Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the final section of How Aesthetic Realism Sees Art, by Eli Siegel. This 1956 lecture is definitive, historic. Yet in it, with all his wealth of scholarship, Mr. Siegel’s manner has a casualness, an ease, that is also exactitude. The lecture answers the centuries-long unanswered question What is art—and beauty as such? The answer is the basis of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

At the end of the talk, Eli Siegel reads a poem that he had recently written—the great “Free Poem on ‘The Siegel Theory of Opposites’ in Relation to Aesthetics.” It is included now in his book Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. I’ll comment on it a little here, after commenting on a pair of opposites that constitutes an emergency for America today. One of those opposites is to be found in the first word of the poem’s title: Free.

Freedom, False & True

Freedom is a beautiful thing, vital for a person—but only if it is real freedom. And that means freedom at one with its opposite: justice, accuracy, exactitude. Unless we’re trying to have our notion of freedom be the same as a desire to give justice to what is not ourselves, we’ll have—in perhaps a quiet way, a seemingly mild way—the notion of “freedom” from which all the unkindness in the world has come.

That false, unaesthetic sense of freedom is ever so ordinary. It has in it: “I don’t have to think, try to see what’s true. This is how I feel, this is what I want—that’s the criterion to go by! To be free is to see anything in terms of what makes me comfortable and important.” That way of seeing, for all its frequency, is contempt. It makes people mean. It also makes them dislike themselves very much.

Meanwhile, the rift between one’s notion of “freedom” and what’s just to people, things, and truth, can cause national horror. Freiheit (freedom) was a word Hitler often used to appeal to the people of Germany. The invasion of Czechoslovakia was to be seen as in behalf of “freedom” for the German people. The attempt to take over Europe, the rounding up and slaughtering of human beings, was to make the German citizenry “free.” Mr. Siegel wrote that Hitler was “perhaps the greatest evoker of human contempt in history.” Part of that evoking of contempt was the appealing to people’s fake idea of freedom: a “freedom” disjoined from asking, What is true? What is deserved by a person different from myself?

Let’s consider the tumult now in America about Covid-19 vaccines. As I comment on it, my point is not what people should or shouldn’t do; rather, I’m writing about the aesthetics of the matter, which is also its ethics. Some people, definitely a minority, claim that the mandating of vaccines is an assault on their personal freedom. Many others object to this claim and say that under some conditions your freedom must take second place to what’s good for all people. They say that exercising your “freedom” to be unvaccinated can spread the disease and have other people die. This is so. But really what should be seen is that it’s not a matter of giving up freedom. It’s a matter of fake freedom versus true—because again: freedom that’s not the same as justice is not really freedom. That fact is illustrated by every good work of art.

Art shows that justice is central to freedom. Beethoven’s music is free because it’s also just: it’s fair to notes, chords, the possibilities of instruments; there’s justice in the way sound continues as it also changes, is anchored as it also soars. Otherwise the music of Beethoven would be slovenly, not free.

When your sense of freedom is not equivalent to the desire to know, to be exact, you can be fooled and manipulated by persons who want to use you. It’s possible that some persons hesitated about Covid vaccines because of a desire to know. However, a different cause has been much more prevalent, massively so. There has been a huge campaign to make people be against the vaccines. And a large reason for the campaign is: if vaccines are even more widely welcomed by Americans, the pandemic will abate—and citizens will be grateful to the present administration for that. Would various individuals with power and money prefer that thousands of Americans die of Covid, rather than that the disease stop under a government which doesn’t suit those wealthy individuals?

Lying is a form of fake freedom. There are the phrases make free with the facts and take liberties with the truth. Lying, gigantic these years in America, has been used to expedite brutality. As we know, the hideous effort to stop people from voting has been “justified” by lies. But it really arises from this feeling in certain individuals: “We have the freedom to do anything in order to get our way!” And their “way” means: an America owned and run, not in behalf of all people, but only in behalf of those they associate with themselves.

A Poem & America

We come to the poem by Eli Siegel that concludes his lecture. It’s not in free verse but in blank verse—why does the title call it “Free Poem”? I think it is because the poem, as it tells about all the arts, leaps freely, joyfully, surprisingly among them. Yet it is all coherent, all exact. And with its freedom, every line has the strictness of blank verse, with those five sure beats of iambic pentameter.

It is a poem about art. But it is a poem, too, about what our lives need to have, and what our beloved America is looking for: freedom that’s inseparable from justice.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Opposites, 1775 & Always

By Eli Siegel

I ’ll close this talk with an instance of prose and oratory. I have said that the opposites are in prose, and I see Patrick Henry’s famous speech as good oratory.

Oratory is one of the arts. It has in it prose, it has in it the drama, but it consists of rising and falling. A real spellbinder is one who knows how to agitate you and then get you rippling. And one should do that in the same paragraph. Patrick Henry is not seen as an artist. Still, I think his Speech to the Virginia Convention, 1775, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are the two best speeches in American oratory. I’m going to look at some passages in the Patrick Henry speech in terms of the various arts. It begins:

Mr. President, no man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House.

We have Patrick Henry here being complaisant, as an introduction: Don’t come at them strong—make it easy for them. He does what Enescu does in his first Romanian Rhapsody: Enescu starts as if he were just meditating on meadows. That is done in art often: you have the mingling of the muted and the energetic—because a good artist knows how to throw his artillery and also act as if he weren’t there.

For & Against

But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen if, entertaining as I do, opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve.

It has been said in the art of salesmanship that if you disagree with a person, make it seem as if you agree. That’s the whole point of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. No matter how much you are against them, act as if you were for them. Now, that is a debasement of art, but, strictly speaking, the principle is present: in art you are against something and also for something; there is discontent and contentment. An artist can feel like a wretch; also an angel—he feels he has got to the success of his life but he’s also groping terribly.

Then, the next sentence: “This is no time for ceremony.” We have abruptness there. And colors are abrupt and also continuous. Brown is a little more abrupt than green, and pink is less abrupt than brick red. Abruptness is a kind of discontinuity, and discontinuity goes on in all the arts. All the arts are immediate and continuous. Photography is immediate, but if a photograph is good it lasts forever.

We’ll find that Patrick Henry gets very excited—but excited as an artist: he has controlled excitement. One definition of technique is: controlled excitement, and as to the right details.

The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the majesty of heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.

Does Abstractionism in contemporary art have anything to do with this speech? I say it does, because the Abstractionist tries to keep out his or her personality. One of the things noticed in art is the attempt of various artists to act impersonally. Cubism and Abstractionism are related to that desire: to change the pulsating, fearful human being into something with the permanence of an orange oblong. This is like what Patrick Henry is doing: he’s talking about himself, but he gets in heaven; he’s polite to the Virginia House of Delegates, a force more impersonal than each individual delegate.

Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

Did you see, in that, the going from muting to pinnacle?

Then Henry says: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience.” That is magisterial—the lamp, wonderful!

“I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.” It gets a little more intense there. No lamps now.

And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry, for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves, and the House. Is it that invidious smile with which our petition has been lately received?

We have irony in art: you say something and don’t mean it, or you mean something and don’t say it, and it all gets jumbled. There’s something of irony in the sentences and tone of the passage I just read, because Patrick Henry acts as if there is care for the British ministry, and he does not care for it.

Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land.

In that passage we have what a painter does, what Leonardo does: Henry begins in the foreground, intimately, and then goes toward something wide. Thinness here, intimacy, gets into wideness. Then, this energy: “I ask gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array?” And you get the thrill, I hope.

In Painting, Architecture, All Art

We have high and low in painting, and this speech goes high and then comes down. High and low are present, really, in all art. A cathedral is a one between its floor and its roof.

The speech ends with a tremendous accentuation:

Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

I’ll close this talk by saying: aesthetics is the study of the beautiful, which, Aesthetic Realism shows, will have to deal with opposites.

Free Poem on “The Siegel Theory of Opposites” in Relation to Aesthetics
By Eli Siegel

Vivent les contrariétés! – Antoine-Marie Lemierre