\/overlooked-network\/files\/2024\/07\/Discussion-with-Matt-Ludwig-and-George-Boys-Stones.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\nTy Heemskerk, Audio Engineering<\/em><\/p>\nImpoverished Aesthetics Promotional Podcast Transcript<\/h2>\n
Matt Ludwig:<\/strong> Hello listeners, thank you for tuning into this promotional podcast for a conference coming to the University of Toronto on October 21st and 22nd entitled Impoverished Aesthetics: New Approaches to Marginality in Latin Literature. My name is Matt Ludwig and I am a PhD Candidate at UofT\u2019s Department of Classics Literature Stream. I am joined today by renowned scholar of ancient philosophy, Prof. George Boys-Stones. Welcome to the podcast George!<\/p>\nGeorge Boys-Stones:<\/strong> Hello Matt.<\/p>\nML:<\/strong> Good to have you here! Together George and I hope, in the next 20, 30 minutes or so, to stoke some enthusiasm for this conference by using our combined interests in philosophy and literature to contextualize exactly what \u201cimpoverished aesthetics\u201d means, at least as far as we can in this short chunk of time. So, before I turn over to George for his insights, I\u2019ll just briefly give our listeners the lay of the land here. In an advertisement for this conference from the UofT Classics department website we read the following:<\/p>\n“Scholars ancient and modern have relied on the category of the “sublime”, or the aesthetic state generated by the perception of beauty and grandeur, to assess the value of Latin texts.”<\/p>\n
But then we\u2019re told, in this write-up about the conference, that contributors are aiming to push back on this focus to instead center experiences that come about through perceptions of the opposite kind. So, the conference speakers will be exploring literary evocations of ugliness, meanness, inferiority and the like \u2013 conditions we can collectively describe as marginal when considered against this assumption that valuable ancient art is that which generates experiences of \u2018the beautiful\u2019 or \u2018the grand\u2019. So, our goal today in this podcast episode is to help unpack the sort of tensions in the study of Greek and Roman aesthetics which prompt a conference like this. So, using our collective impressions about the philosophical and literary traditions of Greece and Rome, we will briefly explore three questions which will hopefully help clarify the context of this conference for anyone who is intrigued by the title but maybe a little unsure what it means. So, the three questions I\u2019d like to explore with George today are as follows:<\/p>\n
\n- The first one is about this notion that the experience of hearing or reading a certain Latin text might be considered impoverished in beauty. That notion implies that there is a strong tradition in place regarding what qualifies as beautiful, and that the texts that this conference will be looking at don\u2019t necessarily match up to this. So, in the first place I\u2019ll be asking George what did the Classical philosophers\u2014our earliest explicit theorists about art and the perceptions it generates\u2014what did they consider to be traits of \u2018the beautiful\u2019?<\/li>\n
- And then secondly, we\u2019ll look at why do our ancient artists would ever avoid such traits in their creations. Why do the arts not stack up towards this idea of \u2018the beautiful\u2019? What sorts of things might artists, particularly poets, be after besides \u2018the beautiful\u2019?<\/li>\n
- And then finally, we\u2019ll conclude by discussing what other uses philosophers envision for aesthetic experience beyond capturing \u2018the beautiful\u2019?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
So, without further ado, we\u2019ll move onto the questions. George, I\u2019ll start you off with a nice easy one: what did our classical philosophers think about beauty?<\/p>\n
GB-S:<\/strong> Great question Matt. I think the starting point might be to go to Plato who has a lot to say about beauty, but who starts exactly from the point that it\u2019s something very confusing. Everyone has a sense of it, everyone responds to it, everyone kind of knows what it is, but no one agrees where to find it. It\u2019s perplexing. It\u2019s a spur to philosophy even, in Plato\u2019s thought. So, he puts a great deal of thought into exactly that question of how you find something in common between these various things and people and circumstances that we respond to as beautiful. And he sort of comes to the conclusion that it has something to do with symmetry and the notion of orderliness. He assimilates this very much with notions of virtue and order and completion, wherever you find it. And so, it becomes for him an extremely important metaphysical principle, cosmological principle, theological principle! He seems to think that \u2018the beautiful\u2019 and ‘the good’, for example, are very similar notions or convergent notions, and unity is very important in that.<\/p>\nSo, there are notions of fit and order. If you think about the word kosmos\u2014Plato makes quite a bit out of this at some point\u2014how we talk about the universe as the kosmos. This is a Greek word, of course, meaning \u2018order\u2019 or \u2018beauty\u2019 and Plato, when he\u2019s talking about cosmology, makes that point very strongly: that we can enjoy doing the philosophy of nature because we\u2019re studying something that is supremely beautiful. So, in a sense, I suppose, the kosmos itself becomes the reference point for everything else\u2019s beauty. If it forms a coherent, contributive part of the kosmos, then it itself is beautiful.<\/p>\n
ML:<\/strong> Ok, great! So, in order to segue from this idea of the symmetry, order and completion of the kosmos as the philosophical basis for an idea of beauty, I\u2019d just like to make the additional observation that these same principles of order, even suitability, fit, or proportion are also mentioned time and time again by the Greek and Latin poets themselves as goals for their own art. So, for instance we see words\u2014you mentioned kosmos\u2014but we also see words like prepon, metron, kairos\u2014words about appropriateness, measure, timeliness. These come up over and over again in the Archaic and Classical Greek poets. So, Xenophanes\u2019 first elegy, for instance, comes to mind where Xenophanes encourages symposiastic singers to match their songs to the cleanliness, orderliness, and austerity of his vision of the respectable drinking party, which in some ways is a vision of the orderly kosmos. So, he says \u2018no stories about Titans and Giants here, but rather hymns to the gods\u2019; there\u2019s something that specifically fits in artistically with certain circumstances.<\/p>\nFurthermore, I\u2019d also like to point listeners, if they haven\u2019t already read this, to Andrew Ford\u2019s book The Origins of Criticism<\/em>. And he talks about how the poets in the Archaic and Classical periods originally strove to attain these qualities with their songs for religious and social reasons, but then eventually these developed into more abstract, objective, metaphysical notions of artistic quality. So that\u2019s where the artistic tradition and the philosophical tradition start to merge.<\/p>\nHowever, whenever, of course, we are discussing people trying to pin down rules for beauty, there are always going to be other artists and philosophers who will be challenging these so-called rules. So, I will be a little bit cheeky with my segue here into the next question and I will quote another archaic lyric poem whose meaning I think we can take both literally and metaphorically as a commentary on poetry. So, here\u2019s Andrew Miller\u2019s translation of Archilochus frag. 60:<\/p>\n
“I have no love for a commander who\u2019s tall or stands astraddle, who\u2019s proud of his curling locks or wears a beard neatly trimmed. Instead, I\u2019ll take a man who\u2019s short and crooked to look at about the shanks, firmly planted on his feet, full of heart.”<\/p>\n
So sometimes, in both war and art, conventional beauty\u2014the symmetrical, the useful, the proportional\u2014is not what we\u2019re after. So then, as a follow up George: in what ways do ancient artists not aim at this definition of beauty? What else are they interested in?<\/p>\n
GB-S<\/strong> Well again, good observation. If you go all the way back to Homer and the Iliad, we\u2019re looking there, we\u2019re invited there, to enjoy looking at scenes of bloodshed, often very viscerally described of course. So yes, there\u2019s a question that arises then about why we like sometimes looking at things, why we even somehow experience aesthetic attraction towards things which are themselves ugly. Aristotle, quite famously, uses the example of a picture of an ugly picture and he says we might not enjoy looking at the ugly person, but we can enjoy looking at the picture of it. And his view is that that\u2019s because we get a sense, at a fairly low level in this case, that we\u2019re learning something about the world through artistic representations of it and we enjoy learning. So, we\u2019re presented with some sort of perspective on the world, even when what we\u2019re being presented with is a representation of something that in itself is ugly. So, there\u2019s this engagement now with the idea of the understanding, the interpretative, the use of the intellect in \u2018the aesthetic\u2019. So, we might want to say that \u2018the aesthetic\u2019 experience adds something to the experience just of beauty\u2014namely, that it adds that dimension of thoughtfulness and reflection and learning. So, we\u2019re not saying that we find this picture \u2018beautiful\u2019, but that we find it \u2018aesthetic\u2019. And I think that gives you a much richer way of thinking about how even very traditional poetry like certain, long stretches actually, of Homer are aesthetically very engaging!<\/p>\nML: <\/strong> Right, so we have a much more complex picture of what aesthetic experience actually is, rather than just capturing \u2018the beautiful\u2019 or trying to articulate \u2018the beautiful\u2019.<\/p>\nGB-S:<\/strong> Right, and then Aristotle really runs with that in the Poetics when he\u2019s talking about tragedy which, for him, is canonically about fear and pity. So, this is not supposed to be attractive or easy on the eyes, as it were. And tragedy is full of horrors: Oedipus putting out his eyes, murder, incest, all the rest of it. But it\u2019s the richest, most engaging intellectual experience you can have in an artistic context.<\/p>\nML:<\/strong> Absolutely! So yeah, in connection with this idea of states or experiences, when we\u2019re watching a play or reading a poem or hearing a poem, that don\u2019t necessarily strike us as \u2018the beautiful\u2019 but actually are important processes in helping us clarify things cognitively, I\u2019d also like to draw people\u2019s attention to a pretty recent book by Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi from 2012 called Frontiers of Pleasure, which talks a lot more pointedly about psychosomatic aesthetic experiences that Archaic and Classical Greek poets were after. They really valued these sorts of artistic confrontations which could generate these sorts of experiences that we might not readily think of as useful, pleasurable, or instructive but actual can be.<\/p>\nSo, one great example she fleshes out is from the Odyssey. She points to three different passages in the Odyssey in which an epic poetic performance induces mournful weeping in the audience. So, we have Phemius in Book 1, Menelaus in Book 4, and Demodocus in Book 8. So, the art generates an audience confrontation with something terrible and unpleasurable. But then Peponi looks closely at the progression of these episodes and she argues that they reveal a kind of early aesthetic theory of weeping responses. So, in Book 1, when Phemius delivers his poem and it induces crying from Penelope, there is not enough aesthetic distance between the listeners and the sad story that they\u2019re being told, so all the pleasure is lost and the aesthetic confrontation has to stop. In Book 4, when Menelaus is telling a story to Telemachus, the same issue occurs, so the auditors try to create artificial distance between themselves and the story to no real avail: Helen brings them drugs to help them fall asleep and forget their issues. But then in Book 8, as this kind of culminating example, Odysseus hears his own woes sung to him by Demodocus and, despite the lack of aesthetic distance and the weeping that results, he actually manages to generate that pain into something pleasurable and transformative. This is kind of a pivot point in the poem. So, Peponi argues that this is because of the particular way in which Demodocus moulds the story. So, in her words, he \u2018others\u2019 Odysseus\u2019 experience in such a way that the emotionality of the artistic confrontation actually prompts deeper, objective critical reflection rather than hinders it.<\/p>\n
So, as you were saying, this idea very much anticipates what Aristotle will argue about the cognitive benefits of tragedy spectatorship. And Peponi herself also sees in this a kernel of Plato\u2019s later discussion in the Philebus of \u2018mixed pleasure\u2019. So, without getting too into the weeds about all the specifics of these philosophical arguments, I\u2019d like to segue from poetry and the arts back to the philosophers and ask you, George: how might our sense of the philosophers\u2019 interest in art also be limited when we restrict ourselves to their theories of beauty? So, you already touched on this a little bit, but what other philosophical uses do philosophers envision for aesthetic experience?><\/p>\n
GB-S:<\/strong> So, you\u2019re right to introduce the notion of emotion, of course, which I hadn\u2019t mentioned yet. But, one of the things that comes out of that combination of the reflective intellectual and the experience of beauty is an opportunity to explore your emotions. So, one of the things that happens, I think, through later philosophy\u2014through the Hellenistic period and the Roman period in philosophy\u2014is that people become very interested in the way in which your relationship with art can help to shape, in one way or another, your intellectual understanding but also your emotional relationship with the world. I think that\u2019s right! And that works in several different ways. So, for example you can have art that is not simply bland and beautiful and unchallenging, but the way in which you respond to more challenging forms of art might tell you something yourself about your own moral state. And it might tell you something you like and it might tell you something you don\u2019t like. So, it might be that you find yourself having emotional responses that you\u2019re even slightly ashamed of or, conversely, that you\u2019re proud of. And this helps you to mould yourself as a human being. So, the aesthetic experience, even the negative, can be part of the learning experience as a philosopher, as a human being, and can act as a kind of test on that.<\/p>\nI think there are also ways in which the representation of difficult cases in art\u2014we increasingly, later as we go on, get philosophers who are engaged in art quite directly; so, Seneca, the first century Roman philosopher writes tragedies himself\u2014I think there\u2019s an exploration there of the limits of the order that there is in the kosmos. One thing that always concerns philosophers of course is how\u2014having said that the kosmos is this beautiful and orderly artifact\u2014how it is that there\u2019s so much ugliness and evil and unhappiness in the world itself! Art of this sort becomes a sort of test case for thinking about how we can explain dark experiences in life, the limited beauty of life itself, in a way. So, the problem of evil, really, becomes thematized through some of these works.<\/p>\n
So, for example Lucan, who of course writes a very challenging epic, is himself trained as a Stoic and I think is partly there trying to help us understand how even the experience of evil is necessary, but can help us to see the bigger picture of the diversity and beauty of the kosmos as a whole.<\/p>\n
ML:<\/strong> Yeah, could you speak perhaps a little bit more generally about how\u2014since we\u2019re talking about Latin literature, and Stoicism and Epicureanism both lurk very large in the background, and sometimes even in the foreground, of the literature that will be discussed at the conference\u2014could you speak maybe generally about how Stoic philosophers might approach art as either conducive for philosophical reflection or a barrier to it, versus how Epicureans might view the same thing?<\/p>\nGB-S:<\/strong> Yeah, it\u2019s an interesting question because Epicurus himself apparently was rather against art and thought it a trivial distraction from the serious job of trying to understand the world. I mean, that isn\u2019t something that his followers really were able to stick with.<\/p>\nBut the Stoics in particular, I think, are really quite attracted to this exactly as a way of trying to explore some of these more difficult areas, and trying to express the way in which you can have a more mature, multi-faceted, multi-dimensional relationship with the kosmos without focussing on things out of context and using them as evidence that there is no god, for example, there is no order, or everything is chaos. In fact, even moments of unhappiness and chaos and emotional disturbance can be part of a patterned whole which leads you to a more mature understanding of the world.<\/p>\n
I think maybe this sort of reflects what I was saying at the beginning: that we make this transition from a na\u00efve reaction to \u2018the beautiful\u2019 to a more intellectually informed appreciation of \u2018the aesthetic\u2019 and a more emotionally mature relationship with the complex. And I think that\u2019s what\u2019s going on with these more challenging bits of literature. They\u2019re inviting a more mature, complex, multi-faceted engagement with the kosmos as the ultimate artifact.<\/p>\n
ML:<\/strong> Yeah, that\u2019s great! And I think we\u2019ve found our way to this notion of Plato\u2019s \u2018ancient quarrel\u2019 which, of course, is lurking in the background\u2014how art and moral philosophy, they have this very complex relationship with each other where, at certain points arts seems to threatens the aims of moral philosophy and, when looked at a different way, it can seem to be very helpful to the aims of moral philosophy, depending on the thinker and the tradition. But it\u2019s this very question I think, about the relationship between the two, that underpins this whole conference and is, in my opinion, a bottomless well from which to draw really interesting research questions.<\/p>\nUnfortunately, that is all the time we have to devote to this very interesting \u2018tho complex topic. But we hope we have intrigued some of you listening at least to attend the conference to hear more! If any of this piqued your interest, please come join us. The main take-away I\u2019d like listeners to consider is this: it is sometimes assumed, particularly in popular impressions of Greek and Roman art, that these ancient artists aimed to evoke some uniform philosophical category of \u2018the beautiful\u2019. But this is misguided. The actual picture is much more complex; there was interest in the ancient world, just as there is now, in how art could generate many, many different types of experience, each with a particular value of its own.<\/p>\n
So, thanks again for listening. This has been Matt Ludwig and Prof. George Boys-Stones. And we\u2019ll see you on Oct. 21st!<\/p>\n
GB-S:<\/strong> Goodbye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matthew Ludwig Jun 1, 2022 Ty Heemskerk, Audio Engineering Impoverished Aesthetics Promotional Podcast Transcript Matt Ludwig: Hello listeners, thank you for tuning into this promotional podcast for a conference coming to the University of Toronto on October 21st and 22nd entitled Impoverished Aesthetics: New Approaches to Marginality in Latin Literature. My name is Matt Ludwig […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":668,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}