Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue we present, through three very different writings by Eli Siegel, the basis of how Aesthetic Realism sees the self.

Our self is, of course, the dearest, most intimate thing to each of us—even though, also, we can be disgusted with it, and confused by it no end. Aesthetic Realism explains that the central matter in everyone’s life—whatever we’re in the midst of—is how we see the relation between our self and that wide, multitudinous, specific, inclusive, puzzling, great, changing, continuing thing which is the world-not-ourselves. Informally, charmingly, and truly, Mr. Siegel described the world as that which “begins where our fingertips end.”

In the third chapter of his Self and World, written in the 1940s, there is this description of the question “facing every human being…: How is he to be entirely himself, and yet be fair to that world which he does not see as himself?” And in exact, kind prose, Mr. Siegel continues:

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]

This writing itself, as verbal art, has a structure, a sound, that is at once snugness and width, ranging and point.

Opposites in Reality and Us

With all that is happening in the world, I am hoping that, more and more, people will see Aesthetic Realism truly, as having the understanding of self that men and women have wanted always, and long for now.

The basis of Aesthetic Realism is this principle, stated by Mr. Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” What I’ve been commenting on are the two biggest opposites in everyone’s life: self and world. But a central reason why we don’t have to see our self and the world as fighting—a central reason why we can “be ourselves” and give the world “what it deserves”—is that things-not-us have the same structure of opposites that we have. Reality’s items, in all their difference, are our deep kin; they stand for who we are. In Aesthetic Realism: Some Central Notions, Mr. Siegel writes:

The structure of what thing cannot illuminate our own structure? Does not a sheet of paper in its wideness and narrowness bring some essential likeness to us, to ourselves? Is not a twig, on or off a branch, in its simplicity and complexity, continuity and discontinuity, an abstract and tangible presentation of what we are?…Every person says something of ourselves, is ourselves, as outside explanation, deep comment. This is why we should know other people…. Edu­cation, principally, is the pleasant finding out of how things can help us know who we are as we see them.

The Fight about Individuality

The three writings by Mr. Siegel included here are all, in different ways, about Individuality—what it really is. That big, inevitable, possibly beautiful thing is a relation of our self and the outside world. And people are terrifically mixed up about individuality. They’re mixed up about it because they don’t know what Aesthetic Realism explains: that they have two ways of seeing the world, which are at war in them.

One of those ways of seeing arises from the deepest purpose we have: to like the world honestly, see meaning in it, add to reality’s value and our own through wanting to be just. The other purpose, the constant opponent to our desire to respect the world, is contempt. Contempt is the feeling we’re more through making other things less. From the desire to be just to the world comes true individuality. There was, for instance, a beautiful individuality in Abraham Lincoln, because he so much, and so steadily, was trying to see justly. There was a dignity even in his fumbling, let alone in his resounding words.

Meanwhile, contempt in people has them feel that the way to be an individual is: beat out others, leave them in the dust; or—see persons and things as unimportant and shallow, while seeing oneself as “deep”; or—see others and reality as dull, crude, mean, while oneself is sensitive and wounded. (There are numerous other ways too of getting to fake individuality through looking down on what’s not oneself.)

Humanity needs to learn what Aesthetic Realism explains: that the most dangerous thing in everyone is the desire for contempt. Meanwhile, there is a basic cowardice, a hideous cowardice, in contempt, and one can see it in relation to the subject we’re discussing. To feel that your ability to be Somebody must come from making other things and people unimportant, means you’re afraid of the goodness and possible goodness of what’s not you. It means that you feel yourself a non-entity if others thrive. It means you feel you don’t have value in yourself unless you can extinguish it in others.

Some years ago I quoted two sentences I see as classic about the authentic individuality of everyone. I wrote:

Eli Siegel—the philosopher who understood man as such and reality—was magnificently fair to and warmly comprehending of everyone’s individuality. He explained to me in an Aesthetic Realism lesson when I was eleven years old, “The first thing is, nobody is just like you, because you’re yourself. The second thing is, you can learn something about yourself from everyone.” [TRO 649]

This Is What’s Here

The first writing by Mr. Siegel included here is a short passage from “The Child,” chapter 9 of Self and World. It is about the little boy whom Mr. Siegel named Joe Johnson. Joe is a fictional child based on Mr. Siegel’s seeing of people as such and, I’m sure, particular children and babies. I chose this passage not only for the greatness of its prose, which it certainly has, but because these sentences are truly definitive on the subject of individuality. We see and feel Joe Johnson’s individuality coming to be through the way the outside world is increasingly met by him and welcomed into him.

The second writing is an English translation by Mr. Siegel (based on a French version) of a poem by the Hungarian poet Endre Ady: “I Should Love to Be Loved.” This translation appears in Mr. Siegel’s book of poems Hail, American Development, where it is accompanied by an important note about individuality and one’s relation to the outside world. Sections of that note are included here too. And through that translation and note, we see the matter of Individuality-and-Relation as having so much human yearning and tumult with it, and also having grandeur. We can feel that grandeur in both the music of the translation and the kind logical sureness of the note.

The third writing included here is an important short essay titled “Individuality as Aesthetic Sameness & Difference.” It first appeared in the journal Definition in 1961. —As we go to that essay and its two colleagues, I am impelled to say this: Eli Siegel himself had and stood for that greatest, most necessary, always authentic individuality. He saw and took with the fullest seriousness and pleasure the fact that he was related to everything and everyone. That made him immensely kind—and also original and mighty—in his words and his seeing. And this seeing is needed now.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Three Writings by Eli Siegel

I.

From “Joe Johnson, Very Young American”
In “The Child,” Chapter 9 of Self and World

Children are included in the census of America. From the viewpoint of the dispassioned census, they are quantitatively as important as persons six, seven, eight, and even forty times their age. The census of the United States has gone ahead on the quite accurate presumption that children are persons, no more so and no less so than human beings older than they. The procedure of the census is here quite justified.

As soon as a child is born he has all the appurtenances and qualities of personality that a professor has, or a broker has, or a grandmother has, or a general has. That personality may be dim, unmanifest, encompassed by the clouds attending inactive perception; yet it is there. A person is a reality which, being an entity or world, sees and must see, is related to inexorably, that other tremendously multifarious entity, the world. It is to be expected that when a new entity, a baby, arrives in that larger entity, the world,—the baby do all it can to establish its own existence by being able to make, all the time, happier and freer and more accurate relationships with the universe into which it has entered.

A baby has been born. That baby may be called Joseph. Joseph will not know just where he is; but he will want to find out. He has needs. Those needs, if met at all, will be met by an arrangement of the larger world and himself. When Joseph’s needs are met, a feeling, however unexpressed, will occur amounting to: “We make a team.” Joe will want to eat; there is food in the world. Joe will want to see; there are things to be seen, and there is light in the world. Joe will want to crawl, and walk, and run; and there is space in the world to be crawled in, to be walked in, to be run in. Joe will want to touch; there are things to be touched. Joe will want to love, and there are things to be loved, whether he successfully does so or not.

Joe doesn’t know what interferences he will meet in the process he has tackled of completing himself. He doesn’t know this now—while in the room in which he at this moment is….

Joe will come to his senses. He will find out that black is different from white; that purple is different from pink; that milk is different from furniture; and that his father is different from his uncle. He will find that when snow falls, it sounds different from when a dish falls. He will know his own voice is different from the voice of his mother. He will distinguish the rain from the water coming out of the faucet in the kitchen-sink. He will smell leaves, milk, and garbage; he will distinguish the taste of oatmeal from orange juice. He will touch walls, flowers, chairs, noses, toes, and himself; and he will come to know that these things “touch” differently. He will take part in this world-exploration and self-exploration with great eagerness.

Joe doesn’t want to die. He may have cried for whatever reason when he got his first touch of the world; but he does other things than cry now. He isn’t against the world. The world and he are pals; though Joe may have a puzzling pal and, at times, a painful one. But there is a tremendous contract between him and that world, a contract dating back to a long time ago; and this contract Joe doesn’t want to break.

II.

I Should Love to Be Loved, by Endre Ady
[In English Lines by Eli Siegel]

{From Mr. Siegel’s 1968 Note to the Ady Poem. Man wants to be alone and also loved; he wants to be alone and also love. It is easy in Hungary or anywhere to feel that one is not cared for, not in the life of another or others at all. The Hungarian poet Endre Ady once thought this in Central Europe, and instead of just having a thought, stated the thought rhythmically; in apparently choice, melodious Hungarian. (Some melody goes from one language to another.)

How does this poem exemplify Aesthetic Realism? It is because Aesthetic Realism says that essentially different attitudes of self are in an aesthetic relation: that the desire for complete individuality is the same as the desire to love fully and accurately what is not oneself….Therefore, when Ady is stating the two possibilities and wishes of self, he is doing what is necessary if one is to see later that one can be just what one is and “of someone” on the same Tuesday.

Aesthetic Realism says that the outside world exists to sharpen, complete, affirm individuality, not to dilute it. Self and World…are two opposites, like Color and Outline, Oneness and Manyness, Nearness and Remoteness, which have been one in art; can be one in ourselves tomorrow.}

III.

Individuality as
Aesthetic Sameness & Difference

It is the purpose of Aesthetic Realism to make individuality aware of itself: aware of what it wants to say, aware of how much it wants to love and can love the world as idea; or can love an idea of the world. Furthermore, individuality must find that love is respect, too; and that love-and-respect for anything is love-and-respect for individuality itself.

It is the aesthetics in an individual which, if seen, can make that individual care for himself; or his individuality. But the aesthetics in an individual is, of course, inseparable from the aesthetics anywhere else.

The keenest, most dramatic, least describable thing in an individual is his difference, his permanent separation, his intimate mobile sequestered worldness. Things are different from each other, but a self seems more different than just plain things. How different a self, oneself, is from all else—what can say or who can say?

While having this difference, this grandiose, subtle, elusive, permeating difference, a self is like all things. What thing is it not like? And a self yearns, pines, longs—dramatic verbs!—to be like other things. The self has a lust for multitudinous identification.

This difference and sameness in self, Aesthetic Realism maintains, is like the beginning of art. The beginning of art—to be found in reality—is the awful and sweet and constant and surprising and shocking difference and sameness of things.

Is individuality, like reality, a oneness of difference and sameness? Is that oneness of sameness and difference so intense in a person that it is equivalent to life itself: to individual life itself?

That is what Aesthetic Realism would like people to consider.

{Author’s Note to “Individuality as Aesthetic Sameness & Difference.” The world needs to be known—and to be known by individuals. An individual needs to know, in order to be an individual in the full sense, and to know implies something to be known. To know an object as a means of knowing oneself better—more comprehensively, more keenly—is to be in an aesthetic situation.

It can be shown that with all the food-getting, mating, diversification of organism, survival, development, to be found in what is called evolution—there is the need of the world to be known by individuals, and the need by individuals to see the world as different from and the same as themselves.}