Ep. 321: August Schlegel on Beauty (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better. Our question for episode 321 is something like what is art? We read a selection of August Wilhelm Schlegel's theory of art written between 1798 and 1803. More information please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer plucking out the eyes of genius in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:32 Seth: This is Seth Paskin perfectly blending the real and the ideal in Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan trying to get away from my self canceling one sidedness in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey uniting my sensuality and spirituality in an autonomous and unlimited capacity in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:53 Mark: Last time we talked about the younger brother Friedrich Schlegel, and it was kind of touchy feely and it was a little hard to figure out what concretely he was recommending in a lot of cases. So we have his older brother August Schlegel. This is more of a textbook. This is basically a secondary work about Kant on art, but highlighting very, in an easy to understand manner the differences between Kant's theory and the Romantic theory he's proposing.

1:24 Wes: Is it easy to understand? This was a difficult one for me to figure out.

1:29 Dylan: Mark just excels at this. He's just, it's just. This is old head.

1:33 Wes: It was so easy for him to understand that he wanted to add 48 pages of Schelling.

1:38 Dylan: He's like, screw this, this is just kindergarten stuff. I need to get some real philosophy. Stop this textbook crap.

1:46 Mark: This was just happened to be a week, a couple of weeks because we ended up putting it off. So I had two different trips during this time, both of which involved a good amount of time with me just sitting around and reading philosophy if I wanted to. And so I chased the footnotes on this and read a little bit of Kant's third critique on the sublime. We covered the beautiful in the regular episode. We covered the sublime or at least part of that section in a close reading. But it's not actually that relevant here that we all necessarily. I don't know. Did you guys look at Kant again?

2:19 Wes: I did, but it. I think what we need can be summarized in a few sentences as we, you know, in. In the context of discussing.

2:27 Seth: Which was my. Which was my earnest hope that you would do, Wes.

2:32 Mark: In sum, Schlegel, who we always mean in this context, August Schlegel, unless we say otherwise, is unsatisfied with Kant's take on the Beauty because it seems to marginalize it. It Seems to sort of fit it. It's a rarefied little thing that people do that's a sort of a byproduct of the way that our understanding works. And it ends up not being as central to philosophy as these Romantics would like because it's not essentially connected with the infinite. But yet Kant on the sublime does suggest that we are excited about the sublime because it does connote something that is too vast for us to take in. And so we have a reaction to that.

3:14 Wes: Yeah.

3:14 Mark: And so, yeah, Schlegel's just suggesting, hey, let's take that insight that Kant had about the sublime and actually apply it to the beautifuls. Maybe we can say why that a beautiful is not just merely a self contained around a circle. Oh, what a beautiful little self contained circle, like. No, no, circles are not beautiful. A circle is just a form. There has to be something else.

3:37 Wes: Kant wasn't just saying look at the beautiful circle. But anyway, he said triangles. Yeah, right. Look at all the geometrical figures. They're so beautiful. The more colorless they are, the more beautiful. But no, I mean, yeah, I think, Mark, you're getting at the essence of this, which is that the Romantics want to vindicate the aesthetic as our mode of relating to the absolute, to the infinite. And to do that they need to say that there's a way in which the sublime is integrated into the aesthetic. It's part of the aesthetic. It's not just sharply separated, which is what Schlegel claims that Kant is saying.

4:18 Dylan: Yeah. And in fact, isn't it because the focus is on the absolute and getting contact with the absolute and the sublime is for Kant, one of the avenues towards it, one of the modes of accessing. Accessing it. To me, that's the reason they walk back from there. Well, the beautiful does the same thing. So the beautiful is effectively the beautiful and the sublime are on a gradient scale. They're not distinct in the way that Schlegel is claiming that they're distinct. For Kant, the beautiful and the sublime are distinct kinds. For Kant, according to Schlegel.

4:52 Wes: Yeah. And we can say just quickly for Kant. Right. Because Schlegel never really says what Kant means by the sublime. Exactly. In one form, what Kant calls a dynamically sublime. You're confronted with the power of nature. Right. Like overhanging cliffs, thunderclouds, things like that that are dangerous, that remind you of your mortality and the fact that you can be killed by these things. Nature is fearful and powerful and overwhelming, but we get pleasure out of There's a painful element, but we also get pleasure out of that because we become more aware that our.

As subjects, as rational, free subjects, we are superior and independent of nature despite that situation. And then there's another form which he calls the mathematical sublime, in which it's a similar sort of thing, except it has to do with our relationship to scale, to infinity, and the sense that it's incomprehensible. It surpasses the ability of our imagination and understanding to deal with it. And yet it reminds us of the power of the fact that we're rational beings and we have the kind of rational access to the infinite. So that's what Kant means.

And then, you know, I think we've discussed the aesthetic enough and the relationship between that and disinterest. These are, you know, separate chapters in the. In the third critique. I don't think they're entirely unrelated, but, you know, Schlegel's saying there's a sharp distinction.

6:16 Dylan: So your point about freedom with regards to the. You didn't need. The term wasn't natural, infinite. It was not the mathematical one.

6:25 Wes: Like the dynamic. Dynamic.

6:27 Dylan: That was a dynamic. I think of it in terms of nature. But you're right, it's dynamic. That's the key for Schlegel, is the way in which it provides access to the activity of our freedom. We realize ourselves as free entities in that relationship. And that's why he wants to hold onto it as the key to aesthetic experience.

6:47 Wes: And we get that in, you know, the aesthetic as well as the sublime.

6:50 Dylan: Right.

6:50 Wes: So Schiller made a big deal of this, which is that how do we find things beautiful? How are aesthetic judgments possible? Well, our judgment goes to work. Instead of subsuming particulars under concepts, there's this free play of the faculties. They're doing work, but they're not subsuming particulars under concepts. In a sense, they're trying and failing. But there's a freedom there in that we're not just determined by the objects of perception, for instance.

7:19 Mark: So quoting Kant here for a second, it seems that we regard the beautiful as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the understanding. That's just what you said. And the sublime as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of reason. So do we remember the difference between, you know, reason is searching for these greater regularities? Reason is the thing that for Kant, actually leads us astray into thinking, hey, you know, everything has a cause, therefore there must be a first cause, which is God. That is an argument of reason. But that actually goes beyond the limits.

You know, reason is always stretching itself out to say things about the unconditioned. And so the whole point of the critique of Pure Reason is to reign that back and say no, actually you need to just say that that only applies to specific areas. But I don't know if that gets at what. Overall, the difference between a concept of the understanding. I mean, dog, you know, most of the concepts we use are concept of the understanding versus a concept of reason, which seems to be only certain highfalutin

8:19 Wes: philosophical concepts, is that even the categories for Kant are categories of the understanding, like causality. When we talk about metaphysics, right, we're using reason when we think about individual souls or God or any, any, you know, so reason is that faculty of at the very least doing metaphysics, which, yes, Kant wants to reign in. And we can do it in a more limited, I don't know, quasi skeptical way. But, you know, ethical philosophy is a good example of this. Right? Practical philosophy, we can talk about ethics anyway, says Kant, despite the limitations of. Of reason. And it's. And that's really one of the places where when we talk about practical philosophy, these are concepts of reason are at work.

9:00 Mark: Okay, yeah, so. So the categorical imperative is categorical entirely because it is a legitimate extension of a concept of reason to everything. Not merely hypothetical, not merely the things of our experience, but to all possible rational beings and their behaviors and stuff like that. So what would an indeterminate concept of reason, how would that even make sense as applying to. I'm contemplating the vastness of the cosmos. It's like, well, that's the kind of thing that philosophy would like to say something about. But if you're really overwhelmed by the vastness, by the sublimity of it, then you're not fixing on a particular concept of reason. Is that the idea?

9:40 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. They all seem indeterminate to me. Right. If you're talking about God or he does talk about regulative ideals within reason as well. But I haven't, I didn't go back and review that.

9:52 Dylan: You know, Mark, you pointed us to just the beginning of the analytic of the sublime, section 23 out of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. I didn't go back and review a ton of Kant, but this distinction between bounded and unboundedness as being the line between the beautiful and the sublime seemed to be there. So what Schlegel was reacting to that the beauty is somehow constrained to the bounded. So just in the, like the second or third Paragraph. Some significant differences between the beautiful and the sublime are also readily apparent. The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in the objects being bounded.

But the sublime can also be found in a formless object. Insofar as we present unboundedness, either as in the object or because the object prompts us to present it. While yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality. So it seems that we regard the beautiful as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the understanding and sublime as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of reason. Okay, but the beginning of that is the important part.

10:58 Mark: I got stuck on the.

11:00 Dylan: For understanding versus reason, but about boundedness and unboundedness. And it's probably not exactly the thing to figure out whether Schlegel's right about Kant. It may be that Kant is more amenable in the end to something like what Schlegel ends up where he ends up. But he's definitely reacting to this notion that the beautiful is tied up with form and boundedness. And he doesn't think that the beautiful is just that. And I would like to get out of talking with you guys about why they would be. I guess it seems obvious to me that they're very, very aligned with one another. They're part of the same kind of experience of aesthetic. So the notion that they would be different just seems kind of that different. We seem kind of weird. And maybe that's just that I already am down the history road from the German Romantics and they've infected me.

11:51 Seth: Isn't the point that Schlegel's making. He's talking about the beautiful and the sublime. And he's talking about how Kant is distinguishing them, making them separate, but that he feels like the whole point of the third Critique is to try to reconcile the distinction between practical reason and pure reason. Or really it's to unite the faculties. So he says Kant's actually working against his own project by making the aesthetic judgment about the beautiful and the aesthetic judgment about the sublime, two completely separate things. And the Romantic project.

Right, Is to unify or identify the way in which we can access the unbounded through the bounded. Right? So the notion is all we have access to, I should say what we make judgments about, aesthetic judgments about, is the finite, the sensory world, the things. And what he wants to point out is that if you define beautiful the way that Kant does, then you're limiting yourself to the finite. You're blocking off access. And he thinks that the Move that Kant makes to define how the sublime would work doesn't work here. It doesn't work here. Not just because it doesn't work, but also because it's misguided.

So Schlegel's project is how can we, through an individual, finite thing, access the infinite or the broad concept? And he mentions at one point, you know, he's like, at least Plato had the intuition, right, that your access of the individual subsumes it underneath an ideal form. Right, which would somehow create the possibility, at least for a judgment of beauty in the object that would be tied to the ideal. But that's really the point he's trying to get across.

13:41 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very well put. The motive here is to say that art, and in particular, right, so art created by human beings, as opposed to natural beauty, which is the thing that Kant focuses on, is a way for us to get at the infinite. And, you know, of course, Schelling was a pivotal influence there. But at the end of the section on the sublime, he will say, in a way, he wants to say that the sublime isn't just about boundlessness and formlessness. You can find it, says Schlegel, in strictly limited forms, and that it's part of the effect of beauty.

So, for instance, in a colossal statue of Jupiter, there's an element of sublimity, and you can't really separate that from the aesthetic effect. And it wants to generalize in that, to say that in a way, the sublime is just the clay. It's just the matter, he calls it, that we refine into beauty. So what we're doing when we create an aesthetic effect, when we create an art object, is we are fashioning something out of the material of the sublime to create something that is an object of our quote, unquote, fancy or our poetic receptivity or, you know, as Schiller might call it, our play faculties.

So without that material, without the sublime, we don't really have a material. We don't have anything to work with. I don't think he justifies that in detail, but I think that's the idea.

15:03 Dylan: And that aligns with the stuff that we talked about with Schiller, where there's this focus on the engine of the aesthetic is whatever this raw material is that has its own activity in it, its own motion, which is aligned with nature. For Schiller, and so it makes sense that you'd point to Schlegel that that's where it's the source of the absolute. It's the way we Touch the absolute. Right.

15:28 Mark: So I think of the sublime in terms of depth, that in beauty we do get free play. So we have to be fair. Schlegel at some point in here says straight geometric objects are not beautiful, but he's not actually saying that. This is Kant's view. It's closer to Hutcheson's view that we study, that Kant inherited from. But even Hutcheson says it's complexity within symmetry. So it's not the pure circle that would be the most beautiful thing, but a pure circle with a bunch of little circles in it. I forget exactly what. You know. There has to be some subtlety to allow our.

Something for our fancy to play over. Unity and multiplicity. So the multiplicity part is the part where we can take time and sort of look at or listen to or whatever, the details of the thing and sink into that. And there's something. I don't know if that's exactly the same as the prototypical version of the sublime, where something is just so huge and awesome that we can also disappear into it. Because the huge and awesome has that sort of fear factor. Right. I mean, we get over it when we're appreciating a sublime artwork as opposed to being just scared by a thunderstorm.

Right. If we can either approach the thunderstorm aesthetically or we can get a picture of a thunderstorm or whatever, whatever the thing that we gain that artistic distance so as a spectator, so that we're not immediately threatened by the thing. And this allows us to disappear, to think deeply about the thing in a way we wouldn't if we were just running away from the thunderstorm. But is that the same kind of depth that, you know, is the thing that Schlegel seems to be pointing at? One of the things they mentioned specifically. Right. How literally the infinity can be within a limited form is the fact that any line can be subdivided infinitely.

Right. So you could just. In a. In contemplating a simple picture of a circle, there's always littler and littler parts. Like there's literally an infinite within any finite figure.

17:25 Wes: You know, part of what this is going to turn out to be as the essay progresses, because it presents itself in a way as a lot of discrete little parts. Right. We're going to move on from an explicit conversation about the sublime to free versus accessory beauty and Kant standard versus spiritual idea. And then these thoughts about language and physiognomy and sort of an a priori communication system that's built into us and genius and style and all that stuff. What ultimately he's going to be getting at is that this sublime element within the. The art object represents the freedom of the subject.

And as a manifestation of the creative power of nature of which we are a part, which has something to do with the. The quote unquote absolute. So in a way, it's like finding God in this idealist sense in the aesthetic object. And that's the sublimity that we are confronted with, but it is also our own. It's the sublimity of our own subjectivity, let's say.

18:26 Seth: Yeah, that. Actually, I really liked the part where he talks explicitly about kind of what it is about nature that we're trying to capture with art. First of all, just as a side note, he's an exceptionally good writer, or at least this translation makes it seem like he's an exceptionally good writer. But he hearkens Back to episode 16, Danto, right, where he has a pretty severe and I think dead on critique about the notion that art is mimetic. So he's talking about. He's like, if the purpose of art was just to get as close to a lifelike representation of the thing, then what would be the point?

Right? And to even say that that's what you're doing doesn't even make any sense because of course, a painting is nothing like an actual landscape. It just doesn't even make sense. So, you know, he says we can't look for the idea of the beautiful or make an aesthetic judgment about how realistic or how much how accurate a representation something is of nature. And so what he says, which I thought was really cool, was he said, you know, what it is about nature that gives it its power is that is becoming its constant source of generation and creativity in the sense that nature is always evolving and moving and that any kind of art is symbolic representation of some sort.

Which is also an interesting point going back to Langer and our discussion about music and symbolic representation. But he says if the symbolic representation that captures the essence of nature is not something that captures the form of it, but that actually expresses this notion of creativity, of generation maybe is a better word. Not creativity, but generation. And so when a really good artist represents a scene in nature, you have an aesthetic reaction to it that would be somehow similar to the reaction you would have to the real thing, which is a connection not to the pure form, but to the generative aspect that is underneath it.

I thought that was really cool.

20:35 Wes: Yeah. Again, very well put, very nice explanation, which I can't improve on except to say, you know, he has this great Quotation in that section where he says this is on page 218. But that is to say art must, like nature, be independently creative, organized and organizing must form living works that are held in motion not through a foreign mechanism like a pendulum, but rather through an inner force like the solar system and completed return to themselves. Which of course sounds very Hegelian, but. So he says, yeah, you can call it imitation if you like, but it's not an imitation of just the way objects look like these static things in the world. It's an imitation of the productive agency at the bottom of things that produces them.

21:20 Seth: Yeah, there's a nice part on. And this notion of generation. It gets us closer to the idea of the infinite. So there's a nice part on page 210.

21:32 Mark: We should just say that. That these page numbers, they again refer to the theory as practice book that we. We're dealing with last time. So it's not that we read 200 pages of this.

21:41 Seth: It just starts on 194 right after he. He's talking about the idea that reason subsumes things under the way in which you use judgment in reason is to subsume the particular under the general concept. And you essentially trying to fix its meaning or trying to fix its concept. He says this is page 210. The poetic view, on the other hand, continually interprets things and sees a figurative inexhaustibility in them. Kant speaks at one point of a cipher writing through which nature figuratively speaks to us in its beautiful forms. Only in this way can everything come alive for us.

Poesy, taken in most general sense that underlies all the arts, is nothing but an external act of symbolization. We either seek an outer shell for something spiritual or we relate an exterior to an invisible interior. And I love that idea that he goes on after that to talk about language. Right. Discursive language versus what you might call a figurative language. And again plays right into what we were talking about with Langer about the idea that music or other art forms have a grammar and a form of representation which is not the same as discursive and doesn't have the same end in mind, but is in fact the opposite, which is the opening of interpretive possibility and the opening, like you said, of figurative reconfiguration, if you will.

I love this idea.

23:14 Wes: Yeah, this is something I really loved about it as well. He's. He's asking the question of how you could recognize spirit in matter. Because this is ultimately what the art object is doing. Right. It's symbolizing the infinite, but it's also symbolizing the human spirit. Part of what he's saying is that this isn't just a matter of a conventional language where we have conventional signifiers like dog or cat that are assigned to objects. There's really an a priori symbolic system at work. And you can recognize that in physiognomy. So, for instance, like, facial expressions are an example, or human posture and gestures, and the way, you know, a statue can represent grace, which is reflective of an inner state, a state of perhaps of human character through these outward physical signs.

And these are innate. I think that's part of what he's saying. These are not. Today, we would say they're. They're probably hardwired. They're evolved through evolution. They're hardwired. They're not just part of conventional language. But then language gets farther away and from that, the more conventional it gets. And it can get very abstract, right? It can be what he calls a system of ciphers. So that when we do something poetic, what we are trying to do is we're trying to restore that original figurative quality to language and get at that base level, communication system that is hardwired deep down in us.

That simply isn't a matter of convention. And so that we can, through an exterior form, we can reveal what's inside a human being as a microcosm of nature and of the universe.

24:53 Dylan: It is a mirror of the universe.

24:55 Mark: Yeah, I like mirror better than talking about the inside. It seems like that has to be merely figurative. I mean, we have the example of our own state. And I've started comparing this to Schopenhauer's take on the external side of things is the causal order. The internal side of things is the will operating. It's a dynamic force. So we get a similar thing here. And, you know, for Schopenhauer, it's very obvious. We all have our experience of our own will acting. I will my hand move and it moves. Therefore I have that concept and I can export it onto everything else, potentially.

It doesn't seem to be so clear. And here, like, it's also through introspection that we get it. But it's like careful, deep introspection, right? You don't just see the spirit of nature just in every single little movement of your hand or whatever. It seems to be something more rarefied, he says. Page 219. Creative nature. It's not to be found in any external phenomenon, but only in the artist's inner self through spiritual contemplation, which seems Like a higher demand than just looking at my own hand moving. But what do we think about that as that is sort of the inside in using just our own case, that if we say it's not that my entire qualia and internal consciousness, that that is the spirit of nature, that's a very individualized thing, but it's somehow a part of us, the divine within us that we have to search for.

It seems a little more problematic to just, in a Spinozic like way, say the physical is the external, the spiritual is the internal.

26:28 Wes: I mean, at the point where he. I think that quote that you're giving, Mark, comes from a section where he's talking about Kant's standard idea versus spiritual idea, which is a distinction between physical perfection. Right. Kant thought that the highest ideal for beauty was the human physical form. And insofar as it could manifest a moral ideal. Right. So again that, that grace example. So in that sense Schlegel is going to claim he's trying to graft these two things onto each other in an artificial way when, when at bottom there's, there's an original unity in which the physical and the spiritual are not actually divided.

And that's what art is actually supposed to get us at. And objects to his idea that beauty is this a matter of being adequate to kind of the average species level form. So he wants to claim, unlike Kant, that beauty is inherently connected to the purposiveness of things. So that what we're knowing through this inner spiritual contemplation that you mentioned, Mark, is quote unquote, the direction of its general striving. The teleology of nature is what we actually get at through that. The fact that there is purposiveness built in. And that's most obvious, right.

In organic form. But we know it in ourselves just through the fact that we are purposive beings. Right. We understand teleology very directly as a matter of our own intentions. You know, he says inner spiritual contemplation. So I, I think you're probably right that he has a higher bar than Schopenhauer, right. It's not just the explanation I gave makes him sound very close to Schopenhauer, which is the way I took him. But I think you're right that it sounds like a much higher bar.

28:11 Mark: I mean, I think you put it as you've got the physical and the mental or spiritual more widely. If you want to say that there's a spirits in nature or something like that, purposiveness. But then the Thing that we're actually shooting for, even though we get to it through either introspection or what's probably much easier, because I don't think Schlegel is a introspectivist mystic, that he's a follower of Schelling. So the thing that we know of from Hegel is that you use external things to learn about yourself, right? You don't just sit back and close your eyes and contemplate like the Buddha or something.

Actually, even the Buddha, maybe you're, you know, you're contemplating suffering in the world. Not just your own suffering, but suffering all around. And sort of this produces the internal epiphany. So we are using these symbolic, external things. We're using art to get to know ourselves and get to know the infinite through that. And it's the infinite where the physical and the mental, as you said, are supposed to be sublated, be overcome, be unified. We discover that actually they were primordially unified in the first place, and it just wasn't obvious.

29:19 Dylan: Yeah. Can we talk for a second to clarify what is meant by the infinite? Is it anything more than the notion of something being too big for us to grasp or.

29:32 Wes: Yeah, it's more than that. That's the bad infinite. It's like the absolute. So the infinite, in the sense of it's not determined by anything else. So it is a first cause. So God is infinite in the sense that he's the unmoved mover. Or you could say any candidate for the absolute is a candidate for being infinite. So like a philosophical atom or the human soul, right? From which freedom, you know, if we are freely acting in the world in a way where we're not, our actions aren't simply determined, then that is an expression of the infinite.

30:03 Dylan: So, I mean, in that way, it just sounds like if I look out on the world and I have the activity of my reason and my understanding is all about fixed things and bounded things and all the stuff tied down. I'm going to just take all that stuff and anything else that's left over, I'm going to sweep off into a bag and I'm going to call that the infinite.

30:22 Wes: It's like substance, you know, whatever is not determined either causally by other things or what doesn't require, it's complete in itself, you could say ontologically or conceptually. So in other words, to be. It doesn't need anything else, and to be conceived, it doesn't. Well, that's. Maybe that's a bad.

30:40 Dylan: This is the. You talk about the infinite now.

30:42 Wes: Yeah. So infinite as in not finite, as in not determined by anything external to it.

30:48 Mark: I just thought of all these romantics as a certain kind of Platonist, so that whenever you're talking about the ideal that, you know, you could just say the divine instead of the infinite. I'm not sure what makes actually infinite in terms of never ending, everlasting, why that's even.

31:05 Wes: Because there are different candidates for it, like the human subjects. Right. So any. Any metaphysical object like the soul can be characterized as.

31:13 Dylan: As infinite, but it feels like it's infinite insofar as it is first defined as the not finite. And then we're going to say, okay, well, that's where all the action is. But for instance, the things that are in motion are in motion in a kind of constrained, bounded, causal way, that is not partaking of the infinite, except insofar as this is where Schlegel, for instance, is going to want to pull in the infinite, because it has to do with God. It has to do with, you know, the whole source, absolute motor of the universe. All the good stuff. All the good stuff is in the infinite.

And I guess. Am I putting it that way? I'm trying to understand a little bit about what is in that category. And I think I've just come down to it's just all the good stuff. We want to talk about the infinite because that's where all the good stuff is. Because I'm already predisposed that I want to have a unity. So they're also parmenidean. Right. Universe is a unity. We're gravitating towards unity. We get our most pleasure out of unity. And that infinite is, in one respect, the whole thing.

32:22 Wes: It is. And that's the Spinozan point of view. Right. That's another candidate for the infinite, which is just the universe, the whole cosmos itself. Right. And Kant makes something of that as well. But, you know, and then Spinoza identifies that with God. But the point I just wanted to emphasize this is epistemologically motivated people want to find a first principle of knowledge. This is about foundationalism. The absolute is the thing that set the foundation.

32:46 Dylan: Sure.

32:46 Wes: The infinite is that, the thing that's not determined, that determines everything else. And we can start, you know, we start from there metaphysically, or we can start from there epistemologically. Those things converge. But we want an ultimate explanation for things, and that ultimate explanation can itself be determined, you know, can't be explained in a way, because if it's ultimate, we're not going to be able to point to anything else that causes it. And that that would apply, by the way, if you found like an ultimate atom or field or whatever you want to call it, which just is, and nothing else explains it, you would call that not determined, not finite.

33:21 Seth: And I think it's important to highlight the connection to Spinoza. This is much more Spinoza or Leibnizian than it is Parmenidean, because for Parmenides, there's no change. And it's quite the opposite here in the concept of at least the way they're employing the idea from Spinoza. You can think of it as access to the infinite is just access to awareness of the connectedness of everything to some extent. In just the same way that you are overcoming some apprehension of an individual object that you think of as discrete, or in using reason, determining a concept, then is distinguished from other things and separated from them.

When we talk about. You mentioned Hegel earlier, Wes, the development of ego and the idea that somehow we're isolated and separate from the world and from other subjects, all of this is intended to try to reach through to something that ultimately demonstrates the interconnectedness of things, although not so much at a more mystical or spiritual level, to some extent. And I think he's trying to bring it into the realm of philosophy through the notion of aesthetics, to make it somehow less religious, less spiritual, less mystical. Because aesthetics could be value neutral with respect to religion or spirituality when you have it connected to nature, capital and nature.

34:52 Wes: It's important to note, I think Spinoza, right, he wants to deny that we in particular, as human spirits, are infinite. We are all just modes of God, nature, the one infinite thing. And really that's in part because he's just a hardcore naturalist, scientific determinist, which is what was so controversial. And these guys are heavily, heavily influenced by Spinoza. I'm going to name drop really briefly here. Beiser scholar has a book called Hegel, has a really good first few chapters go into the connections between the German idealists, the Romantics, Hegel and Spinoza. So it puts it all together in a very interesting way. It's complicated because Hegel's influenced by the Romantics, but he's also reacting against them in a way influenced by Kant, reacting against Kant, and the same thing with Spinoza. Very, very Spinozan, but also some really critical differences.

35:49 Mark: So what I was trying to get at by saying that these Romantics are a particular kind of Platonist is I wasn't necessarily wanting to go so far as If Platonism is ultimately to be equated with Parmenides at the highest level, in other words, there isn't a unity of everything, right? There are all these forms, but they all collapse to the form of the good. And then if you only have one thing, according to Parmenides, it can't change. Maybe that's true in some level. You know, if you really want to, say, have any view that we are all one, everything is ultimately one, then maybe Parmenides is right, it cannot change.

But there are levels beneath that, right? Even for Plato. Well, you've got the form of this and the form of that. Like, there are all these important things that are still beyond human experience. They're with the good stuff, as Dylan says, right? They should be put in the infinite, the other world, you know, that you would see if you went outside the cave. It's not like you go outside the cave and it's just a single blinding light that is just. Everything is uniform. You've achieved the permanent D in one. Like, no, you know, you see that the dogs you saw were just pale reflections of the real dog.

And the particular vision that these guys have, like Schopenhauer's, like Nietzsche's, of what's really going on at this infinite level, is a very dynamic one. So I don't know if it's the

37:05 Wes: Heraclitean, Platonist or something dynamic in a sense of, like, organic development. So still focused on a whole and still focused on systematic unity. But so they. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, in that sense. But yeah, yeah, sure, they're against. They're against the static ness of Spinoza.

37:23 Mark: Right. So if you're depicting something accurately, I mean, this is something that's very explicit in the shelling that I was looking at about this. It's. You're depicting it in its dynamism. You're not merely, oh, what? This is just a beautiful image of a static face that makes us think of the face of heaven or something like that. Like, well, that gets at something. But to really get at what it is to be a human being, the essence of the human, you would have to have something that suggests growth, maybe a picture of a face in which you can kind of see the young person and the old man. This is not an example from anything that we read, but I can see how, and better. The best statues are these ones that don't just depict a divine figure, but a divine figure that's doing something. Because activity is just really essential to what makes the human perfect.

38:11 Dylan: Yeah.

38:11 Wes: Hegel will criticize Spinoza for saying, it's like the universe, slash God is just this one big, marble, unchanging thing. And it looks from the inside like it's changing, or from our. The perspective of our individual spirit modes, it looks like it looks dynamic. I don't know if that's an accurate characterization of Spinoza, but that's the way it comes across in their criticisms of Spinoza, that somehow dynamism is an illusion from our limited perspective, from within the whole. Right. Just like evil is an illusion. And they want to say, no, the dynamism is actually right at the base level of the ontology. And so if you want to say what it is as a whole, you have to do, like Hegel's phenomenology, you have to unfold the whole development. And it's not just like the end point is the real thing. The whole development is included in the whole as moments.

39:04 Mark: Heaven would be exciting.

39:06 Wes: Heaven would be much more interesting.

39:07 Mark: It would just be sit there on your cloud. I'm not sure what it would be.

39:13 Wes: It's not just pickleball and chicken soup in retirement.

39:17 Dylan: It's. Well, I do remember reading Paradiso from Dante and thinking that heaven was just the most boring place ever.

39:29 Wes: You've possibly imagined and purposefully represented that way.

39:34 Mark: We should look at it.

39:36 Dylan: No, no, no.

39:39 Mark: No Dante episode in the future.

39:41 Dylan: No. Well, if we could do Inferno or even Purgatorio, that's fine, but Paradiso is just.

39:46 Wes: Yeah, just Inferno. Inferno is enough.

39:48 Dylan: Stanza after stanza. Anyway, this is so boring.

39:53 Mark: So I think in our second half, we can get into more of these specific points that he is, you know, this free. Free beauty versus accessory. Accessory. And all these things. You know, these particular points about Kant and do a lot more quotes.

40:07 Dylan: Ingenious.

40:08 Mark: Yes, for sure. Any final thoughts for the first half about this overall point of the text? And y' all enjoy it? Seth did.

40:20 Seth: Yeah, I did very much.

40:22 Wes: Well, yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. But like I said, it was a pretty big task for me to kind of decipher it, go through second read with the notes and figure out in detail what he was saying. So I agree with Seth that he's a really good writer and there's a lot of literary flourish to this, but there's a lot of complicated ideas and there's a lot of different distinct. They're all related in the end. A lot of different, distinct criticisms of points in Kant and elsewhere.

40:50 Mark: He's not aggravating in the way that Friedrich Schlegel is to me, he doesn't like, purposefully under, say, like, he actually tries to make explanations for everything that he says. That should be a very low bar. But, you know, with these Romantics, who knows? I guess one more point to at least leave people to think about. So, Seth, you had mentioned how you liked how talking about the external is symbolic of the internal, which then I really been going on, what is the internal? That's been the entirety of part one here. But is the infinite determinative such that when you're using this symbolic language to point to the infinite, is it actually opening up interpretations, as you said, Seth, or is it in some way zeroing it in?

Like we're trying to just get straight to God. How is this. We're trying to get straight to this infinite, eternal. How is that compatible with this opening up that you were reading into this from. From Langer?

41:51 Seth: It's not just Langer. I was brought to mind of kind of a hermeneutical approach as well. I read the intro essay to this section by the translators, and there's a reference in there to, like, Jewish rabbinic kind of tradition. But the idea is, if you think about it, what this would mean in practice. If art was a symbolic representation that was of the infinite, but still determinate in some way, in a way that the finite symbolic representation is not, then in a certain sense, it would not be interesting to us over time. And specifically, Schlegel makes the point that when it comes to aesthetic appreciation, all individuals bring their own experience to it, and they have their own individual aesthetic appreciation.

So there's a sense in which when you create a legitimate, good work of art, you're creating this broad interpretive field not just for everybody now, but for anybody in the future to come and have some kind of aesthetic appreciation and connect to that piece in their own way. So it's not the mechanics of you creating meaning through artistic creativity, but creating this kind of site or opportunity for aesthetic experiences and aesthetic interpretation to happen. And that's what I thought was really powerful and interesting about it. Because when I think about, you know, when you think about going and looking at artwork from a different era altogether, or if you return to the same piece over and over again, like I do with, you know, certain artists that I, you know, I just have a completely.

I always find something new when I look at their work or individual works. I think this is a pretty good explanation, if you will, or a model for how that might be possible. And what is special about aesthetic or about the aesthetic, about the beautiful, about artistic creativity that differentiates it from it also. Then you know, that can lend itself to not just visual representation, but for poetry or literature, anything that involves this type of creative act, even if it's using discursive language. Then of course you can talk about an aesthetic experience with the Bible, which is kind of the ultimate open ended text for some of us.

44:25 Wes: The section on manner and style is really critical here because he will argue that manner, as in is a bad thing, which is to say the imprint of our idiosyncratic personal characters, our habits and the things that we do that aren't really free. He'll say that, you know, the true artist actually will relinquish individuality to the beautiful and minimize that effective individual character. Which leads him to say, to ask the question. Well, because what he opposes to manner is style. But does that just mean that there's only one style if we have to minimize all these individual differences?

And then he will give an explanation of why it is that there are different styles, including this idea that we actually can only approach the infinite through our unique character? We're kind of stuck with that. And what we want to do is we want to kind of develop that with a sense of consciousness. We want to do something free there and not just be unconsciously acting out our character ticks. I don't know if I explained that very well, but anyway, it's complicated. So maybe. Yeah, that's something for discussion in the. In the next part.

45:37 Mark: Yeah, there's a nice parallel between the multiplicity in interpretations and the multiplicity in styles of creation. You'll hear about that and many other things in part two. If you are a Partially Examined Life supporter, that should be the next thing in your feed.

45:52 Wes: If you're supporting through Apple, it won't

45:53 Mark: show up until next week, but otherwise you should see it probably immediately. And if you are not one of those, go to partially salmonlife.com support and become one of those. Thanks everybody. So long.

46:04 Wes: Thanks.

46:05 Seth: Thank you.