Dear Unknown Friends:

Here, in the current issue of TRO, are portions of a lecture titled Aesthetic Realism as Philosophy, which Eli Siegel gave in 1950. Thirty years later (in 1980), Martha Baird included three sections of that lecture in three issues of this periodical (TRO 363-5). And I am very glad to bring those sections together now, so that readers today can meet Mr. Siegel’s discussion of seventy-five years ago. This Aesthetic Realism principle is its basis: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” And Mr. Siegel speaks about the fact that, while the opposites are in our own hopes and worries, those same opposites are also in the subjects that philosophers have dealt with, puzzled over, disagreed about.

This Is Looked At

Philosophy can perhaps be described as the study of what is funda­mental to reality itself. And Mr. Siegel has shown that wherever this study takes place sincerely, opposites are centrally present. Occasionally in the history of philosophy there has been an awareness that one is dealing with opposites. Most often, though, there is not such an awareness.

In the three portions of the lecture published here, Mr. Siegel speaks about the opposites being and change; then weight and form; then one and many. And in TRO 363, Martha Baird comments on his discussion of being and change and the two philosophers whose opposed views on the subject have gone through the millennia. She says:

The early Greek philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus have often been paired, and their contradiction has been noted. But Eli Siegel, for the first time, reconciles them gracefully and shows, in two paragraphs, that a basic question of philosophy is explained by music, and is in every person. No philosophy book ever told us this!

Ms. Baird also uses a phrase that I love and am glad to quote and comment on here. She says that Mr. Siegel gave this lecture “with his customary extemporaneous ease.” Yes. In all his teaching there was erudition, there was exactitude, there was his love of truth—and as he spoke his lectures (he did not read them) there was spontaneity wed with scholarship. And there was always beauty in the way his words came together, both as meaning and sound.

The Same Opposites Are Here

Since the material quoted in this lecture has its abstraction and also its difficulty, I want to present as a preface something very different. This something is a poem by Mr. Siegel, one that accents the ordinary, has a simplicity, is not philosophic discourse, and is about children. Yet the opposites Mr. Siegel speaks of in relation to philosophy are in it. The poem is “Night in 1242.” Mr. Siegel wrote it in 1926, and it appears in his book Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, with this note by the author: “The Middle Ages as the ordinary moment.”

Let us look, a little, at this poem in relation to the opposites you’ll soon read Mr. Siegel speaking about as large in philosophy.

There is that first pair he speaks of, being and change. Well, the poem is about a big instance of those opposites: the going from day to night, night to day. The change from one to the other is tremendous; yet it is ever-recurrent, so it is constancy too. And here, two children are affected by it. They want to keep playing—but with dark approaching, they have to go home. People throughout history have had feelings about this day/night change-and-constancy. Sometimes there can be a melancholy as the sun is setting; or an anger when one is in bed and the sun comes again. And many children have been afraid as daytime becomes night.

In this poem, I think night and day stand for the world itself in its being and change: a world that two children, with their hopes and confusions, have to do with all the time.

Then, there is the next pair of opposites Mr. Siegel speaks of as in philosophy: weight and form, or substance and what one cannot touch. Jane and John themselves have tangibility; they have bodies. And the world they meet is physical too—it has trees, branches. Meanwhile, there is also something in both children that does not have weight, cannot be touched: feelings, purposes, ways of seeing. And it’s hinted that John mistrusts some way of seeing him that Jane has: he feels she wants to make fun of him.

What should we do about our purposes, so intangible yet so important? Aesthetic Realism explains that there is a fight in everyone between two big purposes. Our deepest purpose, the best thing in us, is to value truly what is not ourselves. The other purpose is the most hurtful thing in everyone: the desire to make ourselves important through having contempt for the outside world.

The third pair of opposites Mr. Siegel speaks of as in philosophy is one and many. How are these in the brief story that the poem tells? Well, we see that Jane, as an individual, as one, has with her this day multiple matters that she likely hasn’t composed so well. There are mother and John, activities outdoors, a return to home, a fondness for John and a desire to make him uncomfortable, obedience to a mother while disagreeing with her too.

Meanwhile, these opposites, one and many—which are in philosophy and a person’s life—are huge opposites in art. They are working together in every line of a good poem—and this is an ever so good poem! In each line there are individual words and sounds doing things to one another—in such a way that the line with its manyness is a unity, a living unity. Let’s look at one line, the 4th. We hear a throbbing, taut, somewhat trembling individuality in each of its first two phrases: “Jane was so little, John was so little.” Then, those phrases come to feel joined, brought into a wholeness, as they’re followed by the definite impersonal phrase “in 1242”: “Jane was so little, John was so little, in 1242.”

It is a musical, tender line—of kindness and might.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Aesthetic Realism as Philosophy

By Eli Siegel

There are two philosophers without whom the history of philosophy would not be what it is. One is Heraclitus and the other is Parmenides. I’ll read passages about them from A History of Philosophy, by Clement C. J. Webb. First, about Heraclitus:

The great importance of Heraclitus…is due to the stress which he laid on the unceasing process of flux or change in which, as he held, all things were involved….Heraclitus compared the course of nature to “an ever-rolling stream.” You cannot step twice, he said, into the same river; for the water into which you first stepped will by now have flowed on, and other water will have taken its place.

Then, the person who is the opposite of Heraclitus, Parmenides. I am fond of both of them:

In dealing with the same problem as Heraclitus, Parmenides took exactly the opposite line. Movement and change, which Heraclitus saw everywhere, he will have to be nowhere. Wherever we seem to find them, we are victims of an illusion.

Parmenides says nothing changes, and Heraclitus says everything changes, and they are both right. It was also shown by various people that really there was no motion. That idea is in the paradoxes of Zeno, which really are very refreshing; philosophers have answered them quite successfully, but they are still interesting.

Yet it seems that while this problem exists in philosophy, it exists in ourselves. Every person is affected by the necessity of changing and yet remaining oneself. The only way this can be done effectively is through the seeing of how change and sameness are dealt with in art. An example is music: in a good musical work, while there is the sameness of a recurring theme, through the difference in the variations as to that theme, the theme becomes more itself. That is one example. But the oneness of sameness and change can be seen in painting; it can be seen in poetry.

Deep in the world, change and sameness are aspects of what reality is. And reality, Aesthetic Realism says, is aesthetic where it begins. When we see it where it begins, apprehend it where it begins, we also see where we begin. And so, in getting to good sense about the world, we get to good sense about ourselves. That is why Aesthetic Realism says the more you know about the world—really, not just for the purpose of vanity and showing off—the more you know about yourself.

Weight and Form

Another philosophic question is the relation of matter to mind, or matter to force, or substance and form, or—perhaps most accurately—weight and form. We see that we are a body; most of us weigh over a hundred pounds. We also see that there is something we can’t give any weight to, which we call our self. If I asked anybody, “How much does your self weigh?” the person would have a hard time answering.

Also, people can feel both lightheaded and heavy. “I don’t have any foundation,” people will say; and then, “I’m just stuck.” All this has to do with weight and form.

The question is in science too. In the nineteenth century, the science represented by such people as Faraday, Berthelot, Tyndall, came to see matter not as a molecule that was just a very teeny-weeny, teeny-weeny, teeny-weeny billiard ball, but as in some way a dynamic center, an assemblage of forces. Matter is described by a nineteenth-century French doctor, J.-P. Durand, as “force without extension,” “unextended in space.”

But this is related to the attitude of present-day science as well. For instance, Bertrand Russell (who is not a scientist) says that matter is an “event”; that the world is not made up of what people think of as matter—it is really made up of events. I’ll read now, though, from Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. (If some of the particular things I’m mentioning are not followed, in future talks I shall get back to them. I simply want to present now some of the general problems of philosophy in relation to Aesthetic Realism.) Whitehead is writing in 1925:

These electrons, with the correlative protons, are now conceived as being the fundamental entities out of which the material bodies of ordinary experience are composed. Accordingly, if this explanation is allowed, we have to revise all our notions of the ultimate character of material existence. For when we penetrate to these final entities, this startling discontinuity of spatial existence discloses itself.

Earlier, Durand used, about matter, the rather difficult phrase “unextended in space.” That is, he said matter is a point, and a point has no extension. Whitehead is saying pretty much the same thing when he talks of “this startling discontinuity of spatial existence.”

Then Whitehead deals with matter as if it were vibrations, like those in notes and colors:

A steadily sounding note is explained as the outcome of vibrations in the air; a steady colour is explained as the outcome of vibrations in ether. If we explain the steady endurance of matter on the same principle, we shall conceive each primordial element as a vibratory ebb and flow of an underlying energy, or activity.

The ultimate particles of matter are seen as at once form and weight: that’s what it comes to. In other words, they are seen as aesthetic. And Aesthetic Realism says that when (for example) the electron is understood, it will be seen that the relation between the energy or form of the electron and whatever matter the electron may have (and it’s very elusive) is an aesthetic relation.

Physics has gotten philosophic. As soon as physics gets to what is the foundation of the world, it gets to what is common to all things—and therefore is philosophic.

Aesthetic Realism as philosophy would say that the relation of weight and form in the electron is the relation that every person wants to have for him- or herself.

One and Many

Another philosophic problem is the problem of the many and the one. There are all kinds of things in this world, and yet we say it is one world. We also have many things in us, and yet we are one person.

The problem of the many and the one, or unity and plurality, is a constant philosophic problem. Sometimes it has been given that philosophic grimness which scares people, but sometimes it has been dealt with quite charmingly.

A pretty important philosopher is the Italian Giordano Bruno, who was dealt with by the Inquisition very badly; he was executed. He lived from 1548 to 1600. In a quite famous dialogue of his called “Concerning the Cause, the Principle, and the One,” he brings up this question of the many and the one. [Note. A person in the dialogue, Theophilus, is commenting on what he calls “this Intellect”: it is that in a natural object which brings together and shapes into a working unity various aspects of the object.] Theophilus says:

By us this Intellect is called the inner artificer, because it forms and shapes material objects from within, as from within the seed or the root is sent forth and unfolded the trunk, from within the trunk are put forth the branches, from within the branches the finished twigs, and from within the twigs unfurl the buds, and there within are woven like nerves, leaves, flowers and fruits.

Whether it’s been seen correctly by Giordano Bruno or not, the principle of unity is something we have to have. The principle of variety we also have to have. And whether we know it or not, we are always trying to solve the problem of the many and the one. Every person is, because he or she is one person meeting many things. To integrate those things without leaving out their manyness so that the unity or integrity of oneself is maintained, would be good sense. But that is not often done. People, without knowing it, welcome a disunity, a rifting, a disintegration, sometimes even a dissolution. How that is done, I talk about at other times. I am only saying now that the problem of the integration of self is a form of the philosophic problem of many and one; and that when it is dealt with rightly you not only have good sense but you have beauty, aesthetics. One of the definitions of beauty has been variety in unity. I don’t think that is a complete definition, but it is part of the truth.

The Opposites Are Everywhere

Manyness and oneness, then, is a terrific problem for every person, as are the other problems I’ve mentioned: sameness and change, weight and form; also the specific and general, or individuality and relation. All those are philosophic problems, but they are the problems of every person. They are The Problems.

In Children’s Guide to Parents & Other Matters, I wrote about manyness and oneness, and sameness and change, in the little essay “About Beautiful Things.” This is some of what I said:

Now in the song I mentioned, there are many different things. The notes change, and so do the words. There isn’t so much change as in going from an onion to a clothespin to a book to a person, but there’s change.

What is also there in the song? There is something that keeps the notes and words together. Well, when you think of anything which has lots of different things in it and you can see them together—these different things, along with being different, are also the same.

I imply that this is one of the things in beauty: that the sense of difference and the sense of sameness are gratified truly at the same time. But it is what we want to feel for ourselves: that we are changing and that we are also the same.