 So what you get in the romantic manifesto from a philosophical perspective is an explanation of why aesthetics is a branch of philosophy. So it is true, if you look in the history of philosophy, that the major philosophers, and this particularly means the systematizers in philosophy, and the primary ones are Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, all write about aesthetics. And there's a reason, because they're systematizers and thinking about the meaning of the system, they have, I think, at least an implicit, often more than implicit, understanding that the full meaning of philosophy and of philosophical ideas can only be presented or requires art to be fully presented. So what philosophy does, or actually let me back up, if you've read philosophy who needs it, the lead essay of the book, philosophy who needs it, that is Ayn Rand's explanation, part of the structure of philosophy and of the branches of philosophy. And if you remember that essay, or if you go and then read it, what you'll see is she has a lot to say about metaphysics, what the questions of metaphysics are, do I have the power of choice or not? Am I able to understand the world or not? Is the world fully intelligible or not? A lot about trying to isolate, these are the questions of metaphysics, these are the issues, these are why those issues, the different answers to these questions matter. And she does the same for epistemology. Does knowledge begin with the senses? Does it have to crucially rely on some revelation? What is certainty possible, and what is its nature? She goes through some of the questions of what epistemology is, and again of why the answers, why there's different answers, and why these different answers matter. Then she does the same for ethics. And then she indicates for politics, but I think she's taking for granted that people understand, yeah, political issues divide people, there's different answers, and it's significant what your view of what government should do and so on. She sort of takes that for granted. And then she says there's a fifth branch and it's aesthetics. And it deals with the needs and refueling of a human consciousness, but there's no discussion of what its questions are, of why those questions matter. So you don't really get an explanation of why aesthetics is the fifth branch of philosophy. And I think if you read or reread philosophy who needs it, you'll see you, she couldn't give an explanation in that essay because she's introducing the subject and she's trying to get, she's talking to the cadets at West Point, and she's trying to get them interested in philosophy and understand some of its structure. And it's only when you grasp that, and really have a firsthand grasp of that, that there is such a thing as metaphysics and epistemology and ethics and they're interconnected, which is a point she's making in the essay, and then politics falls out of that. And this is what the guidance that philosophy is meant to offer. It's guidance on these questions, answers to help you navigate the world. And then what aesthetics is a branch of philosophy and sort of what philosophy identifies and what she identifies, I think fully in the romantic manifesto is philosophy is incomplete. Philosophy itself can't provide the full guidance that it's promising. So the whole, and she called, I mean, it's a philosophy for living on earth. It's meant to offer guidance. It is developing all these principles that are supposed to guide you, but these principles, these philosophical principles by themselves are insufficient. And the only science that's going to identify that is philosophy itself. And so what aesthetics is about is identifying there's a philosophical need that a human consciousness has, given that we're philosophical beings, there's a philosophical need that philosophy itself can't satisfy. And then so the basic question for aesthetics is, what satisfies this need? And her answer in the romantic manifesto is art satisfies this need. Art is what concretizes and objectifies and makes fully real to each individual, the full nature of philosophical principles and their action guiding significance. And then it's an exploration of how art does this and how different forms of art do it in different ways and so on. But that's the crux of the issue. And so you get for the first time, like I took, I mean, all through graduate school that I had in philosophy, that we dealt a little bit with aesthetics here and there. There was no explanation of why did philosophers deal with aesthetics? And what you get in the romantic manifesto is if you're really a philosopher in the sense that she is or Aristotle is or Plato is, you have to be interested in aesthetics because it's the means of making fully real what different philosophical principles mean. And it's significant that is different. It's not just, you don't need this just for objectivism. You need this for philosophy, period. And you know, I think some of the most successful philosophies have known this, and maybe the most successful is religion. Religion knows, particularly the Christians, they know they need art. It's not an accident that for centuries they hired the best artists they could and they made their churches beautiful and they commissioned the greatest artists in the world to paint Jesus over and over and over again. Right. And there's a reason because they understood, not explicitly, I think, but they understood implicitly the power that art provides and that art completes their ideological, their philosophical mission, their philosophical purpose, that art is what will actually inspire their parishioners to do what they want to do, motivates them, fuels them, drives them. You know, if you think of some of the great music that was written before the Romantic period, it's mostly church music. If you look at Bach or you look at Handel, if you look at other composers of that period, what they wrote was for the church to try to inspire the parishioners. The emotion that the philosophy is trying to intellectually, if you could call it intellectually, motivate them towards and they understood this relationship between the emotion and the cognitive, the emotion and motivation and art has always been used. And then if you look at the authoritarians in the 20th century, they understood this. So the communists use art in order to inspire the proletariat, not good art, and that's why it doesn't really inspire the proletariat, but art in order to try. And if you look at Nazi aesthetics, the Nazis were very conscious of the need to create an aesthetic experience to drive and to motivate and to the collective. The beauty of Romanticism is that it's about the individual. It's not about collective motivation. It's about motivation for the individual, which are fuel for you as an individual. And I think, particularly for the new people, you know, this is why I thought that art was so crucial, not just for philosophy, just not, but for life, for all of us as individual. And I'll talk, we'll talk a lot more about this tomorrow, that art is not optional. It's not something nice to do on the side once in a while. Art is a crucial part of life. And to the extent that you don't experience it, you are poor spiritually for that. And it's, it's, it's crucial to immerse yourself and to find avenues to seek it out. And we'll discuss that quite a bit tomorrow and how to do it and where to do it and so on. But, but I want to make this point, this is not, and I know a lot of objectives to feel this way. You know, it's, it's, you know, who has time for that? I'm busy, right? I mean, it's great, but it's, it really philosophically is something that you need, need, you know, to live a good life, you know, to live the kind of life, an egoistic life. Again, we'll talk more about that tomorrow. You don't think art should necessarily reflect, reflect life, especially life as it is today? Exactly. And I recognize other schools of art only I don't like them. I just found that. I prefer romanticism. I just found that a little bit contradictory with Ben when she said in terms of religion that she didn't believe in religion as we do because it's not based on realism as she said and more mysticism. You're mixing categories. It's the issue of religion is metaphysical. It's so in nature, in reality. Now, art is not metaphysics. It's not there without men. Art is man made. It's a product of men. And when it's a product of men, you don't have to copy it. You don't have to say this is a fact because 10 men did it that way. You create your own art or you like a school of which there's only one representative. Anything that this man made is open to reason, but not by the same kind of mental process as metaphysical or scientific factual issues. For instance, here I can only recommend that you read my book, The Romantic Manifesto, because I couldn't cover it in a few minutes. The reasons why I can demonstrate to you that romanticism is the best school of art, the best, most justifiable, but not the only one. You like Charlie's Angels. Yes. Because why? Because it's the only romantic television show today. It's not realistic. It's not about the gutter. It's not about the half-wit-retarded children and all the other kind of shows today. It's about three attractive girls doing impossible things. And because they're impossible, that's what makes it interesting. It shows three young girls who are better than so-called real life. And that's a romantic school of literature. You want art to be romantic, don't you? Oh, sir. You're not crazy then about art which reflects life. Not the life of the moment. I want art to reflect life long range. How do you feel about abstract art? Do you mean non-objective? Non-objective. I think it's less art than photography. I think it is an enormous fraud. Fraud? Yes. It's impossible to discuss it seriously. It means nothing. It is nothing. The perpetrators claim that they don't know what they're doing. And I think they're right. I'm willing to take them at their word. They don't know what they're doing. And neither do we. And the Ashken is the proper place for it. But I mean it seriously.