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This article refers to the philosophy founded by Eli Siegel in 1941 called "Aesthetic Realism". See aesthetics for the general subject; realism in the arts for applications by artistic genre; and the realism disambiguation page for other uses of the term.

[Lead Summary: Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy founded by the American poet and critic Eli Siegel in 1941. Its primary principles are: "One. The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis. Two. The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it....Contempt can be defined as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it. Three. All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." (cite TRO).]

Philosophy

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PurposeAesthetic Realism was founded in 1941 by poet and critic Eli Siegel. The Aesthetic Realism Foundation is dedicated to the understanding of, and greater respect for, people, art, and reality.
Coordinates40°43′34″N 73°59′56″W / 40.725989°N 73.99882°W / 40.725989; -73.99882
Chair
Ellen Reiss
WebsiteAestheticRealism.org

Aesthetic Realism is based on the idea that reality, or the world, has a structure that is beautiful. Eli Siegel identified beauty as the making one, or unity, of opposites.[1][2]

In Siegel’s critical theory of art, what makes a work of art beautiful is a guide for what can make a good life. A successful novel, for example, composes opposites that people are trying to put together: oneness and manyness, intensity and calm, sameness and change. [3] His studies led him to conclude that any successful work of art or music combines essential dualities.[4][5] In the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism, Siegel developed this concept, writing that the arts and sciences all give evidence that reality has an aesthetic nature.[6] He described the world as having a construction like art: it too, is composed of opposites. In Siegel's eyes, freedom at one with order could be seen in an electron, a tree, or the solar system.[7][8] Siegel reasoned, "If...the structure of the world corresponds to the structure [of art], that much the world may be beautiful in the deepest sense of the word; and therefore can be liked."[9]

This idea led to the primary concept of Aesthetic Realism, that the world "can be liked honestly." Further, a core teaching of Aesthetic Realism is that it is “every person's deepest desire to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.”[10][11][12]

But Siegel recognized another competing desire which drives humans away from such an appreciation—the desire to have contempt for the world and what is in it, in order to make oneself feel more important.[13] Siegel argued that when a person seeks self-esteem through contempt—"the addition to self through the lessening of something else"—he or she is unjust to people and things.[14] Contempt, the philosophy maintains, may seem like a triumph, but ultimately results in self-dislike and mental distress,[15] and lessens the capacity of one's mind to perceive and feel in the fullest manner. Siegel held that, in the extreme, contempt causes insanity.[16][17]

Aesthetic Realism attests that one’s attitude to the world governs how all of life's components are seen: a friend, a spouse, a lover, a book, food, people of another skin tone.[18][19] Accordingly, Aesthetic Realism argues, individuals have an ethical obligation to give full value to things and people, not devalue them in order to make oneself seem more important. Aesthetic Realism states that the conscious intention to be fair to the world and people is not only an ethical obligation, but the means of liking oneself.[20][21]

The philosophy identifies contempt as the underlying cause of broader social problems as well: societal evils like racism and war arise from contempt for “human beings placed differently from ourselves” in terms of race, economic status, or nationality. Siegel stated that for centuries ill will has been the predominant purpose in humanity’s economic activities. The philosophy asserts that humanity cannot overcome its biggest problems until people cease to feel that “the world’s failure or the failure of a[nother] person enhances one’s own life.” Siegel stated that until good will rather than contempt is at the center of economics and in the thoughts of people, “civilization has yet to begin.”[22]

Poetry and Aesthetic Realism

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Eli Siegel stated that ideas central to the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism were implicitly present in “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana,” [23] the poem that brought him widespread fame when it was awarded The Nation's esteemed poetry prize in 1925. The philosophic principle that individuality is relation, “that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things” is in this poem.[24] It begins with a hot, quiet afternoon in Montana and travels through time and space, showing that things usually thought of as separate and unrelated “have a great deal to do with each other.”[25] These are lines near the end of the poem:

Hot afternoons are real; afternoons are; places, things, thoughts, feelings are; poetry is;
The world is waiting to be known; Earth, what it has in it! The past is in it;
All words, feelings, movements, words, bodies, clothes, girls, trees, stones, things of beauty,
books, desires are in it; and all are to be known;
Afternoons have to do with the whole world;…

The search for that which connects all branches of knowledge [26] led Siegel to discover a key concept of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”[27] In Aesthetic Realism classes, he criticized the “intricate tepidity” of T. S. Eliot, whom he declared was “not a poet” [28] and the widely accepted Freudian view of art as sublimation.[29] Aesthetic Realism classes were scholarly[30] and demonstrated that poetry was related to the problems of everyday life.[31] The viewpoint of Aesthetic Realism is that “what makes a good poem is like what can make a good life.” [32]

Siegel defined poetry as “the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”[33] In Aesthetic Realism classes he explained that the greatest desire of a person is to put together opposites, as, in a good poem, “emotion changes into logic: there is no rift between the two.”[34] He maintained that music distinguishes true poetry, whatever the language, period or style; the music of a poem shows the poet has honestly perceived opposites as one, and sincerely united personal feelings with the impersonal structure of the world.[35] “Poetry,” he wrote, “arises out of a like of the world so intense and wide that of itself, it is musical.” [36] Therefore, Aesthetic Realism teaches, even a poem that in substance seems to condemn the world, in its technique and music is praising the world, seeing it truly.

In thousands of Aesthetic Realism lectures, Siegel demonstrated the centrality of poetry to every aspect of life, including "Poetry and Anger," "Poetry and Love," "Educational Method Is Poetic,” "Poetry and Time," "Poetry, Money, and Good Will," “A Poetic Technique of Parenthood,” “Poetry and History,” and “Hamlet Revisited; or, the Family Should Be Poetry.” [37] His students affirm that an important aspect of the philosophy continues to be the study of how a good poem has within it “the composition, beauty, sanity we want in ourselves." This education, they assert, “makes it possible for poetry to be, as Matthew Arnold said, a criticism of life.” [38]

  1. ^ James H. Bready, in the Baltimore Evening Sun: “Eli Siegel's system lives" "In brief, the Siegelian lifeview holds 'all reality, including the reality that is oneself [to be] the aesthetic oneness of opposites.' Motion and rest, surface and depth, love and anger, and so on, once identified, can and must be reconciled..."
  2. ^ Eli Siegel: ”In Aesthetic Realism, beauty is the putting together of things that can be thought of as opposites….Aesthetic Realism says that reality is aesthetics….Reality is, when completely seen, beautiful: that is, reality consists of a mingling in aesthetic relation, of such opposites as the orderly and disorderly….” Aesthetic Realism: Three Instances, N.Y.
  3. ^ Deborah A. Straub in Contemporary Authors: “This philosophy sprang from Siegel’s belief that ‘what makes a good poem is like what can make a good life…, for poetry is a mingling of intensity and calm, emotion and logic.’” URL: http://pdfserve.galegroup.com/pdfserve/get_item/1/Sad7df8w16_1/SB976_01.pdf
  4. ^ William Packard: “And as far as Aesthetic Realism goes, it is eminent good sense. Eli Siegel has boiled it down to a simple formula: ‘In reality, opposites are one; art shows this.’ An artist will try to see the opposites in action, in himself and in his world and eventually in his own work.” How a Major Poet Is Ostracized by Lit Cliches: Eli Siegel in View, published in newsArt The Smith; URL: http://www.aestheticrealism.net/NewsArt-Packard-article.htm
  5. ^ Ralph Hattersley: “The solution to our problem with opposites and the use we can make of photography in finding it is pointed to succinctly in the Eli Siegel dictum, ‘In reality opposites are one. Art shows this.’” “Form and Content in Color,” Popular Photography, July 1964, (Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 84-87)
  6. ^ Lawrence Campbell in Art Students League News: “According to Siegel all the arts and sciences are really attempts at liking and understanding the world.” (March 1983, Volume 37, Number 3)
  7. ^ Eli Siegel: “Philosophers have often seen reality as freedom and order, simultaneously and continually. Indeed, the first opposites I chose in my Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? , 1955, were Freedom and Order. You can see these right now in the world if you look at it: freedom and order are in the street, in the ocean, in woods in upper New York State .” “Good Sense for the World,” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #221 (22 June 1977); URL: http://www.aestheticrealism.net/tro/tro221.html
  8. ^ Eli Siegel: “Verlaine....has some of the subtlest music in French verse. And here we have the first description of the world which beauty and art illustrate: that is, the world is simple and various at once. It is one universe, even as it has many twigs in twilight.” “Each Time: Like of the World” (op. cit.):
  9. ^ Eli Siegel: “If … the structure of the world corresponds to the structure music may have or a novel may have [or any art], that much the world may be beautiful in the deepest sense of the word; and therefore can be liked. “Good Sense for the World,” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #221 (22 June 1977); URL: http://www.aestheticrealism.net/tro/tro221.html
  10. ^ Martha Shepp: “Aesthetic Realism teaches that the deepest desire of every person is to like the world, honestly. This is the purpose of art education, and actually, ALL education. (Cataloguing Critiques: Submission to C. Staples & H. Williams, the University of Tennessee , Knoxville , TN. URL: http://www.marthashepp.com/cv_syll_phil/CritPresent4Website.pdf
  11. ^ Daily Poetics, URL: http://dailypoetics.typepad.com/daily_poetics/2006/09/the_world_art_a.html
  12. ^ Eli Siegel, ”Aesthetic Realism: a Tripartite Study,” “The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known,” #247 (21 December 1977), URL http://www.aestheticrealism.net/tro/tro247.html
  13. ^ Deborah A. Straub: ”Aesthetic Realism describe[s] the two opposed purposes in everyone’s life. As Siegel once observed, even though "every person, in order to respect himself, has to see the world as beautiful, or good, or acceptable," there is also "a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world." According to the philosopher, contempt for the world causes tremendous damage to the self (with effects ranging from boredom to insanity) and, on a larger scale, to the entire world when one nation’s contempt for another leads to war.” Contemporary Authors, URL: http://pdfserve.galegroup.com/pdfserve/get_item/1/Sad7df8w16_1/SB976_01.pdf
  14. ^ Bryan Patterson: “Eli Siegel, the great American poet and historian, defined hatred and contempt of people different from ourselves as the false importance or glory people received from the lessening of people not like themselves.” Herald Sun of Melbourne , Australia (April 19, 2009); URL: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/sunday-heraldsun/better-to-try-world-on-love/story-e6frf92o-1225700167216
  15. ^ Deborah A. Straub: “According to the philosopher, contempt for the world causes tremendous damage to the self (with effects ranging from boredom to insanity).” Contemporary Authors; URL: http://pdfserve.galegroup.com/pdfserve/get_item/1/Sad7df8w16_1/SB976_01.pdf
  16. ^ Lawrence Campbell: “Among many bold pronouncements none by Siegel are stronger than the assertion that contempt of the world produces insanity.” Art Students League News (March 1983, Volume 37, Number 3).
  17. ^ Michael Kernan in The Washington Post: “There are two elements: oneself and everything that is not oneself, which he calls ‘the world.’ These two opposites must be brought into harmony: By liking the world, one can come to like oneself. If, on the other hand, one feels disdain, or what he calls contempt, for the world, unhappiness results. ‘Contempt can be defined as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it,’ he says. Contempt can lead to insanity, according to Siegel.” The Washington Post (August 16, 1978); URL: http://www.aestheticrealism.org/Press-Articles-on-Aesthetic-Realism/Wash-Post-Article-Kernan.htm
  18. ^ Eli Siegel: “An attitude to the world…governs one in one's everyday life. If you feel that the world is ill-managed, is contemptible, is unkind, you have to show that in how you see Mildred or how you see Morton…” “Aesthetic Realism; or, Is a Person an Aesthetic Situation?” (January 14, 1969); URL: http://www.annefielding.net/Aesthetic-Situation-by-Eli-Siegel.html
  19. ^ Deborah A. Straub: “Siegel regarded this emphasis on the attitude of the individual towards the world as the major difference between Aesthetic Realism and other philosophies.” Contemporary Authors, URL: http://pdfserve.galegroup.com/pdfserve/get_item/1/Sad7df8w16_1/SB976_01.pdf
  20. ^ Bennett Schiff: “Nancy Starrels once attempted a working definition: Aesthetic Realism, she said, is: ‘The art of liking oneself through seeing the world, art, and oneself as the aesthetic oneness of opposites.’” New York Post (16 June 1957)
  21. ^ Deborah A. Straub: “As Siegel once observed, …‘every person, in order to respect himself, has to see the world as beautiful, or good, or acceptable.’” Contemporary Authors; URL: http://pdfserve.galegroup.com/pdfserve/get_item/1/Sad7df8w16_1/SB976_01.pdf
  22. ^ Eli Siegel, “Civilization Begins” in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #228 (10 August 1977).
  23. ^ Vincent Starrett in the Chicago Sunday Tribune (July 28, 1957, Part 4, Page 4): “It is a longish poem, at once serious and jocose; an essay, according to Siegel, in Aesthetic Realism; and Aesthetic Realism, he says, is “about [how] the having-to-do-withness or relation of people, is they, is themselves.”
  24. ^ Corbett & Boldt: Modern American Poetry, page 144 (Macmillan Company, 1965): “Siegel’s poetry reveals a view of reality in which ‘the very self of a thing is its relation, its having-to-do-with other things.’”
  25. ^ Deborah A. Straub, Contemporary Authors: “Siegel composed ‘Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana’ with this principle in mind, taking “many things that are thought of usually as being far apart and foreign and [showing] in a beautiful way, that they aren’t so separate and that they do have a great deal to do with each other.”
  26. ^ "Aesthetic Realism on Art and Self," Peter Gorlin Interviews Eli Siegel on The World of Art, WKCR, 18 April 1963 published in Definition 15 (Definition Press, 1963): "Aesthetic Realism is an educational method. And the first thing that it asks is: What is there in common in biology, and in history, and in the study of music, and in psychology, and in religion, and in cookery, and in the study of the history of sport, and in the study of fabrics, and in the study of chemistry, and the study of geology, and in the study of the dance? Is there something in common? The one thing that is in common is, obviously, the opposites, because in every art and every science, there is something that is and something that changes.”
  27. ^ Music's Intellectual History, edited by Zravko Blažeković & Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, 2009), page 167: "It is a central belief of Aesthetic Realism that art, indeed, has metaphysical substance, and therefore any attempt to sever art and philosophy limits the precision and the freedom of one's mind. "The world, art, and self," said Eli Siegel, "explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."
  28. ^ Patrick Skene Catling, Baltimore Sun, 19 April 1952: “Mr. Siegel condemned [Eliot’s] ‘intricate tepidity and lukewarm subtlety….Mr. Eliot is not a poet.[He] is faking all over the baseball field.’
  29. ^ Katinka Matson, Psychology Today Omnibook of Personal Development (William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1982): The basic tenet of Aesthetic Realism is that all reality is united in an aesthetic union of opposites: This is beauty itself....Siegel analyzes what he calls "failures" as personified in the work of certain men, Sigmund Freud and T.S.Eliot among others. Siegel believes their common failure to be the neglect of seeing "the large continuous purpose of man as good will for everything, animate an inaminate." Freud "appealed to incompleteness in man." He confined man's possible view of self by emphasizing his sexual anxieties and death instinct as the keys to mental disorder.
  30. ^ Donald Kirkley, Baltimore Sun, 24 September 1944: “These proceedings are orderly, sensible, and, in this writer’s opinion, scholarly and valuable.”
  31. ^ The Villager, 26 July 1956: “This relation of poetry and aesthetics to what a person feels and thinks, goes through in any day of his life, is the unique contribution of Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy taught by Mr. Siegel.”
  32. ^ Deborah A. Straub, Contemporary Authors: “Known first as Aesthetic Analysis and later as Aesthetic Realism, this philosophy sprang from Siegel’s belief that “what makes a good poem is like what can make a good life.”
  33. ^ Ellen Reiss, Preface to Quintillions by Robert Clairmont (American Sunbeam Publisher, 2005): “Eli Siegel…[is the] founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism....Poetry, he wrote, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”
  34. ^ Patrick Skene Catling, Baltimore Sun, 19 April 1952: “In aesthetic realism,” Mr. Siegel said, “emotion changes into logic: There is no rift between the two.” Emotion and logic, energy and calm, can and must coexist in poetry if it is to be good poetry, in Mr. Siegel’s opinion.”
  35. ^ Ellen Reiss,Preface to Quintillions by Robert Clairmont (American Sunbeam Publisher, 2005): “Eli Siegel ...founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism...[showed that] every true poem...has come from a person’s seeing something so justly that he or she has perceived in the immediate object the structure of the world itself: the oneness of opposites. And we hear that structure as poetic music. Poetry, he wrote, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” That is true about every instance of good poetry--no matter what its style, or language, or in what century it was written. On the other hand, an unauthentic poem, however impressive, however praised, is insufficiently sincere...lacks that honesty which is a self at its very center meeting what an object really is.”
  36. ^ Eli Siegel, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, No. 181 (15 September 1976): “Poetry arises out of a like of the world so intense and wide that of itself, it is musical.”
  37. ^ http://aestheticrealism.net/lectures/
  38. ^ M. Carpenter, K. Van Outryve, Preface to The Critical Muse, page iii (Terrain Gallery, 1973) ISBN 0-911492-18-6: The Critical Muse is an anthology permeated with the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism...Every poem on the pages that follow is about the need of a person to put together opposites in himself. What makes these poems so important is this: as they tell us about the opposites in ourselves, the way they tell us, the technique of poetry, shows that opposites can be one. The music of poetry...is the most important sign that opposites are one...In our studies with Eli Siegel, we have come to see poetry as having within it the composition, beauty, sanity we want in ourselves. This is the education which makes it possible for poetry to be, as Matthew Arnold said, a criticism of life.
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