end of the second to last paragraph, he says, beauty is thus an object for us, for reflection is the condition for any sensation of it that we may have. But at the same time, beauty is a state of our subject, since feeling is the condition according to which we form an idea of it. So that, to me, is going both ways, right? That we have the rational part, that's beauty, or the aesthetic is mediating to the physical. We make it an object, and then we also have the state of the subject, so we feel it. Right?

40:37 Wes: And this, by the way, is also one of the most famous parts of. This is the thing that philosophers know about Shiller's theory, if they know anything, which is that he thinks that beauty is not just subjective, but objective. Because for Kant, it's just subjective. We do make a universal demand on people with judgments of taste. We say, you ought to agree with me. But that demand for agreement is just based on the fact that we all have similar cognitive faculties and we expect similar responses. Beauty is not in the object in a. In a sense. But for Schiller, at least according, you know, the interpretations I've seen, he's taken to be saying that there is something objective about beauty. It's in the object, so to speak, whatever that means.

41:18 Mark: Right. He stresses that beauty is universal, but he doesn't get into the sorts of conflicts that we considered when we were talking about, you know, Hume's on the standard of taste and stuff where. But it seems like we disagree a lot about the beautiful. Well, no, the things that we disagree about are those extra aesthetic content points. You know, they're ideological disagreements. It's not about the beautiful forms. Those actually are objectively beautiful. So I guess, you know, he's taking us back to these rationalist considerations about form and symmetry being beautiful and things like that.

41:52 Wes: And with Hume, someone is right about the matter because someone has more basically more taste or they're more a more discriminating taste. It's like seeing the world at a higher resolution because they're well trained and because they have more experience with art objects and they can compare them to each other and. And maybe just innate sensitivity. They're looking at aesthetic objects at a higher resolution, and so they can Tell us more about whether they're beautiful and then the insensitive person is just wrong.

42:19 Dylan: They're just living in an eight bit world.

42:21 Wes: Yes.

42:23 Mark: Anything else from 25th, for instance, here? I had a lot of notes in this one, but I don't know if I need to go into them.

42:30 Dylan: I mean, should we sort of be journeying to wrapping up?

42:34 Mark: Yes.

42:35 Wes: Mark doesn't want to.

42:39 Mark: Some of those last ones were painful. I think we've completely told the story already of what he wants to do here. It's just, why does he need so goddamn much text? When I got to the 27th letter and it ends up being, what, six pages or eight pages by itself? Like, God damn it, why is it. Why is he still talking?

42:56 Wes: I mean, I agree he's, like, very repetitious. But also, the 27th letter does have its own point. I mean, one of the big points is that the aesthetic is not a danger to truth. Right. This idea of championing appearance, which sounds very Nietzschean, these are new points for me. And then the description of this utopian aesthetic state, and no privilege, no autocracy is tolerated as far as taste prevails and the realm of beautiful appearance holds sway. So this is really saying our priority is not even the truth. Our priority is beauty. And that will have these political effects. You don't establish a good state by saying, yes, we're reasonable, we're enlightened, now we're going to have a French revolution, get rid of the monarchs, everything's going to be great. Of course, that didn't work.

43:44 Dylan: Men and women are going to get along.

43:46 Wes: Yeah, Rationality alone is not going to do it for us. So rationality just as much as strength. Again, he's thinking of the material impulse there must be, subordinated to the aesthetic.

43:59 Dylan: He says, in the midst of the awful realm of force and in the midst of the divine realm of law, the aesthetic impulse to form constructs unnoticed a third happy realm of play and appearance, in which the fetters of all circumstance are taken from man, releasing him from everything that could be called either moral or physical constraint.

44:19 Wes: Yeah, I love that. That's one of my favorite quotations from the whole Thing.

44:22 Mark: I was looking at. This is the second to last paragraph of the whole thing. Everything in the aesthetic state, in other words the nation state, even the subservient tool, is a free citizen having equal rights with the noblest. And the intellect, which forcibly molds the passive multitude to its designs, must here ask for its assent. Here, then, in the realm of aesthetic, appearance is fulfilled the ideal of equality which the visionary would fain see realized in actuality also. And if it is true that the fine breeding matures earliest and most completely near the throne, we are bound to recognize here too the bountiful dispensation which seems often to restrict mankind in the actual only in order to incite him into the ideal world.

In other words, we're looking for freedom, equality, the kind of things French Revolution was looking for. We're never actually going to get that in an actual state. But insofar as we're aesthetic, then everybody's equal. Okay, that's some cold comfort. As long as you're not with your aesthetic trying to intrude on the realm of the actual. That would be a bad taste.

45:26 Wes: All right. This is the question about his optimism and whether he thinks a rational, just state can exist. Because I think the aesthetic is still in a way supposed to give us the rest. Supposed to give us not a Napoleon, but a democracy, a liberal democracy that functions well and. And then a society in which people behave ethically towards each other. But there is that footnote where he says, does such a state of aesthetic appearance exist and where can it be found? And they'll say it exists in every fine tuned soul. And then he seems to suggest that it maybe will exist among some elite circles of society. But it seemed to me unclear whether he's saying it could actually exist as a political state. But he then moves on to talking about a constitution for the aesthetic state,

46:07 Dylan: especially at the end here it seems that the aesthetic state he's looking to optimize freedom, which sort of sounds familiar and you know, everyone being a free citizen. But I get lost on the way in which it's a response to say something like the French Revolution, which seemed to be concerning to him for its sort of violence and its lack of freedom. And it's not clear to me how it's going to perform that work.

46:34 Mark: I guess, yeah, those people who are ended up committing the atrocities and terror if they were just sufficiently chilled out, they were too taught taut and they needed the power of art or beauty to come in and make them worthy to be good citizens and deal rationally with each other and not be swept away by their. Their savagery or on the flip side by their barbarism, which is their equality means everyone. We must cut off the tallest of the stalks, if that's what equality means. According to the radical egalitarianism, that is an example of not savagery, but barbarity in the sense of being hyper rational. To the point of totalitarianism.

47:15 Dylan: I could have used some more examples about how these things would work.

47:21 Mark: Well, looking forward, I don't think we're actually going to get them. We kind of decided in this or I decided in going through these Romantics that Schlegel should be next. Like he's the most straight ahead romantic philosopher such that he didn't even get his shit together to write a big Schelling or Fichte or you know, a big treatise that he's more like Schiller in that he's kind of a poetic artistic. He's more an art critic. So Schlegel wrote a lot of essays and essays about like Greek poetry and things, but then is most famous for his fragments.

So we'll read a couple of his Theory as Practice and Dialogue on Poesy and then concerning the Essence of Critique, which is a sort of a later iteration of that. And then as much of the fragments that were published in his. The journal that he did with his brother and Novalis and other Romantics at the time in Jena as we can stand now. Let me insert a comment on a later day as I'm about to post parts one and two here. We did record a part three, which we will reserve for the hardcore fans who give us money, partiallyexaminelife.com support for those people.

Part three will come up a week after this. For everybody else, you'll get to hear the first part of it via a preview a day or two before the Schlegel episode drops. Thanks for listening. Please feel free to reach out to us plartiallyexaminedlife.com or comment on the blog post associated with this. So tell us what you thought of this. What else? If you are a fan of Romanticism, German Romanticism, eventually maybe we'll get to British Romanticism, though that's more poetry than actual fly philosophy. Feel free to reach out to us what you think you should be talking about.

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49:11 Dylan: Good night.

49:11 Wes: Good night.