Dear Unknown Friends:

It is an honor to serialize the 1964 lecture Aesthetic Realism Looks at Sensation, by Eli Siegel. Through it we see that something so fundamental to what we are—our senses, and the physiological organization that enables them to work—is aesthetic. Our senses are in keeping with the principle at the basis of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

Mr. Siegel shows that our power of sensation, our ability to touch, hear, taste, smell, see, is always a oneness of in and out, self and world. In every instance of any one of our senses, what is outside us is able to be in some fashion within us; the world becomes ourselves. If I touch the wood of a table (as I am doing now), I am experiencing a great yet everyday drama: meeting what’s other than myself and having that otherness become of me too, through that touch.

The rich, exact, sometimes humorous lecture we’re serializing can enable a person to have a deep pride because one’s own being is made aesthetically, and a deep respect for one’s fellow humans and the world. In the first part of the lecture, Mr. Siegel used, as illustration, passages from a textbook. Now he begins to discuss a poem of Keats.

Sensation, Intellect, Knowledge, Pride

For much of the last century the reign of Sigmund Freud brought a certain vastly hurtful foolishness and ugliness to the way the senses were often seen. Freudianism encouraged millions of people to see sensation, in its multitudinousness, as really about sex. If a child, for instance, wanted to touch her lips to a red balloon, or her fingers to her own arm—well, she was engaged in some kind of “polymorphous perverse sexuality.” Eli Siegel was a clear, scholarly, and courageous critic of Freud, including at the very peak of Freud’s power. Now psychiatry has gone away from Freud, without ever having stated that he was unscientific and incorrect, and that psychiatry was incorrect in its long adherence to him.

Meanwhile, a torment that has been with humanity for many centuries continues: people feel that the world of their senses, particularly touch, is a different world from that of their intellect, reason, logic. Of course, we can find technical statements that in a fashion relate the two—like this, from a National Institutes of Health webpage:

Sen­s­ory information undergoes extensive associative elabora­tion and attentional modulation as it becomes incorporated into the texture of cognition. [ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9648540]

Yet because the aesthetics of the matter—which is also the real science of the matter—was not understood by the writers, such statements do not have a person see that the war one has made between the tactile and the intellectual is a false war. They do not give one hope that the pain-making, shame-making rift they feel can end: the rift between touch and logic, body and careful thought. I am immensely grateful to say: Aesthetic Realism can end that rift, and some of the reason why is in the lecture we’re serializing. Early in it, Mr. Siegel spoke this way about sensation and knowledge—which people have seen as so divided:

To have a sensation is to know something….The important thing about sensation is that it is knowledge. To see a color is knowledge as much as to understand an algebraic problem.

Mr. Siegel’s conviction, and the logic he has given in Aesthe­tic Realism for that clear statement, I find greatly beau­tiful. Further: in this talk, as he speaks about the sens­es in relation to a poem of Keats, something primal is being shown as inseparable from something richly intellectual. We feel the inseparability—and it is thrilling.

The Cause of the Battle

Yet why have people, men and women alike, felt an enmity between their sensation and their intellect? There are two reasons. First, they haven’t met the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism—which can teach us what the self truly is: an aesthetic situation. The second cause is that which Aesthetic Realism shows to be the hurtful thing in everyone: contempt, the desire to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” All misuse of sensation arises from contempt for the world: the desire to make what one meets something oneself can own, manage, have on one’s own terms, disdain. The contemptuous use of the senses can be, for example, in how one looks at and touches another’s body; or in the misuse of food; or in looking at an object and “seeing” it as insignificant or ugly, when it really is not.

The wrongness is never that of the senses themselves. The wrongness is contempt, which includes using one’s body to evade one’s need to know, to evade seeing truly a person, a thing, the world. Meanwhile—just as we can use the beautiful senses in service of contempt, we can also use thought to have contempt for that world which our eyes see, our ears hear, in which we taste, smell, touch. In both instances, contempt weak­­ens us; it makes for divisions within us, inner rifts and war.

When people can learn from Aesthetic Realism that the purpose of our self—our whole self, mind and body—is “to like the world through knowing it,” there will come to be the pride and kindness humanity longs for.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Sensation Is Poetic

By Eli Siegel

I go to another aspect of sensation and use part of a poem by Keats. But first I’ll read the definition of sensation as it is offered this evening: Sensation is at once the getting to and coming within an organism of some instance of the outside world, or of some aspect of the organism itself which at the time is other than it.

By that last part I mean that if we, let’s say, touch our calf because it hurts a bit, or scratch our ear because we don’t know any better, or rub our neck because it’s chafed, the part doing the touching, scratching, or rubbing—and feel­ing the effect—is different from the part touched, scratched, or rubbed. If we slap our knee, the part doing the slapping is different from the part being slapped, just as it would be different from something we slap in the outside world. If you don’t know that, you might as well retire and be a plant.

Similarly, our sensation from a self-inflicted injury is as much as from an injury done by an ancient Goth who came from eastern Europe to do it. So sensation can obviously arise from what we do to what we are. That is, the organism can affect itself.

Keats Tells of Sensation

John Keats and Charles Baudelaire have been written of as important in the history of sense, and they are. Keats himself has a statement that Matthew Arnold reprehended, “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”—though what that seems to say is not what Keats wholly meant. In all poetry there’s that mingling of the receptor, sense organ, subtlety and intensity of particulars—and general idea. The mind is given to generality, but also has those millions of receptors, each one of which, as I said, is looking for business and, it seems, gets it. —So here is the first stanza of Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” written in January 1819:

Now, we look at sensation and try to place it. First: sensation is mingled with perception in general. The word eve, for example, used in the poem’s title, is not a sensation word. But next door to eve there’s some idea of darkness, and while we don’t have sensations from evening we do have sensations from dimness or darkness or blackness.

“Ah, bitter chill it was!” Bitter is a word that serves many purposes. Some music, even, has been called bitter. And the word is applied to people: He felt bitter after his disap­pointment. However, the original thing, the thing that’s un­ques­tioned, is that there is a taste that’s bitter. Pepper and aloes and quite a few medicines are bitter. How is it that the word took on its other meanings? What’s the relation be­tween pepper and the bitterness one feels after reading a letter?

But we have to begin at the beginning, and that usually means finding ourselves as close to animals as can be. A dog will take something in its mouth and after a while act as if that dog were displeased. If you put pepper in a Saint Ber­nard’s mouth, the Saint Bernard will get rid of it as soon as possible and go to its real business of rescuing peo­ple. Bit­terness is a taste and there are organs for that. In a human being, taste is differently arranged from other sen­s­es: there are papillae. Yet however humbly bit­terness begins, with the tongue, it sure has got to some­thing, since people have thought it well to describe the world as bitter.

The primary matter, though, is an in-and-out simultaneity between oneself—through an organ and the brain—and something else.

The Grandeur of Touch

Next we have the word chill. The first thing in a sense is to have a particular aspect of body that gets something first; and with chill, that cannot be seen so quickly. It seems to be the whole body, and it’s different here from there—a per­son can feel cold in one part of the body and not so cold elsewhere.

“The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.” In every impression there is something of sense, and the owl can make for many impressions. The owl has been mostly associated with its hoot. The hearing of a hoot is a sensation, as the hearing of a stringed instrument is, and the ear is there. But there are feathers, and touch is the sense nearest to intellect. Touch is the most general sense. Still, it is called a sense. —It would seem, then, it would be right to say there’s a sense for cold, even though that may not be so clear.

We can touch with every part of ourselves. The hands are most noticeable, but elsewhere is also where touch can be. Touch is the grandest of the senses. With all the senses there is the outside world becoming what we are. There can be no such thing as sense without the outside world—for that while anyway—becoming what we are. So one can imagine one’s stroking an owl: there would be the feathers, and there would be a sensation, without which your life is incomplete.

All Nouns

“The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass.” Every noun is a possibility of sense. The hare’s way of talking, or expressing itself, is little known now, but in one way or another it must do something in the way of sound. We know that a sheep bleats. But what a hare does, it’s hard to say. However, the hare has a body, and one can imagine having a hare fall in one’s lap. That’s a good sensation. Keats doesn’t invite it. Rather, he invites us to cheer up the hare that’s limping, “trembling through the frozen grass.”

Then, grass has many possibilities of sensation. Most people do not think of grass as frozen; we know grass can be cold, and being among frozen grass is an experience. All sensations are experiences. It would be more difficult to show that all experiences are sensations, but all sensations are experiences. If one has had the sensation of touching a cold champagne glass in the office of the president of France, it’s a sensation—the touching of the cold champagne glass.

So we come to one of the phrases that have remained in the history of English philosophy: John Stuart Mill defined matter as the “Permanent Possibility of Sensation.”

The Possibilities Go On

“And silent was the flock in woolly fold.” How much silence is heard is an aesthetic question. It is related to the question of how much white is seen—in what way is the seeing of white different from the seeing of pink. Often in poetry, silence is heard.

Poets can give a direction to one sense rather than another. Keats does not say, Look at the flock in woolly fold. If anything, he is saying, Hear the flock and you’ll hear nothing. Meanwhile, there is the word woolly, and that should be compared to grass, compared to feathers, compared to chill.

“Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers.” This is sense; it’s the decrepitude of sense, but it is sense: the Beadsman’s fin­gers are numb.

“…while his frosted breath.” Frosted is not, as such, a term of sense. However, there is something to see; and to see frost and vapor, with cold attending, is a thing of sense, is a sensation.

Then Keats compares something cold to something quite warm: “…‍while his frosted breath, / Like pious incense from a censer old.” To differentiate in sense is to be able to tell effectively the difference among frost, vapor, and smoke—or between the vapor of frost and the vapor that is more like smoke. Keats is making a comparison. He says the frosted breath of the Beadsman goes up as “pious incense from a censer old.” We have a pleasure seeing this, because to have the senses compared sincerely, or the effects of the senses, or sensations, is an aesthetic job. Meantime, both these things, the incense and the frosted breath, make for sensation.

“Seem’d taking flight for heaven.” That is a mingling of sense and imagination. Keats says the censer and the Beadsman’s mouth are both a cause of something going heavenward. (The comparison could be questioned.)

“Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.” A picture is mentioned, and one thing that can be said of all painting is that it makes for a sense impression. If it made only for a sense impression it wouldn’t be much of a painting, because we don’t have to go to paintings to have a sense impression. We can go to anything. We can go wherever there’s color: we can look at blood and we can also look at crushed grass, and we have enough sense impression for a while. But sense arranged, sense with a relation among the instances of sense—that is nearer to it, nearer to art. And the question of how much sense is idea or perception, will be something looked at more.

Poetry & Sensation Continue

That was the first stanza. Here is the second:

“His prayer he saith….” A spoken prayer is heard at least by the person saying it. Sometimes it’s heard by others. Prayers are usually not shouted. As soon as a prayer is shouted it becomes a threat, which means it loses its standing as a prayer. And prayers are mumbled, and they’re intoned, and they can be put in a plain spoken language—like Italian or French or English. But a prayer is heard. A prayer does do something to the airwaves, does make for vibrations. The ear is just looking for prayers; the brain is, the nervous system is, and so prayers have been heard. It can be presumed that the Beadsman, the “patient, holy man,” heard himself uttering the prayer.

“Then takes his lamp….” Whenever you grasp any­thing, you have a sense impression. You can’t grasp without touching. But grasping is a certain kind of touching, differ­ent from the touch of hitting the keys of a piano. So if you take a lamp, you have a sense impression that is dif­ferent from many other sense impressions got first by the hand. Meanwhile, as I’ve said, a big thing about touch is that any part of the body may be used. You can touch something—and occasionally this is done rudely—with your kneecap.

“And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan.” All these adjectives make for sensation, including meagre. We have El Greco—without the meagre, he wouldn’t know what to deal with. El Greco just loves the meagre, and the wan too.

We Hear What the Poet Has Done

As these sense im­pre­s­sions are presented, chiefly visual, there is something heard—which is Keats managing his words and lines and syllables.

“The sculptur’d dead, on each side, seem to freeze, / Emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails.” The word that is most of sense here is black. But the other terms, including “the sculptur’d dead,” are also in the field.

One of the things sense does is give sensation to other things. Keats says the Beadsman is much affected—his “spirit fails” him—as he thinks of how the sculptured “knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries” must feel. We can think, as he does, that these sculptured people are very cold now: they have “icy hoods and mails” and may do some aching.