 Euron and I were talking before the sessions and we're talking about each of our talks and what we're planning to cover. And there was a lot of overlap, there was a lot of points that we were going to touch on that were similar, we weren't going to say exactly the same or highlight exactly the same thing about the point. But we thought, so we were talking and we thought, well, you know, and maybe what we should do is do them as two panels, sessions, two discussions where we're highlighting certain points from the romantic manifesto. So I was planning to highlight some of the more philosophical points. Euron's talking about the exploration of art in your personal life. But we'll try to weave that together into these talks. And then we thought it would just be more interesting to have a discussion about some of these points and to look at some points from different angles. And we don't always agree about everything, even about or certainly about our evaluations and responses to different artworks. So this overlap, I think, as well. Yeah, and the fact that we disagree and the fact that our evaluations are often different, I think, is important to some of the points we're going to be making in terms of how you should go about exploring arts and experiencing arts and not feel like you have to follow some kind of dogma and some kind of set experience that all objectivists respond to arts in the same way. So we wanted to illustrate that not all objectivists respond to arts in the same way. And it's important. That is an important idea, because I think it inhibits some people's ability to experience and enjoy art when they are modeling themselves versus what Ayn Rand thinks or what somebody else thinks and what they should feel and what they should experience versus what they actually are experiencing, which is which is really the key to art. It's what you experience. And we'll get into all of that. So we were going to start with the point that so we were both I mean, part of what we were talking about before the session, we both obviously reread the romantic manifesto in preparation for our talks and deciding what we were going to highlight. And both of us had the experience of that the book again blew us away with how interesting and rich the book is, how many insights. There's multiple insights on almost every page. And so, Iran, you wanted to talk a little bit about just sure I'm curious and don't be shy, right? Because I know maybe this is an intimidating question. I'm curious how many people have not read the romantic manifesto because it's helpful for us in terms of just calibrating how we do it. OK, so the vast majority. Well, OK, keep keep the hands up because I want to get it. All right. OK, so maybe maybe 15 percent or something like that have not. So let me start by encouraging you to read this amazing book. It you know, I've read it, I don't know, four or five times in my life. And I read it again in preparation for this conference and getting blown away as an understatement, particularly this time that I read it. The more I know about art, the more I've experienced art. And those of you who know me know that I seek art out and I spend a lot of time with art. The more I know about it, the more impressed I am with the depth of what she is conveying in in the romantic manifesto, how original it is, how new it is and how insightful it is. And it's not just in a sense, it's not it's not just that it's about the art out there to your response to the art. So it's amazingly psychological. And Rand, generally, if you read Rand, her essays are almost always psychological. There's always a psychological aspect when she's even when she's talking about deep philosophy. But here it's because it's about your response to art. It's amazingly psychological. And I think we can all learn from reading the essay, not just about art, but about ourselves, about our own psychology. And but I want to say something about her genius because Rand is a unique genius. She's a philosopher and we're all familiar with her as a philosopher. She's a great artist and we're all familiar with her as a great artist. And what you see in the romantic manifesto is those. I mean, you see it in a literature, obviously, but here in the romantic manifesto, what you see is both of those coming together. Her deep understanding of the creative process, a personal understanding of the creative process, a kind of understanding of the creative process that it's hard for me when I'm reading it to get because I've never created art. So it's something that only the creators, I think, fully understand. So combine that with a vast knowledge of the history of art and a woman who went out and sought art and experienced art and engaged with art, all kinds of art over her lifetime. So the experiential, the creation and overlay that with a genius as a philosopher. And that's what you get in the romantic manifesto. It's the combination of all of that. And and it makes it so that again, the more I read the book, the less I understand it, in some sense, the more I get how much I don't know. The more I get how deep she is and how, in a sense, it's hard to understand without the inductive knowledge that she had about art and about that experience of creating art. So don't be my intention is not to intimidate you into not reading it. Read it because every reading you'll get something out of it. But it's truly a profound book. In many respects, it's it's the one that I find the hardest to fully grasp, to fully concretize for myself. Yeah, I exactly that same experience. And it's important, I think, really to emphasize that I'm certainly from my perspective, you're from Iran's too, as he just said, that I approach the book from I'm a consumer of art, not a producer of art. And if you think of the genesis of the book, it's I mean, the subtitle, it's a philosophy of literature. And the book comes out of lectures that she gave on the art of fiction. That's now collected into a book that Tor Buckman edited. But that is aimed, I think that those set of lectures were aimed primarily, not exclusively, but primarily at aspiring fiction writers. So they're from the point of view of the producer of art. And I think there's a lot of remnants of that in the romantic manifesto that it's distinctively has a perspective that this is what it is like from the point of view of the creator of art. And that that is a layer of complexity that often goes over my head. And I want to now make a comment about some of the themes that she brings up in the introduction to the work that help place this whole issue of romanticism and aesthetics into the context of what I think she was doing as a philosopher and what she was particularly interested in. Ayn Rand was a champion of the 19th century. I mean, she called the 19th century the greatest century in Western history and the greatest century existentially. So it's the century in which you have just tremendous advancements, tremendous advancements in standard of living, of rising populations of the creation of the middle class. You get tremendous developments in science, in technology and in art. So she thinks in terms of the culture, the 19th century is the greatest century in Western history. It's the greatest existentially, but not intellectually. She says it's one of the worst intellectually or philosophically. And part of what is happening in the philosophical world is they're turning against all these great values that the 19th century is helping bring into existence. And you can boil those three sort of to get the underpinning of what the cultural trend of the 19th century is. And this is the way she puts it in the introduction. Of individualism, capitalism and romanticism. These are the three fundamental values that the 19th century brings into existence and gives expression to. And individualism here means individualism in ethics. So you can think of it in terms of the declaration, the pursuit of your own happiness. That morally is what is ascendant in terms of culture, not again in terms of the philosophy of the 19th century. But the culture, it takes seriously in the ethical realm that the individual is the primary unit. And then the consequence of that, if the declaration is taken seriously, the consequence socially, economically, is capitalism. And this perspective on the individual and the individual taking himself seriously, concerned with his self-expression, self-development, that what the movement you get in art is romanticism. Romanticism, one of the things she highlights about it is it's about the individual self-expression. And so in a way, you can think of it there's an individualism that's underlying all the capitalism is the system of individualism. Romanticism is the art of the individual and that glorifies the individual. And individualism in morality is about taking seriously your own life and happiness. And these are the values that she is interested in, that she champions and that in the 20th century she has to defend and put on a secure philosophical foundation because her view is all three have crumbled or disintegrated. That individualism has been replaced by all forms of collectivism in morality, that capitalism is being replaced with socialism and in America with a mixed economy and that romanticism has disintegrated. And they all for a similar reason that they did not have a philosophical and there was no philosophical understanding of the essence of any of any of individualism and morality of capitalism or romanticism. And she's going to write that this is what they are and this is how to understand and defend them. And if you think of her major philosophical work, virtue of selfishness, it's a new concept of egoism is its subtitle. This is about understanding at the deepest roots individualism in morality and the pursuit of happiness. And then capitalism on the unknown ideal is about defending capitalism and the romantic manifesto is about defending romanticism. And that's a way of understanding her work. And then ito e introduction to objectivist epistemology is a defensive reason that she thinks underlies all of these. And that's in essence, I think what she's interested in from a philosophical sort of a nonfiction writing perspective. And some of the motivation is and she mentions this, right? She glimpsed the 19th century. She had she was born in 1905. So she and in my view, the 19th century culturally ends with World War One. And I think historians agree on this. World War One was a profoundly traumatic event in Western civilization. It ends the sense of life, the culture of the 19th century in bloodshed, in disaster, in a horrible, horrible demon, maybe the most horrible war ever. Because it's pointless. Yeah, it was pointless. What was it about? It wasn't an ideological struggle. It wasn't good versus evil. I mean, you know, you guys can tell me afterwards what World War One was about and why we entered. It was completely pointless. And so it's this horrific war. But what was going on before is the consequence of this individualism, capitalism and romanticism is a culture that embraces life, a culture that is vibrant and exciting and optimistic and positive and individualistic in the sense that people are pursuing their happiness. And to some extent, we can't even know what that culture was. And she says that I can't hear exactly where, but she says, if you didn't experience it, you can't know what it was because we're surrounded by a particular culture today. It just is what it is. And we can change ourselves, but it's hard to change the culture is not changing. It is what it is. So we don't know what it's like to live in a world where everybody in the culture, in the air, in the in the vibe, you know, is pursuing happiness, is pursuing their own achievement, is pursuing their own life, is excited about life, that that is the cultural trend, the consensus. And she glimpsed that. She saw that in her youth before before the Russian Revolution. She saw it and she identified it later in the kind of artwork that was created there in the romanticism and she identifies as explicitly. And I think that, again, colors a lot of how she writes about this. She knows what is possible and that's the world she wants, that and better, right, that and better. And again, it's a context that's very hard to recreate for ourselves. It's a very hard to completely understand, I kind of get a sense of what she's talking about, but to completely understand what that is, what that kind of culture would be. I wish, right? I wish we could experience it. I wish we will. Some of you will experience it one day. But that is that is what she is bringing to the writing of the Raranti Grinterfest. Don't realize all of her writing is the knowledge of what is possible culturally, not just individually, but culturally. And and that is that is, I think, really important to understanding why she views romanticism is so important. Yeah, it comes up in the intro of this point again. And one of the things one of the points she makes is that what she glimps was a cultural and artistic atmosphere in which Hugo and Shiller, so two writers were part of the contemporary aesthetic scene. They're not relics of the past. They were part of the contemporary scene. One anecdote that I hold that to me is unfathomable. It's a way of holding that you can't grasp what the 19th century must have been like. So both will probably talk about this at some point. Both Iran and I like Beethoven quite a bit in. I think this is it's December 1808. Beethoven premieres in one concert, his fifth symphony, his sixth symphony, his fourth piano concerto, his choral fantasy and some other works in a four hour concert. I mean, these are major masterworks that you'll be lucky if the whole 21st century has worked four works comparable to that. And it's one concert that doesn't do too well. The people are exhausted and it's new music. They don't quite understand it. And that I mean, that what such a culture and atmosphere must have been like. It's important. It's really important, I think, to hold. You can't really grasp what that was like. But yet that it's just like capitalism, the unknown ideal. You have to hold it. This isn't an ideal, but there's an element of it that is unknown and that you're trying to reach. Well, just one thing about the concert, because it's interesting because it's a link to capitalism and art and capitalism. Beethoven, to a large extent, is the first artist, certainly the first, I think, musician to actually make a living independently. He is not dependent just on aristocrats paying him or the church paying him. But he puts on concerts and sells tickets and makes money from the sale of the ticket. For the first time, you've got a middle class. The people are playing pianos at home. So the first time people are buying sheet music. So Beethoven and then, of course, musicians falling a selling sheet music and they're making they're making royalties off of the music that they make. So they they're actually making money and this again integration of capitalism with aesthetics, which nobody talks about and nobody thinks of is happening during the beginning of the 19th century and then is taken for granted later on. But it was revolutionary. Mozart and Bach and Handel have to grovel before kings and aristocrats and and popes and cardinals and whatever in order to get crumbs so that they can write their music. Finally, there's a middle class as freedom, in other words, to actually this capitalism so that these musicians can actually be independent creators and actually sell their art to an audience that is willing to buy it and engage with it. So the 19th century in so many ways is the most important century in all of human history. It's the manifestation of what is possible to mankind. And that great tragedy, of course, is that is happening at the same time as intellectually, philosophically. Everything is falling to pieces. And that's why the 20th century. That's why World War One, in a sense, actually happens. If you understand Rand's theory of history, ideas ultimately manifest themselves in the reality. And World War One is a manifestation of those bad ideas that are being developed during the 19th century. There's a lag. So maybe let's turn to what Rand, why Rand views art as so important? What is it about art that is so, I mean, as she puts it, crucial to human survival, certainly crucial to human happiness? And what Rand identifies, and again, this is really genius, is the fact that we are conceptual being, the fact that ideas are held at such an abstract level makes it very difficult to sustain those ideas, to hold those ideas, and to constantly live with those ideas, apply those ideas in our day-to-day life every day, all the time, as principles. Because they're abstract. And we need a concretization of them. We need something where we can see and say, yes, that's what it is. That's what it means. That's what life's about. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing. That's why I'm exercising my life the way I'm exercising it. And this is true of the deepest ideas that we hold. That is our metaphysical ideas, our fundamental views about life and about the world and about existence and about our own lives and our place in the world in which we live. And this is hard, particularly on a day-to-day basis where the world is not necessarily cooperating with your ambitions and your needs or your ambitions. And art gives us a concrete, an actual reality for those metaphysical ideas about what the world is like. Instead of just holding an abstraction, we can now imagine something, a hero in a novel, a certain character in a novel, a painting, or even a piece of music, although it's a lot more complex to see the link. I think Fine Rand in her writings has a lot of really... I think partly because she's an artist, she has a lot of examples that are really succinct, yet really powerful. And if I had to pick the best example that she has, it's from the romantic manifesto and it's from the start of the essay, Art and Sense of Life, to illustrate, she's trying to capture in sort of, if you think about what the example is, in emotional terms, this power, this metaphysical power of art. So she gives the example of, if you saw a painting of a beautiful woman, what your reaction would be. And then it's a beautiful woman with a colesaur. And that you would have a powerful reaction. It says something very, very different about life if that's what the artist decided to depict. And this is what he thought of as this is important, this is what you need to focus on in life, this is what you have to keep in mind at all times that values are so easily undercut by a reality that is in a sense hostile to you and so easily will thwart any of your ambitions and any of your choices. And just in that one simple example you get, yeah, art has something really powerful and really philosophical to say. And so what she's emphasizing and that the crux of the objectivist theory of aesthetics of its power is that it's philosophical, that it has something to say about the nature of reality that as you navigate life, this is what you should pay attention to. This is what's important. This is what you have to keep in mind at all times. So it's essentially about that art has a metaphysical meaning though she emphasizes, and this is particularly from the point of view of literature and the subtitle of the book is it's a philosophy of literature. So she's sort of in the second half of the book, particularly concerned with her own art form, literature and even more so the novel. And I just say a little bit about the example you use because I think we can break it down a little bit for those maybe who haven't read the book. What does it say if a painter paints a painting of a beautiful woman, it's focused, it's just imagining you had this beautiful woman coming out, she's dressed beautifully, she's elegant. He's saying something about life. He's saying something about the beauty of life, the vibrancy of life, that beauty is possible, beauty is important, right? And that life is, the world is knowable, it's sharp, it's in focus, you can see it. She talks about style as reflecting an art of psychopistemology. That is the way he sees the world in a deep sense. The way he uses his reason, his senses and he's saying the world is knowable and there's beauty in the world. And then imagine that same beautiful woman with that coltsel and now what is the artist saying? He's saying, yeah, there's beauty in the world but it's got a defect and it's always gonna have a defect. And there's something important about the defect because he put it in the painting, he could have chosen not to, he could have painted over it. Even if the model had had a coltsel that morning, he could have painted over it but he chose to use it. Now in real life, we have coltsoes all the time. But art is not there to reflect to us real life. Art is there to reflect what should and could be, to quote Aristotle I guess, right? And so the metaphysical importance is the coltso is a reflection of the artist telling us, yes, beauty is possible but it will always be undercut. The undercutting is what's important. And now the philosophical meaning of the painting completely changed and what's important is your emotional response to the painting, hopefully depending on what your philosophy is and your sense of life is, will completely change. And just a little bit like that, just something little like that can change your entire response to it because it's so deep and that's why the example is so wonderful because it encompasses so much about art and about your response and how you respond to art. But it's that, those metaphysical, when we talk about metaphysical judgments, we're talking about those kind of things, is life normal? Do I belong on this planet? Can I know the world? What is my relationship to existence, to reality out there? Those are the kind of answers that art reflects back at us. That's what it concretizes, the answers to those kind of questions. Yeah, that's important to really emphasize that. And then the, so the essence that she thinks of it is it projects something metaphysical but she also writes particularly again about literature that the only way to convey the full reality and the full meaning of moral principles and moral values and different moral viewpoints is to project their full meaning and significance in a person's life and in life. And like if you were to live this morality or these moral values, these moral principles, this is what it would look like. This is what that kind of life in the world would look like. And she makes a point about that people with the fountain head would ask themselves often when they're in difficult situations trying to navigate more like what should I or should I not choose, what would Rourke do? And that helps them orient them to where the answer lies that he's a concretized projection and embodiment of certain moral principles and moral values. And you need that concretization and objectification in reality like a vision of a moral person who will then help you. And it's not an accident. So for instance, the religious people, what would Jesus do? That this is, but it's a projection of he's supposed to be the exemplar of their morality. And if they're taking that seriously of thinking what would he do in this situation or that situation? And it gives full meaning and life to the moral principles that are involved and that are at stake. 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, if 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 are, 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 in 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 that 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 she couldn't give an explanation in that essay because she's introducing the subject and 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 and 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 gonna 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. But that's the crux of the issue. And so you get for the first time, 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 it's different. It's not, you don't need this just for objectivism. You need this for philosophy period. And 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 pay 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 into 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 this is why I thought that art was so crucial. Not just for philosophy, just. But for life, for all of us as individual and 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 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 I wanna make this point, this is not and I know a lot of objectives to feel this way. Who has time for that? I'm busy, right? I mean it's great but it really philosophically is something that you need, need in order to live a good life, in order to live the kind of life, an egoistic life. Again, we'll talk more about that tomorrow. And this, Iran's emphasizing or emphasize at the start Ayn Rand's extensive experience with art and much broader than just her field literature. I think this, it's telling about her that she's interested in this because she's, and it combines with her interest in philosophy. But it's, I think it also explains, so a common point and it's often viewed as a negative but which I view as a positive is that I mean it's people remark about Ayn Rand and you can see it a little bit in question periods for instance of how violently emotional both positive and negative she can get about issues when the questioner, really you feel things about that and just asking a kind of intellectual question what do you think about blah blah blah and to her it's not just an intellectual question and of getting that why it activates such an emotional context on her part is it's the integration of her intellect with her values. That integration is facilitated by art. So to take one of the major kind of philosophical issues that comes up in the romantic manifesto the issue of free will and determinism. If you hold this just as an intellectual issue there were some thinkers in the history of the West who talked about free will and they had some theories about it and some are better than the others and some are more intellectual about it and some are more it puts free will on the side of emotion and some are really mystical it puts it on the side of the supernatural and religion and that's bad and then there are determinists some are more scientific and some are more religious and that's what this issue is about. If you just hold it like that it doesn't have emotional significance or it doesn't have that much emotional significance. If you see and both sides portrayed in art and if you think of it as it's a battle between Hugo and Shakespeare and you hold it like that and you have a response maybe not a sense of life we'll talk about some of that to Shakespeare but that if you take like Romeo and Juliet I have a love hate relationship with that play I like it and I go to see it often and when it's performed well it is very powerful but it's perverse philosophically it's and you go out of the theater mad but glad to have experienced it because it really conveys what determinism means and the way it thwarts the pursuit of values and if you hold it like that and you hold Hugo is this is what it means to take free will seriously and then you hear somebody talking about yeah well I'm a scientist and obviously there's no free will what your value experience is is you want a world of Shakespeare not Hugo and that's monstrous and that's part of what it means to have philosophical ideas really embedded in your understanding and your perspective it has a real value perspective and she has that in spades and so she has I think emotional reactions to where for other people like how could you be having any kind of emotion about this and she sees the whole meaning and it's art that helps her not only art but art helps her to get the full meaning of different philosophical ideas yeah because art concretizes those philosophical ideas so when you see a concretization of an evil philosophical idea in art you emotionally respond in a way that in the real world it's hard to dissect what is art gives you the essence of those ideas it gives you the immediacy of those ideas she experienced them immediately so when evil ideas like in Romeo and Julia to manifest on stage you're angry why are they you know to give away the ending I don't think it's a secret right why do these beautiful people have to die there's such a beautiful couple there's such passionate in love they're so amazing right they're breaking away from this evil tradition and they have to die I mean the logic of the play necessitates the logic of Shakespeare's philosophy necessitates a day and it becomes this emotional thing that this is what determinism means so I'm mad at Sam Harris right it's not just an intellectual debate this is about whether Romeo and Julia die or not right and that's what art gives you it gives you that reality now you can see it in history history you can also see the effects of bad ideas and what happens but that is hard and it's messy and there's a lot going on art essentializes it it makes it, it gives you the point and this is one of the values of experiencing philosophically evil art that is art that projects a philosophically evil idea is to get at that concretization of what that means and what that is and what that's like and in many respects you gain a lot I highly highly recommend a lecture of Leonard Pieckoff's that I don't think gets enough attention and people should listen to it's the survival value notice the words survival value of great but false or evil philosophically false philosophical evil art why, what value you get survival value as a human being you need it to survive a reading tall story of experience art that is philosophically the opposite of everything we believe in reading Shakespeare Shakespeare so I highly recommend that I mean it's so insightful it was just a personal note it was a consequence the lecture was a consequence of a confusion paper I wrote so of a confusion I had about aesthetics that I submitted in a class to Leonard and his answer in the class was so amazing that he turned it into a lecture and it was truly truly one of my favorite lectures and for the experience of art necessary I think so that you don't turn away from artists like Shakespeare which I think you can't turn away from Shakespeare it's too important as an experience in ways that I think only Leonard is very good at explaining I wanted to go back to something that we started with which the sort of some of the personal value that you can get out of the romantic manifesto and some of its kind of practical advice and I think the basic practical advice that we'll be talking about in sort of more specifics more detail tomorrow but that's the and this is going back to the issue that the 19th century is the greatest century in history it's ungraspable and she also has a perspective it's not in the romantic I mean there's touches of it in the romantic manifesto and in the introduction but she writes about this elsewhere of what a bad cultural atmosphere does to an individual does to a person and does to a soul so she has one of my favorite articles of hers is an article called our cultural value deprivation and it's what it does to you if you're in a cultural environment that is devoid of values and she's writing in the 60s where it is pretty close to devoid of values there's elements that I think are better in the present than in the 60s but if you're comparing it to the 19th century and this is part in terms of thinking about the romantic manifesto and what she's telling you about the 19th century you can't even fathom what it was like and you're in a culture that is degrading your soul in various ways and she talks about art in our cultural value deprivation but she talks about other aspects of the culture of its politics of its or lack of intellectuality its anti-intellectuality indeed and that one of the ways she puts it that I think is like and again this is her this kind of characterization I think is her as an artist giving it what's happening is a form of affixation and she gives the example of there's certain kinds like carbon monoxide poisoning that you don't even notice is happening so you can be I mean there's cases like this that someone's working on their car they started they don't open the garage door and they found dead the next morning because they don't even notice that they're being suffocated and killed and that she thinks is this is what a cultural atmosphere that is devoid of value it's degrading your soul and you don't even know it and part of what she's I mean the essay is about is recognizing that okay it's like you've got carbon monoxide in this and there's things you can do about it and the basic advice in the for the romantic manifesto is there's this whole 19th century that is much of it is buried that you're not going to learn about you're not gonna be encouraged to experience what was there and what was possible and this is the point she makes about capitalism and capitalism the unknown ideal in the introduction it's a very similar kind of thing capitalism is buried under a mound of silence is one of the ways I think she puts it and you're not going to learn what actually happened in the 19th century in terms of economic development the incredible prosperity you're gonna learn about exploitation and these workers who are on strike and so on yeah that is nothing like what actually happened and if you want to learn about what capitalism is and why it was an unknown ideal you have to go and discover these facts you have to go and actually explore and from the romantic manifesto it's the same point in regard to art you actually and actively have to go out and seek this and you need to do it because your soul is being crushed or suffocated and that is the basic point of the romantic manifesto and it's the basic point that I took from the book I mean I read the book at 17 and the basic thing I took from it was okay so she's saying that I can get aesthetic experiences like what I get from the fountain head and Atlas shrug from other art and I don't get any kind of experience currently like that and in school we're reading Canadian naturalistic literature and it is I mean the idea that this is what you would give to teenagers is I mean it's in a sense funny but in a sense this is what it means like that you're suffocating a person's soul that is trying to reach something and she's saying no there's stuff out there that is like the fountain head and Atlas shrug and my response was okay I'm gonna try to find that stuff and by far my favorite art form is music so I'm gonna go explore the music of the 19th century and that's what I started doing and it's I mean such a personal and profound value I can't imagine my life without this thing and that's the basic message but that you have to actively do that yeah I mean I had the same response when reading romantic manifestos though it took a while because in those days it was hard to find these values it was hard to figure them out but yeah just start searching what do I like? Where do I find this stuff? What is, where do I find all this art that she is talking about? And it takes work, it takes work one of the great tragedies in the world we live in today right now is that a lot of the 19th century art the paintings, the sculpture particularly the paintings, the sculpture not true of music luckily but painting and sculpture is all buried so if you go to any museum any museum in the world in the basement that's where the good stuff is it's tucked away somewhere it's not important according to the curators of the museum it's still good art in some of these museums but a lot of the art is buried it's in museums I often see a painting in a book and I want to know where it is because I'd like to go see it and it's oh it's not in display why? because it's in the basement and they keep it there and the basement's a massive there's a huge amount of art that was produced in the 19th century it's unimaginable how much and it's not in display and you can't see it anyway but again we're going to talk a lot more about that about finding the art and about that tomorrow I want to talk and we should end soon because we could go to Q&A but feeding off of this I'm going to talk about the cultural deprivation because I think I think we don't know it but there's carbon monoxide everywhere if you think if we live in a culture we're breaking bad at Game of Thrones are the best then we're in trouble but it's but it's you know she has an essay in the romantic manifesto that is just heart wrenching and it's beautifully written and it's very it makes you really angry it's called Audenmaul treason and it feeds off in a sense because what it does from the culture of deprivation is it takes one person and one example and she gives this example of a successful businessman somebody successful in life who's been successful but feels guilty and feels depressed and has no purpose and is struggling and he gets rationally he gets the ideas but he's still struggling and when you dig deeper he's always been attracted to certain romantic when he was a child he was attracted to romantic God and that was suppressed that was constantly he was told oh life's not like that that's not what it's like and he repressed so he repressed those emotions that response that he had to greatness and psychologically now he's completely messed up he's completely repressed he can't connect with his emotions he's afraid to feel so he gets objective as a conceptually but he can't actually get it emotionally he can't get it he can't live it fully and he can't enjoy it so he's following the virtues but not happy because psychologically there's a problem and she identifies it as this idea that he has not been allowed he was not allowed as a child to experience his emotions through art through romantic art through his heroes whatever they were at whatever age appropriate level they were it starts with cartoon heroes it goes to superheroes maybe and it goes on adventure stories detective stories or whatever it was that was all suppressed and the personal damage that he suffers and the work he has to do in order to claw himself out of it and one of the things she identifies as part of that work is to reconnect with those ecstatic experiences part of that work is to surround yourself with the right kind of art so you can that will help you to climb out and one of the things we haven't talked about but if you want to ask in the Q&A is that Iron Man has this view of art affecting you not just emotionally but affecting your cognition how you do your subconscious integrations I mean she has this I think I've got it here she has this right at the beginning about a cognition she has this amazing passage that is you know that art teaches man how to use his consciousness art teaches man how to use his consciousness it conditions or stylizes man's consciousness by conveying to him a certain way of looking at existence now read that like 20 times and think about that's deep and profound and difficult to understand Leonard talks about that in the lecture that I suggested because I think that's it's really important the more you surround yourself with art in a sense the better of a thinker you become the right kind of art and it's that kind of profoundness if that's a word the mind and mind are full of that and it's an amazing book highly highly recommend you read it many times and think about it and try to concretize it in your life try to bring it into your life try to make it real in your life and we'll talk about this tomorrow but it's one of the few areas where you're in complete control you can shape your life in this realm you wanna I mean I can make the point yeah make a last point and then we'll I'll make a so art and moral treason is one of my favorite articles in the romantic manifesto and it's written from this perspective this person who as you're on was putting it it has been suffocated in various ways and has repressed and so on but there's many things that come in that essay about the full nature of morality it's completely it completely transformed my view of just what the subject of morality is and how to think about it and part of what is completely wrong in the modern approach to ethic not just that it's altruistic but the Kantian utilitarian kind of I mean that's what you're normally presented as these are the two major choices you have and so they don't even really get what the subject of ethics is and you can get that from art and moral treason that's another aspect that is really important and it's part about the motivational power of morality and does it have personal power in your life is it a personal motivation and that art is essential for getting that and one perspective on this and to link it to some of her fiction and it's what she comments on in her 25th anniversary introduction to the fountain net about what the fountain had the sense of life that it conveys and she puts it as man worship and the worship is important there and then she elaborates on what the meaning of that is that the moral emotions are things like what you regard as sacred what you revere so the issue of reverence and worship and that if you've never and so this is going back to art and moral treason if you've never experienced those emotions you don't really get what morality is about and what it's motivating power should be in your life and art, I mean the fountain net this is certainly true but great art is not there's not that much that does this but the experience of it to get what the actual moral emotions are and what reverence is I don't think you can get them without art and that's a part of it in terms of morality and that's a part of what it can do and this is from the kind of moral philosophical perspective this is a major major reason you should seek out great art because it's the only realm in which you're going to experience what those emotions are and in terms of trying to rebuild or build your soul that this is what should motivate it art is indispensable to that all right we'll take questions and I think the mic's over there yeah good morning gentlemen good morning I would like to know what contemporary composers if any do you gentlemen enjoy yeah I knew we were going to get this what's your favorite movies and I didn't bring my tomorrow I'm going to have my lists of my favorite movies and stuff so if anybody's going to ask me about my favorite movies don't ask today ask them all what contemporary composers do I like I mean I can't think of any I mean there might be some in the audience who write music I know there are quite a few musicians here but in terms of really life today writing today I mean I like contemporary music kind of as a background thing going on but in terms of actually listening to music I do that that's classical music to me and I'll talk more about that tomorrow and what I get out of it and why I think it's so important I enjoy jazz I enjoy some popular music I grew up in the 70s so you know I like Pink Floyd I like Bob Dylan I like all kinds of stuff like that but I don't love any of them right what I love is I'll tell you tomorrow in terms of my favorite composers but I really do think to go to Ankar's point or Ryan's point really I think we live in an oxygen-deprived musical and aesthetic environment in terms of what is possible and what was what existed and what is being produced and what we are consuming today maybe in music more than in any other form because it's so it's so it's so instant gratification it's so focused on instant gratification it's all the same it's so it's the best I can do for yeah I'll say one thing it's not a contemporary but it's sort of the last I think probably chronologically the last composer that I have a major love for which is Sibelius so he's the 20th century and I'm bringing it up because Gold listens to Sibelius so I think he is a great composer but it's a point it's relevant to talking about this issue of cultural value deprivation when you look at his career and when he wrote what a lot of it is pre-World War I or immediately after World War I for much of his later life he doesn't compose much and this is a thing you see with a lot of artists who span the World War I either after World War I their art is dramatically different than pre-World War I or they have more and more trouble creating art as they were creating it pre-World War I so it's very interesting to look at artists who span that it's part of the evidence that have how much World War I was a watershed and this idea that you're bringing values into the world and it has to be a world worthy of those values and a world in which you want to project them that's a significant issue even for Ayn Rand that after she writes Atlas Shroud she's thinking of writing other things and continuing as a fiction writer but she can't imagine bringing her sense of life into this contemporary world and you can see that and you can see that she talked about that to some extent you can see it in the journals you can see it in the notes for the last novel that she was planning on writing and never wrote that's a very significant issue so it's not just what the culture does to you what it does to artists as well is a major issue in terms of thinking about art and why we might not have anything that is very good in the contemporary world Thank you gentlemen Hi, a sort of tangential question to the last one like you talk about 19th century romantic music as this embodiment of sense of life in music I see that and get that totally but do you think there are modern forms of music that have rediscovered that cause I feel like and you have to know where to look for them but there are forms of rock music and there's a lot of Rush fans in here but that kind of rock music that seems to achieve that same thing and it's almost like that was rediscovered in the 70s and 80s but if you know where to look for it it's there do you think modern music can achieve that same thing You know it's so hard to talk about music it really is and if you read Art of Cognition I mean look at how hard it is that genius to talk about music because we don't have the vocabulary we don't quite understand what it's doing and how it's doing what it's doing and she says you won't have a complete theory of music until you have physiology done and so on my answer is my answer is no but I can't prove it and I can't even really talk about it and I acknowledge that and I think we all need to acknowledge that our vocabulary is some of you again some of you are musicians and you know much more about this than I do but I think there's something about the form of romantic music in the late 19th century and not to say that that was the end and if World War I happened there wouldn't have been further development there wouldn't have got better maybe modern instruments being used and different forms I just can't see it if you look at the complexity the length the emotional power that it projects late romanticism and Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto I don't know what what can come close to that kind of emotional experience so I know people who get that from certain jazz compositions and just having a discussion yesterday about that so I don't want to discourage you from liking what you like and I'll talk a lot about this tomorrow I don't want you to discourage you from liking what you like what you like you like I want to encourage you to expand and broaden and experiment and try and go to places where you might have not wanted to or not or where it's hard or where you've found barriers or whatever so I'm not trying to limit I'm trying to expand right so you know could they have grasped something in a sense of life in a short song or something yeah but in terms of a musical aesthetic experience I think we peaked in the romantic music period of the late 19th century early 20 I mean Rachmaninoff is middle almost middle 19th century 20th century so it went into the 20th century but I don't think you can match that well thank you for a wonderful discussion and keeping with the theme of music I'm sorry I'm sorry but in the art and cognition essay who was that? 15? 15 Rand wrote that until a conceptual vocabulary is discovered and defined no objectively valid criterion of aesthetic judgment is possible in the field of music and then it would take a joint effort of several types of people and do you know since this was written decades ago do you know of anybody who's made any advancements in that area or starting to explore that field? I mean I know of some objectivists who are looking into it but not I don't know if they've made advancements so if they have some theories that I would think of as yeah this is adding to what Rand's hypothesis or helping to prove it or disprove it so I don't know about them but there is work being done we're familiar with work being done on it and trying to work off of that essay and expand it and increase our vocabulary but I'm not in a position to judge whether it's right or wrong maybe others here are but there is work being done it's something that a lot of objectivists you know musicians seem to be attracted to objectivism and people interested in music and musical theory seem to be attracted to objectivism so I think there's quite a bit of work being done I ask because I'm fascinated with the idea that part of the difference between music and the other arts is that Rand states that we're still pretty much on the perceptual level and not yet on the conceptual level and that's this fascinating insight well in terms of understanding it but the nature of music is that it's always going to be at the perceptual level and she makes this point I think Tal put up a slide where she makes that point music is different than other arts because music is immediately impactful on our emotions it doesn't go through any kind of analysis or thought it just impacts directly immediately so in that sense it's always going to be at the perceptual level in terms of experiencing it but we don't have the tools yet to completely understand that process that's what she's talking about it's part of what makes literature distinctive and I think partly why it's easier to analyze that literature I mean so the other visual arts start at perception as well literature starts with concepts and is using concepts to build percepts to build a perceptual world that you can visualize and imagine in your mind I mean that's what the fountain net does say but it starts with concepts it starts with an abstract devices and that's different than the other art music but also the visual arts that all start with perception what is the purpose of corporate art in particular the kind of odd sculptures you see in front of buildings what are they trying to achieve and do they achieve it I saw one right around the corner from the hotel over there that I couldn't understand well I mean if you read the romantic manifesto I mean has a pretty clear view of so called modern art she doesn't think it's art she thinks it's at best decorative often ugly and disruptive but I don't know what particular thing you saw but if it's a metal thing then it's not art it's just now what is the purpose of it the purpose is a good purpose ideally not I don't know what their purpose is but the purpose of having art outdoors like that is to create an aesthetic environment for your workers to create a pleasant place to work pleasant place to be and it projects an image of what the corporation is about I would recommend right across the street from the hotel I don't know which direction that is there's some public building and it looks like some building library maybe and there's a sculpture of Jefferson and Hamilton it's a courthouse they're really good sculptures they're a little faded because they're old and a little dirty but the point of sculptures like that is to convey something about this environment that we're creating this building, this square, this whatever so that it's beautiful so that it's inspiring so that it's pleasant to walk through and to live in and I think that's the good purpose of corporate art I think today it's not art it's ugly, it's silly and I wish they'd spend their money elsewhere hi thanks it's weird if you see a connection between love and art so if you think about Rand has a statement and I'm going to butcher it but she says show me show me a picture of a woman that a man loves and I can tell you all about him and I find you can do the same thing almost with art so to me there seems to be some kind of existential connection so I'm wondering your thoughts on that yeah it's a connection that she brings up and she brings up in the romantic manifesto I would caution a few things so one the statement in At the Shrug about tell me what I think it's something like tell me what a man finds sexually attractive in the philosophy of life maybe I and Rand can do that the idea that don't try it at home so there's a difference between the phenomenon that she's bringing up in the romantic manifesto is that so again this dual perspective from the creator of art and then the response to art it comes from a phenomenon that she calls a sense of life and we'll talk a little bit about that tomorrow that whole issue is a complex issue and she thinks that in love and particularly romantic love the same phenomenon is at work so both for the person you love what their sense of life is and your sense of life that is so that interaction is so she thinks there's a deep commonality between these but the now on the art side what is important I think is to say that art and the work of art conveys sense of life is not to say that it conveys in a way that would be graspable to the viewer the full sense of life of the artist and Rand makes a point about her own sense of life that you saw us and the audience that she was talking to have no clue about my sense of life and then she says well you have an easier way of knowing something about mine than I do of knowing about yours because mine is on every page of my novels but I hesitate to think how little of it is that and so what you could grasp so that sense of life is involved and it doesn't mean you can look at an work of art and tell this is the whole sense of life of the sense of life embodied in that work of art that you're interested in whereas in a romantic relationship it is you're interested in the person's full sense of life which takes long to get to sort of think I've got a handle on that and she has comments about that too of how she said something like after many years you may know approximately the sense of life of the person, the individual you're in love with so it's very important to understanding and what she thinks the phenomenon is but be cautious about okay I can now list this person's sense of life with X Y's and be very cautious also of these what I would just, they're sort of like labels that you think you understand and you oh he's got a malevolent sense of life or he's got a tragedy, you don't really know what you're talking about if that's how you're, that's, it's and often all it means is it's something I don't like about his sense of life so it's malevolent and that's not real categorization yeah thank you it's interesting hi maybe a bit closer I want to ask about the relationship between art and education familiar and understand the position that that art can on the have a supplementary use for education for directed purposes and conceivably some, some didactic works can have some aesthetic value but what I mean is they are similar in their structure they're both select, very selective they are both oriented towards helping the human mind grasp a certain idea and often times there be the purpose between art and education is confused or mixed like for example when certain authors are actually trying to build art to quote educate the masses so what I wanted to ask is where I could if you are familiar with anybody basically placing these two fields and purposes side by side and clarifying what the differences and similarities are I mean if I understand the question I'm not sure I do but I think a big part of it is what is the goal art's goal is not to educate it can be used to educate but the goal is not to educate the purpose of art is to experience it's the experience as an end in itself it's what you get from that moment of interaction many moments of interaction with the art what you're getting from it that is the purpose of art any educational purposes is a secondary or third level consideration education is concerned primarily with the education that it has a purpose it's not about the experience so there are two different phenomena and you think about them completely differently and if you read the romantic manifesto education doesn't really come up much other than in a sense it's a model education by creating this model that you can emulate that you can live by one aspect where they seem to overlap it's kind of secondary to both fields is one purpose though not perhaps the primary of art is to help a person grasp a complex abstract idea and basically to retain it short on time so I'm going to let Ankhai try to get one more question in it's to retain and give its full meaning art is cognitive in that sense and one of our art is cognition but its education is breaking up and these are the principles the point that it's for experience that's the really really really important point and she gives an analogy and you can think of this in terms of education an airplane is for flying it's for that experience yes you can take an airplane apart and you might have a class where you're taking an airplane apart and this is how it's put together and this is what enables it to fly and if you change the wing like this it's going to crash and that's education and you can analyze the airplane from that but it's a radically different experience and activity so there can be connections between them but you have to get that their purposes thank you this will be the last question there is a theme in popular in a lot of popular artworks that I think is very emotionally appealing to Americans and I'd be interested to hear your comments on what you think the philosophical influences would be that would give rise to the theme three examples I would give for this is American beauty the movie Sopranos and Breaking Bad where you have kind of dual sides of the nature of the characters of good and evil and over time it's kind of revealed that the good side the light side is a fake veneer and the characters descend into destruction as the real true side of them the evil side emerges so I'd be interested to hear why you think that appeals to the public and maybe what philosophical influences would give rise to that I've only seen American beauty which I hated I was going to say catcher in the ride too might be an example there are a lot of these and you're right it's a common theme if you take Breaking Bad it's this idea of supposedly good person every good person has a monster hidden inside of him and what brings out the monster is small moral breaks and it's a slippery slope and then the monster emerges and he's a real monster and it's all done where does that come from? that comes from the logic and contemporary philosophy the idea that man is flawed that man is fallen we're all really deep down if you just let loose if you take away the constraints of conventional society we're just savages in the woods and we do anything to anybody so it comes from a rich philosophical tradition of the last 200 years that portrays man as basically depraved and that we put on a civilized facade in our day-to-day lives present ourselves as good but really if you give us the opportunity we would just wreck havoc on the world and we would rape and pillage and people believe this and it's manifest in art over and over and over again part of the appeal of Game of Thrones is hey we get to vicariously rape and pillage on a large scale every week on every show but it's tragic and it's horrible that this is the best and it is aesthetically some of the best television or whatever that's being created for the themes and those are the experiences that we get and I can't remember American Beauty I saw it a long time ago I remember hating it but I can't remember it enough to say anything about it but I think it's the same thing why are we attracted to the Sopranos we're attracted to the Sopranos because here's a guy who's kind of nice in his family he's a gangster from the beginning to the end he's a bad guy he's slaughtered people left and right and vicariously we're living this idea he has this facade of civilized he lives in a nice house he has normal children he has semi-normal children and he has a wife it's as if you can have but that comes out directly out of I think the philosophy and the culture in which we live I believe we're out of time I've got the one winning