Ep. 320: Friedrich Schlegel on Romanticism (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 320 is maybe something like what's the relationship between art and philosophy? Or possibly what's the philosophical purpose of art criticism? We're continuing our investigation of German Romanticism by reading some selections from Friedrich Schlegel, including Concerning the Essence of critique from 1804 and the speech on Mythology from his dialogue on posy 1799, and some of his fragments published between 1797 and 1801 in a couple of different magazines. For more information, please See partially examined life.com this is Mark Linsenmayer captivating the spirit of love with my magical word in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, lacking either philosophy or art, or possibly both.

1:01 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes, never quite as sloshed as Schlegel in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:09 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey constructing myself Within Myself, Discovering the secret coherence and unity of the age in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:19 Seth: Wow.

1:20 Mark: So, yes, we were interested in looking some more at German Romanticism, this thing that was just subsequent to or overlapping with German idealism to bridge the gap between Kant and Hegel or, I don't know, Schlegel, like Schiller, is giving me a lot of proto Nietzsche vibes here,

1:38 Seth: at least the later part.

1:40 Wes: Yeah, I think certainly Nietzsche was influenced by this. And Nietzsche, in a way is a reaction to Romanticism early on, seems to be pro Romantic, especially in his relationship with Wagner, but of course, then turns that around and gives an excoriating critique of Romanticism. And Romanticism has some unsavory connotations early, at least German Romanticism, I think scholars would call this early Romanticism. But ultimately it's associated with fascism. And this is one of the things that Nietzsche was on to German national the relationship between Romanticism and German nationalism. Nietzsche has a complicated relationship to Romanticism as both influenced by it and critic of it. But it's. The influence is very obvious.

2:26 Dylan: It just seems the fascism part would seem to just come in through the fetishizing of nature and that we grow out of the ground. You know, you'd go that, you go that direction. You can see fascism coming up pretty quickly.

2:37 Wes: Yeah. Schlegel himself will talk about cultural authenticity. Right. And the critic as trying to be a guardian of that.

2:45 Seth: Right.

2:46 Mark: We already read some Johan Herder a while ago who is very big on. Maybe he's the guy who came up with the idea of Geist as like the spirit of the age, which, you know, of course, also lends itself very naturally to some sort of fascist interpretation. I didn't see that too much in the parts we read here of Schlegel. Schlegel was known as an art critic, as was his brother, August Schlegel. And they published a magazine together for some of this time. August, I guess, is five years older. So yeah, Friedrich Schlegel, when he wrote all this stuff we're reading, was like late 20s, early 30s, pretty young guy. And he's best known for these fragments.

3:23 Seth: Right.

3:24 Mark: In this. The Athenaeum, this magazine. And it was a fragment from Friedrich. Fragment from August fragment from their friend Novalis, whose real name was also Friedrich, incidentally, a fragment from Schleiermacher, also a Friedrich. So we've got many Friedrichs going here.

3:41 Wes: And they were all roommates. Not really. I'm exaggerating, but this is a very exciting time at the turn of the century. As lasted only a few years. When the early Romantics were all together and Jena doing their thing.

3:52 Mark: Yeah, looking at his biography, he was sort of actually in and out of Jena. That he was there for a year. And then he went to Berlin for a while. And that's where he hung out with Schleiermacher, I believe, and some other folks, but then went back to Jena. But Jena is where August Schlegel and his and Fichte were based. So he's known for writing in fragments and defending that it's actually essential to his philosophical method. And I think we've seen similar things. Why Nietzsche was so big into aphorisms. That there is something about an aphorism that opens itself.

You know, it gives a pinpoint from which you could then go off in your own thought and expand it into a whole philosophical view. As opposed to a system where everything has to hang together. That Schlegel was all about sort of thousand points of light. But even if you create all the thousand points yourself. Right. Great independent thoughts that sort of can grow into something. And by this combination of perspectives we will get something like the truth. And so even his dialogue on poesy, which we did not read all of, in fact, I guess it's not a well known enough work.

We could not find a ready English translation online. I mean, there's like one for 30 bucks you can order. It's kind of set up like the Symposium, but there's no like Socrates figure that comes in at the end and is like the big deal. Like it's just a bunch of different speeches on things. So all these decisions were made for what we read this time from these folks at University of Minnesota that in 1997 put together this book, Theory as Practice, a critical anthology of early German Romantic writings. So even though the self contained volume of schlegel's fragments is 300 plus pages, they picked out the ones that were relevant to at least what they were describing as Romanticism.

So it was like 10 pages of Athenaeum fragments, 10 pages of the Lyceum Fragments, this other journal, which is enough.

5:43 Wes: But you know, just going back to what you're saying about Fragments, and I think you're getting at maybe a perspectivalism or attempts to take several different perspectives on the same thing and not try to work from a first principle of knowledge, which is what the idealists were trying to do. Fichte and Schelling, who were very influential on Schlegel, but also you can see his work in some sense as a reaction against German idealism in that incarnation. But the fragment, right, can be more poetic. There are advantages to brevity as well, right?

You try to give people not just a rational grasp of some point, but a poetic relation to the whole, as Schlegel likes to put it. Because the poetic, and this is where some of this influence of the German idealists comes in. The poetic is how we, as we saw in Schiller, is a good candidate for how we might experience or have knowledge of the absolute, if you want to put it that way. Kant rejected intellectual intuition. This poetic aesthetic relationship to things is supposed to solve that problem and even maybe solve the problem of self consciousness.

How do we know ourselves? I just think, you know, there are a lot of different advantages. The fragment, one might argue, and I think Schlegel does get a little bit of that in this reading that line up with his theory of the poetic and its important role in philosophical knowledge.

7:09 Dylan: Yeah, I don't want to let the notion that the fragment is somehow manifesting the particular for Schlegel, which I think it does. But he's clearly obsessed with the idea of the whole and the unity. And even if he wants to emphasize its non systematic nature, that you're not going to have derivation of the whole from some set of particulars, it is going to be the case that the whole is the thing by which all of the particulars are part of the whole is the anchor point. And that process between the particular and the whole is going to bring in this notion of infinity. For Schlegel the way in which we become bigger than ourselves. I found this combination of ideas an interesting and provocative heap of ideas.

8:00 Mark: Mm.

8:01 Dylan: And so I think there'll be lots to talk about, but I think it's a heap.

8:05 Mark: Seth, opening thoughts on this. Did this tickle your fancy or irritate the shit out of you?

8:13 Seth: I would go with tickle the fancy. So I had a really positive experience reading Schiller in the context of some other things that I'm thinking about, this notion of aesthetic education as a mediation between realism and idealism, or between reason and sensuality, that sort of thing. And this felt very much a piece of that. There's a lot of. As Dylan said, it's a heap. There's a lot of provocative and interesting ideas in here that aren't really fleshed out. But he says somewhere that idealism is not the goal, but the motivation or the grounds, the possibility, something like that.

So he's trying to acknowledge the absolute, acknowledge totality, but as a framework in which there can be a kind of coherence or pragmatic play of artistic endeavors that will cohere if we pay the appropriate level of attention to it or something. So he's making a shift away from something like grasping the absolute or some sort of path to an individualistic approach to the end goal of idealism into idealism being kind of like Eros. It's the motivating force that gets us to start this activity. But ultimately the activity itself is critical, which is necessarily, I think, social in some respect.

He has a lot to say about how wit and irony and how to talk to others and how to treat others as part of this. So there's a different dimension to this that I think is really interesting. So I actually found it quite stimulating. I thought the fragments were really great. I mean, just from an entertainment perspective more than anything else. A few good quote bombs that are dropped in there. Philosophy is the homeland of irony. I think that was the. But you still get all of the standard. You know, the German character exists, but only in a few Germans.

And the German nation is ahead of us, not behind us. And with an appropriate amount of respect for the other cultures. He's constantly referring to Italian or French or Roman, even writers, to make his point. So he's clear that he's quite well read. And I remember going into this whole Romantics thing that I felt like Wes was really Romantics and the German idealists. I was like, eh. But I'm quite enjoying it. And it's remarkably insightful and like you said it anticipates a number of things that we see, you know, in the future. Not just Nietzsche.

I think so, yeah. I'm a fan.

10:43 Wes: Mark, you wanted to begin with the second essay we read, the Essence of Critique.

10:47 Mark: You know, now that I'm thinking of it, since the way that things are going. Maybe we should start with fragment 116, which is the one that keeps getting cited again and again. We can almost read the whole thing. It is less than a page. Page 320 of our text or PDF. Page 333.

11:03 Dylan: Fragment 116.

11:06 Wes: Romantic posy is a progressive, universal posy.

11:10 Mark: Let's say what posy is, because this is going to be a. But I mean, it's.

11:12 Wes: I think it's just what he's about to tell us. It is not a Parker Posey. It is a. What is poesy.

11:18 Mark: I mean, I think sometimes it's just translated as poetry, but I think it just means art generally. Right. Or sort of the spirit of art, something like that.

11:26 Wes: I think it'll mean that for him, it'll be of expansive conception of that. But. Yeah, go ahead, Dylan.

11:31 Dylan: I mean, I was trying to figure out why it gets used that word posy instead of poetry. Because he. In other places, he uses the word poetry. When he's thinking poetry, he's thinking something that is, for lack of a better term, more static and scientific. And poesy is sort of the motive force behind poetry. It's the activity that is tied into the end result that in one manifestation becomes poetry. But he generalizes it into the sort of elemental force of the universe that's manifest in nature. It's manifest in the. The behavior of a child. And it's the thing that we tie into that becomes the force of art, for instance. But to me, it was tying back to a kind of Greek root word of poesis. To make things.

12:23 Seth: Yeah.

12:24 Wes: And I think if it were just translated as poetry. Right. You might think he's strictly talking about product itself. And poems. Right. Just actual poems. And in this case, he's talking more about the creative act involved in producing poetry. But also involved in creativity in general. Right. And poes making poesis any kind of becoming. Right. And then you can expand it to nature and to any kind of becoming. Yeah.

12:55 Mark: Dylan, you mentioned that there's a contrast of a sort of scientific view of it. I think poetics, he says, specifically, is the thing he's against. You know, in some other places, it sounds like he actually wants to be scientific. He wants to subsume science within this realm of idealism and Posey. But in terms of, like, let's make a formula for what is the good. So, you know, like we got in Hutcheson. Is that the. Am I. Am I reaching for the right guy? Pre Hume.

13:23 Dylan: He's one of them.

13:23 Seth: Yeah.

13:24 Wes: Shaftesbury.

13:24 Mark: And yes, Hutcheson, I think was specifically, I was thinking in terms of the beautiful is the symmetrical, this kind of rationale.

13:31 Wes: But also Aristotle. Right. Like, you know, here's what tragedy has. It has a turning point and catharsis and blah, blah, blah, right? You analyze the poetic in terms of its structure, how the artist accomplishes what they're doing. Break it apart.

13:45 Dylan: Analyze it in his breaking apart, he sees. We'll get to this on the critique part, right. There's the importance of pulling things apart and understanding them as part of a whole. But the reference to Posey is really trying to sit there with the active nature of, whether it be art or nature, the source. And I mean, in the end, he's going to want it to be also never ending. It's one of the ways in which infinity gets pulled in. Right. Because you'll never stop becoming.

14:17 Wes: In his point of view, romantic posy is a progressive, universal posy. It is not only destined to reunite the separated genres of poesy and to bring poesy into contact with philosophy and rhetoric. It wants to, and also should, blend and merge poesy with prose, geniality with critique, posy of art with the posy of nature, give life to poesy and render it sociable, make life and society poetic, poeticize wit and fill up and saturate the forms of art with every kind of genuine cultural material and animate them through the oscillations of humor.

14:51 Mark: That's a tall order. There's a lot of stuff in there, Right. So the thing that romanticism gets accused of, which I think both Hegel and Nietzsche are reacting to, is they just lump everything together and therefore prevent us from actually understanding anything. And I don't really see that in Schlegel, but if you think that contra Kant. Wes, you said Kant rejected intellectual intuition. Right. Just being able to somehow grasp God,

15:17 Wes: for instance, but also the self. Right. So self consciousness is not an intellectual intuition of a self as substance. Right. It's beyond the veil, it's transcendent, and we can't have an experience of it. But, yeah, God, anything in itself, we can't grasp them by intellectual intuitions.

15:33 Mark: So a mystic thinks that you can somehow directly know the absolute, whatever that is, God. You can become one with God. You Can. And this is part and parcel of, you know, the reputation of Romanticism. But even when we were talking about that in terms of Emerson and his oversoul, it wasn't a matter of just sit back and take some LSD and you'll become one with the oversoul. It was like, oh, no. The oversoul is the fact that we have so much in common with the rest of creation. There's an analytical component to it. And Schlegel ends up similarly saying, like, if we really want to understand this unified thing that is posy, you know, you got to be a philologist, you got to understand different genres of art. You got to really be a highly intellectualized critic. Like, the critic has a role in, like, deciphering all these little nuances. And so it's not just jumping right to the absolute.

16:25 Wes: In Schiller. Right. The play drive and the aesthetic relation to things seem to be our mode of access to the absolute. And I think there's something of that here in Schlegel.

16:38 Dylan: Yeah, except Schlegel, to me, doesn't. In not emphasizing the play part, he's pointing to what play does, but he's not talking that much about actually playing. So the beginning part of the dialogue on Posey, I could hardly not just read it aloud. In fact, I did to my wife. This deeply flamboyant reveling in the poetic nature of the world. I mean, it just. Yeah, this reveling without talking about the activity of play.

17:08 Wes: Like, we've seen this before, right, With Erasmus, where you react against the philosophical aridity, maybe, or abstractness. And you say, we need to return to the concrete and to the individual, and a rhetorical or a poetic relation to the world can help us with that. So the humanist right wants to retrieve something of the rhetorical and the poetic over and against the Scholastics. I think we see something of this here in the Romantic reaction to philosophical abstraction. Even though you could accuse Kant of that, maybe, but also, Kant is what gave these guys the idea.

The aesthetic is sort of the way out of a lot of different problems. Right. Third critique, the aesthetic relation to the world becomes this enormously valuable idea because it doesn't suffer from the same problems as reason and understanding and intuition. And how do they work together. Right. Our knowledge of the world, ultimately, because of critique and the critical philosophy, stops short of something, stops short of the absolute, of God, of self, of all the important, of things in themselves. And we can't give that up. We can't give up that desire and so the aesthetic becomes the go to thing to try to help us get back to reality.

18:24 Seth: This brings me back to thinking about Schiller, in that there's a sense in which we talk about the philosophical perspective that reason is universal, but that aesthetic sense, aesthetic taste is not. And so Kant is trying to address and reconcile that. Schlegel points to the fact that this ability for free play and creativity, while not actually exercised by most people is. It's something that binds, you know, that's universal, that's shared by human beings. And so essentially the mechanism for liberation in that sense, or for elevation of the self or whatever is possible.

And this is part of what motivates his project. He thinks as long as people are flailing around, trying to exercise their creativity and free play and generating a lot of things that in his mind, I guess, suck. He doesn't seem to think very highly of a lot of the creative, a lot of the poems and things that are being creative. But I think he thinks that given the appropriate critical framework, given the appropriate approach to understanding the. I'm not sure what the uber term here is, that we could cultivate that and guide sensibilities, aesthetic and creative sensibilities, to the point where you would start to see this massive generation of exceptional artistic works that actually achieve some kind of connection, if not with the absolute, but with some form of universality and that tell, quote, unquote truths.

In the same way that he thinks the ancient. You know, we haven't talked about his opinion of the ancients, but the way he thinks Greek art did.

19:59 Mark: Yep, let's keep going on this one, and then we'll, I think, bringing the Greeks in as the contrast. I think his attitude towards the Greeks is kind of like Nietzsche's attitude towards the Greeks in the Genealogy of Morals, that the Greeks hit on something in a very natural way that was wonderful, but it was limited because it was unreflective and kind of stupid and sort of had its own destruction built into it. But we should both admire the unity that they had. You know, they really had a Geist. There was a. All Greek literature was unified in a way that ours is not.

That every. Our artists are just going this way and that and producing, as Seth said, a lot of crap because they're sort of not actually tied into the universal. And we could get into what that means to actually be good art. But if we can redo that, if we can contain Bildung, this word he keeps using over and over again, if we can create this edifice that is like that. But we're doing it intentionally. We're doing it. It's going to be even better.

20:56 Wes: Schiller seemed to be a full on classicist in what we read and I think Schlegel went through that phase. But in the readings we have today, he's looking to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Provencal ballads, things which the classicist would look down on really. And more contemporary stuff. That is what inspires the Romantic, right? The novel. Goethe. Yeah. Roman is just the German word for novel.

21:23 Mark: The romantic writings in the medievals I heard him refer a few times like, I assume like the King Arthur stuff is what I think about.

21:30 Wes: Yeah, that's what he's talking about, Malory.

21:33 Seth: And Romantic poesy comprises everything that is in the least poetic. From the greatest systems of art that themselves contain multiple systems to the sigh the kiss breathed out in artless song by the poetizing child. It can lose itself in what it represents to such an extent that one could conclude that it's one and all is to characterize poetic individuals of all kinds of. And yet no form exists as yet would be suitable for fully expressing the spirit of the author. For this reason, many artists who merely wanted to write a novel end up more or less presenting themselves in rough approximation. Only romantic poesy can, like the epos, act as a mirror of the entire world that surrounds it and become an image of the age.

22:21 Mark: The epos is that like the epoch,

22:23 Dylan: it's from the same word. It's epic. And it refers to song.

22:27 Seth: You want me to resay it saying epic? Just to make it clear.

22:30 Dylan: I think there's a reason why that word. I think it probably reflects the word that he picked.

22:34 Wes: Yeah.

22:35 Mark: So what do you think of this so far? I mean that it's going to become an image of the age comprises everything from the greatest systems of art to the artless song of the poetizing child. What a phrase.

22:47 Seth: Is this a pejorative or a descriptive characterization? In his mind it's descriptive praising. I mean, yes, you think? Yeah, yes, the artless song, that's a positive thing. Okay. The innately generative creative act of the child.

23:04 Dylan: Yes, an artless song. He's saying that posy is the fundamental source and force even in the crappy song that you hear some drunkard warbling in a bar late at night and you feel like it's just only portraying his self degradation. No, in fact, Posey is the source for that just as much as it is for the poetizing child, whose lilting tones and witty and ironic insights are greater than the age of the child is raising you up to your transcendental self. It's the whole thing.

23:40 Wes: It really reminds me of the play Drive of Schiller, except that it's got this kind of Schopenhauerian spin on it. Instead of it being will as the ultimate thing in itself, it's posy, or the poetic drive or whatever you want to call it.

23:55 Mark: You can see why he'd be praising mythology and the need for mythology as we're going to get into, because he could be saying the muses rather than romantic poesy, you know, or like, in praise of folly, like characterizing folly as a goddess that speaks through all of us. That's how I'm seeing this, is that there's this spirit of creativity.

24:13 Seth: Yep. It's also a marked characteristic of the democratization of the urge. So there's no sense in here in which there would be something like high art and low art or. He's not talking about even. Not genres, but, like, forms. So music, art, pictorial art, sculpture, what have you. He's just basically talking about it as an urge that comes out of individual

24:39 Dylan: human beings, not just human beings. Maybe the art in terms of fine art is created by human beings. But he's going to say, like, the beauty of a tree is art in this posy sense. Right.

24:52 Wes: And so there's a creative force behind

24:54 Mark: it, wants to blend the posy of art with the posy of nature.

24:58 Dylan: Yeah. So the conclusion for him would be that, unlike Kant, the natural world and the beauty of the natural world really is beauty.

25:07 Seth: So. But wait, are those two different poesies or one posy, one posy?

25:12 Mark: Maybe it's two different poesies that are sublated into a single posy. This is, you know, the difficulty for any of these monists, you know, who are. Who are praising mysticism of some sort. I don't think that he ultimately is saying there's no difference between high art and low art and stuff, but insofar as they're both rooted in posy, like. Yeah, okay, you're right. Yes. It's the same spirit in all of it.

25:34 Wes: There's a poesy spectrum.

25:35 Mark: It's not that the low artists are the ones that are out of touch with poesy. It seems like people try to create any level of things. Like, why does he think that something is bad? Art is because it lacks posy, which is fundamentally a religious impulse. Right. A yearning toward the infinite. That if you're just sort of creating something as a craftsman, it could be very carefully and systematically Created with a lot of subtle textures and stuff. But like, if it doesn't have the spirit in it, then it's just going to be trivial. It's just going to be a little piece of craftsmanship created for a purpose.

Right. Created to wow an audience. I'm thinking of the computer graphics created in a film to like, you know, put over this particular effect of getting the audience excited by showing an explosion or wowing them or whatever. That all these are very. Just manipulative and not actually in touch with poesy art itself, the muse. Unless they are. That could be. The thing that the critic would argue about is whether this scene in Avatar 2 did in fact channel the spirit of.

26:33 Wes: You'd have a better chance of arguing that it's doing something sublime, I think, but.

26:37 Dylan: Uh huh.

26:37 Wes: With explosions and all that type of stuff. But anyway, are we done with this? Do we want to read the whole thing, in other words, or should we pull out some final bits and pieces? Romantic poesy organizes all parts of each thing. That's one of these points where it sounds like it's this universal metaphysical principle

26:56 Mark: I think we want to read in the next sentence, because that at least was quoted in the secondary literature. So we said only romantic poetry can, like the epos, act as a mirror of the entire world that surrounds it, become an image of the age. Here's the new part. And yet it is also romantic poesy that can hover on the wings of poetic reflection between the presented and the presenting, free from all real and ideal interest, and continually raise this reflection to a higher power, thus multiplying it, as in an endless row of mirrors, is capable of the highest and the most multifaceted cultural refinement that since that word bildung possible and not only from the inside out, but also from the outside in.

For Romantic poesy organizes all parts of each thing whose product is to be part of a whole along similar lines out of which arises the prospect of a boundlessly growing classicism. Yeah. So what is this hovering on the wings of poetic reflection between the presented and the presenting, etc. I know that's supposed to be something that's placed in contrast to it can become the whole mirror of an age, but can also do this other thing, and I'm not clear what that is.

27:58 Dylan: Well, to me, the presented and presenting, and then also all ideal and ideal interest. He's presenting poles of things. Realism and idealism are poles for him, like the particular and the whole and the finite and the infinite and the presented and the presenting are Going to be.

28:17 Wes: And I think interest here. When he says free from all real and ideal interest, I think he's getting at aesthetic disinterest, which he will in several places in the readings we did today. So the other aspect here, hidden behind this, right. Is the response to the German idealists and the attempt to explain self consciousness. Right. As Schelling puts it, the intuiting and the intuited kind of merge. Right. And I take this presented and presenting as a way of articulating that, raising reflection to a higher power. So in other words, even though he's not saying it directly, and maybe I'm overreaching here, poesy is a principle of self consciousness, Principle of the possibility of self consciousness is at work here.

29:00 Dylan: I couldn't help but think about thinking, thinking itself here, which it's funny to me that that reference never comes up here and other stuff that we've been reading in the idealists. But the thing or the entity doing the thing that the thing does straight out of Aristotle was interesting.

29:19 Wes: Part of the, you know, part of the reaction problem with Kant and the reaction of the German idealist to him is that the self consciousness does not involve the presentation of a self as object to oneself. Right. There's no experience of the self. It's just this. Kant calls it empty. It's just the representation, I think, which is completely empty. So then the question becomes, we need real self consciousness in the sense of some form of knowledge that Kant bars us from, because that is the fundamental principle that we're going to derive everything from, right?

This is just advanced Cartesianism where we got to make self consciousness the first principle from which we derive all other forms of knowledge or the possibility of knowledge. So the. Again, keep repeating it. But, you know, the aesthetic or the posy relationship becomes a way of crossing that boundary and having a relationship to the infinite. Right. To the collapsed subject, object unity that underlies everything.

30:17 Mark: Right. Earlier, when I was saying that the romantic intuition is toward God and West corrected, you know, toward the self. Well, those are the same thing.

30:26 Wes: Yep.

30:26 Mark: For the idealists and certainly for Schiller, when I was trying to think this through, you know, as a romantic, because Schiller explicitly. I don't know how much we really got into this weird distinction between form and content was that the self by itself is entirely empty. It is this thing we have this direct contact with that Wes was just describing. And insofar as it is empty, I think it is actually universal. Right? Everybody's self before a content, essential content comes along. And gives you something to focus on and think about is one and the same.

Not just the same type, but the same token. So that really there is only one self in the universe. It's just that somehow we're broken up and we each have these individual sense organs and point of view. And once content comes into it, then we get this division. But ultimately what these romantics are trying to do is to get us again back towards the oversoul. Something like that. But you could think that the way to do that is through just a mystical oneness, like do the Buddhist thing, scrub out all the content, and then you're back. You're the form, you know, you're the universal.

And that's how you know that you're God. Whereas I think that Schlegel is setting up the thing that Hegel said that. No, actually it is a much more complicated. The self coming to get to know itself, as Hegel puts it. And that's what the study of poesy amounts to. It's a building we have to make posy rather than it just being this

31:53 Wes: natural thing through the development of culture. Right? This is the historical development of culture. So we can't just avoid being artists and intellectuals and say, we're going to meditate.

32:03 Dylan: This mirrors, though he doesn't point to that strongly to the mirror of individuals, Right. He can't help but thinking of that in terms of culture, right? That you're getting others reflected in you and you're getting yourself reflected in others.

32:18 Mark: The mirrors of culture.

32:19 Dylan: You're saying, okay, his use of mirror here. And I'm not saying that he's doing that work himself here, but I couldn't help but thinking about just the juxtaposition of his discussion of how romantic poesy acts as a mirror to the entire world that surrounds it and becomes an image of our age reflecting reflection of a higher power, thus multiplying it as an endless row of mirrors. And then right next, it is capable of the highest and most multifaceted cultural refinement possible.

32:49 Mark: Yeah. And so irony ends up becoming. I mean, that is the literal in literature. It's literature reflecting on itself, right? It is a mirror placed within literature. I'm going to break the fourth wall. I'm going to, you know, various literary techniques, the Socratic irony, where you don't quite know what Plato's actual view is, given what he's putting in Socrates's mouth, that these are, you know, it's not just that literature is holding an image of the age to it. Which is what, you know, of course it does that, but it's also an endless. It's all holding up to itself. So one of the ways that literature is truly poetic or, you know, has the spirit of poesy in it is by being self reflective. And I don't know if analytical is the right word because that sounds cold. But a gay science.

33:32 Wes: I think irony too, you know, there's a broader sense to it than this meta relationship to itself. So I think it's associated with disinterest. Right. In the state of play, you rise above what I think Schiller calls called earnestness. So you are not interested in the, you know, at a theoretical level, in literal truth, or you're not interested at the appetitive level. Right. And what the object can do for you, you are above that. So the ironic. I'm not discounting what you said, Mark. I think at a more basic level that ironic relationship to the world is very intimately related just to what it means to be being creative, playful, or experiencing the aesthetic. So we should definitely puzzle through all the places where he talks about irony.

34:18 Mark: The next sentence. We're almost done with this, but let's. Romantic poesy is to the arts what wit is to philosophy and what society, interaction, friendship and love are to life. So that sounds like, yeah, you could have a life, but if it doesn't have these things, it's a crappy life. To actually have life as it was meant to be lived, you have to have all these sociable things. Interestingly, if you're doing philosophy in a dull way, if you don't have wit in there, wit related to irony, you're doing philosophy wrong. You're doing it soullessly.

You need a gay science. And that's what romantic poesy is to the arts. That you could just again be constructing something very skillfully. But unless it has that joie de vivre or something in it, then why bother? And then he just says romantic poesy is in the process of becoming. Going back to the very first line. It's a progressive, universal poesy. It is something we are building.

35:08 Wes: It is infinite. It alone is infinite, alone is free.

35:13 Dylan: One thing that is characteristic here, it's a process of becoming and it is going towards something. It's not that posy is just a source of energy or a source of activity that then happens to get condensed or manifest in a whole bunch of different ways. Sometimes they come together, sometimes they don't. Is there is a very, very strong directedness in Schlegel's understanding of it. Right. It's going towards whatever the universal whole is. But that universal whole is something specific. Even if it's is. You only get to it in a kind of asymptotic way. It's not that it's multifaceted or multiple. It's a genuine single whole. That constructing of it isn't constructing something that could be anything else. That constructing is manifesting the activity of posy. But again, it's towards a specific goal.

36:13 Mark: Dylan, you're talking about the beginning of the dialogue on poesy, which. It's the beginning of our selection before the speech on mythology. I don't know if it's actually the beginning of the work itself, but maybe we should, because I think this falls directly on what you're talking about. That it is the thing that brings us together. It is the whole. It is, you know, so why we would need a mythology in there. In the other essay, what critique is supposed to be doing are all related to this single thing. Dylan, do you want to read the part that was delighting you? At least the selection. Give us a couple sentences.

36:42 Dylan: I mean, it's the third paragraph and the fourth paragraph. But the spirit that knows the orgies of the true muse will never make its way to the end. Or believe that it has reached it, for it can never satisfy a yearning that constantly renews itself in the abundance of satisfaction. The world of poesy is as immeasurable and exhaustible as living. Nature is rich in plants, animals and creations of every kind, shape and color. Even the most all encompassing spirit cannot easily encompass all those artificial works or natural products that carry the form and name of poems.

And what are those compared to the formless and unconscious poesy that stirs in a plant, shines in light, that smiles in a child, shimmers in the bloom of youth, glows in the loving breast of women. But this is the first originary poesy, without which there would surely be no poesy of words. Indeed, there will never be an object, a source of activity or of happiness, or for all of us who call ourselves human beings, other than the one poem of the divinity of which we are both part and flower the earth.

37:52 Mark: I think we're getting an idea of how irony. You know, this is no longer him writing an essay. I mean, actually, even the fragments you're supposed to say, I don't know, it's just a fragment. Maybe I should take this ironically, but it seems like there was a more straight ahead manifesto quality that I can identify with Schlegel's actual view. Whereas here I don't know. Is he in his encomium, going a little engaging, a little bit of dramatic license by saying Posey is not just like romantic posy. That's this thing we're going to build. But Posey is like the Ur force. You know, I don't think this is serious metaphysics that he's engaging in here.

38:29 Dylan: He says in his own critical fragments that this essay is the worst thing about it is its complete lack of necessary irony.

38:39 Mark: Yeah. Oh, okay.

38:41 Wes: So I think there is. He is doing metaphysics, but go ahead. I do want to back us up to something in a second, but go ahead.

38:48 Seth: Again, I'm going to go back to this, something I said earlier in the paragraph preceding the one that Dylan just read. He says reason is unitary and is the same in everyone, but just as each person has his own nature and his own love, so too does he carry his own poesy inside of him. And again, when talking about this notion of essentially reason has some kind of structure, grammar, science rules. So it's not just that reason is unitary, that we all think exactly the same way. It's that the exercise of reason by individual human beings is structured by some kind of, you know, think of it, his version of critique, a science.

Right. I mean, this is getting on the verge of the emergence of Wissenschaft and that kind of thing. But essentially there is a critique of reason, surprisingly actually called critique of reason by somebody preceding Schlegel. Right. And his point is, is that we need the same kind of rigorous discipline, grammar, structure, whatever, of posy. Otherwise all these individual poesies are just going to be shooting off and developing crazy things, some of which will hit some artists. Some people will get it, many won't. But what could we do if we could actually educate and structure these creative poetic strivings.

Creative strivings and everybody along the way so that they understood how to connect that drive with this organic whole. Wouldn't that massively increase the quality and the utility of all of the art that's created? It might end some orgies.

40:30 Dylan: Yeah.

40:31 Seth: It might end some true muse orgies, but it's a sacrifice we have to make.

40:35 Wes: I think here, too, he's. You know, Mark was mentioning the kind of fiction super subject that's not individuated because it's essentially transcendental. And then we have to figure out why the finite even comes about, which is an older problem. Right. For Spinoza, the finite is just barnacles on the great super substance that is God. It's just you know, we are part. We are modes of God. For instance, instance, we finite beings. The principle of individuation is something that's on people's minds. Reason is unitary and the same for everyone. But what is it that individuates us? And this is reminiscent kind of of Nietzsche, you know, become yourself. Each of us with our own particular personality, our own particular character. The individuating principle, I think he's suggesting is Posey, as opposed to reason. Yeah, go ahead.

41:27 Dylan: Well, it is and it's. But that individuating principle is universal and it's part of what brings us together as well. And so it's doing multiple work. It means the same thing with, like, being and becoming. So posy is the thing that is the motive force or whatever for becoming, but it also directs us towards our being.

41:48 Wes: Yeah, this is the nature of self consciousness. Right. So you posit the other for Hegel. Right. The absolute is the unity of self and other or. Or even of the same and different. So you individuate, you get the finite, but then that gets reflected back into the absolute through self consciousness, through knowledge, through culture, through those. Yeah, Dylan, as you put it, those things that unify us.

42:11 Mark: I had pulled out a fragment in Ideas, the last section of fragment number 13. Only he who has his own religion, an original view of the infinite, can be an artist. So in other words, he's saying Posey in our work is individual, but it is always shooting at the infinite, which is, you know, there's only one infinite. There's only one ultimate thing to shoot for. But everybody has to have his own way of getting here, his own religion. It is a primary religious. If you want to say, like, what makes for good art? Does it have religion in this broad sense shot through it? It's just interesting that religion can't mean the shared social thing. It is defined here as an individual path toward the infinite.

42:52 Dylan: But Schlegel does believe that it's going to ultimately be unifying as well. And it might be a conceit that he has that in manifesting your most individual religion, you'll in fact align with. Everybody's religion will align. And this is what culture is going to be. This is also where you're going to get the hint of fascism. Right. I mean, you're going to end up with fascism if you go too far down that road. That all of your individual reachings, all your individual religions actually are reflections of one religion.

43:24 Wes: Again, this relationship between the particular and the universal. I think the idea is that you might get a greater grasp on the absolute by reading a four line poem on a jar, right, Sitting on top of a hill. Wallace Stevens. I think that's what that poem's about. Then you would, by doing very abstract philosophy about the nature of God, right, where you're directly talking about God, you're directly talking about the absolute. But it's abstract and it's rational and it doesn't do the same thing. So. And the poem, right, seemingly is about a jar on something very particular.

And it expresses one's own very particular artistic capacities, which, you know, there's a particular character to the poem which reflects the character of the artist, all that stuff highly, highly individuated and has to be, to be really successful as an aesthetic product, as an artwork. But it's through that concreteness, through that individuality, that it gets back to the absolute.

44:23 Dylan: There's a section on the top of 181 that you're making me think of. You're pointing to the energy of the particular, still pointing out towards the absolute odd of itself. In this paragraph, he uses the word spontaneous over and over again. To me, that's a key feature of poesy and of the universe itself is generating these things. We're tapping into what is sort of a source out of which we don't know where it comes from. It is spontaneous. It is just there. So just as the core of the earth spontaneously clothes itself in formations and plant life, just as life spontaneously sprang forth from the depths and the world was filled with joyously multiplying creatures, so too does poesy spontaneously blossom forth from the indivisible elemental force of humanity, when the warming ray of the divine sun meets and impregnates it with that delightful image.

45:22 Mark: Let's end part one. We can come back and talk more about mythology and stuff like that. Folks who are supporters, you'll see Part two as the next thing in your feed, probably right now. Thanks, everybody.