Dear Unknown Friends:

We publish here the first part of the 1964 lecture The Infinite and Finite and Their Disguises, by Eli Siegel. In this lecture one can see something of what Aesthetic Realism is as strict philosophy—as ontology, for instance, and aesthetics. In fact, Eli Siegel is the philosopher who showed that ontology (the study of being) and aesthetics (the study of beauty) are the same study, and that they are inseparable from our everyday lives, including our angers, confusions, sulks, pleasures, regrets, hopes, victories, worries about money and love. “The world, art, and self explain each other,” he wrote: “each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

Mr. Siegel, the most learned of people, had a beautiful down-to-earthness and often humor in speaking of the largest philosophic matters. Similarly, as he spoke about human life and happenings, including what a particular person was going through, there was always largeness, and the grandeur of respect.

Mainly, as people go about their lives, they do not feel that the reality they’re meeting has a structure, let alone a structure they can like, an aesthetic structure. They may care for various things, but they pretty much feel the world itself is a mess, an inimical mess. Then there is their self within—with its emotions and thoughts that no one else knows and that they themselves often can’t make sense of. They largely feel their intimate self is apart from outside things—not explained by these.

Such feelings have consequences. Because unless we learn from Aesthetic Realism that reality has a structure which makes sense, and unless we see we have that same structure of opposites and so are related to everything—we’re likely to welcome what Aesthetic Realism identifies as the most hurtful thing in humanity: contempt. Contempt is “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” And from the feelings I’ve described, joined with contempt, has come so much of what’s amiss in people’s lives.

There Are Coldness, Unkindness, Conceit

Right now living in Portland, Oregon, is a young woman we can call Denise. She works as a bookkeeper for a Portland non-profit company. Like millions of her fellow humans, she is confused by the world. And also like millions of people, she has unknowingly used her confusion to have contempt: she has tried to change her not being able to make sense of things into a victory for herself: “To see the world itself as an impossible mess,” writes Eli Siegel, “…gives a certain triumph to the individual” (Self and World, p.11). There is a rather steady feeling in her that comes to this: “Look what kind of awful world I got myself into! It’s not good enough for me. I’m superior to it.” And so, though Denise is polite, there is a deep conceit in her.

Looking down on reality other than oneself includes a looking down on people. Denise feels that people—for instance, the people she works with—are neither as efficient nor as sensitive as she is. She doesn’t know she prefers to feel that way—prefers to feel apart from people, wounded by them, unappreciated, and superior—because there’s a victory in such a feeling. It’s the victory of contempt. Her boyfriend, Jude, has complained that she looks to feel hurt by him. He also says, “You think you were put on earth to train me!”

Just as Denise hasn’t seen a coherence in the world, she hasn’t seen how she is related to other people. In both cases, this non-knowing is not, as such, contempt. The contempt comes from 1) not trying to know and 2) getting importance from feeling reality and her fellow humans are not good enough for her—even though she chats with them in the office, goes to social gatherings, and kisses Jude with a certain intensity.

There is a coldness in her, like that of so many people: she doesn’t think deeply about what another hopes for, about who that person is. She can’t, because she’s basing her self-importance on being apart from and superior to people. She has noticed an increasing tendency to make fun, in her mind, of people with an ethnic background different from hers. She’s chided herself slightly for this, but it goes on. This is because, if you dislike the world different from you and want to sneer at it, you’ll sneer at and want to punish people who stand overtly for that world different from you. So Denise has the cruelty that is in coldness. She has found herself saying mean things to Jude with a desire to hurt him; sometimes she apologizes later, sometimes not. And she has had the coldness and cruelty of looking with disgust at people obviously poor on the streets of Portland. She has been much drawn to a politician who speaks with open scorn of many people: he seems to justify a way of thinking she has despised herself for.

Lying

Denise also lies, as so many people do. That is because having contempt for the world means having contempt for the facts about it. When you feel superior to the “mess” which is reality, you feel superior to truth and feel you have the right to change any fact to suit yourself. (The politician Denise is so taken by lies massively, and that both satisfies and frightens her.)

What Denise and all people are thirsting for is to learn what Aesthetic Realism explains: that the self of everyone, including our own unique self, is composed as the world is. We’re each, for instance, trying to make sense of high and low—pride and humility—in ourselves. We want to be like that tall oak whose grand height is inseparable from roots that go low into the earth. And when we hear the voice of Luciano Pavarotti go from a certain lowness to a thrilling height, joining and honoring both, firm yet proudly trembling—we’re swept because he is showing us how we hope to be, and how reality is.

To see the oneness of opposites in the world, art, and ourselves is the urgently needed, beautiful opponent to contempt. It brings to a person the emotions we long for, and the intelligence and kindness we were born to have.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Infinite & Finite & Their Disguises

By Eli Siegel

In the study of the opposites, one of the things that have to be seen is that the opposites are a disguise for each other. To see that actually taking place is very necessary if they are to be seen fairly. For instance, there is the pair of opposites that are the most cosmological, the hardest to understand—opposites that Kant placed with the antinomies in his Critique of Pure Reason and which are with us nonetheless all the time: the infinite and the finite. Now, Martha Baird is going to talk once more of music as representing separation and junction. To say that these two things are disguises of the finite and infinite may seem audacious, but it happens to be quietly true. The world seen as going on, seen as being present without any separation, is the world as infinite—which the world is. The world, however, as limited, as definite, is the world as finite—which it also is.

When this is felt, it is seen that reality is aesthetics. But it cannot be felt unless the forms the infinite and finite take are seen honestly. I say honestly because to be honest means that the self is present while the object is honored wholly. If the object is not honored wholly, the self is not only present but insists on the absence of what it isn’t—which is not honest.

This matter of the infinite and finite is also a technical problem of art. It is well to begin with the first of the 15 opposites in Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?*

Freedom and Order. Does every instance of beauty in nature and beauty as the artist presents it have something unrestricted, unexpected, uncontrolled?—and does this beautiful thing in nature or beautiful thing coming from the artist’s mind have, too, something accurate, sensible, logically justifiable, which can be called order?

If what I have said is true, then this pair of opposites is equivalent, under another garb or disguise, to all the other 14. Furthermore, it is the same as that cosmological necessity, infinite and finite. It happens that the infinite is freedom—more freedom than we can conceive. The infinite can be called a state of inconceivable, endless sloppiness. Earth and even the solar system are orderly compared to that endless, shapeless, never-stopping idea of the infinite. The tangible is orderly compared to the intangible.

Freedom and order, persons would grant, belong to the technique of art. However, the infinite and finite would be harder to see as belonging there. Still, they are there. Poetry shows the finite and infinite in the fact that every poem is a study in the definite and indefinite. This is a technical problem. When we talk of the poetry of George Crabbe and begin with the definite and then get to suggestion—as did occur here in a discussion of Crabbe—or we look at a poem by Swinburne and begin with something quite indefinite and then get to the definite, we are showing that poetry is indefinite and definite at once.

The indefinite is not the same as the infinite. It’s more on the side of vagueness—which doesn’t mean that the vague is endless. Still, there is a relation. Definition and vagueness are in poetry, and every poet goes toward one or the other. Yeats, in his early work in particular, begins with Celtic indefiniteness and then, being a true poet, he gets to something that exists, is definite. Pope generally begins with the definite and goes to the indefinite. This is largely so of Tennyson, or Landor, or, as I said, Crabbe. It is so of Herrick.

There are persons who have been called lapidary: they seem to write in delicate stone; there’s a hardness—and a going toward the indefinite anyway. Latin poetry is mostly that way. So is Japanese. A relation can be seen between Beowulf and Pope insofar as the language of Beowulf is clipped and sharp and generally definite. Something else occurs in certain religious poetry, and with symbolism in Mallarmé—with the vague seen first.

There Was the 18th Century

Today I am discussing these matters beginning with an essay in a book called The Enchantment of Art. It’s by Duncan Phillips, who goes for the life approach to art—for art as “enchantment,” as vital, as life-giving. As soon as you do that, you don’t write with the geometrical, technical, severe approach that is also possible.

In chapter 16 Phillips writes about Watteau. The reason this is important is that while Watteau is elegant and 18th-centuryish, it was felt from the very beginning that something else is going on in him, some depth. Depth in itself is on the side of vagueness. Surface is on the side of definition. This has to be qualified in many ways; but strictly speaking, as soon as more than one dimension is present, vagueness is also being invited.

Now, the 18th century is given to the clipped effect and not to vagueness, not to symbolism, not to vaporous strangeness. Phillips says:

Whether we like it or not we must all agree that the art of the eighteenth century was, for the most part, clever, vivacious and superficial.

Phillips is more against the 18th century than many people are. Still, Coleridge and Wordsworth weren’t working with nothing—they didn’t try to overthrow certain trends of the 18th century because there was nothing to overthrow. There was something to overthrow, though also there was something to see. Wordsworth and Coleridge opposed the “clever, vivacious and superficial.”

If we look at the term clever we can think of the finite. The infinite, whatever else it is, is not clever. It is incommensurable, irrational, inconceivable; it is mysterious; it is utterly ineffable. If one wanted to, one could say it was clever—but the word clever would have to be used in another way. The finite is clever insofar as it has separated itself from the infinite and called itself a cosmos in its own right. Anytime things can go on their own and make for a neat separation, we have cleverness. Earth is very clever because, while the universe is mostly vague, here it is having elections and such and definitely showing it exists. In fact, its 25,000-mile circumference is pretty well apprehended by now, and its millions of square miles.

Then there is vivacious. The 18th century is vivacious. But Watteau is also not vivacious, though he is one of the most important painters of the early 18th century. If he were only vivacious he wouldn’t be remembered. And the infinite is also not vivacious. The infinite is inconceivable, stolid in its spirituality, immutable, and the immutable has a hard time being vivacious. That’s all there is to it: if you’re unchangeable, inconceivable, you’d better give up on being clever and vivacious.

Phillips uses the word superficial. The last thing that the infinite is is superficial. The 18th century generally kept away from the infinite. Most people do. It happens lives can be lived without the infinite’s being thought about as such. A person can say, “This is infinitely superior” or “infinitely more desirable”; the word infinitely is almost like the word terribly—it’s become a word of degree. “This is infinitely improved,” a person will say, meaning that he likes it a good deal more. But the infinite as such is something that still can stagger. It is not superficial.

With the 19th century and Romanticism and various philosophers (particularly German ones), it is felt the infinite was given another chance—a chance that had been taken away by Locke and Hobbes and Shaftesbury somewhat and, generally, the 18th-century philosophers and a good many of the 17th-century.

Compassionate?

Phillips says about 18th-century art:

It was an art neither of the people nor for the people.

There are two kinds of art, two kinds of poetry: that which is sympathetic, tender, compassionate; and that which simply describes. Also, there is tender art and there is decorative art. The art of Voltaire has not yet been seen as compassionate. Perhaps it is; but Voltaire is not thought of that way. And Pope is not. The 18th century generally is given to the decorative, the ornamental. In the same way as lace ruffles were not seen as tender, or a rapier, or silk breeches, so 18th-century art is not seen as tender. It is seen as brilliant, clever, delightful even, but not as tender. As soon, however, as there’s a feeling about the people, or about animals, as there was with Romanticism, we have something else. And we come at this moment to two other opposites. These happen to be in the physical world: they are soft and hard.

Softness is on the side of freedom, hardness on the side of order. But one can go further and say that the infinite is present in softness and the finite in hardness. Romanticism is seen as softer because, as is hinted in the Phillips sentence, there is in it a feeling for people that is not in 18th-century art. And Gibbon is not seen as a great lover of mankind. Lord Chesterfield is seen as being interested in his son but not in the welfare of people. The 18th-century way has been looked on as so classic that the plight of the average soul was secondary, whether human or animal.

Then we have the third sentence:

With the passing of the mediaeval guilds the plebeian mind ceased to count.

I am reading these sentences as I find them; still, there is something to be seen here. Romanticism asked persons to be interested in each other deeply. There’s a difference between tenderness and etiquette; this has been felt for a long time. If you do not care for people, you make up for it with etiquette. That was done in the 18th century. Also, etiquette is definite while feeling is indefinite. Furthermore, it can be said etiquette is finite and tenderness is infinite. I’m stating a likeness among these opposites, because something has to be suggested before it can be proved.

Literature and painting were made to express the tastes and sensibilities of the élite, fastidiously withdrawn from the shocks of vulgar reality.

Here we have other terms applied to literature. One of the words that won’t be applied to Wordsworth is fastidious. Not that he’s not careful, but somehow the word doesn’t go for him. A word that won’t be applied to Whitman is also fastidious. And Whitman, though later, has the Romantic force or way in him.

The sentence has the word élite. In the same way as the finite separated from the infinite and called itself the elite because it was the one thing that took on tangibility—all the rest was shapeless—so when people separate themselves from others they become the elite. And the elite are usually hard. Snobbishness is an ornamental form of hardness. Fastidiousness is a delicate form of hardness.

Phillips uses the phrase “vulgar reality.” While Romanticism was more vulgar, it is also more wonderful. The infinite is something that works two ways: on the one hand, it gets to the limits of the world; on the other, it looks for itself in what is next to you or under your feet. While Blake had some sense of the infinite as east-of-the-sun-and-west-of-the-moon, he also saw it in a flower, in a lamb, and occasionally in a person. This would mean that the infinite was in “vulgar reality.”