Dear Unknown Friends:
In the preface to his Self and World, Eli Siegel writes:
Aesthetic Realism is personally useful; it is all for personal development; but it is always a seeing of the whole world, and…what the world is. Aesthetic Realism, then, is unabashed philosophy, as it presents the moment as friendly to a person; as perhaps wider, deeper, more of oneself than was thought.
The 1964 lecture we are serializing—Mr. Siegel’s The Infinite and Finite and Their Disguises—is “unabashed philosophy.” It’s a lively, magnificent, logical discussion about the structure of reality. What that structure is, and also who we are and what art is, are outlined in this Aesthetic Realism principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”
We include here an article by Alan Shapiro, jazz musician, educator, and Aesthetic Realism associate. It’s part of a paper he presented last month at a public seminar titled “Expressing Himself & Being Just to Others—Can a Man Do Both?” This article is vivid in its showing that Aesthetic Realism is not only “personally useful” but longed for by people.
Philosophic Opposites & Contempt
In his lecture, Mr. Siegel looks at two opposites that can seem quite apart from our everyday lives: the infinite and the finite. And he shows that these are inseparable from such other opposites as freedom and order, the loose and the tight, the vague and the definite. Now, to comment a little on how those philosophic opposites infinite and finite are central to our own feelings, choices, how our lives go, I’ll say something about what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the most hurtful thing in the human self: contempt. Mr. Siegel described contempt as “that in [us] which says: ‘If I can make less of this and this and this, my glory is greater’” (TRO 247).
In contempt, the opposites of finite and infinite are always present—but not accurately, not honestly, not as one.
First, though: a little about them as beautifully one in how the self of everyone fundamentally is.
Every person is just oneself, so particular, individual; and that means definite—finite. Yet it can be said that every person is infinite too, because we’re related to everything. Mr. Siegel has described the fact that if we hear a person mention anything, that thing comes to be in some fashion in our mind. Further, there’s no limit to what we’re akin to through the structure of opposites which is in us and everything. Take rest and motion: they’re in a leaf as it’s fixed safely to a tree yet blows in wind, in a song as it changes surprisingly yet feels like one unified song; and the same opposites are in us as (for instance) we’re at rest in a chair while our mind is astir, in motion. We are infinitely related—which means we, in all our finiteness, are infinite.
In having contempt, though, we deeply hate that aesthetic relation of opposites, and deal with them in a spurious way. Basic to contempt, Mr. Siegel explains, “is the feeling in people that they have the right to see other people and things pretty much as they please.” This feeling, he says, “is the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world” (Self and World, p. 3). In feeling one has the right to see anything however one pleases, one is essentially—and horribly—making oneself infinite. One can change any fact one pleases: The facts are what I want them to be—which means one feels one’s power over truth is infinite. We have seen this way of mind in full ugly flower in certain politicians, but it begins in the contempt that’s in everyone.
Contempt, as it belittles something or someone, can appear so finite, so narrow: a snicker, a sneer. But it has in it what Mr. Siegel puts this way in “2-A Pleasure Described”: “I can endlessly despise, and the more I despise the more, apparently logically, my own ego is glorified” (Self and World, p. 357). With “endlessly” we have the infinite.
In Racism
We can see the sleazy drama of false infinite-and-finite in a terrible instance of contempt: racism. In all racism and prejudice you don’t see a person different from you as having that true finiteness which is his or her particularity—as having a self as individual as your own. And you certainly don’t see the person as having that which is with the infinite: Meaning, Scope, a relation to Everything. You’ve expunged from the person these opposites as they truly are, so you can look down on him or her and be superior.
Contempt is always about the whole, infinite world. Contempt can take a finite thing—a stain on the rug, a bad smell, what you consider an ill-made garment someone’s wearing—and use it to be disgusted not only with the immediate thing or person, but with reality itself. To feel you’re too good for the world (and people do feel this, quietly, every day) is to make yourself quite infinite—because if you’re better than an infinite world, how very infinite you must be!
The bad finiteness of contempt is present as people try to annihilate their unsureness through a swift, decisive utterance scornful of someone or something. There is the dismissive expletive, often of a physiological nature. If something confuses you, you utter (outwardly or in your mind) a fast denigrating word or phrase and you feel for a moment that the whirl of things is triumphantly wiped out. The expletive is with the finite: it sums things up. On the other hand, in having this swift contempt you make yourself a god, wiping out whatever you choose—and so the infinite is there.
—Now, having looked a little at these opposites in contempt, we go to the great lecture in which Mr. Siegel speaks of them powerfully, respectfully, with humor and kindness.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education
A Drama of Finite & Infinite
By Eli Siegel
In the chapter I’m looking at [in Duncan Phillips’ The Enchantment of Art] there is this about the 18th century:
It was an age of facile but frivolous culture and accomplishment, of facile but absolutely false connoisseurship, in short the age of the dilettante and his debonair trifling.
Many persons would say that this is unfair to the 18th century, and I am with them. Still, that there has been such a thing as what he describes is true. Persons have chosen to be frivolous and safe rather than to get deep and be lost. The infinite is the best thing you can get lost in. By its very nature, you’re supposed to get lost in it— “Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!” That’s a line of Shelley.
With the word connoisseurship in Phillips’ sentence we have the opposites of surface and depth. Connoisseurship has always been seen as going with the top of things. A connoisseur is one who is not swept by what he admires; he maintains his aplomb. When you admire and lose your footing almost, you’re no longer a connoisseur—because a connoisseur, no matter how much he’s for something, maintains his aplomb.
What Neo-Classicism Did to the Classics
Phillips writes of the 18th century:
The classics were quite the rage but brought up to date: Homer done up by Mr. Pope in neat little parcels of rhymed couplets, and in France, the gods and goddesses of Boucher sporting amorously on the walls of my lady’s boudoir, Olympian, but in name only.
Victor Hugo is larger than the 18th-century “classics,” or neo-classics. Hugo, with the slightest encouragement, would bring in the mist over a mountain or the endless darkness of an endless sea. The neo-classics, before they got in any such thing, would take their time; perhaps would never do it: a mountain was a gigantic interference with civilized life.
The translation of Homer by Pope is a little neater than Homer. It’s a good work and has been disparaged. But whatever else can be said, this can be said: Mr. Pope is neater than Homer. One doesn’t use the word neat of the Homeric hexameter, though Homer’s hexameter is exact. There’s a difference between being exact, strong, shapely even, and being neat. The word neat belongs to neo-classicism.
We come again to the infinite and finite: the infinite is not neat. The infinite is the most sprawling, careless, unprecise thing there ever was. It’s the biggest spiritual slob conceivable. It makes every bit of carelessness found on earth look like exactitude. And the infinite was looked for by Romanticism. The infinite is present in all art, because the purpose of art is to capture the infinite while still honoring it. But if the capture gets more attention than what you’re capturing, it’s “classic”—that is, neo-classic. When Mr. Pope did his capturing, the endlessness of what was captured was less noticeable than the means of capturing.
To see some of the difference, we can compare Boucher, whom Phillips mentions, with El Greco. El Greco quite clearly is going after something else. Raphael is sort of in between; he has a touch of El Greco with a little veering to Boucher. Titian is ornamental, but there’s a feeling of depth, which depth has not been granted to Boucher or Fragonard.
What has this got to do with freedom and order? A criticism given of the 18th century—which is valid, and not just of that century—is that the art of the century got to order at the price of curtailing freedom. This is a little like getting the neatness of the finite at the price of insulting, or not feeling entirely, the infinite.
These Are Here Too
Meantime, other pairs of opposites are also present in this matter. A technical pair is loose and tight. Neo-classic art is usually tighter. There’s a loose art, to be found in Blake and in Whitman and in Hugo, which is grander and seems more on the side of the infinite. Loose and tight can be seen as representing freedom and order, because when things are casual there’s freedom, and looseness has that casualness. Tightness has something else—order. And if the order is at the price of freedom, it becomes “classic” in a bad sense.
What Is Real Self-Expression?
By Alan Shapiro
It was the evening of my senior thesis concert, the culmination of my college major in jazz. I’d worked for months composing, arranging, and rehearsing the music. Then, as I sat at the piano, my right foot began shaking wildly. What was going on? In a while my foot settled down and I began to play. People liked the concert—but why had I been so nervous?
In his lecture Aesthetic Realism and Expression, Eli Siegel defined expression as “anything we do having an outward form, for some purpose of ourselves” (TRO 901). What that purpose is, is crucial—do we hope to have a good effect on reality, respect it, and be affected by it truly? Or do we hope to get “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself”? The second is contempt, and it makes true self-expression impossible.
A battle between those two purposes was raging in me, and that’s why I was so agitated at the concert. With one part of myself, I wanted to be fair to the music. But with another part, I wanted to use the music to impress people with how wonderful I was. Learning to criticize contempt and choose respect enables a man’s life—and real expression—to flourish.
The Inner Debate Begins Early
From the time I was a child, my desire to like and respect the world showed most in my love of music. I was happy to begin taking piano lessons when I was six. A few years later, my parents got me a record of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I was swept by its grandeur and beauty, and played it over and over, LOUD. At the end of 10th grade I heard a young man play jazz piano, and I was thrilled. I loved the rich, often dissonant harmonies and the swinging beat, and thought, “I’d like to learn to play that kind of music!” Though I wasn’t conscious of it, I was liking the structure of the world: the oneness of opposites, including freedom and order, sharpness and smoothness.
But I cultivated another way of thinking, too. I used the fact that my father was a doctor and the director of a medical research institute, and that my mother was a college professor, to be important. And I took the approval I got from my mother and grandmother as proof that I was better than other people. Also, I was confused by my parents’ marriage, which ended in divorce when I was 16. But I didn’t try to understand. Instead, I inwardly mocked them, feeling they might act nice but that was a fake. I exploited their pain to feel sorry for myself and cynical, and to feel I shouldn’t be too affected by anything.
In his lecture on expression, Mr. Siegel explains:
We have to be impressed before we can express ourselves.…[If we] have put up so many guards that we can be immune to anything deeply exciting, we’ll never express ourselves. People have to be stirred—and not just superficially. [TRO 903]
I put up “many guards,” cultivated a smooth, cool, nonchalant demeanor, and used drugs and alcohol to get away from the world. As Mr. Siegel describes, this making myself “immune” was disastrous. As the years went on, I felt less and less. Though I tried to hide it, I was worried: I was lonely and often depressed, and thought I’d never succeed in love. Even as to music, I was distressed by the sense that I’d never be able to express myself as I hoped to; I didn’t feel enough.
My Life Begins to Change
Then, when I began studying Aesthetic Realism, I met the comprehension I was longing for. In my first consultation I told my consultants I was against myself for being so competitive, and felt there were “blocks to my creativity.” They asked me this kind question, one Mr. Siegel asked: “Do you want to be as good as you can be, or better than other people?” I’d been driven by the latter. Whenever someone could do something I couldn’t, I’d get angry and look for flaws in that person.
Another question I heard was this, about a friend of mine, a fellow musician:
Consultants. Does it make you a better musician to think that you are a better musician than Dan Maxwell?
AS. No, it doesn’t change anything.
And they asked, “Do you think trying to be better than other people keeps you from being as good as you can be?” I was amazed. Was an unjust purpose I had with people the very reason I felt deeply unexpressed?
Aesthetic Realism explains that the purpose of life, the purpose of love, and the purpose of art are the same: to express oneself by being just to what’s not oneself. As I learned this, the expression I hoped for—in life, love, and art—became possible for me.
True Expression in Love
My mistake about women, I learned, was the same as my mistake about music. My consultants explained: “As a man thinks about a woman, he’s in a fight between whether he wants to see more meaning in this person, or wants to possess and conquer her.”
I told them about a girl I’d met after college. I thought she was “cute” but I wasn’t interested in her as a person. As she and I talked, the main thing on my mind was “I hope she wants to have sex.” Then, when we were in bed that night, I was unable physically to have the sex occur, and I felt terrible. Years later, in studying Aesthetic Realism, I came to feel that my own unseen objection to my bad purpose was a cause of that physical inability. I hadn’t been after seeing meaning in her and the world; I’d been after conquering her, having her make much of me and give me pleasure.
In the consultation I was asked: “Do you think it’s a good thing that the self objects to itself for having a purpose that’s unfair?” This was so kind! I knew I felt ashamed, but didn’t know there was something good in me that objected to my own selfish purposes. And I was learning about the proud purpose I needed to have:
Consultants. Do you want to be a vigorous advocate of seeing a woman as having meaning? Are you vigorous about good will?
AS. Not enough.
Consultants. Would it help your whole life?
Yes! Eli Siegel described good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” That is the purpose that enables a man to have true self-expression.
When I first met Leila Rosen, I had already seen large meaning in her. I’d heard her speak publicly about her important success as a teacher of high school English using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. Then, in a conversation about teaching, she asked me questions about myself that affected me deeply. Yet I didn’t ask to see her again, and the reason was: I was angry at being so affected; I was supposed to be the impressive one. Then I saw that I was running away from what I wanted—to have big, authentic feelings for a woman—and I made another choice, with a new purpose. I wanted to have good will for Leila, to be even more affected by her and have a good effect on her.
Leila and I talked, and I was mightily impressed: here was a woman who wanted to be kind. I fell in love! This summer we celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary.
Aesthetic Realism is the most stirringly intellectual and deeply romantic study in the world.