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

0:07 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 321, part 2. We've been discussing August Wilhelm Schlegel's theory of art. We are going to get a little more into specific stuff from the text. So page 196. He is talking about Kant's distinction between free beauty versus accessory beauty. What does that distinction mean?

0:28 Wes: Free beauty presupposes no purpose. So for instance, according to Kant, flowers, although that's an example that Schlegel was going to dispute because flowers are organic and Have a teleology and therefore supposed purpose. So there are things that we find beautiful because we understand them according to what seems to be their purpose. And there are things that don't involve purpose. And that, for Kant, is the higher form of beauty, purposeless beauty. Yeah. Even though he has a complicated account according to which beauty implicates purposiveness without purpose.

Right. We've talked about that before. We can talk about in the. In the sense that any form of beauty in nature seems to suggest that there's something about the world which makes it designed specifically for our cognitive faculties, not just to give us the pleasure of beauty, but for us to understand it. If it weren't designed that way, we couldn't comprehend it, or we wouldn't find it beautiful.

1:27 Dylan: Right.

1:28 Wes: So that there seems to be an intelligent design behind it. But that doesn't mean that specific things actually have a purpose. But I don't know. Can we give another example of. Since the organic is kind of the point of disagreement to some extent between Schlegel and Kant, what's an example of purposive beauty? I think architecture.

1:45 Mark: I mean, his quote, the beauty of a person or horse or building. Architecture presupposes a notion of purpose. The judgment about any accessory beauty is thus no longer a pure and free one.

1:56 Dylan: Right.

1:56 Mark: This is, according to Kant, rather, is dependent on a judgment of reason.

2:00 Wes: But then Kant has this weird view that flowers are so complicated that we don't really understand the teleology and therefore we don't think they're beautiful through that teleology, through that concept of there being an organic purpose. Which is odd, in which. Let Schlegel attacks him for.

2:16 Dylan: Yeah, because we do not have a good enough idea of what a flower is supposed to be. Not only because we carry in as a general image of a flower in accordance with the different types, but also through a physiognomic sense, if I may call it that, or for all of organic nature, which would enable us to recognize the very first flower we ever laid eyes on precisely as a flower, as the delicate apex of the plant world.

2:40 Wes: So I think this is important because he'll get into this whole physiognomy thing a few times in the essay. So the theory at stake here, Right. Is that you could tell things about a person's character by looking at their body and their face. Right. Our outward form, in a way, reveals our inner character. And I think he. He broadens this idea. Again, there's the example of grace. You know, I think it would apply to facial expressions and to body language, this innate hardwired language. That's not simply a matter of convention. We would say it's a matter of evolution is already there for us.

And that's physiognomic, in a sense. And here he's using it a bit metaphorically to understand a flower as a flower, as a natural kind. And I think he's right about this, by the way. There is no induction. We don't need to see a bunch of flowers and say, oh, look at all these shared feature of flowers. We understand that this is an organic unity, that this is a structured thing. And our ability to do that is hardwired into us. We just have that built in. So that likewise, part of that, according to Schlegels, we know what a flower is for. It doesn't matter if we're not botanists and we don't fully understand the implied teleology.

All the functions, right, of a flower and the different parts of a flower, we can understand that as inherently teleological innately through this physiognomic sense, even before we become scientists about it.

4:04 Dylan: So it does make sense that there would be morphological categories that we would recognize quintessentially, you know, this is a flower, this is not a flower as a kind of natural kind thing. But it seems to me like a different question of whether or not those are effective heuristics versus whether they're natural kinds. That's a different question. And part of that comes to whether or not you're just wrong about whether or not something's a flower or not. Things that look like flowers that aren't flowers. And that gets to you saying that, well, what a flower is not its morphology, for instance, it's not what it looks like.

4:38 Wes: Remember our Kripke episode where we fix, right? So we have stereotypes, surface manifestations, and we could be wrong about those, but we assume they point to an essence, right? So that they become rigid designators. The superficial qualities of water clarity and a certain kind of taste and all that, long before we know it's H2O. We assume it's a natural kind and that there's an essence to it before we can even say what the essence is. And we could ultimately be wrong, could be another world where it's the same phenomena at surface level, but a different essence, a different molecule behind it.

But that's not the point. The point is just that we recognize that there is an essence, whatever it turns out to be. And whether or not the stereotypes that we've used to fix it turn out to be correct. So we can make mistakes. But. But I think what we don't make a mistake about unless we've been deceived by a really good imitation of a flower. We have an innate sense that this thing is organized and structured, that this is a entity in that sense. Whether or not it's properly categorized as a flower or this type of flower. That. But. And I think he's right about that.

5:46 Dylan: Yeah. The way Schlegel puts it is we recognize when a flower is deformed.

5:50 Wes: Yeah. They're normative. In many cases there is an ideal. Right. That we implicitly understand and that's how we understand health as well.

5:58 Seth: That's interesting you use that term, Wes. There's an ideal, you could say too, there's an organizational structure, there's a symmetry or a structure. We somehow have an innate sense to be able to tell when something organic like that, a natural kind, if you will, is structurally.

6:17 Wes: Yeah. Because these things are not always true to type. Right. You've never seen a tiger before and you come across one that's three legged. You don't need to see other tigers to know that they're four legged. You just know that that's not functional. So you can understand the ideal, the normative, natural kind for that tiger without ever having seen a better representative of the species.

6:38 Mark: I don't know what an ideal Wes would look like, but I know it's not you Wes.

6:42 Wes: It's. I have to agree with you on that.

6:46 Seth: I don't need to see another Wes to know that this is Wes.

6:48 Wes: I think between me and the ideal Wes, there's a lot of more nutritious meals and less alcohol in my past.

6:57 Dylan: The three legged tiger is an interesting example where Wes is saying, well, we would immediately recognize it that if it's the first tiger we ever saw and it had three legs, we wouldn't say, oh, this thing that I'm going to call a tiger has three legs. We would say, oh, this is an example of this thing. But it's missing a leg. And we immediately recognize it as missing a leg. And I think that's correct. I think if you follow that thread, which you don't have to follow it here, but I think it takes us in some very interesting directions about what natural forms exist out there and how that would be tuning our evolutionary recognition of kinds.

7:35 Wes: Yeah. I really do think that he's saying the equivalent of the, you know, he doesn't have evolution at his disposal. But we would say this is an innate evolutionarily developed ability not to recognize specific organic forms like flowers, but at a general level. This we would supplement, right. Kant's categories with these types of physiognomic senses that can identify the inner by way of the outer. So it's not just being able to say that this is a organic thing. It's all also comes to the level of dealing with other human beings and saying this facial express. Smiling means what smiling means. It's not conventional, it's not arbitrary. We've evolved to be able to recognize that. And language doesn't come out of nowhere, it's built on top of that.

8:18 Mark: Schlegel wants to generalize this to refute Kant's example of music not set to words is not worth our while. Here he talked about music not set to words as being the quintessential free beauty. I categorically deny that any artistic product whatsoever can be included as a free beauty. For such a product must have some meaning, some intention, and thus it must exist in a determined manner. So we are meaning seeking creatures. And even Kant, right, he said in the third Critique that it is a regulative ideal or something. It's a regulative idea that we look for purpose.

We don't read purposefulness off of nature that is like space, like time, like maybe a higher level of abstraction. So it's something to do with reason rather than the understanding. But it's still something that we read into nature and we should do that throughout that. Actually that's the way we take in any kind of art is we look for meanings in it and we're not violating the spirit of it. We're, you know. Oh no, actually it's just surface level form. If you're looking for meanings in it, you're just confused. Like no, Schlegel is saying that is absolutely natural.

And we should not think that there's this sharp distinction therefore, between the form and the content. I was thinking of our later episode we did on Sontag, Susan Sontag, who talks about style in a very similar way that we're gonna have in this essay.

9:36 Wes: Yeah. So for Kant, purposive beauty is a degraded form of it. But for Schlegel, it's the only thing. That's the only way something could be beautiful if it implicates purpose.

9:46 Dylan: All art has intention.

9:48 Seth: Right? Because all art is ultimately produced by human beings. That's another key point here.

9:55 Dylan: Yep.

9:55 Mark: One of the things that he's getting toward is whereas for Kant, natural beauty was the prototype for Here, actually, we only ended up appreciating natural beauty or imputing a beauty to nature because we already have an idea of art. So this is what we're moving toward.

10:09 Seth: Yeah. I think he references at one point he says something to the effect of there's truth in the man is the measure of all things comment, at least with respect to the aesthetic, so.

10:21 Wes: Which he oddly attributes to Plato, even though that's what Plato is trying to refute as an expression of relativism. But his point is taken.

10:29 Seth: Yeah. I mean, there's no discussion here about whether animals could have aesthetic appreciation or could create art. Actually, doesn't he make some reference to animals? I think I saw somewhere in there. But the notion is, of course, because we're talking here about the synthesis of. Because there's judgment and we're talking about human faculties and reason and that sort of thing, then the aesthetic is a uniquely human experience. And we are like we've seen numerous times over and over again throughout the years. Man is the mixture of the finite and the infinite, the, you know, spirit and matter, the divine and the human.

You know, blah, blah, blah. We're the site of where these things come together. And the aesthetic experience is identifying the places where those things coincide. Or I shouldn't say the aesthetic experience, the creative act, a successful aesthetic act or accessible creative act, which somehow fuses those two diverse things. And then the aesthetic experience is a recognition of that which in turn is going to reflect back on ourselves and make us understand something more about our own human nature.

11:37 Wes: He brings up animals, by the way, in the genius section because he wants to fight Kant on this idea that in a way, genius is just instinctual. So that animals, what they do, could just be considered aesthetic.

11:49 Mark: Right. I think, Seth, you had said that we interpret art as purposive because people. Because artists are people with intentions. And so this is exactly what we're going to get in. What Wes was referring to is. But how much of what is in an artwork is the artist's intention as opposed to something subconscious, which we could just say is nature acting through you? You know, you could be an idiot savant sort of a. I don't have any plans at all. I just opened my pen, my mouth, my paintbrush, and the art just comes spilling out. That's not going to be the kind. Despite the reputation Romanticism has, that's not what any of these guys end up recommending. You're not responsible for that at all. It's just nature doing its thing.

12:31 Seth: Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.

12:33 Mark: The chicken, that is really, really artistic. Just get the chicken to dip his beak in some pain and man, what that comes out.

12:42 Wes: Kant says nature gives the rule to art, which is what Schlegel is taking as saying that in a way it's a result of instinct. He makes genius, quote unquote, a blind instrument of nature, or what I even like better, the spoiled darling of nature, essentially. But then the second part of that theory is Kant says that, well, then we kind of have to discipline genius. It has to be academically. So talent has to be academically educated, right? We need to be educated in taste in order to rein that raw instinctual genius in and do something with it. And what Schlegel's going to want to say in opposition to that is no, those two things actually have to be fused at a lower level.

So that an inherent sense of taste has to be integrated into the moment of inspiration. And that in part comes about through the fact that our artistic sensibility is a product of influence from previous artists. So in other words, it's not that we just have a moment of inspiration and then we rein that in and, you know, shape it like marble into something coherent based on our abstract ideas of what's tasteful, we're influenced. And that inspiration will show itself as structured, will show itself as having an integrated sense of taste. Here's a good quote.

It'll say this is precisely the most intimate union between unconscious and self conscious activity in the human spirit, between instinct and intention, freedom and necessity. Because the original split in which man as a finite being finds himself forever caught is sublated in the spirit. Genius appears to us as something superhuman, as a divine power. And its pronouncements are true revelations. So again, in a way reminiscent of Schiller, uniting the form and the matter drives, right? Or as Schlegel will put it, fantasy and reason, not through foreign power, as he puts it, because that harmony of human nature is there at bottom, before the split.

And that's part of what it means to get in contact with the absolute and the infinite is to get in touch with that original unity before the. The fall, so to speak.

14:54 Seth: And I think also this view, again, he might be setting up a straw. Kant. I like that this view, you know, I think, respects the fact that to create a beautiful work of art is not simply, like you said, it's not something that's like a spontaneous action where you're just channeling some power through you. Artists take years to hone skills and crafts, you know, their craft and their Techniques to be able to then realize the inspiration that they have or manifest the vision that they have that comes from within. So it respects the fact that art is a skill.

And there's a reference to some ancient book on sculpture. Was it called the Canon? I looked it up when I was reading. I don't have that in front of me right now. But the notion that there are. You know, the Greeks didn't just recognize any old thing as beautiful in art. They had ratios and techniques and, you know, all sorts of things. Which is not to say that somebody might have chosen different techniques. But the point is, to become a great sculptor is not something that just happens overnight. It requires a ton of work. So I think I appreciate that fact in it.

But did we want to talk about manner and style?

16:10 Mark: For sure. Have we covered genius enough? Just such an important thing about Romanticism, this praising of the artistic genius that he thinks that Kant is not give. You know, just to seize it as the savant that doesn't have the. The arts. And you need to add it to these. And they must be fused, you know, is that. Is that all there? We want to say about that?

16:32 Wes: We could do style now, but we should probably come back at some point to the next section is his discussion of Kant on the aesthetic idea and its relation to purposiveness and which culminates with an appeal to Schelling.

16:46 Mark: Yeah. I want to say all these things are getting at the same thing, sort of. There's an organic unity in the ideas of Romanticism. Amazing. I did have one other genius thing, which is page 201. The innate disposition through which nature gives the rule to art. According to Kant, this is at least what I labeled as what Kant thinks genius is. In other words, it sounds like whatever the genius creates becomes the rule. So we get kind of a euthyphro question of does genius always aim at. Does it successfully reach the infinite? Or is there something. I think this is actually a good transition to style. And maybe this is even.

17:26 Wes: This is what he takes to mean that nature gives the rule to art in the sense that the instinctual speaks through us. That's how he takes that which he says. Schlegel's critique is that. Yeah, that is he saying that genius would. That's a way to understand what is good art and bad art is simply to appeal to the. Those who are authorities because they are most in touch with that instinctual inspired part.

17:52 Mark: So this is again getting back to this question of style that if all geniuses are. Were sort of the best mystics, then it seems like they would all give you the same thing. We're all getting a connection with the infinite. But yet, you know, what makes someone a genius is their complete distinctiveness. And so we are, you know, there are many routes to God, or if you want to say it that way. And every brilliant artist, to quote Friedrich Schlegel, is a creator of his own religion. So what is the equivalent of that? In August Schlegel here, you just said,

18:27 Dylan: mark, that there's uniqueness. You know, point to the uniqueness in genius. And I'm wondering if that is a side effect just because it's so unusual to have genius. I didn't see any notion, to me, at least, of there being novelty involved in the activity of genius. In the middle of 201, it seemed to me there's a kind of unity with the natural. Now, if in an artistic formation, body and spirit are fused into one to the point of complete harmony, then animal nature, as well as mere reason, vanish, and the ideal, the purely human, the divine, or whatever else one may wish to call it, emerges.

Yeah, so it seemed to me that. And earlier in this, he, you know, criticizes Kant, does not acknowledge the absolute indivisible act by which the genius brings forth an artistic creation. For the ideal consists in the inability to distinguish any longer between the perfection of animal nature and reasonable nature.

19:26 Wes: I mean, in the section on manner and style, he's going to get at this tension that you're pointing to. Because he's going to suggest that manneredness is a bad thing. So that our uniqueness, in a way, is a bad thing when it's expressive of our idiosyncratic personal character traits. In other words, there's a bad form of style. And often what seems like originality is what he associates with that. But then he kind of has to backtrack and explain why there isn't just a single style, how it is that there could be distinct styles. If style, in a way, is supposed to divest itself or quote, unquote, relinquish individuality to the beautiful and not put the imprint of one's individual character on art.

And he has a few explanations of that. One of them is that, you know, so why are there many styles? Art is basically an infinite whole. No one can completely possess it. It can only be grasped from diverse sides. We are finite beings, and we can't fully grasp that. So as artists, we can only give one particular part of that individual whole. And we're going to do that through our own Unique character. So this is quite complicated account, right? Because in a way, he seems to say, no, unique character. That's mannered bad. Now he's going to say, we can pull that off, actually, if we develop that with freedom and consciousness and we have a system.

Right. He talks about having a system. So something that's developed and more systematic than just unconsciously saying, oh, I'm Wes, I have these quirks. Let me put that into. Into art and call that a style. No, that's not what that is. It has to be developed, and it has to be an expression of freedom. And there, ultimately, we do have to get to something universal. We have to get at the human. It can't just be about Wes.

21:19 Mark: So I was trying to relate this to earlier, what he says about, like, the human form. I mean, we were saying before, like, well, you know, if something has a purpose, it has a telos, it has an aim. We can tell a deformed flower from a good flower. Well, then it seems like there should be an ideal human face. But that's not the case. That's explicitly not the case that the type allows a multiplicity of different instances. So I want to connect that then to. If different artists are painting a face, they could, through their own inimitable style, give us a new version of the ideal face.

21:58 Dylan: That's true, I think. It's not that you couldn't have some kind of novelty. I was just saying that genius isn't tied to novelty as a characteristic.

22:11 Seth: I'm reminded of something. I just recently went this year to an exhibit on Jean-Michel Basquiat that his estate put up. And one of the things is they have a little video section, and there's an art historian or dealer friend of his who talks about recognizing that he was developing, he says, either a new grammar or a new syntax that was merging things which had been considered separate before, together. And not that I want to use the term novelty, but I think Schlegel is thinking in terms Wes, when you were talking about. He says we use the term mannered in a negative way sometimes.

Like, overly mannered could be a reflection of expressing too much of the finite or the personal. Right. That's not connecting, but it could also be leveraging the tropes or techniques without the inspiration or without the connection to saying something, not connecting it to anything external, really. So it's like overly mannered, you almost say, might be pleasant instead of beautiful. Right. Or could be attractive, but would not meet the criteria. And genius, somehow, I think, because not all artists Were geniuses. Right? Not everybody who creates something beautiful is a genius.

That's going too far, I would think. So you have to have the ability. What separates the genius who creates their own style from somebody who creates a beautiful work in some style that's not overly mannered?

23:50 Dylan: You would never call someone who created one tremendously beautiful work of art and that's it, that's all they ever did a genius. Right. Unless you want to say, well, that was a work of genius. And that's a characteristic of the artwork in the sense that it was a moment of genius or whatever. Right now we're sort of parsing out what we mean by genius. And I'm taking it that it has to do with the overall activity. And this is where the manner and style thing comes in, is style ends up being the right refinement of manners. Whereas if it's something that's mannered, it's like you can see all the moves, Right.

When you talk about a perfect athletic movement or something like that, it all looks easy, right? Whereas if it's not looking easy, you might recognize it as an astounding feat. But it's not. It doesn't transform into the combination of grace and athleticism and execution, where it is its own one whole executed style.

24:56 Wes: He'll say, style is thus a system of art derived from a true fundamental principle. Manner, in contrast, is a subjective opinion, a bias expressed in practical terms. And before that, he's just saying it's indicative of just the character and habit as opposed to something that you freely develop. So if we think about someone with a very distinct style, like Van Gogh, for instance, or Picasso, what makes Van Gogh's very distinct style that is present and identifiable in all of his paintings, at least after a certain stage. But so that, you know, we could always look at a painting and say, okay, that's a van Gogh, or that's an imitation of a van Gogh.

What makes that a style as opposed to just a manner? It's a little bit hard for me to figure that out, even on Schlegel's account. Right. Because it is naturally an indication of something personal about Van Gogh. It comes out of his particular character. And I guess Schlegel would want to say, well, but it's. It's something that's been consciously developed. And there's something about the execution that is free. In other words, he's not painting by numbers according to his own habitual tendencies.

26:13 Dylan: But there's a unity to it that gives it style. I mean, then that it has a style. It requires there be a unity to it.

26:21 Wes: And if you look at Van Gogh paintings, especially ones that you haven't seen, because everything starts to seem mannered. Right. If it's just the classic painting of the sunflowers of a chair or whatever that you've seen a million times in prints and elsewhere, I think it's harder to appreciate everything. You know, we'll talk about Benjamin on this at some point. But what mechanical reproduction does to art, the fact that there are prints of all these things that we're exposed to all the time. So look at a Van Gogh painting that you haven't seen before and there's something transcendent about it. It's not that our attention is just drawn to the Van Gogh ness of the painting or to the. The stylistic thing that he's doing. You know, it's almost like there's an intentional object beyond the thought that he grasps and communicates.

27:08 Dylan: The way we. I think we would often describe it is that something that is. I'll call it a genuine style or something that is. Rises to that it attains a kind of natural kindness to it. That it arose naturally even though it didn't. Right. But it seems as if it did.

27:26 Seth: Right.

27:26 Dylan: And to me what that's reflecting is it has a thickness of execution that corresponds to the kinds of things that you see in nature. So when you see a Van Gogh painting and it has that, especially as you pointed out, one that you recognize as a Van Gogh painting but is not one that you've seen before and you sort of see it maybe anew. It's like seeing a flower that you've never seen before. Recognizing it as a flower.

27:56 Wes: Yeah. But it doesn't interfere with the particular content of the representation. It's still uniquely individual. And I think that's important because when we recognize something as just derivative or I don't know what's a good example of this. Yeah. We could look at a well executed painting and not get that profound esthetic sense out of that. Again, it's kind of hard to say why that is. Why some things rise to a certain level and others don't. But I think what Schlegel is pointing to is correct, which is that some of these things are transcendent. They break through to the level of the freedom of the human spirit. They get us through to the. The other side of. Of subjectivity. They're able to express that. And not everything is able to do that.

28:41 Mark: I've been staring at this quote from 204 for a while about the genius versus the ideal. The ideal must necessarily be created by genius that we comprehend the one through the other. For the ideal is precisely the objective appearance of that lively harmony of human nature that expresses itself subjectively in genius through the activity of the spirit. So I asked the question before. If the, according to Kant, is the ideal, whatever is created by genius. Well, in a sense, yes. That those are cluster concepts. That what makes something genius is that it gets at an ideal, which again, could be multiplicity.

It doesn't have to be the same ideal because there are many ways to get to this, the realm of the infinite. But adding the lively harmony of human nature that expresses itself subjectively in genius through the activity of the spirit. So in a sense, that the genius is not just getting at something in the object that they're painting. They're getting at the work of nature, you know, this law in themselves. They're exhibiting themselves through the work.

29:46 Wes: Yeah. So to represent, say, I don't know, a field with a plow in it. Right. In a farmhouse in the background, background. I'm thinking of this particular painting. These are not just static objects. They're implied productive capacities and dynamism that lies underneath them, even if they're not organic. And that is a window into ourselves as spirit, as productive capacity. So there's something, in other words, alive in those representations.

30:15 Mark: Right. To do a good picture of that plow, the plow would have to essentially speak to you. Obviously, you're not really getting at the inner essence of the plow. You don't have a psychic connection with the plow, but you're imputing onto that plow. There's some resonance there.

30:30 Wes: If you just go for verisimilitude, you can't get that effect. This is part of his, you know, spiel against verisimilitude and naturalism and idea that it's just mimesis. Obviously, you can get the effect with photographs and we can talk about how that's done. But, you know, unless something else is going on, if you're just trying to get a perfect representation of that, it's hard to communicate this transcendent aesthetic component to communicate spirit. So the point is not that it's Van Gogh's particular character and manner, but. But it's that there is some subject there behind it all. Should we talk about the section on the aesthetic idea in relation to purpose?

31:09 Seth: Can I just read one? One of my favorite Comments on page 215? Psychology is not worth much as a science, and it is absolutely deadly in poesy. Indeed, it is the most disgusting putrefaction which occurs only when the living organism is destroyed through mere imitation, copying. One will always lose out to nature. Hence art must strive for something else in order to compensate for this deficiency, namely the pure selection of that which is significant in the appearance while omitting distracting details.

31:41 Wes: Yeah, this is what they tell you to do in film writing class with dialogue. They say, no, you are not trying to imitate what real people sound like, because that is not actually interesting. And there is no aesthetic effect in that. If you think that's what dialogue writing is, then you. You're mistaken. It's completely unlike how people really speak. You're selecting for certain things.

32:02 Seth: Yeah, well, and there's an interesting sense in which you can think of example after example. So, you know, you talked about Van Gogh and his thing was color, right?

32:11 Wes: And swirly. Swirliness.

32:13 Seth: Swirliness in color, right. And then Monet, blotchiness and what's his name had light. You know, the Dutch landscape painters or whatever. Picasso, Cubism is a perfect example of this sort of thing. The challenge which we've seen on all the aesthetics episodes that we've done, right, is that you're striving to use a discursive form to define and isolate what it is that you want to be able to say, okay, if you do A, B, C and D, then you will create a beautiful work or you'll write, create good art. And if it was that simple, somebody would have done it by now.

And there's this recognition in the way that Schlegel is defining it. Again, we talked about this early on about the plenitude of interpretations. You can't fix the meaning it's like. Which we tend to turn into, well, I know it when I see it. Or you have to have cultivated taste in order to be able to understand or recognize it. And then that makes people queasy. And that's why, you know, esthetics is the handmaiden in the phil. Philosophy departments, right. Everybody does other disciplines first. But I think there's something brutally crucial about the fact that as a discipline, but also as a human experience, it is intensely personal.

It is intensely social. It is somehow has this notion of connectedness, and it's messy. And that's what human experience is like. It provides a basis for discussion and debate and agreement or disagreement in ways that other things can't. I feel like this is greatly enriching my life.

33:53 Dylan: This aspect of connectedness, I think, is. It's a big theme for Schlegel. I mean, he connects it. He pulls in the very aspect of language and communication through aesthetic as being a primary component of aesthetic experience. And connecting to the infinite through the aesthetic is how we connect to the infinite.

34:14 Wes: I think I have a connection between what you guys are saying that involves the section I just mentioned where he talks about Schelling. So there's a point where he mentions figurative inexhaustibility. All right, so that's on page 210. So in this section, you know, he's just gotten done criticizing Kant on the relation of the aesthetic idea to purpose. And it kind of culminates in the section on Schelling where he says Kant's view of aesthetics is flawed because he stopped halfway in his elaboration of transcendental idealism. And Schelling gets it right because it involves this healing of the split within human nature.

And it basically because it. He understands that the aesthetic involves the representation of the infinite in finite form in which the sublime is included. So we get a symbolic representation of the. Of the infinite. And here's how he puts it. How then can the infinite be brought to the surface? This is 209 going on to 210. How can it be made to appear only symbolically in images and signs? According to the unpoetic view, sense perception and the activity of the understanding determine things once and for all. The poetic view, on the other hand, continually interprets things and sees a figurative inexhaustibility to them.

The this gets at what Seth was saying. Poesy, taken in the most general sense as that which underlies all the arts, is nothing but an eternal act of symbolization. We either seek an outer shell for something spiritual or we relate an exterior to an invisible interior. So I think, yes, finding this figurative inexhaustibility, which has something to do with metaphor and the fact that all things are one. Right. There's isomorphisms that we pick out. I think our relationship to the aesthetic is inexhaustible in the sense that we can never say enough about what is figurative there.

36:01 Mark: Yeah, well, just continuing on. 210. Undeniably, through an absolute act that is not grounded in our experiences and logical conclusions, it is through the deed that we immediately or unconsciously acknowledge the original oneness of spirit and matter, which can only be speculatively demonstrated. This is all prelude to this claim that we've referred to a couple times, but which is probably the most radical thing in here. Without this unconscious acknowledgment of primordial unity, communication among human beings, or even the desire to communicate could never have occurred.

It's not just that, you know, this primordial unity is something that mystics discover when they fast and meditate. It is something that we're all underlyingly aware of. And it is just in the action of my animals gesturing to each other. Right. I'm not even saying human beings that that assumes an underlying unity. Otherwise why would we even bother to reach out to each other? That seems like a really weird claim to me. Yeah.

37:04 Wes: This is connected to all his talk about physiognomy.

37:06 Dylan: Right.

37:07 Wes: And the fact that a certain gesture or facial expression or something could communicate something. So that that's an example of the physical and the spiritual being intimately connected. And it's not just like conventional language like English, which just arbitrarily connects certain signs to certain phenomena. Some things are just connected at ground level. So there is some base level ontology where the inner and the outer corresponding to each other. And that as that gets elaborated in human consciousness, we start seeing a split. And then we see it linguistically as well. Right. In arbitrary signs. But some things are symbolic, which is to say, not just arbitrary signifiers. All representation in language is symbolic in origin.

37:52 Dylan: But we have a couple different pieces of unity going on here. Right. There's the unity that is the wholeness of the infinite. Right. So everything partakes of it. And then there's going to be the unity that amounts to the integrity of individual things. The unity that makes flowers. Flowers or kinds. Kinds. Or the sentence. A sentence. A sentence. A communication act. There's going to be those unities together. And I think, as Schlegel is pointing, that there's an aesthetic sense that is active that makes us see them as unities.

38:26 Mark: Yeah.

38:26 Wes: I think with the flower example. Right. An analogy to physiognomy. The exterior form communicates something about the interior. It communicates first and foremost that there is an essence. Even if we can't, say, talk about DNA and cells and all that stuff, yet it implicates something like that at bottom.

38:42 Mark: So on 2 11, he was talking about a network of signs. These signs of signs are first of all formed. And these are modified in the most diverse ways and then continually transposed from one sign to the next. This is not possible without each representation serving as the image or sign for another. So these are things that are sounding

39:03 Wes: like Saussure and also Nietzsche. Truth and Lie.

39:06 Mark: Sure. Signs referring to other signs. They have to come down to some sort of basic ostension. I recognize smile refers to this feeling of happy in My head. This is very un-Wittgensteinian. This has a very pre-Wittgensteinian, Augustinian or whatever. Take that we understand these basic things. I understand your expressions because I understand, I guess I understand my own feeling of happiness. Something like that. It can't be that we relate the inner and the outer through inference. Right. Because we don't experience the inner in other people to relate it to the outer.

And we don't experience. Even if I experience my own happiness, I don't experience my own smile in the way that you do. So it seems like either way, there's a puzzle here of how these primordial. They just have to be built in. I think, as you were saying, Wes, associations that we somehow don't learn, there would be no way for us to learn them.

40:05 Wes: Yeah, I think there's two aspects to that. There's the built in stuff, and that's at ground level. And then when he wants to talk about signs, of signs, I think he's talking about metaphor because he talks about how etymology shows us the stuff. So to think of an example, you know, virtually any use of a word, often if we think about it, it's really metaphorical. So. Or take the phrase take a stand, I'm going to take a stand against such and such, against injustice. Right. It's using a metaphor, literally the image of someone standing. And the more we think about language, the more we see that it is always traceable back to these more or often more traceable back to these more fundamental components.

Nietzsche really runs with this idea in Truth and Lie that all signification is essentially metaphorical at bottom anyway. And then what is the bottom exactly? It's hard to say. Where does metaphor stop and how do we talk about that?

40:58 Mark: And it seems there is a sort of political or artistic recommendation here, is that when we realize, here's another quote. Representation is the connection between sign and reference. And this disappears if the signs are arbitrary. So language becomes a collection of logical ciphers suitable only for performing the calculations of the understanding. So that this is what language becomes if it loses sight of its metaphorical origins. And so art is about rediscovering that so that, you know, language just doesn't become dead words. I guess language should be pointing out the mutual concatenation of all things. Right? Everything should be metaphorical for everything else. And that is the way again that art hooks up to the absolute. Right.

41:41 Seth: Or again, the limiting factor of the understanding's use of signification or symbolic representation.

41:51 Wes: Yeah, we want to be returned to the symbolic to A non arbitrary system of communication in the way that, you know, right. Smiling is connected to something inner. We want to return as much as possible to forms in which the inner is non conventionally related to the signifier.

42:07 Seth: I like that example of the smile mark, by the way.

42:10 Mark: All right, so thanks to my footnote chasing, I'm imposing on the rest of the guys one more take on romantic art. Because Schlegel here is referencing Schelling, which got me to look at some Schelling, specifically his system of transcendental idealism. That's the book that we read on our past Schelling episodes. I'm going to re listen to those. But the very end of the book, part six, this is from 1800, so just around the same time as the rest of the stuff we're reading. He gets at the quote that Schlegel gives here of, you know, it being the absolute pinnacle of philosophy.

Art is the one and only true and eternal argument and document of philosophy which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form. Namely the unconscious element in acting and producing. And its original identity with the conscious. Art is paramount to the philosopher precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where it burns in eternal and original unity as if in a single flame. That which in nature and history is rent asunder. And in life and action no less than in thought, must forever fly apart.

So Schlegel thought that that was awesome enough that he put that whole paragraph right in his article from Schelling, which made me chase down that article in Schelling. And Schelling is objectively just a more profound thinker than these Schlegels that we've read. And it sort of sucked me in, but then made me want to look at, you know, since it's really just a short piece of his system of transcendental idealism I found on the relationship between the plastic arts and nature. So this is exactly what August Schlegel is channeling in here, which we didn't actually get into that much of what August Schlegel says about that.

So we still have that on the table. I'm hoping, even if however much time we spend on the text itself, we'll get the chance to sort of give our last word on Romanticism. So this can serve as sort of a nightcap or an end cap for the unit. Thanks everybody for listening, for getting through all this stuff with us, and thanks to you guys. Reach out to us pl@partiallyexaminedlife.com give us some indications of what else you think we should read your comments on these episodes. You can comment on the blog post@ partialexaminedlife.com or reach out through Facebook or Twitter, etc.

Good night everybody.

44:27 Seth: Good night.

44:28 Wes: Night.