https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=a5yRd9dRXkU
So we were going to talk today about reinventio, reinventioing, art, right? We wanted to talk about art, and the importance of art, and maybe some false notions we have about what that is, or some limited notions we have about what that is, and how do we make art relevant again for this time, which means going again, like all of our discussions, to a meta level and saying what is art, and what is the function of art, and what is the function of art for the human soul, and all that. So this is what I want to hear from you guys about, which I think you might have to. Andrew, I’d like to add one more thing to that, one more question, one more dimension. I’m actually also interested in what is the role of art within dialogos and dialectics. I’m interested in this exploration of art for its own sake, sorry for the pun, but I’m also interested in this exploration of art for how I can better understand the role and function of art within the practice of dialectic and dialogos. That’s to me what’s most upper most on my mind right now. Okay. So that’s interesting, because I think art is always a dialectic of some kind. I mean, you know, I’ve been a musician, and there’s a dialectic between the artist and the audience. There’s what you’re trying to express and how people receive that. What do you mean by that? What specifically would art have, what does dialogos have to do with art? Well, thank you. That’s a very platforming question you just gave me. So if you remember, I’m influenced by Starry’s work on beauty and the way beauty trains us to truth and justice, and we’ve already discussed that at length. And I’m similarly influenced by Collingwood’s notion that what art does is get us to remember the non-categorical identity of things, kind of the sectionist. And what that brings me into is that I see what’s happening in art is a serious playing with and through our salience landscaping. And I think one of the things that art can do for us, and one of the things art should do for us is to take us into that liminal space where we’re trying to improve our capacity for discernment. So I’m also deeply influenced by Fisher’s book on the aesthetics of the rainbow and rare experiences where he talks about how art puts us on what he calls the horizon of intelligibility. So I think art therefore puts us into situations that at least superficially look like bullshit. In that often in art, so what do I mean? In art, sorry, in bullshit, let’s go there first. In bullshit, one of the defining features of it is things are salient beyond our understanding. Things are salient beyond our ability to grasp them. And we’re just caught up in how salient things are independent of our understanding. But in art, at least initially, we seem to be getting into something similar, where often, especially in great works of art, we’re finding things salient before we have an understanding. Often art is triggering inchoate feelings and thoughts and conceptions. And so it looks like… Like on the form, when you say inchoate, you mean art gets us in touch with what we don’t quite yet already know. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So art is often, and this is what I take Fisher to mean by the horizon of intelligibility, right? Art is often ascending. It’s often trying to point us into a space beyond where we are. And now the thing about that is, like I said, that’s at least superficially very similar to bullshit, but there seems to be a difference between them. And Fisher makes this connection to Socrates in his book. He talks about, yeah, but with art, what’s happening is that you’re experiencing a state of wonder. You’re experiencing a state of opening up and trying to recover a deeper sense of truth or realness, whereas in bullshit, the opposite is happening. The opposite is happening is one is pretending to know all that one needs to know, and one has become indifferent to the truth. So wonder is an opening, so it’s an ostentatious opening, where bullshit is an ostentatious closing. More of an escape, perhaps, right? It’s more of an escape, but I think it’s more what the bullshit artist wants you to do is to not think anymore. The bullshit artist is really trying to get you caught up in not thinking and not caring about the truth. That was Frankfurt Central Notion. Whereas the work of art, where it might look like bullshit initially, because we’re perplexed, but that wonder, I think, at least should be, I don’t know if it always is intended to be, but that wonder should be in the service of drawing us into a deeper understanding, reawakening our concern for what matters, for what’s real. So I think if that argument is plausible. And this also maybe is the difference between actual art and, let’s say, mindless entertainment, which is 9% bullshit, right? Yes, exactly. That’s exactly where it’s going to go with this, Andrew. So thank you for that foresight. So if we do have that kind of a distinction, one of the things art does for us, in contrast to entertainment, and this is an ancient thesis that a lot of artists won’t initially like because of romanticism, but art has an educational function in that what art is supposed to do is tutor us into actively learning how to discern between bullshit and wonder, how to actively allow our salience landscaping to be restructured in the service of the pursuit of truth or a deeper connection, as opposed to, as you said, an escape or an isolation or a misdirection, or, as you said, entertainment, where we just sort of try to cut ourselves off for a while from reality. I’m not opposed to entertainment, but I’m opposed to entertainment as a way of life. And I think art, when art is distinct from entertainment, art is helping to portend a way of life for us. I’m going to jump on that a little bit. An independent, but I think complementary thought, which is that the opening, the affordance of opening of worlding, if I can put it that way, that art allows, is that art as a function, I think one of the things that it does functionally is it helps to transcribe the logos of a given notion, of a given encounter into mythos. It involves a dispersal of an experience into a landscape that can then be regathered and retrieved and cohered interiorly as a world unto itself. And so then made sense of. And so then when it’s recovered and recollected, it is recovered and recollected in such a way that it is, I think, disposed more elegantly. Right. So that one of the things that art actually allows us to do is take the logos of a given experience and telescope it out in an accordion fashion so that it can actually become something to be traversed and indwelled and known from within and cohered from within so that in the regathering of it, it can be known more fully and then known through. Right. So I think of something like narrative. Narrative is certainly by no means the only form of art, but I think for a good reason, it’s often a canonical form when people give such examples. Storytelling, for instance, one of the things that storytelling does is it takes a given pattern and makes that pattern participable. It makes it traversable, explorable and infinitely discoverable. Right. You make a world out of a concept, a world out of a notion. And and your encounter with the notion specieates encounters that can then be regathered and cohered in your understanding, your episteme of that particular pattern. And I think I think that the function of art has something to do with the specieating of different forms of encounter from our ultimate encounter with the logos. So you’re saying that art has a parabolic function? Yes, yes, exactly. The way in the Republic, you know, Socrates proposes lowering the psyche up, magnifying it into the state so that we can get a better understanding of it. Yes. And then we can re-informalize that back and become different because of that. Is that what you’re saying? Yes, exactly. As if, you know, let’s say, let’s say our intent is to know the logos of nature. One of the things that art does is it it produces the flora and fauna that allow us to explore it so that we can better gather and regather and regather still with appreciating precision, perhaps ontologically, the logos of nature at large. And and and there’s some so there’s something exploratory about art that actually allows us to to I think this is a neoplatonic idea, although I think Gadamer talks about it a little bit too, that we disperse it so as to better recover it, so as to collapse it together. This is one question I have and that is, you know, in Plato’s Republic, Plato is quite censorious about art, right? Yep, yep, yep. Art should be like this and not like this. And he’s very particular so that the danger is art becomes a kind of moralism, right? Becomes a kind of a tale of good or evil, right? Where sometimes, you know, in Edgar Allen Poe, when when the guy is stabbing the cat with a knife, this is like that’s the thing that opens you up. It doesn’t have any kind of educational or moralistic quality to it. It just opens you up to to a kind of naked perspective. So I hear you, John, and I agree that art has this sort of educational quality, but then I’m afraid of it becoming a kind of moralism. Yeah, I wasn’t I wasn’t trying to advocate for that. I agree with what you’re saying, Andrew. I was trying to and I want to gather together with what Chris said and by you. I was trying to I was trying to open up an aspect of art that I would answer the question you posed to me, which was what’s its relationship to dialectic? So I was proposing to that in a way analogous to how philosophy plays with concepts. Art plays with our sensorium, our salience landscaping and our inactive intelligibility. Just like Chris says, he’s I think he’s proposing a specific way in which art does this salience landscaping, because it’s a training in wonder. It’s a training in wonder where wonder is something that allows us to discern between the opening up right to something more than what we have seen or known and bullshitting, which which locks us down and disconnects us from concern with the truth. See, the thing about Poe is Poe is there is still the aesthetic there that I’m talking about, because, you know, the moments in Poe, those those moments of horror, right. Horror is another way of getting you outside of the categorical like identity of things. Those moments of horror, we realize potential in the world that we couldn’t realize before. And and and post horror is directed towards getting us to to be more in touch with reality as it is. Poe is trying to break through the veneer of civilized existence and remind us, no, no, remember, underneath all of this veneer, there is this and this is really there. So I think Poe actually is a good example of exactly what I’m talking about, because I think horror. Well, we talked about this. I think horror and awe and wonder are all on a continuum. And so I think horror is a way in which we telescope the way Chris is saying, our salience landscaping so that we can move into we can seriously play ourselves into that liminal space where we can wonder again about ourselves and the world. But if that became too explicit or then it would lose its power somehow. It has to be very naked or something. Art shouldn’t be philosophy. Art shouldn’t be philosophy. Yeah. Right. Art shouldn’t be philosophy. I keep saying that because that’s exactly what I’m saying. I think art is working with a different part of our cognitive faculties that, you know, that need to be addressed and educated independent of our capacity for reflective conceptualization very much. But you see, I’ve noticed that whenever to do whatever degree I’ve been trained in art, I’ve noticed that what happens is. I get a training in this kind of discernment that I’m talking about. And again, it’s not it’s not it’s not a propositional it’s an actual sensory motor discernment that allows me to distinguish between when people are manipulating the salience to bullshit me and when they’re when they’re manipulating the salience in such a way that I yeah, I don’t know. I’m slightly confused, but that confusion is ultimately towards a good end. Because that’s why art is so important, because it doesn’t really allow you to bullshit on some level. Like, well, you can’t propositionally bullshit. You can’t make something you can make a kind of simulacrum of something. And it’s but you know that it’s a fake. Right. If you have the eye of discernment and can tell what is a genuine work of art, you know what is bullshitting and what is it. That’s that’s part of the work of contemplating a work, I think. That’s exactly it. I’m trying to situate. Think about think about how we train discernment. We train discernment by by by putting ourselves into contrasting situations. And I’m saying art gets us like artists training us to discernment in contrast to entertainment on one side and propaganda on another, because propaganda looks like art. But I think it’s basically doing that kind of thing. It’s actually trying to make you not think it’s trying to bullshit you. It’s trying to get you self-enclosed within an ideological framework. Yeah. Right. Which is why art is really I think one of its functions is to take the closed ends of the world and make them porous again. Yes. Right. To reopen the world in such a way that the that the that the to perhaps to refrain to some of the language we’ve been using in our previous discussions to take this to take the such of an encounter and use it as a way of presencing the want for more. Yes, exactly. Right. That’s why there’s an inherent and implicit error to art is that it’s somehow it’s somehow recollective of its own finitude, its own limitations, and it constantly extends beyond itself from the species of a particular thing to to the more of whatever the parent of that species happens to be that elusive parent that it’s trying to retrieve and and then and then to draw the affinity between those two things and to claw and to continue to close. Of course, it can’t. It’s it’s it’s not because it’s inexhaustible. It can’t ultimately be closed, but to try and mediate the relation between the suchness of specificity in that regard and then the and then the moreness of what’s unbounded. There’s a there’s a beautiful example. What we’re talking about, Poe, we may as well throw another author into the mix. There’s a short story or a novella, I guess, by Tolstoy called Family Happiness. And and right at the beginning of this novella, there’s a there’s a young a young woman. She’s a teenage girl and she and it’s and it’s a summer. It’s over over the course of a summertime. And and, you know, they live out in the country, her and her family, and they’re visited regularly by this family friend who’s a little bit older, a little wiser, you know, has has but but but but but countenance is a lot of warmth and is a very good friend of the family. And as as this man starts visiting them more and more regularly, this this young woman begins to find in each of her artistic encounters. A kind of renewed vitality, a kind of participatory valence, a kind of life giving energy out of playing music, out of taking walks, out of out of, you know, darning clothes, out of all kinds of all of these craft oriented activities that she’s undertaking habitually in the course of her daily life. Take on this pregnancy, they take on this great sense of independent vitality. And then she realizes at one point she has this insight where she actually realizes that all of the these these new loves that she is encountering and all of these different forms of arts and crafts are all species of the same love that she has for this man that has been visiting. And so these these arts become a way of finding the specific encounters that she has with any one of these activities with the way in which they are all being gathered and the force in virtue of which they are all being gathered, which isn’t to say that this man is the end of love, but that he becomes a symbol unto the form of love that all of these separate encounters are being gathered and cohered by and in the undertaking of all of these different activities and they’re cohering together, she comes to this this this more this this fuller understanding of what such a thing means. And so I think in some ways, that’s what I mean by the like, it’s the dispersal out and then the retrieval of in order to gather it into into something by which to see. So that’s a process of cognitive evolution. And that’s a process by which we’re evolving, right? We’re evolving our capacity for sensory motor interaction with the world, because you’re sending out, like you said, you’re sending out all the variations, your species, you even use the language of speciating and then you put right and then you try to gather back. What is it that they all gather to and belong to? And then, of course, that’s not going to stop there. Presumably, you know, you’re going to keep having that kind of cycle. And that’s what I mean about I think how art is there’s this. Yeah, there’s this it’s kind of it’s kind of an educated, socially constructed evolution of our sensorium and in a very comprehensive manner. Yeah, I can relate to what you’re saying, Christophe, in terms of my, you know, in my 20s, I wrote a lot of songs and I think the songs that I wrote that had some quality to them probably were written without me being able to like they took me over on some level. They were not propositional in any way. They were like something I discovered as like, wow, what’s this? And I didn’t know what I was doing at all. And that would the more I didn’t know what I was doing, the more I was in an area that was alive, which sounds like a kind of romanticism. So I was throwing all these things out there and they would form something that was and when I became much more conscious of what I was doing, it was harder to do. It was much harder to to actually construct something like it’s hard to construct a work of art. I think it seems to be reliant somehow on inspiration, on something beyond. Does that make any sense? Yeah, I think it relies on the I mean, speaking as a cognitive scientist, I think we have this term that’s not very helpful creativity. I think creativity is a way of pointing to cognitive processes of insight, metaframing processes where we’re switching between the telecom mode and the paratelic mode. There’s all these processes at many levels of cognitive analysis at which we engage in a restructuring of what we find salient and relevant, not by doing something. You can’t do it. You can’t do an insight. But what we do is we do things that trigger the process to self-organize and then we bear witness to that epiphany, to use Rutson’s very pregnant phrase. That’s what I think actually happens. So most of the work actually is not actually the artistic expression. It’s just training. It’s just training. And it’s just opening yourself up for some kind of muse or spirit to arrive at your doorstep on some level. But that’s exactly it. You have to write a lot of bullshit out of your system before. I mean, I know that’s the writing poetry for decades. You have to write a lot out. And that’s what I mean about we tend to focus too much on the product of art. And what I’m trying to do right now in what we’re saying, and this is how I think it’s connected to the dialectic, is focus, get us to focus on the process of art. What has to happen in people’s development? And what virtues and sensibilities do they need to cultivate such that the things that we call art are produced by them rather than fixating on the product and trying to determine what art is from that? That’s what I’m suggesting. That’s I think that’s absolutely right. I think that also serves to explain why, you know, a lot of artists will tell you, at least the prodigious ones will tell you that they disidentify from the products, from whatever is whatever arena is spontaneously created in the encounter with an experience or the encounter with a mode of inquiry. It’s the arena that’s produced for the purposes of practicing agency. Whatever is left behind in that arena once the agency is evolved and practiced and practices its way out of that arena, whatever is left over in the arena is in a way incidental. It’s incidental, at least to the development of character that it has affected. Also, it can trap the artist. Like he can create a product and that can define him. Yes, exactly. And then he slips into the having mode. Because he gets stuck in the having mode. He doesn’t exactly doesn’t keep learning because he becomes the image of himself as an artist and his product becomes crystallized so he can’t transform in the way it is necessary to continue to create a living art. Yes. Yes. Which often what I find is in that, that was what I thought when John was speaking was the problem is almost youth in a sense in terms of how we see art in popular culture is that people get famous or and they create art very young and then they don’t have a full life as an artist because they become defined in some kind of a way and that some kind of maturing process has to occur for an artist to be a generative personality instead of a destructive one. I think that’s very well said. Very well said. So my concern is that there should be some there’s some transfer relationship between this training and discernment so we can reliably discriminate between bullshit and wonder that that that should that that should find a place within dialectic as a practice and via logos as a process. That’s what I mean about that. That’s how I think art right. And the fact that via logos is committed to emergence. It’s committed to taking us to like the horizon of intelligibility that it’s committed to getting us to see things in their non-categorical identity again. We’re trying to do it right now. We’re trying to reinvent your art. We’re trying to step outside of the categories. I see all of that as finding a proper home within dialectic. So I do think that there’s deep connections between the practice of art and the practice of dialectic. Yeah. I also think people have kind of a limited idea of what art is. It’s limited to the performance or the plastic arts or music or whatever. But fundamentally, your whole life should be in art on some level. I mean, maybe that’s a grandiose statement, but. But. Well, I think that’s making sense here. I know we have to distinguish an artistic process and what is, you know, what is painting and music and that kind of thing. But I want there to be a larger definition of the project of art. Some narrow sort of activity of playing guitar and writing a song or painting a painting. But that was Nietzsche’s hope, right? But the problem is the way that the term he used, the term he originated has degenerated and it no longer has that reference. Nietzsche came up with the idea of a lifestyle. And the whole point about a lifestyle was exactly what you are articulating there. It was trying to bring the education and evolution in the practice of art into one’s life as a whole, because he was trying to come up with a non-religious or maybe post-religious way for the cultivation of virtue because he saw the need for it. And he came up with the idea of lifestyle. But the problem with the idea of lifestyle, right? And if you read what he talks about, he’s got these amazing passages of you’re trying to like you’re all of the impulses within you are and you’re trying to shape them into something, right? And it’s and that’s not what it means anymore. Lifestyle has degenerated into, you know, a particular fashion or branding of oneself that has nothing to do with what Nietzsche was talking about. But I think the idea of having an aesthetic, even this isn’t going to be deep enough, but something like a profound aesthetic style to one’s existence as an ideal for one’s life. I think that’s exactly what Nietzsche was trying to talk about. Yeah. Maybe the issue with Nietzsche is that his idea was too much based on the individual artist. Yes. Rather than perhaps the collective experience of creating art in a community or with other people or which which I don’t know, you can be a solo artist or you can be in a band, you know. I think, yeah, I think his antipathy towards Socrates and Plato really blocked him from seeing the sort of dialogic and distributed aspects of art. I think that’s true. And I think also I find he lost the idea about the dynamic balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian within the work of art. Like if you look, right, the spirit, you know, the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music, it’s clear that the two are supposed to be, you know, held in equal balance. Then he becomes increasingly antagonistic towards the Apollonian as he goes on. And I think that’s also very detrimental to his overall argument. Right. So we need to keep in mind then the choral elements, as we talked about, I think, in our last conversation, the three of us, right, we talked about the choral elements of dialectic and dialogos as foundational to its place. Yeah, really, yeah, choral as in relating to the chorus that are fundamental to its situation within meta-dialogue, right. That the choral presence is what we mean by the more of the meta-dialogue that helps to gather the relevance of whatever is situated within a particular practice. Yeah, because the choral is, I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s not an individual expression. It goes beyond… Decidedly not. You know, we kind of consider art to be an individual expression of some kind. Even if you’re a solo artist, I don’t think it’s an individual expression. I think that’s kind of a lot. That’s kind of one of the lies of how we consider art to be. It’s about expressing yourself. But I think, yes, you’re right. If you have the choral, the choral is always working with you and you’re synthesizing all of these voices into some unique expression that’s beyond you. Well, I think it’s… I’m actually arguing against the romantic proposal that art is fundamentally self-expression. I’m actually arguing that art is fundamentally a form of self-cultivation and self-transformation. And that you’re not trying to express, you’re trying to make a new way of being possible for yourself and for others. A work of art, like Krish said, he said this a few minutes ago, it should open, it should give you a serious play and practice of opening up another world. That’s what a great work of art does for you. Ultimately, look, ultimately… If you are not already pre-committed to an unjustified individualism, why is self-expression such a valorized thing? Who cares? I mean, really, I’m not trying to be cruel. I mean, who cares? What is that for? I would search for something universal in a song, not something about me. If I was trying to write a song. Yeah. If I was trying to write a song. Yeah. It would be something that would ground me in a larger community and make me see myself rather than give me a strong definition of who I am. Yeah. You don’t want to be planting a flag on yourself. That’s not what art should be. Right? I mean, art works with the material of the self. It’s self-cultivation. But I mean, it’s ultimately… Right? I mean, all the Meaning in Life literature shows that what really gives us meaning in life is to matter, to be connected to something beyond ourself that has a value independent of our egocentric concerns. Self-expression, by definition, fails that project. So it fails to contribute to meaning in life. That’s why I’m getting so passionately critical of it. Whereas if I’m engaging in self-cultivation that transforms me such that I become a vehicle for a world opening up to other people, that is mattering. That is making a difference beyond myself. And that is meaningful. I was listening to your video with Jonathan Pagio today. Oh, yes. He’s a very fine artist. Yes. And he’s also in a way he’s a traditionalist, right? Because he wants to create icons. And I guess at the time when icons were being created, you were looking through the eye of God, right? Probably like that. And then suddenly humanism came along in what, 13th, 14th century? And you’re supposed to look through the eye of yourself. Okay. And then, I don’t know, maybe you could, you know more about the history of ideas than me, John, but then I guess we have Einstein and relativity and then we have postmodernism and then the self starts to dissolve and then there is no such thing as a self anymore. And so I was thinking about the beauty of what Jonathan does. And I was also thinking about my desire for post-traditional art as well. And what might that look like? Because I’m not just satisfied with iconography. And I do think there’s something modern about what he’s doing at the same time. I don’t want to accuse him of being, you know, but at the same time, I think iconography is a beautiful form of expression. But there is something to modern art that is perhaps close, I don’t know, to Zou Chen or something like that’s not narrative. Or, I’m throwing out a lot of ideas here. Excuse me. Can you pick up on any of that? Yeah, I did. I picked up on a few things and then I’ll turn things over to Chris. I think one of the great important things about modern art, whatever that is supposed to point to, is precisely the fact that it reminds us of the possibility of non-narrative wonder, of non-narrative self-cultivation. It liberates us. I don’t think it should be seen as excluding narrative, because as Chris rightly says, narrative is an important feature of many genres of art. But modern art tried to liberate us from that to some degree because I think it would. You see this in… Oh, what’s the name of the guy who… Oh, he was synesthetic, Stuckler K. He wrote the spirituals of American book. Yes. Yeah, yes. Right? And he talked… You can see clearly, and he’s one of the fathers of modern art, right? He sees the abstract as a way of freeing us from narrative, as a way of freeing us from egocentrism, as a way of bringing back the sacred in art. So I think that that is an important value in it. I don’t think that that’s a problem for Jonathan, because as you said, Jonathan sees these as icons. He sees them as windows. You have to remember, remember Eckhart, the eye by which you see God is the same eye by which he sees you. It’s not right, right? It’s a transjective, bidirectional thing. Jonathan sees that. But for people caught in humanism, they don’t have that. There isn’t that translucency, right? And so I think what modern art was trying to do when it went post-humanist and went abstract, right? At least initially, condensed, you can see this, is it’s trying to open us back up to the trans-egoic by liberating us from the narrative, because ego and narrative are very bound together, very inter-defining. So I think your illusion to it being something like a Buddhist, having a Buddhist component to it, I think that’s well placed. I think that’s well said. Yeah, there seems to be a tension between the narrative and the post-narrative story, and maybe they’re both necessary. Well, I like the discussion between sort of non-duality and person, there shouldn’t be a personal God versus sort of the impersonal versus the personal. Those two have to be, sorry, I think those two, you have to transcend the non-duality and also transcend the personal, but they both have to come together. Yeah, I think that is properly the project of non-theism. But yeah, I think that’s right. I think that, I mean, there’s areas of art that maybe we don’t, there’s areas of art that maintain a closer connection to the sacred precisely because they have this structure. You just said, you know, there’s where you have a narrative structure that undermines its narrative and undermines any, it destabilizes you trying to take up any self-satisfied ego role within them. That’s exactly what the parables of Jesus are. The parables of Jesus are these narratives. Like when you read the parable of the product of the Son, you think there’s this story. But when you try to put yourself in any of the roles, you fall under God’s judgment, right? They don’t work. And, you know, and Sally McFadden’s all this great work on, and the Sufis have similar things where the parables are narratives that then deconstruct themselves as narratives because they’re designed to explode you beyond an egocentric way of being. And I think that’s what I meant when I was trying to say earlier about, you know, there’s almost a, and you can see how this could go together with what Chris is saying. You can see how a parable, right, gets you to telescope out the intelligibility in the narrative, but then it collapses the narrative and you get the regathering and you have to transcend to something in that regathering. So it’s not just a gathering back, it’s a gathering that then pushes you beyond the space that was originally drawn by the narrative. And I think in that sense, we should talk more often in our culture about appropriate connections between art and parable that and I think that’s something that that needs to be explored more and more right now because we’ve gotten too much into, again, like you said, art as a product that is some kind of… Art for art’s sake, perhaps. Yeah, which I don’t, I ultimately don’t agree with. Exactly. We shouldn’t be creating wonderful trophies of self-expression. We should be creating parables that constantly propel us beyond ourselves. Yeah, well, it seems to be that for all of those reasons that art, those instances where we believe of art of any given instance of it, that it is genuine art, right? Because there’s a little bit of a, there’s kind of a normative distinction, I think a kind of ineffable normative distinction that people make when they say this is real art. They don’t even, we don’t typically, we don’t even know what we mean by that when we say it, but you hear people saying it all the time. Ah, you see that story or that novel or that show or that whatnot. That’s real art as opposed to this other pulpy stuff. And I think… Like what that is, what that means. Well, yeah, I think that part of what that means, which I think is, which refers back to everything that the two of you have just said in the last three minutes, is that when when the purported subject of art, whatever it happens to be at the time, seems to become conscious that it lives in reference to some necessity, it’s narrowly guided by that, that it is not of itself or for itself, but that it exists only insofar as it exists as a gesture, a beyond word gesture away from itself. I think under those circumstances, we say of something that it is true or genuine art. And so when you were talking about the idea of self-expression, I thought that was kind of interesting and you spoke of it, both of you spoke of the idea of self-expression pejoratively, but I think and fairly so. But if we were to capitalize the S at the end of that self, I think we would find that that expression took on something of a different meaning because it would be collected. It’s like the divine double, right? Exactly. It would be an expression of the divine double. If what art is, is self-expression and perhaps also simultaneously self-impression, that it is mimetic. It is mimetic of the inanearable. It’s mimetic of something that has not been fully retrieved. Right. And it’s we are and that and that brings that brings into the question of art, this idea of ontological conformity, that if what it is doing is trying to get itself into conformity of that, which is not imminently retrievable, then it becomes a way of rendering an impression of a self yet undiscovered, that capital self, that divine double self for the sacred second self. Right. And so every time you produce something, there is a kind of there is a kind of attempted imitation at the self that is out of reach to bring it into presence. And it’s not that you would have to express that self perfectly. It would be that you would have to gesture towards it, I would say. That’s right. Because you’re not going to express it. The work of art is a gesture. It’s not a complete telling of what that is. That’s right. Which is why it has to be translucent. Right. It has to be porous. It has its boundaries have to be permeable because it’s not it’s an it’s approximation. It’s ever, ever approximation. It’s ever approximation. Right. That’s why a true and I’m sorry, I keep coming back to narrative. Not not because it’s essentially the case, but just because it’s the most easily retrievable example for me. But one of the things that one of the things that we find in a truly, truly, truly good story is that its specificity seems to provide the current for a universality. And those things seem to be and there seems to be an antimony there. They seem to be in contradiction. But of course, they’re not right. Because the more such the such of the story is, the more it seems to presence the possibility of being more. The more it’s the more it’s mimetic finessing seems to gather its arms around something of appreciating realism. That’s why magical realism as a form of narrative is often so powerful, because magical realism as a subgenre as a subgenre of narrative seems to actually make a narrative conscious of this very dynamic. But that’s that’s when it gets that’s when it gets parabolic. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. That’s I’m saying this is all very this is all convergent with that observation. Yeah. Parabolic is is that different than, let’s say, symbolic? Yeah, I think that’s the difference. Because because you would say that we need parabolic art. And I would say I find symbolism and art very powerful. And I think Jonathan Pagio is sort of showing us that. And we’ve sort of lost our symbolic literal literacy, like we’re symbolically illiterate a bit. And so people used to express themselves in these powerful symbols. And now people are often creating something that is a very poor kind of realism, right? It’s like a documentary style. It’s just it’s just it’s like Werner Herzog says it’s like reading the phone book. It’s like you try to create realism, but it doesn’t have that magic to it because because realism, in a sense, is the bullshit. And it’s real realism. Yeah, I think that’s right. I don’t think these I don’t think those two claims are in competition with each other. I think they should be enfolded together. I think I agree with you and I agree with Jonathan that, you know, and I know Chris does, too. You know, recovering our symbolic sensibilities in a proper way, a wise way, a way that affords discernment is exactly one of the things that art should be doing, especially right now. But but I think if we thought, well, let’s take what Jonathan makes. The icon, right, the point about the point about the icon is it’s ultimately parabolic, right? If you get locked into the icon, right, then you you turn it into an idol. That’s what Jonathan Marian talks about, right? In the God beyond being, right? You write it always has to have this parabolic structure to it because it has to reach you where you are, but then it has to explode so that you are propelled beyond. That’s an infinite expression. And as Christoph says, porous, right? That’s what he means. And translucent rather than a fixed closed system. And I think that’s exactly the thing it has to do is it has to like Chris is right, though, right? It’s not an amorphous infinite, right? It’s not the indeterminate. It’s the infinite that has been poured into the finite so that it glows with something beyond the finite, but is never anything other than finite for you. Right. That’s the that’s the that’s what I’m trying to get at. And the notion that Chris was mentioning about the self-expression with the castle capital S, as he was saying that I was thinking of one of his favorite authors, somebody who actually transcend the boundary between philosophy and art, which maybe undermines what I said a few minutes ago. But I’m thinking of Kierkegaard and thinking about how Kierkegaard writes these parabolic narratives that are designed right to do exactly what we’re talking to design to sort of suck you in to a particular role and then explode that role so that you come to realize that you have within you something that is the potential for any and every role. And that that’s something your soul has a relationship to something much more ultimate than any one of these roles or ways of life. And again, I think that’s one of the pre if that’s what you mean by self-expression, Chris. That’s what I can I can agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s beautifully said. That’s precisely it. Precisely. Yeah. I just don’t like I just don’t like the phrase because of its sort of standard meaning. Right. Yeah, of course, of course. And I wouldn’t be inclined to use it either. But if we were to if we were to try and recall something of an original meaning within the commonplace expression, it would require that minor augmentation. I think that was my only point in saying that just as a way of playing with it. I mean, part of our practice of reinvent you here is to take what is common and play with its commonness as a way of recollecting its original meaning. And this is I think that’s all just part of the same practice. Well, I don’t think it’s happenstance that you mention those two because I think there’s deep connection between how we’re talking about art and the practice of inventio. What we’re trying to get between we’re trying to get between inventing and discovering. That’s what we’re talking about here. May I raise a question for all of us? Because I think it was also implicit in what Andrew was asking. And we’ve lost the thread. And I want to make sure we go back to it, which is does art have to be beautiful? Right. So I’ve argued that we should be concentrating more on the process rather than the product. But does the process always have to be in service of being drawn by, induced by beauty? Or are there other things that properly afford and draw art out into the world? I would say, John, that beauty, the practice of art is not suffused constantly with beauty, but it is constantly guided by its search. Right. That like I’m just thinking on a very, I’m thinking on a very hands-on, just trying to the process of trying to produce something, whatever it may be, right? Whether trying to produce a paper or trying to produce a song, which I have no experience with Andrew, but you’ll be able to speak to. Yeah, it’s mostly. I think you’re, I think you’re, I, it is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I believe it. It’s mostly just the most irritating thing in the world, right? It’s laborious, right? It’s laborious and irritating and its melodies get in your head and you hate them and you somehow have to go to the end on some level and get the thing out. It’s like, as I said, the midwife hole, it’s like, you know, the birth. Yeah. Right. Right. The eros, right? Because the eros, right? The instinct of eros is guided by beauty, but that doesn’t mean that every, that the, that eros is always disposed to be beautiful, though it seeks beauty. And I think perhaps that’s the difference, is that the eros of art is guided attentionally in the pursuit of beauty, but its incidence is not always beautiful. I would say that my answer to John’s question is that, yes, art always has to be beautiful, but our definition of what beauty is, is probably problematic usually because we think of beauty in a very narrow sense. Exactly. And that beauty itself can be found in the most banal, it can be found in something grandiose, it can be found in the baroque, it can be found in, it can be found anywhere and in any circumstance. And so it doesn’t have to conform to, let’s say, a platonic ideal of what beauty is, or symmetry or any of that, but I’m not sure if I’ve answered the question myself, but I think the answer is yes, that art has to be related to beauty, but we also have to broaden the notion of what beauty is to not be something cliche and, you know, very- Well, let’s play with this because I want to. By the way, I just want to make note how you, in the middle of art, you were invoking midwifery, which of course is also the project of Socratic dialectic. Yeah. Well, it’s a dialogue with yourself, you know. Don’t you call that the vertical dialectic or something like that? You’re dialoguing with higher powers. Let’s play with this, what you guys have both said. So what came to my mind when I asked this question was a painting that I’ve often found very powerful and I consider it a bona fide great work of art many other people do, is Picasso’s Guernica, right? Guernica, which is, it’s hard for me to, when I’m standing in the presence of that painting, to say I’m experiencing anything like beauty. I’m experiencing shock, horror, and I’m experiencing even the perversion of the sacred. You know how he has that big, he has the light at the top that’s taking the electric light that’s taking the place of God right in the painting. And yet all of this is because, and this is where Collingwood’s idea comes in, and that’s why I’m asking this question. Because Collingwood says that, because he actually uses this example. Collingwood said the point of that is to try and get us, and I’m going to use the language we’ve been using, is Picasso doesn’t want us to think of the battle, the bombing of Guernica categorically. He doesn’t want us to slot it in all the other bombings, all the other tragedies. He wants us to directly experience the ineffable, horrible suchness of that moment. The non-categorical ah of Guernica that can’t be captured categorically. Because only that horror is appropriate to the tragedy that was unfolding. That’s the right relationship to the event. So you see what I’m, I’m not saying that I’ve refuted you guys or anything like that. I’m trying to say that isn’t it- Maybe beauty is the relationship like between you and the painting. It’s not the painting itself, it’s the relationship in a forest. That’s what came to mind. Well, okay, so that’s what I was wondering because it is, and picking up on what you said Andrew, I’ve been trying to reorient this off the product of art to the process. Can we reorient from a product notion of beauty to a process notion of beauty? Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s what we have to do in fact. So some of what you seem to be just describing John is that one thing, one experience you have when you look at the Picasso painting is that yes, so it accommodates an uncategorical experience of such a phenomenon. But what it also does I think in the way that you’ve given, I can’t remember where this example comes from originally. It might be yours John, but when you talk about the suchness of the trees and the morness of the trees that you encounter, a beautiful tree such that it is unique and incomparable, and you also encounter in this beauty of the same tree, just the infinite possibility of tree-ness in all of its beauty. So then one way then of thinking about art in the way that you’ve just described it with this example and I think you just said this Andrew, is an appreciation of the relation between those two uncategorical categories of the infinite more of the beauty of something and the such of its beauty and being able to relate those two and to intimate and make more intimate their dialogue in the experience of a given work. Oh, so if you’ll allow me to be slightly poetic then, what you’re saying is that Picasso’s Deneca actually presences the soul of the bottle. Yeah, and what I thought was it’s the courage of the artist to express that in its most naked form, which also makes it beautiful. Yes, I think there is a connection to, I mean he’s definitely trying to train discernment. In fact, it’s hard to justify that painting without it having that. If it just horrified me towards no end, I mean his intent was ultimately even political there. He was trying to wake people up. He was trying to get them to discern what was actually going on in this battle in a profound way. So it’s not shock value, which is that’s one of the problems with contemporary art. Yes, exactly. And the shock does not have the content to it. It doesn’t because it doesn’t have the same kind of invocation because the shock actually dissociates from its realism rather than impressing it. The shock actually doesn’t conjure the soul of an experience. What shock does is actually, I find what shock does is actually dissociate from the soul of an experience. So this idea of art being a kind of being a way of presencing the logos. I think being a way of presencing and this then goes back to the idea you brought up, Andrew, of the renewing. So what it does, I think, in some ways is it makes of a particular rendering a symbol that presences the soul of the logos. So this then circles back to the argument I made that virtue is the beauty of wisdom. So there is a process, a relational, transjective process notion of beauty that is appropriate then. And then would ally with our attempts to redirect the discussion of art off the product and onto the process again. Yeah, off the it and back to the thou. Exactly. Right, beautiful. So that the product serves to invocate the process. And to reproduce it, to midwife it again. Yeah, the product has to not be like a Campbell’s soup can. It has to go beyond the Campbell’s soup can and keep reproducing itself. It has to be generative. That’s a word I was thinking of when I was… It has to be fecund. Exactly. Exactly. When a film, you know, you watch some films and then you just feel that, you know, when I watched these like expensive films, expensive superhero movies that everybody, Avengers and people think are so great, I just feel exhausted afterwards. Like I feel like I’ve been depleted of energy. And then there’s other films you watch, like I mentioned Werner Herzog’s films, somehow they have this texture and depth to them. And you watch them and you feel like you’ve been nourished in some kind of a way, right? You haven’t been like, you know… That’s what Plato says… You know, art can be a kind of rape, you know, it can be like, not art, but cheap entertainment. It can be kind of, it rapes your soul. But the real kind of art is just like an opening of, as you say, arrows. And it’s infinitely realizable for that very reason, right? The difference between watching the good film and the bad film, right? Or the strong film, the artful film and the unartful film is that the artful film, the artful film is you can interrogate it endlessly because when it articulates itself out, there’s something that is shining forth through the medium of the work that is not of the work itself. And you don’t, that’s not true of every… Again, I think that depends on the integrity of the artist, is what, you know, John is saying about, you know, all of these qualities like wisdom and virtue. If the artist is being motivated by those qualities, you know, that integrity, then that shines through. If he’s being motivated by some kind of something else, who knows what that other thing is, probably trying to please the mob or something, then it comes off as being, you know, empty. So there’s two things that came out of what you guys were just talking. I kept interrupting, I shouldn’t though, because you guys kept unfolding more. What, Andrew, to gather back to previous discussions we had, we talked about this, how Plato talks about, you know, the beauty is, like when we were talking about Hanswer, that the response of beauty should not ultimately be consumptive, it should be generative. The response to beauty is the desire to generate more beauty. And then you guys link that, I think, very astutely to the notion of the inexhaustible, an inexhaustible fountain of intelligibility. And then what you did to my mind, and tell me if you don’t like this, but you wed beauty and art and sacred as all intertwined and interwoven together. That sacredness, because that’s what it is when we find something, an inexhaustible fountain of intelligibility, and that we find within it a beauty that makes us want to generate beauty. Isn’t that a really good definition of the sacred? Yeah, absolutely. It also serves to explain why art, whatever alleges to be art, if it does not, if it does not invoke the sacred, it appears not to be art. The same activity, perhaps. That means that, this is the- Does that mean, you know, like, because art can contain all kinds of unsacred things? But again, your point, is it the process or the product we’re talking about here? If the point is to put those unsacred things in, to wake us up from how we have perhaps put them into idols, or perhaps how we’ve lost touch with their original meaning, if it’s to wake us up to the sacred again, then I think it’s art. If it’s just to be irreverent, then I don’t think that would count as good art to my mind. No. I mean, what we’re doing here is we’re critiquing, I mean, we have launched a deep critique of, you know, the romantic slogan, arts for art’s sake. We’re saying, art to be art should never be for art’s sake. Yes. And we’re also making an implicit statement, we’re also making an implicit platonic argument that only good art qualifies the definition. Yes. Yes. If it is not of the good, if the art is not of the good, then it is not art by definition, which is a very platonic argument. How does this sit up with you? I’m starting to react against that a little bit, because I don’t want to narrow it into something somehow. I think that it can’t be narrowed to platonic ideals, because that would, that would be didactic, or is that the right word? Well, maybe, wait, I’m going to ask Andrew to do what you did earlier when I made a proposal. You said maybe we need to reinvent our sense of beauty to be appropriate to where the argument is leading us. Like we have to go all the way up and all the way down is what I want to say. We have to see the art in the garbage, we have to see the art in, you know, distorted electric guitars, and, you know, the Ramones, okay. We also have to see art in these, you know, I don’t want a moralistic Christian version of art. I’m sorry, Jonathan Casual, I’m sorry, I don’t want that. I want the Ramones and the Sex Pistols too, even though they are irreverent, but there’s some authenticity coming through there. Absolutely there is. I don’t think anything that we’ve said, in my mind, in my mind, this is good to resolve then. In my mind, nothing we’ve just said excludes the grungiest forms of art imaginable. To me, this definition includes all of that because we’re, with a great breadth, we’re trying to expand the definition of what we mean by beauty in the first instance. I don’t think it is to the exclusion of anything that seems like it has dirt under its fingernails. I don’t see it as excluding that. Yeah, and so I was proposing, Andrew, that we do an inventio on, or I think we are already doing it, an inventio on the sort of platonic notion of art. That’s what I think is actually happening here. I don’t think it’s about, I think there has been a mistake, and Plato bears some responsibility for this, and so do some of the Neoplatonists, so I think that it’s well said, but I think there has been a mistake of reducing all of this to what Nietzsche would call the Apollonian, and that should never be the case. The frame making of the Apollonian always has to be inextricably wed to the frame breaking of the Dionysian, or you never get the insight. Apollonian is cold, right? The Apollonian? Generative chaos of the Dionysian. I think that’s unfair to the Apollonian because of the way the dichotomy is unfolded. I think the Apollonian is supposed to be warm, but it’s supposed to be warm with light and with stable form, and the Dionysian is supposed to be the warmth of heat and rupture. They’re both warm, but they’re warm in different ways. They’re generative in different ways, right? I mean, birth requires a really painful breaking and separating, but it also has to come into a stable being, right? A child, or it turns into a disaster. So I agree, with that aspect of the Nietzschean critique of what I think fairly has been called the Platonic, I think that’s right, but I think what Chris was alluding to was the notion that I still think is recoverable from Plato of art as something ultimately aspirational, something that is ultimately cultivating wisdom as a defining feature of the art. And I do think that there is wisdom to be found in some of the things. I mean, I think, Hendrik’s guitar riffs were definitely doing simultaneously frame breaking and frame making, and he was talking about a way of being, a way of seeing the world, right? He was. That was what was going on then. I was thinking of Cézanne, who he mastered all the classical forms, and then he couldn’t find anything that mattered to him in all that, and so he took a big bonfire and he burned everything he’d ever done for 40 years. And then he came up with this sort of non-perspectival art where he would do the mountain of Saint-Victoire over and over again, millions of times from different angles, and you could see it. And he just threw out perspective and invented power, invented a whole new form. It looks very much like a postcard to us now, but at that time it was something radical to him, through the destruction of the old, right? And the more you kind of destroy of that, that’s perhaps the Dionysian as the destructive element. Exactly. Exactly. And I think if Plato had been more connected to his proposal, which I think he really proposed, of the generativity as the primary response to the beauty, he would have seen that all generativity has within it both the frame-breaking Dionysian and the frame-making Apollonian. And this generosity, let’s say, of the theater, right? Because that’s what he was criticizing, right? Is the theater and all its garishness and all its… Yeah, he didn’t like the way… I mean, poetry means something much more than it means for us. Because poetry also meant writing plays, right? So he didn’t like the way in which that was… Now, it’s clear that he likes some of the classics, like Sophocles, because… And he clearly likes Homer because he cites Homer repeatedly. But he wants to rewrite them. He wants to rewrite the parts that are misleading the youth. But this circles us back around. Because this is Plato’s worry. And this is why I proposed it as the initial question. Plato’s worried about people not being able to tell the difference between wonder and bullshit, right? That’s exactly what you’re putting your finger on again. He was worried about the way in which these things can bullshit people. Yeah. And he was criticizing Netflix, more or less. In a sense, he was criticizing this popular sort of… Well, and he might have ultimately been wrong, I think, about some aspects of art. I don’t want to deify it. But what I’m saying is, Plato, I think, was at least cottoning onto the fact that this stuff can very rapidly devolve into entertaining bullshit in which people are self-satisfied with not needing to learn, not needing to be educated. And that’s what bullshit, again, that’s its defining feature. The point about a commercial, for the typical instance, one of Frankfurt’s, a bullshit, is to make you stop questioning about the product so that you’ll buy it. Or the point of the commercial is to make you to stop reflecting about the candidate and vote for them. But the point of a work of art is to make you reflect more about this thing, or make you reflect more about this person. So can art be political, then? Can art be political, is the question. Well, it depends. I think it could be political in the Aristotelian sense of politics, whereas we are recognizing… I mean, when I say I’m not political, I don’t mean politics in the Aristotelian sense. I mean the Aristotle sense is that, yes, idea that most of our cognition is done and should be done in distributive cognition. And that is where we are at its best. Unfortunately, Aristotle, by an accident in history, only wrote monologues. So that’s what it got boxed. But the political, I mean, insofar as an artist is trying to get us, and I mean this word now deeply, to wonder about distributive cognition and its sacred capacity for us, I think it can properly be political art. To the degree to which it is not calling us to explore and try and refine ourselves into a more conforming relationship with reality, to the reach in which it’s trying to get us to be closed and finished and think we have both, you know, break the Gordelian friction, that we claim to have both completeness and consistency, and we’re all done. So in that way, when it tries to be ideological, in that sense… Then it becomes propaganda. Then it becomes propaganda. That’s exactly what I would argue. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is why I think any ostensive work of art that has prefigured its objective to close the ends of the world into a knot that establishes firm ideological boundaries, to me, can never constitute good art because it can never reflect that right relation to the real. Right. And so to go back to whatever examples, I think Guernica is an example of political art that is not ideological. He’s just trying to get us to realize the evil, the truth of the ineffable evil that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. And sometimes it doesn’t even need to be that extreme. Sometimes it’s simply to call into question the unquestioned certitude of certain, the prevailing clime of false beliefs, right? I mean, that’s, you know, like one of the things, one of the art forms I enjoy most, and it’s often a very low brow art form, if we’re talking about it in those terms, is comedy. Like stand-up comedy for me. Like those that do it well are among the greatest artists, I think, of our time, precisely because they have a knack, they have a penchant for inducing the aporetic experience in relation to that which goes unquestioned. And that’s why their particular forms of trans, and the more trans, like when they are artfully transgressive in that way, they are profoundly, profoundly powerful for that very reason. But I mean, part of that is at least because, I mean, I would argue that humor, I mean, the thing, the advantage that humor has then is that, sorry, the advantage that comedy has insofar as it invokes humor is that humor is engaging the machinery of insight. And so it’s already getting insight into play. Like, I mean, if your jokes are falling flat, then there isn’t any insight in what you’re doing. So the thing that I would then ask you then is, Chris, granting you that I think comedy has a special role because of the way it invokes insight. It doesn’t just request it. It actually, we have to do insight in order to follow the comedy. So I think that’s a point in its favor. But the opposite, of course, is, right, many comedies are merely entertaining. Right? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not something being incidentally humorous that makes it artful. It’s the provocation of humor in service of insight, I think, that is the art of the practice. I guess the people like Lenny Bruce in the beginning, they did have really something powerful to say about race and things like that. But the way their way of putting it, it was quite, I would say, beyond entertainment. I mean, you’re laughing at the worst parts of yourself. You’re laughing at seeing yourself inside out. You’re laughing at seeing your, the best comedians are most self-mocking of themselves, he says, right? Right. Because I think one thing that good comedians do is they call attention to the form of life that inculcates our experience and conditions it unthinkingly, right? The forms of life that, you know, the proponents of our habits, the proponents of the way that we behave, the structures we live by that go unseen by us through most of our days are precisely those that, I mean, good observational comics, that’s what they do in effect, right? They call our attention down to the fundaments, to the rudiments that structure our behavior, and then turn our attention back to those things. It’s, I mean, I don’t mean to over attribute brilliance to the genre, but there is a certain amount of Socratic self-inquiry that good comedians induce and induce very deliberately. Well, I’ve heard it said that tragedy is the art that reminds us of our capacity for transcendence, and comedy is the art that reminds us of our finitude, so that we never think of ourselves as gods. And I remember Jonathan Miller saying, if you want to present a tragedy well, try to highlight the comedy in the play. Yeah. You want to present the comedy well, try and highlight the tragedy within the show. Because comedy is horrible. I mean, it’s totally tragic, you know, and I guess tragedy has us beyond the tragic. So there’s maybe an inverse there. Well, I do think that there is a dialectical relationship between tragedy and comedy, and that they kind of, it’s almost a yin-yang. I don’t mean that one’s yin and the other’s yang, but you know, the way the yin and the yang interpenetrate and interdefine each other. Because, I mean, this is what, this is what Duhamelan argues is the core of Socratic dialectic. There’s a human-wrote book called Transcendence, what is it? Transcendence and the Finite or Transcendence and Finitude? The point is that Plato is always trying to keep us more both in our capacity for transcendence and our mortality as finite beings. Because if we give into just the finite, we become enslaved to despair. And if we give into just the transcendent, we become inflationary and arrogant and destructive. That makes sense. Interestingly, those two things can sometimes combine into the morality tale. What, the tragedy and the comedy? Yeah. Yeah. Because what you’ve described is the dialectical relationship between them, and that dialectical relationship does seem to be essential to the narrative form. And sometimes those two are collapsed and then reformulated into a third model that becomes a morality play. I’m not saying that every morality play constitutes itself in that dialectic, but some of them do. And when that happens, I think that that synthesis is remarkably powerful for that reason. Well, I was thinking of Dante when you said that. Well, there we go. Yeah. I couldn’t think of a better example than that. So you have the divine tragedy and the divine comedy in a sense. And they interweave with each other. And you know what we now describe? We’ve now described the Bible. That’s usually a sign that we’re onto something. Well, I did want to sort of, I wanted to come back to the connection of art and religio. I wanted to distinguish between individual expressions, which you kind of talked about, and community tasks in terms of art. And art is something you create with people, and then art is something that you do in solitude. Well, I’ve been making an argument throughout that art is a specific, although Krukegaard says, and Dante says that art and philosophy can overlap. But I was arguing that art is a specific way of producing, drawing out, and educating, right, religio, our sense of connectedness, mattering, being connected to something beyond ourselves. Yep, that’s been my argument throughout, a really fundamental connection between art. Maybe religion itself is a collective art. Could you say that? That’s often what I think I found myself arguing in various locations. Sometimes it’s very poor art, right? I mean, in churches these days, it’s like there’s not much, you know, often it’s really beautifully done and powerful. It has the same, perhaps, function as a concert or something. Well, that’s because I think you’re looking at, I think you’re looking at an old religion that is creaking. But let’s say that religion is ritual art, where ritual means there’s community tasks involved and distributed cognition. I think the place to look for this, I spoke at the movement summit a couple weeks ago, and I was just overwhelmed. And that is the correct verb, right? By the number of people there who were, this was all about, these are all people who are coming out of communities, emerging ecologies of practices and emerging communities about embodiment and movement and about self-transformation and the quality and the complexity both within and between all the speakers and then all of the various communities that they were representing and the way they’re networking together. That’s the religion that is now emerging right now. And that is filled with what we’re talking about. It’s filled with new kinds of art, things that are, you know, that are moving between a lot of the established boundaries and categories and creating new ways in which people are training and educating religion. That’s happening. It’s really happening. And the emphasis on this being community tasks is becoming more and more focal in all of these communities. One question I wanted to ask you guys is, I wanted, since we’re talking about art and reinventing art, if you’ll forgive me to ask a question because I’m a little bit curious. I’d just like to know which artists, you know, were very formative or moving or powerful for each of you. I’m just curious if I can ask that question. Yeah. I mean, so novels, Hesse was very formative for me, Herman Hesse. Me too. And Melville, Moby Dick and Conrad, those are the three authors. Poetry, overwhelmingly, the greatest influences are Blake and Wilka. Those are huge and continual with me. And for music, the two most formative influences on me are Beethoven and the Beatles. Beethoven and the Beatles, okay. Great. What about you, Chris? Well, that’s a good list, John. I’ll just, you know what, I’ll single out one, which is a play. It’s called Art Town. Thor and Wilder, which is probably my single, it’s actually not just my favorite play. I think it’s actually just my single favorite anything, just piece of art writ large literature. It’s called Art Town? Art Town. It’s an American play. It was written in the 30s. Thornton Wilder is the playwright. And it’s a, it is actually, apropos of the conversation from five minutes ago, it is a cosmic morality play. And I think it’s, it’s a sacred text to me because I return to it every few years. And I find that it’s wellspring of wisdom and insight is deeper than I could have ever known five years prior, five years before that, five years before that. I keep returning to it like a well and it deepens every time for me. And it is, I think, it is, I think, among many other things, it is a dramatic representation of perhaps the, I don’t want to be so reductive as to say it’s a play about the meaning crisis. I think that that would be, that would be unhelpful to say, but I think it’s, it is a cosmic morality play, very, very simply rendered about what our relationship is to the infinite at this moment in time. Chris introduced this play to me, what, Chris, about five or six years ago? I hadn’t- Something like that, yeah. I agree, yeah, it’s a profound work of art, it really is. I have never, I’ve never seen it, I’ve never seen it played. I long to, I’m hoping civilization hangs together long enough that I get to watch it. I think it’s especially prescient right now because it’s about, it’s about the relationship between the communitas, it’s about, it’s about understanding the, it’s as much of what we’ve been talking about with Dialogos, in fact, it’s about what the relationship is, the, what is, what is the affinity between the interpersonal intimacy of communitas and our intimate relation with the divine. And, and it’s not, when I say it’s a morality play, I don’t mean to say that it’s trite and didactic and moralizing, I don’t mean it that way. It’s very unassuming. In fact, it’s the most unassuming piece of writing I think I’ve ever read. It makes, it makes, it is not self aggrandizing. It’s, it’s, it is, I think it’s perfect in its simplicity. It’s descriptive, but in its description, it’s, it’s, I think it’s hallowed. I think it’s just beautiful. It never loses the human touch with the finite while also extending beautifully towards the transcending. That’s right. And it, and it is among other things about, even though it never once uses this word, it is about that you were talking before about Andrew, about the loss of symbolic thinking, the loss of the symbolic experience, the open, the open ended experience with the world. And, you know, it’s interesting because the first two acts of the play unbeknownst to the, to the, to the reader or unbeknownst to the audience member take place in this world in which such things are, are, are forgotten. And then there’s a moment at the end of the play where one character has the opportunity to recollect the world with that symbolic porosity, with the shining quality of, of, of a world that is alive and that refers itself to the infinite. She has the opportunity to live in the world with it shining forth the infinite to her. And it’s an, it’s just, I, I, I can’t, I can’t even read the play without choking. It really, I can’t. So anyway, I highly, highly, highly recommend it. That’s amazing. It’s very much. Go ahead, John. Sorry. I was going to say that was beautiful, Chris. You really do have such a beautiful soul. My God. Wow. Yeah, actually, only in the best company. We had one discussion where we were analyzing, you know, some, some vanilla TV show and you have this insight into the show. I think it was, it was this movie, The Marriage. I thought, wow, this guy should be working in theater. Like, like you should, you should be, you should be making these, these productions or something like, Wow. That’s very kind of the government. Like you just had the insight into this very moment and what it meant. And I was like, Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s very good. That’s right. I really think what needs to happen in the near future is for Jonathan and Christopher to have our deal logos. I think that’s what the discord, the discord folks were telling me that actually. I think, I think that is a very astute proposal on their behalf, but I agree with it. I think that you and Jonathan should have a deep discussion about the symbolic and the art and what that, its connection to the sacred and everything you just, you just spoke there. You always, your capacity for doing this always humbles me. So Only in the best of company, gentlemen, only in the best of company. Thank you. I welcome it. Well, gentlemen, I would like to talk longer, but I should get going. Okay. Sorry. I just, I just let my last question is, is there any loose ends here? Is there anything, any part of like our reinvent you? I’m not sure if I fully got the dialogical part of, part of our, I’m not sure if that was fully expressed this time, but I’m not sure. Well, this is, I’m there yet with that. This is my takeaway. I mean, I think there was an argument in this new way that we’re trying to argue that what we’ve been playing with or reorienting from the product to the process. Okay. Reorienting from the understanding beauty in the product to beauty in the process. And then that brought us inevitably to very tight connections with virtue. Wisdom, the sacred and religion. And I think that’s, I think that’s a very good place to come to. Sure. Yeah. And I’m still feeling the chorus. I think that was one of the greatest insights I’ve, one of the insights in these conversations that I’ve been thinking about the most is this idea of the chorus, which accompanies, you know, us while we’re having a conversation. In other words, we’re not, you know, alone. Okay. So thanks. Thanks so much as always. Thank you, Andrew, as always. Yeah. Thank you as always. Putting these together is always really, really wonderful. And thank you, Chris, too. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. Both of you gents. This is always the greatest of pleasures. Yeah, for me too. An enormous pleasure. Have a good one. Okay. Take good care of my friends. We’ll talk again. Until the next time. Yep. Bye-bye. Bye.