The Wednesday Society
A podcast that takes a philosophical deep dive into forgotten or intentionally neglected texts.
The Wednesday Society
05 | On Beauty | Beauty and politics
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Cosmos in Greek means both order and beauty, and it refers to the order of the universe. So what is the relationship between beauty and order?
Just a few years after the French revolution and during the reign of terror, philosopher and poet Frederick Schiller wrote a series of letters in which he defended the idea of an aesthetic education for a healthy and robust democracy. But his idea has gone largely unnoticed. What is an aesthetic education and how can it be relevant for us today? In this episode Dalia and Simon discuss the idea of aesthetic education, its role in politics, and what that means for the relationship of beauty and political life. And, they strongly disagree about the success of aesthetic education.
The Wednesday Society is hosted by Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. In this first season, Dalia discusses beauty in its many forms with concert pianist and writer, Simon Tedeschi.
- Producer: Sarah Allely
- Composer: Russell Stapleton
- Sound engineer: Bethany Stewart
Email us: wednesdaysocietypodcast@gmail.com
This podcast was made possible through the support of the Australian Research Council, recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney, and supported by the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney. The Wednesday Society was created on Gadigal, Kuringai, and Dharug country.
In Greek, the word kosmos means the universe and beauty. And it describes the beauty of the order of the universe. Hello and welcome to the Wednesday Society, a podcast that invites you to slow down, reflect, and discover. And we do this by reading texts that aren't all that well known. Maybe that's because they've been forgotten or even intentionally neglected. I'm Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. This first season on beauty takes a deep dive into what philosophers and writers have said about beauty over the centuries. We ask the question: Can beauty actually change our lives? In each episode, we discuss beauty in connection to the overarching theme of Diatima's ladder. The idea is that at every step of the way we experience beauty in a different guise. And as we go up the ladder, we transform through these experiences of beauty. If you haven't listened to the rest of the season, we give a great overview of all of this in episode one. So this is episode five, Beauty and Politics. And we're pretty far up Diatima's ladder. We're on step five, which is the moment where the student begins to recognize the beauty of order and law. Cosmos. And here, when it comes to order and law, we're concerned with civic institutions, collective action, and the distribution of power. And also education. Education is crucial when it comes to voting and making decisions about democracies. Citizens need to be able to think critically, assess claims, and make responsible choices. And when I say education, I don't mean formal education or instruction. It can be a conversation with family around the dinner table. Education here is character formation. It's not about going to school and passing tests. But what's the connection between education, politics, and beauty? Well, the experience of beauty gives us pleasure, but it's not the same kind of pleasure that we get from, say, eating our favorite foods. Experiencing beauty makes us curious. It makes us interested in what's being expressed. It makes us want to investigate. You're on a hike. You're in awe of the natural landscapes. And so you want to deepen your understanding of the plants, the wildlife, even the geology. And this is how the experience of beauty can play a role in education. When it comes to beauty and politics, well, the story is grim because historically they've been a bad match. Think about propaganda, which uses beauty to manipulate. The most obvious example is Lenny Riefenstahl. She's the documentary maker who filmed the Nuremberg rally in 1934. Riefenstahl's films used all sorts of techniques that were actually developed for feature films at the time to convey a particular message. Hitler is a hero. He's going to save the German people. And the German people are united under him. Yuck. This is one way Beauty enters politics, but the other way is via education. And this is what we're going to discuss in this episode. The kind of education we need in a democracy is about character formation and not education as instruction. It's education through experiences. And in the text we're looking at, the most important experience is beauty. Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humanity was written in 1795 by the philosopher, poet, and playwright Friedrich Schiller. Now, as a side note, Schiller wrote lots of different things, including William Tell and the poem Ode to Joy. Letters on the Aesthetic Education was written in response to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. That was the time when the French started turning against each other and put people under the guillotine. Let me just start off with a simple distinction. The distinction between a subject of a monarchy and a citizen of a republic or a democracy. In a monarchy or a dictatorship, everything is top-down, and the people who live under the regime are literally subject to the rules imposed on them. They can get what we might call a good education by learning lots of facts or becoming technically astute. And even in democracies like Australia and the United States, university education is becoming more and more about instruction and technical know-how and less about character formation. In a democracy, we need citizens who are equipped to listen to different perspectives, debate, and decide on how they want their country to run. But how do you transition from being a subject to a citizen? That was the question that the French Revolution failed to ask and answer. And it's a question that remains live for us today. How do we move from being passive, submissive to becoming creative and active? So this book of letters by Schiller is for anyone who's interested in asking this question. How do we develop our moral and political agency? How do we become creators of our world and not just passively accept it as it is? Schiller's answer is education, and more specifically, aesthetic education. That means becoming involved and thoughtful citizens instead of just learning facts and figures. To discuss this text with me is pianist and writer Simon Tedeski. Hello, Simon.
SPEAKER_00Hi Dahlia. And we're going to begin with the letter 8, which is really, I think, the diagnosis or the wound as Schiller identifies it.
SPEAKER_01So my favorite passage comes from letter 8, and we'll look at letters 8, 15, and 22. I just love this one. He says, our age is enlightened. Why then do we still remain barbarians? And this just speaks not only to 1795, but also to 2026. What does it mean that we're we we are enlightened, we have information, we have knowledge, we have solved heaps of problems. Reason, calculative reason, has managed to do a lot of things. And yet, we're still killing each other, we're destroying cultures, we still remain barbarians.
SPEAKER_00It's incredible. And you know, what just came into my mind when you said that is Francis Fukuyama, who said that in the absence of oppression, humans will fight against freedom itself, which I think is an extraordinary concept. And it's almost what Schiller is implying here. And Francis Fukuyama, all these years later, post-Cold War, he's saying this stuff that humans, you know, living in an affluent society will need friction. It is part of the human condition. And uh, this is essentially what uh Schiller is saying. Modern humans, and we can still say that he's talking about modern humans, are fragmented.
SPEAKER_01Fragmented, yes. They were certainly fragmented in 1795, and we are so much more fragmented today. We are, as um one of my favorite T. S. Eliot quotes is distracted by distraction from distraction. We are not only fragmented in our world because we have so many experts who have very tunnel-visioned knowledge, so everybody knows a lot about one small thing, and so knowledge has become fragmented. Labor is fragmented, we have no idea what these cogs and various pieces actually uh that we make actually turn into, and our inner state is deeply fragmented. And this is what Schiller is interested in, the inner fragmentation that we all suffer from.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And you know, this is why I think Goethe, who Schiller's kind of BFF, um, was regarded as the last great true global intellectual in that totally holistic sense. I'm thinking here of William Blake, who in his poetry is talking about the roads and rails that are carving up and desecrating his beautiful England. And all of these people, Blake, Schiller, Goethe, are looking at the world changing because of capitalism and mechanization and industrialism.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell And Schiller's response is aesthetic education. Now, I think we really need to figure out what aesthetic education means. The two terms are rarely, if at all, considered together. So we usually have education, which is something like instruction, and then we have aesthetics, which has to do with experiences of beauty and art. And so I want to just ask you, Simon. You're a pianist. Did you go through what Schiller calls an aesthetic education?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell In a sense, and let me tell you, coming from a world of classical music, which is very rarefied, there is no guarantee whatsoever that classical musicians will be better than any other segment of the population. And straight away when you asked me that, I thought of George Steiner, the German Jewish philosopher and literary critic, who said that the Holocaust was committed by, and I'm paraphrasing here, men who worked at the concentration camps and then went home and listened to Schubert and they read Goethe. And these were very intelligent, well-educated and cultured urbane individuals. So I think that reading Schiller now, and of course knowing about romanticism and what happened, I think it's very haunting, and yet he certainly cannot be discarded because what he says is of tremendous power and import for our age.
SPEAKER_01So I think it's really important, Simon, to say that the aesthetic education that Schiller is outlining here is exactly the opposite of what these guys who go to the concentration camps and then go home and read Schubert are doing. What are they doing? They're compartmentalizing. They are separating their work life from their aesthetic life. And Schiller is exactly fighting against that fragmentation, that ability to compartmentalize. So you are a really evil human being in one moment, and then you go home and enjoy the most beautiful, sublime music in another moment. And his notion of aesthetic education is to undercut our willingness to compartmentalize, to separate ourselves so that the music that we enjoy is not something that is something that actually can have an effect on how we act in the world. Whereas most of us today, and this is why I asked you, like, did you go through an aesthetic education? We don't. And I have a reason for that, but I want you to tell me more. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Far be it for me to push back against a woman and a philosopher who actually specializes in this uh very thing. But for me, um Schiller proceeds from a presupposition that uh I f I find interesting but a problem. That uh we have reason on one side and that we have sensation on the other. And that in itself is a presupposition that I think is based on a falsity. Um there is tremendous passion in reason and uh there is uh tremendous reason in sensation. Um these sensation and emotions have their own intelligence to them. So what I think is that uh, you know, looking at the Nazis, um, I think that they were in many cases aesthetically educated people in the way that Schiller might have anticipated.
SPEAKER_01But but uh I completely disagree. I'm sorry. I do not think they were aesthetically educated in the way that Schiller thought, because first of all, we have to distinguish between cultivation and instruction. Instruction is how we think of as education, and instruction is an outcome of Enlightenment pedagogies. So in the Enlightenment, that's the moment that what we today regard as standard education, the idea of a standardized education, emerged. And what also emerged at that time? Standardized testing. So everybody at a certain age had to pass certain tests so that the state can make sure that everybody was learning the basics, right? Maths, English, or you know, German, whatever it was, right? That's the notion of education that you have in the Enlightenment. Schiller's notion of education is very different. It's not simply about rote learning, it's not about remembering uh Latin verse or whatever, but nor is it about um passing tests. It's about cultivating the inner person, the person who is going to eventually become a citizen of a republic, giving them the capacities to think for themselves, the opposite of uniformity.
SPEAKER_00Yes, but in a way, I reading Schiller look still, nevertheless, at what he's saying at the notion of capital I improvement. And I see a little bit of the other thing as well. I see a little bit of that top-down approach, which is that man, and I say man with a capital M, you know what I mean, can be improved, can be cultivated, can be civilized, can be made more than himself. And I think we've established in many respects that this is simply not the case. Aesthetics is not something that can be neatly compartmentalized or delineated or fenced off like a paddock. And I think that that that really is uh a lot of the problem that I have with uh with Schiller Schiller's letters.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. But that's exactly his point, that we should actually bring aesthetics into every aspect of our lives. So let me describe to you what I think of as an aesthetic education. It's not you go to school, you do your tests, and then after school, you have four hours of violin with your instructor, right? And then you become a great violinist, or in your case, a great pianist. It's rather bringing music, bringing art, bringing every single one of these various arts into studying maths, into doing geometry, into gardening, and integrating these various um, as you could say, ways of being human together. Now, how many places in the world actually have an aesthetic education where doing art is part of being doing maths?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Yes, that's actually a very, very good point. Though I still am a little bit cagey about it, not only because I'm cynical, but because of I suppose I come from the benefit of of knowing what happened in history. And uh I would argue that many of the people who have committed the worst crimes in history were aesthetically educated, but they were people who were not just simply cultivated, but they were people who actually felt they were people who could stand in front of a painting or a piece of music and be profoundly moved. And I think that that is what scares me the most of all.
SPEAKER_01So, Simon, I really disagree on that, but I think we will not keep hearkening on this point because in a way, if if if that's what you really think, then um what's the point of education? There has to be some reason for why we believe young people should be educated. And the best kind of education is an aesthetic education precisely because it integrates these different aspects of our being human. And you were pushing back against Schiller saying, oh, he says that we have reason and we have sense, and actually reason is passionate, sense is rational. Yes, that's what he wants it to become. He just says the problem is when reason becomes too rationalistic, it becomes cold. And you can imagine, let me give you a contemporary example here. Somebody who holds tight to their principles, right? Believes in everything that these rational principles are, and then they're they see a human being who is the opposite, comes from a different group, a group that they should hate, a group that they have demonized. And that person uh needs them for whatever reason. They are starving, whatever. What is going to happen? If you're a very rationalistic person, if you're going to abide by reason alone, you're going to ignore that human being. And Schiller gives that example. He says they will ignore brotherly love because they want to abide by their reasons, right? The cold-hearted person. That's what he's worried about. And then the other extreme is the person who is an absolute hedonist. And well, we have a lot of hedonism in our culture today. So he's not saying that reason and the senses shouldn't be closely aligned. They should be. The problem is when most people have engaged in one extreme or the other.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's interesting. What I would respond to that is, I mean, what Schiller says reminds me in many ways of one of the great Australian music educators, Richard Gill, who would say to children, I don't want to know what you think about this piece of music, but I want to know what you feel. Even so, your argument seems to me to be saying that a true aesthetic education, according to Schiller, would actually have a chance at raising the bar and raising the general level of humanity. And I'm not sure that that's the case. I don't think that history has borne that out.
SPEAKER_01Because we haven't yet had a true aesthetic education. It's for the future. And so I just think all of those people that you claim have been aesthetically educated haven't, if we really understand what aesthetic education is. It's not compartmentalized.
SPEAKER_00But is your argument that, say, to give two examples, the writers Celine and Ezra Pound were not aesthetically educated?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Absolutely not. Aaron Ross Powell Okay.
SPEAKER_00Well, I suppose that we've hit that impasse now.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Yes, we have. So let's move to why does Schiller think aesthetic education is so important? We have to some extent already made some headway in that direction. It's because he thinks most people are either super rational and abide by cold principles and therefore become cold-hearted, or uh extremely sensuous and hedonistic. And so we know the problems of both, right? And he says we need to find a way of unifying them. We need to become whole human beings. And why do we need to become whole human beings? Well, because we're composed of these two drives, as he called them. And as long as one is controlling the other, then we are internally dominated. Then there is a part of us that is the ruler, and there is a part of us that is subjugated. And as long as we are internally dominated, we cannot be externally free. We cannot act as free citizens in a republic.
SPEAKER_00To me, not being a philosopher, it seems that uh Schiller is a little closer to the Enlightenment clockwork mechanism than he would otherwise be comfortable with. What you're talking about, Dahlia, as I understand it, is the sense drive, or and forgive my German, the Stoffrieb. And the form drive, which is formtrieb. Impulse change in the body or reason, law, and stability. And the synthesis is created by play drive, which is not to be confused with play as we would use it in the colloquial sense, but play as uh modern psychologists call it, when we are, I suppose, totally embodied, but our mind is working as well. It's a tremendous concept.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell I I think play drive is the most interesting aspect of this book, in fact. And he gets into it in um I think it's letter fifteen.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell, exactly, yes, which is the solution.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell And if we think about what is play? So so reason is uh the uh Is the is the form drive, the sense is the Stoftrieb, the sense drive, and then play drive, that's the place where beauty enters. But let's think about what happens when we are in play. When we play a game, what do we do? You tell me, what do we what do you do when you play a game?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Yes, or play a piece of music like a child or listen to a child play a piece of music. It's close to that to that uh that idea of flow that psychologists talk about. It is the pure interrelation without force of the mind and the body. But I think again, knowing what we know, what is the difference between the two? They they interweave with each other. There is a counterpoint between the two. And it's almost like technique becomes invisible because it is so incorporated.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell I agree. But another way of putting it, and this is what I was thinking a lot about, is that so reason is absolutely serious. It takes itself very seriously. And there's a kind of once you know what is right, once you have a ch grasped what your moral duty is, you're always either compelled by it, or you're kind of pushing it away because you're a hedonist and you don't care, you don't want to listen to reason. So there's a seriousness and you feel the compulsion of reason, but you want to ignore it. In in hedonism, in the sense drive, you feel pulled by your body, you just want to do it, and you can't control yourself either. So there's another compulsion here. So in both cases, you're experiencing a form of constraint or unfreed. In the play drive, there's something that is freeing going on. Because, well, play is not necessary. We don't need to play this game. You don't need to play the piano. It's unlike physical needs, and it's unlike the compulsions of moral reason that's sort of like there in the background telling you you must do this and you must not do that. Play is something completely unnecessary, but it's not fully arbitrary, because we still have to play according to rules.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I I would actually support that, but only to a point. Um I think that if one I find it very interesting. Looking at history and where romanticism went by the end of the 19th century, there was this true sense of uh decadence. It had really uh turned into a almost carnal exploration of the body, the body being pure intelligence. I'm thinking of uh Against Nature, the novel by Heusmans, which is uh a satire of that, but it's very, very interesting that in many respects, and uh and in this regard I am arguing with you, disagreeing with me, um, that uh Schiller's um Schiller's uh invocation to humanity in these letters did not come to pass because the world went a different way.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus Absolutely, the world went a different way. What I think is is also cool about the playing, the idea of play and and the fact that he centers play so much. I mean, how often nowadays do we make play as part of education, right? Education is not playful, but as soon as it becomes playful, I think you get so much pleasure out of it, and you're more likely to be interested in it. And so play unites pleasure with seriousness because when we play, we're serious about the game we're playing. We wanna in we wanna do it. We won't otherwise, if we don't follow the rules, we're not playing the game. But yeah, we get pleasure out of it. And this is why Schiller thinks it unifies the two. It unifies the sensuous pleasure with the seriousness of reason.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell I'm thinking of Lawrence Stern here, who is writing Tristram Shandy, the great novel at that time. And it's a novel that is in many ways more pessimistic than Schiller because his ult ultimate argument is that humans are chaotic and cannot be civilized. And so he's almost proto-postmodern, proto-Dostoyevskian in his idea. But there I find it very interesting that these two men writing at the same time are essentially lamenting this uh utter failure of reason. And I mean later people would even would even deny that reason existed at all. And uh we've had, of course, in recent decades, people like Richard Dawkins, who are sort of these uh you know, bringing back this idea as reason as this uh this uh overarching force which we have to cling to again. And uh I mean I'm very dubious about reason as something that can be delineated at all. But um I find it so fascinating and it it doesn't really give me much optimism that in the centuries ahead we're going to be moving beyond what Schiller has said because we're gonna be struggling with these ideas such as uh has been written about in Letter 15.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell What's interesting that I just was thinking about is so in the centuries ahead, we're gonna, you said, we're gonna still have to work through what Schiller uh is is talking about. And it's it suddenly occurred to me that the experience of beauty, so let's let's go back to the experience of beauty and how beauty fits all all in all of this, he says is it's an experience of play. It is in the experience of play that the play drive is, at least for adults, most clearly expressed. Because when we experience a beautiful piece of music, for instance, we feel the seriousness, but we also feel the pleasure. Or we feel that a work of art is on the one hand sensuous, right? Every work of art is sensuous, otherwise it's not art, but it also is meaningful, has a form of some kind, right? And so it's the perfect unity of the sense with the form. And we play when we experience beauty, we enter into the state of play. And this is an experience that I think we're going to really need in the years and decades to come, because we are becoming less and less connected to our bodies, and we are becoming so much more like machines. We're modeling ourselves on the machines that we use, right? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
SPEAKER_00It's so interesting what you're saying, because on the other hand, you could argue that we have never been more emotionally out of control than now. All of the people who are saying, you know, we're so emotional, or you are so emotional, you for your political beliefs are themselves emotional. What I am thinking about when you're saying is that Schiller is talking about the mind must be joined with the body. But he's almost a proto phenomenologist when he's talking about when people when the later thinkers were talking about the mind is the body and the body is the mind. And I suppose he is really prefiguring a lot of that stuff. And that that's what I was trying to say, perhaps somewhat clumsily earlier.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell So what's good about what you just said, and I want to say so I I emphasize this sort of we're becoming super rational, or in this negative sense, we we we are all about hogging information, harnessing knowledge, and so on, but we have divorced ourselves from our bodies. But you're completely right to say we're also extremely emotional, our emotions and our feelings of mob-likeness, like belonging to the mob or connecting to others in a kind of irrational, unconscious way, are also exploding. And we have an explosion of all sorts of emotional kinds of issues. Those are precisely the extremes that Schiller is talking about. The highly rational person, the cold-hearted person, and then the person who can't control their emotions.
SPEAKER_00What I find tremendously exciting is how Schiller weaves all this together, and I'm moving on now to letter 22, into the aesthetic formulation or shine. I think that this is for me the most radical concept from Schiller, because he almost going against himself says that art, true art, a true aesthetic experience is that of appearance or a type of surface. So if I go and I I'm moved by a Beethoven sonata, it's because I am enjoying the free contemplation of something that is the appearance. Um it's the ability to dwell in the appearance of a Beethoven sonata without needing to possess it or to um colonize it with my reason. I think that that's a radical, radical concept.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell I think to to continue thinking about um letter 22, he says in a truly successful work of art, the contents should affect nothing, the form, everything. For only through the form is the whole man affected, through the subject matter, by contrast, only one or other of his functions. And I think this is getting to what you're saying because he's against having art being reduced to a particular message or a content. It's all about what matters is how it's going to affect you, not what it is saying. So reducing it to concepts, to a message, whatever that is, that's when bad art emerges. That's when art entering into politics becomes propaganda.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think that's Schiller's big move, but I also think it's where he hoists himself on his own petard. As you correctly say, he says, pure feeling is chaos, pure reason is tyranny, and that the balance of both is through aesthetic experience. And he uses the Greeks, I forget in which letter it was. And of course, like many people at the time, he he sort of imagines the Greeks as being this sort of pinnacle, this uh, you know, walking on a mountaintop or, you know, the apex of of some hill, um, sort of in total connection with their body and their intellect, and they're all just, you know, it's it's almost this kind of priestly garb. And uh and from what we know now of the Greeks, that's pure idealization. Um Hölderlin was the same, uh, the way he he uh idealized the Greeks. The Greeks were just as crummy as we were. Um so I think in many respects the i his reverence for the ancient Greeks is uh it uh undermines his own argument.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Well, that's something that we I'm not sure why we need to bring that up in in all of this, because the argument can stand on its own two feet. And this is what philosophers do best, Simon, is try to understand the argument irrespective of other aspects of the the the the text. So yes, maybe he references ancient Greek. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00But what other argument is there other than the context of humanity that we're speaking about? I mean, maybe it's because I'm not a philosopher.
SPEAKER_01But the question is, does it make sense, in the end, to argue that beauty can enter and has an integral role to play in our political life without being propaganda? And I think that's the really good question to ask Schiller, and I think he gives us a really good answer.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I am buoyed by your optimism. I'd love to be able to think we could get Donald Trump or George W. Bush, get them since they were kids, and give them this beautiful sort of uh cornucopia of reason meets body meets sensation meets and I honestly think that much of the same thing would happen. And I think that Dostoevsky was right that we are essentially irrational creatures.
SPEAKER_01But Simon, Dostoevsky was actually a big fan of Schuler, and in particular the aesthetic letters that we've been discussing. So Dostoevsky was a Russian philosopher and novelist, and the author of the novel, The Brothers Karamazov. And in that novel, Simon, we have three characters, if you remember, the three brothers, Ivan, Dmitry, and Alosha. And one can read this novel and the three characters as exemplifying the three different drives that Schiller describes. So Ivan, he's super rational, he follows the law, it's all about, you know, upholding uh reason and so on, and duty. And he represents what Schiller calls the form drive. Dimitri is the really sensuous brother, he's all about bodily pleasure, and he represents the sense drive. And Alyosha, he's the hero of the novel. He's the way forward, he's the response to all the problems between the brothers. And what is he? He is rationality and sense coming together, and he represents the play drive. In him, these two things harmonize perfectly through love. So, to my mind, to be completely honest, like Dostoevsky is actually the showing us why Schiller's uh text is so important and still so relevant today. So, for anyone who's interested in understanding the sources of the brothers Karamazov and understanding Alyosha's character, you've gotta read Schiller's aesthetic letters. You've been listening to On Beauty, the first season of the Wednesday Society. I'm Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Look out for my book on Beauty, which I'm currently writing.
SPEAKER_00I'm Simon Tedesky, pianist and writer.
SPEAKER_01Our producer and editor is Sarah Alley, Russell Stapleton, composer and music, and Bethany Stewart is our sound engineer. We would love to hear your thoughts on this discussion and any suggestions for neglected texts. Email us WednesdaySocietypodcast at gmail.com. And whoever sends us the best suggestion or piece of feedback will be offered one of our fabulous tote bags. We're giving away merch instead of selling it. This podcast was made possible through the generous support of the Australian Research Council. We're grateful to record at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney, and recognize the support of the School of Humanities, also at the University of Sydney. The Wences Society was created on Gadigal, Koringai, and Darrow Country.