Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part four of the lecture we are serializing: the great and seminal How Aesthetic Realism Sees Art, by Eli Siegel. Its basis is the following principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Eli Siegel was the philosopher to explain that the human self, the self of each of us, is an aesthetic matter: though we don’t know it, we need, for our happiness, pride, and true intelligence, to do what art does, make opposites one.

Attending the class were working artists, many of whom were present at an Aesthetic Realism class for the first time.

In this section of the talk, Mr. Siegel speaks about opposites in many arts. And he says—in 1956: the oneness of opposites “is present in any new art that may come up. It is present at the moment in television.” So I am going to comment on something that is certainly new, and not dreamed of when this talk was given. It’s not art in the fullest sense; but it is aiming to do what the Roman critic Horace said poetry does: “miscuit utile dulci,” put together usefulness and sweetness. I am referring to internet video conferencing, which has come to have tremendous importance during the Covid pandemic. I’ll comment a little on opposites in video conferencing, particularly conferencing that involves many people—in education, for instance, and in various business and governmental meetings. As I do, I’m very glad to say that a web conferencing platform is making it possible for Aesthetic Realism to be taught more widely than ever at this time of pandemic—to people across the nation and abroad—in (for instance) classes on anthropology, the visual arts, marriage, poetry, music, the cinema.

Nearness & Remoteness

A pair of opposites Mr. Siegel mentions in the present section of his lecture is Nearness and Remoteness. Today, is there beauty in having perhaps 90 people who are miles apart (even thousands of miles apart) be present close together on a screen in real time, with oneself among them? Is it beautiful to feel that we may be in our own living room interacting moment by moment with people so many miles away?

These opposites have fought in the lives of men and women. People have made two different worlds of what’s close to them—their family, the intimacy of their home—and what is far-off. And they’ve pitted those two worlds against each other. On the one hand, a person makes the cozy, close world seem the only thing friendly, a world one can manage to suit oneself—and sees the far-off as unfriendly, forbidding. On the other hand, a person can see the faraway, the elsewhere, as the only thing interesting, and look down on what’s near, sum up things and persons close to one, find them dull.

Both ways, the person is having contempt. And contempt, Aesthetic Realism shows, is the most hurtful thing in the human mind. It is “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Having contempt, we pit against each other the two biggest opposites in our lives: self and world, the world we were born to know and value. And in doing so, we have arranged that all the other opposites in us war with each other too.

Meanwhile, there is internet video conferencing, with its aim to have people feel actively, workably, warmly near each other even as they may be geographically ever so far apart.

One & Many

Central opposites in all art are One and Many. They are central in web video conferencing too. How good a video conferencing system is depends very much on how gracefully it enables each single individual to express him- or herself, with many other people present and wanting to express themselves. And how well does the platform enable the teacher of a class, or conductor of a meeting, to go from that person’s own expression to finding and calling on many other people who want to speak? How well is each individual able to hear and see the many other participants there?

The matter of One and Many—in the widest and most immediate sense—is urgent for America now. These opposites have to do with how a nation is governed and owned—and it’s necessary now that they be one, in America and elsewhere. Justice to all people needs to be seen as justice to each individual person. Eli Siegel wrote over 70 years ago:

The world should be owned by the people living in it. Every person should be seen as living in a world truly his. All persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs. [Self and World, p. 270]

And These Opposites

Two pairs of opposites fundamental in video conferencing platforms are Depth and Surface, and Complexity and Simplicity. Underlying, deeply within, every internet video conference there are the intricate technological inner workings of a web application. And the purpose of that complexity is for there to take place on the surface of a screen something simple in its workability for every participant.

Then there are the primal opposites of Motion and Rest, with their related pair, Speed and Slowness. The professional persons who are constantly updating conference platforms are trying to have them at once as dynamic as possible and as composed as possible. One doesn’t want to see the rectangle-bound participants jumping about too much on the screen, so that one doesn’t know where to find whom. And one certainly doesn’t want that dreaded form of rest: a visual and/or audio freeze—of a fellow participant, or oneself, or everyone.

Sameness & Difference

The great opposites of Sameness and Difference are present in this new structure, the internet video conference, in very many ways. But I’ll mention one that is obvious yet also large in its meaning. Each person in the conference (in “gallery view”) has a rectangle the size and shape of everyone else’s. It is a beautiful eternal shape, with its joining of horizontal and vertical at right angles. It has stability and reaching. But for everyone, that rectangle is the same: no one gets a larger or smaller; no one gets to show his or her self-glory by being a hexagon or rhombus, or an obtuse triangle. Those same-size rectangles are very democratic.

At the same time, in them we find individuality; we find difference. We find portions of people’s homes; or their choices in virtual backgrounds, which show their tastes; and we see their faces—and every face is different, is just one’s own. So the internet video conference screen is a lesson in how America needs to be: where the distinction of every particular person is seen and valued, while everyone’s human equality is asserted. Through those rectangles each person owns the screen equally—as each citizen, in all his or her distinction, should equally own America.

A Note about the Lecture

I have written before about the beauty of Eli Siegel’s spoken prose. That beauty is throughout the lecture we’re serializing. But I point to it specifically in the final paragraph of the section that is here. He mentions many pairs of opposites present in many arts. But it is not a list—far from that. The opposites are alive; the arts are alive; the sentences breathe, dance; the phrases have great variety and yet stability, sureness. All this comes from the beautiful sincerity of Eli Siegel, at one with knowledge, at one with kindness.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

In All the Arts

By Eli Siegel

The opposites I’ve been mainly speaking about, outline and color, are present in all the arts, though perhaps with different names.

I’m going to read the first lines of a poem of Whitman. It’s about the Civil War; and it’s a great poem because it solves the problem of line and color or mass. “Come Up from the Fields Father” has a subject, as the painting of Piero della Francesca that we looked at has a subject, the greatest subject in the world: the relation of death to life. The Whitman poem takes it up in another way. A letter comes to a family from a son, but by the time it reaches them the son has been killed in the war. This is how the poem begins:

This poem has lived, and the reason is that, along with the almost unbearable subject, line and color, line and mass, are made one.

“Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete.” If you listen to this, I think you will hear line—it’s direct. Such things are in music; such things are in architecture.

“Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete, / And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.” So there are two lines in different directions: a line from the field and “come to the front door.”

“Lo, ’tis autumn”: that has more of a mass quality. Then Whitman gets to color: “Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder.” And there are smooth effects and staccato effects in “Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind.”

“Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines”: that is a round line. There’s some color in it, though not directly. Then, we have width in “Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds.”

“But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call, / And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.” There are various motions; it is like a dance. Also, there are a mass effect and a line effect. It is so in music: there are line and mass in music, and they have to do with the fact that reality is that way.

As the whole poem is studied, we’ll see that Whitman put together outline—occasionally curve, occasionally straight, like a boulevard—with interior. Poems do that. Art in general does.

Take Music

Let us take another pair of opposites, and music. There is Béla Bartók, who is written of in Transition Forty-Eight by René Leibowitz. The following has to do with oneness and manyness, being and change:

Bartók had by now become fully conscious of what one might call the fundamental problem of musical composition, that is, variation.

The two concepts which give it meaning are implied in the word itself. The first is variety and the second is unity or economy since “variation,” after all, means that we vary something, and that this something must necessarily remain the same thing.

Being and change are philosophic things, but in art they take the form of continuity and discontinuity, variation and persistence, variation and theme, and more. And always, the matter of sameness and difference is there. It will be present in television tomorrow; it is present in the cinema today.

There is the art of music, but there is an art, also, of music for the cinema. In the journal Critique, René Leibowitz has an article on Hanns Eisler and his book Composing for the Films (1947). In a footnote Leibowitz shows that Eisler had to think of sameness and difference in a new way when writing music for the cinema. He quotes Eisler—and I’m translating:

Utilizing “movement in so much as it is a contrast to repose,” Eisler places a scene in the rather sinister suburbs (in Kuhle Wampe) in an atmosphere “passive, despairing, and false in an ugly way,” with the aid of a rapid, sharp, and polyphonic prelude, of marcato character.

Which means this: that Eisler takes a scene in a place having evil, he gives to that scene a kind of liveliness in order to bring out its meaning. Going on (Eisler is being quoted)—

“Its strict form (…), contrasted in relation to the loose structure of the scenes, makes for a shock with a conscious intention of provoking resistance in place of sentimental sympathy.”

So the purpose is to cause a shock, through the way “strict form” and “loose structure” are related. That is an aspect of sameness and difference. —It’s sameness and difference all the way in art, in all the arts, in every one. If cookery is an art, it is in cookery: there are pungency and smoothness when you like something. Those qualities are different from each other—they’re opposites—but they are in behalf of the same dish. If a thing is too smooth you can’t stand it; if it’s too pungent, usually you can’t.

Leonardo Too

In a very well thought-out work, The Art of the Italian Renaissance, by an esteemed critic, Heinrich Wölfflin, we have passages that deal with sameness and difference. There is this passage, in which Wölfflin quotes Leonardo—Leonardo is very much interested in the opposites. This is in a footnote:

We may quote Leonardo, Trattato della Pittura: “I repeat that direct contrasts should be placed near each other and commingled, for one intensifies the effect of another, and the more so the nearer they are.”

The point of Aesthetic Realism is this: Is an artist—insofar as the person is an artist—trying to put opposites together, whether he or she knows it or not? And is a spectator trying to see them? Aesthetic Realism’s explanation of the opposites in art is an explanation of the unconscious intention. And the seeing of sameness and difference is a way of honestly placing oneself.

They Are There

The opposites are present in art. They do make for beauty. When you have a feeling of beauty, it can be shown that opposites were felt. A person may not know it. A person may not know, when she sees something beautiful—let’s say a fabric—that she felt something bright and soft at the same time.

Brightness and softness are related to energy and repose. Energy and repose are present in all writing, in music. If the “Moonlight Sonata” had only energy, it would not be very good—nor would it if it had only repose, which is the more conspicuous thing. It has both, and so, though it isn’t seen as the greatest work of Beethoven, it remains. We have in his other work tenderness and toughness, as in the Ninth Symphony. We have the opposites in all music. Music is surprise and expectation. It’s what you expect most and are most surprised by.

We find that the oneness of opposites is present in photography. It is present in pottery, architecture. It is present in any new art that may come up. It is present at the moment in television. It is present in a sentence. It is present in the world. It is present in an object. And when I say this I mean that if these things were looked at very closely, the opposites would be found.

Take the art of the drama. One theory about it is that all drama implies conflict. But conflict that doesn’t have any closeness wouldn’t make for drama. For instance, if two mothers who are strangers fight, there is not so much drama; but if mother and son fight, there is, because there’s also closeness. That is obvious: you have to be close before there can be a real conflict. The conflict in the human self is interesting because it’s in the same person. So Hamlet is interesting, and Faust is interesting.

Sameness and difference are in the dance. We find heaviness and lightness in architecture. We find sameness and difference in the motion picture, as we just saw. But we find all the opposites there. We find swiftness and slowness; nearness and remoteness. We find the moment and eternity in a photograph; we find suggestion and clearness. We find complication and simplicity in the novel. We find immediacy and suggestion in the short story. We find in music, oh, so many opposites: music is just the most lovely is-and-isn’t. And the oneness of opposites is present in a chord, as it is found in a poem where you have a wide sound and an intense sound at the same time, and difference among the intense sounds at the same time, and difference among the wide sounds.