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

0:07 Wes: Hey.

0:08 Mark: This is a partially examined life. Episode 322 part 2. We've been discussing Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Mostly on the relation between the Plastic Arts and nature from 1807. And we will get to some of his system of Transcendental Idealism, Part 6 from 1800, which was the thing that actually influenced these Romantics that we've already been reading. What we've been discussing was written after pretty much everything else we've read. 1807 versus for August Schlegel in 1795 for Schiller, and somewhere around there for the Friedrich Schlegel stuff. Where did we want to start?

0:48 Dylan: I think we should stay in Plastic Arts in Nature. It might be a small point to talk about for a little bit, but he does make a significant distinction between sculpture and painting. And I wondered if it was worth talking about that. And also the absence of talking about written poetry or music. I mean, it's the plastic arts in nature.

1:10 Mark: Maybe what's being unveiled or is right in front of them. As sure he's giving the speech. Or some statues, I guess. Maybe some paintings, too. I don't know.

1:19 Wes: But I have good notes for most of this essay, except for one section where I just. My notes say painting versus sculpture, pages 25 to 29. So, Dylan, you're going to lead the way on this. Yeah.

1:33 Dylan: The big thing on painting was that it was more able to capture the vitality than sculpture was. At the beginning of 25, he makes this interesting comment that had no mythology preceded it, art itself would have arrived at and invented gods had it not found them. So the sculptures of gods as a reflection of deities that existed is material and in a certain sense, intellectual means. It offers its works, too, by no means as the things themselves and wishes them to be looked upon expressly as pictures. It therefore lays not that stress upon the material and in for itself that sculpture does. And it appears from this cause when elevating the material above the spirit to sink deeper below itself than in a like case, sculpture does. So painting is more abstract and therefore more likely to be in touch with the more access to the infinite, to the soul, to the spirit.

2:32 Wes: Right.

2:33 Mark: Some of the context here is why sculpture was the tool of choice for the ancients. And painting is more modern. That, you know, this demonstrates how we've become more elevated over time. That painting is inherently more spiritual. But I'm trying to find the quote. I'm where he says basically, sculpture has to boil down the mirror of all nature, the monad, as it were, to a point.

3:00 Seth: Right.

3:00 Mark: This one little figure. Whereas paintings, because it can represent a scene. Right. It at least suggests. And I would think, you know, we could add a thing about literature, that literature would even be a higher level, which I think was the point of. When Friedrich Schlegel was talking about this, it was sort of from.

3:19 Wes: Yes.

3:19 Mark: The sculpture being the ancient Greek and actually the novel. Or maybe if we're just talking in terms of poesy, it would be like, you know, the concentrated poem where you're just like a limerick, whatever. The ancient Greek form of the limerick,

3:37 Wes: you know, from Nantucket.

3:39 Mark: Yeah. That's the verbal version of a sculpture. Because you're admiring the internal rhymes between them. You're admiring just the structure, you know, the. The. Sorry, what's the Japanese haiku? The haiku, yes, exactly. That kind of thing. Like it's a very contained structure, but whereas an epic where the ancients eventually got. Or the novel where we now have, you know, the entire universe, there's no limit to its abstraction.

4:07 Dylan: So. Yes, I think that's right. There's a couple points where he's articulating this notion of condensing the whole into a point. One's on page 26 in the first main paragraph. But I have my note is that it's still in terms of painting. But the quote here is, if the deviation of plastic into the sphere of painting is an injury to art, so also is the subjugation of painting to the conditions and requirements of sculpture and impose limitation equally arbitrary. Nice sentence structure. So if the former, like gravitation, tends to one point, the latter may, like creative light, fill the whole universe.

4:47 Mark: You know, of course it's talking about the plastic arts right from the beginning. And I remember one of the first thing he says about it is according to an old saying, a plastic art is dumb poetry.

4:56 Wes: Yeah.

4:57 Mark: It should express ideas that have their origin in the soul. The link between the soul and nature can only be conceived as their vital synthesis. So yeah, I mean, I think the same would go. When I was talking about the image of a face, does it really make a difference if it's a portrait, a two dimensional, just the face versus a sculpture of a bust? Like those don't actually seem that different to me. I guess if we're going to emphasize how much more spiritual painting is, you got to get, oh, it's a painting of a scene and you've got the perspectives among the things and you've got.

Well, he talked about chiaroscuro and just the things that people were doing with light and perspective and stuff like that. That is not really available in. I want to say it's not available in sculpture, but have you seen Brian Hertz award winning LEGO sculptures where you can only tell that it's a Picture of Abraham Lincoln. If you back up to 20ft and then you see that, you know, you can have perspective in sculpture. It's just not the norm.

5:54 Dylan: I mean, at the end of the section, he also links up. Maybe it's not the first one, but he links up again art with philosophy. And Here in top 28, connects painting to being a poet and philosopher. He says the bloom of the most cultivated life, the perfume of fantasy together with the roots of the intellect breathed jointly out from his works. Raphael, he is not mere painter. He is at the same time poet and philosopher. The power of his soul stands at the side of wisdom. And as he represents things, so are they ordered in the eternal necessity. In him has art reached its summit. And its pure equipoise of the divine and human can almost only be in one point. So it is in his works that the unique impress is to be found.

6:44 Wes: Yeah, this is the part of the reading that annoyed me the most. Once he gets into specific artists and says all these exaggerated things about them.

6:54 Dylan: Yep.

6:55 Mark: I didn't. I mean, I did read to the end, but, you know, my note to you guys was like, if around here, once you get the point of the difference between sculpture and painting, just stop. You don't need the rest of the. It seemed to devolve. Maybe I just ran out of steam. I do think that though, you know, talking about Raphael as this great philosopher, this should be our transition to let's get what we want to get before we get too tired here. Out of the other selection.

7:19 Wes: Let's do it.

7:19 Mark: And I guess we could ignore section one if you.

7:22 Seth: If.

7:24 Wes: I mean, we'll never get to anything else.

7:29 Mark: All right. If we feel like masochists, maybe we'll do a. We could do a part three where we. Where we close. Read section one there, Mark.

7:36 Dylan: I knew this was gonna happen. So you said at the beginning that this is the last we're gonna do with romantics, but now you snuck in. Oh, maybe we'll do another episode on the romantic.

7:46 Mark: No, not another episode.

7:47 Dylan: Tomato, tomato.

7:49 Wes: It's me and Mark slogging our way through it.

7:53 Mark: If we have not revealed already to the people, we will soon reveal our close reading ongoing product, which I'm sure is going to affect how I think about doing Pel? Especially with a text like this. Should we just start reading page 225, section 2, character of the art product? Obviously, we're not going to do this whole thing as a close reading, but just to get the flavor the work of art reflects to us. The identity of the conscious and unconscious activities. But the opposition between them is an infinite one. And its removal is effected without any assistance from freedom.

Hence, the basic character of the work of art is that of an unconscious infinity. And then in. I don't know what brackets mean, synthesis of nature and freedom. Maybe this is the editor saying what that means besides what he has put into his work with manifest intention. The artist seems, instinctively, as it were, to have depicted therein an infinity which no finite understanding is capable of developing to the full. And then he's about to talk about mythology here. So, right, this is going to be infinity here.

8:55 Wes: Let's start with conscious and unconscious role in this. And I guess plays a big role in Schelling in general. I didn't go back and listen to those episodes. But I think the conscious activity, right, involves the comprehension of the world. And the unconscious activity is the production of the world. Am I wrong about that?

9:12 Mark: Yeah, I guess I was just seeing this as. First and foremost, let's talk about the artist, right? We were saying that the genius is the one whose conscious and unconscious are aligned. We've been talking before about the mind and body being. You know, the best sculpture is one that shows that mind, in fact. That spirit is in fact, body, right? It shows the physiognomy. The shape of the face, the shape of the body shows the dynamism of the spirit. Like it is our doorway to seeing spirit. So this is a. You know, it reflects to us the identity of the conscious and unconscious activities. I guess that was the word that was making you think, oh, this is talking about the thing that we ended in the last section. You know, the overall product.

9:52 Wes: I mean, I think it's both, right? What's going on in the artist recapitulates the absolute, right? The moments of the absolute where there's the unconscious productive activity, which is nature, which is the positing of nature and is that deterministic realm. And then the realm of consciousness and rationality and freedom and all that. So. So when whoever it is puts synthesis of nature and freedom into brackets, the unconscious corresponds to nature. And infinity, of course, corresponds to freedom. And that's to say. I mean, Mark, I think you've already said this, but there's a way in which, you know, in the other essay, he actually talks about this a little bit.

When we are inspired and we're producing a work of art, it's almost as if nature is acting through us. It's almost as if when we talk about that moment of inspiration, we are just like the most determined in that moment, because we don't have any say over what we're doing. They gave. I think it was Schlegel who gave Kant flack over that idea. Oh, what are we just like birds doing stuff? Completely instinctually, he didn't like that idea. So we need that conscious element, and that's where the freedom comes in. And you can associate that also with artistic training and craftsmanship and the understanding of beauty at a more rational, abstract level, and also influence being familiar with the history of art.

Somewhere we get freedom out of this.

11:20 Mark: Yeah. I think if we want to make sense or a little more sense of him bringing up freedom here, we actually would have to look back to part one, which is talking specifically about the identity of the conscious and unconscious in the self and the consciousness of this identity. The product of this intuition will therefore verge on the one side on the product of nature, and on the other side on the product of freedom, and must unite in itself the characteristics of both. If we know the product of the intuition, we are also acquainted with the intuition itself.

Hence we need only derive the product in order to derive the intuition. Wow, that last sentence is exactly why we're not going to talk about section one anymore. We can imagine. We talked about this quite a bit in our Shiller discussion. You know, even if you're just thinking about it epistemologically, there was a question for Kant, like, if we're the ones synthesizing the manifold, I'm creating causality. I'm imposing teleological expectations, I'm imposing all this. It's me doing it. Is it? Me freely doing it?

12:20 Wes: Right.

12:20 Mark: I mean, it seems like it's not. We're the kind of creatures that we are. We have the understandings that we have, we have the minds we have. We're products of nature. But at the same time, Kant wanted to sort of cheat and say, well, but as appearances, we're products of nature, but in ourselves, we're. We're free beings. And so Schiller was trying to, like, really drill into that. Like, how does this actually feel when you're encountering an artwork, when you're thinking about just being a civilized individual at all? Right. That you've got the determined parts of you that's almost like your desires.

Classical ancient Greek ethics, you know, you've got the lower part of you, the brass parts of the self or whatever, that are bronze parts that seem like the determined parts. And then you've got reason, whatever it is, that allows you to come along and Assert freedom. And somehow we have to understand ourselves according to this, you know, to be a whole person. We have to understand ourselves as both of those. We don't want to just, on the Platonic model, rise above and identify with pure reason and say, the animal parts of me are my slaves, they are my horses, and I will guide them around.

That's being, you know, barbarian, as Schiller put it. We need to actually have these merge. And so Schelling is telling us how that actually works here, or rather just saying they merge in the work of art. He tells how or why. Exactly.

13:47 Wes: I mean, he goes on to talk here about, you know, the way a work of art can be expounded upon ad infinitum as though it contained an infinity of purposes. That's one of the. The characteristics of good art. I guess that's one of the ways you can say it contains infinity. Whereas if you have something that's really derivative, that just apes another work of art, as he puts it, you get something that's overly conscious. Right. First of all, and it appears as an object. I mean, I think part of what's going on here is we don't simply want the artistic production, the art object, to come across as an object of design, as an object of our reflection.

In order for it to be, you know, an object of intuition for an audience, it should be an object of intuition as well. Which means you need that unconscious element. Right? It has to be its own thing. It has to be individual. Am I just repeating what he's saying, or am I actually explaining anything?

14:49 Mark: When in doubt, keep reading. Besides what he has put into his work with manifest intention, the artist seems instinctively, as it were, to have depicted there in an infinity which no finite understanding is capable of developing to the full to explain what we mean by a single example. So here is the mythology of the Greeks, which undeniably contains an infinite meaning and a symbolism for all ideas, arose among a people, and in a fashion with both, make it impossible to suppose any comprehensive forethought in devising it, or in the harmony whereby everything is united into one great whole. So it is with every true work of art.

15:23 Wes: You know, suppose someone came along and said, all right, I'm going to create a mythology, and here's the God of this, and here's the God of that, and designed it as a system and did that reflectively and consciously. That kind of forethought would ruin it. It would not be powerful as a mythology if it came nearly from consciousness.

15:44 Mark: Like Scientology.

15:46 Wes: Exactly.

15:49 Mark: With Xenu and yeah.

15:52 Wes: And then there's the L. Ron Hubbard book. Right. What's it called?

15:55 Mark: Well, Dianetics doesn't have that, but they

15:57 Wes: made a movie out of the novel with John Travolta in an apparent Battlefield Earth. I think apparently it was like the worst movie ever made. But. So that's what happens.

16:06 Dylan: I thought that was Water World.

16:07 Wes: Okay. That's a competitor. That's what happens. According to Schelling, when you try to do the mythology consciously, you end up with Battlefield Earth, bad science fiction novel.

16:18 Dylan: That's what you end up when you try to do it badly. But it's not like there isn't good mythology that was known to be created by an author. Right. As opposed to the mythology of the ancient past is sort of something that's a telling of something that it's not clear who the author is of it. Exactly. Right. I'm thinking of something like Tolkien. Are there mythologies that would qualify as art that are more robust?

16:44 Mark: Yeah, probably every mythology is ripping off past mythologies. Right. Even whatever the ancient Greeks were doing. It's not like all these stories came from nowhere. It's probably folk tales and it's things that were combined. Like, why do we have different. Two different sun gods? There's Helios, that's actually in the Chariot. There's. And there's Apollo, because those are. Probably came from different places and they got smushed together. You know, I don't find it motivating, Schelling saying that the harmony whereby everything is united into one great whole. Like, I don't think a historian mythology would say that there is a harmony that would unite in one great whole. That in fact the plethora of different sources and conflicting sources. I don't know. I'm undermining his point. Or somehow this is part of his point, that it's better than Tolkien coming up with something on his own.

17:32 Dylan: To me, he's just doing Greek fetishism here. This isn't the only part. All these romantics are Greek fetishists. Yeah.

17:40 Wes: The way this ends, though, I think in section B, I think ties in well to our other reading, because the intuition is the way in which we can comprehend the infinite in the object. In B, he's going to give us a little bit of the psychology of this, where the aesthetic production proceeds from the feeling of an infinite contradiction, to quote him directly. And so that the effect of a good art product is one of tranquility, which he was getting at in the other reading. So that even where there's Pain or intense pain or joy. The outward effect is one of calm.

What does that infinite contradiction? It's mind, body, spirit, matter, that type of contradiction which. And the original contradiction that's created in the absolute through the positing of the other, through the positing of the contingent material world. So the psychology is that we're trying to reunify in a way we're trying to get back to our original oneness. Which sounds like a very. Reminds me of the account in Aristophanes where we're trying to, you know, where love is about merging with our lost other half, finding our other half.

18:52 Mark: Or can we spend just a another five minutes on the concept of intuition to sort of put it, put it to bed maybe as far as romanticism goes, because I remember clearly Ayn Rand talking, you know, in favor of reason against intuition and thinking about the woo way that people talk about intuition of. I just have a good feeling about that. And like that is something that the logic bros of today would find thoroughly repellent. We've talked in different circumstances about even in Carl Jung, who's sort of known as a very woo figure, someone whose ideas are compatible with a lot of mystical and drug induced and whatever.

Even his in coming up with that intuition versus sensory versus the personality test. Well, intuition in that sense is pulling together a broad range of data that you may not have registered consciously. If you're very sensory oriented, then you have to be just like, no, show me the thing right in front of me so I can draw the conclusion based on the thing. Whereas someone who's more intuitive is still relying is just as much as an empiricist, but is just has a different way of putting a lasso around what the data is and is going to be maybe better at gauging an overall situation.

Whereas you know, if you're trying to program a computer to be in a step by step way to like figure out what situation is this and you know, come up with an algorithm, it would have much more difficult a time. So that's one model of intuition to

20:23 Wes: give though the philosophical context for this, right? This begins with Kant, where the intuition is that way of relating to an object which is quote unquote immediate. Kant uses that word, immediate. It's non discursive. So the other way of relating is discursive and conceptual. When we relate things to things conceptually, we're relating to them through universals essentially or through these, through concepts that join a number of different particulars. But the intuition gives us the particular and For Kant, it is the sensuous particular. He rejects the idea that there can be an intellectual intuition, which is why he rejects the idea that there can be metaphysics.

Right? Because if we want to know about Malebranche, right. Malebranche fully embraced intellectual intuition. Kant just turns that into categories inside oneself because we're not allowed to find it outside of us, ourselves through intellectual intuition like space and time. For Malebranche, that's an intellectual intuition of space. For Kant, it's the form of intuition and we intuit particular objects in space and time. The German idealists want to reverse all that and say metaphysics is possible, intellectual intuition is possible, or some sort of intuition.

And they I think, is it in Schlegel or it might just be in Schelling. But if intellectual intuition isn't possible. So for in other words, if we can't get to God or the absolute or the infinite through intellectual intuition, then the art is kind of a back door. So aesthetic intuition saves us. So aesthetic intuition is about an immediate relation to the infinite that is neither discursive nor is it simply like the type of intuition where we grasp something, especially temporal or whatever it is, some other type of intuition, some of other type of immediate grasp.

And I think it has something to do with, you know, again, being aware of that inner productive essence that's producing the thing and making it individual and whatever is unifying all the parts, all of that stuff. But you're getting at a more colloquial kind of understanding of intuition. I think they relate well.

22:29 Mark: Let me ask Dylan, what do you remember about. Because I still feel like I need a little more refreshing on like Malebranche versus Kant, what the intellectual intuition amounts to. Does that make sense to you, Dylan, or.

22:41 Dylan: I don't remember.

22:42 Mark: It's not what we read for today. So this is.

22:44 Dylan: It's okay. I don't remember what distinction Malebranche had from Kant.

22:50 Wes: Well, intellectual intuition is just, you know, this is the way you'd have to grasp God or the soul or anything that's not an empirical object.

22:56 Dylan: I'm remembering the kind of mathematical, of the kind of intuition that Descartes talks about in the Rules for the Guidance of the Mind. Right. Where there is a kind of empirical grounding, but the links that you make between one piece and another is an intuitive link.

23:14 Wes: You're exactly right. The famous Wax example, what we intuit so we don't experience substance, which turns out to be extension. Right. Which is Descartes version of matter.

23:25 Dylan: Yep.

23:26 Wes: Substance is not an empirical object we cannot know it through our senses, but we can know it through intellectual intuition. Yes, that's exactly what Descartes is describing.

23:36 Mark: Right. And Malebranche extended that to we can't know anything really through the senses. Like we couldn't. It's just a bunch of dumb little flashes. And like, to make sense of any of it, you have to connect it to concepts, which is intellectual intuition, I believe at least involves the intellect and I believe even involves its connection. To grasp that an object is finite, in other words, to grasp the individual glass in front of me, I have to have a notion of infinity that contrasts to the finiteness of this object.

24:08 Dylan: It's also how you'd close the gap for someone like Descartes on generating a law. You don't experience the law, just like you don't experience matter. Right. And in contrast to someone like a positivist, which would say, well, I'm going to do a whole bunch of experiments and I'm going to gather a whole bunch of data and then out of that is going to arise the law. And someone who was pointing to intellectual intuition would say, well, that's bullshit because the law doesn't arise out of the data. There's something you've added to it. This is the intellectual intuition that you're going to close the gap.

24:42 Wes: That's a perfect example. Right? So Hume would say we don't have sensory experience of causality. That's the skeptical moment.

24:49 Dylan: We intuit it.

24:50 Wes: Malebranche would say we have an intellectual intuition of causality. Kant would say, no, we don't need intellectual intuition of causality. That's a bridge too far, that's bogus because we imprint causality. We have the category in the mind. So in many cases, intellectual intuition for Kant just gets replaced by categories. Hegel comes back and says, no, we can grasp things in themselves and the categories just turn out to be among them.

25:17 Dylan: You know, Kant does that to dodge the Hume's criticism, right? So he's trying to. She's trying to build a fence. And so in building the fence, he gives, he gives that up so as to give a better foundation from his perspective.

25:30 Wes: It's just this big Jerry rigged system that's attempting to deal with skepticism that in a way looks even more skeptical than the thing that it's trying to deal with.

25:39 Dylan: We would be far from the first or last people to immediately point to the shadow cast by the thing in itself over all of the stuff that Kant is talking about.

25:50 Mark: The ultimate response to the Randian logic, Bro, what I'VE just referred to conception of either I get it through my senses and I can actually know it, or you're just making stuff up. You're just doing tarot card woo woo. Magic is that that relies on a really overly simplistic idea of what experience actually delivers to you. Which is entirely what we got an email recently saying you guys are covering a lot of rationalists. Can you do some more empiricism? Can you please? And was suggesting more Hume in particular. I think that's a great idea.

I've also really wanted to get to Russell, you know, his intro to the Problems of Philosophy book. I think between the two of those things, the sort of Humean and the early 20th century version, both of which are overly simplistic, but at least those guys are very smart and so that they at least, you know, have defenses for being overly simplistic in this way and for ruling out the kinds of things that Malebranche and Kant and these folks are going to allow.

26:52 Dylan: Who's the guy that we recently read contemporary of Russell? Was it Moore that was basically beating the drum of look, the world is pretty straightforward in my experience. That was more nuanced than that as we were reading through it. But really coming down on a realist point of view that the world is

27:15 Mark: directly accessible to us, even ethically. We're not making stuff up. You can just read ethical truths right off.

27:22 Wes: They're onto the same thing as the German idealists, though. The German idealists are realists. Idealism versus materialism. Those are two forms of realism. And they want to say the world is immediately accessible. Kant sounds very similar to Moore. I mean, not Kant, Hegel in some ways where he's going to say, look, skepticism is self limiting. Some of you people are very certain about your big epistemological systems and mediation and this and that, and seem to be less confident about the existence of cats and dogs. Which is kind of absurd when you think about it.

But your skepticism has to be motivated, right? So there are all these common sense for Moore was a. There's a bunch of common sense propositions that are implicated in skepticism. So that at the point where skepticism undermines those propositions, it undermines itself. And Hegel says the same thing. Why not doubt the doubt after a certain point? But I think that gives us some good context for what Schelling is talking about when he talks about intuition.

28:21 Dylan: And it makes sense that we would want to talk about intuition because the whole thing with romantics, as far as I can tell, is this connecting the Infinite to the finite. And that's going to be a bridge too far for any kind of strictly empirical, rational kind of thing. You're going to have to have something that transcends it.

28:42 Seth: Right.

28:42 Mark: I wanted to get another quote out here. So 226. Just returning to what we were talking about last time. The difference between the beautiful and sublime, it is one which occurs only in regard to the object, not in regard to the subject of intuition. Where beauty is present, the infinite contradiction is eliminated in the object itself, whereas when sublimity is present, the conflict is not reconciled in the object itself, but merely uplifted to a point at which it is involuntarily eliminated in the intuition which actually amounts to the same. So it looks like the conflict has been eliminated in the object. Sorry, is it. Is it clear what the conflict is?

29:18 Wes: The conflict between spirit and matter. So. Right. This gets back at the grace thing that we were talking about and the

29:25 Mark: grace that sounds like the beauty in the object itself. I'm looking at this beautiful sculpture. Wow, that is so captures. It just eliminates the conflict between spirit and in matter. Because, like, you've really captured the grace and spirit of the human form or

29:42 Wes: whatever in there, the animating force. Right. There's a heavy element of the organic here which is motivating the German idealist. So the creative productive force underneath the form is made manifest and therefore reveals that matter is not simply this inert Spinozan thing. There's life in it.

29:59 Dylan: I want to ask a question because of the constraint of the beautiful on our passions and a quote from our previous from the plastic piece about focusing on beautiful works of art. And I couldn't help but feeling like the beautiful in this context as a constraint presupposes an understanding of what beautiful is, especially in terms of constraining passions or constraining activity, giving form to activity. If the distinction between a beautifully constrained activity and not beautifully constrained activity is admitted, so it would seem like there are whole things that are raging activity that are in fact ugly.

I don't know how to distinguish them except insofar as you just from beautiful things that are constraining activity. This is where it feels romantic in the conventional sense of the word. I'm romanticizing all of nature and human life or human beings insofar as they manifest the beautiful. And it's not paying attention to all the ways in which things that are intrinsic actions or the forms of people or their activities that are full of passion and just as constrained but aren't beautiful.

31:21 Mark: Well, I mean, this is why I was reading the quote about the sublime here, because I think that would be an example. I don't know if all cases of the sublime were this, but, like, something gets really ugly, but yet its depiction is so beautiful. I think that's going to be one where you're not going to say this picture of somebody of a dead body is just so beautiful, because you've shown how you can make an argument that it's still beautiful, that somehow the material and the spiritual are still combined. But I think more likely it's that it makes you think about death, it makes you think about these overwhelming things.

And so it's not that the psychological discomfort is resolved right there in the image. It's not that it's giving you everything in a pretty little package, but it's that it, as it says here, it's not reconciled in the object itself, but merely uplifted to a point at which it is involuntary, eliminated in the intuition. So by saying involuntarily and by intuition, it's not just like. Well, when you think about it, then you feel better about it. No, it's actually the presentation of the ghastly corpses or whatever gives you this. Kant could just say it gives you this aesthetic distance.

Or, you know, we've had a bunch of examples of how the sublime, we have to stop actually being afraid. We can't just be horrified by the thing, right?

32:37 Wes: We feel superior to it in our rationality. We know that as spiritual beings, we can't actually be hurt by it, right? So the biggest. The big crashing waves or the towering cliff or whatever, which is scary and makes us feel our smallness in relation to nature. But then on the flip side, we realize that as rational beings that can't touch us and we're actually superior to nature. That's the sublime thing, and that's where it's eliminated in intuition. And there's a contradiction, right? This is the content. Yeah.

33:05 Dylan: For.

33:05 Wes: Between pain and. So for Kant, right, the sublime is painful and pleasurable at the same time. There's the fear, and then so the harmony happens in here, in the subject, whereas in beauty, things are nicely harmonized within the object itself. So that's what I think he's saying.

33:20 Mark: So I feel like the Romantics are not going to like the idea of, I'm reasonable, therefore I feel superior. That's a very unromantic thing to say.

33:29 Wes: Remember, the Romantics are all about the rational as well.

33:32 Dylan: What are the Romantics going to say about depraved Act. Right. So you have. When I'm thinking about Raskolnikov, maybe that's an example of a piece of artwork like that. Right. And maybe like cases that are so lurid, you would say that they're somehow, in some ways somehow too factual. Maybe we can just come up with all kinds of terrible, awful situations to depict. It's very easy to get very extreme about it. And so this is where the constraint of passion being constrained by the beautiful that's rendered in art. It seems like it's presuming a particular interpretation of the beautiful. Right. It's morally good, for instance.

34:19 Mark: I guess I'm wanting to pull on the part whole distinction, you know, that we made in part one of this discussion of, you know, the horrible, depraved thing that's being depicted. If you're just getting vicarious thrills out of that, you know, you want to see a slasher movie because you want to see the blood or whatever, that's not going to be artistic appreciation, but it's the way that it fits into the whole presentation. So that was part of, like, why the sublime. A lot of sublime is like something that can't even be depicted at all. It's like the vastness of an abyss.

So it can't be that you're appreciating the beautiful form of the vastness of the abyss, but it is the fact that the abyss is being depicted in a painting, in a poem. Something about the way the abyss ends up being an element, maybe a negative element. But then that gets balanced out in the whole work of art. Or maybe the whole is your situation as a human being contemplating the work of art, if we want to bring that in. But the whole experience ends up being one of, again, sort of beauty and grace. So all this stuff that seems corrupt or is just merely sublime ends up having to be reducible to an experience that you could just say, art is the beautiful.

I think beauty is taken in this very broad sense of everything harmonizes somehow.

35:36 Dylan: This runs right into exactly the Platonic criticism of art, right. Of harmonizing or normalizing depravity. Unless you say that it comes along with allowing you to cathartically, whatever, process it. And then, yeah, I guess it just gets a question of what is the experience of that depravity, for instance, through our doing to you or not.

36:01 Mark: If beauty is just defined is on page 225. My note was. Here is the beauty is the infinite finitely displayed. Well, there's nothing in there that necessarily suggests that beauty is a Furthering of life. I think that was something that came out of August Legal. It does seem like it's kind of amoral. And you'd have to. Then I'm sort of thinking back to 50 how well he completely gets an ethics out of it. And maybe it's just. It's the Kantian cheat. It's that once you realize you're a spirit, then something like the categorical imperative moves in and dictates like, no, only this kind of stuff is good.

It's not just like we're all one. Therefore if I kill you, it's like nothing. It's just like a piece of code in a video game killing another piece of code in a video game. Like you could have a completely. There is a path from a romanticism to utter depravity and nihilism. I guess that's the thing that Nietzsche was worried about. Right.

37:00 Wes: For Schelling, it was the concept of disinterest in the aesthetic is the precursor to the concept of respect and the ethical. Right. So his whole point was that the ethical arises out of the aesthetic. In that sense, the worry is that things go the other way.

37:17 Dylan: Part of that is taking seriously the idea that art leaves a mark. So the extent that art affects you and that that's any way related to the content, how is it that the mark is always a good mark? And this is effectively part of relation to Plato's argument taking that seriously.

37:34 Wes: Bad art might not be but anything that captures the vital force at the center of things, even if it's a representation of something terrible. I think the idea is that that's educative, not in a didactic sense. Right. Schiller and all these guys, I think at some point they don't like didactic art where you're just going to tell people all the good things they should believe. But you're ethically informed through contact with the absolute, the infinite, and through being put in touch with this primal creative force.

38:08 Dylan: Yeah, I guess that's the part that seems somewhat taken for granted. Not that you can't see it, but it feels like there's something else about the way in which you. The framework in which you're experiencing that that is educative.

38:23 Wes: There's explaining all this part.

38:25 Mark: Whole stuff reminds me of and everything harmonizing and reminds me of Leibniz. And so maybe this is the way out that if you are broad minded. Right. This is what Schiller was saying.

38:36 Wes: Right.

38:37 Mark: You need art to get you to not just be fixed on. This is what I Want. What do I need to do to achieve that? But to Wes, you were saying this in terms of the critical distance that you open it. Broadening your mind is not just away from the individual thing you desire right now, but it is to the oneness of everything, the wholeness. And so every sort of bad thing ends up getting justified in harmonized. I mean, we. We had just have the same issues that we had with Leibniz in the first place of like, but then what do you do with the fact that there are some things that are just right in front of us that are very bad and we should do whatever we want to stop that.

Like, Leibniz doesn't lead you to either stop trying to make things better and saying, you know, a fatalism God sets everything up. You know, so if there's something bad that happened, well, I guess it was just there to educate me. So. Right. We had this against fatalism thing that Mozi was arguing against recently, that the exact same thing. These are all going to be problems. I think this is a. We kept talking every time we talked about existentialism, whether in the context of, you know, Nietzsche or no country for Old Men or whatever, like, how do you get ethics out of it?

We had a similar thing out of this Romantic project that we get the wholeness and I'm part of the whole, and everything adjusts to itself. Well, then where is your impetus to be a social reformer and to fight for what's right? Like, these are just going to be things that these types of projects have to grapple with. And I don't know that we read the right thing by Schelling to see what Schelling has to say about that. There's probably stuff about ethics earlier in

40:12 Wes: this text for the existentialists. We did, by the way, just. We did read the right stuff because we read Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism. And the Beauvoirs, the Ethics of Ambiguity, where the existentialists were critiqued a lot on this. And then they have to fall on their swords and say, okay, well, yeah, it's not just any set of values that we will. That has to involve respect for the freedom of the other. It ends up sounding very Kantian.

40:35 Mark: Yeah.

40:36 Wes: So the question mark you're asking is, what do the Romantics do about this?

40:41 Mark: I feel like we ended our Friedrich Schlegel discussion the same way. And I think what I said there is just like, well, he's just assuming that. Right. That Friedrich Schlegel, you're all courtly people that I'm talking to and are not going to be summoned to the way. Even if I write a scandalous book that shows a lot of sex in it, you're taking it in a very aesthetic, high minded way. The non romantic is not going to find that presumption acceptable. Like no, you need a better argument here than just well, we're seeing. Art enables us to see the inside of nature.

And nature is. You could just assume that because we're all good Christians that nature is going to be ultimately good and we'll use Leibniz kind of logic to argue that point. But if you're not inclined in that way, you demand a more robust defense of why does we're all one mean that everybody should act according to ethical rules. It's not obvious. Any final words on Romanticism to put this to bed? I wouldn't mind us since we didn't actually do this with Seth since he had to go because his kids were sick to have a nightcap or something where we get to.

I don't know, maybe we've said everything about the details and there is no overall arc that you guys feel the need to express. But I feel like I never got to actually say in response to all these things that I sort of think it's ridiculous and give some sort of elaboration of of why I think that's the case. And I can't do it now in the last three minutes of our discussion. But I was re listening to the earlier Schelling discussions where I do make a point of like, I see where he's going, but I also think it's kind of silly.

42:23 Wes: Yeah, I mean I'm game. I'm game for another.

42:26 Mark: It's hard to fit things in.

42:27 Wes: I'm always game. Mark is just obsessed with Romanticism.

42:33 Mark: There's a big story here. I would like to get into British Romanticism. I would like to actually do that. Sorry, is it Keats? Beauty is truth. Truth is beauty that you already covered on subtext. Maybe I just. People just need to listen to that subject. I know I did listen to it at some point, but I still couldn't tell you.

42:50 Wes: Listen to the one on Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. Because that poem in a way captures the romantic credo of not just leaning towards the passions and the emotions, but saying we need this fusion, the synthesis between the rational and the passionate. The thing that Nietzsche is going to pick up and do something even more interesting with.

43:10 Mark: Well, you were just saying in the nightcap how you were on subtext, going to discuss the same version of the Odyssey that we spent two hours on here with the translator. So you clearly felt like doing it in this other format is helpful. So I don't know if the reverse goes. The fact that you've dealt with this British Romanticism in subtext, do you feel like there's still, you know, more justice at this group? I don't necessarily want us to read poetry, but maybe a philosopher writing about British Romanticism.

43:42 Wes: Well, Coleridge is actually also a great essayist and writes about this stuff. So we could read some of Coleridge's prose. I would love to do that, actually.

43:50 Mark: But I read something in the preparation. You know, one of the intros to these things of, like, Coleridge being accused of. He was so influenced by Schelling that he, like, just ripped him off, like, unattributed in some of his essays. And so there's like, a big plagiarism Coleridge scandal that we will be in a good.

44:10 Wes: I like it.

44:11 Mark: You know, ultimately, we don't care. We just want to talk about the ideas, but.

44:14 Wes: All right, let's push the schedule out.

44:18 Mark: I'm willing to set this aside. We didn't finish all of ancient Chinese philosophy. We're not going to finish all of this. We're going to move on. Yes. Next time we're going to talk about some philosophy of language, a couple of episodes about Tomasello. Wes, do you want to.

44:33 Wes: Tomasello? Yep. The first will be about whether language is an innate instinct or it's an instinct. Tomasello thinks it's innate, like Chomsky, but he disagrees with Chomsky and Pinker about it being an instinct and about it being about there being a specific universal grammar. So we will try to figure out that debate and then after that. Tomasello has also written about animal cognition because he thinks that language is grounded in particular cognitive capacities. And he thinks a lot about that in chimpanzees versus Humans. So we'll do an animal cognition Tomasello episode as well.

45:08 Mark: Yeah. So this will, I think, fill out some of these issues keep coming up. I know we dealt with in some way in our Langer episodes not that long ago, some version of this, but most of it was calling us, like, you know, we even had a discussion at the time. What are the current philosophers? Well, Tomasello is a current philosopher. So we're going to get to, you know, see something that is scientifically informed up to date. And then unless something changes, we will get to spend some time with Kierkegaard. And maybe a bunch of episodes with Kierkegaard.

We'll have to see what our appetite is, but at least two hey folks, inserting this later, Wes and I did record a part 3 where we go in more depth, line by line through the more difficult parts of the shelling, which is not just a matter of challenging ourselves, but really gets at the philosophic heart of everything that we've been building up to here. You can get that if you have become a supporter via one of the methods listed@partiallyexaminedlife.com support I also want to point you at partiallyexaminedlife.com class where you can get the details on a core text in philosophy class that I will for sure now be teaching this fall.

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46:51 Wes: Good night, Good. Night.