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The idea that beauty might denote an actual quality of the world, something outside the human frame, is one of the great taboos of modern intellectual thought. Beauty, we are almost universally told, is a cultural contrivance rooted in politics and history, an illusion that exists only in human heads, for human reasons. On this view, a world without us would be a world without beauty. But in this episode Phil and JF explore two texts, by James Hillman and Peter Schjeldahl, that dare to challenge the modern orthodoxy. For Hillman and Schjeldahl, to experience the beautiful is precisely the break out of human bondage and touch the Outside. Beauty may even be one of the few truly objective experiences anyone could hope for.

Peter Schjeldahl, \u201cNotes on Beauty,\u201c in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
\nJames Hillman, \u201cThe Practice of Beauty,\u201d in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
\nC.G. Jung's retreat, Bollingen Tower
\nUgly public art in Palo Alto
\nDave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
\nDeleuze and Guattari, \u201cOf the Refrain,\u201d from A Thousand Plateaus
\nRoger Scruton, Beauty
\nWeird Studies, Episode 36 -- On Hyperstition
\nWeird Studies, Episode 33 -- The Fine Art of Changing the Subject: On Duchamp's "Fountain"
\nLionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
\nGeorge Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
\nIngri D'Aulaires, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
\nMessiaen, Quartet for the End of Time
\nChristian Wiman, He Held Radical Light
\nGod, Book of Job