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

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 322, part three. I'm just back here with Wes. We wanted to talk a little bit more, maybe do some close reading of what I called the hard reading, the system of Transcendental idealism. Maybe start page 229 on the relation of art to philosophy.

0:28 Wes: All right.

0:28 Mark: Do you want to read some for us?

0:30 Wes: Sure. Now that we have deduced the nature and character of the art product as completely as was necessary for purposes of the present inquiry, there's nothing more we need do except to set forth the relation which the philosophy of art bears to the whole system of philosophy.

0:45 Mark: Nothing more that we need to do.

0:48 Wes: It's going to be very simple. The whole of philosophy starts, and must start from a principle which qua absolutely identical, is utterly non objective.

0:57 Mark: What does that mean?

0:59 Wes: I think what he's saying is that him and Fichte, they're big on this original identity that comes before the split between subject and objects, and that's the absolute, that's the neutral mono stuff, as I've called it, that gets split up and it's a legacy of Spinozan monism. So when he says non objective, right, it can mean two things. It could mean subjective, and that sounds rather Hegelian, or it could just mean it's neither subject nor object. And I'm not sure that would be more in the line of what I understand of Schelling, but it's unclear to me why he simply just says non objective here.

1:37 Mark: Yeah, I remember for Fichte's project, and this whole text by Schelling is still very much under Fichte's influences, breaking away from him a little bit. But we're talking about the ego, we're talking about the eye, we're starting with the Cartesian starting point and we want to say that the thing that's doing the thinking is identical with the thing that's being thought. So we discussed that as something that was an achievement of philosophy, because the things that are being thought, normally we think of them as objective. And so to actually see that they're really part of the ego, that it's really all one thing, it seems like that should be the ending point, but this is actually the start, the principle, absolutely identical, it must be non objective.

I also remember him, at least Fichte in his letters to Schelling in our Romanticism book, crapping on the Schlegels and their neo Spinozism. So I'm not sure exactly what issue they had with Spinoza, but I think it's that maybe, you know, the issue that they would have with Spinoza is that it doesn't take this project, this phenomenological project, the starting in the first person point of view into account, that it's dogmatic. It's dogmatically saying everything is one, mind and matter are actually one and the same thing. But unless you're coming from this according to Fichte and Schelling from the transcendental standpoint, from that first Cartesian point, then there's no way that you could know that.

There's no way that you could establish that. So even though the result might be something that looks like Spinozism, there has to be something about this start, and I think about the whole method of philosophy, how art would work into it, that has got to be very different than Spinoza.

3:17 Wes: Yeah. No, I like the explanation in terms of Descartes and the object of thinking being the same as the thing that's doing the thinking. And I think we saw in our Schelling episode, there's the idea that the intuition of the self is the thing that creates the self as well. I don't know if you remember that you listened to those recently, right?

3:40 Mark: Yes. That there is. No, I want to say there is no self before one creates it. But then how could. If the creation is a mental process, then there must be a mental going on. Unless you're saying the self as something social, or the self as a recognition of self, but there still has to be mentation going on, which implies, you know, transcendentally something that is doing it.

4:07 Wes: I guess the self just is this process of ascribing a self in thought. I think that's the idea that the self just is this. It's like Kant's apperception, the. I think, right. It's a certain kind of representation. So we do away with the Cartesian move to a mental substance and we say that so. Right. It's not just that there's a substance that has this thinking property and can treat itself as an object, but in fact what the self is, is just that process of representing of a thinking that accompanies its thinking by a representation, I think, and that essentially constitutes the self as much as it thinks it.

4:54 Mark: Second sentence. But now how is this absolutely non objective to be called up to consciousness and understood a thing needful, if it is to the. The condition for understanding the whole of philosophy, that it can be no more apprehended through concepts than it is capable of being set forth by means of them, stands in no need of proof. So obviously the, the non objective can't be conceptual. If you grasp a concept, you're grasping some kind of object. It seems nothing remains, therefore, but for it to be set forth in an. An immediate intuition, though this is itself in turn inconceivable. In other words, inconceivable. It can't be in a concept, not that it can't exist. And since its object is to be something utterly non objective, seems indeed to

5:41 Wes: be self contradictory, it can't be set forth in an immediate intuition because it's non empirical. I think at this point. Right. So intuition is always has that ambiguity between empirical intuition, which is the primary form, and then the intellectual intuition, which Kant denies as possible, and then the aesthetic intuition. But I think in this case, I think he's trying to say that it's not showing up in space and time, because I do think he thinks intuition is the way. Right. Unlike Kant, it turns out not to just be a representation of the.

I think and the self is an inaccessible thing in itself, but because the self just is that process, then we have intuitive access to the process of self creation, to our own intuition in a weird way. Right? He says all that stuff. Listeners go back to our original Schelling episode. It's like we're intuiting the intuiting. So maybe I'm wrong about this, but that's my, my take for right now. We're going to find out more in a second.

6:36 Mark: Well, and if you remember, that's also. It seems like this is Kierkegaard's notion of self, that even though Kierkegaard is not engaging in this Cartesian project, if I remember correctly, it was the dynamic process of labeling the self actually is what the self is. Whereas these guys might be talking about no, no, no, this is only when you're sitting down and doing transcendental philosophy. I believe that Kierkegaard went so far as to say, no, this is actually how it works sort of in action. But you could see why it seems to be self contradictory though, because even intuition, it seems like here is me intuiting something.

There must be an object of my intuition, just like there's an object of my perception. There's an object of whatever. But, but he's going to say, no, no, no, this intuiting is not like perception. I mean, maybe there's other things I could intuit. The two plus two equals four. And I'm thinking about the number two. That's an object. I'm thinking about another number two. I'm thinking about the fact that connects them. Those are all objects even though they're not empirical. But this is going to be a special kind of intuition, I guess. I don't even know if you'd want to call it intuition, but.

7:39 Wes: All right, well, let's find out.

7:41 Mark: Yeah, read the next sentence.

7:42 Wes: But now we're such an intuition in fact to exist, having as its object the absolutely identical in itself, neither subjective nor objective. All right, answers that question. And were we in respect of this intuition, which can only be an intellectual one to appeal to immediate experience, then how in that case could even this intuition be in turn posited objectively? So I think we've covered a lot of this, but he's. Now he's pointing to the fact that suppose we say there is an intellectual intuition of the self or of the process of self making which turns out to be the same thing and it's neither subjective nor objective.

The intuition itself, if we're grasping the self making intuition, right. If intuition has to be turned on itself. Right. We have an intellectual intuition of the intuition of self making that can't be objective. I'm thinking out loud here. I don't know if this is actually going to.

8:40 Mark: I mean it seems like there's going to be an infinite regress, right? Or something like if you think there has to be, but somehow this has to be. No, no, the intuition of itself, it's of the same intuition. It's not a second order intuition because otherwise we just keep backing up. That was a question. How could this intuition in turn be posited objectively? Here's another question. How that it is. This is a clarifying question. That is, can it be established beyond doubt that such an intuition does not rest upon a purely subjective deception if it possesses no objectivity that is universal and acknowledged by all men, at least for math. We can all do the same phenomenology. But I'm the only one, I guess, intuiting my particular self perception. So how do we know that even if you have something comparable, how do we know that this is actually getting at something real?

9:29 Wes: Yeah, and we have the same problem, right, With Kant and the aesthetic. Kant said aesthetic judgments are universal, right? We demand that everyone agree with us that the object is beautiful. There's a matter of fact in a way about whether or not it's beautiful, but it's not objective in the sense that beauty is not a property of the object, even in Kant's limited sense of object as appearance. And Kant will end up saying that's okay, it's universal just because we all have the same cognitive faculties and we're all going to tend to judge beauty in the same way.

So Schelling, I think is about to get out of this problem by saying this is fundamentally an aesthetic phenomenon. We can have a non deceptive and yet non objective intuition of the self by way of the aesthetic. So he'll say this universally acknowledged and altogether incontestable objectivity of intellectual intuition is art itself. For the aesthetic intuition simply is the intellectual intuition become objective. This is evocative of. We're looking at the Romantics in Schlegel. The implication has been that when we have an aesthetic intuition, there's a concrete empirical object before us, but we're getting an immediate sense of the infinite and subject, object identity, or the spiritual, all that stuff.

So instead of needing to go to say, oh, I have an intellectual intuition of God as substance, I can say I have an aesthetic intuition of something within the empirical realm that in some sense reveals divinity or spirituality.

11:09 Mark: Right? And the divinity or spirituality doesn't necessarily have to be itself the object. If we're saying that what's really happening, and I think this was explicit last time when we were saying how the sublime is something where it's not that you're grasping what's awesome about the sublime in the object itself. The object itself could just be something indistinct. It's what it makes you do. It connotes something about the infinite, so it connotes the self consciousness. So I think this is to say when we've been saying, hey look, I see God in that art, what I'm really saying is I'm seeing God in me.

And I think one thing that I wish I had made clear last time, that helped me, you know, when we're talking about grace, so that you've got all these elements in a picture, in a song, in whatever, and if they're just things related to each other, just forms that could be empty and we need to have the special sauce, the mojo, the grace. Well, I think in one of these things, Schelling explicitly said it's an idea that brings these things together, which makes a lot of sense. Like if you're talking about the idea of a face, and in fact it connotes Platonic ideas, right?

What's the ideal face? Well, it's not just a pretty shaped nose. I mean, even calling it a nose connotes the idea of a nose. Like what is its purpose? What is the nose supposed to be on the face? So there has to be Something. And you could generalize that from, you know, these projects of nature to an artist creating something. Right. It's the fact that the artist has this unified vision of what the art is supposed to do that is the central idea that is bringing it together. And I guess if you're a Platonist about ideas, then even if the idea is I want to make this perfect limerick or something like that, then there has to be some way that.

That perfection. The idea of perfection is pointing at, you know, the infinity and the Godhead and something that is involved with the self. I'm finding it hard to actually complete that connection.

13:10 Wes: Yeah, it's making some sense to me. I mean, it. Although we should say use sonnet instead of limerick for perfection. But I think it's, you know, ultimately. Right. In the plastic art essay that we just discussed, it's about getting in touch with this vital, organic. Maybe in some cases, this. This vital creative principle underlying things. So I'm trying to put that together with what you just said about perfection and the creative vision of the artist. So maybe those two things are related.

13:44 Mark: So I'm also having a lot of trouble connecting it back with the stuff we started talking about about the self. Because it seems like this is a. Either a very primordial thing that happens whenever there is self consciousness.

13:56 Wes: Right.

13:56 Mark: That you were talking about Kant's apperception. So just to identify that this sensation I'm having and now this sensation all belong to a me. That apprehension of the transcendental self that. Or maybe this is only something that happens during rarefied times when you sit down and do philosophy and you discover, you achieve the Hegelian accomplishment of finding, oh, the object really is the same as the subject, that that could also be a thing. But neither of those seems to match very well with finding something beautiful in an artwork. Even finding that it's beautiful because it embodies the creative power of nature and discovering the creative power of myself. Like, all that seems quite different from these fundamental things about self consciousness.

14:40 Wes: Yeah. I mean, unless you think of the Hegelian progression where. Right. What does self consciousness ultimately mean for Hegel? And why is it a progression? Really? The highest stage of self consciousness is high culture and philosophy and art. So we start out with more primitive forms of self consciousness, but its fulfillment is actually in culture. So how are you self conscious? What does it mean to be self conscious? Well, it's not just saying I have an I think or something like that. It's going to a play. That's how we do it. We Play the game of self consciousness through art.

And so I think some of this is about finding oneself in the aesthetic object, which is reminiscent of Marx. Right. And the non alienated work products. We're essentially putting ourselves into the thing that we're laboring on and finding ourselves in it as opposed to alienated where, you know, it's a factory. And so we're being deprived in a way of self consciousness in that circumstance of just being on an assembly line. I think we should read the footnote as well. The footnotes give something from the author's copy. I don't know what exactly that means, but it's like a different version and it's always clearer in my experience.

15:55 Mark: Let me throw in one thing because I scrolled up to the table of contents. So we've been referring to this as the Hegelian achievement of self consciousness. But of course it's only Hegelian because he stole it from, or modified it from Schelling.

16:06 Wes: So yeah, this particular text he does the whole stages of consciousness thing. Right.

16:12 Mark: But you're right, I think for Hegel we never actually got to the end of the phenomenology of spirit. But if I remember correctly, the social. And then you're right, once we've got the social, we've got all of history. Then that's spirit knowing itself. Absolutely. Whereas here we go through the sort of philosophy of science and you know stuff about the objective. Then part four of the book is System of practical Philosophy according to the principles of transcendental Idealism. Matter as free activity. Deduction of the concept of history. Infinite progress in history.

History is the unity of freedom and necessity. So that's all part four, part five, which is. Is very short. Essentials of Teleology according to the principles of Transcendental Idealism, Nature and Art. And part six is what we read, art. So it's like Schelling adds this whole extra thing on about teleology in general and art, where Hegel just doesn't seem to think that's necessary. I don't know. Not knowing more about Hegel's philosophy of art, why he would just chop this off?

17:13 Wes: Well, doesn't he get to that in the phenomenology? Doesn't he get to. With absolute self consciousness?

17:19 Mark: Is there an art stage in between politics and self consciousness for Hegel?

17:23 Wes: I don't know. Yeah. Later part of phenomenology is just not. I'm not that strong on it to know exactly. But yeah, no, I think it's worth emphasizing, as you pointed out that the whole idea of self consciousness as the consciousness of the other's consciousness, of me and the whole master slave dynamic and reciprocity, that's an important step, not just going to a play, but anyway. All right, so read the footnote. The proceeding is replaced in the author's copy by the whole of philosophy starts, and must start from a principle which, as the absolute principle is also at the same time the absolutely identical and absolutely simple and identical cannot be grasped or communicated through description nor through concepts at all.

It can only be intuited. Such an intuition is the organ of all philosophy. But this intuition, which is intellectual rather than a sensory one, and has as its objects neither the objective nor the subjective, but the absolutely identical in itself, neither subjective nor objective, is itself merely an internal one which cannot in turn become objective for itself. It can become objective only through a second intuition. This second intuition is the aesthetic. So Mark, you were saying there's no meta intuition. There's no second order intuition.

But it. Now it sounds like they're actually. That's the way out. We have a second. And by the way. Yeah, this is way clear. Right. We were speculating about whether he meant certain things and it's clear that he means. Right, them. I hope he didn't like revise this clear way of putting it into what we got in the published version. That's the feeling I got. Like, he can write clearly, but then he. But anyway, hopefully he. He actually was revising in his own text and made this clear. But so I, I think, yeah, if we do have a meta intuition, so we have a meta intuition of the intellectual intuition, which is an aesthetic intuition.

I think. I don't know. Is that right?

19:15 Mark: It is an aesthetic intuition. So even if I'm not looking at a work of art, but only doing the Kantian transcendental thing, this. So this is like, you know, when Schiller, we were saying, hey, he slipped the aesthetic right in there in identifying any objects at all, just making the aesthetic much more fundamental that I think maybe that we are seeing some version of that here. That.

19:39 Wes: Right.

19:40 Mark: The reason that we can appreciate works of art is because we have this aesthetic sense that we had even before there were any works of art.

19:47 Wes: Right.

19:47 Mark: That we needed, you know, in order to gain self consciousness.

19:51 Wes: Yeah.

19:52 Mark: Unless it's one and the same. In other words, we didn't have any self consciousness at all. And until art came along, which would be a very weird evolution of. Of like Hegel's master enslave thing where we at least need other people to treat us certain ways. And then you say, oh, I guess I must be a person too, because you're talking to me like I'm a person. And I gain this, you know, this extra layer more than just my introspecting about, you know, the foggy nothing that's in my head. I gain some, you know, concrete things. But if art is actually the way that we learn about ourselves, that would be quite interesting.

20:28 Wes: Yeah, that is very interesting. Let's just kind of recapitulate here, because in a way, all of this is about. I mean, as you pointed out, they're trying to make sense of Descartes, I think, and the idea of self awareness. And so what we have at this point is a intellectual intuition of oneself, which is to say an intellectual intuition of the.

20:50 Mark: It has as its object neither the objective nor the subjective, but the absolute identical in itself. Neither subjective or objective is itself merely an internal one which cannot be in turn become objective for itself. It can become objective only through a second intuition. The second intuition is the aesthetic, right?

21:08 Wes: So we above, we have the identical. The identical is the object of an intellectual intuition. So the identity I equals I. And then for that to become an object of my awareness. I think, I think that lower level intuition isn't really anything to us. Until we can do something with it. It's not spatiotemporal, so we can't experience it in that way. I think he's saying in a way we have to experience it. Right? And the intellectual intuition is not enough to do that. And the meta intuition, which is aesthetic, allows us to actually have it in the way that Descartes thinks that we have it, which is that it's an experience for us, for it, for Descartes, right. It just turns out to be. I mean, ultimately it turns out to be that we're a substance and that we can, I think we can experience ourselves as such. But that's the thing that they want to avoid.

21:57 Mark: So I think this might be what we'd called in some other contexts, non-thetic self consciousness, non thematizing. So in other words, you could have the identical, the internal, the merely internal. But that's not full blown self consciousness, that's sort of non positional self consciousness. You know, there is an I accompanying all of these things. And at some level we have to be aware that it is the same as all objects. If you want to take this hard line, transcendental idealist line, but you don't discover that until you do philosophy, or

22:27 Wes: in this case do art here's another way of thinking about it. You know, the big controversy we had in Descartes. Descartes gets to the point where he, you know, I think, therefore I am. But the I is ambiguous. I is ambiguous between just this thinking that says I and between the substance which really is there. And I think he's saying we need not just this identical, the self ascription of identity or whatever, or this representation of an I. We need to know that there's a real I behind that. And that's what aesthetic intuition, I think, does for us.

We need this to be real. For Kant, Kant leaves us in a state of limbo because he will say we don't have an experience of an I as a substance. That's a thing in itself. So it's transcendent, it transcends our experience. It's inaccessible. And we can only speculate about what it is and stuff about morality that follows from it. But all we have is the bare representation, I think, which is kind of empty in a way. And I think the aesthetic is a way to make it not just empty, not just this empty ascription of I to a thought.

23:35 Mark: I was putting it like you could discover what true self consciousness is either through philosophy or. Or through art. What is it to discover it through philosophy that involves some having this intuition, which he's saying is an aesthetic intuition. It can't just be mouthing some theory, mouthing the words. The subjective I is identical to the objective I. Just saying those words, as I'm sure every listener is aware, doesn't mean you understand what it is. You have to feel it. It's a. It's a, you know, this fundamental religious feeling which actually.

So while you were reading that, I pulled up Hegel's Phenomenology table of contents and we were sort of both right. So there is the section on ethics and politics and going through a lot of history. Then the last major section, about 80 pages long, is religion. So natural religion, God as life, God as light, plant and animal, the artificer, I don't know. And then B, religion in the form of art. The abstract work of art, the living work of art, the spiritual work of art, finally the revealed religion. And then 25 pages later, absolute knowing for 15 pages.

So that's how it ends until we actually read that part of the book at some point. Now, I'm curious, but certainly we're not going to do it soon unless we do it as a close reading.

24:56 Wes: Right. Maybe we should do that. That's 15 pages. Yeah.

24:59 Mark: Well, the absolute knowing. I mean, I. I was more thinking the actual art part to.

25:03 Wes: Oh, I see.

25:03 Mark: Pick at this G. Well, and then

25:05 Wes: there are his aesthetic lectures, which are supposed to be good, which I. Like I said, I want to do

25:10 Mark: them, but next page. This whole thing is only three pages long, so it is possible, since we're only halfway in, that we could finish this here. The work of art merely reflects to me what is otherwise not reflected by anything, Namely, that absolutely identical, which has already divided itself even in the self. Hence that which the philosopher allows to be divided even in the primary act of consciousness, which would otherwise be inaccessible to any intuition, comes through the miracle of art to be radiated back from the products thereof.

25:41 Wes: Yep, I think that makes sense in light of our previous discussion. We're finding ourselves in the art object, so absolutely identical, which has already divided itself even in the self. Right. I think for Fichte, the. The. The division comes about with the positing of the objective world outside of ourselves. I think Schelling's thing is that we already have this division in the whole process, in the whole identity process. But anyway, I mean, for there to

26:08 Mark: be any sort of mentation at all, there has to be some division between the thinking and what is being thought about. So even if you want to say somehow it's circular and it's, you know, I'm seeing my own tail. Well, there's still the distinction between the seeing and the tail in there. So that could be that there's this, you know, it's a dynamic picture of an ego that is trying to see its own tail continuously. But that process, you could see that as. It certainly sounds like the dynamic creativity of nature. I don't know, maybe it's more futile than that if you actually think of a dog chasing its own tail.

But maybe, you know, if that's the thing that ultimately creates the objective world. Right. It creates everything. Like, to see this fundamental gear that is flipping around to see the dynamism, you need to be able to, like, reflect it in some way. You need to create a piece of art or some symbolic. I don't know if symbolic is the right word, because symbolic implies. Does it imply arbitrary? You want to somehow represent. So it doesn't have to be an arbitrary representation. It could be onomatopoetic. It could be, I'm writing some music that's very ferocious, and this represents the turmoil.

You know, somehow the thing has to get reflected externally and then we can actually gain some distance from it, make sense of it, ponder about it.

27:32 Wes: Self Consciousness requires something that isn't simply a direct link up between self and self. And for Kant. Right, it was Kant, cognitive stuff. It was, you know, look at these objects are causally related. Experience is experience. So I find myself in the unity of experience. And then Hegel comes along and says, no, you got to find yourself in the unity of the social. And in this case, it's here in the aesthetic, in art. So in a way, we need a mirror, I think, is the idea whether it's objects of cognition or other people or.

28:08 Mark: Yeah, the objects. Yeah, that you put your work into. As you were saying. Marx adds to this, which I think is in. Probably in Hegel too.

28:15 Wes: So this idea of being radiated back from the products thereof. So that's pretty. It is not, however, the first principle of philosophy merely, and the first intuition that philosophy proceeds from which initially become objective through aesthetic production. The same is true of the entire mechanism which philosophy deduces and on which in turn it rests.

28:38 Mark: Yeah, I think that's just what I was saying that you could see this primary whirling ego chasing its tail as this primary mechanism. But art doesn't just let you see that, but the whole product that comes

28:51 Wes: out of that philosophy sets out from an infinite dichotomy of opposed activities. And then the footnote philosophy makes all production of intuition proceed from a separation of activities that were previously not opposed.

29:05 Mark: To what? From a separation of activities that were previously not opposed. What activities?

29:11 Wes: Probably intuition and understanding. But let's. Let's keep going. But the same dichotomy is also the basis of every aesthetic production. And by each individual manifestation of art, it is wholly resolved. So, yeah, what we were seeing in the plastic essay was the resolution of the separation between subject and object. I guess that's the dichotomy. And then footnote two. All right, well, that's. That's not important.

29:38 Mark: So it says the footnote two and. And is wholly resolved is struck out in the author's copy. So actually this does make. It's not his rough draft, it's his subsequent thoughts. So maybe these. These are actually improvements that he later thought. Like, how can I say this in a manner that actually makes sense?

29:55 Wes: Schelling later read his own texts and found them baffling and confusing and had to puzzle in the notes, just like we all do. All right, so the infinite dichotomy of opposed activities, I guess something to do with subject and object. Maybe understanding and intuition are implicated, but the same dichotomy in the aesthetic production.

30:17 Mark: Maybe the activities are not necessarily the activities of a single mind, but just opposed activity in general. In other words, opposition, Heraclitean opposition, oppositionality. That ultimately. Right, we said that the artworks, they present these figures of strife, these individual things, but then they all in the work itself, the whole idea, all these contradictories are resolved, you know, very much in the way that thesis, synthesis, antithesis, antithesis. Got everything in there, you know, Sorry, Synthesis has got everything in there.

30:50 Wes: That's like the resolution in Schiller of the material drive associated with the passions, right? And the formal drive associated with rationality and the play drive. So, yeah, these two sides of us, and we can think about it in various ways, get resolved in the art object.

31:07 Mark: Now, what is this wonderful power whereby in productive intuition, so the philosopher claims, an infinite opposition is removed. So far we have not been able to render this mechanism entirely intelligible, since it is only the power of art which. Which can unveil it completely. Wow, this sounds like the end of Wittgenstein's Tractatus or something like. I know I've been saying all this stuff, but you know, the important stuff, it can't even be said. This productive power is the same whereby art also achieves the impossible, namely to resolve an infinite opposition in a finite product. It is the poetic gift which in its primary potentiality constitutes the primordial intuition. And conversely, what we speak of as the poetic gift is merely productive intuition reiterated to its highest power, replaced in

31:52 Wes: the author's copy by that productive power whereby the object arises is likewise the source from which an object also springs forth to art, save only that in the first case the activity is dull and limited, while in the latter it is clear and boundless. The poetic gift, regarded in its primary potentiality, is the soul's most primitive capacity for production, insofar as the latter declares itself in finite and actual things. And conversely, that's where they're going to leave off, right?

32:25 Mark: Is what we speak of. The poetic gift is merely the productive intuition reiterated to its highest power.

32:30 Wes: Yeah. So what we're doing with the aesthetic is it's an extension of this fundamental intuition involved in self consciousness. Mark, as I think you had said

32:40 Mark: before, only for an idealist would intuition be productive. Intuition is usually getting at something. It doesn't make things.

32:48 Wes: But if it's passive, this is the way that Kant defines in the Critique of Pure Reason. This is the passive thing. The understanding is creative and spontaneous. The intuition is the thing where we get, you know, ultimately it's how we get sensations. For instance, the given or it's the mechanism of the given.

33:04 Mark: So just thinking, I mean, is that primarily what we're. Productive intuition. Even just having any thought at all, it seems like that is producing some complexity in the self, producing an object within the subject that even though it's really still part of the subject, but that we can call an object and we can think about. And so what is art more than taking your thoughts and putting them on paper, putting them in a song, whatever, making them concrete in some way, so they're much more vivid than your. Just your thoughts, which sort of drift off in every which way as soon as they come out. You know, that's the whole purpose of language itself is like, we're going to nail this down. I know it's not exactly what you were thinking, but just translate somehow the thinking into the words. And then the words can be used for any number of purposes.

33:52 Wes: I mean, I think when he says a poetic gift constitutes the primordial intuition. The primordial intuition is the one of identity despite separation into subject and object, into rationality and passions, all of those different things.

34:09 Mark: Sorry. It's a second order. One that grasps the identity. Or it's the first order identity itself.

34:15 Wes: It's a second order, second order. Well, anyway, let's not worry about it

34:20 Mark: because my whole like thing chasing its own tail forgot about the second intuition.

34:25 Wes: Yeah. It is one in the same capacity that is active in both.

34:29 Mark: Right. Art and the primary thing. Yep.

34:32 Wes: Yeah. The only one whereby we are able to think and couple together even what is contradictory. And its name is imagination. Hence that which appears to us outside the sphere of consciousness as real and that which appears within it as ideal or as the world of art are also products of one and the same activity.

34:52 Mark: I mean, that's pretty crazy to say what I was just describing as like the productive capacity is just coming up with any thought at all that sounds like imagination. But he's saying actually imagination, if you're a transcendental idealist, is one in the same as perceiving the book in front of you. Because it's really just you coming up with it. There still has to be some difference, right? That.

35:12 Wes: Yeah, there's creative. I'm trying to puzzle through imagination here because in Kant, right, it's another faculty in a way, or. And it's the thing that unites the understanding and the intuition. Imagination synthesizes the manifold within intuition and makes it amenable to concepts. Right. Before we can start putting things under concepts, they have to be things. They have to be Synthesized. They have to be synthesized across time. Right. This is kind of. It's very similar to Husserlian phenomenology, where the manifold. Right. Different angles on a particular object that has to be put together into an intentional object. And the imagination plays a role. So I'm not sure if that's what he's thinking of.

35:55 Mark: Well, but it sounds like then that Schiller was not original in saying that imagination has to come, or rather the artistic sense. If you're saying imagination and the artistic sense are one and the same thing, that. That has to come before you even have conceptualization. It sounds like that was right there in what you just said about Kant. You need an imagination before you can actually loop things into concepts. Right. Because when I'm looking at a particular hand, I have to be able to imagine how it relates to other hands. And just, you know, the notion of

36:25 Wes: hand is not just in the back of the hand, Right.

36:28 Mark: Yep.

36:28 Wes: Looking at the palm, the back is in your imagination, but it's. Which is critical.

36:33 Mark: The world of your imagination. You can see that objects have the other side of them. Oh, that's awesome. Thanks for that.

36:39 Wes: Yeah. Very creative. So, but then there is the creative imagination, where you're just sticking stuff together. Right. You're doing a collage of stuff that you find and experience, and that's how you get something creative and new. So I'm not sure which exactly he's talking about. Hence, that which appears to us outside the sphere of consciousness is real. Okay. Objects within it, ideal in the world of art, are also products of one of the same activities, the thing that's giving us physical objects in the world, which, for Kant. Right. Is all of these various activities of, you know, faculties at work. Intuition, understanding, all that. The constructive activities. That same constructive activity is the one which gives us the world of art. How is that true?

37:30 Mark: Maybe just read on. But this very fact that where the conditions of emergence are otherwise entirely similar, the one takes its origin from outside consciousness, the other from within, it constitutes the eternal difference between them which can never be removed. Gee, I sure wish we'd read that sentence.

37:48 Wes: So what he's saying is, you know, if we're talking about the construction of objects, the origin is outside the consciousness in the sense. The data that gives us the manifold comes from the outside. And then we synthesize it and make our objects. But if we're doing the aesthetic, that's not what's happening. We're not just having an experience. Right. The material is coming from the inside. Right. We're not relying on a manifold from the outside.

38:12 Mark: And I don't know if he's breaking. He's saying, actually, I'm not a transcendental idealist after all, because there can be things that come in from outside consciousness, or whether outside and inside are both terms within consciousness.

38:25 Wes: One of the things that Kant has been criticized for, right, Is the thing in itself, you know, in the time in between him and the. And the German idealist, the other idealists. And part of the problem is the thing in itself is just the principle of mind, a mind independent reality. It's playing the role that God has played and Berkeley and Leibniz and these other systems, and even Descartes, right? Where Descartes has to kind of deduce God using the. Ontological argument so he can guarantee external reality. You need some principle of mind independence.

That's why Kant doesn't think he can get rid of the thing in itself. The data just can't be random noise, right? It's great that you can have intuition, do space and time for you and the understanding, do causality and all that, but where does the data come from, right? There is such a thing as contingency. The cat is on the mat. It's not. That doesn't come from inside us. Unless you're Fichte, right? Fichte seems to think that, you know, at least the. The super subject got. You know. So if you're identifying the self with the super subject, God, then yeah, if God is producing contingency, then fine, you can say in a way that contingency comes from the inside in that sense.

But for Kant, it's gotta come from the outside. And one of the big problems with Kant is that to say that it's data coming from the outside is also to say that it's structured, right? And the big puzzle was like, well, structure can't come from the outside because we don't get that through the senses and the mind has to impose it. But it's kind of crazy to say that we could even have data without structure. Anyway, this is kind of. It's not exactly what all these guys are saying about the thing in itself, but it's in the same. The criticism that I'm just making, but it's in the same territory.

And even this idea, right, that the thing in itself could cause something in consciousness when causality is supposed to be merely in consciousness. So, Mark, the question that you're raising, that you just raised is one of the things that was basically one of the criticisms.

40:18 Mark: All right, let me Take on this long paragraph. We'll see how much of it we can read in one go here. To be sure, then, the real world evolves entirely from the same original opposition. As must also give rise to the world of art, which has equally to be viewed as one great whole. And which in all its individual products, depicts only the one infinite. I think we've all covered that. But outside consciousness, this opposition is only infinite. In as much as an infinity is exhibited by the objective world as a whole. And never by any individual object.

Whereas for art, this opposition is an infinite one in regard to every single object. And infinity is exhibited in every one of its products. That's at least very provocative. I've referred to, you know, just the fact of infinite smallness. That, yes, in every finite object there are many parts. But that seems like that's in the external world too. So he must mean something different than merely. So there's have to be something that there's an infinity in this statue of somebody's head that I'm looking at that's different than the kind of infinity that's in.

Well, you know, the fact that space and time seem to stretch out to infinity. For if aesthetic production proceeds from freedom. And if it is precisely for freedom that this opposition of conscious and unconscious activities is an absolute one, there is, properly speaking, but one absolute work of art. Which may indeed exist and in altogether different versions, yet is still only one, even though it should not yet exist in its most ultimate form.

41:47 Wes: All right, that's puzzling. Opposition between conscious and unconscious. The unconscious is the positing of the objective world, I think. Yes. And the conscious is the comprehension of it. The unconscious creates it. And then we come around.

42:00 Mark: Well, or maybe the conscious is that this is actually the distinction between imagination and perception. That when you perceive or even think a mathematical truth or something, then it's still you doing it, but you're doing it unconsciously. You're not aware that it's your own freedom, your spontaneity that's creating it. It seems like it's being limited by the data coming in. The objective thing. Like that's just what objectivity is. Whereas the conscious is the free play of the imagination. We know that that's free.

42:31 Wes: So the idea, okay, so subject production from freedom, precisely for freedom. That this opposition is an absolute, absolute one. I mean, freedom, the objective world. Right. We know this conflict, Right. That is preoccupying them between determinism, the objective world and the possibility of freedom.

42:47 Mark: Yeah. For freedom, it seems absolutely. I can't change 2 plus 2 equals 4. I can't change that. This is a book in front of me. That just seems like a limit to my freedom.

42:56 Wes: Yeah. And also. Yeah. I can't make decisions really. I can't really have free will because I'm just another one of these objects. But there is properly one absolute work of art. Why is there only one absolute work of art? Strictly speaking, it's only in the. I mean, I think he's thinking the whole universe, right? So particular works of art are derivatively such. But we find the true infinity only in the whole, or something like that. I'm not sure. So let's read on.

43:25 Mark: For if aesthetic production proceeds from freedom and is for freedom that the. The opposition is an absolute one, there's properly speaking, but one absolute work of art. How do those three things fit together? I mean, because there's only one freedom. I'm not really sure. I mean, if you say there's only one ultimate point of agency. Right. It's only. We could easily just turn this whole thing theological, right? There's only one God. Artworks are revealing us some aspect of God, revealing the aspect of God within ourselves. Of course, there's only one super, you know, oversoul, that is the godhood within us.

There's only one oversoul, that is the will within the universe. And those are all one and the same thing. But what does that have to do with freedom? And that freedom somehow shows us that there's. This oneness exists. Like it seems like freedom shows us that this oneness doesn't exist. Right. Because it's the limits of our freedom. I can do certain things with my mind. I can come up with ideas. I can't do things like that with the objective world.

44:24 Wes: I mean, the opposition is resolved, which is a good thing for freedom. Yeah, no, but I mean, I think your explanation is good. You know, there's one infinite, there's one God, and we've. So in that sense, you could say there's only one work of art. It can be no objection to this view that if so, the very liberal use now made of the predicate work of art will no longer do nothing. Is a work of art which does not exhibit an infinite, either directly or at least by reflection. Are we to call works of art. For example, even such compositions as by nature depict only the individual and subjective.

In that case, we shall have to bestow this title also upon every epigram which preserves merely a momentary sensation or current impression. Though indeed the great masters who have practiced in such genres Were seeking to bring forth objectivity itself only through the totality of their creations. And use them simply as a means to depict a whole infinite life. And to project it back from a many faceted mirror. So you want something in a way that reflects the whole. Right. If it's going to reflect the infinite. If you're doing a still life, you know, an apple, let's say.

It can't just be about the apple. His example of the epigram. Right. Just like some small little thing, it sounds like that can't really do the job. You would need an epic. Maybe. It can't just be the preservation of a momentary sensation or current impression. There has to be enough there to get at the infinite.

45:51 Mark: I know. We only have basically one page and a little more. Let's just see if we can. Sure, in 10 minutes how much we can get there. If aesthetic intuition. So this is number two. The whole. The whole thing proceeding was number one. If aesthetic intuition is merely transcendental intuition become objective. It is self evident that art is at once the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy which ever and again continues to speak to us. What philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing and its original identity with the conscious.

46:25 Wes: Right. And this unconscious element, as we've seen in his essay on the Plastic Arts and in Schlegel, they associate that with inspiration. Art is paramount to the philosopher precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which, in nature and history is ren asunder. And in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart. The view of nature which the philosopher frames artificially, is for art the original and natural one. What we speak of as nature is a poem lying pent in a mysterious and wonderful script.

Yet the riddle could reveal itself were we to recognize in it the odyssey of the spirit which, marvelously deluded, seeks itself, and in seeking, flies from itself. For through the world of sense there glimmers, as if through words, the meaning, as if through dissolving mists, the land of fantasy of which we are in search. Each splendid painting owes, as it were, its genesis to a removal of the invisible barrier dividing the real from the ideal world, and is no more than the gateway through which come forth completely the shapes and scenes of that world of fantasy which gleams but imperfectly through the real.

47:44 Mark: What a fricking Platonist. I mean that, like I think, everything you've read so far at Least should very much jive if you were listening to our Friedrich Schlegel episode. If you were listening to the august Schlegel episode, Shining but imperfectly through the real. Yeah, keep going.

48:01 Wes: Nature to the artist is nothing more than it is to the philosopher, being simply the ideal world appearing under permanent restrictions, or merely the imperfect reflection of a world existing not outside him, but within. So we're finding the infinite and the subject within the object with the aesthetic. But now what may be the source of this kinship of philosophy and art, despite the opposition between them, is a question already sufficiently answered. And what has gone before so. Right. The philosopher is looking for the subject in a way. Art allows us to actually do that. We can theorize as much as we want about the subject, but we can't get it in the same visceral sense that we get it in art through theorizing.

48:45 Mark: To the last paragraph on the page, the second sentence. Philosophy was born and nourished by poetry in the infancy of knowledge, and with it all those sciences it is guided toward perfection. He may thus expect them on completion to flow back like so many individual streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they took their source. Right. So we needed imagination and poetry to get all the intellectual stuff going. And this, some of the stuff that I just skipped was a recapitulation of what knowledge is, is going out and coming back. And, you know, that should sound very familiar from Hegel.

49:19 Wes: It sounds like he's saying that philosophy will become actually more poetic, which it kind of does in Nietzsche and in continental philosophy.

49:27 Mark: Yeah, no, that's. So that's exactly. I think this is a great point to end on that this is the romantic moment, is to basically say what Nietzsche was saying with the gay science that we need to, we can no longer be just cutting things up into abstract systems. I think even the excesses of the metaphysicians that somebody like Hume wants to chop down is maybe because they are too much individuals imaginations that it's sort of just figuring out. You know, if you think about Leibniz's weird thought experiments of like, why he came up with the Monad, why he came up with the best possible world, that it's just that idea of possible worlds in the first place, that these are all intellect run amok.

There needs to be something that connects to what feels very real to us. Right. The whole point of why Voltaire and Candide's objection to Leibnizian philosophy through the character Pangloss was so obvious is because it just doesn't feel real to us, you know, that something must have gone very wrong if you say that all the people dying of disease, that that's actually the best possible world.

50:46 Wes: Hmm.

50:46 Mark: I don't think you need the pretentious edifice of romantic philosophy and wanting to have there only be one true truth, only one source of the work of art, only one thing that all philosophy and there's really only one insight. It's the same as Platonism that, you know, you have individual insights about individual things getting at the perfection of them, you know. So I understand what a chair is or what any other tool or what a human face is by understanding its excellence. But ultimately these things still drive back to some singular right, the form of the good, the form of the one, you know.

So I don't see it as ultimately justified by saying that you have to be a monist for any of what I just said about Leibniz to work. Like, I don't think Voltaire was a monist. You know, but you could find it intuitively implausible philosophy that is too abstract. And maybe that's some of the stuff that Nietzsche is complaining about is that scientists or philosophers who say, oh, we just search for truth, search for truth and that are not self reflective about where that search for truth comes from, how it could have its root in the instincts.

Right. His whole point in the Truth and Lie essay and other things. There's insight to be had over and beyond what the logic bros would the church of reason would have you search for. And so romanticism is one but very extreme systematic objection to that sort of rationalism.

52:13 Wes: Yep.

52:13 Mark: Do you have any closing to wrap up your thoughts on this?

52:18 Wes: Ditto. It sounds right. No closing.

52:23 Mark: All right. No general observation on the whole system for. For Schelling. Maybe someday if enough people beg us, we'll go back and do some more Schelling, whether in our close readings or in Pel proper. Thanks Wes, for taking one more crack at this.

52:40 Wes: Thank you.

52:41 Mark: Bye.