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

0:07 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 320, part 2. We've been talking about Friedrich Schlegel and we were in the intro to his dialogue on Poesy. He said he didn't like Poetics, right? So it's unnecessary to preserve and propagate Poesy with their reasonable speeches and teachings, much less to create it, invented, set it up, give it putative laws, as Poetics would like us to do. Because Poesy is spontaneous.

0:32 Wes: Only possible to speak about Poesy with Poesy. So give us works of criticism that are themselves poetic and not dry, rational aristotelian expositions on the principles of.

0:45 Seth: There's an element too in here of kind of hermeneutics, as he talks about having to kind of start from where we are. So the critical enterprise is not a view from nowhere.

0:55 Wes: Since one person's posy must be limited precisely because it is his own, so too must his view of posy be limited.

1:01 Mark: But the spirit cannot bear this, doubtless because it knows without knowing it that no human being is merely a human being, but rather can and should be really and in truth, all of humanity as well. Therefore, a person keeps going outside of himself, ever certain of finding himself again, in order to seek and find the completion of his innermost being in the depths of a stranger. The game of communicating and approaching is the business and the power of life. Absolute completion occurs only in death. Very Symposium Aristophanes view in the symposium that, you know, everybody love. We're seeking our completion. Well, that's what we're doing in artist. Seth, you brought up Eros before as a great thing to compare to Poesy here, that it's like Eros is shooting us outward to seek completion.

1:45 Wes: Then he'll go on to say, so we have to strive to go beyond our own particular unique posy to expand our view of it. But that doesn't mean generalization, which is deadening and has the opposite effect. It's not about saying, okay, here's one, Poesy, here's another. Let's do some comparative literature stuff and find the general commonalities. You know, your expansiveness comes out in poetic activity itself.

2:17 Seth: The critical structure is not the same as subsuming the law under a universal or, you know, the rule under a universal. It's not the same as saying, this is a token of a type or that identifying some kind of abstract, universal concept under which we can bring your individual posy. No, what you do is you're retaining your individuality and your particularity, but it's somehow you're expressing something universal. So the poem itself, the work of art, artistic movement itself doesn't become subsumed and generalized. Instead it itself. I mean, I'm going to use the word represents. I'm not sure if that's the right word, but it represents a generality, a general thing that is common and shared and should be recognized by others who have the sensitivity.

3:06 Dylan: I'm reading this as the generalization that is pejorative here is taking particulars and trying to extract from those particulars things that are common amongst all of them. And the kind of taxonomy that ends up being deadening, as opposed to taking the particulars in their own energetic manifestation and pointing back or pointing forward to. Or outward. Maybe that's the better, better word, outward towards this sort of universal source. And so the challenge with this generalization is it's overly particularized and doesn't maintain the connection with activity.

3:50 Wes: Yeah, I think mythology is supposed to be the key to doing this. Right. So you will, yes, start that mythology section by talking about the power of enthusiasm, being splintered and posy and wanting to overcome that, and then giving the example of, you know, you've. So it's a. It's a dialogue. So. And I'm not going to try and distinguish who's speaking at any given time, but you yourselves have written poetry and have often felt it's not really connected to soil, to heaven, to living air. There's something to abstract about it. And the solution to that is mythology, when we'll have to figure out what he means by that.

So he'll say, our posy, I maintain, lacks a midpoint, as mythology was for the posy of the ancients and modern poetic arts. Inferiority to classical poetic art can be summarized in the words, we have no mythology. And then I thought, oh, well, what's this gonna. Where is this gonna lead us?

4:47 Mark: Yeah, I mean, I could see how you could say that there was a unified sort of spirit of the times way in which sensibilities would react, a background of beliefs and practices that. Yeah, of course, ancient Greece is a small civil. And he's probably just looking at Athens, really. It's a small civilization. And so, of course, there's going to be a lot of unity. And by this time, it's a more sprawling, cosmopolitan thing. And so we've lost that. But at the same time, you know, we have these greats. Everybody knows in his time who Goethe is. And they have the whole classical tradition behind them.

So it's not like they don't have any shared points of reference. But somehow a mythology is more than just like a bunch of shared points of reference. It is like a central thing to which your religious impulses keep getting turned back. And it's concrete and shared. And so what possibly comparable to that would anybody want to exist in current times or for him, then? Current.

5:50 Wes: Yeah. What is he going to mean by mythology? We're not going to bring back the Greek gods and he himself, Ludovico, I guess I am going to try and distinguish the authors. After all, you know, Ludovico would say, I beg you not to yield to Unbelief regarding the possibility of a new mythology. I welcome doubts, but I don't know that we ever get a concrete definition of that. He'll say, it has something to do with idealism, and it's a basis, and yet it's a basis for a new realism, for harmony of the ideal and the real. But what do we get as a concrete answer in terms of what this mythology looks like?

6:27 Dylan: I'm not sure that this is the answer to the question, but the criticism, like what's wrong with the old mythology? Seems to be that it's rooted too much in the senses into creating a mythology that is sort of accounting for the physical world. And the new mythology would be rooted in spirit. This is at the top of 183.

6:49 Wes: He'll say later, what is any beautiful mythology but a hieroglyphic expression of the surrounding nature in this transfiguration of fantasy and love?

7:00 Seth: So if we go back to Langer and Cassirer and some of the things we talked about, the mythology of the ancients is going to, in some sense be a form of animism. It's the idea that the mythology is connected to the earth in the sense that you are ascribing to the earth motives and emotions. And so there's a connectedness through this mythological representation of spirits, of, you know, for example, the forest or whatever. And these mythological characters are typically associated with natural events, right? Which at the time were unexplained. So now that we're in the era of science, where that stuff's all been explained away and we're not capable of seeing the world as animated and alive and having that form of connection. We need to have a mythology that can exist in the world of science. And that ancient mythology is not it.

7:56 Wes: I mean, he may be suggesting that German idealism itself. I mean, he directly says it right. Idealism. Mythology just is idealism. And just as it is the essence of the spirit to determine itself, to go outside of itself and return to itself, and then eternal exchange. Just as every thought is nothing but the result of such activity, so too the same process is visible in the form of every form of idealism. Idealism itself is nothing but the acknowledgment of that law unto itself. And then later, in every form, idealism must go outside of itself in one way or another.

And in order to be able to return to itself and remain what it is. Therefore, a new and equally unbounded realism must and will emerge out of the womb of idealism. I think this is Part and parcel of the idealism being able to explain finitude, explain why the absolute produces the finite. Thus, idealism must not and will not merely become a model for the new mythology based on its own mode of development, but rather will indirectly be a source of it. So, particularly in physics, or similar tendency. Particularly in physics. And then, you know, we can expect that this new realism, because after all, it is of idealist origin and must hover over idealism's own ground, will appear as posy, which must of course, rest on the harmony of the ideal and the reality.

So we get this idea as the new mythology having something to do with the realism that's grounded in idealism. And then he wants to go on to tell us how Spinoza is related to that.

9:26 Mark: This was the biggest incomplete sentence that I felt like in our reading for today. Is that because he's so fragmentary and anti systematic that what exactly his relationship is to transcendental philosophy and to idealism, how idealism is supposed to generate realism is not explained here. And maybe that's because either I'm not remembering clearly enough or we did not lay out, you know, we did not read the right things by Fichte and Schelling to really get the idea of why he is saying this, why somehow Poesy is the secret to physics. I think I slacked at you, Dylan, a question while we were prepping for this about.

He's so enamored by what's going on with the dynamic paradoxes in physics that are revealing the holiest revelations of nature. And so, you know, he's doing this sort of seeing mysticism in. In the physics of his day that gave him hope that idealism would be the key to everything, to all the sciences here in a way that seems very not characteristic of what we would normally think of as romanticism, but, you know, very pretentious about if Poesy is going to be the queen of the sciences.

10:36 Dylan: Well, my response was just that I didn't read anything in particular factual about it. But this time period in the late 1700s is a pretty important time in the development of modern science. There are a lot of different threads coming together. Newton's been around, but there's a whole bunch of stuff that is going towards a kind of unification. And I immediately thought of all the stuff in experimental science that is still a mess and is trying to be ordered in its particulars into a whole. So you have beginnings of chemistry and the notion of the atom and the arrangement of parts.

And then I think you also have very prominently Electricity and magnetism both separate at this time. But there's a lot of stuff. In fact, it made me think a lot of the parlor tricks and parlor activities going on with static electricity. You know, that there's a kind of delight in watching and partaking in mysterious activities of the natural world. And how genuinely mysterious it was. And a kind of delight at that. So people would bring these big static generators into a parlor. And then people would take turns getting shocked by the static electricity discharges.

And there's this kind of mysticism of science at this time. Where it feels like it's revealing something about the world that was hidden before. But you're getting a handle on it, the way magic works, right? You're getting a recipe for it. There's a kind of order that feels like you're tapping into how the world is working behind the scenes. And you're discovering it and that you're getting a hold of it. You're sort of maintaining that delight of the mysterious. At the same time as you're beginning to understand it. That's what it feels like.

12:32 Wes: You get these intimations of the possibility of a grand universal explanation. Even when you don't have that right. Even when you're doing specific. So he'll say towards the end of the essay. That every experiment and every specific experimental hypothesis. Rests on this implicit hypothesis. Even if it's unconscious about the whole. Right. About the absolute. So looking at some of the secondary literature. He's accused of having a coherence theory of truth. You know, again, this is another way in which a small part could relate to the whole. And that means that any specific object could have hieroglyphic, as he puts it.

Or allegorical significance. In other words, we don't have to write epic poetry about the Greek gods. In order to be getting at the absolute. We don't have to be that literal. We could be writing about a jar. We could be writing about anything. It's all connected. And the symbolic resonance of those things can be our mythology. I'm reading, by the way, just completely reading into this. I don't know if this is what he's saying. But this is one way to understand the idea that there can be a mythology of realism.

13:40 Dylan: One thing that strikes me about this is the way in which he is delighting in recognizing the beginnings of figuring things out. And I think he's sensitive to the fact that reason is playing a role here in the activity of understanding. And he's, you know. Even in your example of the poem about the jar there's an understanding that's coming forth from it, but he's wanting to maintain the place where that's sitting, where things are still mysterious at the same time as being, pointing towards an understanding that they have that vitality of the unknown or the uncertain, while there is still at the same time a glimmer of structure and understanding.

And if you go too far, then you get this deadening generality, right? If you over structure it, then it kills the mysterious in it. And he's wanting to sit there. Something like that is sort of coincidental of his time, right? There's new discoveries being made all the time.

14:40 Wes: I mean, the other aspect of this is he talks about metamorphosis, right? Which is a big deal in ancient poetry, but it's usually these magical transformations of gods into beasts and so on.

14:51 Seth: And.

14:51 Wes: But it's scientifically relevant as well, right? You can explain various macro level phenomena in terms of elements, break them down into elements that are actually universal, like atoms, let's say, or subatomic particles. And one thing can become another through chemical transformation. Right. It's been alchemy up to this point, but it's now it's becoming something else. It's becoming the scientific version of that. So that capacity of things to change into each other is not just reflective of magic and the divine, but reflective of a fundamental universal scientific reality which grounds all phenomena and unites them.

And part of what poetry does through metaphor shows us that there's this relatedness between everything, that there's this isomorphism between different things. So you can compare someone's eyes to against their face, to the way the stars look in the night, for instance. So metaphor is a form of transformation, just like chemistry. And it points to the unity, the great, the fact that there's one absolute sitting behind everything.

15:55 Mark: Yeah. Insofar as there is a logos out in the world, insofar as there is a unified theory that can explain everything, then there is a logos in the mind potentially.

16:06 Wes: Right.

16:06 Mark: This is just straight up Kantianism that if we can say, look at all the uniformity there. That must be because the mind is structured in certain ways to generate spatiality and the law of non contradiction and number and just all this other stuff that Kant imposes on it. I found a footnote here, footnote eight, which is trying to explain why for Schlegel, reality is always conjoined with ideality, that is the theoretical and the empirical, the ideal and the real form, a real union in consciousness. There's no reality outside of consciousness. A quote from a different writing of Schlegel's.

Now, dualism and realism are the two elements of idealism. Another quote. It can easily be seen from this that physics is the highest among the sciences since it is the point of indifference of mathematics and history, just as idealism lies in the point of indifference of dualism and realism. And mathematics and history are derived from dualism and realism. None of that actually clears anything up to me, but it does say, yes, just go with it. This is from Fichte, you know, via his interpretation of Kant, that we're going to somehow get realism out of idealism.

17:12 Wes: Well, in Kant, right, it's transcendental. Idealism is correlated to empirical realism. And even in Berkeley's idealism, right? For Berkeley, it's the only real realism because if you have matter and idea, you have this dualism which cannot be overcome. And it's ultimately not a good ground for our access to objects, to empirical objects. So realism is associated with our direct access to empirical objects. And that's only possible through idealism, right? Through those objects being phenomena which we construct and are directly available to us.

17:44 Seth: Mark mentioned the point that I think is important to return to, which is the notion of history or historicity, or that, you know, one of the things that differentiates the unity or the absolute as regards Poesy versus, for example, science, like you said, physics is the. Is the paradigmatic science because it's ahistorical as well as being transcendental in some respect with these, these universal laws. And whatever the universal principle or universal guide or bonding we're going to get for Poesy out of critique is going to be historical. And in fact, I think that's why critique, he talks about critique and not science, that there's a sense in which the approach would be similar.

Like he likes the idea of a hypothesis. But the ultimate effort of critique is not to identify the ahistorical in the historical. Rather, it's somehow place the historical in its context and simultaneously be an act of creativity or an act of. Of artistic merit itself at the same time. So in other words, we talked about starting from someplace that you're not starting from nowhere. We talked about the need to have this regenerative, reiterative system of critique that is simultaneously, it's like we're generating art or generating critique, which further explains and clarifies the process and the path of what art should take.

And simultaneous is an artistic endeavor. So it's much more organic and historical. And I guess I saw in a footnote or something that Hegel hated Schlegel. But it'd be interesting to read what Hegel had to say about Schlegel.

19:29 Wes: Yeah, Hegel might have attended his lectures on transcendental philosophy. The speculation is. And thought they sucked. But there is this natural relationship between critique in the Kantian sense, and then historical critique, right? Which in Foucault becomes genealogy, or Nietzsche becomes genealogy and Foucault becomes genealogy. Where for Kant, the critique is to say that we have limits to reason, and that involves the fact that we have a kind of cognitive conceptual scheme through which everything is filtered. To put it in a very simple way, that conceptual scheme can be thought of to be not just universal subjects based on their shared cognitive structure, but social and historical, social constructions, for instance, other ways of looking at things to filter of one's cultural embeddedness.

So that critique must become historical and genealogical. In that sense, we have to explain the history of the idea in order to fully understand it. And for Hegel, in a way, the phenomenology is about the historical development of the categories. It's a genealogy of the Kantian categories which are just there statically. And in Kant, this is actually a good segue to his transition from. He makes that connection between nature or physics and mythology through metamorphosis. This is on page 186. And then he's going to move on to irony. Indeed, the artificially ordered confusion, this charming symmetry of contradictions, this wondrous external exchange of enthusiasm and irony, which itself lives even in the smallest elements of the whole, already seemed to me to be an indirect mythology in themselves.

Neither this wit nor a mythology can exist without something originary and inimitable, absolutely indissoluble, which, after all, transformations still allows the older nature and power to shine through, where naive profundity allows the glimmer of the absurd and the crazy, or of the simple minded and the stupid to shine through sublation of the course and the laws of reasonably thinking reason. So I think there's something here in irony, taken to the level of absurd comedy, that is supposed to relate us to mythology, because in a way it seems.

It seems the very opposite of seriousness, but in some sense it is a way of getting at the absolute. And of course, the play frame of comedy and the playframe of the aesthetic are of course related. You can't completely tease those apart. So I think that's partly what the relation is. So we get to irony, not unrelated to the indifference of the aesthetic, as the kind of fundamental engine of a mythology that Might involve, say a Falstaff, right in Shakespeare or a fool or some other character like that that seemingly base and not sublime at all, but actually is the figure through which the absolute shines through in the clearest way.

22:25 Mark: Well, maybe that's part of what the attitude of the ancients toward their mythology. One of the things that appeals to him is that it was not just like a religion. It was at least, you know, according to a number of things I've read that after a certain point, do the gods really exist? Like that wasn't really the question. Certainly they're not moral models, right? They do all these foolish things and they, you know, we're still scared of them. They represent, you know, whether the crops are going to die and whether lightning is going to hit you and things.

But it was a share a point of comparison that was not just we are all the serious man with regard to our mythology. It is not our religion such it is this shared. It's more like our attitude toward Star Wars. I mean, Tolkien said he was trying to build a modern British mythology. And I was thinking of that in relation to what Schlegel is talking about here. And by just creating cultural touchstones that are these stories that then can infuse and connect and help us to understand each other's work. But we don't necessarily take as gospel

23:26 Wes: the original chaos of human nature for which I have yet to know more beautiful symbol than the colorful swarm of ancient gods. So this is the realism, I think we're not talking about gods anymore. We're just talking about particular human beings. And yet the Absolute can shine through them.

23:40 Dylan: I think there's going to be a spectrum, right? Even for the Greeks, there was the active question there's brought up in public sphere whether the gods are real or not. Plato's critique of poetry in part has to do with a understanding that there is a spectrum of which people understand the reality or not reality of gods. And being sensitive to that spectrum is part of having a stable society. And there's also at it the difference between people who are frankly more sophisticated and less sophisticated. Not in a way that I think Schlegel would disagree with. Schlegel clearly believes in more sophisticated and less sophisticated forms of art. Even if he's pointing to Poesy as being the source of all of it. Right. There's also better and worse forms of it.

24:27 Wes: This is on page 189. And without calling it by name, we make this demand everywhere, even in quite popular genres such as drama. We demand irony we demand that events, people, in short, the entire game of life, really be taken as a game and represented as such. This appears most essential to us, and indeed, what does it not include? Thus we abide by the meaning of the whole alone. That which charms, touches, occupies and delights the sense, the heart, the understanding, and the imagination individually appears to us as nothing but signs, means for the intuition of the whole at the moment we lift ourselves up to it.

25:01 Dylan: Well, there's a whole section 108 in the fragments on Socratic irony as well.

25:06 Mark: One of the reasons we're doing this is as preparation, because I was trying to read Kierkegaard's either or and seeing like, oh, he's got this beginning whole section which looks like Schlegel's Fragments, not that I knew about Schlegel yet. And he also has a whole essay on irony, which I was thinking maybe that would be easier for us to take on. But it's actually many hundreds of pages, just like either or. There's lots of points of Kierkegaard that there's a reason that we haven't done them yet. I think we could have a whole separate episode on irony.

I think this is super interesting, but I think, Wes, the quote that you just gave sort of helps to say, if we say we demand irony out of everything, it's treating it as if it were a game. I mean, I'm interpreting that as we demand a certain distance from it, that if it's just being presented as a sentimental, you know, a thing here I'm telling you a true story about all these people who just died in this earthquake. Like, well, there's nothing ironic about that. That's very sad. And if your art is just like, let me do a fictional version of that and put it on screen.

And that's just sentimentality. Like, that's not gonna be art for these guys. That's not.

26:13 Wes: Well, Schiller. Yeah, Schiller talked about tragedy, right? And said, you're still trying to get to the indifferent mode of the aesthetic, but you create greater resistance for yourself because of all the pathos involved. I think a really good fragment for irony is 121 the Athenaeum. And this is on page 321. An idea is a concept completed to the point of irony. An absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses. The continually self generating interchange of two contesting thoughts.

26:42 Mark: So he's giving definitions here for idea versus ideal.

26:45 Wes: Yeah, an ideal is at once idea. In fact, if for thinkers, ideals do not have as much individuality as the gods of antiquity do for artists, then all pursuit of ideas is nothing but a boring, tiresome dice game with empty formulas, or, in the manner of Chinese Bonzes, a brooding contemplation of one's own nose. Nothing is more deplorable and more contemptible than this sort of sentimental speculation without an object. So again, this kind of plea for particularity down towards the bottom is something that sounds very Nietzschean. Only a spirit that contains a multiplicity of spirits, an entire system of Personas, can do this.

A spirit within which the universe, which is that germinates in every monad, has grown to fullness and matured. All right, that doesn't. Doesn't sound like Nietzsche, actually, rhetorically, in a way it does, but the point is a bit different. So I think, you know, irony too. The Nietzsche part is the perspectivalism. So you want to be able to take different positions on something, and this is an important. So as a Shakespeare, you want to be able to take the villain's perspective, you want to be able to take another character's perspective. In a way, you're lifted above your own particular opinion, your own particular point of view.

You're in multiple points of view. And that's an ironic position.

27:59 Seth: Yes. It's not just that you have a view from somewhere, as opposed to a view from nowhere, which is the scientific mode, but it's that you have a view from many places. So you're not restricted just to your particular view, but rather you're able, or the art challenges you, to take the perspective of somebody who's not you, which is still not a view from nowhere. Really interesting. Well done.

28:26 Dylan: But there's also this aspect of qualified earnestness. So this perspectivalism requires earnestness from each of its points of view in some respect, because if you don't have that, then it's just another leveling in which everything is equal to everything else. You need to have the richness. And Schlegel might use the word authenticity. I'm going to use the word the earnestness of the perspective, even if ultimately, in holding or in an ironic stance, managing multiple perspectives, you don't earnestly hold any one of them specifically.

29:03 Wes: Yeah, you got to be able to inhabit each perspective.

29:06 Dylan: You got to inhabit them. And that inhabiting. I'm going to stick with the word earnest has to have some earnest authenticity to it.

29:13 Wes: Yeah. What does Plato say? Seriousness and playfulness or sisters or something like that.

29:19 Mark: So I've been looking through my notes on concerning the essence of Critique. And we've actually hit most of the themes because these all. It's an introduction to a book about Lessing or a book of Lessing's poetry. I'm not totally sure. It's just trying to say what the role of the critic is, which is to be the literary policeman of the stuff that he's been talking about throughout here, of making sure that art has the proper juju in it, that it has the posy, the posy police, the building the Romantic project is supposed to be engaging in. So I don't feel too bad that we are not spending substantial time on that. I guess we have another 10 minutes or so if we want to take it.

30:01 Dylan: I found that one to be the least interesting, and it's the one that I started with, and it's the one that was the source of my crack on slack about when are we going to be done with Romantics. After that it got better.

30:14 Seth: Crack on slack.

30:15 Wes: He does say at one point, this is the most interesting part to me, where he will talk about people. In more recent years, and particularly since Kant, people have taken a new path and have rescued at least the dignity of Poesy by deriving each particular aesthetic feeling from the feeling of the infinite or the recollection of freedom. But then a little down, he'll say, because Poesy is the more general art. A science of posy could not be called aesthetics, nor could it be called fantastics, since this latter is in turn so general that it would be conflated with the concept of philosophy as a science of consciousness.

30:50 Mark: So aesthetics having to do specifically with the senses, like that's what it literally means, the senses and beauty.

30:56 Wes: Yeah. Well, I was thinking aesthetics in the Kantian sense. But a science of posy would rather have to be called something like pathetics. Correct insights into the essence of anger, desire, and so forth. Physicalistic theory of humankind on earth, however, is undeniably far too incomplete to establish such a science.

31:14 Mark: So that's not what Aristotle's poetics is trying to do. Or is Aristotle's poetics too surface level? Aristotle's analysis of emotions, like Spinoza's analysis of emotions, is not getting at some fundamental. It's not seeing how each emotion is connected to the yearning for the whole, or whatever you was just in that previous section we just read.

31:32 Wes: Yeah. It sounds like we have to remain on the level of a psychology which doesn't appeal to the underlying neuroscience and so is not properly scientific. I don't know. I mean, ultimately, he'll say for critique to perform its role, which is to call out what's inauthentic, it has to have that posy property of being attuned to the whole. So we hold that this construction and knowledge of the whole are the primary and most essential condition for a critique that is really able to fulfill its high calling. And I think that has something to do with it being pathetics rather than aesthetics attuned not to merely to the abstract, but to these concrete things like anger and. I don't know.

32:14 Dylan: Well, I think it also joins up with the last paragraph where he calls it the middle term between history and philosophy. History being the particulars of philosophy being the general right. The history being like the what happened and not so different than the understanding essences of anger, desire and so forth, but then moving outwards to an actual pathetics.

32:41 Mark: I think this is going to be very related to this concept of genre, which is very important to Schlegel's criticism. That genre is not just going to be like a set of stylistic characteristics. It has to be something about the essence of the work. Quoting here, page 273 somewhere. Genres are important because one demanded everything from each work and thus had no concept of the fact that as with each thing, so too should each work only be exemplary within its kind and genre. Otherwise it becomes a trivial, commonplace things, as are so many works of modern literature.

So on the one hand, he's saying, to be a good critic is not to just like, these are the standards. Does this work meet the standards? No, Bad, bad work. It's to see the, you know, grasp the organic character of the work. What is it essentially trying to do? What point of view is it coming from? Elsewhere? He says, to understand a particular artist, you would really have to do a whole genealogy of that individual. Just like, you know, you might do of the whole Geist of the society or the philosophy of history. Determine the, you know, the great end point of history or whatever.

Do that with an individual. In other words, trace, like all their influences and their stylistic roots and their. Their spiritual roots. Trying to grasp the essence of this person as a psychological individual. It becomes very demanding to be a good critic, to really immerse yourself in the work and not just be so by saying, unless it has the juju of Romanticism on it, then it's bad art. Unless it somehow attaches to the whole. That's very different than saying, hey, I'm a good critic. I have a good sense of the whole. I can look at any given work and say, this one's disconnected.

From it, that one really hits the spot. If that was your view of what his take on art criticism was. Given everything else we've said here, you are wrong.

34:26 Wes: That sounds like a closing.

34:28 Mark: Well, so it becomes. The differentiation of genres, when thoroughly completed, leans sooner or later to a historical construction of the whole of art and poetics. This construction and knowledge of the whole are the primary and most essential condition for a critique that is really able to fulfill its high calling. So that's interesting to me that you'd think that when I talk to musicians or whatever, like, ah, the genre, it doesn't matter, I just do what I do. But no, actually understanding genres is to understand genre understood in this sort of deep sense and not just a set of stylistic characteristics is to really understand the essence of what a work is trying to do.

And so mapping out the various genres is like a map of the spirit. It's like doing Hegel's phenomenology with the history of art, which I know then is what folks like Adorno, if we ever read some Adorno aesthetics that he was a neo Hegelian in. How does one art style prompt another art style prompt another? You know, very much in tracing the patterns of Geist. And so this is, I think, right here in Schlegel, he's recommending that we do that.

35:32 Wes: We should read some Adorno aesthetics.

35:35 Dylan: I did not take up the challenge yet of having read any of the August Schlegel stuff.

35:41 Mark: I haven't actually either. I mean, I read a page, I should say it looked pretty straightforward.

35:46 Dylan: Okay, so what I will say is I read the introduction to that section and I thought, oh, well, this would be pretty interesting. So if we're looking for something that we're going to do in less than two weeks that feels manageable and related, I would be totally fine with doing that. I confess, unless we are very specific. I'm a little nervous about going after Kierkegaard in a week and a half just because that guy's crazy. He's just hard to get. It takes a lot of work to figure out what he's doing and a lot of volume to figure out what he's doing. And he's like your crazy friend who you really find interesting, but you can only take so much of because they're always running around in some kind of fit.

36:35 Seth: Oh my God, that is such an accurate. And that is such a wonderful description. We have friends that are very dear to us, but like 30 minutes into a visit you're like, okay, you'd be like, oh yeah, did you have you watched this latest thing on Netflix? And then somehow in five minutes they managed to turn it onto whatever their rant is, like ecology or politics or LBGTQ things or whatever it happens to be. You're like, how did we get there? How do we get to this point? And why do we always get to this point when you come to visit within 30 minutes, like, can't you just enjoy a glass of wine and nonsense.

37:12 Dylan: It's because everything is about you. That's what it is, right? That kind of person. Everything's about them.

37:18 Mark: Kierkegaard has a deep commitment to irony in that. The whole first half, as far as I can see, the whole of either or is. The either is the aesthetic point of view. The or is the ethical point of view. His actual view, the religious point of view, isn't even in the book. It's implied as a background thing that he'll then bring up later in other essays, in other works. But so to say that, you know, it's not that everything is going to come back to talking about Jesus or something for Kierkegaard, in the way that maybe that would be comparable to your conversational friend Seth, that he's willing to dwell for 500 pages or whatever. The first half of either or is just on here's me pretending to be Schlegel or somebody like that, a romantic. Where does that lead you? Is that the kind of person you

38:07 Seth: want to hang around?

38:08 Mark: That's a really high tolerance for irony,

38:10 Dylan: especially 500 pages of it. Right? So anyway, Mark, you were wondering, what are we going to do next? I don't have any other opinion than that we've been pointing towards either doing Kierkegaard next or Schlegel, and I'm fine with either one. If we do Kierkegaard, I just want it to be constrained us to know something about what we're doing, which might be all right.

38:30 Mark: So folks who are familiar with either or who are listening can weigh into us. I know from looking at syllabi and from just scanning the book myself, but I would love to hear from other people what actually were the most interesting parts of that book for you? Or do you, as a Kierkegaard fan, does that just mean you read Fear and Trembling and some other stuff that is not this? Any other thoughts, Seth or Wes?

38:54 Seth: We could go on a summer break for three months or not.

38:57 Mark: Folks can let us know if they would prefer us to do that. And they could just listen to back episodes and get into re Release.

39:08 Seth: There's no more Romantics. Right. Just to fill out the slate.

39:12 Dylan: Romanticism is dead.

39:13 Mark: This is a big book. And Wes and I tried experimentally reading a little bit of Novalis for something, and it was no go. And I've looked at some of the other Novalis selections in here, and I did not enjoy them. Like, he's a poet, but at least everything in this book is just like his notes to himself. And it's not good.

39:31 Dylan: You know, for sure that Novalis guy who names himself Novalis is, like, going to be the most insufferable, pretentious person that you've ever met in your life.

39:45 Seth: Well, so I'll say this. I would be up for more Schlegel if there's some deeper dive specifically on. Like, we don't need any more of what we read. Like, if there's like.

39:56 Dylan: Well, we're talking about a different Schlegel. We're talking about the Schlegel brother that was.

40:00 Seth: Oh, the brother. Okay.

40:03 Mark: Yeah. The idea with the second episode would be a straight up aesthetics episode, you know, to try to do what we did with Schiller. That the first one was his politics, the second one was his aesthetics. Here we got a lot of this overall romantic project and a lot of vague stuff about creating mythology and stuff. But, like, what is actually being suggested over and above Kant, for instance. So I think August Schlegel will give us that.

40:27 Seth: Did the woman named Caroline, who was married to both of them, ever write anything? Maybe that would be the right text.

40:32 Mark: Right. Caroline was married to August Schlegel. And then after they got divorced, she did not steal him away, you know, or he did not marry Schelling. It was not the same person that married both.

40:43 Seth: Not FWJ Schlegel. That FWJ Schelling.

40:47 Mark: Exactly. Too many Friedrichs. This is in the Stanford article is that Schelling was really into August Schlegel and Caroline's daughter, but she died. But during that, the daughter dying and being. I don't know if actually engaged, but being enamored of this much younger daughter became close to Caroline. And so when August and Caroline broke up, then he was there to swoop in.

41:12 Seth: Nothing creepy about that.

41:15 Wes: Anyway, so we're gonna read Schlegel's theory of Art. A Schlegel's theory of Art.

41:20 Mark: And I'll leave most of this in the recording. Unless you don't want you talking about your friends in the recording, Seth.

41:26 Seth: They don't listen to this.

41:27 Mark: Okay. A guaranteed Nobody I know.

41:31 Seth: There's like six people I know who might actually occasionally listen into an episode. Yeah, I'm not even remotely a celebrity or impressive amongst my friends and my family.

41:42 Mark: You're like Jesus, not recognized in his home state of Galilee that he. They couldn't accept that he was the.

41:49 Seth: All right.

41:50 Mark: That is true.

41:51 Seth: I am like Jesus.

41:53 Dylan: According to your T shirt. You are. That's right.

41:56 Seth: Did you see the.

41:57 Mark: What does it say?

41:58 Dylan: Disappointments.

41:59 Mark: All of you with a picture of Jesus holding. Holding his arms wide. That is a cool T shirt. That should be for sale at our site.

42:08 Seth: It is. I bought it so you can. But yeah, it is time to get into Kierkegaard eventually so that I can launch our either or T shirt line. I have. I have big plans.

42:19 Wes: Nice.

42:20 Mark: The front will be every.

42:23 Seth: Every T shirt will come into it. Or it'll have a. It'll have a question or pose a position. And then you'll have one of two options in the T shirt. Either or. So it's like Jesus, question mark, yes or no. Those are your either yes or either no. And so we have a whole series of are you an idealist, a realist, all that kind of stuff. And you get to pick your shirt. It's like social media for shirts.

42:48 Mark: All right. We'll determine whether that is real or irony next time. So. So long, everybody. Good night.

42:55 Wes: Good night.

42:55 Seth: Good night.