Great conversation, thanks for sharing it with us live! I’m very curious about Sam’s Romantic take on AI, now.
The main point under discussion made me think about Anna Karenina. I read it right in the middle of my most careless, rule-pushing stage of life—necessary and unregretted in hindsight—and I inevitably found myself reckoning with the way I preferred Anna to Kitty.
Some context, for those who don’t know the book. The title character is a married woman who essentially blows up her life to go have an extended affair with the handsome and reckless Vronsky. Kitty, by contrast, is an innocent young woman who is initially attracted to Vronsky but ends up accepting the attentions of Levin, a rural aristocrat who derives considerable meaning from accepting his responsibilities to his land, and who lives a very different kind of rule-following, fulfilled life.
I think the book wants you to prefer Kitty and Levin to Anna and Vronsky; I’ve certainly seen it read that way. And it’s not that I can’t see the argument for (Kitty & Levin) > (Anna & Vronsky). But I think that’s an illusion; it needs breaking up. My ranking is Levin > Anna > Kitty > Vronsky.
What I mean is, it’s better to be a self-directed, fulfilled person who freely chooses a restricted but worthy path than to be someone who casts aside everything to follow your deep yearnings. But it can be better to fight a society that can’t give your needs and impulses anything worthwhile to follow—even if you blow important things up in the process, even if you die—than to meekly follow along. And yet, it’s better to meekly follow along than to be the sort of person who just runs around carelessly with no worthwhile end in view.
A corollary of this is that a person could very plausibly, in life, take a path like Vronsky->Kitty->Anna->Levin. Start out libertine, realise you’re not getting much out of that and turn conventional, decide that the conventions are also empty and break free again in a more directed fashion, then use what you learned from the period of freedom to find better restrictions. If you flatten this to liberal->conservative->liberal->conservative, you’ll miss the nuances. Relevantly, this is why Wordsworth’s turn towards the conservative is not unromantic: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52299/nuns-fret-not-at-their-convents-narrow-room
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I wrote the above just after the livestream. Since then, the Anna Karenina angle has prompted me to think about the ways in which Romantic passion, and the frustration thereof, can be gendered—or not. This intersects with some free-floating points I’ve been wanting to make for a while. As a result, I am partway through trying to write down what promises to be a rather long post! Thank you all for the inspiration.
It was an excellent conversation. As you all were describing the different lived experiences of various romantics, from the most violent to the most transcendent, I thought of Moses as this kind of proto romantic, both the young man raging against the machine of Pharaoh’s Egypt, killing in heated response to injustice, to the leaving of comfort to escape into the wilderness and then the transcendent encounter of the sublime of the terrible mountain, meeting God in the burning bush, humbled and in awe. What you all seemed to say was salutary was not the violence but the journey from comfort and materialism into the unknown to pursue a transcendent view of reality. Moses as an archetype seems relevant in our time where the Myth of the Machine reigns. I’d love to hear more from you all especially any reactions you have to thinkers like Iain McGilchrist or Charles Taylor who have taken the transcendent insights of romantic thinkers seriously, especially as it relates to the recovery of the imagination and the intuition as equally important as science and reason. I know you all did an excellent interview with Taylor. McGilchrist’s chapter on romanticism in Master and the Emissary, and his reflections on Coleridge and Wordsworth have been enlightening.
There is no conversation that is "pro" or "anti" Romanticism. Romanticism is all there is... the rift or crisis opened up in the wake of the Enlightenment. It's a question of how we respond to the predicament. Gasda's point: how you want to live? All of the artists from Rousseau through Eliot and beyond provide models, strategies, and perspectives. The debate, in other words, is how do we respond to the crisis (i.e. separation, turning point) of modernity.
My new place of residence is a five-minute drive from Byron's grave and former residence! Definitely worth a visit if you're ever in the UK.
I do think there is a serious question as to whether we can act out Sam's vision of romanticism today. We live in an age where knowledge and not knowing are juxtaposed judgmentally, even if not morally. Our addiction to news and building knowledge rather than necessarily questioning makes this form of living more difficult in our day-to-day lives. The purpose of WOC and its rarity is wonderful, but also a testament to the wider problem that I'm identifying, I think.
I'm closer to the idea that the turbulence we experience today is tied to the notion of stability in the first place. If our stability is threatened, and almost everyone's is today, be that romantically, socially, economically, or culturally, then our systems of culture, government, and economy pin us back into pre-existing moulds of acceptability. Perhaps a popular culture focal point to express this could be Hank Moody from the show Californication. Hank, a talented writer adrift in a whirlwind of romanticism, longs and fights for his lost love Karen, who has settled down with a boring but successful man called Bill. Hank does eventually win his love back, but once he finds his love it all breaks down again as Karen seeks the comfort of normalcy.
Great conversation, thanks for sharing it with us live! I’m very curious about Sam’s Romantic take on AI, now.
The main point under discussion made me think about Anna Karenina. I read it right in the middle of my most careless, rule-pushing stage of life—necessary and unregretted in hindsight—and I inevitably found myself reckoning with the way I preferred Anna to Kitty.
Some context, for those who don’t know the book. The title character is a married woman who essentially blows up her life to go have an extended affair with the handsome and reckless Vronsky. Kitty, by contrast, is an innocent young woman who is initially attracted to Vronsky but ends up accepting the attentions of Levin, a rural aristocrat who derives considerable meaning from accepting his responsibilities to his land, and who lives a very different kind of rule-following, fulfilled life.
I think the book wants you to prefer Kitty and Levin to Anna and Vronsky; I’ve certainly seen it read that way. And it’s not that I can’t see the argument for (Kitty & Levin) > (Anna & Vronsky). But I think that’s an illusion; it needs breaking up. My ranking is Levin > Anna > Kitty > Vronsky.
What I mean is, it’s better to be a self-directed, fulfilled person who freely chooses a restricted but worthy path than to be someone who casts aside everything to follow your deep yearnings. But it can be better to fight a society that can’t give your needs and impulses anything worthwhile to follow—even if you blow important things up in the process, even if you die—than to meekly follow along. And yet, it’s better to meekly follow along than to be the sort of person who just runs around carelessly with no worthwhile end in view.
A corollary of this is that a person could very plausibly, in life, take a path like Vronsky->Kitty->Anna->Levin. Start out libertine, realise you’re not getting much out of that and turn conventional, decide that the conventions are also empty and break free again in a more directed fashion, then use what you learned from the period of freedom to find better restrictions. If you flatten this to liberal->conservative->liberal->conservative, you’ll miss the nuances. Relevantly, this is why Wordsworth’s turn towards the conservative is not unromantic: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52299/nuns-fret-not-at-their-convents-narrow-room
*
I wrote the above just after the livestream. Since then, the Anna Karenina angle has prompted me to think about the ways in which Romantic passion, and the frustration thereof, can be gendered—or not. This intersects with some free-floating points I’ve been wanting to make for a while. As a result, I am partway through trying to write down what promises to be a rather long post! Thank you all for the inspiration.
A few really special moments in this conversation. Well worth the time listening to it.
-Michael
It was an excellent conversation. As you all were describing the different lived experiences of various romantics, from the most violent to the most transcendent, I thought of Moses as this kind of proto romantic, both the young man raging against the machine of Pharaoh’s Egypt, killing in heated response to injustice, to the leaving of comfort to escape into the wilderness and then the transcendent encounter of the sublime of the terrible mountain, meeting God in the burning bush, humbled and in awe. What you all seemed to say was salutary was not the violence but the journey from comfort and materialism into the unknown to pursue a transcendent view of reality. Moses as an archetype seems relevant in our time where the Myth of the Machine reigns. I’d love to hear more from you all especially any reactions you have to thinkers like Iain McGilchrist or Charles Taylor who have taken the transcendent insights of romantic thinkers seriously, especially as it relates to the recovery of the imagination and the intuition as equally important as science and reason. I know you all did an excellent interview with Taylor. McGilchrist’s chapter on romanticism in Master and the Emissary, and his reflections on Coleridge and Wordsworth have been enlightening.
What a fantastic experiment! Way too much to say, but, and, plus, uws., but just a great idea. Bravo.
There is no conversation that is "pro" or "anti" Romanticism. Romanticism is all there is... the rift or crisis opened up in the wake of the Enlightenment. It's a question of how we respond to the predicament. Gasda's point: how you want to live? All of the artists from Rousseau through Eliot and beyond provide models, strategies, and perspectives. The debate, in other words, is how do we respond to the crisis (i.e. separation, turning point) of modernity.
ty
My new place of residence is a five-minute drive from Byron's grave and former residence! Definitely worth a visit if you're ever in the UK.
I do think there is a serious question as to whether we can act out Sam's vision of romanticism today. We live in an age where knowledge and not knowing are juxtaposed judgmentally, even if not morally. Our addiction to news and building knowledge rather than necessarily questioning makes this form of living more difficult in our day-to-day lives. The purpose of WOC and its rarity is wonderful, but also a testament to the wider problem that I'm identifying, I think.
I'm closer to the idea that the turbulence we experience today is tied to the notion of stability in the first place. If our stability is threatened, and almost everyone's is today, be that romantically, socially, economically, or culturally, then our systems of culture, government, and economy pin us back into pre-existing moulds of acceptability. Perhaps a popular culture focal point to express this could be Hank Moody from the show Californication. Hank, a talented writer adrift in a whirlwind of romanticism, longs and fights for his lost love Karen, who has settled down with a boring but successful man called Bill. Hank does eventually win his love back, but once he finds his love it all breaks down again as Karen seeks the comfort of normalcy.
Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower