Ep. 322: Schelling on Art vs. Nature (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 322 is something like, what's the relationship between art and nature and philosophy? And we read two selections by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, part six of the System of Transcendental Idealism from 1800, and on the relation between the Plastic Arts and Nature, a speech from 1807. For more information, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, a dark, unknown force which supplies the element of completeness or objectivity to the piecework of freedom. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:50 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas, trying to figure out why it is utterly impossible for anything objective to be brought forth with consciousness.

0:57 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, opposed to disjunctivity in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:01 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, governing my raging passions with the confining power of beauty in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:09 Mark: All right, I think those quotes. Dylan's is the only one that even sounded like it made sense. So that should give you an. An idea of what we're doing here. We've had so much romanticism already. I know people are probably sick of it. I know people probably want to stop, but I was chasing the footnotes. I want to mainline the real stuff. I didn't want these copycat schlegels. They gave us the entryway into here. But they were all working off of this template from Schelling, whose work System of Transcendental Idealism we had read the beginning of before, so we should know.

I re listened to our two episodes on that to remind myself what his overall project was. And the overall project, amazingly, at the end of the book, was that art is the key to philosophy. Crazy. Just to sort of get a different presentation, different details, a little more practical application, a second opinion. I found this thing, actually, in a book called Philosophy of Art, which was published much later, but it was a freestanding speech from 1807 that I thought added enough that it would give us a whole episode to be able to talk about this rather than the 15 pages of the shorter one.

What did you guys think?

2:17 Seth: I don't think the extra reading gave us all that much more.

2:21 Wes: Okay, wait, which one?

2:23 Mark: The extra reading meaning the speech?

2:25 Dylan: No, I thought those Plastic arts in Nature.

2:27 Wes: I thought there was a lot in there, but it might. Yeah, I mean, I think Seth is right that there's a lot of overlap. Right. With what Schlegel was saying and Rhetorically and I don't know if it's just a translation, but rhetorically, it's a very annoying thing to read.

2:40 Seth: Yes, exactly. It's like a popularized version of what the other thing was. More philosophical and so. But you can enlighten me on how it.

2:49 Dylan: He's practically wearing a cape for the whole thing, as far as I'm concerned. You know, he's just in this thing. It's like if you think of your period piece from Bridgerton or whatever, the crazy romantic that shows up giving the speech at some kind of town hall meeting for a bunch of rich people at the beach and he's throwing his arms all around. That's what this is.

3:15 Mark: Which is at least a good counterbalance, I think, stylistically. Even if it was just dip in for a few pages to see what this is like to this pseudo mathematical thing, which I think he kind of run out of steam by the time he got to these last sections on teleology and then on art, they're quite a bit shorter again, it was only 15 pages total, broken into three sections and. Well, obviously we'll talk about it. The three are called deduction of the art Product as such, which I think is the part that made both Seth and Wes want to not do this episode. But I'd warned them in Slack. Skip down to number two character of the art product, which makes more sense. And then the one that August Schlegel actually quotes is from section 3 under Corollaries relation of Art to Philosophy.

4:04 Wes: Which one are we going to start with?

4:07 Mark: I mean, do we want to do the hard one?

4:11 Wes: I would start with the easy one. Okay. I think maybe it'll help inform the hard hard one. But also I took better notes on

4:18 Dylan: the easy

4:21 Wes: guilted me.

4:22 Dylan: And I feel like I'm confused because. Are we talking about plastic arts in nature?

4:28 Mark: Yes, the easy one in quotes is this speech on the relations between the plastic arts and nature.

4:34 Dylan: Okay, still.

4:35 Mark: Yeah, it was still per page. It was at least as difficult as the August Schlegel to get through.

4:43 Dylan: Can I just read the first paragraph? It gives you a sense of the whole thing, right?

4:46 Mark: Please.

4:46 Dylan: You festive days like the present, adorned with the name of a king that, like a magic word, calls forth joyful emotions and all hearts seem of themselves where words only can celebrate them to lead to the contemplation of the universal and most worthy, thus joining the hearers in intellectual sympathy, as the patriotic feelings of the day have already in loyalty.

5:11 Wes: Yeah, syntactically very complicated and lots of clauses where you forget where the antecedent verb is and all that stuff. So I don't know if that's reflective of the German. It's really interesting that he can write this way, given how he normally writes. But it could just be 19th century style. Right? This is a 19th century translation.

5:31 Dylan: Or maybe it's also 19th century performativism. Right. If it's a speech, because the whole thing does feel performative in a certain way.

5:38 Seth: But do we know the occasion for it?

5:40 Mark: So I found, you know, just a couple days ago, this other translation by Jason M. Wirth, which is actually the one I will link folks to online, probably maybe both of these are available free online. There is a little intro. According to this, Schelling delivered this address at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich, where he was a member from 1806 to 1820. Was presented on October 12, 1807, in celebration of the name day of King Maximilian I, Joseph of Bavaria. He, along with his son, the Crown Prince Ludwig I, were prodigious collectors of Greek and Roman sculpture. So that's all we know there is. Just to give a little alternate translation, which is not any better. We'll stick to the one that we all read.

6:21 Wes: And when is this translation from?

6:23 Mark: So the other one is definitely from like 1845 or something like that. This second later translation is for the North American Schelling Society, which only started in 2017 through a sublime password. Festive days like the one today, which was named after the king, Summon everything in unison to feelings of joy. Because they can only be celebrated with words and speeches. They seem to lead of themselves to the contemplation of what recalling is what is most universal and worthy. Connects the auditors as much in spiritual participation as they are united in patriotic feelings. Quite different sounding.

7:01 Wes: Okay, so it isn't exactly a popular audience. I guess the closest thing you could

7:05 Mark: say to the art audience.

7:08 Wes: Yeah, it's not exactly a conference paper, but so I guess they're celebrating. This is what happens when they celebrate. I do think there are some insights in here if you can get through the rhetorical thicket. And a lot of it is reminiscent of Schlegel. And there's so much back and forth between these guys. I don't know that you can say who's first among the Romantics in saying something. But he's getting at the same question of whether art should just imitate nature. And what is the relationship between art and nature, which turns out to be a very interesting one.

And to begin with the very beginning the first few pages of this essay. He begins with this idea that art is about the surface, right? So he says at one point, art is an appeal to sight. We can look at the visible surfaces of things, which is unlike what we do when we're philosophers and we're reasoning about things and we're purely in the realm of the rational and subjective as opposed to the concrete. But the disadvantage for art is that artists, quote, unquote, seldom arrive at a conception of the being of nature itself. So there's some inner essence or inner nature that can remain hidden unless you do art the way Schelling thinks you should do it, getting at the vital force of things.

So in the very beginning, he says, plastic art should be like poetry. It should express, quote, unquote, intellectual thoughts. And this is going to move him on, you know, page three of the essay to talking about the concept of the imitation of nature and how that is related to what science does with nature. And then the question is, well, what do we mean by nature? Is it nature of the dogmatist, of the naturalist? Nature is a dead aggregate, as he puts it, or is it the nature of the Romantic, which is this primal energy that is always creating and producing?

So when you ask the question whether art should imitate nature, you're suggesting something that could mean two different things. If it's going to be imitating mere form, shapes, the surfaces of things, then the answer for Schlegel and Schelling is no. But if you think of imitation in terms of capturing that creative, primal energy that is the source of the natural, then yes, in some sense of imitation. Yes. And I'm looking at pages three and four here.

9:31 Mark: Yeah, I don't think we mentioned last time, according to August Schlegel, Kant had said that we get our notions of beauty as sort of an average, the beauty of a face. That means we are talking about how it's sort of tied to teleology, tied to what a face is supposed to look like. So in other words, even though, like, a triangle might be really beautiful, a triangular face, that's going to be freaky. That's. You can't just, you know, disinterestedly contemplate the shapes involved in the face. You have to actually know that it is a face and it tends towards a certain thing.

Well, how do you figure out that thing? According to Kant, it was just. Well, you've seen a lot of faces, kind of what is the quintessential face, which to Schlegel at least sounded like the average Face, which has to be wrong. Like, I don't know if that's actually what Kant said or meant, but no, it has to be what the face should look like, what the face is tending toward. So you add in this dynamism, whether you're talking about August Schlegel or the person. I think he's channeling here, Schelling, that, you know, what is the face trying to be like?

What's trying to be like the heavenly angel face or something. So when you say, is it supposed to imitate nature? Well, not nature as it is right now, but maybe nature as it should be, nature as it's aiming towards something

10:47 Dylan: like that, I don't think that's quite right. Where he ends up, at least, I don't think he gets a kind of teleological understanding of it because he's focusing on the activity and the unity of an active soul in this one moment. Right. Which isn't quite the same thing as the ideal face or the ideal form. For him, it's all about capturing the full activity of the underlying soul. That is the living, breathing aspect of nature in the form that you have instantiated in the art, which isn't quite the same thing as the ideal form of that thing.

11:24 Wes: Yeah. He addresses this very question on pages four to five, and he associates this account with Winckelmann, art as a production of an ideal. Should the artist imitate nature? Well, beautiful things in nature, because not everything in nature is beautiful. There's a lot of ugly stuff going on in nature. Winckelmann would say, you want nature to be more elevated than actuality, than what is real. And so you do things according to this ideal. And Schelling is going to say, you know, that doesn't quite get there. It's still nature as a kind of set of these lifeless things.

Right. People who are essentially materialists. An ideal form is great, okay, that's an improvement. But it's not something that's animated yet. We need nature in the sense of essence, the hidden, animating thing that's underneath the form. And on page three, he'll say something really interesting, which is that part of the problem of imitation is that it's easier to imitate the material and the surface form than it is to get at that essence. And what, what happens when you don't do that, when you don't get at the creative life of the thing, which Schelling associates with the very individuality of the thing, it's like it's asserting it's separateness and individuality then you don't create feeling, you don't create emotion in the audience.

So what is it that touches us about art? What is it that really gets us? It's not just these idealized formal relations. To make us really feel something, it has to get at something more inner, something more profound.

12:59 Dylan: Yeah. So at the end of the second paragraph on page three, as you pointed out, Wes, he's contrasting sort of the scientists as the viewer and the interpreter of nature and the artist, and the charge that art should be an imitation or reproduction of nature. And this is where the. We have two senses. To some, nature is nothing but more than the dead aggregate of an indeterminate host of objects, or the space in which things are packed, as in a case to another, merely the ground whence he draws his nourishment and sustenance. To the inspired inquirer alone is nature the holy and ever creating primal energy of the world, which begets and actively produces all things from itself. And that last one is the form of nature and understanding of nature that he's going to say that the artist captures.

13:50 Wes: And on page six, it's not that we can. How do we capture that? Right. It's not like we can say, all right, I'm not going to, you know, show you a beautiful vase, I'm going to do a still life of a vase or whatever, I'm going to break it open and show you its essence, which obviously you can't do that. So the question is, yeah, how do you do it? And I think he's going to say that form is not going to buy, it is going to work by itself.

14:14 Mark: Right. Because if it was just forms, if it was just about pretty forms, imitation would be just fine. Right. Past artists have discovered those. You have to have to penetrate the veil, perceive the living energy within the ancient works, within the forms. Which is why, as Friedrich Schlegel had said before, it's great to glorify the ancients, to see. And this is what the in here, Schelling is saying Winckelmann was doing. You have to discover, like, what gave the ancients their mojo and come up with our mojo that will enable us to do that. You always have to start from scratch. You can't just, we've discovered the perfect forms. Here you go. Let's just keep recycling them.

14:49 Dylan: Implicit or maybe even explicit, he is praising Greek art, but also calling it a kind of stage in development, because there's a glorification of the current form of art as being another step, a better step along the way to capturing nature's vital form, which at the end he links up with the patriotic duty of the nationalistic. Makes it nationalistic at the end.

15:18 Wes: Yeah, that's an interesting ending.

15:20 Dylan: I was completely surprised about. I was like, oh, wow. So this is about being true Germans. Oh, now I get it.

15:27 Seth: Once you see that it's a speech for the king, I'm sure that makes more sense.

15:31 Dylan: Yes, yes. And then I had forgotten about the phrase patriotic feelings of the day have already in loyalty in the first paragraph. Until I read it. Until I read the opening, I totally forgotten. Patriotic feelings shows up at the very first paragraph. So now I get it.

15:47 Wes: Yeah, it's really very in parallel to Schlegel, where there's talk of style versus mannerism. Right. Which he's going to talk about something similar with character and then the segue into art as the expression of a national identity.

16:02 Seth: I'm going to be perfectly honest, I may be conflating him with somebody we just recently read who's. I may be saying something that is not in this reading, but it's one of the other ones. But there's kind of a couple steps in this about this notion of the animated character of nature that does not get captured by form but was somehow captured by the Greeks. And the link for him is that the Greeks had a fully mature, if you will, or fully developed mythology that was not consciously generated by one individual or another individual, but instead emerged kind of organically, which everybody understood.

And he uses the term mythology. You know, we're talking about gods and heroes and things like that. But really it's to point out that the mythological view of nature is a view in which nature is animated. So it's seeing active forces in natural phenomenon and in individual things in nature. So, you know, as Dylan said, it's not fully formed because, of course, it's a polytheistic religion and it's a different kind of situation. But that guiding principle, if you will, animated the art of the Greeks and gave it the right kind of character, even though we've since moved beyond that.

Because, of course, we're in a different time where we need to kind of rediscover the animation in nature, but without using a kind of Greek mythology. We have to come up with our own mythology.

17:32 Wes: It was interesting earlier on in the essay because again, the problem is, you know, we have these visible forms like sculpture or painting, and then the question is how we can get the animated force, the animating force, out of that. And he seems to suggest on page seven it's almost like being a scientist. So seven to eight, where we can give a kind of theory. This is not his words. This is my elaboration of this. But we can give a theory of what the force is that unifies all the different parts. So he's using. He does use the word force and he does talk about unifying parts on page seven.

And then he says to. I think this is towards the bottom. This is the last paragraph. We must look beyond form in order to gain an intelligible, living and true perception of it. Contemplate the most beautiful forms and what remains when you have denied in them the effective principle. Nothing but mere abstract qualities such as extension and relations of space. Does the position of one portion of matter in the neighborhood of another contribute in any degree whatever to its inward essence or the contrary? Evidently the latter proximity makes not the form, but the kind of proximity.

This, however, can only be determined by a positive force opposed to the disjunctivity and subordinating the plurality of the parts to the unity of one conception. And then on and on like that. And then on page eight, it becomes this idea of. He starts using this phrase, effective science. So on top of page 8, to really comprehend the essential and form, we must regard it not merely as an active principle in general, but as an intellect and effective science. So the reason why I'm bringing us back to this is because what he's, you know, he's trying to explain how it is we might grasp this essential living force and an artistic object.

And I think seeing the unity of it, and I think this sounds a lot like Hutcheson unity and diversity. There's a little bit of that in here as there was in Schlegel.

19:25 Dylan: He's pointing to an idea of the thing that you're interested in in a true science, which I think you're right, Wes. He's effectively saying that art is the true science, is it's going to find what is that animating force that takes parts and makes the one thing that you're looking at into a one.

19:44 Wes: We intuit it in art, right? So we can give a theory. We can do Newtonian mechanics or whatever and do the math and all that. Do science in that sense. But when he says effective science, what I think he means is that he'll give these examples like the movements of stars are effective science. It's like the stars are doing their own science. They're creating their own little dances and according to some sort of order. And we can extract that scientifically, but we can Also extract it intuitively. And we're more in touch with it when we extract it intuitively. But to do that, we have to create these artistic representations to fully get at that essence.

20:27 Mark: So he mentions at the bottom of page seven, I think you had read this quote, the effective principle, right? You need not just the beautiful forms, but you need the effective principle. And then right after that is when he first brings up, not merely as an active principle in general, but as an intellect and effective science. And then right after that, all unity can be no other than intellectual in its nature and origin. And to what tends all investigation of nature, save to the discovery of the same science in her? For that in which there is no understanding cannot be the object of understanding.

The perceptionless cannot be perceived. The science through which nature acts is indeed in no point like human science, which is interwoven with a reflection on itself. In it, conception differs not from action, nor intention from fulfillment. I think this is even back to Berkeley. I mean, this is just an idealist thing that there has to be mind in something for us to understand it at all. So we can talk about the science that he says is reflective. We know we're doing science, it's human science. And then like you were just saying, Wes, what the things are doing themselves?

I mean, is that just the same as saying it's teleological and purpose driven and, you know, that's what. Yeah, I mean, he's.

21:41 Wes: Later on he's going to say it's the divine mind that animates all this stuff. All the stuff, really, when you get into it, even Hegel starts to look very Berkeley. And underneath it all, God is still ultimately the lynchpin of the whole system. There's spirituality and matter. As he puts it in the next paragraph. That's where he talks about the stars and stuff.

22:02 Dylan: Is that before this is common to effective sciences. In nature and art, the bond between conception and form, between body and soul.

22:11 Wes: Yeah, it's a little before that, but it's on the same page. It's in the previous paragraph, but yeah. No, I think that's the place to go, Dylan, where you just went.

22:19 Mark: Every single thing is preceded by an eternal conception schemed in the infinite understanding. I mean, it's the mind of God.

22:25 Wes: There's the one. There's the one.

22:26 Mark: There you go.

22:26 Wes: That's what I was thinking.

22:27 Mark: By what means does this conception pass into actuality and embodiment? I mean, this sounds like a very big theological question. Only through the creative intelligence, which is as necessarily combined with the infinite Understanding as that essence which comprehends the idea of immaterial beauty is combined with that which embodies it in the mind of the artist. So God as the mind crafting things. It's the same thing when the artist is coming up with things. Especially when we. As we mentioned in our August Schlegel discussion. I'm forgetting how much Schelling dwells on this.

How much of it is unconscious. Right. If an artist really was just a savant, acting without thinking, without plan, then it would just be literally, you know, just like bees building a beehive, which is basically God doing the building. It's the infinite mind, it's not the individual bees. It seems like a lot of what the artist is responsible for is going to also have to be straight out of the mind of nature. As opposed to the emphasis on genius that we saw in August Schlegel.

23:32 Dylan: But isn't the genius in Schlegel effectively just a mere conduit? The true genius is the one who's most connected. I thought that what we were just talking about here is actually very similar to that, to the notion of genius. That they're the ones who are most connected to God.

23:50 Mark: Right. For August Schlegel, it was. The ideal is a merging of the unconscious with the conscious. Because you need the conscious crafting. You need all that skill that the great artist has developed. But right here on page nine, the position of the artist in relation to nature should be continually made clear by the declaration that art really to be art should at first withdraw itself from nature. And only in the last accomplishment, return to her. The true meaning of this seems to be no other than the following. In all things in nature, the living principle appears only blindly effective.

If it were so with the artist, he would not be distinguishable from nature itself. If it were his wish consciously to subordinate himself to nature and to repeat things present with a slavish truth, he would produce masks indeed, but no works of art. Thus he must remove himself from the result, from the creature that he may elevate himself to the creative energy and spiritual. He's on that. Maybe this is just a clearer way of explaining what August Schlegel meant by the merging of these two things. Because I don't know what that means. Like that you're.

Sometimes, you know, you have the craft, but when it comes down to creating the work, you sort of set the craft aside. You're not thinking about the craft, you're just doing it. Here it sort of sounds like he's emphasizing, you know, Remove yourself from nature, do the craft thing. And only at the end will you sort of. Maybe this is just a way of saying the same thing. Only at the end of the product do you sort of dive back into nature and find, oh, I'm actually revealing

25:14 Wes: the truths of nature. I mean, he does say something very similar to Schlegel. This is later on in page 17. But we shouldn't think of this as, oh, we have inspiration or we have all this raw passion, and then we got to moderate that. You know, he thinks of that as a form of moralism. It's like we got to repress that a little bit for Schlegel was, oh, we got to apply our art theory to it or practice and rein it in. Right? I got to reign in that inspiration. What Schlegel said is our influences have to already be integrated into that moment of inspiration.

And here Schelling will say something like, passion is moderated by beauty itself. It doesn't need these external rules tamping down on it. And in fact, there turns out to be this interesting balance between these uncontrolled, raging emotions and passion and all that stuff. And then the form, the beautiful form that holds it all together, or the, you know, the unifying animating force that holds it all together and produces a beautiful form. Not that that helps exactly explain all that. But I thought it was very interesting that him and Schlegel are kind of onto the same thing.

26:23 Dylan: There at the end of page nine and the beginning of 10, you get something directly related to this, like what the artist is doing and how it's holding. So the artist should indeed, above all things, imitate the spirit of nature, which, working in the core of things, speaks by form and shape as if by symbols. And only insofar as he seizes the spirit and vitally imitates it, has he himself created anything of truth. So there's this notion that you pointed to, the constraint that beauty has on raging passions that gives it its form, and that's the vital manifestation of it. And here again, you have the artist. If they're telling something true about nature, they are encapsulating in the beautiful form the raging action of that that reveals the truth of things. I say that, and I don't know exactly what that means.

27:24 Seth: When I hear the idea about emotion, I'm trying to separate out the idea that it's the artist who's harnessing their own emotions. And somehow emotions are necessary for reflecting the vital energy of nature in the work of art. Or is he talking about the emotional response in the viewer. I don't know. I'm confused on this point.

27:48 Wes: I think it's both. So in page 20 he'll talk, right. About the soul of the artist showing itself in his work and even in something that's painful or tragic. And he gives the example of a statue, I forget the name of the statue, which. There's a grieving mother, famous statue. It will say that the overall effect of the statue is peaceful despite the storm of passions that's underneath all that. Despite the fact that you can actually see grief. I think in the. I looked up the statue and you can see grief in the face of the mother who's just lost one of her children.

This whole idea of the tragic, Right. This came up in Schiller as well. This comes up frequently because the question is, first of all how we can enjoy watching something that's painful. For Plato, it was a big deal because it was corrupting. For Aristotle had a way to justify it in terms of catharsis here. What he'll say is that all these passionate energies are aroused, but there's a self conscious spirit that is present there that creates this overall beautiful whole. And the effect, oddly enough, is actually peaceful. Through the reflective element in the tragic, you get a kind of calming energy.

And I thought there of Hamlet, right? So you've got all this crazy stuff going on, but then you have this guy thinking about it through the whole. He's wishy washy, but he's also the amount of reflection, right? Or take any Shakespeare tragedy. The amount of crazy stuff that's going on combined with this reflective, almost rational element, I think that's part of the. I think that's part of what he's getting at.

29:24 Dylan: Did you see him articulating that taming power of beauty through that intellectual form? I guess what I'm reacting to is that you brought up Plato's account which basically says this is something to be avoided because the raging passions are something to be tamed and we have to figure out how to deal with them.

29:50 Wes: We get induced with them, right. And we identify with these crazy people and we become crazy.

29:55 Dylan: Yeah. We get stimulated, but not redirected at all. And Aristotle has a kind of psychological account that the effect of art leads to. You know, he has a process involved, Right. It stimulates a reaction that is distinct from actually causing you to act, but arouses those feelings and allows for cathartic experience that actually tames your soul. Right. And I didn't see that kind of mechanical psychological account here.

30:27 Wes: Let's look at page 21. And by the way, I think Aristotle agrees with Plato that there's identification. I just think Aristotle has a more psychologically sophisticated theory of what identification is. And it doesn't mean you just become the thing that you're identifying with. All right, so this is towards the middle of the page. So I'll just read the beginning of the paragraph and I'll jump down. But there are higher occasions when not merely a single power, but when the conscious spirit itself breaks through all restraint. Occasions when even the soul itself is subjected to the bond which joins it to its sensuous existence.

And then it starts talking about pain and crime. This is the case in all truly and in an exalted sense, tragic situations, as in those which are offered us by the tragedies of antiquity. If the blind energies of passion are aroused, the self conscious spirit is also present as the preserver of beauty. If the soul suffers, how can it save itself from torment and desecration Arbitrarily to restrain the energy of pain, of tumultuous feeling, were to sin against the aim and intent of art and would betray a want of feeling and soul in the artist himself.

In other words, you can't just get rid of the emotions, you can't get rid of pain, you can't get rid of the nasty, ugly stuff, because you deprive art of vitality that way. So in that beauty based upon grand and constant forms has become characteristic, art has prepared for itself the means of manifesting the whole greatness of feeling without destruction of the symmetry. So the symmetry is the containing thing. The part where he talks about the peacefulness of the effect. We can go to that part as well with the statue. But the overall effect of even sad representations or even highly emotional content matter.

Right. Just what was that one Ivan the Terrible, that Ilya Repin painting that we discussed before, where someone's been murdered, where you can get. I mean, I think we talked about that in terms of disinterest. So he's trying to get at the same effect as the Kantian theory, but he's going about it like Schlegel and Schiller, I think, in a little bit of a different way. So the overall disinterested or peaceful or maybe even Apollonian effect here is accomplished by what something to do with.

32:45 Mark: Well, it's an emergent property of whole and parts. So it's a harmonious. This is on the couple of pages before you had read, where he's talking about how having particular parts that Are harsh severity of forms and the parts as relation to the whole. If unity must be felt, it can only be by force of individuality, isolation and antagonism. So you actually need, as you were saying, the ugly things, or. I don't know if you always need ugly, but you need things to stand out as individuals. So I think this talk of emergence, property. Sometimes he talks about grace as being the thing which it seems, you know, that's not a very helpful term.

But if you just want to characterize what is the difference between an ineffective painting or song or whatever that has these forms that are copied from antiquity or whatever, versus the ones that I was saying have the mojo? Well, it has to do with the artist's skill in putting all these individual elements together in such a way that then we get this overall effect of the mojo or the grace or whatever that leaps out.

33:52 Wes: Character is another word he uses. So page 17, you get the power of the passions. They rage ungovernably, and yet they're repressed by force of character and so confined to forms.

34:04 Seth: I'm curious about the relationship between this grace and this and the soul versus artistic genius. And whether talking about genius is additive or if it's a different way. Because the next paragraph, and I have. Whatever the newer translation is, I think open, I couldn't find the other one.

34:24 Dylan: Where are you.

34:25 Seth: This next paragraph, after the one you stopped reading in. However, grace proven in the most extreme repulsion would be dead without its transfiguration by the soul. But what expression befits it in this situation? The soul rescues itself from pain and emerges vanquishing, not vanquished, by renouncing its copula with sensuous existence. Although the spirit of nature may muster its forces for the preservation of the soul, the soul does not enter this struggle. So I'm wondering if Is the activity of transfiguring pain by the soul through grace, or as grace or whatever this means, Is that itself the.

I don't want to say duplication, but is that the experience of connecting to that dynamic force in nature? And then is there the additional part where the artist would have to take that transfigured experience and represent it in form of whatever sort? Could we imagine this being done by an actor, for example, or a singer, who would. In some sense, it's not a plastic art, but I don't know the whole thing. Once he introduced the notion of grace, I started to struggle.

35:34 Mark: It's deeply unhelpful.

35:36 Wes: The first mention of it is page 19, where he says, the essence right towards the bottom, this essence, incomprehensible, as we have said, and yet appreciable by all, is what the Greeks called charis. And we grace, where in a fully developed form, grace appears. There on the side of nature, is the work perfect. All demands are fulfilled. Here already, soul and body are in perfect harmony. Body is the form and grace the soul. And then after that, I'll say on page 20, the spirit of nature is, but apparently opposed to the soul and is in fact the instrument of its manifestation.

This whole, the German idealist story is about the division of the original unity which Schelling gets into here, which is the division between subject and object being reconciled. And part of the reconciliation that art effects is to say, well, actually, the soul isn't just something hidden, you know, a separate substance that we can't see and that can talk about metaphysically. We can actually apprehend it concretely through art in the sensuous. In sensuous manifestations. So we see the soul and the body and kind of a harmony through the artistic representation.

So I think grace is an important word because it. I mean, it could refer to something religious, but also just the aspect of character or the aspect of communicating with one's body. Schlegel went on and on about this, Right. There's a language of the body and of the face that's just kind of there already, where we can actually communicate emotion and inner life through posture. Right. So you could look at a statue in a certain physical position, and it's not just a spatial representation of a certain position. The position of the body has a meaning.

It has a signification that goes beyond the merely material. So it's not just matter, it is also signifier. And that's part of what I think grace gets at.

37:41 Mark: Just Googling charis here, the sense of grace. I think Schelling is probably playing with this double meaning. Or maybe the double meaning that exists in English exists in German. But grace, meaning, like you move in a graceful way, it's not necessarily the presence of God being grace, which is how I was reading it as deeply unhelpful.

38:02 Wes: Oh. Oh, I see. I didn't realize you were reading that way. Okay. Yeah.

38:06 Dylan: I like the way you're pointing to the Schlegel for the emphasis on how posture and form, especially form of movement, reveals the inner life. Right. And that somehow art would be grabbing that and trying to incorporate that here. I thought that he was talking about God because of what comes after. When on page 20, he starts talking about soul, he Goes from discussion of grace to talking about soul. And he says at the top, but the beauty of the soul itself, incorporated in bodily grace, has the highest deification of nature. And then he goes on, all other creatures are supported by the spirit of the world and thereby maintain their individuality in man alone.

As in a midpoint rises the soul, without which the world would be as nature without the sun. And then he goes on that the soul is effectively this point of transcendence. And the soul is not concerned with matter, but only with the vital spirit as the life of things. It has no property, it has no possession, nor anything of limits. It knows not, but it is itself knowledge. It is not good, but goodness itself. It is not beautiful, but is beauty in its essence. That all sounds like God to me.

39:28 Mark: Or Plato. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Christianized Plato.

39:32 Dylan: Yeah.

39:32 Wes: There's probably a double. I think the word in Greek. Right. Is adopted in the. In the Bible. So these ideas are connected.

39:39 Dylan: Sure.

39:39 Wes: The idea of physical grace, but in the context of Schlegel. Schlegel went on about grace, Right. Considerably. I think for the German Romantics, they are definitely thinking about the gracefulness of a sculpture. Right. A physical form and in sculpture. And then plus maybe all that other divine stuff on top of it. So the grace part is, you know, it's the favor of God. Right. So the grace in the religious sense is about the favor of God. And this is Kant's purposeful purposelessness where the aesthetic is good news. It's almost like the aesthetic is like a quasi religious experience because it makes it seem as if nature is.

Because we can find it beautiful. Just thinking of nature now, not hard objects, but looks like it's made for us. Right. There's a grace in that. And the same thing with the being able to unify the division between soul and body. That's grace. Right. In the religious sense, when we look at a physical human body and see that it's also a signifier, that it also can mean that we can see it as graceful. That in itself is a form of grace in the sense that we see that matter and spirit are actually one by God's good favor.

40:53 Mark: Right. And as Fichte and Schelling's main project to demonstrate through this phenomenological ontological method of examining self consciousness, how you might have thought that the objective that matter was something separate from mind. But in fact we have to show how the two are one in the same. And it was supposed to be a more complicated story than Berkeley's. Just. Well, of Course matter is just the thoughts of God. You know, that it was a more dynamic story about coming to discover that we as animals or whatever might just see ourselves beset by all this foreignness.

But it's through philosophical sophistication on the one hand, we could see how actually we're all one, how those apparent objects are in fact part of the subject. And you know, a full statement of what the subject is is a recognition of that. Well, art is going to be the direct way. It's much harder to do this with philosophy, but in art we're sort of doing it all the time in some way that we see how art is a mirror of the soul or how art's presentation of nature shows us that nature is not a mechanical, but is. It is a soul filled thing. That's why we appreciate it, because it has this resonance within us.

42:11 Wes: Let me just read this one quote, assuming that we're going to be leaving this in the second half, but so page 24, he says in many cases the spirit of nature shows itself in opposition to the soul. That opposition means many things. It means that the world is dangerous to us. It means that there are material objects and we're spiritual beings, all that stuff. So the positing, right, that produces the world out of the subject for Fichte. So it seems in art by voluntary coincidence to commingle with it. So, quote, remembrance of the original unity of the being of nature and of the soul by the certainty that all antithesis or opposition is but apparent.

That love is the bond of all being and that pure goodness is the ground and signification of the whole creation. And then he goes on to talk about sensuous grace. So that again is another way of talking about grace. The revelation that that opposition is only apparent.

43:05 Mark: All right, we will wrap up all of romanticism for, for the foreseeable future in our second half here. If you are a partially supporter, it should be in your feed already. Or if you support through Apple, it'll be there next week. If you're not a supporter, why don't you go do that partiallyexaminelife.com support. We would love to have you you on board. It's like you'll be reflecting the inner nature of things through your outer behavior. Come join us in love. All right, thanks.

43:37 Wes: Thanks.