Episode 115: Schopenhauer on Music with Guest Jonathan Segel

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 115 is something like what is music really? And we read Arthur Schopenhauer's the World as will and Representation, Volume 1, Portions of Book 3, first published in 1818, with a couple of chapters from Rolling 3, published in 1844. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Lintonmeyer speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:43 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:46 Jonathan: This is Jonathan Sagal. I'm in Stockholm, Sweden.

0:50 Mark: I'm sure the biggest initial surprise is that that is the in fact correct pronunciation of your last name. I only recently learned that my dad,

0:57 Jonathan: coming from New York always said it Rhy Bagel.

1:00 Mark: That makes sense. So Jonathan was and is a member of Camper van Beethoven, one of my favorite indie bands, and then has done a lot of solo stuff and artsy improvisational compositions working with Fred Frith and other people who our listeners have never heard of. So what else? What do you want to plug before you even get started?

1:19 Jonathan: I don't know. I do a lot of my own music, but I do all sorts of different kinds of music, from rock music to the improv world and back again. Oh, and I write chamber music, you know.

1:27 Mark: Alright, so look him up on Spotify or whatever. S, E, G, E, L. Jonathan Segal spelled with E's. All right, so let's get into this. So we talked about Schogenhauer last time, but this is supposed to be a wholly different way of approaching a different section of the same book. Last time we read the entirety of book two and we're just really trying to figure out what he was actually saying. For the most part that the complexities, once you start saying that the world is just different manifestations of an underlying single will and what that actually means for the stuff that we are looking at from day to day gets complicated. And so we're relying a little bit. We hope folks who are tuning into this one will maybe go back and listen to that one first just so we don't have to re explain all this stuff about the different levels of objectification of the will, right? From the physical things that just exert gravity and impenetrability at the bottom to the higher clear manifestations which are us, of course. Right? Anything with a self organized, self motivating proposive engine within it, seemingly. Book three, we switch to talking about aesthetics, and Jonathan is our first official rock star guest. So we're going to focus on. Music is actually the last section in there, section 52. But because he presents music as well, music is the one that's different from all the other arts. Then we kind of have to go through all the other arts, or at least in summary, we have to get there for that to make sense at all. So the sections I had picked out, at least, though I'm sure individuals among us may have read wider than this was within book three. Well, last time we actually already covered a couple of the ones at the beginning, the sections about Platonic forms.

3:06 Wes: There's the metaphysical level, where the particular things of the world, which equal representations for Schopenhauer, are objectifications of the will. And they have grades all the way from what he calls inorganic nature, just mere unliving matter, all the way up to human beings, who are the highest grades of objectification. And standing in between them are the Platonic ideas, which are sort of like the templates for individuals. But in art, we are getting at. The artist is trying to evoke these Platonic ideas, whether it's a particular poem or piece of. Well, music is different actually. But for most of the arts, you're actually trying to, through individual representations, evoke these Platonic ideas.

3:47 Mark: So that's. That was the very beginning. Sections 31 through 33 or so section 34 is where we're going to start today, which gives a picture of what it's like to experience the beautiful. Jumping ahead to sections 38 to 39, which give maybe a more succinct theory of what the beautiful is and how that's different from the sublime. Section 40, right after that, where he warns us against the charming as opposed to the beautiful. Jumping ahead to section 45, where he discusses human beauty in particular, and then 51 and 52, I think it may be the bulk of what we focus on. 52 is the one actually on music. 51 is on poetry and literature and tragedy. So, of course, for folks like Jonathan, for folks like me that write songs, then music is just as much concerned with the words as anything else. Even though Schopenhauer ultimately is going to say, like Kant, that that's a bastardization, that you're mixing things, something that's very shallow, with music, which is deep, which is a reflection of the will directly.

4:44 Wes: So where does he say that exactly? Does he say that?

4:48 Mark: Well, when we get to 51, here I mean, it's not a matter that anything that's literary, anything that has words in it is cheap.

4:55 Wes: He's just saying music is more. I didn't see him maybe in the charm section when we get to that, but we can leave that.

5:01 Jonathan: He did talk a little bit about how there are only certain composers that were really able to put together the lyrical with the musical to make it so great as to not be a miniature representation of something and actually transcend whatever he was trying to say to make it universal.

5:19 Mark: Right.

5:19 Dylan: And lyric poetry, of course, is the lowest form of poetry.

5:22 Jonathan: Right.

5:24 Mark: Improvisational anyway. So there's a lot of interesting stuff raised here about improvisation and structure. And is music really so different than these other things in that it's non representational. These other things are representational. That's the uncontroversial point. But of course, given his metaphysic, that becomes much more important than it might be for other folks. Then we tacked on a couple. These volume three sections are really just commentaries. Years later on the original book. The one that Wes picked out that was really interesting was called the Inner Nature of Art. Just a few pages. And then there's one that I just kind of discovered today that's a few

5:56 Wes: chapters after that, 30 minutes before the book. No, I didn't get to that Called

6:01 Mark: on the Metaphysics of Music.

6:02 Jonathan: Which is funny, actually. I think it's so hierarchical and it's so almost one for one symbolism of like what the parts of music are supposed to represent. It's very funny, I thought.

6:13 Mark: And a lot of that's in section 52 proper from this as well. Just that the basso represents the lowest forms of objectification of the will of the movement of the great volcanoes and tectonic plates.

6:25 Jonathan: He ascribes physical meanings to all of these things, like the base is the earth and the tenor is the world of vegetation.

6:34 Dylan: It's like the Timaeus of music.

6:36 Wes: The melody is man.

6:37 Jonathan: Yeah, melody is man. Exactly.

6:40 Mark: Which in turn shows what is okay to do in music and what is not. Like you can't have a fast moving bass in music. That is a sin.

6:47 Wes: Yeah.

6:48 Mark: Like in fact, you can't have a bass that goes up just one step unless there are inversions involved, of course. You can't have 1, 4, 5. I guess it has to move 1, 4, 6. Yeah.

6:59 Speaker: 1.

7:00 Mark: I remember taking music theory classes where we would learn about voice leading. And it's all based on four tone harmony and exactly what you were allowed and not allowed to do in that and that seems to be something that was invented with Bach or before and.

7:14 Jonathan: Yes, exactly.

7:15 Mark: This guy's writing in the early 19th century, for the most part, although he never changes his mind by the time we get to the mid 19th century. But still, we are pre Stravinsky. We are pre the burst of modern music.

7:25 Jonathan: Yeah. If we're going to discuss, like, where he's coming from music, you know, when he started writing this. What was it? 1815, 1820. And so Beethoven was still alive and Schubert was still alive. They were about to die, essentially, in the 1820s. So the tonal language was just getting stretched out a little bit at that time.

7:44 Wes: When does Wagner come on the scene? That's in 1860s, say, 1860s. Yeah. So that's.

7:50 Dylan: Yeah, that's Nietzsche time, right?

7:52 Jonathan: Yeah.

7:52 Wes: I mean, at that point, we'll see some of this stretching out of the tonal possibilities and a greater emphasis. Right. On dissonance and the things, you know, which Schopenhauer talks about a little bit because of Nietzsche. I associate Schopenhauer with German Romanticism because

8:07 Jonathan: Nietzsche took on the world as, well, idea or the will. Yeah.

8:11 Mark: Well, he was, in his early work, extremely influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, and he saw those guys as doing kind of the same thing. And you could see somebody like Wagner reading Schopenhauer and though not paying attention to the exact. Like, here's what you can do and not do in terms of voice leading until you have a bass that moves. But taking seriously this very romantic image, frankly, of music as representing the soul of the earth itself.

8:35 Speaker: Yeah.

8:35 Jonathan: And how it's. Music is the representation of will itself rather than being a representation of anything else.

8:41 Mark: Yeah. A representation of a representation is what.

8:44 Jonathan: Yeah, representation of a representation. Exactly.

8:46 Wes: Well, he calls it a copy. Does he call it a representation in your translation? Because it's not a representation in the typical sense. Right. Or is it.

8:54 Jonathan: No, we're sort of getting ahead of ourselves here.

8:57 Wes: Yeah, we are.

8:57 Mark: That's all right. As far as I'm concerned, we can start with music and work backward.

9:01 Jonathan: He says music stands alone. Right. In it, we do not recognize the copy or repetition of any idea. And that would be the Platonic idea of existence in the world.

9:11 Mark: Is it idea with a capital I or idea?

9:14 Jonathan: The idea. Yeah.

9:16 Dylan: Isn't that true of all art? Right. I mean, music is maybe quintessential in it.

9:21 Wes: Well, no, he distinguishes it from other arts in the sense that other arts, they're mimetic and they are imitating the phenomena. They're imitating things in the world which are the same as representations in order to evoke the Platonic ideas. But for Schopenhauer, the music is a direct copy of the will. It doesn't have to go through those. It's not mediated by all that other stuff.

9:45 Dylan: So you have the advantage of both having the feeling of the Platonic idea evoked as you would with other art, but also having it be a direct conduit rather than a conduit through a

9:55 Jonathan: representation through Plato's world of forms.

9:57 Mark: Yeah, well, and so that adds an extra level there as well, that ordinary representation. So if you draw a picture or write a story about a person, then the work is representing the individual. The individual in turn is bringing to mind in some way, if it's a really good artistic representation of it, the Platonic form of that thing. So in other words, like the essence of humanity itself, you have a particularly beautiful. The Mona Lisa or something that's just capturing. Although frankly, she's a really weird, atypical looking person and that's why she's interested.

10:29 Wes: Yeah, but it doesn't have to be typical in order to get you, you know, because the Platonic idea, an artist isn't necessarily representing the. Well, I guess the artist does in a sense want to get you to the Platonic idea of human being. Right. According to Schopenhauer.

10:44 Mark: Yeah. There is some perfection with human beings. And then he goes farther, as we discussed a little last time, that while with an animal, there's just the most awesome type, there's a form for that type of animal. It's something like the Platonic form, where if you draw a jaguar really well, then you're getting the essence of jaguar. And with human beings, well, there is the essence of human being as well. But then there's also within the individual there's something akin to the Platonic form that is the intelligible character. So in addition to saying, wow, that is really just the quintessential human being you've drawn there, you could also say you've really captured George Clooney's visage there in an awesome way, that he's pretty awesome, but you've made it even. So there's something even on the individual level that is outside of space and time.

11:30 Wes: Yeah, there is a Platonic idea for Mark, there's Markness. So whereas an animal, the best you can do is to evoke the species. For human beings, there's an idea for that individual.

11:40 Mark: And then beyond that, all these Platonic forms are just manifestations of representations of something. They're still representations because they're still things that we are in touch with. They become representations because we're contemplating them. Right. So at least through this special kind of experience, we're getting past individuals and contemplating the universal. But that's still as contemplated as. Therefore an object is not will itself, it is the manifestation of the will. Which I guess we don't want to say that any of this stuff represents the will.

12:08 Jonathan: Exactly.

12:08 Mark: That's the wrong word. Well, maybe it is. I mean, the world as will and representation. The whole point is all this stuff is representing the thing that it's ultimately a manifestation of. At least when we look at it, then we're looking at a representation.

12:20 Dylan: I guess it evokes a connection to the will directly in a way that the fourfold.

12:28 Mark: The fourfold root of principle. Yes, Whatever causality, our everyday experience. That's his long winded way of saying that.

12:36 Dylan: Yes, but it's through art that you make that connection, even if it's through a representation, as opposed to through reason and causality. You can't even through representation get anything but that surface. So this is the difference between art and science. For him, all of science participates in the causality and reason. And you can only know the world through this mediated form, through these objects and causality. But through art, you can touch the form itself, even though it's mediated through a representation. The experience that it evokes in you can be a direct experience of the will. That seemed to be the whole difference.

13:12 Wes: Yeah, I think, Dylan, you're right to get at the non representational experience part of this. Right. Because he does call it knowledge. He calls it knowledge and contemplation and things like that. But ultimately the knowledge we have of representations, for example, scientific knowledge, is a much different type of knowledge than aesthetic experience. Right. So Platonic ideas are not really representations, even though there's an analogy in a way. But our experience of them is contemplative. It's non representational or intuitive is another word that we could use.

13:43 Jonathan: Yeah, because all that you could actually study of the Platonic ideal is some representation of it in the physical universe.

13:48 Wes: Exactly.

13:49 Dylan: I just found it very interesting. He makes this direct comparison between the poet and the mathematician in the sense of their link to the a priori. So the mathematician here is like Galileo, who in writing down his equations, gets to the form of force there, and the poet, and this is in my version, page 47 of section 51, he says the poet is like the mathematician who constructs these ratios, a priori in pure intuition or perception and expresses them not as they actually are drawn in the drawn figure, but as they are in the idea that the drawing is supposed to render perceptible. And he's contrasting here the historian with essentially the engineer. So you have a historian and an engineer are sort of rooted in the actual events of the world and the universe and they look learn by causality, their account is through language of causality, whereas the poet and the mathematician get to the true form of the world. And I found it interesting that he made that link as well, but he doesn't spend much time with the mathematician part.

14:51 Mark: So just to reiterate the thesis then about music is that while all these things in some way, by getting at the form, get us close to the will, music is supposed to be even more direct, that in that it's non representational, there's no Platonic form for a major chord. You could ask why not? But it seems just as random as all these other things that he's saying are Platonic forms. But that's the thesis. I think for us to really get a handle on that we probably should backtrack to 34 and talk about the experience of art in the first place and then move back up to this point. But before we do that, just so let's go around if we want. So Jonathan, I'm especially interested, had you read any of this kind of stuff before in your schooling?

15:29 Jonathan: Yeah, but again, this was 30 years ago or something that I've read most of these texts. I don't remember specifically having read the aesthetics part at all.

15:38 Mark: Okay, so yeah, I mean this is one of when we're looking for big time philosophers that talk about music. Of course, if you get in the 20th century, then you get lots of people talking about many things, but they're not necessarily names like Schopenhauer that would spring to mind as the geniuses of philosophy. And we looked at Plato talking about this kind of stuff and he's mostly focused on rhetoric and music is only a little tiny piece of it. So Schopenhauer's actually got one of the most famous music centric theories, I guess the most influential in the history of the literature here. But it's pretty weird. And the way he describes it is that it entirely depends on you buying into his metaphysics, which is not the kind of aesthetic theory you would think that would then have a lot of influence. Like because there have to be a way that we could, if it's true that this has been influential, we could Tear away some of Hind's insights here from this giant edifice that he's put together.

16:26 Jonathan: But it's entirely dependent upon your understanding of his concept of the will, for one thing. And it puts it really into a historical context, actually, when you go and look at it, because everything that he's talking about is coming straight out of the 18th century, where he's trying to avoid talking about all of his ideas in terms of theism, really. And he wants to make it in sort of a post Enlightenment way of dealing with the will as the underlying force or character of things. But then he has to build up this entire set of hierarchies around everything. Everything is qualitative, essentially.

16:58 Wes: I don't think you have to accept the metaphysics to think that this has some insights, though, into music. You don't have to believe that the world at its core as a thing itself is will in order to think, oh yeah, there's an interesting relationship between music and the will. The will in the sense of this entity that is sort of the combined desire and action thing that he talks

17:20 Jonathan: about earlier to step out of the 19th century a little bit. He does actually say that music lacks a direct relationship between the signifier and the signified. Basically what he's talking about there is a language that lacks semiotics, that music is a language which doesn't have a literal sense of semantics. It's communicating something, but it has no literal communication or no literal word or something like that. And he actually stated there was a disassociation between the signifier and the signified, which I thought was very interesting, especially for 1815 or something like that.

17:52 Wes: Yeah, that's section 52. Where is that exactly?

17:56 Dylan: It's right in the first paragraph.

17:58 Jonathan: Of 52.

17:59 Dylan: Of 52, about 2/3 in, he talks about Leibniz.

18:04 Wes: And this idea of music is involving these mathematical relationships. And so Leibniz sort of says doing music is like doing arithmetic unconsciously and not knowing you're counting.

18:14 Jonathan: Right.

18:15 Wes: So part of his point is that the formal part in music, this mathematical relationship, is between the signal. So what he says is in this regard, the numerical ratios in which it. Music can be resolved are related not as the thing signified, but only as the sign that in some sense music must be related to the world as the depiction of the thing to the depicted, as the copy to the original. We can infer from the analogy with the remaining arts. And then if you go down further, he says further, its imitative reference to the world must be very profound. So it Sounds like he is. Now that we're looking at this closely, it sounds like he is saying there is this imitative aspect to music, even though it's not imitative in the way that we normally think about it with the other arts.

18:59 Jonathan: Right. It's not a literal representation of anything in the same way that, say, the painting of the pear is a literal representation of the pair.

19:05 Speaker: Right.

19:06 Jonathan: And he does also, in his mathematical analysis, he also talks about how music, even though it's a mathematically based system, it's imperfectly accounted in the physical world because of temperament, essentially, instead of tuning systems. That I found was very interesting that he actually went to that degree of analysis of music. Like you couldn't actually have the literal 3:2 ratio for your fifths all the way around because you would get out of tune. So they have to temper.

19:32 Wes: Yes. That imperfectness of music that he talks about. He's trying to get also at the sense in which music is meaningful or satisfying to us. And what Leibniz is implying here is it's the same sort of satisfaction you get in completing a mathematical problem. So it's the satisfaction in these formal relationships, these mathematical relationships. And he's saying the satisfaction is not actually in the math, it's in this more profound imitative reference to the will.

20:00 Dylan: Well, and the sign of that is that if it were true, then music would only be as pleasing as doing mathematical problems. And Chopin, Aristotle says it's clearly, clearly more pleasing than doing mathematical problems, and therefore it's more than that.

20:14 Wes: Am I going to go to the concert tonight or am I going to stay home and do math? I don't know. That's a tough one.

20:19 Dylan: Maybe Leibniz would have stayed home.

20:22 Mark: Should we.

20:23 Wes: Sure.

20:23 Mark: Move to 34?

20:25 Jonathan: Yeah, let's go back to.

20:26 Mark: I was going to try reading my paper translation here by Akila, just so it doesn't match what any of you have in front of you.

20:33 Jonathan: All right.

20:34 Mark: Suppose that lifted by the power of spirit, one abandons the usual way of regarding things, stop merely pursuing relations among them, the ultimate goal of which is always relation to one's will under the direction of the principle of sufficient ground. That's his version of the principle of sufficient reason. Thus no longer considers the where, the when, the why, and the wither of things, but simply and solely the what. Nor lets abstract thinking, concepts of reason, consciousness, occupy one's thinking, but instead of all this, devotes the entire power of spirit to perception, becomes entirely absorbed in the latter, and lets the entirety of consciousness be filled with restful. Contemplation of a natural object, just at that moment, present to oneself a landscape, tree, cliff, building, whatever, entirely losing oneself one's will and remaining only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object alone existed without anyone perceiving it. And one can thus no longer separate the perceiver from the perception.

21:27 Wes: One important thing here to mention is that he's really picked up Kant's theory of disinterest in aesthetic experience, and he's running with it. So in our aesthetic experience, say a painting of an apple, or just take the actual apple, if we're thinking of it aesthetically, the pleasure is not from the idea that we can devour it and get gratification that way. It's pleasure in the formal. Its form, let's say, that's this idea of disinterest. And for Schopenhauer, that means it's disconnected with desire. And even though desire and will aren't exactly the same thing, it's helpful in this context to think of them as synonymous. It's the sense in which aesthetic pleasure lifts us above desire, our everyday desires.

22:08 Jonathan: It's again, it's like contemplation of the species or the idea of the object, rather than your literal interaction with it.

22:16 Mark: Right. So there are two portions of this experience, and he says in different particular artworks, one can be more prominent than the other. The first is the losing of yourself, and he calls this the subjective side of the experience. That the thing that ultimately is the evil in the world that brings us all the suffering that we want to get rid of. If you're a Buddhist, if you're. What Schopenhauer is recommending is the principium individual. The fact that I exist as an independent human being, that's my existential separation from everything. When you really get into a piece of artwork, you're not thinking about yourself at all. You lose yourself. He thinks that there's a literal, ontological thing going, that because I am not just this individual animal running around, but that I am deep in my being, this will that actually is self identical to everything. It is outside of time, it is outside of space, it is outside of everything that I associate with this individual animal. So that you literally are transforming through this experience of art. But that's the subjective side. That's what it feels like.

23:14 Dylan: And he calls that you're a pure

23:15 Wes: subject of knowing and you're will less. That's the other important part of that.

23:19 Mark: Well, yeah, so that's all the proof that this is actually happening. That you're not just fooling yourself, that the will slides away. Even if you're beset by pain at that moment. If you're awesome enough, if you could, you could abstract from that, maybe even grasp your own pain. This is not something he talks about, but if you're desaad or somebody, you grasp your own pain aesthetically and not even really care about it, other than like as an interesting work of tactile art upon yourself.

23:46 Wes: Yeah, no, that's an important part of Nietzsche, this aesthetic view of oneself as a.

23:50 Jonathan: As an experience.

23:52 Wes: Yeah. But also you can come to view your own pain and tragedy in life from an aesthetic point of view. And you can view yourself from an aesthetic point of view.

24:00 Mark: Right. Which is certainly easier when you're talking about my whole situation as a person in a bad environment where I'm eventually going to die and everyone I know is going to die. That you can abstract from that. But if you are actually at that moment being beset by fishhooks in your arm, then that requires a little more talent to play that game.

24:17 Wes: The Schopenhauer puts it, in the end, you have to suffer for long enough and then it takes practice.

24:23 Mark: Well, it's true that he talks about life in the Buddhist tradition again, as we are always uncomfortable in some way and we just get used to it, just to having a body at all. I think this just means that he didn't have a good workout routine, he didn't have a good diet. He didn't.

24:38 Wes: Well, his idea is that our desires are never, always satisfied. And any lack of satisfaction, any actual want, any desiring is a form of pain and suffering.

24:49 Jonathan: Yeah. And especially the lack of feeding that desire is literal suffering. He says.

24:55 Wes: Yeah, he's not making an empirical point about oh, the world sucks. It's a problem that's not solvable in principle. Just the very nature of the will is that satisfaction is temporary. And a lot of times. And the way desire works. Right. Is that to want something is to suffer and then you satisfy it and then you do that again and repeat ad infinitum. So the great thing about art is escaping that little cycle for a period of time, escaping this desiring willing state and being in a desireless peaceful state. Which is a really interesting way to look at aesthetic experience.

25:29 Dylan: Yeah, but in a non base way.

25:32 Wes: Explain that. What does that mean?

25:33 Dylan: It seems to me that you could satisfy your hunger by eating an absolutely delicious meal and be satisfied in that you will. Later on you'll be hungry again. And he talks about a little bit about sex too. Those are inferior forms of satisfying the will by far.

25:52 Wes: Yeah, but it's not aesthetic experience is not the satisfaction of desire. It's the transcendence of desire.

25:58 Jonathan: Yeah, it's all about transcendence. It's all about this escaping from the physical world and the world of causality and transcending basically, which it should follow from that.

26:09 Mark: That if you have a desire to get off through really good music or something, that there's something self contradictory about that. That it's like wanting grace in a religious context. That you can't just, oh God, I want that grace. And then, oh, I feel the grace like that. No, there's something. You're doing religion wrong. If you're yet on Chopra diagram.

26:31 Wes: This is the interesting difference between our everyday desires and then our aesthetic. Would you say we have aesthetic needs and aesthetic desires in the same sense that we get hungry, that we feel, that we suffer? I mean, it's an interesting question, but certainly not in the same way as we suffer from sexual deprivation or hunger or any of those other drives.

26:51 Jonathan: I think that he does say essentially that humans have a desire deficit for aesthetics, but that it's easily fueled by the base things like. Like in the section on the Charming where he talks about lyric poetry and things like that. I think that it's easily fueled by those things. And a lot of people fall for those as essentially aesthetic junk food. That's jumping ahead again.

27:13 Mark: That's right. Well, so let me give the other side of this. These two things that are supposed to be exactly the same, becoming a will and the subject of knowing is supposed to be one and the same thing with being able to get at the timeless Platonic forms of things. And so of course, in some arts there's more emphasis on one side than the other. So for instance, if I'm just contemplating a landscape, then the things that I'm seeing in the landscape, let's even just make it a very simple landscape. Or contemplating a piece of architecture. Right. The lowest form of art that he goes on about for a while. Then really what I'm contemplating is, are things like a gravity or just mass forces of nature. I'm not thinking about individual blades of grass and how they differ from each other, but just the mass of growing grass itself. If I'm looking at a big prairie or something like that. So in that case, you're not getting at an essence, a Platonic idea, so much as you're just losing yourself in the thing. There are essences Involved, I mean, just seeing gravity, seeing impenetrability, seeing the physical dynamics of water and the fact of growth of grass. All those things have something in the realm of Platonic forms to reflect on, but it's not something that's that interesting by comparison to something about an individual person. So the other side would be something like tragedy, a kind of literature where you're really getting. It's character oriented and it reflects the mean circumstances of the universe. And so you're really contemplating not just the form of humanity itself, although there's that, but even that intelligible character of Hamlet in particular.

28:43 Wes: Right. It's a Platonic idea, but the thrill of it is not like knowing something. Oh, I know the abstract features of this thing. It's knowing this thing in its particularity as an objectification of the will. And the Platonic idea gets us closer to that.

29:00 Dylan: Are you making the distinction between figuring something out and knowing something in that way, as opposed to knowing something aesthetically? So if you figure something out, that's not what he's talking about. It's not that kind of aesthetic pleasure.

29:10 Wes: Right. I just want to reinforce the point. Aesthetic experience is knowing a Platonic idea. It's not about knowing abstractions and it's not about knowing grass as grass. Exactly. It's more about knowing anything as a objectification of the will. So in some sense it always comes back to knowing ourselves. Because it's a way of knowing the will, let's put it that way.

29:32 Jonathan: Or knowing ourselves as part of this will.

29:35 Wes: Yeah, because of course, we are just tendrils on the one big tendrils. We're all octopus.

29:42 Jonathan: Yes, in a way, in doing that, in knowing ourselves as pieces of the will, it sort of moves away from all of the causal explanations that the principle of sufficient reason was furnishing. Like all of the principle of sufficient reason texts, all of the fourfold root are explaining the causal relationships of everything and how everything becomes what it is. And this is sort of, again, it's transcendent. It's like he's trying to describe a way of going beyond all of those sort of equations that tell of the causal relationships of things or how things become or how things have an explanation.

30:20 Wes: Yeah, it's a non scientific form of knowledge.

30:23 Jonathan: Yeah, exactly.

30:24 Mark: So putting these two things as equal sets up the problem of the whole thing. It on the one hand, rules out the kind of thing that Dylan was referring to these lower forms of gratification as being properly artistic. Because even if you can say I'm really losing myself in this awesome orgasm or something then? Well, no, but are you getting in touch with a platonic form? Is that the, is that the ultimate orgasm that you've, you've grasped? Well, perhaps you could be watching a highbrow porn and getting no personal satisfaction out of it. I'm just contemplating it as I would Michelangelo's David as just that expression is, just captures what humanity and its striving is about. That, you know, anything can be made an object of aesthetic contemplation. That's important, you know, so even the most lowly, even the most ordinary thing, if you approach in the right way, could be. Art could be the object of aesthetic contemplation. But still, that doesn't mean every experience of positivity counts as an artistic experience or something.

31:19 Wes: I mean, it's hard to treat an apple as an object of aesthetic experience while you're eating it, right? If you're using the object to gratify yourself, you're going to have trouble simply getting at the aesthetic part of it. So an orgasm, I think unless you can find a way to make it not gratifying at all, you can't have an aesthetic experience. Might be able to have an aesthetic experience of someone else's orgasm, which I think artists have tried.

31:43 Dylan: It's like tantric sex, right?

31:45 Jonathan: Yeah, well, I guess that's.

31:47 Mark: You would think he would want to add that to his.

31:48 Speaker: Yeah. Really?

31:49 Wes: That's an interesting question.

31:53 Mark: So tantric sex might be one of those kind of things. Like. So it looks like music would break the theory because if you say the only real authentic artistic experiences are ones in which I not only lose myself, but I'm getting at a Platonic form, then. Well, since music is non representative, what platonic form could you possibly be getting at? And so that's why he has to give this whole. Well, music is just different. Music is even more awesome and fundamental than anything. It's not just cheaper and more sensual than the other things, which you could maybe give that as your response. I think that Plato would probably say

32:25 Wes: that it's your direct conduit to the will, where the other arts have to hobble along with the whole.

32:31 Dylan: You're mainlining will.

32:33 Wes: Exactly, exactly. Freebasing.

32:37 Mark: Yes, but you could see the response, like Plato could buy into a lot of this, but say no, actually music is even worse than all these other things because it's not representational. The representational art is bad enough because it's a copy of a form, but music doesn't even have that. It is just Purely, I believe Andy Partridge of xtc, in an interview said, it's just a fancy kind of smell. I don't know what people are getting so excited about. It's just that

33:06 Dylan: it's even worse than cookery, right?

33:09 Mark: Yeah. Especially rock music, if it's trash.

33:13 Wes: It's a way to directly, for Plato, directly manipulate your emotions.

33:18 Dylan: I think you're right, Mark. I think that's exactly what Plato would say.

33:20 Wes: So you could take a completely opposite tack on this and say, wait a minute, isn't music about the manipulation of desire? Yeah, you could.

33:28 Jonathan: Well, he does sort of avoid the idea of how predisposed people are towards it by saying in the thing about lyrical poetry, when he's talking about rhythm and rhyme and how they're just there to keep you going, to keep you interested. But it doesn't really go into the idea that your mind, when you hear periodic things, you have a tendency to project them because you're able to do this as a human being. And, you know, something that the beasts or the brutes or whatever he calls the animal kingdom can't do, but to project into the future the idea of resolution and continuation of rhythm. So you're basically setting yourself up when you're listening to music. You're always. And especially when he's talking about the music of his time, where it's cadential and tonal and utilizes very square rhythms, threes and fours and things like that. Your mind is always setting yourself up for gratification of desire. Essentially.

34:20 Dylan: You're yearning for resolution all the time.

34:22 Jonathan: Yeah, yearning for resolution. And you're hearing where it's supposed to be going.

34:26 Wes: Yeah. And he does talk about that in section 52. This. Always trying to get back to the tonic note. I think we are getting at this tension between the idea of aesthetic experience being will less in some sense, and yet it being a conduit to the will or.

34:43 Dylan: Well, the way he understands music is it's sort of quintessentially willful, and you are in it because of its motion and its directedness. But that state you would be in is will less.

34:55 Jonathan: Or you surrender to the will of the music.

34:57 Dylan: You're surrendering to the will, as opposed to something like imagining a will less music, one that was not so propulsively forward moving and yearning for resolution and that sort of thing.

35:12 Mark: That would be John Cage.

35:13 Jonathan: Well, yeah, absolutely. And that's Zen. Like, he wants to get at this objective observing of things so that you can get to know the form or get to know the Platonic Idea. But he doesn't do that with music. Like, he doesn't even. Nobody could possibly have envisioned potentially at this point in history observing sound in the same way, in the same objective way. And even though he talks about this sort of Zen type of transcendent observing, in order to be able to be free of the desire or whatever is being literally represented, in order to be able to observe and see the will of yourself in the species or in the Platonic form of what's being represented that's possible in music entirely. But people didn't actually start to do that sort of thing until the middle of the 20th century when they would just listen to sound and say, I'm hearing music, or try to listen to music as only the sounds that it is, rather than as something that necessarily has to go tonally back to a root or rhythmically to a cadence or something like that.

36:17 Mark: This is why I think it's so useful for us not to just focus on the music section here. Because if you get over this ontological division that he has to make that he set up for himself between music and everything else, then a lot of things he has to say about the other arts are people very well applicable to music. So, and he points out. So in this volume three thing that he wrote a number of years later, he gets at some of the comparison to that. He talks a little more about rhythm and how. Well, it seems like the symmetry involved in rhythm in musical rhythm is similar to the symmetry involved in architecture. And he brings it up really just to knock it down and say, oh, but obviously, you know, in accordance with the rest of my theory, music is a completely different thing and is way better than architecture. And to talk about rhythm as the architecture of music is just denigrating to music. Rather, we should just take that as, oh, yes, that's a good point of comparison.

37:06 Jonathan: He does say about where the expression of architecture being stationary music coming from a Goethe quote. So, you know, that he wants to believe that because it's Goethe, when Goethe said architecture was rigid music or something like that. So he wants to believe that architecture is art there.

37:23 Mark: Well, and just the fact. So we're all recording on these electronic devices and we can see the sound waves showing up in a visual pattern. And how. How much more obvious. I mean, you can just write and people have written programs to just make that visual pattern even more interesting and colorful than it is right here. And there's so many ways that one could translate sounds into the visual or I suppose even into the tactile or the.

37:50 Dylan: Into Smells, the Smellophonium.

37:57 Wes: I want us to get back to this basic tension between his theory of aesthetics in general and then the sections on music. So this tension between aesthetic experience allowing us to transcend our wills or become will less, and the sense in which music is sort of really plugged into the will. So part of this we'll see. In section 51 he says some things. He's talking about lyric poetry, but he's also talking about songs. And I assume he means things that are set to music there. But he says, for instance, basically that in songs there's a sort of tense interplay between expressing an emotion and sort of disinterestedly contemplating the results of that emotion. So that gets at sort of like a unified theory of aesthetic experience. And then what he's going to get at with music. So he says, for instance, it is the subject of the will. In other words, the singer's own willing that fills his consciousness. Often as a released and satisfied willing joy, but even more often as an impeded willing sorrow. Always as emotion, passion and agitated state of mind, which is something ascetic experience is supposed to get us out of. But then what happens is the singer takes on the stance of the pure will less subject of knowing in relation to all of that agitation in relation to all of those emotions. So you're doing both at once, I think, with music.

39:22 Jonathan: His example of the German song, I don't know what the song is, but he talks about the person falling to his death and casually observing the clock, the time, as he's falling to his death.

39:32 Wes: Yeah, basically it sounded to me like he's saying the experience of a good song is like looking at your watch while you're falling from a great height. It's that contemplative part and then the

39:43 Jonathan: urgent part, simultaneously subjective and objective. And it's atemporal, essentially.

39:49 Mark: So not looking at your watch.

39:51 Jonathan: Yeah, it's not looking at your watch, but as you're subjectively experiencing it, you're able to step away from the timeline essentially of the experience and describe it as well.

40:01 Speaker: Right.

40:01 Mark: I read that particular part as just talking about not the style of experiencing it as a subject, but as what the content of that particular set of lyrics was. That. But it seems that in some places here he's arguing against the kind of church sanctioned censure of certain subjects that, like, you should only write about noble things. And like, isn't it unfortunate that painters found that they had to paint all these freaking Christian scenes when those are so Boring compared to other scenes. But then he's doing the same thing here, I think, when he's saying, oh, well, you know, if tragedians write about how horrible life is and how the will can never be fulfilled, or depict saints, which, according to Schopenhauer, are the people, people that can dissociate themselves from their will. So someone like this guy that can be falling from a clock tower and know what the time is, or I think I gave the example in one of the last episodes of the old Buddhist or Taoist thing, that you're falling off a cliff, you're hanging from your fingers, and you can contemplate the strawberries in front of you and enjoy the taste of that. That's what we're shooting for. And so insofar as art is representative, not music, then if it represents good stuff, according to Schopenhauer, like this, then it's better.

41:12 Wes: Yeah.

41:12 Jonathan: He has that whole hierarchical arrangement of paintings, of still lifes, how the still life can represent. I have to find this. This is so great when he's saying that the still life can represent the idea, the Platonic idea. Unless you put in too many things, like the fruit is great, but once you have herring next to it, you're exciting a person's hunger or their desire. So that's ruining the whole sublime aesthetic experience.

41:38 Wes: Still lives work, as long as there's no edibles in them. Yeah.

41:41 Jonathan: Well, he says painted fruit is admissible.

41:44 Wes: Right. Because it's evocative of growth and life and things like that.

41:48 Jonathan: Yeah. And nature. And you can see through the object itself to contemplate its whole causal relationship with the universe or something like that. But once you put the fruit next to oysters, herrings, crabs, bread and butter and beer and wine, it's all together to be condemned.

42:04 Wes: See? And again, this brings us back to this tension. It sounded like, with that section on the song that I read, that it's perfectly fine for the arts to satisfy desire or to evoke strong emotions and agitation and passions, if they also create that contemplative, reflective relation to that. Right on top of that. But then in other parts, it's as if. Well, no, it's completely contradictory. You can't arouse hunger or else you're going to ruin the whole aesthetic experience.

42:36 Jonathan: Yeah. It's going to take you out of the objectivity.

42:38 Wes: I still don't know exactly. Yeah. How to solve that.

42:42 Mark: So let's add the sublime into the equation, because that. We had an episode on the sublime. Burke, who gave us a lot of the sort of the raw intuitions that Kant and then Schopenhauer are drawing on for this. And in that discussion, it really wasn't clear where the sublime stopped and started. Burke didn't have the emphasis on this will less part of it, which Schopenhauer is taking to a whole extra level of vividness of this disinterested behavior. Whereas when Kant, who initiated this idea, I guess he's talking about just more negatively. Like, if you're not excited about this, if you're not excited to lust by the painting of the nude or to hunger by the picture of the fruit, then that's better and then that's aesthetic. And if you are, then it's not. And that's sort of as far as he goes. Whereas Schopenhauer is giving us this very vivid, like, experience. It's almost an ecstatic experience, but without ecstasy. And this is what we're having trouble with. Or the ecstasy is one that is detached from desire. It's especially Buddhist Hindu ecstasy that is only the ascetic has access to.

43:44 Jonathan: It is incredibly Buddhist. I don't know. What's he reading? Text?

43:48 Wes: Yes.

43:48 Dylan: The Vedas.

43:49 Wes: Yeah, he was reading the Vedas. Okay. Buddhism and Eastern philosophy.

43:54 Mark: Yeah. And stirring all those different types of Eastern philosophy together in a way that Westerners have been guilty of ever since.

44:02 Jonathan: Yeah, I know. This really leads into not only Nietzsche, but also the Hermeticists or the Hermetics in the later 19th century. It's pretty funny.

44:11 Mark: But with Burke, one of the things I put forward is it seemed like a horror movie would count as the sublime, according to Burks, because it's just something terrible and scary is happening. But I'm an observer and I'm at a safe distance, so I don't have to actually get freaked out. I can instead have a vicarious.

44:29 Wes: I'm not so sure about the horror movie because that sounds a lot more like tragedy, which is aesthetic. It's not.

44:35 Mark: I was making that connection between tragedy and the sublime. And maybe for Burke it works. Who cares about Burke at this time? For Kant, for Schopenhauer, it definitely doesn't work because it really has to be

44:46 Wes: something, but is actually dangerous to you.

44:49 Mark: Right. Well, that for sure. You can't have an experience, I think, that is corresponding. Right. The idea of a horror movie is still to scare you.

44:57 Wes: Yeah.

44:57 Mark: You feel safe because you're. You're in your. But if it's a good horror movie, you forget that you're an individual sitting in a theater or watching it on tv. And you're pulled in and you get freaked out in the way that someone in that situation would be. And then it's only because you don't have to stay there and actually get killed that it's.

45:15 Dylan: That it's.

45:16 Wes: And I think he does end up talking about landscape, so probably. Maybe I should withdraw my objection there. But.

45:21 Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. He talks about the potential danger of storms in harsh landscapes and things like that, and how the harsher the situation is, the more your potential for actually having a sublime experience would be.

45:34 Wes: Yeah. So I was wondering whether we actually have to be there or whether it can just be a picture. And so I think it's probably the case. Mark is right. That it can just be a picture. So the idea of the sublime for Schopenhauer. Right. Just to say it explicitly, I don't think we've done that yet, is that you start out with an experience that is dangerous to you, but there's a quick twist where you can nevertheless appreciate it simply aesthetically and transcend the anxiety of it and the fearfulness of it. So like a great cliff, where it could kill you in the wrong circumstances, but you're contemplating it not from that standpoint, not from the standpoint of fear, but from the standpoint of simply of aesthetics.

46:17 Mark: And I guess the twist for Schopenhauer here, even as opposed to Kant, is that it takes a conscious act to overcome the fear or whatever. It's not just that you're in a situation. I mean, it seems like if you're in a safe situation, you're looking at a painting of a vast something, a vast fireball, whatever, the kind of thing. One of those massive paintings in an old church that just goes across the entire wall. Or a widescreen movie, something like that. You might think that just the fact that I'm sitting here as an observer, I know I'm safe. I don't have to will. I don't have to overcome my fear to appreciate in a aesthetic way. But according to Schopenhauer, you. Yeah. It has to be something that would ordinarily freak you out. And then you overcome that, and you have to keep doing it. You have to keep reminding yourself that it's not real.

47:05 Wes: Yeah. He calls it a conscious and violent tearing away from the relationship of the same object, of the will, which are recognized as unfavorable by a free exaltation accompanied by consciousness beyond the will and the knowledge related to it. Yes. This violent tearing away that gets at the core of that.

47:26 Mark: All right, we have the sublime on the table.

47:28 Jonathan: In 41, he talks about the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. Being that the object could draw you in by its beauty, in which case it would prevent you from making that consciousness. Beauty is great in the world of aesthetics. But if it prevents you from making that conscious decision to jump to the objective contemplation of the object, it doesn't become sublime.

47:48 Mark: So you're talking about section 40 on the charming. Right?

47:51 Jonathan: Yeah. Right. In 41, he specifically lays it out, the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.

47:56 Mark: You want to read a quote?

47:57 Jonathan: He says, difference is found to depend on whether the state of pure will, less knowing, which is presupposed and demanded by all aesthetic contemplation, was reached without opposition by the mere disappearance of the will from consciousness because the object invited and drew us toward it, or whether it was only attained through the free, conscious transcending of the will to which the object contemplated had an unfavorable and even hostile relation, which would destroy contemplation altogether if we were to give ourselves up to it.

48:28 Wes: So to think something is beautiful is actually to be in this desireless, will, less contemplative state. And I think what he's opposing to that is this idea of it being attracted to it or charmed by it.

48:40 Jonathan: Right. I was understanding that as to say that if you were drawn toward it as beauty, you could never experience the sublime that way. You would always be essentially drawn toward it. It would be altering your will, essentially. It would be pulling you in towards it. So that you could not have that contemplation that allowed you to reach that sublime state.

49:00 Wes: Yeah, but I don't think it's beauty that does that, though.

49:02 Mark: That's the distinction between charming and beauty that he's trying to make. And I think he's trying to head off an objection that we've already voiced to some extent, which is that if you look at sublime as involving an act of will to overcome repulsion, that there should be some corresponding act of will to overcome charm. To get to an aesthetic point as well, he wants to say, of course, the charming or attractive, on the contrary, that is apart from the sublime, draws the beholder away from the pure contemplation which is demanded by all apprehension. The beautiful, because it necessarily excites this will by obstacles, directly appeal to it. And thus he no longer remains the pure subject of knowing, but becomes the needy, independent subject of will.

49:40 Jonathan: Right.

49:40 Mark: So it seems like he should have a third class. That there's the beautiful, which are things that we have no trouble Getting in that aesthetic mode. And then there's the sublime, which we have to overcome the negative stuff. And then there's the third category where we have to overcome the positive stuff. There should be a third thing.

49:54 Jonathan: Right.

49:54 Wes: And this is again, the section where he talks about painted fruit being admissible. Because it exhibits itself as a further development of the flower. And so on and so forth. So without our being positively forced to think of its edibility. It just seems to me that in many cases, actually the aesthetic experience will be in tension with something attractive or charming. And going back to his talk of tragedy and of songs and things like that. It seems like there's going to be a lot of arousal of desire and passion as part of an aesthetic experience. Even if there's also this contemplative part

50:26 Dylan: I wanted to push back a little bit on. And maybe Schopenhauer doesn't have a good answer for it. But that these aesthetic experiences. You're in this will less mode and contemplative mode for it. The way he talks about it, it seems like it will inevitably involve gratification as well. You might want to make a hierarchy of kinds of gratification or something. But it's going to involve at least the kind of gratification that comes from either relief from the tension of the will. Or the gratification of fittingness. That you have gotten into the flow, that things have clicked together. The absence of the tension of the will is going to involve a kind of gratification. And that's, in fact, how you identify that you got there.

51:10 Jonathan: Yeah.

51:11 Wes: And we could go back to Kant's distinction. Right. So Kant says beauty is about pleasure. And then he distinguishes pleasure and gratification. Which would be the same, Dylan, as doing your levels of gratification thing.

51:21 Mark: So I just think that him using the fact that there's a conscious effort involved. To appreciate the sublime where there's not in the beautiful. Is just the wrong way to put it. I think that's just a mistake. It's never necessarily a conscious effort. But it takes a certain mode, as he readily admits, to get in an aesthetic state. Whether the aesthetic object is the beautiful or the sublime. I mean, you can buy that the sublime has something that wouldn't ordinarily be unpleasant in it, and the beautiful doesn't. It's an easy distinction to understand. I don't see much more to make of that. Certainly I wouldn't go on to characterize the difference between them. Is like, you're such a more virtuous person to be Able to appreciate the sublime because you can overcome fear. Whereas to appreciate the beautiful, oh, anybody could do that.

52:01 Wes: Calling it conscious is a bad. Although I'm still willing to give him the whole idea of it being a tension between the dangerousness of it and its awesomeness.

52:09 Mark: Getting rid of the conscious effort part would overcome the need for a third category of aesthetic appreciation. I would say that there's just the beautiful and the sublime. I would think the sublime, you don't need any great education to appreciate that either. Just like animals can't do either of them, I'm sure little kids as they stare in fascination at a fire or something. It's a very primal thing to appreciate the sublime, to feel that this is a dangerous thing and I'm kind of in awe of it, but yet I'm standing over here and so it's not going to actually burn me. Now that seems just as primal and will less.

52:41 Wes: Yeah, but he doesn't say that it requires a education though, right? You go out, you see a waterfall and you say, that's awesome. To say the conscious tearing away is odd. I don't understand where he gets the conscious part.

52:51 Mark: I know we didn't read the sections on genius, but he refers to it somewhat in the sections that we did read. And just the idea of what enables a person to be an artist, that it requires having this sk of being able to get in the will less state.

53:05 Jonathan: Right.

53:05 Mark: Just like you need to be a good spectator, even more so. So that you can not only appreciate, but you can even channel the platonic forms in sketching out a character.

53:14 Wes: I think it markets in the parts that we read for the last podcast, 30 through 33.

53:19 Mark: I guess the next part that we had on our list was Human Beauty, Section 45.

53:23 Jonathan: Right. Well, he talks about beauty as something that's objective, something is beautiful, and that's an objective quality, as if.

53:30 Mark: And in that section, he does get a little bit at what I was referring to that. So he says art does not imitate nature. How is the artist to recognize the perfect work, which is to be imitated, and distinguishing it from the failures if he does not anticipate the beautiful before experience? It's arguing for this platonic view of beauty, which then if you're an artist, you have to be able to get in touch with the platonic forms in a way that ordinary people can't, at least with such vividness.

53:54 Jonathan: Right.

53:55 Mark: That's where genius comes into things. And Wes, we talked about this and Dylan, in our conversation on Schopenhauer last Summer geniuses having depth. Depth and be able to see the truth of things. Now that we've read more Schopenhauer, we can see that means being able to see that everything is actually will. It's to become a Schopenhauerian saint of sorts, to be an artist.

54:13 Wes: Yeah. There's some interesting things in this section where basically artists do beauty better than nature. The artist's intelligence expresses clearly what nature stammers, quote. By recognizing in the individual thing its idea. He, so to speak, understands nature's half spoken words. It's the addition of intelligence to the natural in a way. So he produces the ideal form that quote, unquote, nature failed to achieve in a thousand attempts. Nature fails and the artist comes along and succeeds. Thought that was great.

54:43 Jonathan: He really is getting away from that whole eye of the beholder thing.

54:48 Wes: Yeah.

54:49 Dylan: One of my favorite things that he wrote that I read so far in this book is a footnote in section 51. So I found his writing is generally pretty vivid and interesting. But those essays that Mark and I and Wes read were just so acerbic that I didn't see that very often until I got to this footnote where he's talking about poetry and tragedy and the importance of great poets and the difference between historians and poets. He says, it goes without saying that everywhere I speak exclusively of the great and genuine poet who is so rare. I mean no one else, least of all that dull and shallow race of mediocre poets, rhymed and devisers of fables which flourishes so luxuriantly, especially in Germany at the present time. It is worth serious consideration how great an amount of time, their own and other people's and of paper is wasted by a swarm of mediocre poets. And how injurious their influence is. For the public always seizes on what is new and shows even more inclination to what is perverse and dull as being akin to their own nature. These works of the mediocre, therefore, draw the public away and hold it back from genuine masterpieces and from the educations they afford. They thus work directly against the benign influence of genius, ruin taste more and more, and so arrest the progress of the age.

56:10 Jonathan: Yeah.

56:10 Mark: So there's no way he wrote that footnote in 1815. In 1818, he wrote that in the 43 year whenever, you know, he's so

56:18 Dylan: much more fun in 1843.

56:21 Wes: I'm actually quite sympathetic to this.

56:23 Speaker: I know.

56:24 Jonathan: But then this is the whole, you know, his whole thing about avoiding the charming as well, because like all of the Public, seizing upon what is perverse and dull as akin to itself, is falling for the charming as opposed to the beautiful. Of course. Rhymesters.

56:38 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

56:40 Dylan: Linking him up with Plato and with any number of commentary today just tells me that people find, A, that art often is both controversial and most of it's a waste of time, and B, that it always affects people and it should affect you, and to be affected by it in the wrong way is bad for you.

57:00 Jonathan: Well, but then he should take his own advice and treat it as an aesthetic experience.

57:09 Mark: So Schopenhauer's advance on Plato, I think, is a good one. That if you are going to be a Platonist and believe that there's a deep essence to things that only the wise can get at and characterize forms as. As having something to do with beauty, then put art in there as well. Make it so that when you're getting at the awesome essence of things, you're getting at artistic beauty. And artistic beauty has something to do with that, instead of artistic beauty just being some thing that degenerates do.

57:36 Jonathan: Right.

57:36 Mark: Degenerates deal with.

57:37 Dylan: I mean, the difference there, right, is Plato is all fine with aesthetic experience as long as it's directed towards the good. And that's his big problem with poetry, is that it is aesthetic experience, and it's undeniable how powerful it is. But the problem is it's not directed towards the good. That seems to be the difference with Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer doesn't seem to care at all about the good.

57:57 Wes: No, not yet. We didn't read that part.

58:01 Mark: Not the good, but toward will.

58:03 Speaker: Right?

58:03 Mark: That's what stands in for the good for him, the form.

58:06 Dylan: But the will isn't good. Right? The will is directed towards whatever it's going to be directed towards. I mean, unless he's going to make the move that the will is always

58:13 Mark: directed towards the good, it's not directed at all. I left out this detail before, which makes less paradoxical. The distinction I was making between music and the other arts that get at Platonic forms before is that if music somehow represents the will directly, and the other arts, the representational arts, just represent these Platonic forms or ultimately enable us to access this. We just have to keep in mind that what is the daddy form? The daddy form of all the forms, what was the good? The form of the good in Plato's system is the will, right? So you don't call it a form anymore because that implies its objectness or something. So that's how Schopenhauer is different than Plato's theory of the forms altogether, but still they have that hierarchical relationship. So you're still with music, getting at the thing that is above all else. You're getting at the timeless center of existence. You're getting at his substitute for God.

59:00 Jonathan: Yeah, he does say the aim of art is the communication of the comprehended idea, as he says it, the understood idea, capital idea.

59:08 Mark: Right.

59:09 Wes: The common aim of all the arts is the unfolding and elucidation of the idea expressing itself in the object of every art, of the will, objectifying itself at each grade.

59:18 Mark: You can try to put that in words, which is to say that to understand it is just to understand that there is a hierarchical relationship. In other words, to be able to voice Schopenhauer's philosophy. To understand a form is to understand that it is part of will. And to understand an individual is to understand it's a copy of the form. But then, of course, this is not just a matter of verbalizing that. Even being a good philosopher, for him, is not just a matter of saying the correct words in the correct order. It's a matter of having this deep intuitive understanding. It's seeing in some strong way, this hierarchical relationship. And that's what art is supposed to do. Do I almost even literally mean seeing?

59:53 Wes: Because, well, the higher, I don't understand what the hierarchical, just ordinary thing, form, will.

59:59 Mark: That's what I mean by hierarchy. And then the different levels of degrees of manifestation between lower and higher that

1:00:05 Jonathan: we've been talking about, and those are different levels of observation essentially from the point of the subject.

1:00:09 Mark: And it's funny how seeing is actually so central there to become the willness subject of contemplation. I mean, I know I've heard this critique before that critiques of philosophy that rely on particular metaphors, then you try to undermine the whole thing by saying you should pay attention to some other metaphor or. Or look at it from a feminist point of view or some somehow twist it. But so one of the metaphors that's really obvious here is just in sight. That's why he says that smell and touch can't get you in touch with truth. With high level art, that the visual arts, well, of course even beyond that, is going to be the conceptual arts, Literature, tragedy is getting at something even more vivid. Even if you have the picture of a person like the Mona Lisa, the Vitruvian man, that is, captures the essence of humanity, or a ancient Greek sculpture that captures the perfection of humanity, you're still, well, you're the human being in all of his actions and environment. And so a story about him might even be even better. But still, putting aside the conceptual stuff, the literary stuff, for light, he says

1:01:05 Jonathan: early on, he says light.

1:01:06 Mark: Yeah, yeah. Is like the essence of beauty.

1:01:08 Wes: You're taking us back to section 38.

1:01:10 Mark: Yeah. Because that's an interesting difference between, you know, you might think that light and gravity are kind of, as a physicist, are equally fundamental and ubiquitous, but yet gravity is, for him, one of the lowest level manifestations of the will. And us appreciating gravity is just to appreciate the raw striving that's in everything. But light is a raw component of beauty. We don't even think of light, according to Schopenhauer, as energy darting around or something. We don't think of it in its kinetic form. We just merely think of it as a way of revealing, of opening truth up to us, and talks about it in that way.

1:01:47 Speaker: So.

1:01:48 Jonathan: So the pleasantest and most gladdening of things, he says, light. And therefore it became the symbol of all of good and et cetera, in religions and things like that, because it was the pleasantest.

1:02:01 Mark: And I'm surprised we don't see in here the praise of vividness that we saw in Kant and Burke. I believe these were both guys that were before the Impressionists. There were things floating around in the artistic universe that he was objecting to merely on the grounds that they did not vividly enough present what the subject was in question. Going back to Burke. In fact, if you're vague about something, you're veering toward the sublime. The only way that a really diffuse painting could be awesome is if it connotes the infinite. Then it would be sublime. It would have an aesthetic value, although of a completely different kind than the beautiful. But for Schopenhauer, well, he doesn't really see the sublime and the beautiful as getting at completely different kinds of things in the way that Burke and perhaps even Kant did.

1:02:41 Dylan: Schopenhauer criticizes the vividness. Right. Of the Dutch realists.

1:02:45 Jonathan: Yes.

1:02:45 Dylan: In their still life, saying that you show me some sumptuous feast with this delicious crown leg of lamb or something like that, that it's going to call forth your hankering for it and therefore destroy your aesthetic experience. You have to have the proper kind of still life, because if you have the eaten apple and it makes you want to eat the apple because it's such a realistic version of the apple, then that ruins your aesthetic experience of it. It won't be a proper aesthetic experience.

1:03:13 Mark: At the very least, so how could we apply this to what he has to say about human beauty? He thinks that you're only really getting at the form of the human beauty and the form of the individual character if you can vividly display the thing in question. Right.

1:03:28 Jonathan: He talks about it in terms like praising the ancients. Again, he really loves his Greeks and talking about how the form that's being represented in beauty, in human beauty is not necessarily a real or explicit vivid depiction of a real human being, but is a depiction of the form or the idea.

1:03:45 Mark: And he goes so far as to say naked is better.

1:03:48 Speaker: Right.

1:03:49 Mark: If you can do naked.

1:03:49 Speaker: Right.

1:03:50 Mark: If you do naked. Like the Dutch realists did. Wrong. I don't know if the Dutch realists were the same ones painting the nudes that he's objecting to and not make them positioned in such a way that they're supposed to arouse you. If you make them asexual in some way, then being vivid is good. So it seems like there's some kind of vividness that are good, but sort of depends what else goes with it. But still, like clarity, like there's a theme here. So likewise in literature that it's even better than to have a still statue of somebody to show the character beset by all sorts of different circumstances. Or he even talks about water. We don't appreciate water just standing in a pool. We like to see it sloshing around, you know, Then we really appreciate what water is. So that's part of the vividness that only light would enable. If you merely smell water, that would not be good enough.

1:04:34 Wes: Well, the whole point of the obstacles thing is to bring out its essence more. So a still pool of water doesn't give you the essence of water. So you have to see it a brook or a cataract or something. You have to see it facing up to certain oppositions and obstacles in order for its character to come out. And the same thing in theater, I think that's later on in 51 or 52.

1:04:54 Mark: And I very seldom hear the word cataract used actually refer to a waterfall.

1:04:58 Jonathan: Yes.

1:04:59 Wes: Right. Where does he talk about the water?

1:05:01 Dylan: There's a whole section on it. Well, especially he's talking about the different ways you manipulate the water.

1:05:06 Wes: It was 51 or 52 in the context of tragedy and having opposition in order to bring out the characters.

1:05:14 Mark: Right, so 51.

1:05:15 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, it's in 51. It's in the paragraph that begins. In the more objective kinds of poetry, especially in romance, the epic and drama, for example, to grasp Completely ideas expressing themselves in water. It is not sufficient to see it in the quiet pond or in the evenly flowing stream, but those ideas completely unfold themselves only when the water appears under all circumstances and obstacles. The effect of these on it causes it to manifest completely all its properties. We therefore find it beautiful when it rushes down, roars and foams, or leaps into the air, or falls in a cataract of spray. Or finally, when artificially forced, it springs up as a fountain, thus exhibiting itself differently in different circumstances. It always asserts its character faithfully. It is just as natural for it to spurt upwards as to lie in glassy stillness. It is as ready for the one as for the other as soon as the circumstances appear.

1:06:12 Mark: So what's interesting about this vividness, why I keep dwelling on this, is that on the one hand, it seems that if water is all splashing around, then it's more sensual. But yet, according to Schopenhauer's account, we like to see it splashing around because that lets us get more at the essence of what water is and how it interacts with gravity and its place in the universe. And so it's exactly against the sensual. In line with Plato, it's toward the more. You don't want to say abstract, but towards the more essential.

1:06:42 Jonathan: If he's so interested in things showing their true characters and being able to see the sublime, or get to these sort of objective viewpoints by seeing the nature of the thing when it has hurdles to overcome, I don't know why he's not interested in the same thing with regard to other senses. Like, he talks about light, but he never talks about overcoming darkness. And he talks about how the bait senses like smell and taste are always going to elicit desire, and you will never be able to get away from overcoming the desirous nature of smell or taste to be able to have a true aesthetic experience or a true sublime experience. He doesn't talk about bad smells, for instance.

1:07:23 Wes: Yeah, one thing, because we're sort of back to this tension between aesthetic experience as will less and desireless, but also aesthetic experience as a conduit to the will in some sense, right? A conduit in the sense of. Of the Platonic ideas are objectifications of the will. So I think in one sense, aesthetic experience distances you from the will, but it also gets you closer. It's just. It's closer to objectifications of the will. So the way I would sum it up is almost as if the goal. He said something about the arts in the section 51. The common aim is the unfolding and elucidation of the idea expressing itself and the object of every art. The way I would sum that up is the goal of the arts is to turn our desires into objects. In this sense, it distances us from the will and from desire. And it also brings us closer in the sense that it brings us closer to the object through aesthetic experience of the object. So it's almost like this second level reflective grasping of desire. So I think that's part of our getting at the paradox here. In the sense in which it takes us away from desire and yet gets us closer to it. At the same time.

1:08:30 Jonathan: It creates an embodiment of the desire so that we can contemplate. Contemplate it essentially, rather than desire it.

1:08:35 Wes: Yeah, it's like concretized desire outside of us that we can.

1:08:40 Mark: And even just doing that with an individual desire as we contemplate a particular striving of a character and a tragedy, gets us at desire in general and the nature of the world. And this is actually a good transition maybe to bring in a little bit of the stuff from the on the Inner Nature of Art essay. That art is ultimately philosophy of a sort. It's getting us in touch with what the true nature of the world is.

1:09:03 Speaker: Is.

1:09:03 Mark: It's making it explicit.

1:09:06 Wes: Yeah. He says in his essay that the aesthetic apprehension is essentially of the true nature of life and existence. And the aesthetic object, in a way, is an answer to the question what is life? So quote. But all the arts speak only the naive and childlike language of perception, not the abstract and serious language of reflection. Their answer is thus a fleeting image. Image, not a permanent universal knowledge. So we are still trying to get at the truth of things, but in this. What I would say again, non representational or intuitive way, instead of the abstract discursive way that we might get at it through philosophy.

1:09:46 Mark: And is he trying to say that art is just sort of a dumb version of philosophy? Literally dumb? I would think he would have to say that it is a necessary companion of philosophy. If you just mouth Schopenhauer's philosophy, then you don't really understand. You have to have art to show you in some way. Maybe there are other ways of getting at this. You could just have quiet meditation or something that does not involve anything we would call a work of art. But seems like a good case to be made there that this is a necessary part of human experience.

1:10:18 Wes: Yeah. And I think he thinks it's superior in a way. Or maybe he would just say there are two different ways of getting at things. But the truth part of this comes in, and he's thinking of the will as muddying the waters. So by removing the will, you're sort of subtracting the subjective contingencies that allows you to get at these essences intuitively. I don't think he says one is spirit of the other in this section explicitly, but my sense is that Schopenhauer sees art as a superior path to the truth.

1:10:49 Dylan: In Schopenhauer's view, the will is always right. So as long as you were plugged into the will, you would never be steered wrong. In Plato's way, it's like being connected directly to the good or an idea, right?

1:11:04 Mark: So being plugged into it directly through knowledge, not just being plugged in as being its manifestation. Because then you're flailing around and you're a prisoner of your own desires.

1:11:12 Dylan: Yeah, well, so this gets back to this tension that Wes is talking about, because you have both those things going on in the aesthetic experience that we've been talking about, right? Where you become will less in that you are now in the midst of that will, right? And so as far as I could tell, you're fully experiencing what's happening, but not as unfulfilled desire or striving of your own. But you're in the midst of that flow. It's not that you're seeing it from afar or transformed it into something else. You're sort of one with it.

1:11:45 Wes: There's another great quote in this essay. The mother of the useful arts is necessity, that of the fine arts, superfluity and abundance. As their father. The former have understanding, the latter, genius, which is itself a kind of superfluity, that of the power of knowledge beyond the measure required for the service of the will. Nietzsche takes off with this right notion of abundance and superfluity. I mean, this sounds almost like a different way for the will to be involved, right? So for Nietzsche, it'll become will to power. For Nietzsche, you don't transcend the will with ascetic experience, right? Because everything is will to power. But you can have this abundant. You can be willing out of abundance and superfluity as opposed to being in that negative position of mere need and necessity and trying to satisfy our everyday desires. That's one other way of getting at the role, I think, of will and aesthetic experience here. There are hints that I think would will lead to a Nietzschean version where the will actually still play some sort of role.

1:12:46 Mark: So I had a quote here that I picked out in the middle of this, the work of the poets, sculptors and representative artists in general contain an unacknowledged treasure of profound wisdom, just because out of them the wisdom of the nature of things speaks, whose utterances they merely interpret by illustrations and purer repetitions. On this account, however, everyone who reads the poem or looks at the picture must certainly contribute out of his own means to bring that wisdom to light. Accordingly, he comprehends only so much of it as his capacity and culture admit of again, emphasizing how certain people don't get certain works of art. You know, if you think that art is revealing philosophical truth in an inarticulate way, but it requires interpretations. A piece of art gives illustrations and a pure repetition. But you have to contribute out of your own means to bring that wisdom to life. What do you guys think of that? What does that mean here exactly?

1:13:35 Wes: Well, he ends up talking about. Remember where he talks about wax figures and art must leave something to the imagination. So the difference between a sculpture and a wax figure, the wax figure is so realistic that it no longer requires your addition, your imaginative engagement. And I thought that's what he was getting at early on here, where the contemplator must contribute from their own resources in bringing that wisdom to life.

1:14:01 Jonathan: He talks about the differences between, say, poetical readings of history and actual history also, where the inner truth is more available to the poetry than to the history, because the history is exactly the description of events, rather than the truth of the events or the truth of the characters.

1:14:20 Mark: I mean, of course, we need imagination. He emphasizes in the literature section, he's saying the whole thrust of art is to put a sensuous thing in front of us that we then can lose ourselves in and contemplate, well, what if it is telling a story? We can't just put ourselves in the sensuous experience of reading the story, of looking at the words on the page or hearing somebody recite the story. It has to be that instead we're thrown into the world of imagination that we then have to generate ourselves. Which is interesting because it seems like one of the things that's awesome about a particularly well written play about Shakespeare or something is not just that imaginary world that sucks you in. I mean, then he would be praising Harry Potter and Star wars and things. He would. But that it's. The language itself is so sensual and tactile, that part of it is losing yourself actually in the meter and the rhyme and the things about the language. It's not just your imagination conjuring these things up. It's more musical than this.

1:15:20 Jonathan: In 51, he does talk about how good poetry can briefly, by means of a few concepts, call up huge imagination things. But he also does point out that the rhythm and rhyme, the aids of poetry, as he says, the peculiar aids to poetry, have a powerful effect. That they keep you bound to the continuation of listening to poetry or listening to lyrical song and such like that. The point being that the rhythm and rhyme are there to keep you inwardly following it. While essentially good poetry is going to be expressing things that leave so much to your imagination that they aren't literal descriptions.

1:15:59 Mark: I guess the question of leaving to your imagination, though, is it that you're using especially evocative language and so it brings forth a vivid picture into your mind? Or is it. Would he be sympathetic to poetry that is multivalent? That a lot of the stuff that you add to it is because purposefully, this thing has more than one meaning. It's getting you to contemplate multiple meanings simultaneously.

1:16:23 Wes: When he's talking about imagination, I think this goes back to Kantian free play, right? Remember that the most difficult part of his theory of aesthetics, where you sort of of arouse the conceptual engine without satisfying it directly. Because when he's talking about imagination, he's contrasting art with philosophy, which he says tries to furnish the same wisdom explicitly. Essentially, it's the implicit nature of the arts that requires our imagination. In other words, it requires interpretation to get us back also to our recur episodes. It demands interpretation of some sort. Even if it's just seeing that the metaphor that Shakespeare has deployed is actually a metaphor, right? That's an interpretive act. So that you understand that when he's comparing Juliet to an earring on the cheek of the knight, for instance, in Romeo and Juliet, that interpretive act requires imagination, not just on the part of the poet, but on the part of the audience as well. You can't get it without engaging in a way in that same imaginative act that the artist did when creating that metaphor.

1:17:30 Jonathan: I think this also gets to that other quote about the mediocre poets. When he was talking about how the public has a great proneness to what is perverse and dull as being akin to itself. The mediocre poets would be the ones that are just basically slaves to the rhythm, so to speak. Slaves to the rhythm or the rhyme without. Without being able to express something that leaves their audience to use their imagination to create something. I think that's his point in talking about poetry that way.

1:18:00 Mark: To the beat of the rhythm of the night dance.

1:18:03 Wes: Until I'M now googling to see if there's actually a song called Slaves.

1:18:06 Mark: Get about the worries on your mind. You can leave them all behind.

1:18:11 Wes: There is a Michael Jackson song, Slave to the Rhythm.

1:18:14 Jonathan: Right, all right, we'll use that next.

1:18:18 Wes: Now, so is this a segue back to music before everyone's too tired to.

1:18:22 Jonathan: I'm trying to go there somehow.

1:18:24 Mark: And part of this can be lyrics, so we still can bring in the stuff from 51. So part of what makes lyrics awesome, at least one of the ways. I know one of the ways it could be to create a vivid picture. So, Jonathan, I remember you in an interview. We're talking about the two approaches of writing lyrics of Are they confessional or are they story songs? Right, right. So if you're doing a story song, that would still be okay for Schopenhauer as long as it was true. As long as you were getting at the essence of things and not just like telling a weird ass story about a hick that was doing irrational things. So. Which in other words, ruling out many of the ones that I enjoy. The Camper Van Beethoven, for instance, for instance, that I enjoy that. I think once you get into stories, you can use irony, you can do this here. But any case, you could go for vividness in whatever. And he, he also Schopenhauer praises. You know, if it's self confessional, then it is, you know, it's really getting at the equivalent of a platonic form of you, right, yes, exactly. Sketching out the universal by sketching out your own emotions and things like that. So there's something praiseworthy there. I don't know how he would feel more about the lyrics that are purposefully oblique, like Bob Dylan's, that a lot of them spill out in such trails of words or Robin Hitchcock that don't necessarily even have any meaning. Syd Barrett was all about this.

1:19:49 Jonathan: Other than the beauty of the words themselves.

1:19:52 Dylan: The sounds of the words, the sounds

1:19:53 Mark: of the words and then just all the crazy, even conflicting images that they bring about that that's part of what makes lyrics in particular so cool. And why even having to rhyme and stay in a rhythm can be liberating in a way. Because if you're completely freeform. Well, obviously there are lots of freeform poets that can be oblique as well. But it makes you use these images that they suggest strongly something they're supposed puts you in a mood by evoking certain things, but it doesn't give you a definite picture. Do you have anything to add to that sort of list? Of functions. And then we.

1:20:27 Jonathan: Well, I think that it has happened a lot, like Bob Dylan, for instance, and several of these other people, like Hitchcock maybe, who, in search of a rhyme, have ended up utilizing words that make no literal sense when put together. Even though, like Schopenhauer says that lyrical poetry is the easiest in 51. Also, he says, because of the fact that you're creating things with rhyme or with rhythm. And so he says, although art as a whole belongs only to the man of true genius who so rarely appears, a man who is not in general very remarkable may produce a beautiful song. And he goes on to talk about how this is proved by the existence of songs like the German national songs and things like that that stick in people's heads. And people are moved by them, even though they aren't necessarily brought on by the genius or the artist. But they're just. They happened that way because of somebody putting things together in rhythm or in rhyme. And it caused the audience to put together imagination that had to go.

1:21:23 Mark: Well, the equivalent of what he's describing there is. Every arena rocks.

1:21:26 Jonathan: Yeah, basically. Yes, exactly right.

1:21:29 Mark: Even just putting. We're not gonna take it. You know, you got a phrase like that that could evoke the French Revolution, but it has that resonance that even. You don't even need a context. People can supply that themselves. It plays on something within them. But, yeah, you could see why he would be a little disdain of that not being the most.

1:21:47 Jonathan: The genius.

1:21:48 Mark: Ingenious use of that kind of technique

1:21:51 Jonathan: to seize the mood of a moment and embody it in a song is the whole achievement of this kind of poetry. So we're not going to take it as exactly it. But he says, also, if the poet is always the universal man. And this is, again, going back to, like, how the confessional, as opposed to the story song. The confessional would be presenting yourself as the Platonic idea of a human being in whatever situation. Like a love song or something like that. If the poet is always the universal man, then all that has ever moved a human heart and all that human nature in any situation has ever produced from itself. And all that dwells and broods in any human breast is his theme and his material and also all of the rest of nature. He puts after a comma,

1:22:37 Mark: the faithful mirror of light.

1:22:39 Wes: Yeah, yeah. And then he goes on to say, we can't blame them for mirroring depravity. Or, you know, you can't make these moral judgments because they're.

1:22:47 Jonathan: Well, he says, but, yeah, poets sing of voluptuousness. As of mysticism, they're the mirror.

1:22:51 Wes: He is the mirror of mankind.

1:22:53 Mark: So what do we think about this in terms of. Is this restricting. And I think we might have had a similar discussion about this last summer when we last talked about Schopenhauer. So there's always the question for me that if you think ultimately the point of art, the point of genius, is to delve into this universal truth, truth, then it seems like there's only one right way to do it. There are lots of different techniques you could use to do it, but ultimately there's only one goal, which is a very depressing way to look at art, as far as I'm concerned. And seems like that's a good reading for Schopenhauer when you look at, again, the very specific things he says about what makes for good music and what makes for bad music, that it has to have the bass notes don't move too rapidly and things like that. And so it seems the great genius going into the 19th to 20th century is just to open up this polyvag is to say, no, no. Schopenhauer has already done a lot here by saying, you don't have to just depict things that Christians would consider to be virtuous. You can depict depravity, you can depict all this stuff, all that is good. You can have the sublime as a respectable form of art, showing things that are scary and crazy. But there's still something. We want to move even farther in that direction and say, no, no, multivalence is great. You don't have to have things point toward the ultimate human nature. You could use irony, you could undermine yourself, you could play with things. And it seems like Schopenhauer is dismissing all that kind of play as shallow, superficial, dabbler, arbitrary playing with the means of art without a proper knowledge of the end. This is from that volume three thing with the end is in every art, the fundamental characteristic of the dabbler, such a man shows himself in the pillars that support nothing. All right, so that kind of undermines at least three quarters of the music that I try to pursue. Just screwing around with a theme, I don't know.

1:24:43 Jonathan: Dabbler, Dabbler. I'm a dabbler as well.

1:24:46 Dylan: What's so bad about being a dabbler anyway?

1:24:48 Mark: If you get rid of Schopenhauer's metaphysical and ethical picture, then there's nothing. It's fine. Which is still fundamentally, even though an irreligious picture, even though he avoids God, while an atheistic, it's still fundamentally a Religious idea.

1:25:03 Jonathan: He goes to great lengths to avoid theist.

1:25:06 Mark: Yes.

1:25:06 Jonathan: I think as was the custom at the time.

1:25:10 Mark: All right, so given all that, what do we have to add still about music itself?

1:25:14 Jonathan: Yeah, Let me go on to 52 and take a look at my notes.

1:25:18 Wes: Yeah. So we're back to the direct conduit to the will. The copy of the will, as opposed to needing. But don't move the baseline.

1:25:25 Jonathan: But don't move the baseline.

1:25:27 Mark: He gives an interesting introduction to this, which I'm not going to read, but I'll characterize that. He says, because it's representing something that can't be represented. It's the will itself. So it's not like you were saying, Jonathan, it's not signified signifier. Because you can't actually point at the signified at all. That's sort of the point. It's. Then I really have no way to prove what I'm about to say in this section. As if he could prove what was in the previous sections that he seems to think throughout his other discussions of art that. Well, because you can see that if you found out that an allegedly great work of architecture was actually made made of wood, then you wouldn't like it anymore. Then that shows that architecture is just showing fundamental relations of gravity and other lower levels of the will. I know that's in a section we didn't read. So there are these phenomenological proofs of the other things throughout. But with this one, he says, really, you're gonna have to read this section a couple times. You're gonna have to understand my entire metaphysical theory. And you're gonna have to listen to a lot of music with this in mind in order to even judge whether I'm correct here or not.

1:26:24 Jonathan: Right. Which I am. Because, yeah, he goes. In this whole. I arrived at the explanation of the inner nature of music and of the nature of its imitative relation to the world. And he goes on to have to really tell how he arrived at this and how you have to follow his logic entirely to understand what music is.

1:26:43 Wes: In fact, there is a very sort of mundane version of what he's saying here, which I think is quite plausible. Right. Which is that in music it's directly stimulating your emotions or what he would call the will. In a way that other arts are doing that, but only after representationally doing something. Right. And it's non spatial. That's another important part. But it's this direct effect on, let's say, desire or the will. Even if we don't buy into the idea that it is a copy of this will, that is the thing in itself, or something like that. The more mundane part of it, the psychological part, we could say is plausible, I think plausible.

1:27:26 Mark: But then it becomes almost trivial. So it's a little hard to say what the result of taking Schopert Hauer's comments about music seriously, but abstracting away from his Platonism, for instance. So you might say that it's actually an abstraction, that what music gets at is great about conveying a struggle.

1:27:45 Wes: It's.

1:27:46 Mark: And I have no trouble saying, but I only know what struggle is because I've done a lot of struggling. I see a lot of struggling things. And it's exactly because of its abstractness that it's so powerful and so universal. And that doesn't mean it's getting at the inner core of everything as ultimately will or something. And that's why all these things struggle, because they're ultimately one in the same struggling will. That's just a weird metaphysical claim. It's much easier to understand that, yeah, isn't it great that rhythms in the air somehow mirror and are not reducible to. I mean, you could say, oh, people like the beat of 120 beats per second for rock songs because it's about the same as the human heart. I've heard that one before. I'm just saying you don't have to reduce it to a particular relation like that in order to say what music gets at is something that is very pervasive in our lives, an animal within us. And so that's why it's so awesome.

1:28:38 Wes: Okay, But I think there's something interesting about even the stripped down, non metaphysical version of saying that music is will related. Normally we think of the will as something related to desire and action, but music is activating towards the will. And our experience of music, what makes it something we enjoy is the sense in which it is operating on the will. So something as simple as just a simple melody near the beginning of the symphony. What's its significance? I think saying that significance has something to do with the will is an important observation. If it has any significance, you know, it has to be.

1:29:19 Jonathan: I think also though, you have to put it in the historical context of what kind of music he's talking about. Because even though he wants to call it a representation or a copy of the will, but he's listening to music that is, like I said, tonal and rhythmically cadential. And so it's constantly utilizing this dichotomy of tonic versus dominant in a very Essentially rigid way. And so it's communicating something that he believes is universal, like, oh, this music feels the way I feel. Oh, that minor key is sad, or that major key is exultant or something like that. And these aren't actually, of course, universal perceptions. He's living in Europe or in Germany in the early part of the 19th century.

1:29:59 Wes: I think an interesting case study for all of this is movie scores and the sense in which they add to the action. Right. Because it's all about. If you want to think about the relationship between will and music, think about what kinds of music go with what kinds of action and movies and obviously take a theme, a very simple theme song like that from Jaws, which is brilliant in its own way, and the suitability of that to what's going on, particularly in the film, to the shark. Now, we. We can't, of course, think about it without thinking about sharks or thinking about Jaws. But you're not going to use the same theme, Right. If it's a little short about a picnic where everyone's having fun and nothing sinister is going on.

1:30:43 Jonathan: Unless you wanted to sit down.

1:30:44 Wes: Unless you wanted to. Yeah. Unless you were doing it ironically. But you see what I'm saying. It's a really fascinating thing that we couldn't get away with putting certain kinds of musics with certain kinds of actions a priori unless you guys reject that. But to me, that's not only plausible, but fascinating.

1:31:01 Jonathan: But I think that part of that is culturally processed by hundreds of years of listening to this sort of music and being indoctrinated into these tonal systems. Different music is going to sound different to different cultures. You know, you could play the Jaws theme to people, the Yanomamo tribe or something like that, and they would probably get a completely different sense of what it is representing or what it means. That's why the music itself is or isn't a language that is communicating something. It's definitely free of the signifier and the signified. It is communicating something, but what it is isn't specific.

1:31:31 Wes: He even says that music, I think, is to concepts as concepts are to individual things. When he's calling it a universal language, it's so universal, it's pre conceptual. And then. Yeah, I think it's a good question the extent to which our reaction to something like the Jaws theme song is cultural. I don't think it's entirely cultural. It's, of course, significantly cultural, but we can't tease that out, obviously. Obviously. So if it's entirely cultural, though, yes, his universal language claim would entirely break down.

1:32:00 Jonathan: His universal language claim is based on this Aristotelian idea of harmony based on perfect intervals from the harmonic series.

1:32:08 Wes: Well, couldn't his theory get rid of his specific claims about bass lines and things like that?

1:32:13 Jonathan: Well, but then Jaws is a great example of that because it's. By utilizing stepwise motion in the bass like it does. It's representing the.

1:32:21 Wes: Yeah, but I'm just. I think the relationship between music and the will is a broader theory than. So maybe it can perhaps accommodate forms of music that come later.

1:32:31 Jonathan: It's interesting to me also just thinking of this as everything that he describes from music based on the first few intervals of the harmonic series and how that creates the tonic triad and the dominant triad and root motion, all this sort of stuff. He's very trained, actually in not only the mathematics of music, but in music theory of the time. But they have no concept at this time of the idea of music that's free of idiom, for instance, or free improv or something like that, or music that is arrhythmic. It's completely inconceivable. For instance, if you wanted to have an aesthetic experience that was an objective contemplation of sound as the beauty of sound in itself, you could do that listening to any kind of music. You could do that like Pauline Oliveras has with her Deep Listening Institute, listening to all different kinds of sounds. Your aesthetic experience is based on your essentially Zen like approach to contemplation of sound objectively, which I would think that Schopenhauer would be into.

1:33:22 Wes: Well, he might not want to call it music, though. Might still want to call that aesthetic experience. But you know, I wonder if he.

1:33:27 Mark: Right, right. Just like you could. You know, I thought it was extremely forward of him and I don't remember which previous section to say that anything could be the object of aesthetic experience. That it comes down to whether you're losing yourself and entering that Zen like state.

1:33:39 Jonathan: Right. That's very like performance art.

1:33:42 Wes: So it seems like we could have non musical, yet aesthetic experiences of sound.

1:33:47 Jonathan: Also. People nowadays, of course, in the past 50 years make music that is from musical instruments that would not at the time have been considered to be music.

1:33:55 Wes: My larger point is, even if it's atonal and arrhythmic, you might still be able to argue that it's still related to the will, what it's signifying. Exactly. That's another discussion. But I think Schopenhauer's theory here isn't wedded to harmonic music of his time.

1:34:10 Jonathan: But he does describe it in terms of the harmonic language and why the math is important. I mean, like when we were talking about why.

1:34:17 Wes: Yeah. All his talk of gradations and his attempt to make an analogy between.

1:34:21 Mark: Between.

1:34:22 Wes: He wants to build that big analogy between the world and.

1:34:26 Jonathan: Yeah. Like the basis.

1:34:27 Wes: Gradations of things and then gradations within music. So that would have to go out the window. Yeah.

1:34:33 Jonathan: But one thing also is that when he talks about music as a universal language, he says its universality, however, is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but it's different kind, united with thorough and distinct definiteness. So he really believes that it has something definite. That is the will that it is communicating.

1:34:53 Wes: Right.

1:34:53 Dylan: One of the ways I took him to be talking about music as will was the way in which it was always happening in time. And in that sense, it's not an object the way a table or a rock is, because it incorporates its own sense of time. The closest thing it might be is to, Like a living organism, where you would understand that organism is happening in time. Time as a whole life rather than in a given moment. And then what makes that music whole would be the way in which, over time, it's connected. And so therefore, how one moment leads to the next moment leads to the next moment.

1:35:31 Jonathan: And that itself is explicative of the principle of sufficient reason, that causality is like the dominant tonic relationship and things like that.

1:35:40 Dylan: Yeah. So it makes sense the way his understanding of music at the time has a lot of that sort of intrinsic characteristic in music, of that yearningness. And I don't know how he would think about modern, atonal or arrhythmic music. And whether he would consider it music or not. An obvious question I think he would ask is, when you call it music or say you have a piece, what is it that's making it a whole? Because if you're going to call it a whole, there's a way in which one thing has to lead to another. And like any kind of story, any kind of narrative, it's that one thing leading to another which is part of what makes it a whole. It's not just that you put a start on the metronome and put a stop on the metronome and everything in between. Now it's a hole. It's a stretch to call mere random noise music.

1:36:27 Jonathan: Unless you're contemplating it in an objective way. Like the Cajian. 4 minutes and 33 seconds, for instance, or something.

1:36:33 Dylan: Yes. Maybe we would start plumbing what we mean by having a Hole in this respect. And then maybe at that point, music really isn't will. It's no longer. It's no longer will anymore.

1:36:45 Wes: I think you're getting at something there, Dylan. You're getting. Getting it a way in which I could be wrong about saying Schopenhauer's theory survives, even if it for atonal and arrhythmic music. Because the music. He's thinking about, the anticipatory nature of it, right? The sense in which it feels like one thing should come after the other, especially after we've heard the piece once. There's strong elements of identification and anticipation. And it's almost like the music is an act of your will, right? Because you anticipate what's coming next. And it's almost like you. Your creation. That's why, for instance, you see air guitar at concerts. You're not going to see air acting at theater performances, right? The air guitar audience member is saying there really is a sense of the part of the listening audience of almost a delusion of the music emanating from themselves, emanating from their own will. And so if the type of music we're talking about is no longer anticipatory story in that sense, then I think, yeah, it probably breaks down.

1:37:45 Jonathan: But on the other hand, it maybe becomes a different sort of aesthetic experience or experience of the sublime, potentially, if you're giving yourself over to it, whatever the sound is that you're having the aesthetic experience of that the unpredictable should

1:37:59 Mark: be like the infinite should be one of the things that could trigger the sublime. That it is scary because it's unpredictable.

1:38:06 Wes: Interesting. Yeah, I think, absolutely.

1:38:09 Mark: Yeah. When I get into music that is more atonal, like, one of the easiest ways to be atonal is to do it in kind of a really hard, like, heavy metal almost setting, is because you can get rid of some of the melodic elements. As long as you still have in there the force and the rhythm and the hugeness. And that's what I'm reacting to. And so when I was in composition school writing things that had kind of crazy tonality, I think just a lot of emphasis went on to the overall dramatic effect. And now that cello is going. And then the fillute is coming in and doing it, you know, and just that it becomes a picture of the dynamics. It's still using a very traditional piece of musical theater. It's just not using all of the pieces in the ways that they're normally used. So it's not paying attention to major and minor chords. It's not really paying attention to what you could pick almost any notes is like as it's those instruments with those sounds entering at that speed. And I was listening to some of your improv stuff, Jonathan, that you have a similar take on that.

1:39:09 Jonathan: If you think about atonal music, where it was really reaching its peak usage was in film. The great film composers of the 40s and 50s were writing amazingly beautiful atonal pieces of music going in all of these dramatic and science fiction and horror and all of these sorts of things

1:39:28 Mark: which actually I was going to bring that up. It's not like I see a lot of classic movies now from the 40s and 50s, but there have been a number of times recently where I've seen things from the 60s or the 50s or 40s where the music is just weird. Like, why is this over this thing at all? Like just scenes of somebody walking down the street and you have. You have just these noises that there was something in fashion at the time that that could be like a normal thing to pull on. We're actually much more concerned, conservative. We're enforcing the genre, the mood connected to the thing using traditional tonality that Wes was referring to. More.

1:40:04 Wes: Planet of the Apes has a great story.

1:40:06 Dylan: Yeah.

1:40:06 Speaker: That.

1:40:07 Mark: Yes. It's the kind of thing.

1:40:09 Wes: Speaking of.

1:40:10 Mark: And for everything like that, of course, that works. Then there are lots of things produced at the same time and are like, why are you doing this? That's just one of the awesome things in terrible movies of what? Whatever take of movies that you see now where the score is saying that this is a really dramatic scene, like it's not happening if you actually listen to what people are saying and the terrible acting. And I would think there would be some room in Schopenhauer's picture for humor given the amount that he uses it and that different forms of irony are just different shades of humor, even if they don't make you laugh out loud. And so once you've had these genre expectations or mood expectations established, then doing something strange with them could likewise just be expressing the ultimate irrationality of the world in a way that Schopenhauer would highly approve of.

1:41:03 Wes: Right.

1:41:04 Mark: If your movie is fucked up enough, then you can have your fucked up

1:41:07 Jonathan: score and it works well.

1:41:10 Mark: A couple quotes that I noticed as we were going through here, Jonathan had mentioned performance art. And I noticed that in the Inner Nature of Art essay had a downright dismissal of conceptual art.

1:41:21 Speaker: Right.

1:41:22 Mark: The mere conception, on the other hand, is something completely determinable, therefore exhaustible and distinctly thought, the whole content of which can be coldly and dryly expressed in words. Now, to desire to communicate such a conception by means of a work of art is a very useless circumlocution. So take that, urinal.

1:41:40 Wes: Right. Art is still expressing universals. Right. It's just that it's not these abstractions. Remember, he gives that distinction between the

1:41:49 Mark: different types of abstraction concepts versus Platonic ideas.

1:41:53 Wes: Yeah. So it's neither directly expressing emotions nor dry, cold abstractions, but really something in between. So he says, therefore music does not express this or that particular indefinite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind. But joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind, themselves to a certain extent, in the abstract, their essential nature without any accessories. And so also without the motives for them. The motives is the psychological moving.

1:42:29 Speaker: Right.

1:42:29 Mark: You could respond and say, well, I never experienced sadness in general. I only experience this particular sadness or sadness which is connected to a cause or something. But I think he actually thinks that when you enter this aesthetic mode, you do get a sense of what sadness in general is. It's not just abstracting from I was sad on Tuesday and I was sad on Wednesday. And I get from that the sense of overall depression in the universe. Like that. Our experience of depression is much more immediate and, in fact, blocks out. And maybe I shouldn't be leaning on depression. Joy, you could, you know, use theoretically any emotion that we leap toward the sublime, that we leap toward the essence of fear, the essence of joy.

1:43:08 Wes: Well, one way of defending that, though, is to say, you know, if I'm listening to the Ode to Joy, it's not my joy exactly. And if it induces the feeling of joy in me, let's say. So that's an assumption. But in that case, it's not my joy exactly. I'm feeling. It's not like I just had a baby or something great happened and I'm overjoyed. It's a different type of experience. And the same thing if it's sadness. It's not that Tchaikovsky's Pathetic makes me feel sad in that direct way that I might feel, your puppy didn't die. It's sadness without being sadness. It's a different kind of experience.

1:43:44 Jonathan: I think that also leads to how you were talking about film music expressing things. One of the classics where the music leads you by the nose to allow the music to explain what's happening in the scene when the actors can't really, really do it.

1:43:57 Speaker: Right.

1:43:57 Mark: Yeah.

1:43:58 Dylan: Why isn't that just merely Manipulating you,

1:44:01 Jonathan: I think it is, really.

1:44:03 Wes: Okay, well, in the film case, are you thinking in general Dylan or just

1:44:07 Dylan: in that maybe the derisive use of the word merely is just calling on Plato. Right. So that, of course it's manipulating you because that's what it's supposed to be doing, if it does a good job at all. Right. I guess I was trying to jive it with the lack of abstraction, the lack of particular end. Like in the case of the movie, as Mark pointed out, you could have the dissonance between some scene like this and then the music being completely different, but evoking a very, very strong reaction. And there, of course, might be the possibility that they're supposed to be ironically joined together, and there's a kind of wholeness. And then you have the whole question of the craft, of whether that's successful or not. But you still have the point, which I think, Wes, you were pointing to earlier, that the music is having an effect of a particular kind of effect based upon its structure or lack of structure, or its sounds or its dynamics. It's eliciting a reaction. And I guess, Jonathan, you were skeptical of how universal that is.

1:45:05 Jonathan: There's a lot of arguments that go both ways, but I think that people come to this point that they believe that a lot of it is culturally relevant.

1:45:11 Dylan: Yeah.

1:45:12 Jonathan: Fortunately or unfortunately, the tonal language of music, the Western tonal language of Western art music, is pretty much universal now in the world of human beings.

1:45:22 Mark: So it's not just that Gamelan music, with its different spaces between the notes, is a different thing. Even the people that are into Gamelan music, once they discover major chords, they're like, ah, screw Gamelan music. Major chords are.

1:45:36 Jonathan: They're affected by it because it's ubiquitous, basically. And if you hear it since birth, you're affected by the.

1:45:43 Mark: The expectations.

1:45:44 Jonathan: Yeah, this expectation and release of cadence patterns, essentially of dominant Teutonic 5 to 1 relationships, or of rhythmic cadence and things like that. You're affected by it once. You've heard it many times especially. I don't know if it's really innate. Philosophers from Aristotle, essentially, in Poetics, when he was discussing music and discussing the Pythagorean relationships of the harmonic series, which is what Schopenhauer uses also. They seem to tend to want to base this idea, you know, the universality of dominant Teutonic relationships, relationships on this mathematical idea. It's possibly there, but like your example of Gamelan music, Gamelans are tuned gongs, right. So the harmonic series of metal is completely different than the harmonic series of a string.

1:46:27 Mark: Right.

1:46:27 Jonathan: And so the entire orchestra, the gamelan orchestra, is tuned to this harmonic series of the relationships of the metal. Each one is tuned differently.

1:46:35 Mark: Certainly something Schopenhauer wasn't aware of because he talks explicitly about like, the only notes that sound good with a low note are the ones that naturally, naturally occur faintly as harmonics when you play the low note in the first place. We've done a whole episode on Nelson Goodman, who talks about art in terms of languages that are developed through conventions. And so then if you're immersed in a convention, then something can really work or not work according to that convention. I think you could hold something like that, but still hold that. There are biological roots for a lot of these things, which would explain why somebody that's raised on gamelan music could get into to Western tonality and vice versa. You know what makes it so interesting when somebody like Peter Gabriel goes on like, I'm going to discover world music, and produces a couple albums that get at some of these different structures. You know, maybe what makes those most satisfying in these hybrid products get put out to us are that they voyage into this realm of not quite normal tonality, but then they still end on a nice major chord or throw in the nice. I'm thinking of the Passion soundtrack in particular, one of my favorite makeout discs. Historically

1:47:44 Wes: did we need to know that.

1:47:48 Mark: You got to give the listeners recommendations of useful things. If they come out with nothing from this discussion, they will order that it'll

1:47:54 Dylan: be just like every other episode.

1:47:57 Jonathan: You know, the way that they say that your nervous system, I mean, again, of course, we're jumping into the 20th century, but your nervous system responds to hearing periodicity like waveforms by repeating it. Essentially you create the same periodicity of the waveform of a note in your nerves, in your ear. And so when you do get into these aesthetically pleasurable whole number ratios of relationships one to two, where you have an octave, things like that, it excites your nerves in these periodic. So you do have a positive aesthetic experience of it.

1:48:30 Dylan: You're literally resonating.

1:48:31 Jonathan: Yeah, exactly.

1:48:33 Wes: That's directly relevant to this theory here.

1:48:36 Jonathan: Yeah. And rhythmically, as a human being, you have this forebrain that tends to hear and collect memories of rhythm as it happens, and then project it into the future, because you're able to do that. And so as you project things into the future, subconsciously, you set yourself up. Basically, you're a tool of the will.

1:48:55 Dylan: Well, or a tool of anticipation.

1:48:57 Wes: Right.

1:48:57 Dylan: And so our Inclination to find patterns and then create expectation based upon previous experience and then have the gratification of seeing that happen again and having our expectations confirmed by having the beat come at the right time next or just a little bit off. So it tweaks us in just the right pleasurable way. Right, yeah.

1:49:18 Wes: In the sense that I talked about of actually being the producer of the sound, what I call the delusion. It's a little less delusional in light of that.

1:49:26 Jonathan: Right, yeah, exactly. Because it's happening in your head as well. You're recreating it essentially to experience it.

1:49:30 Mark: So I feel we need to at least read one of the sillier quotes from Schopenhauer on music so we can see kind of what we're reacting against. His over determination of this parallelism between music and the will. So this is from the Metaphysics of Music essay. It's just the second paragraph, but it's very similar to lots of things that are in section 15. So the four voices or parts of all harmony, the bass, the tenor, the alto and the soprano, or the fundamental note, the third, the fifth and the octave, correspond to the four grades in the series of existences. The mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, the brute kingdom and man. This receives an additional and striking confirmation in the fundamental rule of music that the bass must be at much greater distance below the three upper parts than they have between themselves, so that it must never approach nearer to them than at the most within an octave of them, and generally remains still further below them. Hence, then the correct triad has its place in the third octave from the fundamental note. And he goes on like this.

1:50:28 Jonathan: It's amazing, but it's like the attributions of the four voice to parts of the world. The brute and man and the vegetable kingdom, the vegetables. Vegetable kingdom and everything.

1:50:39 Mark: Let's just call the tenors the vegetables. The vegetables.

1:50:42 Speaker: Let's call.

1:50:43 Mark: Do that in your local.

1:50:44 Jonathan: But it's funny because, you know, he called symbolism a degenerate allegory, and yet he's using symbolism to sort of back up his claims.

1:50:52 Dylan: Maybe he doesn't think of them as symbolism.

1:50:54 Mark: It's not that we experience it as symbolic. He thinks that if you tell a story that's only an allegory, it's just like the conceptual art thing. Why didn't you just say the name? I think he gives the example. If there's a story about fame that incites someone to lust for famous fame, couldn't you just written the fame in big letters on the wall? And that would kind of do the same thing or to bring it home. If we took one of the pieces of literature and said what's the philosophical point of it? And tried to break it down into just those two sentences, like, come on, you wouldn't have had a story in the first place if that was what you were trying to do. You have to actually immerse yourself in the phenomenal experience of this thing. And so what he's doing is this post hoc explanation of why we think music is awesome. Not anything about like what the experience of music is like here. Right. I mean certainly we're not thinking about vegetables when I'm hearing the tenors.

1:51:48 Jonathan: And music doesn't have a literal analysis. So we can't really argue with any sort of reason to say, no, you're wrong because it doesn't have a literal analysis that can back us up.

1:51:58 Mark: Yeah. Just to comment on this relationship between the words and the music, he, like Kant, thinks that instrumental music is the pure stuff. If you put words on it, you're really introducing a foreign admixture that makes it worse. Worse. But still music like in a movie score. And he didn't have that to talk about at his disposal. I'm sure he would have been all over that topic. You know, if what you have in your story in your libretto is a particular example and a well written one of suffering or whatever the emotion is and then your music faithfully expands that and makes it real, like, well, that's just a very effective use and that's a good song. It's just don't think that it's the other way around. If you make the music just a little extra part on the libretto and it's really all about the libretto, you know, like a musical, I would think, where the point of the music is to tell the story. If the point of the music is to tell the story in just an interesting way. He says even stuff like the Four Seasons. Well, he's referring to Haydn's the Seasons. He says, yeah, should be dismissed.

1:52:55 Jonathan: He says the translation I have says such music is entirely to be rejected.

1:53:02 Speaker: Right.

1:53:02 Mark: If the music is just represents a battle or something. But if it's the other way around, so don't think that the 1812 over reduces to the cannon firing in the battle, then you're just a cretin. If that's the way you're getting into it. But if you on the other hand are celebrating a battle and you want to bring up some music to do that, well, it's going to be Great. You could definitely do a good job with that. What lesson have you gained from this as a composer, Jonathan?

1:53:26 Jonathan: Well, I'm definitely going to think about my bass motion at this point.

1:53:31 Mark: No bass solos. If that bass player starts soloing in

1:53:34 Jonathan: fourth hour, only in fourth and fifths.

1:53:38 Mark: Like, can I jump up on the fretboard two octaves and then have the organ hold down the bas? Yes, you could do that.

1:53:43 Jonathan: Yes, you could do that.

1:53:44 Mark: It does prove what I know, that basses are better than cellos because cellos are not far enough from the right upper register.

1:53:50 Jonathan: They're essentially the vegetable king.

1:53:53 Mark: Yes, cellos are vegetables. Let's put it. Any last thoughts?

1:54:00 Jonathan: I was impressed by his knowledge, actually of. I was impressed by his knowledge of the mathematics of the harmonic series and tuning and temperament, like where he says, therefore a perfectly accurate system of music, mathematically, as he's talking, cannot even be thought. Far less worked out. And on this account, all possible music deviates from perfect purity and it can only conceal the discords essential to it by dividing them among the notes by temperament. Temperate instruments had really only been available for, I don't know, 60 years or something at this point. People had been tuning through things up until the 1730s or 1720s or something.

1:54:38 Mark: So you mean like a piano?

1:54:40 Jonathan: Well, they didn't have pianos. They had harpsichords before that. Right. And then at this time, the pianos were forte pianos that were leather hammered. This is a great example from having gone to music school, having majored as a composer. When Beethoven wrote piano sonatas, they were for forte piano, which had leather hammers, so it struck the strings much more stridently than a felt hammer, like a modern piano. So that in some of his piano sonatas where he has very close chords in lower registers, it was far clearer on the instruments that he was playing. I'm not certain of this, but I think that up until they actually had pianofortes, which are the modern felt hammered pianos, they weren't using equal temperament. They were still tempering certain tuning systems using like for instance, Bach's well tempered system. It's not equally tempered. All of the notes aren't equidistant, distant.

1:55:29 Mark: I'm sure a lot of people are not aware of this. So, like, for instance, I was taught if you tune your guitar by playing a D major chord at the bottom and you get everything so that it sounds like a perfect D major chord, it will basically be a little out of tune for most of the other chords. And this is why people who play stringed instruments or woodwind Instruments that they can use their mouth to make the fine adjustments, you know, look down upon us clobbers upon pianos and guitars, because it's like you're settling for an approximation, right? That you don't get the exact pitch

1:56:00 Jonathan: that you need, especially the piano. I've always thought that in knowing that that pianos are essentially the fascists of the classical music world because everybody has to tune to them.

1:56:11 Mark: Would it be that piano is based on C or whatever that it's based on? This is the note that is into. And then all the other notes are going to be correct in relation to that. But then that's only if you're playing in the key of C that it actually sounds good.

1:56:24 Jonathan: But there are people that do that, like Lamont Young and Terry Riley did tuned pianos. And they sound amazing because it creates huge harmonic clouds around things. So you start to hear melodies within the resonances, the harmonic resonances of the instrument. It's quite amazing.

1:56:40 Dylan: Yeah. Especially at the higher orders of the series. They reinforce each other in a way that you'll never get on a regular piano.

1:56:47 Jonathan: I was very impressed that Schopenhauer actually knew all this stuff, or seems to have written out of this from a point of knowledge as well as his knowledge of music theory at the time. Time, which is the talk of bass motion and the bass having to make larger jumps like we've been making fun of all this time for some reason. Remember this from Counterpoint class in the university. But there is a line from probably Gratis et Parnassum, which is the basic music theory book of the Baroque, which said that when moving towards a perfect consonants, the lower voice always has to make the larger jump. That was one of the rules, basically. I think Cage said that music theorists are following behind the composers to explain their behavior. Basically. But you could say that the Baroque era culminating with Bach had the exemplary music theory, how everything was supposed to be.

1:57:37 Mark: Just to give my closing, I found this a lot of fun to just drill a little more closely into a few things about Schopenhauer. Having a lot of the system work already out of the way with our previous episodes. So we could probably have a whole further conversation on just the musical aspects of this. Based on what he said here, which is fairly brief and as repetitive of what's in everything else that he's written. I think we got some juice out of it.

1:58:03 Jonathan: Yeah.

1:58:03 Mark: I don't know that I'll be applying this to my personal compositions anytime soon,

1:58:06 Dylan: but you should try one time just follow his rules rigorously and See what you get.

1:58:12 Mark: Jonathan probably has more energy and time on his hands for doing that, so I'll punt that to him.

1:58:16 Wes: Possibly start do some baroque compositions.

1:58:19 Dylan: Yeah, that's probably right.

1:58:21 Jonathan: One thing that I think that he didn't really get into was the perception of time or temporality in music, which I thought was sort of interesting, because especially if you're talking about departing from subjective viewpoints, you know, or understanding aesthetics from objective viewpoints, or achieving a sublime or transcendent viewpoint, music is amazing for altering your sense of temporality or sense of. Sense of time.

1:58:44 Mark: Yeah, it was just that in the inner nature of art. Yet something about a cadenza.

1:58:48 Jonathan: Right.

1:58:48 Mark: Talking about symmetry and rhythm. When music, as it were, in a fit of desire for independence, seizes the opportunity of a pause to free itself from control of rhythm, to launch out into the free imagination of an ornate cadenza. Such a piece of music, divested of all rhythm, is analogous to the ruin, which is divested of symmetry and which accordingly, in architecture, which accordingly, may be called, in the bold language of the witticism, a frozen cadenza.

1:59:13 Speaker: Wow.

1:59:14 Mark: So a really poorly constructed building or a ruin. He's not fond of free form. And there was things that he said also in here that made me think, like, the thing about the dabbler made me think that he wouldn't really be down with improvisation. But then later in that same essay, he praises the ability to be very unselfconscious in an artistic production. So in a good improvisation is when you're really hooked in, you're channeling the universal, you're acting out the will. You are the will then and there. Yeah. So I don't know how that would work with an improvisational ensemble unless you could transcend your individuality and really being locked in as an awesome jazz quartet or whatever, can, as a group, channel this. He might be more skeptical about that, but it's. Anyway, there's lots of fun toys here to think about music with.

2:00:02 Wes: What I thought was also interesting, just to give my closing here, the kind of reversal we've gotten out of this book. So for Kant, things in themselves were objects and they were inaccessible. And the best we could do is scientific knowledge of the phenomena. For Schopenhauer, music is. And that's one thing he makes a big deal of in the section 52. Music is the best way to get in touch with the will, which is the same thing as the thing in itself. So it gives you the innermost reality of the world, or what he calls the innermost kernel of things or the heart of things. And he even goes on to say that a detailed explanation of music would also be a detailed explanation of the world. And he sort of hints at Pythagoreanism, so even to the point where, well, for Pythagoras, it was something fundamentally mathematical, but here he's thinking something fundamentally musical about the world. And at the beginning of the section, he says that music could continue to exist even if there were no worlds at all. As if music is this first fundamental thing. So what's interesting to me is this reversal where it's not science any longer that brings us into connection with the heart of the universe. It's now music. It's not even poetry or any of the other arts, but simply music.

2:01:22 Mark: All right, next time we're going to talk about Freud on dreams. Some of the interpretation of dreams. Dreams, some of On Dreams. If you get the Freud reader, it's the selections that are in there. Or look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com for the exact page attributions. We are supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a massive contribution. Big donors since last time have included Colin Negritsch, David Pellegrin, Guy Malcolm, Jason Calmes, Thibargan Baskaran, Beth Tullis, Billy Pritchett, Matthew McAvoy, Richard McManus, Frank Markopoulos, Andrew Griggs, R. Mark Phillips, Sophie Lye, Chris Calvert Minor, Sarah Garotte, Charles Wisotski, Michael Singer, Merrick Waterstone, Jennifer Rhodes, Tony Gilkerson, Paul Towson, Aaron Barry, Paul Post, Juan Luna, Juliet Lynn, Liberty Street, Lou Navico, Eric Eliason, Paul La Rosa, Michael Leary, John Doyle, Brandon Mitchell, Derek Lawrence, Wayne Schroeder, Matthew Harrington, Robert Nolan, David McCracken, Arthur Rucker, Gordon McKean, Benjamin Crock, Jeffrey Hackert, Ian Hayden, Oliver Neal, Paul Spirantio, Jeannie Carey, and Meghan Edwards. Thanks also to the smaller donors, including those who are newly or on a continued basis signed up for a $5 a month citizen site. We've got a Twitter feed, we've got a Facebook group. And I want to point out that the song that you're about to hear at the end of this episode is not by me for once. It is by Jonathan Segel. It's called Ever and Always, from his all attractions album from 2012. So thanks, Jonathan, for doing this.

2:02:50 Jonathan: Thank you so much for inviting me. Inviting me.

2:02:51 Wes: Yeah, it was really fun.

2:02:53 Dylan: Thanks, Jonathan.

2:02:54 Mark: Good night, everybody.

2:02:55 Jonathan: Good night.

2:02:55 Dylan: Good night.

2:02:56 Wes: Good night.

2:08:40 Speaker: I never knew that I cared about the air that you breathe but now I'm coercing it to try to make you believe that I'll always be there Always looking right at you you never I'm gonna get r me I never thought much about the water you swim in Now I'm coming singing to tell you it's not a whim to say that here I am and there you are I'm there and so and so Never letting it go Because I'll always be there I'll always be right beside you Always be there I'll always be I think you're plugging your ears so your eyes can see more why don't you open those ears to hear what I'm sorry for? It's not like anyone else we'll listen together Nothing's the smallest word that I say to you so now you're feeling the ground all around your feet it's telling you now about the genetic heats from the fronts of the between us, around us, among us and through it I'm never letting you go Because I'll always be there I'll always be right beside you Always be there I'll always be.

2:10:15 Jonathan: So now I'm wandering through this world

2:10:18 Speaker: of forms to find a plan and keep you safe and warm I'm asking every line, every shape, every point Till I find the right way for you because always is now and will be always to come Forever in moment I Under the sun, the water, the air and the earth and the clouds Are always telling you so I'll always be there I'll always be right beside you Always be there I'll always be right behind you Always be there I'll always be right beside you Always be there I'll always be right Sam.