Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of Eli Siegel’s wonderful 1964 lecture The Infinite & the Finite & Their Disguises. We’re in the midst of the philosophic basis of Aesthetic Realism, described in the principle “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” In this talk, with logic, humor, depth, vividness, Mr. Siegel is speaking about a pair of opposites that are seemingly abstract, unrelated to life as we live it: the infinite and finite. And he’s showing that these are akin to opposites people are affected by every day—also confused and distressed by: for instance, being separate and being joined; what’s superficial and what’s deep; artifice and what’s natural.

Mr. Siegel is reading passages from Duncan Phillips’ The Enchantment of Art. They’re passages in which Phillips condemns the 18th-century approach to art as going for the artificial and the surfaces of things. And Mr. Siegel speaks of the 18th-century painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, speaks of him briefly but greatly, with powerful new seeing, in prose sentences that are themselves beautiful.

Always, Self & World

To precede that discussion, I’m going to comment a little on something that’s very much of our time and offhand seems far away from philosophy: the selfie. Last month, an article on Yahoo News asked in its headline, “Why Are People Willing to Risk Death for a Selfie?” The article reported:

In late May, a 21-year-old college student fell to her death after climbing over a retaining wall while taking photos on the top of a scenic cliff in Oregon….Selfies have led to people falling off of buildings, drowning in rivers and even being electrocuted.

The selfie, so popular, is a means of looking at what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the biggest matter in the life of everyone, in any century. This matter concerns opposites with us every moment: self and world; or I and everything not I; or here, what’s in me, and there, what’s outside of me. In his book Self and World, Mr. Siegel explains:

We all of us start with a here, ever so snug and ever so immediate. And this here is surrounded strangely, endlessly, by a there. We are always meeting this there: in other words, we are always meeting what is not ourselves, and we have to do something about it. We have to be ourselves, and give to this great and diversified there, which is not ourselves, what it deserves. [P. 91]

Our very lives, our pride or shame, our intelligence or foolishness, our kindness or cruelty, depend on whether we’re trying honestly to put these philosophic and pulsatingly immediate opposites together. Do we have the purpose which impels a true artist in any medium—to be our own expressive self, take care of that self, by being fair to the subject we’re dealing with and the world it stands for? Or do we have that purpose which is contempt: to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else”? Contempt pits the opposites of self and world against each other, and Aesthetic Realism identifies contempt as the most hurtful thing in every human being.

And So—the Selfie

Taking a picture of yourself with a mobile device and perhaps posting it online, is a situation of self and world, just as every situation of life is—whether it’s reading a book, eating a sandwich, kissing someone. A selfie taken amid certain scenery is obviously a relation of self and world. The desire to take such a picture can be in keeping with humanity’s deepest hope: to affirm one’s relation to the world. You take a picture of a cliff and yourself near the cliff, and it’s: I have to do with this! This has to do with me! And I want to be fair to it. Yet just as you can want to own a person you may kiss—use him or her to see yourself as adored and not want to understand that person—so you may want to own instances, perhaps stunning instances, of the geographic world; that is, use the world as a backdrop to your own importance.

The Yahoo article notes:

Selfie-related deaths have spiked with the proliferation of smartphones to capture the perfect snapshot for social media posts…. [But some] argue that the compulsion to document and share our experiences is part of human nature.

In the phrase “share our experiences” there is a question—everyday, urgent, and very interesting—of ethics. And here, along with the opposites of self and world, are opposites Mr. Siegel speaks of in his lecture: surface and depth. If we “share” an experience, whether through a selfie or a conversation, is it to show something of who we deeply are and to have people see more meaning in the world? That would be an honoring of ethics. Yet the selfie has brought up in a particular way the confusion of humanity: we want to show ourselves—but is it really ourselves, who we are, that we want to show? Do we take and share a selfie because we want our real me to be known better—or do we want to keep the depths of us hidden and impress people with some self we’ve arranged and put forth, including through making the background a glamorous accessory to our glory?

The Yahoo article tells us:

Some national parks, cities and countries have launched selfie death awareness campaigns to remind visitors…to prioritize safety over snapshots.

I think another large reason for that intense drive to take selfies at striking locations is this: without articulating it, people are ashamed of not liking the world, not seeing big, vibrant meaning in it. So they want to act as though they do—by showing via posted selfies, Look at how I’m in the midst of the world! This is a tribute to the ethics in a person: in Mr. Siegel’s beautiful words, the world is “the other half of yourself,” and so if you don’t honestly want to like the world you’ll never be at ease. And you’ll try to make up in some fashion for having insufficient feeling for things not you; and you’ll try to make up for your desire to be hidden and in yourself. One result may be visually placing yourself next to cliffs, mountains, landmarks.

A selfie taken anywhere in the world should be accompanied by a desire to know, like, be fair to the world itself. It shouldn’t be a substitute for that desire. If it’s a substitute, there will be a deep agitation in the selfie-taker, however adroit at the procedure he or she may be. —And with the agitation can come carelessness.

Looking at Oneself

The selfie is really a form of something present long before our time: the self-portrait. While we can be sure thousands of self-portraits in paint and other media, made over the centuries, are of dubious value, there are some that are definitely art and some mighty art. Why they’re art is a guide to how we should see the world and our self, whether we’re taking a picture or not.

Rembrandt van Rijn painted himself in over 40 works. The first time I walked through the door to a room at the Frick Museum and unexpectedly saw across that room Rembrandt’s great 1658 self-portrait, I literally stopped in my tracks and tears came to my eyes.

In this picture he has not painted himself amidst scenery of any kind. Yet the outside-world-not-Rembrandt is present assertively in his clothing, particularly the expansive glowing gold garment bound with a red sash, and the fur cloak across his shoulders. Why did he feel he should paint himself in such dress? It was not in order to show off. His expression is too thoughtful and too deep for that. One feels through the attire he chose that the luminosity of the world, the grandeur of the world, are of him, that he honestly felt they were—not that he’s making himself superior to things and people.

Rembrandt, painting himself, is using himself to say something, lovingly, about the world, and using the world to show who he is. His right hand seems to rest on the arm of a chair. We don’t see the chair (that object-not-Rembrandt), but through the way he has painted his own hand, we feel the chair’s arm; and the hand is sensitive to it, tender to it, even as the hand relaxes.

Then there is Rembrandt’s face. He is trying to know that face as an object in the world. And he is painting it so as to show who he truly, deeply is. This face is one of the great joinings of depth and surface. We see thought in it, the thought within that particular self; and yet the face, painted so unglamorously but so magnificently, has, with its protuberances and crevices, something like the topography of the earth. What can one say of the eyes? They see. And we feel their seeing is from, and also shows, the center of the person; and the seeing is kind. It moves me to say that these eyes remind me of the eyes of Eli Siegel.

To the garment again. While the most assertive part of this self-portrait is the broad glowing gold horizontal across the chest, this gold horizontal has vertical folds throughout it; and the light-and-dark of those folds is related to the light-and-dark that Rembrandt shows in his own face.

There is, of course, much more to say about this self-portrait, this grand selfie. But I’ve written a little about it to illustrate what Eli Siegel was the critic and philosopher to show: we need, for our ease and pride and happiness, to have the purpose which is in art—the purpose simultaneously “to be ourselves, and give to this great and diversified there, which is not ourselves, what it deserves.”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

How Opposites Have Been Felt

By Eli Siegel

As we look at looseness and tightness in art, again we’re in the field that I am trying to make more immediate: of the infinite and finite. Along with being shapeless, which is sloppiness of the edges, the infinite is also loose, which means sloppiness within. The infinite corresponds to looseness, and the finite to tightness.

Also, there are expansion and contraction. The infinite, in its quiet way, without doing a thing, is expanded immeasurably by its very nature. It’s expansion itself. The infinite is the mother of all expansion. Contraction belongs to the finite.

Then there are separation and junction. And here we have both things present in the infinite. The infinite is separation, endless separation—with this separation, really, being exactly the same as junction. However, the infinite does accent separation. And since the finite hugs itself more, is more pleased with itself, the finite stands for junction.

As I said earlier, there are soft and hard, which are obvious things, with soft being with the infinite, and hard with the finite. Even fast and slow are in the field: the infinite, being anything, can be seen as faster than your trying to catch up with it. That’s one of the qualities the infinite has—it out-speeds your next mental move. It’s about the fastest thing going. It also can be seen as slow. But the infinite generally stands for what is fast, the finite for what is slow.

We have vague and definite: the infinite is vague, and the finite is definite. And the most wonderful thing is that, on the whole, the infinite is with warmth and the finite with cold, because as soon as things cool down they become more tangible. And warmth is more motion.

These are technical things and they concern the painting of Watteau, and poetry. The thing that is seen in Watteau making him different from Nattier and Lancret and Greuze and other 18th-century painters, is: with his elegance, with that surface doing of his, there is some depth; something is going on that is subterranean. One feels these aren’t only 18th-century figures being gallant: there is something more. And so Watteau has been considered an important painter. The reason is that the depth of the infinite was present in the ornamental tangibility of the finite as surface. And this, in turn, means that the freedom of depth, the freedom of suggestion, was present with the order of particular 18th-century surfaces.

Nature Made Polite

Duncan Phillips says of the 18th century:

Nature also was much admired but not in its unadorned roughness—oh, no, no!—trained of course in parks and gardens to an effect tout à fait rococo yet simple enough to set off by contrast the distinction of lords and ladies playing at country-life in their diverting way.

This is somewhat unfair, but it is well said. Nature was made polite, generally, in the 18th century. The poetry of the “town,” as it was called, was looked on as more desirable than poetry about nature, and as soon as nature was written about, it became polite. The favorite notion of nature was a lawn, in the 18th century—not the chasm in “Kubla Khan.”

“Nature [was]…trained of course in parks and gardens.” We have separation and junction here. The thing we see in any improvement of nature is separation. As soon as a garden comes to be from land that was not taken care of, we have a sense of separation. A garden would look at a forest and say, I’m the élite of the woodland. A good deal of 18th-century feeling about nature was in terms of landscape gardening.

So nature was admired, but as tamed, “not in its unadorned roughness.” Roughness, strangely enough, stands for the infinite, smoothness for the finite. Obviously, a park is an example of the finite. For instance, Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx, might seem wild territory compared to apartment houses, but it’s tame territory compared to real forests. And a smaller park definitely is.

“…to an effect tout à fait rococo.” The rococo is a delicate way of interfering with the infinite. Since the time of this essay (1914) there have been other feelings about it, but the accent in rococo art is the limited. It is true that anytime something is limited there’s an attempt to change it, so the harpsichord at times wanted to be a storm, a torrent, thunder. The baroque is the rococo breathing deeper; the rococo is more delicate. The rococo arose out of the baroque: Why do we have to have all the worry in the baroque—why can’t we just have delicacy?—then the rococo came to be. The baroque was already an interference: it got the heave and the sigh of great thought, but with a safeguarding limitation. The baroque and the rococo are still being debated. But the feeling Rousseau had about the rococo—that it was an attempt to tame the Lord as present on earth—is quite true.

The surface, as surface, is in the field of the finite, and the 18th century was much given to that; the appearance of things was seen as important. Appearance can be used in two ways: to hint that the soul isn’t worth thinking about; or to beckon one to the soul. In the 18th century, though not altogether, appearance was used to say, We have conquered the cosmological as impolite.

I never see the paintings of Fragonard without a renewed sense of the pity of it—the pity of so much technical knowledge and skill frittered away on confetti and confectionery.

Then there’s Watteau. He is technical, but the difference is: this writer and others feel that Watteau does have caves in him. Beneath all that elegance is an abyss, a chasm worth knowing.

Emotion & Thought

About 18th-century art, Phillips continues: “Thought was despised. Emotion was in bad taste.”

We come to the problem of what emotion is, and where emotion is the infinite aspect of thought, with thought more definite. The two do have a dance of the finite and infinite in them, which means a dance of order and freedom, of separation and junction, the vague and the definite, even the soft and the hard. Thought is seen as harder, emotion as softer—though, again, emotion seemingly has more force.

These things are in poetry, and Watteau is begun with in this talk because Watteau is an example of surface being taken seriously—one of the very few examples of surface winning out yet looked upon as having meaning, import, content, suggestion, wonder, even the infinite. One can see those people in “The Embarkation for Cythera” as being of all time, as having reverberation, an undulation in them.

The technical problem of vagueness and definition, of the misty and the clear, is in Watteau, and is related to these other opposites. It is quite evident that the infinite stands for the suggestive, the vague, and the finite for the clear. Then, to use terms that are everyday: softness is vague, hardness clear. Something more difficult to see is that slowness is with clearness and speed is unclear, while it’s quite true that in slowness you can also find something unclear.

The point is that these notions seem to say the same thing to each other, with surprise. We look at separation and junction. From one point of view, separation seems clearer. But you look at junction and you see that in some way junction is clearer than separation. Still, you have to see what is the main thing; and the main thing is that separation makes for clearness, junction for unclearness. It is separation that’s on the side of the finite, and junction that is on the side of the infinite, which is the tremendous exemplification of inescapable unclearness. The unavoidable obscure and inconceivable is the infinite.

This, then, has been an excursus in relation to some opposites, beginning with Watteau.