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Reprinted from

The British Journal of Aesthetics

On Aesthetic Realism

by Edward Green

The American philosopher Eli Siegel called the philosophy he founded in the 1940s Aesthetic Realism. His philosophy has as its central principle: ‘The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.’

The Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel is a way of seeing reality as a whole. In a 1944 article in the Baltimore Sun, Donald Kirkley wrote about Siegel:

He thought “all knowledge was connected—that geology was connected with music, and poetry with chemistry, and history with sports.”… He wished to find…some principle, unifying all the various manifestations of reality.

[This] core principle is that there is no fundamental difference between the structure of reality and the structure of beauty. Moreover, the very nature of self is aesthetic. Siegel stated: ‘The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites’. In 1977 he gave a compact, tripartite description of his philosophy:

One, Man’s greatest, deepest desire is to like the world honestly. Two, The one way to like the world honestly, not as a conquest of one’s own, is to see the world as the aesthetic oneness of opposites. Three, The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is contempt.

In 1955 the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism published Siegel’s essay ‘Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?‘ Through reviews and commentaries his conception of Aesthetic Realism reached a wide audience, as was acknowledged by the editor of the Hibbert Journal of London in his introductory comments when, in 1964, that journal reprinted the essay.

Siegel’s book Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism (1981) was reviewed in the Smithsonian and on its dust-jacket are public endorsements of his work from several prominent figures including Meyer Schapiro, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Columbia, William Carlos Williams, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet, and Huntington Cairns, the former Secretary of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Cairns, for example, wrote: ‘I believe that Eli Siegel was a genius. He did for aesthetics what Spinoza did for ethics.’

I agree with Cairns. So do other scholars in various fields, academic and artistic. I mention just one: my colleague, anthropologist Arnold Perey, whose 1973 doctoral dissertation from Columbia, Oksapmin Society and Worldview, is based on Aesthetic Realism, as are his various publications since. In 2004 for the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology under the auspices of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM), held in Graz, we gave a presentation entitled: ‘Aesthetic Realism: A New Foundation for Inter­disciplin­ary Musicology’. It was published by ESCOM and can also be found online.

In [Eli Siegel’s] writings one finds a vital clarification of the relation of ethics and aesthetics; aesthetics and metaphysics.

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