Beauty At Work
Beauty at Work expands our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. Sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan interviews scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders across diverse fields to reveal new insights into how beauty shapes our brains, behaviors, organizations, and societies--for good and for ill. Learn how to harness the power of beauty in your life and work, while avoiding its pitfalls.
Beauty At Work
Art and Yearning with Dr. Daniel McInerny (Part 1 of 2)
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How is art relevant to our yearning for flourishing? In this episode, I interview philosopher Daniel McInerny about his new book, Beauty and Imitation.
Dr. Daniel McInerny is associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is also a novelist and dramatist. As a scholar, Daniel is foremost interested in reactivating an Aristotelian understanding of mimetic art, long out of favor among philosophers. His latest book is Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts. At Christendom College Daniel teaches courses on the Philosophy of Art & Beauty, the Philosophy of Technology, the Philosophy of Culture, and Poetic Experience & Truth. In March 2023 Chrism Press published his novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair. Daniel is also the author of a play, The Actor, which will premiere in November 2024. Daniel also writes the Substack newsletter, The Comic Muse, where he shares stories and sketches from his studio.
In this first part of our conversation, we talk about:
- What is mimetic art?
- Mimetic art as storytelling
- Delighted contemplation as the ultimate goal of art
To learn more about Daniel and his work:
Newsletter: https://danielmcinerny.substack.com/
Beauty and Imitation: https://a.co/d/cNquN03
The Good Death of Kate Montclair: https://a.co/d/0KKy0PS
This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/)
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)
It's a representation. So literally, you're taking the presence of something in the world and you're representing it in another medium. What you're representing is, as I say, one or more formal aspects. On one level, you're going to be representing something sensible, right? So take, you know, the example of a still life painter. He's going to paint a bowl of fruit and a bottle of wine. He's going to try to represent on a canvas in oil paint the sensible qualities of the bowl, the fruit, the bottle of wine, the light, the table, etc. But he's also going to try to capture what we can call the intelligible reality, the meaning, in other words. And there is a meaning even to a bowl of fruit and a bottle of wine on a table. It means something, it says something about human beings.
SPEAKER_00I'm Brandon Vidunathan, and this is Beauty at Work, the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust. Why do we need art? And what does it have to do with our yearning for fulfillment? My guest today is a philosopher who puts forward an account of art as a representation of reality. And such mimetic art, he argues, is always fundamentally an attempt to tell a story about the human quest for meaning and flourishing. Dr. Daniel McInerney is associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College in Virginia. He's also a novelist and dramatist. His latest novel, published in 2023, is The Good Death of Kate Monclair, and his play, The Actor, premieres in November 2024. As a scholar, Dan wants to reactivate an Aristotelian understanding of mimetic art, long out of favor among philosophers. And this is the subject of his latest book, Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts.
SPEAKER_01All right, Dan, fantastic to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us. Brandon, it's a real pleasure to be with you today. Thanks so much for having me on.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. No, well, this is, you know, I think your new book, which we'll talk about in a little bit, is um it's a perfect fit for this season of the podcast. And congratulations. It's it's such a fantastic work, and I've really enjoyed reading it. Before we start, though, I want to ask you if you could share with us a memory of an encounter with beauty that you had in your childhood that remains with you till today.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a great question. I I love that question. Very creative question. When I think of my childhood, and I think of anybody, say, in my family, who would think of me as a little boy, they would think of me drawing. Uh, that's what I was. The the artist in me came out very, very early. And I still have some of the little notebooks with my cartoons that I was drawing when I was four years old, five years old. My family and I were living in a pivotal year of my childhood. Again, my years spanning my four or five years old. We were living in Rome, and there were some exciting world events going on, the first moon landing. Wow. And so these notebooks are filled with drawings of the lunar module on the surface of the moon and Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts walking on the moon. So when I think of the art that first inspired me as a kid, I'm not, even though I was living in Rome, I don't go to the Pietà or the or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I think of cartoons because that's what I did. Uh that's what first drew me. The claim is not that this is the most beautiful art, but there was sufficient beauty there to draw me in. I saw very few, in fact, I might even say no Disney cartoons as a kid. That is, no feature-length films. Uh this is this was before uh this was before video recordings were available before DVDs and certainly before streaming. So it was very hard to see a Disney film, for example, after its first run, after it was out of the theaters. Every so often they would rerun one of their classics, like Peter Pan, but it was very hard to get to. And I and again, I don't think I saw any of them uh as a little kid, but there was a show on Sunday nights, The Wonderful World of Disney, and it was mostly live action, but there was just enough animation in it to fire my imagination. I became uh like many kids, uh, Walt Disney became a hero of mine, um, not just because of the amusement parks, but because he was an animator, because he drew cartoons. And that's what I thought I would do as a kid. I would tell my mom, I'm I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go live in California, I'm gonna be an animator for Walt Disney. I think all this is is important for me even today. There is, I think, a very strong connection between those first forays into the world of art through cartoons and what fascinates me today, because what you have in a cartoon is you have a kind of comedy typically. You have an exaggeration, but you're still trying to say something true through it. And I'm still fascinated by that today as a philosopher. Uh, my art today is not so much drawing, but it's the writing of fiction and drama. Even in all those areas, I still think about the comic nature of human life or how to tell a comic narrative in a way that will manifest some deeper truths about the human condition. In a way, it's still a kind of fascination with the cartoon, if I can exaggerate.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, wow. I have, yeah, yeah, this resonates with with my own experience as a kid. I was initially drawn to cartooning quite a lot. Um, of course, it was comic strips, right? It was Spider-Man and Superman. And so those were the sources of my my imagination. We had this series which is very popular in India of Hindu mythology in comic book form. And that was my religious education as a kid. It was it was that, you know, it was these comics. And so I would I would do these, you know, elaborate sketches of scenes from Hindu epics, and then and then got into movie posters, and that's what I was known for as a kid. The guy who would do the you know, the latest Bollywood movie would come out, and I would, I would sketch the poster and I would be asked to make copies for my friends at school. Oh my goodness. And uh yeah, so but I got to a point where where I found myself like because I didn't have any formal training and we didn't have you know a private tutor or anything, I got to a point where I couldn't express what was in my head, and I couldn't like fix the problems with the the nose wasn't showing up as it ought to, and I couldn't make the the grimace like just right, and didn't know how to do it, and I got so frustrated that I gave it up altogether. So it was and I moved on to other forms of art like music and you know. But it's an interesting thing as to, you know, we want to, when we encounter the beautiful, when we encounter something that strikes us, we want to reproduce it, right? Represent it in some way. Yes. And almost that we're forced to do it, we want to share it. And that I think that's that's one of the the interesting themes about the concept of imitation in your book. But before we go there, I just want to ask you a little bit more if you could talk about your journey into philosophy and and into your creative writing. Could you say a little bit about what led you in those directions, as opposed to say, becoming an artist or cartoonist?
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. I still today think of myself as an artist first for the reasons we've already begun to talk about. That's uh the nature that began to manifest itself first. But I think the philosophical always came along with it long before I was ever aware of it. It was it was the fascination with art and making art, even cartoons. And by the way, I drew, if not movie posters, I in college made a little money drawing posters for the event science. So if there was a band who came to campus or some big campus event, I would often do the poster for it. So we have a lot in common along those lines. But um, the philosophical and the creative were always bound up together, I think, uh, with me. So when I when I was an undergraduate, I studied English literature. So my artistic interests were were going toward poetry, toward storytelling. But then I took a course, uh, I was at the University of Notre Dame as an undergraduate. I took a course in the philosophy of art. And that more than any course inspired me to start thinking about, you know, what how I might uh make my living after graduation. And maybe, maybe the academic life might be the life for me. Because in studying the philosophy of art, I saw that, hey, my interest in the pursuit of truth and my interest in in art and the beautiful, they can come together. I don't have to give either one of them up. So that I think that was that was one of the key thoughts that got me thinking about graduate school and an academic life. I was always writing at the time, very badly, of course, and have always written fiction, drama, screenplays throughout my adult life. And I see that now it's just the flip side of the coin. I can pursue philosophy and still pursue my interest in art, and I can pursue my writing and still inquire into the truth. So uh just in 2023, I published my novel, The Good Death, of Kate Montclair with Chrism Press, and uh very happy about that. And I have a play uh called The Actor that's gonna premiere here at Christenham College in Virginia in November of 24. So I'm enjoying what I'm writing and I'm enjoying the philosophy I'm doing.
SPEAKER_00Amazing. Amazing. You grew up in a household where both philosophy and and uh novels were were being being written, right? Your dad was really prominent uh philosopher and novels. Did you, when you were growing up, did you see his uh work as an inspiration for you or something that you maybe wanted to distance yourself from? I know sometimes kids don't want to be like their parents in terms of what they're doing for a career. What was that relationship like for you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about my father as an influence too. So my father, the late Ralph McInerney, was a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame for over 50 years, and he was a renowned scholar of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. And so, yeah, I grew up in a household where I saw my my father doing philosophy at a very high level, but also publishing fiction at a very high level without a lot of fanfare. I think that's what kind of struck me. He just did it. And there seemed to be, at least from the point of view of a child, just kind of no fuss about it. It was all integrated in who he was and his pursuit of the truth. There was no dichotomy, there was no double life. It was just, it was all one. And so, yes, I was imitating my own father from a very young age. In those days, he had a um he had a basement office in our home in South Bend, Indiana, and it was not a finished basement. It was a pretty rough camp down there, but he he loved it. It was his own private kind of more of a man hovel than a man cave. But he he would type on a typewriter. These are the days before computers, and he gave me to use an old royal typewriter, which is this big, you know, a heavy contraption. And he taught me how to how to you know put the roll the paper in, and uh, I would type with one finger, and I was writing stories because that's what my father was doing. So imitation was huge. And again, it took me a while to think that I would follow him into the academic life. I've already described that happened very late in my undergraduate years, and I I certainly surprised him when I took the idea to him. But yes, he had an incredibly formative uh influence upon me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Let me ask one more question before we jump into your book. What is your writing practice like, uh, both in terms of your philosophical work and your creative work? I mean, do you find that you're in the same state of mind when you're doing both those kinds of activities? Do you need different stimulants for different kinds of uh writing? Or how do how does that like how do you how do you integrate both of those very different, I don't know, maybe maybe from the outside they look like very different kinds of writing?
SPEAKER_01They are very different kinds of writing. I don't know if I think about it too much. What I think about most of all is having at least a tolerable amount of uninterrupted time. I I think if I if I have time to focus, that's kind of enough. I don't have to do special mental gymnastics to write fiction or to write philosophy. It's it's more having that space in which to focus than I can do work. I typically don't do in one session, let's say I have a three-hour opening in a morning. I typically won't write both fiction and philosophy in that period. I'll usually just focus on one. And, you know, there are trade-offs that happen because of a busy schedule all the time, but I'm typically looking for for morning hours. Uh I've never been, even as a young man, I was never a night person. So I I my father was. My father wouldn't begin writing until 10 o'clock at night and would often go till two in the morning. I I just have never I've never had uh those bio-rhythms or whatever you need for that. So to me, it's more like where can I find the hours of focus? But I always have uh a fiction project and a phil philosophy project on the stove at the same time, even if I'm not pursuing them in the same session.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, amazing. Good. Well, let's jump right into your book. This is so Beauty and Imitation. It's it's uh like I I really loved your book, loved the argument, uh, very provocative. And your book is an articulation of a particular account of art, right? The Aristotelian tomistic approach to mimetic art that originates with Aristotle and is developed further by Thomas Aquinas. And you say here that art is imitation, the making of a picture of some feature of the world, and art thus images or represents for our delighted contemplation one or more formal aspects of its source of origin. So mimesis is typically understood as imitation in the sense of copying, but that's not what you're arguing here. Could you say a little bit about this account of mimetic art? What is this Aristotelian domestic account and how does mimesis differ from copying?
SPEAKER_01Yes, that's uh a great question. And I think we have the whole movement of modern art, even beginning in the you know, 18th and 19th centuries, to thank for taking this concept of imitation and really distorting it and then passing it off as mere copying. That is certainly not the case. I don't think it's ever really been the case. There are certain artists who aim for literal exactitude or photorealism. Sure, that that's that's one approach. But that's certainly not the only approach when it comes to imitation. So let's get to the heart of it. What is what does it mean for an artist to imitate? As you said, as as you were reading from that passage in the book, it's a representation. So a literally, you're taking the presence of something in the world and you're representing it in another medium. What you're representing is, as I say, one or more formal aspects. On one level, you're gonna be representing something sensible, right? So take, you know, the example of a still life painter, he's gonna paint a bowl of fruit and a bottle of wine. He's gonna try to represent on a canvas in oil paint the sensible qualities of the bowl, the fruit, the bottle of wine, the light, the table, et cetera. But he's also gonna try to capture what we can call the intelligible reality, the meaning, in other words. And there is a meaning even to a bowl of fruit and a bottle of wine on a table. It means something. It says something about human beings. It says something about how human beings arrange and beautify their domestic spaces. We don't just leave them bare, we don't leave just wine bottles in a cupboard. We like to display our fruit uh and the fruits of the vine. That's really interesting about human beings. And I think that's a big part of what a still life painter is trying to capture. But okay, in that represencing, it's not at all necessary, again, that the artist aim for a literal rendering of the sensible qualities of the thing. Again, so aiming after photorealism. If that were the case, then I think photography would be the highest art, and and a certain kind of photography would be the highest art. But there's more than one way to represent these realities. And what the artist really wants to do is make a representation that freshens our perceptions, that allows us to see the bowl of fruit and the bottle of wine with new eyes, so that it's its sensible beauty and its intelligible beauty show up to us in a way that is marvelous again and opens itself up to our contemplation. So imitation is compatible with myriad number of different artistic styles. It's not just about copying nature.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Well, that's really uh yeah, fascinating. And I and I and I'd be curious to know if you think that the rejection of what was perceived as just copying was in part a function of artists who did see their work. And I, you know, I think of Renaissance painters perhaps who and sculptors who seem to be very invested in sort of very faithful you know, copying, right? And and and really wanting to portray the human face or the body and you know, almost to have a photographic uh representation.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I mean certainly um say in Western painting, especially in the time period you point to, you know, a certain rigidity uh set in. Uh we became enamored with kind of a scientific approach to art in a way, uh the rules of perspective, for example, and proportion. And so, yes, and in the excitement of all that, trying to get to render things as faithful as you possibly can to how they really look in the real world became, I think, too too much of an ideology rather than just one approach. And so, yeah, that that certainly helped to give imitation something of a bad name. And and perhaps there's not too much wonder that artists who who always want to freshen their perception started to resist that and look for for ways to to approach their work other than imitation. But I'm hoping to reactivate this notion in a way that that freshens imitation itself. So people don't see it as stale, old school, you know, kind of kind of approach.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Um you also use the the phrase delighted contemplation, right? So it's it's it's representation for a particular purpose, or at least has uh with with a particular consequence in mind. Could you talk about the role of delight and contemplation in this idea of mimetic art?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's the whole goal of art is our contemplation of it. We want to see reality with those fresh eyes. And that's a it's that I mean that literally. We we want to see it with our eyesight or hear the music with our ears. So there's a our sensibility is certainly engaged, but also our intellect. We want to chew that reality over in our mind. And we're made for that as human beings. And because we're made of it, that that chewing over of the beauties of reality in our mind, that's a messy metaphor, but that chewing over is a delight. Yeah. It's a joy to us. And those words delight and joy are are they're not just emotions. They're not emotions primarily, they are rational expressions of reactions to the beauty that we're imitating in reality. So, yes, that's why that's what we want when we go to the arts. We want that joy more than anything. That's what we look for. If someone recommends a book or you have to go see this exhibition, or you have to see this, what we're hoping for more than anything else, is not an art lesson. We want delight.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And it's and it seems like it's delight in in knowing, right? There's there's there's an understanding and insight. Um there's a lot of resonance that really surprised me with accounts I'm hearing from scientists. Over the last five years, I've been studying the world of beauty and science. We've asking scientists around the world what beauty means to them, where they encounter it, and and so forth. And we hear a lot in their accounts that sounds very much like this sense of delight in being able to reproduce. Reality in an equation. And so they there are many scientists who call certain equations works of art, or even experiments as works of art, because of the sort of ingenuity that goes into designing it and then the immense clarity it gives you about the essence of some particular phenomenon and the way in which something really is, in the sense of, ah, this is how things are, this is the hidden order of things, the inner logic of things. And some go so far as to say that this is, you know, access into the mind of God, or, you know, there's the Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilchek, who talks about nature as embodying beautiful ideas and mathematics giving us that access to the mind of the artist. I'm curious to know what you think about that ability of science to represent reality, whether through models or equations, and the way in which some people call those works of art, is that does that fit into a conception of mimetic art or is that just maybe metaphorical?
SPEAKER_01Boy, that's a great question. It puts me in mind of an author that uh I have been delighting in the past couple years or so, and I bet many of those in your audience will know. This is the neuroscientist and philosopher and literary critic Ian McGilchrist.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And um wrote a big book, I think in 2009, The Master and His Emissary, and then a few years ago, an even bigger book, actually in two enormous volumes, The Matter with Things. And there's a chapter in The Matter of Things or The Matter with Things, where he collects quotations from scientists, mathematicians, uh gushing, in short, about the beauty of their scientific or their mathematical work. And it's a wonderful chapter. Uh Einstein, for example, is a classic example in that chapter. I have no problem. Uh in fact, I delight, I'm enthusiastic about hearing scientists and mathematicians talking about the beauty of their work. It's an interesting question. Does is is an equation, for example, imitation? Not in any straightforward sense, not in the way in which we talk about it in the arts, at least, because again, in a painting, in a novel, what we're doing is we're representing really the human reality. The human quest for fulfillment is being represented on the canvas or in language in a narrative. In an equation, it's not so clear that that's what we're doing. We're not trying to picture a human quest for fulfillment. Now, I'm not denying the equation isn't is beautiful, certainly not. I'm just saying it doesn't seem to be imitation. If we want to get really metaphysical, I think though we might talk about it as an imitation of transcendent, even divine beauty. So that every beautiful thing in reality, in whatever sphere, is going to imitate the beauty of transcendent reality. There, I think you can you can kind of bring in a metaphysical sense of imitation, but but not, I don't think, an artistic sense of imitation.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, in the creation of scientific models, perhaps there's a lot of judgment that has to go into criteria of elegance and parsimony and and and ways in which you you you know you have to structure things to convey the maximal amount of insight with the minimal amount of information, or even in you know, these the ways in which the uh models from the James Webb telescope have been colored, and there's sort of sort of choices that have to go into our artistic schema, you know, choosing what colors to present. And those are, I think, maybe a bit fuzzier as to, you know, I I don't know whether those are quasi-artistic works, because there is almost a kind of aesthetic practice there. But I want to uh double-click on this point about the human story. Uh, you know, this is one of the things that I found surprising about your book and and really quite provocative was you you argue that the mimetic arts are all storytelling arts, right? And even something like instrumental music is fundamentally about the human story. And you have a particular definition of story which I'd like to read. You say that a story is an ordered sequence of events on the beginning, middle, and end that pictures the human pursuit of some goal or good. And in this pursuit, the protagonist encounters conflict, keeping him from the goal, conflict the protagonist resolves or fails to resolve by his own choices, not by chance. And these choices ultimately reverse the protagonist's fortunes in a way that is both probable and marvelous, and so offer the reader or audience an understanding of the meaning of the protagonist's adventure, an understanding that manifests the adequacy or inadequacy of the protagonist's purposes to the human end. So there are a lot of things you've built into this argument and it's really very provocative. And so could you talk a little bit about how is all mimetic art about the human story, say even instrumental music?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Maybe just for our conversations per purposes, I'll use a simpler definition of story, though there are reasons why I have such a tightly packed uh definition, because it is so integral to my argument. And you're absolutely right. I think it's it's certainly the most controversial thesis in my book that every of what I prefer to call the mimetic arts rather than the fine arts are storytelling art. So what do I mean by that? Well, yes, a story is some protagonist on a quest for some goal. The claim is, though, that a human story, a story that we write, a story that we make, is an imitation of our own story as human beings, so that human life takes the form of a story. It certainly doesn't feel like that all the time, I grant you. Our days sometimes seem very haphazard. There are interruptions, uh, unscheduled meetings, you're you're just bopping along trying to keep your head above water some days. It you don't feel like the protagonist of a novel or of a film. But if we zoom out, I think what we see in all human beings, as I mentioned earlier, is this deep desire for fulfillment. I don't think you're gonna find a human being who doesn't want in some way total and complete satisfaction. We're gonna define that in many different ways, and we can have fun arguments about who's got the best conception, but at least we have that common denominator that we are seeking fulfillment. So what I want to say is that all of the mimetic arts are in some way trying to represence that human endeavor, that attempt to find fulfillment, an attempt which sometimes fails, or sometimes succeeds only partially, or sometimes succeeds quite well. And so we can name kinds of stories that show us failure, we call them tragedies, we can name stories that show us a mix of both. Often those are we call them dramas of one kind or another. Stories that give us success in finding fulfillment, we call comedies. So we have these kind of super genres or archetypal stories that try to capture that basic trajectory toward fulfillment. So that's that's at least a beginning uh of a reply to your question.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So how's that quest made manifest in forms of art that are not obviously stories, right? I mean, so you you gave the example of the the bottle of wine or the bowl of fruit, and there at least you can you can see a you know an artifact that you might imagine a social context in which that's lived out, a person's life in which those those things play a role. But um, there are other forms that seem a bit more abstract and it's hard to sort of you know picture, I suppose. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, to take maybe the next most difficult kind of example. Um a painter paints a landscape and you don't even find a house in it or a farm or a barn, not even animals, say it's just it's just the earth. And it's beautiful, but how is is such a painting trying to imitate the human quest? I would say because it's showing us our habitat. This earth is our habitat. This is where we live. And so the landscape is going to show this is the kind of place where we can flourish and find fulfillment. This is the kind of place where we find rest. This is a hostile place, and this is not a place where we're gonna build a home. But in some way, shape, or form, it's going to be related to us if it has anything to do with this planet. The argument gets gets harder, though, I admit, if uh, especially when we get to music, as you said, when you get to instrumental music, I think that's the hardest objection for me to meet. In a thumbnail sketch, I would say that even instrumental music is trying to imitate the movement, the psychic movement. In other words, how it feels experientially to seek after the good or fulfillment in a given context. It doesn't mean that you have a named protagonist in a piece of music. In in Mozart's 40th Symphony or Beethoven's uh sixth, you have you have no named protagonist. You don't know exactly what the goal is. So, oh actually, Beethoven gives us some subtitles that might help. That's a rather narrative piece of work, but but stay with Mozart's 40th. There's nothing you can hang on to that's explicitly narrative. What's narrative, again, is is the flow of the sound. Right. That is trying to capture the the emotional and intellectual flow of what it feels like to fall in love or be frustrated or feel lonely in life. It gets tricky though. I'm not saying the composer has always exactly literally named the emotion he's trying to imitate, but nonetheless, I think we can describe instrumental music in that way.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's certainly the desire to capture me, so yeah, to to represent a feeling or an emotion or a sentiment, or or even, yeah, the you know, the over the arc of a piece, uh, you know, a range of emotions of election and conflict and resolution, right? And yeah, I recall uh you know the Italian theologian Luigi Giussani has this reflection on uh Chopin's raindrop prelude, which has has the single note recurring over and over again as the hammering of this incessant desire for fulfillment, right? So there's ways in which you can interpret uh works of music as fundamentally having to do with with our quest. And you might read an interpretation like that and go, oh, yeah, that's that's a good way to read it. That resonates with me, right? Which I love that who knows if the composer would agree, but but there's there's a sense in which one might say, that's that sounds like an adequate way to understand how this work of art represents an aspect of the human quest or yeah, and I love that example, and I'm gonna steal that from you.
SPEAKER_01In talking about this, I always come back to the fact uh I don't I haven't met many people in my life who don't describe their reaction to music in emotional terms. And that to me is where you start. We we describe music as eliciting emotions, as feelings in us. Okay, that that's where we get started. And that's that's interesting. How how can mere sound do that? I think it's it's trying to do that through imitation.
SPEAKER_00All right, that's a great stopping point for the first half of our conversation. Stay tuned for the second half next week where Dan talks about why stories are moral arguments, but not in a philosophical sense, and whether beauty is objective. To make sure you don't miss it, subscribe to our podcast if you haven't already, and please leave us a review. We'd love to hear what you think about the show.