Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue serializing the 1970 lecture by Eli Siegel Criticism Is the Art of Responding to Value. And in the present section we see something of Aesthetic Realism as sheer philosophy—philosophy at its richest and most logical—and also Aesthetic Realism as that which explains people, in all our confusions, worries, and hopes. It’s an honor to comment a little on how both those truly inseparable aspects of Aesthetic Realism are here.

There is the central principle of the philosophy Eli Siegel founded. That principle, which I’ll soon quote, describes something the centuries of art criticism have searched for—what beauty is. And it states too what no other writer on mind saw: the fundamental desire of the human self, our constant desire. Explained Mr. Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

The present section of the lecture we’re serializing is very much about what it means for opposites to be one.

Not a Compromise

It is crucial to see that the oneness of opposites—which is beauty, and which we thirst to have—is not a compromise of opposites; it is not a “happy medium,” a middle course, or some tepid blend. Mr. Siegel explains that when, in an instance of art, opposites have been made one, there is always a living drama between them, an agogness: a simultaneous battle-and-friendship of those opposites, an inseparable fighting-and-love between them.

Take one of the greatest, most cared for works of art: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It has intensity, forcefulness; and it has gentleness, calm. Those opposites are not in a compromise in the Fifth Symphony; what we are hearing is not some middle ground between them. We feel that the intensity and gentleness confront each other, assert their difference from each other, even defy each other—and, at the same time, love each other, embrace each other, complete each other.

In life, our intensity and calm, our forcefulness and gentleness, largely are not one. They do not have in us that fight-and-friendship, confrontation-and-embrace, with which they come together in Beethoven.

For example, our intensity can be of such a kind that it makes us ashamed—so we try to calm ourselves, try to attain the seeming gentleness and quietude of being unaffected. But we can’t be proud of this calm, either, this tepid gentleness, and soon swing to being sloppily thrusting and intense again.

Our intensity, being ill-based, does not say to our calmness: “I am Myself, different from you, proud to be what I am: I will not lessen the essence of myself for anyone, including you. And at the same time I love you, True-Calm-and-Gentleness, and want to be completed by you, add to you, be joined with you forever.” Nor does our calmness have this real fight-and-love regarding our intensity. But in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, intensity and calm do have it. Aesthetic Realism is education in how our lives can have that way of seeing, that way of being, which art has. It is the most beautiful, kindest, proudest education in the world.

These Opposites Too

It can be said that the largest opposites in our lives are self and world: our own irreplaceable self and all that is not ourselves. Aesthetic Realism shows that the deepest desire of every person, every self, is to like the world on an honest basis. But that oneness of ourselves and the world, which constitutes honest like of it, is (again) not tepid, or limp, or tame, or “mystical,” or self-effacing. Like of the world has in it friendliness, certainly, but also has authentic fight. How we want to make a one, a thrilling and steady one, of battle with the world and care for it, Mr. Siegel speaks of greatly in the part of his lecture included here.

A form of self and world that has been a subject of enormous desire and confusion, is love between two people. A person one is trying to love is, after all, not oneself, but an instance of, a representative of, the outside world. I am going to quote a poem by Eli Siegel that is about love, and is, in its brevity, both sheer logic and rich music. It is much about those opposites of fight and welcoming, objection and treasuring, in the situation of self and not-oneself which is love. The poem, “Behold, Love Is Criticism,” of 1959, has to do with the unseen hopes in the kitchens and bedrooms of America. It also has to do with the title of the lecture we’re serializing, Criticism Is the Art of Responding to Value.

How love needs to be like art—needs to have in it the art way of seeing—is a vast and beautiful subject, which the philosophy Aesthetic Realism explains. But some of the explanation is in this poem about the need for fight and cherishing to be one.

Take a representative person, Haley, who is married to Jack. She is troubled by the way she can go from feeling for him to feeling against him, from showing care for him to getting into fights with him. She doesn’t understand the cause of that shuttling in her response—and I won’t try to give anything like a full explanation here. But the chief thing wrong with the way we object to a person and care for the person, the way we see the person as good or as bad, is that our basis is not beautiful. There is not, to use Mr. Siegel’s phrase, “a joyous reason” behind what we feel.

The big corrupter of how we’re for and against people is, Aesthetic Realism explains, an aspect of contempt: we see people not in terms of how just they are to the world itself, but in terms of how important they make us. Haley feels friendly toward Jack mainly because—and when—he seems to make her important. She sees him as good if he acts (however subtly) as though she is superior to all other human beings. And she is against him when he doesn’t deliver Haley-aggrandizing goods. Meanwhile, the situation is subtle, because Haley has depth and she is ashamed: without being able to articulate it, she’s ashamed of this basis she has used. So sometimes when Jack praises her she gets angry, with herself and him—because she feels she doesn’t deserve the praise.

She and humanity want to learn from Aesthetic Realism what the “joyous reason” is which should impel us in our relation to a person. That reason, that purpose, is: to encourage the person, and be encouraged, to like the world itself, know it, see meaning in it, respond justly to value in it. That purpose should impel our objections and our praise. It is the purpose we happily owe to other people—including one whose hand we may hold, and whose eyes may look deeply and dearly into ours.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Friendship & Fight

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel has been commenting on statements from a review of various books, in Poetry magazine (February 1970).

In his comment on Barbara Hernstein Smith’s book Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Laurence Lieberman has this sentence:

The circumference of the subject has been delineated once-and-for-all. [P. 350]

We have the word circumference. And circumference, area, and center are like the three possibilities of a human being. Every human being is center; he or she also takes in territory; and also, there’s a circumference. The circumference is where a tension is. Where an object ends and something else begins is where war is and friendliness may be. I used to say, and I can still say, that the world begins where our fingertips end. That is quite true. But a friendship is possible where our fingertips end, and a war is possible.

“Focus” & “Perspective”

Then we have a dealing, by Lieberman, with a work of Frank Lentricchia on W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. This is said:

His [Lentricchia’s] method is painstakingly thorough, and certainly he has chosen a most propitious sequence of steps for focussing each man’s working theory in perspective. [P. 351]

There is the phrase “focussing each man’s working theory in perspective.” Offhand, one would say that to focus something in perspective is not an easy thing to do, because as soon as you have perspective, the idea of focus seems to be gone away from. I guess opposites were looked for in some fashion by Lieberman here, only it’s rather awkward to put it that way.

But the two things—something like focus and something like perspective—are in poetry, and they are in art itself. The feeling for them is what constitutes a painter, composer, dramatist, dancer, filmmaker, photographer, architect, sculptor. They are together in the artist’s seeing of an object. I said earlier that an object is as it is, and also is in relation to all things. When the accent is on an object as it is, something like focus is in process. But everything has its milieu, its environment, what is around it. For instance, you have a shadow, and that is something around you. It seems to come from you, but it’s around you anyway because often the shadow reaches the gutter before you do.

This has to do with a specific thing and its milieu, but also with specificity and suggestion, and the problem of specificity and suggestion has been in art from the very beginning. It’s definitely in music, where you hear a note and also the overtones. But it is in all art. And one of the things making for music in poetry is the seeing of an object as in focus, specific, and as having a relation to suggestion—a relation that is both warlike and friendly. Words, then, have two qualities, both in prose and in poetry: they have the quality of clearness, of individuality, and they have the quality of suggestion. This is the way the world is: everything is, and also reflects and is reflected upon. The matter of focus and perspective has to do with that.

Mr. Lieberman also reviews a book by Ruth Miller, on Emily Dickinson. He says, about the letters that are included:

Some of the letters are encumbered with vagueness and ellipsis, which would seem to indicate that the poet’s intelligence is operating far below the height of her powers, and this condition should warn the critic not to pose airtight conjectures. [P. 352]

The using by Lieberman of the phrase “vagueness and ellipsis” along with “airtight conjectures” is part of the trend or instinct in people to make a one between tidiness and suggestion. But just what is an “airtight conjecture”?—because if it’s a conjecture, it can’t be airtight.

Technique & Largeness

The passages I have been commenting on bring up problems that concern criticism. These problems will come in ever so many ways. They come from the beginning of poetry. They’re problems raised by Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Horace, Longinus, the medieval critics, and Plato. These are persons who looked at works and asked, What’s going on here?

There are two chief ways that poetry needs to be dealt with. One way is to study—and it’s very necessary and very technical—the relation of one syllable and another. The other way is to see the poem as an individual replica of the universe using an object to begin with and also to end up with. The earliest criticism, the criticism of Plato, is of that universal kind. There’s very little technical criticism in ancient times.

Seeing technical problems is necessary, but I’m going to step aside for a while and deal with poetry in the large way. A representative of that large criticism—which can be continued into the matter of technique, or facture, or process—is Walt Whitman. It is important to see, for example, that a good line of poetry has in it contraction and expansion, has in it angle and rotundity. But that is commented on by the fact that a poet is at once Consciousness and Nature. Whitman’s criticism is of that universal kind. This is a very late poem of his—quite a few of the later poems of Whitman aren’t so good as poetry, but this one is good as poetry—“When the Full-Grown Poet Came”:

Quarrel & Friendliness

I said that in poetry, a writer’s seeing the drama between opposites—seeing them as both friendly and warlike—made for music. The implication in this poem is that since the full-grown poet is a reconciler of Nature and the Soul of man, he’s aware that there might be a war between them—because you can’t reconcile people unless you know they’re quarreling.

Because the purpose of an artist, a poet, is to represent Nature with new possibilities, to show that a human being can find things in it that weren’t seen before, Nature can be seen as saying “He is mine.”

Day and night are mentioned, and they are one of the earliest examples of war and friendliness. We have the phrase It’s like the difference between day and night—but everybody knows that day changes into night, and night into day, and it’s a friendly job.

Whitman has, in parentheses, “(the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night).” Spheres are studied, mathematically, and mathematics has a great deal to do with this warfare and friendliness of opposites. There’s the fact that trigonometry is so much given to angles, circles, and curves, and a constant relation is found, a constant similarity, between curve and angle; and the fact that within a sphere there are straight lines.

“Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night.)” Whitman is aware that while he has made Nature and the “impassive globe” alike, the globe doesn’t care about things but Nature does care. Earth, thought of as not being Nature, would be impassive. Yet having “all its shows of day and night,” it’s surely busy—and having also all the seasons that Vivaldi couldn’t live without.

“But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone.” So there is a fight. Any artist has to feel, I’m present somehow in this work. I don’t know—I believe in determinism, I read Buckle and Taine—but I think I’m a little present in this work. Then, he also thinks that there are various forces working. There’s the question of how to be fair to the forces and oneself.

What I’m saying is this: music arises in poetry out of seeing the war and friendship in every object. Something corresponding to music in poetry arises in painting out of seeing the war and friendship in every object. And a very important war is the tendency of every object to expand into relation and to contract into selfhood. Every object can be seen that way, and that is how an artist sees it. As Cézanne looked at those fruits, he didn’t let them alone. They were all trying to be the tablecloth, and also other fruits, and also light, just pure light—let alone the world. Every fruit in Cézanne’s paintings was ambitious.

“Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand”—which means the poet would know that there was this fight between the two.

Meaning they’re not wholly reconciled yet, but he knows the job has to be. There has to be the oneness of self and universe.

The important thing is to see that all harmony is concealed warfare, just as all balance is concealed imbalance.

The Way of Art

The tendency, then, of art is to be fully aware of the war that is in things, in oneself, and in the world as such—and see the war and the friendliness as alike. That is related to the fact that a farmer tries, as they used to say in novels, to get wheat out of the unwilling soil, or barley out of the unwilling soil. The soil that is unwilling was also seen as a friend, because, after all, it was the soil from which the barley would come—the harsh, forbidding soil, which the farmer loved anyway.