Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue we begin to serialize a magnificent lecture Eli Siegel gave in 1964: Aesthetic Realism Looks at Sensation. It is about a tremendous aspect of the human body—and also about the self that is ours, in all our hopes, worries, confusions, longings, pleasures, ponderings.

At the basis of what Mr. Siegel describes is a central principle of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” As he speaks about the senses, he is showing that the biological organization which makes us able to feel is a oneness of opposites—the very opposites that are one in every work of art. In this talk Mr. Siegel doesn’t point to how the opposites he looks at are in art (he was speaking, after all, to people who were already studying Aesthetic Realism). So I’ll say just a little on the subject here.

In the first part of the talk we learn, for instance, that our organs of sensation are a union of part and whole. Well, part and whole working as one are fundamental in every instance of true art. In a good novel, every chapter, every description, every instance of dialogue contributes to the wholeness of that novel. No aspect of the novel, however surprising, is off on its own; a gesture of the protagonist or even a seemingly digressive comment by the author is a means (though we may not be conscious of this) to the novel’s unity and its power.

Mr. Siegel speaks of the workings of our sense organs as having foreground and background. Those opposites, of course, are things a painting has; in a good painting they assist each other, enhance each other.

And as you’ll see, there is that central pair of opposites, in and out. The having of something outside oneself become authentically of oneself, within oneself, is a prerequisite for art to be. For instance, a composer, painter, poet, dancer welcome into themselves things of the world—whether sounds, shapes, colors, words, relations of objects, happenings, meanings—and from that just welcoming within a person, new seeing and expression can come forth.

Are the Senses Ethical?

Aesthetic Realism makes clear that the senses are not only aesthetic but ethical. They’re ethical in terms of their strict science. “To be ethical,” Mr. Siegel explains,

is to give oneself what is coming to one by giving what is coming to other things. To give oneself what is coming to one, is to enable oneself…to meet objects accurately, to blend with externals fortunately. [Self and World, p. 243]

This accurate, fortunate blending with externals as a means of being oneself is what the senses are about. The senses, of course, can be misused. But in their physiological composition and procedure, they are evidence for the Aesthetic Realism principle that our deepest desire is to like the world honestly—to be more ourselves through being affected truly by what’s not us.

Our sensory organs are a living criticism of contempt. Mr. Siegel described contempt as the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” And he identified it as the most hurtful thing in the human mind, the cause of every injustice. Contempt has thousands of forms, and every one of them is counter to the purpose of our very senses. Here are four examples:

1) Contempt is the cause of racism: the feeling that oneself is big through looking down on people one sees as different from oneself—that one should not be affected by who they truly are.

2) Contempt is the basis of the profit motive—which is the motive, not to welcome the meaning of things and people respectfully into one—but to conquer them, manage them, use them as means for one’s financial aggrandizement.

3) Contempt is in the false and immensely popular notion of love which has this unspoken basis: “You’re mine!—that is, I own you. The main thing about you is whether you make much of me. I don’t want to be affected by who you really are, all you have to do with—those ever so many other things, people, the world in its richness and puzzlingness. And I can use you to dismiss other people and things, make myself superior to—and unaffected by—them.”

4) Contempt is in a desire now had by millions of people to get to and maintain a coolness: be unmoved, unaffected by, and therefore superior to what’s around one.

Aesthetic Realism explains that if we go against the purpose of our lives—which is to feel and know the world justly, vibrantly—there are results: our contempt makes us profoundly ashamed. It makes us dislike ourselves. It makes us feel unsure, agitated, empty, dull, ill-natured, and worse. And one can ask: if we have, day after day, a purpose counter to the beautiful purpose and organization of our sensory apparatus—might we affect that apparatus badly too?

There Is Joe Johnson

As a prelude to the important lecture we’re publishing, I’ll quote a great instance of English prose. It is from chapter 9, “The Child,” of Self and World. Eli Siegel is writing about Joe Johnson, a person recently born, who will take into himself what the world is, very much through his senses. The writing is alive with warmth, exactitude, kindness, and grandeur:

[Joe] 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] 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…; and this contract Joe doesn’t want to break. [Pp. 217-218]

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Always the Opposites

By Eli Siegel

Today I talk on Aesthetic Realism Looks at Sensation. And that subject, sensation, is quite clearly a sign of the fact that a human being is in and out at the same time. We all, in knowing who we are, have sensations, and these cannot be separated from what we are. Every sensation we have is, very clearly, a matter of ourselves and something else, which cannot be divided. As we taste something, the thing we taste and ourselves seem so close and so different too, but closeness is there—the taste is ourselves at that time. And so with the other senses.

The biggest thing, perhaps, that has happened in the consideration of the senses is that the original noble five have been much added to. Meanwhile, lately there’s been a tendency not to add so many senses and to find that some of the “new” senses are really perceptions, and so on. A dispute in the present-day psychological world is: how many senses are there once we go away from the first five?

That is a useful question. But it is important first, in the field of the senses, to see that the object can be different. If we touch our own big toe, that is sense as much as if we were touching a toe of a sculptured lion. We can hear ourselves talk. We can sometimes hear ourselves breathe, and we can hear our heartbeat. The senses are as much in play if something of ourselves is the object as if something other than ourselves is the object.

That is the large, useful strangeness about the senses: we can be affected by anything. If I say there is a stifling heat somewhere in Africa now, and everything is swampy and muggy and even the crocodiles or hippopotamuses don’t want to move, it’s a little confusing but a touch of swampiness and mugginess comes your way.

The senses are the opposites right from the beginning. They are in and out, and also they are a oneness of knowing and feeling. To have a sensation is to know something. To have a sensation is also to feel: to have a judgment that is one of pain or pleasure. The important thing about sensation is that it is knowledge. To see a color is knowledge as much as to understand an algebraic problem.

A Textbook Tells of In & Out

I’ll begin with a passage from a quite respected book, Psychology for Students of Education, by Arthur I. Gates. The passage, really, is wonderful. Three quarters of the statements in respectable textbooks are wonderful. And if they’re not seen as wonderful it’s because the textbook is disguised so well that you’re deceived. Gates has this:

Sense Organs and Sensations.—Our everyday experiences lead us to think of the sense organs in connection with what are usually called sensations. When we think of the ear, we think of sounds…. [But] it is incorrect to assume that the sense organ is alone sufficient to produce a conscious experience…. Hearing a sound is the result of a very complex reaction of the organism in which the activity of certain parts of the brain is essential….Sensing is a response of the whole organism, especially of the brain, and not the result of mere stimulation of the sense organ alone….

What we have here is in and out in a most beautifully involved and also orderly fashion. We do see, and we do hear; we do taste, touch, and smell: the senses have generally been successful, although all the senses have their ailments, some of which are very strange. But this is not the time to talk about ailments of the senses—that can be on another occasion.

So, looking at the passage. What we’re told, under the heading “Sense Organs and Sensations,” is that there are particular phases of ourselves which bring about sensation, or enable it to be; then, always, there is the whole self. With the particular things making for sensation—as, say, the hairs in our ear, which seem to be very important, and the large things, the nerves that take what happens in the ear to the brain, and still larger things—there is the whole self. We say, “I heard the mosquito,” not “My ear heard it,” or even “My brain heard it,” or “My receptors heard it,” or “My nerves heard it.” “I heard it.” We have, then, organs, living parts of the body, that are sense organs, and these help make for sensation. The point of the writer is that they are not all.

“Our everyday experiences lead us to think of the sense organs in connection with what are usually called sensations.” That is quite clear. We put, let us say, a telephone book over our right ear and it seems we don’t hear so well. This can be tested.

“When we think of the ear, we think of sounds….” Good. This is old-fashioned psychology.

…The eye goes with colors; the nose with odors; the skin is thought of as the seat of cold, pain, pressure and warmth and the interior of the body with many sensations and feelings.

However, as soon as the skin is brought into sensation, things get complicated. There is touch, and it seems everything can be used for touch. The ear is supposed to hear, and instead you see to it that the ear touches a magazine, or something else. So the ear can touch. The eye, unfortunately, can touch too; that happens when the eye is punched, even though there is such a delicate and grand protective mechanism. The tongue can be touched not just by food. So there’s an inter-involvement of the senses, which is as it should be. But when we talk of the skin and all that it can do, and talk of such things as pressure and warmth, and of a mysterious thing called the kinesthetic—at this time the senses can seem to get lost. I intend to follow them, because the kinesthetic is exceedingly important. It can be seen as the life sense, the motion sense. However, we have the original five, and they can keep us busy.

“…and the interior of the body with many sensations and feelings.” We have feelings that are interior. A bellyache is felt. There can be various instances of malaise of all kinds, and you are feeling something. A headache seems within yourself. There are aches for every part of the body, and something like sensation is present.

An Organization & a Wilderness

The writer says, “It is incorrect to assume that the sense organ is alone sufficient to produce a conscious experience.” There is something in the body that has been compared to a telephone switchboard, a clearinghouse. Everything that comes to us, insofar as it comes to us, is afferent and gets somewhere. Meantime, there seem to be favorites: something coming to us is more involved with this part than that part. The nerves are discriminated among, and it’s a history that hasn’t been made sense of. But one thing is certain: it is quite beautiful. The wilderness of our senses and our nerves and the brain and the self, has no equal among wildernesses.

The hearing of sounds requires bodily apparatus other than an ear. It requires an ear properly connected by nerves with other parts of the body, especially with the brain.

This means that the organ is not only an organism but an organization, and not only an organization but a composition.

“Hearing a sound is the result of a very complex reaction of the organism in which the activity of certain parts of the brain is essential.” So there is something immediate and something more remote, something in the foreground and something in the background. The sense organ is the foreground, and the brain, particularly, is the background—though one isn’t aware of any difference. Still, the sense organ is first.

“Sensing is a response of the whole organism.” The relation of whole and part in any one thing is an aesthetic matter. That the whole organism is involved in any sense impression hints that we have aesthetics about, because whole and part making a one is a large purpose of aesthetics—also of efficiency.

Millions of Receptors

The human equipment of sense organs…includes not only the familiar organs for seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling and a large number of pressure, pain, cold and warm receptors in the skin, but also literally millions of other receptors in the inner organs of the body.

There are receptors, all of which are what they are and all of which are looking for vital outside business, and most often finding it. They are looking for something to be brought to them, and in life something is always brought. To describe which receptors are dealt with lavishly and which scantily is a hard job, but it would seem that if there are millions of receptors, they all can’t do the same amount of business at the same moment. Some must be neglected, and that is a story I’d like to deal with.

Meanwhile, it should be seen that, as with all matter, the human body—and this includes the human nervous system—is made up of parts that are very small. Some of these parts are called neurons, and they are part of life, though most people have lived and not only have not seen them but have not even heard of them. Life does use the exceedingly small. And if there are millions of receptors within the inner workings of the body—and they all have something to do or they shouldn’t be called receptors—then we have life present in a diminutive form or beginning. The cell is life present in an exceedingly diminutive way.

The whole interior of the organism is richly equipped with receptors which are sensitive to many sorts of activities and conditions in the organism itself.

So while some receptors are affected by outside things, some are affected by things within oneself: they “are sensitive to many sorts of activities and conditions in the organism itself.” And I should like to point out that those two words, activities and conditions, are motion and rest. We do have in our body activities and conditions—and activities are motion and conditions are rest.

Being Affected & Affecting

Since activities and conditions within the organism affect [the] sense organs, the reactions of the body really produce stimuli which lead to further responses.

Every response is also something looking for a response. There is activity and there is response, and from the response there’s a new activity, which in turn is responded to. Things are changing, and there is inter-involvement of a most subtle kind in the nervous system; meanwhile, the nervous system is part of the body.

The passage I quoted is fairly technical. It is a kind of picture which I think makes it clear that there is a tremendous simultaneity of in and out at every moment of our lives.