Can People of One Culture Understand People of Another, Really? If So, How?

It is possible--in fact it is necessary--for people of one culture to be able to understand people of any other culture. If it is true, as some think, that every culture is so completely unique that the feelings of a person born into it cannot be understood by a person of another background--well then, how can there be hope for the world to be kind? How can there be hope for citizens of the United States, steeped in American culture, to understand the people of Iraq from within and so, be kind? How can there be hope for Palestinians and Israelis to understand one another so deeply that war and hate are no longer the compelling things they have been for years?

For mutual understanding between people of different backgrounds to be possible--and we know it has occurred in history--there must be things that every culture has in common, every person has in common. It is this common basis that makes possible the "translations" we know have occurred: as when, for example, Sir Walter Scott wrote about a Jewish family, Isaac and Rebecca, with sympathy and accuracy in his novel Ivanhoe.

Certainly every culture is unique: the culture of Japan is unique. The culture of the Paiute-Shoshone nation is unique. But is every unique culture made up of general components shared by all cultures? Is every unique individual human being made up of general components shared by all people? Is it right to say that representatives of three cultures--let's say the Inuit of Alaska, the Mengti of New Guinea, and the Americans of Mt. Vernon, NY--are like the elements Zinc, Potassium, and Argon which are, all three, built of the same particles: protons, neutrons, electrons? Are there "elements" that build every culture, and are in a unique arrangement in each? If so, what are they? How can they be discerned and described?

There is an obligation on the part of every anthropologist to use our discipline, anthropology, to cross the cultural barricades that have separated people. As students of culture we ought to be in a unique position to make international understanding a reality. But that has not happened--and will not happen--through the accustomed channels. The big reason is this: Anthropology is still looking for a way, or method, of understanding a culture so that (1) the anthropologist can describe it truly and (2) people of any other culture can understand that description. I believe there are already some anthropological works that do convey inner feelings present uniquely in specific world cultures. Three are E.E. Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer; Bronislaw Malinowski's Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia; and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa . But if we ask how can we do this ourselves, what information about a culture and selves in it we need to convey, and how we can gather that information, there is only one place in anthropological theory to find the answer.

It is the mission of this website to show that the method of Aesthetic Realism--the education founded by the poet, critic, and scholar Eli Siegel--is the means to meet this large and humane goal of scientific anthropology.

The Permanent Opposites Are the Natural Units Anthropology Needs

In every branch of science there are natural units by which measurements can be expressed. What are the natural units of anthropology?

A meter is a natural unit of length which is unquestionably used to measure--anything: the diameter of a star; the circumference of a diamond ring; the height of a child. Writes www.learner.org, "The meter was originally based on the size of the Earth, with the distance from the equator to the North Pole being arbitrarily defined as 10 million m."

What about the feelings of people? Are there natural units within them? For instance, if a person in China a thousand years ago left home to go on a journey, and then came back, would his or her feeling be intelligible to a person in any part of the world, of any culture? Are tears universal? Are smiles universal? Is longing universal? Are reunions universal? Here, I would say two pairs of "natural units" are the opposites of Separation and Junction, and For and Against.

The poem of Li Po (AD 701 - 762) "The River Merchant's Wife" has the immense poignancy of separation and junction, for and against. These opposites are so deeply and exactly seen by Li Po that the power of his poem to communicate deep feeling transcends cultural barriers. This poem enables a human self of ancient China to show itself clearly to a human self in America. It was translated by Arthur Waley and then Ezra Pound. All successful art refutes the notion that people of different cultures cannot communicate their deepest feelings.

A major purpose of my website Aesthetic Realism: A New Perspective for Anthropology to show how the natural units of anthropology--the actual elemental forces in the human self, and in culture, and in society--are the opposites that philosophy, aesthetics, and physics employ.

Among the most salient opposites in anthropology are: self and world, difference and sameness, separation and junction, order and freedom, for and against. They are aesthetic opposites, as first defined and described by Eli Siegel. I refer the reader, for example, to his Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? (1955). Look at Freedom and Order and ask, Is any society without both? I will be saying more about the natural units of anthropology as time goes on, and why they are necessary and also give anthropology a beauty akin to art and literature.

Anthropology Is about You and Everyone

Taught by Arnold Perey

Spring 2008

Aesthetic Realism Foundation

January 23 • The Scientific Concept of Contempt

The difference between what a thing deserves and what a person gives it, explained Eli Siegel, is one definition of contempt. The contempt principle is new to the social sciences and necessary in order to understand anthropology & oneself.

February 6 • Liking the World: The Evidence from Anthropology

The thing that makes human selves different from other life forms is seeing and caring for the world’s structure of opposites, and showing this in art, science, and in language itself.

Saturday February 23 • Selves and World in a Great Museum

Anthropology class joins THE VISUAL ARTS AND THE OPPOSITES class at the Museum of Natural History (Central Park West @ 79 th - 81 st Street) at 11 AM.

March 5 • Equality, What Is It?

Looking at tribal cultures in Africa, America, and elsewhere—& wealth inequities in the U.S. today—we ask, “What is equality, really?”

March 19 • Good and Apparent Good

When Hamlet questioned the apparent good of avenging his father, did he stand for the best in a human self—in Africa, Asia, Oceania, or Manhattan?

April 2 • Selfishness: the One Thing Seen As Evil in Cultures Worldwide

From the Wall Street Journal: “Trader Made Billions on Subprime. John Paulson Bet Big on Drop in Housing Values” (1.15.08).

April 16 • The Organizing Principle Is Always Aesthetic

Students in the class speak on instances of anthropology, explained by Eli Siegel's Theory of Opposites.

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Resources by Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism. Important, powerful instances of her writing in the fields of literature and the social sciences

• Ellen Reiss on poet Robert Burns: 'I comment on two poems of Robert Burns that are a means of asking, How should jobs and work be in this land?'
• Ellen Reiss commenting on eight poems by Eli Siegel. The collection is titled "The Persistence of Fabric."
• Aesthetic Realism Can End Racism Writing by Ellen Reiss and others : Includes links to not-to-be-missed articles and websites countering racism
• Description by two New York City elementary school teachers of a class conducted by Ellen Reiss, discussing how a child deserves to be seen.
• Ellen Reiss writes on J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, & the Romanticism movement in English literature. How are the ordinariness and strangeness of reality seen by Ms. Rowling?
• Ellen Reiss describes the motive behind unjustly "criticizing" John Keats in 1818 and illuminates why Aesthetic Realism has been seen untruly in our time.

Aesthetic Realism and Anthropology Classes Winter/Spring 2007

AESTHETIC REALISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Taught by Arnold Perey
6:00 PM alternate Wednesdays 3^rd Floor Library
Winter-Spring 2007

Aesthetic Realism Lesson in Anthropology Taught by Eli Siegel

This semester we study an Aesthetic Realism lesson in which Eli Siegel explored questions central to anthropology. We study it in light of this great organizing principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Is this the concept which brings organization to the diversified field of anthropology? In this semester we say why the answer is yes.

January 24 Thanking the Corn Maiden—and Others

February 7 Does Marriage Include More Than a Couple? Looking at Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage

February 21 The Terrible Transformations of Respect -- India / Africa / USA

March 7 Thievery, Plagiarism & Contrariness in the Tribe

Beginning with Indians and getting to those of us who aren’t.

March 21 Separation from Reality and People: Why?

“The King of Abyssinia always dines alone.” --Ernest Crawley, The Mystic Rose

April 4 The Organizing Principle Is in Aesthetics

Students speak on an instance of anthropology.

Saturday April 21 What Principle Is in Native American Art?

Joining THE VISUAL ARTS AND THE OPPOSITES class at the Museum of the American Indian, 11 AM at One Bowling Green, NYC

For more information go to my website: Aesthetic Realism: A New Perspective for Anthropology and Sociology.

AESTHETIC REALISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY CLASS

Here's the schedule for the new (Autumn 2006) series of anthropology classes at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. I call this series "Anthropology As Elemental and Kind." And the reason is, the Aesthetic Realism understanding of anthropology shows in scientific and surprising ways how thoroughly akin we are to all people, because of the elemental structure all selves have in common, a structure of opposites, including pain and pleasure, welcoming and repulsion, practicality and a sense of beauty. We'll discuss why it’s important, crucial, necessary--and aesthetically pleasing--to know this. --Arnold Perey, PhD

This class meets alternate Wednesdays, 6-7:30 PM, at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City.

• September 20.... Anthropology at Its Simplest — and Your Place in It

• October 4.... What Should Children Know about Anthropology?

• October 18.... The Evolution of Speech: Self-Expression and Raw Survival

• November 1.... Africa’s Blombos Cave: Were the First People in History Anything Like Us?

• November 18.... SATURDAY [ not Wednesday, Nov 15 ]

We meet with The Visual Arts and the Opposites class to see the show, “Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: The Art of the Papuan Gulf” at 11 AM, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• November 29.... How Sameness and Difference Fight and Add to Each Other in the U.S.A.

• December 13.... Do Opposites Unite You to Everyone? Students Speak on their findings


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Call the Aesthetic Realism Foundation at 212-777-4490 for information or log onto www.aestheticrealism.org.



See: Friends of Aesthetic Realism--Countering the Lies for point by point refutation of obviously ridiculous but nonetheless horrible lies by a few angry people.

And see: The Aesthetic Realism Online Library for a true account of the basis of Aesthetic Realism, reviews, an interview with Eli Siegel, and the truth about this kind philosophy.

Ellen Reiss, anti-war writer

In "When We Feel Hurt; or, Arabs and Jews" Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, describes the ordinary mistake out of which wars have arisen throughout history:

"Each of us makes [this] mistake...: we lump people together, rob them of their fulness and specificity. And with that mistake comes this: we make ourselves inaccurately different from other people; we don't see that we are vividly related to every human being. These two wrongnesses are so ordinary. But from them has arisen the huge cruelty of all the centuries. So I speak a little here about the agony now going on between Israelis and Palestinians — and give the only real solution to it."

As an American, and Jewish, I am a person who examplifies this real solution and know other people, among them Israelis, who also examplify it. We have changed the way we see Palestinians and their rights. The change was from that ordinary wrongness--seeing Palestinians as essentially different from Jews--to real respect: seeing that their feelings, their rights, are as real as our own and must be honored for us to respect ourselves. Ms. Reiss wrote on this solution in a column published as an ad in the New York Times in 1990, titled "The Only Answer to the Mideast Crisis." But with supreme foolishness this article was not discussed, taken up, implemented. And that is why we have the horror now in southern Lebanon, let alone elsewhere. I shall soon quote Ellen Reiss on the solution--the only one that can last. But for now let us look at how her commentary continues:

"There is no bigger emergency in the world now, both internationally and in the private life of everyone, than the matter of: What do we do when we feel we've been hurt? Peoples feel hurt by other peoples — Israelis and Palestinians certainly do. But also, individuals feel hurt by persons they know — by a spouse, acquaintance, co-worker. It happens, Aesthetic Realism explains, that we can arrange to see ourselves as hurt, because our being hurt seems to justify our doing anything we please, dealing with people however it suits us."

What has "suited us" in America includes a foreign policy. including the use of violence, that millions are hurt and insulted by and are retaliating against--and what "suits them" includes horrifying acts of violence. There is no doubt that the situation between Israelis and Palestines, the mutual hate and retaliation, is the focal point around which opposing forces, both harmful to humanity, have gathered and erupted. And what could solve this mutual hate would be good for the whole world.

I am not going to attempt to explain fully what is already in this important issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, but to point to it as presenting the most important thing we need to see in order to end the horrendous destruction now in the Middle East and prevent its escalation. For this commentary by Ellen Reiss, click here.

This commentary presents Ms. Reiss's practicable, do-able, absolutely necessary beginning point. I quote it now:

"The following, however, can and should take place immediately:
Every Israeli Jew is asked to write a 500-word soliloquy of a Palestinian. Every Palestinian is asked to write such a soliloquy of an Israeli person. Every day, on Israeli and Palestinian radio and television stations, these soliloquies will be read, ten of them each day. First Ms. B_______, an Israeli mother, might read the 500 words she wrote, trying to get within and describe the feelings of a Palestinian mother. Then an 18-year-old Palestinian will read the soliloquy he wrote of an elderly Jewish man who landed in Haifa in 1945, just liberated from a concentration camp. A young woman in the Israeli army, Rachel, will read her soliloquy of a Palestinian woman her age, Salma (Rachel's family now lives in the house Salma's family had before they fled in fear in 1948).

"The soliloquies will be read on the air, day after day. Persons in government, too, will write them. There will likely still be some persons viciously angry on both sides, but they will not be able to get the adherents they now can get. People will see others as real at last, real as oneself, and will feel others are seeing them as real. And you cannot hurt a person whom you see as having feelings like your own.

"I am presenting a principle, a solution — not 'taking sides.' "

To any thinking person, it will be evident that the principle behind these soliloquies is the only thing that can lead to peace. I mean a peace that is based on a solid foundation. It is wholly different from the temporary network of military balances and political compromises that have held war partly in check for decades.

As an anti-war commentator Ellen Reiss has the company of many people. I am one, who knows that Aesthetic Realism has the understanding of the fundamental cause of wars and how they can end — an understanding from which every diplomat, politician, citizen needs to learn.

Aesthetic Realism and Understanding the Cause of War

In 1976 the important article by Eli Siegel “What Caused the Wars” was published in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. Using texts including Churchill’s The Gathering Storm and Auden’s poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” evidence was presented for this conclusion: “While the contempt which is in every one of us may make ordinary life more painful than it should be, this contempt is also the main cause of wars.”

For example, Winston Churchill writes in The Gathering Storm, “The war leaders assembled in Paris 1919 had been borne thither upon the strongest and most furious tides that have ever flowed in human history” (p. 4). Eli Siegel asks, What is in a psychological “tide”? It is known that Allied leaders were impelled at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 by a desire to humble old enemies. Is this contempt in action?

How did the revenge on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles lead to Hitler’s retaliation in World War II? Was the idea of Aryan supremacy that drove the Nazi armed forces into Poland, across France, and eastward into the USSR a furious form of the “lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it,” which is contempt? Mr. Siegel points out that analysts of history write of war arising from the desire for “dominion” and from human “aggression.” But dominion and aggression are extreme forms of the everyday desire to diminish and control what is outside oneself.

I have done research that confirms the invariable presence of contempt for the enemy in tribal warfare in each region of the world where it has occurred. [See for example Gwe: Young Man of New Guinea--a novel against racism.(2005)]

The study of contempt in the human self is presented by Aesthetic Realism as the study most needed to bring an end to wars. Israeli essayist Ruth Oron, for example, has written on the need to replace contempt with mutual respect in the Middle East and documented how Aesthetic Realism has brought out respect where contempt had been.

At present I have been presenting evidence in the anthropology classes I teach at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

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Resources to know about:

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method
The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company
Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism: A Biography
Friends of Aesthetic Realism—Countering the Lies
Photography Education: the Aesthetic Realism Viewpoint
The Terrain Gallery / Aesthetic Realism Foundation
Aesthetic Realism: A New Perspective for Anthropology & Sociology
Lynette Abel / Aesthetic Realism and Life
Alice Bernstein, Aesthetic Realism Associate
Ellen Reiss writes on the "criticism" of John Keats
Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, on poet Robert Burns
About Eli Siegel
Eli Siegel's 'Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?'
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Aesthetic Realism: So Different from Structuralism Yet Somewhat Like It

Some observers, such as Conrad Arensberg of Columbia University[personal communication], have pointed to a resemblance between structuralism, as presented by Claude Levi-Strauss, and the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, founded by Eli Siegel. Meanwhile, there are also important differences.

The reason for their likeness is that both respect the dialectic process and see opposites as primal in our understanding of the world. A dialectic, writes musicologist Rose Rosengard Subotnick, "enables one to grasp the two opposed priorities as simultaneously valid". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectics]

Aesthetic Realism, however, sees the dialectic process as essentially aesthetic. This makes for very significant differences. Eli Siegel presented reality as having a dialectic structure, yes, but more fundamentally as having an aesthetic structure. That is why, he stated, the world--or reality--can be liked: it has a structure that is beautiful the way a painting or poem is beautiful. This differs from structuralism, which does not neccessarily accent the value--or beauty--of an object's structure, but the structure itself.

This brings us to another difference between structuralism and Aesthetic Realism. The opposites which, Siegel explained, are at the basis of reality are the metaphysical or ontological opposites: such as freedom and order, one and many, sameness and difference, individuality and relation, matter and energy. These are qualities which are in reality as such (see for instance Aristotle's discussion of One and Many in his ''Metaphysics''). And take an electron--it is both substance and form, a particle and a wave. A sonnet is both substance and form (a Shakespearean sonnet about the Dark Lady has subject matter and sonnet form) -- see the similarity? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle describes every instance of matter as both definite and indefinite (we can know position or velocity but not both). Monet's ''Waterlilies'' are both definite and indefinite--and beautifully so! We feel both opposites at once: hence the idea of dialectic. We see it as beautiful: hence the term aesthetic.

Eli Siegel wrote in his preface to ''The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict''(Definition Press, New York: 1946):

"Were there a word as exact as aesthetics for the purpose, we would have been glad to use it. The nearest word, other than aesthetics, is dialectics."

Claude Lévi-Strauss by comparison--the best known of structuralists today--relies on such opposites as ''sky and water'', ''succulent and dessicated'', ''raw and cooked'' which are not ontological, along with such opposites as ''diversity and unity'', ''order and disorder'' which are ontological; but the structuralist approach does not see it as necessary to differentiate between them. That is, ''Raw'' and ''cooked'' are not ontological the way ''disorder'' and ''order'' are; they are not fundamental or inescapable in the description of any reality--though we do use them to describe food as well as other things that we process, e.g.: "He ''cooked up'' a plan for revenge. But it was only a ''half-baked'' plan."

Lévi-Strauss explained that opposites are at the basis of social structure and culture. In his early work he demonstrated that tribal kin groups were usually found in pairs, or in paired groups that both oppose one another and need one another. For example, in the Amazon basin, two different expanded families would build their houses in two facing semi-circles that together make up a big circle. He showed too that the congnitive maps, the ways early folk categorized animals, trees, and so on, were based on a series of oppositions.

Later in his most popular work ''The Raw and the Cooked'' he described the widely dispersed folk tales of tribal South America as all related to one another through a series of transformations--as one opposite in tales ''here'' changes into another opposite in tales ''there''. As the title implies, for instance, Raw becomes its opposite Cooked. These particular opposites (Raw/Cooked) can be considerd as symbolic of human culture itself, in which, by means of thought and labor, raw materials become clothes, food, weapons, art, ideas. Culture, explained Lévi-Strauss, is a dialectic process: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

While Aesthetic Realism has a resemblance to structuralism and other philosophic thought, and arises from the Western philosophic tradition, it also differs in this fundamental way: Eli Siegel stated that art, the self, and the sciences have in common a structure of fundamental opposites--opposites which make for beauty. "The world, art, and self explain each other," he state: "Each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." This relation among those three things: reality, the human self, and art, had not been understood before.


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Important Links to know about

As an educator myself I have used, and highly recommend to every teacher, the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. This educational method, taught by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, has been successfully used to teach a wide variety of subjects (K-12 and beyond) for over 30 years. Students learn their subjects with a beautiful eagerness and thoroughness. The most compact introduction to the theory of aesthetics on which Aesthetic Realism is based would be "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" and the chapter "The Aesthetic Method in Self- Conflict" from Self and World. Some of the many subjects Aesthetic Realism is resoundingly true about include not only the very basis of aesthetics in general, but photography in particular; not only conflict in the human self as such but a new perspective for anthropology and sociology in particular and a way of seeing a person, whether man or woman, in relation to history, current events, and art--as the website created by Lynette Abel shows -- and that by journalist Alice Bernstein, an Aesthetic Realism Associate. The large online body of work on these very subjects has been provided by Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, who writes on the "criticism" of John Keats as well as, for example, on poet Robert Burns, and much more. Meanwhile, to learn more about Mr. Siegel, you can visit the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company, as well as biographical information on the Aesthetic Realism Foundation website. Meanwhile, I am sorry to say that as has occurred so often in history, a very few people have attempted to smear this new knowledge and present it as far from what it truly is. This is documented on the important website titled Friends of Aesthetic Realism—Countering the Lies--which I hope you visit.