Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of the 1969 lecture A Thing Has This, by Eli Siegel—one in a series of landmark talks in which he showed the central relation, the likeness-in-difference, between art and science. “Self, the arts, the sciences explain each other,” he showed: “they are the oneness of permanent opposites.” For example, the opposites of fact and feeling are deeply together in both art and science—though science accents the first and art the second.

In the lecture we’ve been serializing, Mr. Siegel explains that science and art are in fundamental agreement about what a thing is. Any thing (which includes any object, person, happening) is all its possibilities, all its relations, “everything it has, not just the part you want to see or do see.” He is discussing a humorous literary essay, “‘Dover Beach’ Revisited,” which, he shows, is about what a thing is and isn’t. Its author, Theodore Morrison, presents the approaches of various imaginary professors to that thing which is Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.” In our last issue we met the Freudian critic, and now we meet the Marxist critic. Mr. Siegel is jocular about the big wrongness of both Marxist and Freudian art criticism. Yet he says that even they have to do with some facet of what the artwork is.

Since this part of the lecture involves a critic who thinks no art is relevant unless it deals explicitly with class struggle and economic injustice, I’ll say a little about one of Eli Siegel’s magnificent contributions to the seeing of both people and art.

He showed that all true art on any subject (including a poem about a rose) is for and represents economic justice, fairness to people. Art as such is a critic of the profit system, which is the owning of the world by only certain people, not all; the using of the labor and needs of one’s fellow humans to aggrandize oneself. Profit economics is based on a horrible severing of the opposites of self and the world-not-oneself: in it a person goes after increasing oneself through weakening others, disregarding what they deserve—that is, rooking the reality that’s not oneself. In utter contrast, art arises from the tremendous, true feeling I take care of myself by being fair to what’s not me.

Further, art shows that the world in its wholeness is in any object. Cézanne showed in fruit on a table a oneness of reality’s motion and rest, immediacy and mystery, individuality and relation. And it’s the world, with its rising and sinking, speed and slowness, that we hear in the music of Blake’s line “Ah! Sun-flower, weary of time.” Art, then, has this upshot: every person too should be seen as having the world itself in him or her; and therefore the world should be owned by all people.

There is much more to say about the relation of art and economic justice. Eli Siegel was great on the subject. And Aesthetic Realism provides the means for humanity to be great about it—that is, to be civilized, kind.

Accompanying this final section is an article by a person active in attaining economic justice for people: Aesthetic Realism associate Matthew D’Amico, a political coordinator for a public sector union. The article is part of a paper he presented recently at a seminar titled “Everyone’s Biggest Confusion: How Should We See Other People?”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

A Thing, Emotion, & Truth

By Eli Siegel

With the next professor, Reuben Hale, we have the Marxist finesse. I don’t know which was more subtle, the Freudian literary criticism or the Marxist. I haven’t been able to decide. I just know that if they’re true, literature isn’t what it is. Morrison describes the viewpoint of Prof. Hale:

The structure of society is a class structure: it is conditioned by the mode of production of goods, and by the legal conventions of ownership and control by which the ruling class keeps itself in power and endows itself with the necessary freedom to exploit men and materials….A healthy literature…can exist only if writers…ally themselves firmly with the working class.

Anyone could see the trouble with Arnold.

There was a book that was very famous once, by Christopher Caudwell, which tried to show that the Victorian poets did not want to see the class struggle interfering with themselves as literary.* And to a point, it’s true. You should know the class struggle. It exists. But there are two ways of not seeing literature truly: one is that of Andrei Zhdanov and the other is that of Richard Nixon. Hale says to himself:

Anyone could see the trouble with Arnold. His intelligence revealed to him…the selfishness and brutality of the ruling class….But his intelligence far outran his will….He was too much a child of his class to disown it and fight his way to a workable remedy for social injustice….Had he thrown in his sympathies unreservedly with the working class,…“Dover Beach” would not have ended in pessimism and confusion.

But it happens that Karl Marx, just about the time “Dover Beach” was written, was looking for comfort from his wife, Jenny von Westphalen.

Feeling about People

It is true that, for instance, if Henry James could have been more interested in factories in New England, and related them to what else he saw, perhaps there would have been even more power in his writing. As it is, as I say in James and the Children, the equivalent of Marx is in The Turn of the Screw and some other works. There’s something that James felt about people that Marx didn’t feel. And there was something that Arnold felt about people that Marx didn’t feel.

Marx and Arnold are more or less contemporaries. Arnold is 1822-1888 and Marx is 1818-1883. Marx must have walked a good deal in London [where he lived most of his life], but it is interesting how in his letters there is no awareness of particular working people. Arnold is not too aware of people, but Arnold in his writing has more about the working people of London than Marx has. Marx saw the workers of London, surely. But he wasn’t interested in them when they weren’t working, which occasionally did happen.

So we can take two poems of Arnold, “East London” and “West London.” They’re not his best, but they show Arnold concerned with people. These are the first lines of “East London”:

This does show that Arnold knew there were the slums of London in summer, and you feel he was concerned.

The second poem, “West London,” is more personal:

There are other poems of Arnold that have this feeling about people. And, as can be seen in his prose, Arnold was aware of Christ as caring for people and as against the way people have been divided in terms of wealth. What Reuben Hale says is in a way true: Arnold could have known more about people and injustice. But I’ll say again: Arnold’s awareness of people occasionally included that which Marx didn’t have.

To Ask

We have to ask, then: Is “Dover Beach” an object? Can it be seen in various ways? As Morrison provides some of those ways, are there even more? Can every object be seen in an indefinite number of ways? And do poems and things not poems have that in common? The answer to these questions is Yes.

A purpose of this talk has been to show that a thing is what it has; that a thing has things in it; that they can be arranged and also seen truly. In art, we arrange things for emotion, which goes along with the truth of a thing. We see the thing in order to imagine it well. We go after truth so that our emotion be good for us and good for the thing. And what this means, I’ll talk of later.

How Should We See Other People?

By Matthew D’Amico

In the chapter “People,” in Children’s Guide to Parents & Other Matters, Eli Siegel explains:

The first thing necessary in liking people is to see that they have insides just as you have. In every person, thoughts go on, thoughts about himself and other things. And it is so easy to make oneself important by saying that what goes on in oneself has nothing much to do with other things. This is a way to get a certain kind of importance, but it is also a way to be awfully, sadly, disgustingly lonely.

Growing up in New York City, there were times I got along well with people. For instance, I loved playing baseball with friends, and playing the trombone in our middle school band. I also loved learning about important and kind people in history, including Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Yet I was in a fight between wanting people to mean something to me and thinking I was better off being separate and in myself.

I judged the people I knew on the basis of whether they were nice to me, never considering how they felt or that there were things they were trying to make sense of in their own lives.

I also used attention I got from relatives and others to feel special and superior. They worried because I was small for my age and had a tendency to get sick. But I saw them as foolish about me; for example, I’d purposely give my father a tired look so that he would carry me on his shoulders, though I was perfectly capable of walking. And when food was cut up for me into tiny pieces, I liked being served and acted like a little prince.

I’m very grateful that as a young person I began to study Aesthetic Realism in consultations. In an early consultation, when I said I felt nervous around people, I was asked how I thought about them—did I sum them up, feeling I was a keen observer of the whole human race? Yes, that’s what I did! And did I get a victory feeling people were phonies? I had. I learned that this victory was contempt, “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” My consultants asked if summing up people really is taking the life out of them? I saw that it was. And they continued: “Is it good for you to see people that way? You can get to a quick summing up of a person, but what happens to you later?” “I feel bad and get nervous,” I said. “Do you also feel cold?” they asked. I did.

I’ve seen that being cold to what another person feels is not just a passive thing. It’s what makes for cruelty between persons, from two boys fighting in a school hallway, to the hideousness of racism, and war between nations.

I began to learn this crucial fact stated by Aesthetic Realism: we need to have good will for people—with good will being, not the soft thing it’s been taken to be, but “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” I would feel truly at ease around people, my consultants were showing me, only if my purpose was to have good will.

That’s what I wanted my purpose to be. And I had a chance when, soon after this consultation, a boy from South Korea whom I’ll call Chung-Ho Lee joined our 5th grade class. He was nervous as he walked into the room for the first time, and I wanted to encourage him not to be afraid. I wanted to be his friend. I asked him questions and was excited to learn about his life in South Korea and what he felt coming here. Before long we were playing sports and listening to pop music together. I helped him with English and he helped me with math. I tried Korean food and he loved going to Ray’s Pizza. He readily showed his enthusiasm for things, from learning the piano to trying new foods. This encouraged me to be wider and see different things as exciting to know. And I saw more possibilities in myself. Eli Siegel explains in his lecture Aesthetic Realism and People: “To know what people are is very necessary, because through knowing what other people are we know about ourselves.”

A Change Continues

It means so much to me that through my consultations I was changing how I saw people. This education encouraged me to have a growing passion that people be seen with fairness, and fairness very much included their getting what they deserve economically. I began to have a large feeling for unions and the justice they fight for on behalf of workers.

Soon after graduating from college I began working for a municipal labor union in its legislative and political department. I was excited, but also found myself in a fight about how much feeling I wanted to have. In a consultation at this time, I was asked how I felt meeting co-workers and union members who were seemingly very different from me. When I responded blandly, “It’s interesting; there are many issues they’re affected by,” my consultants asked me how large and alive I wanted my interest to be—how much I wanted to know these people. “Do you think,” they asked, “you can honestly learn from them?” And “Do you like the fact that people are complex and that it takes an effort to know them, or should people be easily understood by you?”

In my conceit, I’d felt it should be easy to know a person. I was encouraged—including through various assignments—to see that I’d be taking care of myself the more I was interested in other people. For instance, I was asked to write about a person I knew and describe one thing that person was proud of and one way he or she wanted to do better. I chose a man I worked with, Richard, who was a City Hall lobbyist for the union. I wrote about his big desire for city workers to be respected—by elected officials and the public—for the hard work they did. I also described a hope in him to do better in listening to people without his interrupting and getting impatient. Doing this assignment, I felt kinder. And I saw something of how much it means to a person to be proud of the effect he or she has on others.

Women & Love

A huge mistake I and other men have made is not seeing a woman as fully real. Instead, we’ve acted as though a woman’s most important job is to make a lot of us, and to soothe us against a harsh world and people who don’t see how wonderful we are. I’ve had the conceit to feel that if I showed interest in a woman she should be honored. And I’ve liked imparting my wisdom to a woman. Then, if she showed she had questions about her own life, or objected to something in me, I’d be quick to be displeased.

In a class for Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates taught by Ellen Reiss, I told of getting angry when a woman, after only one date, didn’t give me instant approval. I felt, “Here I am, a charming, thoughtful, gallant man with a good sense of humor and a job with benefits—a woman should show her appreciation right away.” Ms. Reiss asked: “Do you want to be angry with a woman because you need her?” Surprised by that question, I saw the answer was yes. And she said: “You can want to inform a woman, but does a woman feel, ‘This is a man who likes the idea that he can be affected by me, stirred by who I am’?” She asked, “Do you think you can put limits on how important a person should be to you?”

To encourage me to want to know a woman rather than own her, Ms. Reiss suggested I write a soliloquy of the woman I was seeing—Caroline, who teaches in a preschool. I wrote of the feeling she has for the children she teaches, wanting them to do well; of how she would like to do a better job of putting together sweetness and toughness; and of her thoughts about her mother. Doing the assignment, I saw with vividness that a woman wants to respect herself for how she sees the whole world—and that I want to be a means of encouraging this.

I am grateful to be learning about the urgent necessity for good will. As a political coordinator for a statewide public sector labor union, I passionately want the workers I represent—who maintain our beautiful state parks and take care of the sick and disabled—to be given the respect they deserve. As I talk to people of different backgrounds who do vital work every day, I want to learn from them and have a strengthening effect on them.

My Aesthetic Realism education has made me one of the most fortunate of men.