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.
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.
Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower