A New Perspective

What Is a Human Being?

2008-07-31T11:53:00.000-07:00

In a class I just gave at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, we were looking at the latest evidence from Africa--mostly from South Africa--to show in detail the single origin of all people, all the people dispersed across the globe now and fighting so unnecessarily. We are all blood kin. It is a beautiful fact. This class, called The Latest Findings from Africa -- What Is a Human Being? looked at the question, what does it mean to be human? When did the evolutionary line from which modern Homo sapiens emerged actually become Homo sapiens, attain humanity?

The current series of issues in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known deals with that, beginning with an anonymous review written in 1850 (Quarterly Review) about which I'll say more another time. The review is written passionately, and insists--at such an early time, 9 years before Darwin published Origin of Species--that all varieties of humanity across the globe evolved from a single source. The opposites of variety and unity, or many and one, are written about with a true egalitarian passion by this reviewer, as a matter of scientific fact. The atmosphere of the time, with attempts to justify slavery in so many quarters, "scientific" and not, is stoutly opposed in the article.

But in the class to which I'm referring, we asked about the first appearance of human beings as we know them: our undoubted direct ancestors in body, mind, and culture. And the oldest clear occurrence is in South Africa--the Blombos Cave and Stillbay region--some 70,000 years before the present. Sophisticated stone tools called bifacial points are there--and delicately made implements of polished bone, 40,000 years or so before they appeared in Europe: a fact that has surprised archaeology.

The people of Europe are direct descendents of those culture-brothers-and-sisters who left Africa and eventually found their way to Europe with the tool kit first observed in Blombos, at the southern tip of South Africa, by the seashore.

And the first "scratchings" of art are there: red ochre oblongs engraved with straight lines in regular geometric patterns! This is the first time in the world such a thing occurred. Even if earlier instances are found, this gathering of artifacts shows that the minds that made them were like our own. Humanity did not have to wait until the flowering of Franco-Cantabrian art for the art instinct to have begun to show itself.

What all this comes to is that a tremendous threshold had been crossed by 70,000 years ago--the threshold into humanity. The relation of person to world, and the relation of person to his or her self, had changed.

So then, what changed? And how do we know these living beings really did change from their ancestors? All of us feel we can be more human. What does that mean?

In the class I pointed to the fact that opposites that are in animals, including our immediate primate ancestors, came to a new, richer and kinder relation in human beings as we became truly human. And they can be in a better relation still. Those I spoke about first were Subjective and Objective. I learned how crucial these were from a lecture by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism--I'll quote this lecture in a moment. And there will be more about this entire subject later.

The answer to What does it mean to be human?--to be a person? we discussed was in several paragraphs of Mr. Siegel's lecture titled Aesthetic Realism and People. I will reproduce two paragraphs which are crucial both anthropologically and philosophically here, from issue no. 606, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known (14 November 1984). I will not attempt to comment now, but I will later. Note that there is humor here along with philosophic strictness:

To know what people are is very necessary, because through knowing what other people are we know about ourselves. There is not a person who has ever lived who can't tell us something about ourselves. For that matter, there isn't a thing. People are simply things, more complete than other things. The difference between a person and a lamp post is that the lamp post is a person who is incomplete because the lamp post is not conscious of itself. In other words, when that which is in the lamp post is in such a form that the reality becomes aware of itself and aware of things that can be called purposes--a certain attitude to everything else--the lamp post would be a person. It is necessary to see that between things and people there is a continuity; between people and ourselves, our very selves, there is also continuity; and at no point is the continuity broken.
People are simply reality when most complete; reality when aware of itself. The importance of people is that they are reality in the richest form. Through seeing that reality can be people, we see what reality can do. And so our attitude to plants and animals and to rocks and the skies can become richer.

A person is a living being that can look at itself--look at one's motives, see how justly one is looking at the world--and be a critic of oneself. It is a great fact that out of inanimate reality, billions of years of whirling atoms, arose awareness. We are "reality when aware of itself."

The simple fact that people in Blombos caves decorated their bodies with beads made of shell, perhaps colored themselves with that red ochre, shows in the most elemental way that they were aware of themselves. "How do I look?" is a sentence of self-awareness. And when one looks at one's own motives, and asks, "How to I look to myself? Do I like myself or not, for the way I was angry last night?" it's self-awareness even more grandly. All this came from the evolution of inorganic matter into matter with awareness.

The period of South African prehistory in which awareness of self was emerging, when a new relation of opposites in the human consciousness was coming to be,is one of the highest points of human evolution. And we came from them.

For more about the Aesthetic Realism understanding of Anthropology, see Aesthetic Realism: A New Perspective for Anthropology and Sociology.

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

2008-04-23T12:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

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

2007-02-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

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

2006-09-11T11:04:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-05T08:33:00.000-07:00

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

2006-02-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

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

2005-10-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Aesthetic Realism and Anthropology Class schedule Fall 2005

2005-09-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

Aesthetic Realism and Anthropology
Fall Semester, 2005
Conducted by: Arnold Perey
Class is given from 6:00 - 7:30 PM on Alternate Wednesdays

The Aesthetic Structure of Society

Text: “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?” by Eli Siegel

Are the greatest anthropological studies based on aesthetics—the oneness of opposites? This semester we shall look at the question.

1. September 21 The Cheyennes: Restraint and Abandon

The Cheyennes, Indians of the Great Plains by E. Adamson Hoebel. Are these two opposites turbulently in people everywhere, and do they also make for beauty?

2. October 5 The Nuer: Resistant and Yielding—Like You and Me

E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s classic The Nuer (East Africa) tells of personal opposites that no society can exist without.

3. October 19 Impelled by the Lure of Romance in New Guinea

A society is like a body that needs emotion to drive it, said Bronislaw Malinowski in his classic of functionalism, Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Are Animate and inanimate two opposites always basic to society and to ourselves?

4. November 2 The !Kung of the Kalahari Desert

Richard B. Lee’s study of these hunters tells of junction and separation in a dramatic, severe, and beautiful environment. Do any people exist without togetherness and separation in their lives? What is the meaning of this?

5. November 19 SATURDAY Self and World on a Polynesian Island

We meet with The Visual Arts and the Opposites class taught by Marcia Rackow at 11 AM at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and see the show “Adorning the World.” The opposites of self and world are in every society and every life. They make for both conflict and beauty.

6. November 30 Middletown: The Urgency of For and Against

Middletown by Robert and Helen Lynd (1929) is a classic study of an American city. Is America and every person in it for and against?

7. December 14 Your Neighborhood

Students speak on an instance of anthropology. Are self and world, for and against, or junction and separation in your neighborhood? Choose one pair of opposites and see.

Contact the Aesthetic Realism Foundation for information about taking classes

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Further Online Resources

Ellen Reiss on "criticizing" John Keats in 1818

2005-05-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

Ellen Reiss's editorial commentary in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, issue no. 1319, 15 July 1998

In this important commentary about Eli Siegel's lecture Poetry and Keenness, Ellen Reiss writes on an intensely relevant matter concerning the Internet today. What a person may present as his keenest perception--may really be nothing of the kind. In 1818 a "keenly" critical review of John Keats was published by a noted literary figure. He has become part of literary history as an example of stupidity and meanness about his contemporary: John Keats. On the Web today there are a few persons who flatter themselves by presenting themselves as "critics" of Aesthetic Realism and the persons who study and teach it. In reality they are liars of the most egregious kind and will be seen as examples of stupidity and meanness in our time.

Ellen Reiss writes:

'As we are determined to ferret out fakery while ignoring value, and sometimes ferret out fakery that doesn’t exist, we are not keen but dumb: to see a thing as our ego prefers and not as the thing is, is as stupid as saying the earth is flat or Boston is a pleasant tropical city in the heart of South America. Further, rooking ourselves of what we were born for — to like the world honestly, be just to it, find meaning in it — is not keen, but idiotic; yet millions of people who think they are keen are doing just that....'

Ms. Reiss continues:

'A person important in the history of periodical criticism, or reviewing, is someone who can be used to study the fight in every person between true and false keenness. John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) had true keenness, which is the desire to cut through superficiality and see and feel as fully and accurately as possible what a thing is. But he also had, with terrific notability, the false keenness people go after, of making the bright, scathing, ever so effective statement, while not feeling and seeing truly the thing he was commenting on.

'A critic, Mr. Siegel has explained, "makes a good thing look good, a bad thing look bad, and a middling thing look middling." Lockhart was so sharp and stinging a critic that he was called "The Scorpion." Yet in various instances — one monumental — he was quite wrong. It is generally agreed now that he is the author of the 1818 review of John Keats’s Endymion in Blackwood’s Magazine. And we have in that influential review a kind of brilliance and keenness which was the same as a vast inability to feel and see the value of Keats.

'Lockhart was the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, and his 1837 Life of Scott has been called the greatest biography in English after Boswell’s Johnson.

'He was impelled there by a powerful desire both to be exact and to be affected deeply. He wrote on German literature, and he translated, with feeling, old Spanish ballads into English. Yet, as the 5th edition (1985) of The Oxford Companion to English Literature tells it, "In 1817 he began [in Blackwood’s] a long series of attacks on, in particular, Leigh Hunt, Keats, and Hazlitt, castigating them as the low-born ‘Cockney School of Poetry.’" The attacks included Keats’s Poems of 1817; then in 1818 Lockhart reviewed Endymion. Here are some of the sarcastic, clever, oh-so-keen sentences from that review. (The "malady" Lockhart refers to is Keats’s feeling he could write poetry.)

To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John Keats....He was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady....For some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of "Endymion."'At the conclusion of the review, Lockhart advises Keats to resume his former occupation: "Back to the [apothecary] shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.’"

'This was written by a person enamored of how "keen" he could be. But because Lockhart couldn’t be affected, couldn’t see value where value existed, yet felt that to sneer was astute, he wasn’t keen but ugly and ridiculous.

'The fight in Lockhart is a fight in everyone: between the keenness of wanting to see and feel the meaning of things, and that contemptuous "keenness" which is really retardation and disability. Because Eli Siegel’s purpose was always to see truly, he was the keenest, kindest, most accurate critic — of both art and life in all their fulness. This keen, deep, alive seeing is immortal in Aesthetic Realism. But it was there, day after day, in the sentences he, as person, spoke — the most beautiful thing I know in the world. The resentment of his greatness by persons of the press and others— their anger that they couldn’t feel superior to Aesthetic Realism and are so enormously affected by it—is both infinitely mean and infinitely stupid. It is through Aesthetic Realism that humanity will have the real keenness we long for, about our own lives and the world!'

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More about Ellen Reiss:

You can see more of Ms. Reiss's literary criticism in her commentaries on (1) Robert Burns, in which she shows that Burns is "a means of asking, How should jobs and work be in this land"; on (2) Eli Siegel's gathering of poems titled "The Persistence of Fabric", which, she states, "have the factual immediacy of cloth one can touch—and also the mystery that can be in the feelings of people: the emotions that whirl within us, or rustle in us, even as we put on a well-fitting garment"; and on (3) "Nature, Romanticism, and Harry Potter", in which she writes: "I'll comment here on a work that, 50 years later, has been affecting men, women, and children throughout the English-speaking world. I refer to the first of the Harry Potter novels, by J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, originally published in England in 1997. What does its enormous popularity say about people and what they are looking for?"

And you can visit these resources:

Ellen Reiss: Biographical Information
Selected Commentaries by Ellen Reiss on Poetry: On Lord Byron • On Eli Siegel • On Emily Dickinson
Selected Commentaries on Current History: When We Feel Hurt; or, Arabs and Jews • Unions and Beauty • Logic, Poetry, and California
Selected Commentaries on Literature: Nature, Romanticism, & Harry Potter • Justice and Punctuation • Mind and Sherlock Holmes
Descriptions of classes taught by Ms. Reiss: "Architecture Is Ourselves" by architect David Salmon • "How Should a Child Be Seen?" by teachers Barbara McClung and Lauren Phillips • “The World As Idioms” by English teacher Leila Rosen

Statement about the way Aesthetic Realism has been met

2005-05-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

Persons with broad knowledge in scholarly and humanistic fields--from art and poetry to literary criticism and the social sciences-- say that the innovations due to Aesthetic Realism have great importance, should be known, and have already had a striking educational impact.

Meanwhile, the furtherance of the scientific and humanistic goals which Aesthetic Realism stands for preeminently, has angered some individuals. These have worked to disparage this new education with pejoratives much like those directed against abolitionists by slave-owning Southerners. Their motive, in the 19th century, was to have their egos uninterfered with so they could continue to own other human beings for profit. And those who have attacked Aesthetic Realism bear a resemblance to Cato the Censor (in ancient Rome) who was known for his desire to stifle what is kind, gracious, and pleasing.

The controversy here is also like that between Darwin and his detractors, which is still going on. That is, there's new knowledge about the world and one's place in it, while the ego says, "How can I, in all my important self-ness, be related to things that seem so different and beneath me--a frog or a grasshopper or, God forbid, a human being of another color?"

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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. Sudents 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.

A note about a most important new way of seeing aesthetics

2005-04-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

The Aesthetic Realism Foundation, listed in Aesthetics Online (see http://www.aesthetics-online.org/net/ae-web.html), is a not-for-profit educational foundation that is so innovative—so important to the advancement of aesthetics today—that I think everyone ought to know about it.

As I once wrote in my doctoral thesis (Columbia University, 1973)

“Eli Siegel sees aesthetics as more comprehensive than other authors. He defines it poetically in 'Free Poem on "The Siegel Theory of Opposites" in Relation to Aesthetics' this way:
Aesthetics is the science of what is,
When that which is, is seen as opposites—
In common language, when it's beautiful. (1958:51)”

The above page reference (1958:51) is to Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems.

And so, the Aesthetic Realism approach enables aesthetics to be used, scientifically, to more deeply understand anthropology—which it has been my pleasure to pursue these 30 years (see A New Perspective for Anthropology). And if you visit the Terrain Gallery website (the Art Criticism and History page) you will see how Aesthetic Realism enables a critic to relate paintings, architecture, photography, to the very self of a person (see http://www.terraingallery.org/Art-Talks-Archive.html).

One can only be deeply affected to read, for example, how the portrait of an American beauty, Madame Pierre Gautreau, is analyzed by an American woman today; how she describes the great dilemma of woman as to assertion and retreat-- and the solution to this dilemma in technical aesthetics. See SARGENT'S "MADAME X"; OR, ASSERTION AND RETREAT IN WOMAN by Lynette Abel.

For these reasons and much more – for the fact that aesthetics can now be respected as adding to one’s perception in everyday life, as one pours coffee or eats a croissant or bagel, or speaks to a loved one, or thinks about war and peace – it is of immediate importance that this new understanding of aesthetics be known.

I hope that whoever you are reading this, you will join me in this effort wholeheartedly.

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Important Links to know about

Here is biographical information about Eli Siegel. An introduction to Aesthetic Realism is in his Preface to Self and World together with The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict. There are lectures by Eli Siegel online, as well as essays with his definitive scholarship in diverse fields. Also see his historic questions about the nature of beauty, "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" Together with reviews of Eli Siegel's poetry and other works and reviews of newly published books he wrote for Scribner's Magazine in the 1930s, these provide a beginning point to know more.

Aesthetic Realism Can Resolve the Confusion in Men about Warmth and Coolness--including in Love and Marriage

2005-04-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

From the Aesthetic Realism Seminar of April 14, 2005

All over the world, men are confused about whether they want to be warm or cool--hot-blooded or "calm and collected"; intense or restrained. A man can be a fiery advocate in a cause representing justice. And a man can also be overheated in the cause of his own narrow ego. We can feel we are being passionate about a woman--her body, her lips--while in reality we are deeply cold to her. At work, we can be cool and efficient under pressure, and then later at home get into a rage because someone drank the soda we were saving for ourselves.

Aesthetic Realism is new in understanding our conflict about coolness and warmth. "Every person," Eli Siegel explained, "is always trying to put together opposites in himself." And warmth and coolness are two of those opposites. They confuse us because we don't know what our purpose is for being either cool or warm. Both can be in the service of contempt or respect. And when they are in service of contempt--as they were very frequently in me--a person is both pained and deeply unkind.

A man learns from Aesthetic Realism how to use his warmth, energy, passion in behalf of the world--and this includes having good will for a woman--and to use our capacity to be exact and organized for the same purpose: to be fair. Then, these opposites come to make sense, which is what a man desires most.

1. Aesthetic Realism Explains Warmth and Coolness in the Self

"The danger in a self," Mr. Siegel explained,

is about heat and cold, a bad mingling of them or a separation of them. In this way our life is incomplete, or we don't like it; and our own selves are likewise incomplete.....we can get too excited, or we can become too cold. We can expand ourselves in a sloppy fashion, or contract in a hurtful fashion...
[TRO 997]

This describes what I did. The way cool and warm were separate in me, and also intermingled badly, confused me because I largely didn’t have good will.

I was most often cool to a person's troubles and went about my own business, saving my warmth for my own concerns. This, and the way I was hotly argumentative, hoping to be superior; the way I could be loftily apart, and then become explosive--be an icicle that got hot under the collar--were forms of contempt and they made me dislike my life very much. Mr. Siegel once said of me, commenting on my coolness and heat: It's hard to think this of such a calm being, but he has been "Furnace Perey."

The place I felt most composed and most excited was as I studied anthropology. In graduate school I began to learn what is called participant observation in courses with Margaret Mead. For example, I remember liking the feeling I had when I went to a service at a mosque on Riverside Drive for an assignment and took part in the ritual, observing other people's responses and my own. And when I wrote my description, which I called “The L-Shaped Room,” I tried to be exact and show my feelings.

But this was very different from what I felt most of the time. In college, with women, the way I was excited and cool, what I was warm to and cold to, did not make sense. For example, on my first and only date with a girl, Linda, a counselor at an upstate NY camp, while we were driving and having a very interesting conversation, I got hungry and brought out the "emergency" cold chicken sandwich that my mother had made for me. I was amazingly unaware of Linda and didn't offer it to her. She asked, "Can I help you eat this?" I felt a flood of warmth and said, "Of course." Not only had my mother served me in making the sandwich, but another woman was going to assist my eating it! As I waited for Linda to feed it to me, she gave me half and began to eat the other half herself. Suddenly I realized what she meant: she really wanted to help do the eating! This incident was emblematic of my social life--the way I was too often warmed and excited by the wrong things and separate from, and cold to, another's feelings.

A great worry arose in me and it is something that affects many men. In college there were several women whom I thought pretty and intelligent and gazed at with melting looks, but then, when close bodily proximity came to be, I felt nothing--the seeming flame I had felt before was just cold. This made me feel deeply incomplete as a man, and I was afraid that there wasn't any answer.

How often this happens, and how many men want to be warmer, is evidenced by the explosive popularity of prescription drugs such as Viagra. But while a chemical remedy is presented, the deep cause of insufficient response in how a man sees, remains generally unknown.

Some years later, in an Aesthetic Realism lesson--the one place I ever really thought I would get a solution for this--I spoke about my concern. I was very surprised when Mr. Siegel asked me if I was against my own conceit. "Do you believe," he asked, "there is a desire on your part...to combat [your] lofty tendencies?" There was! He explained what was not present in any book dealing with the subject--and I had read quite a bit--that this difficulty about potency was an elaborate way of punishing myself for, he said, "declaring yourself to be better than" people, including women. And I began to see, with great relief, that there was an answer. As my study of Aesthetic Realism continued and I heard incisive criticism of how I had exalted myself and lessened a woman's mind, her ethics--this situation decisively and definitely changed.

And I'm proud that my colleagues and I have been able ask questions in Aesthetic Realism consultations on this subject, such as: Have you felt so ashamed of your desire to use a woman's body without respecting her, that you have been unable to be close to her? Do you think a man can feel the world itself, including in the form of a woman's body, is not good enough to please him? If a man is angry at a woman, which would he rather do: punish her by being cold, withholding himself at a crucial moment, which is deeply mean, or try to strengthen her through being critical with good will, which is the real warmth?

2. Warmth and Coolness in an Etching and Life

Unlike all the disciplines I looked into--without finding the self-knowledge I hoped for--Aesthetic Realism understands the human self, and central in that understanding is its showing how we see the world affects everything in our lives, including sex. In order to understand myself better, I brought this etching in to a class with Eli Siegel only days after beginning to study.

[SHOW SLIDE 1]

As he looked at it, Mr. Siegel, referring to the eye in the upper center, began to ask about the coolness and detachment that had confused me so much. "What you would like to do, is gaze at everything?"

AP Yes.

ES There is an eye here that seems rather uncomfortable and alone -- it
also seems to act as if it's the wisest thing going.

AP That eye is being swallowed by the bird.

ES I don't think this would be swallowed because you make that bird ineffectual....If I looked into the allegory, I would say the bird, being Arnold Perey, wanted to swallow his desire to be one-eyed Arnold Perey looking too composedly at things.

This was true.

Then Mr. Siegel asked, "You are against yourself for being just an observer, but you also don't like to participate?"

"Yes," I said.

And he pointed out the way to solve this is not to do away with being composed, or with observation, but to join those with the desire to be active, energetic--and have a good effect. Mr. Siegel said, "The eye, instead of simply looking, also wants to be somewhat more like these whirling globes." This oneness of observing and actively participating is good will--the encouraging of other people's lives, with the hope that they be stronger and more worthy of respect. This desire is true warmth, and because it is also exact, it has a right coolness, too.

3. Good Will Brings Cool and Warm Honestly Together, in Love

A man can change how he sees the world and women. My life, and my marriage to Barbara Allen, are witness to that. I learned that the purpose of love is not the ownership and conquest I was after, it is to use a woman to like the world with. I changed fundamentally as I learned what this means. I heard beautiful, tough criticism for my unjust and really brutal way of seeing -- wanting to possess a woman, have her absorbed exclusively in me and not have a mind that ranges far and wide, comes to new knowledge; wanting to use her to complain about other people and have her soothe all my presumed hurts by monumental praise of my brilliance--and agreement with me in all matters.

In one class, early in my study, Mr. Siegel explained:

You have the feeling that you, in some way, have conquered the world because a woman is, in a silly fashion, solicitous towards you....[she] fixes the bandages with a little kiss.

And he also said:

You'd like to have a situation with a woman like that with your mother: you'd torment her, she'd forgive you, and life would go on.

Had this not changed I most assuredly would not have the marriage I am grateful to have now.

Shortly before Barbara and I married, I met Mr. Siegel as he was taking an evening walk. It was early spring and the sun, surrounded by glowing red clouds, was setting. Eastward the sky was blue. Mr. Siegel looked up and said--"My hope for you in your marriage is that you be like the sky--as cool as that blue (he pointed) and as passionate as that red."

I love him because my Aesthetic Realism education has made that emotion possible. The lack of bodily feeling in sex that troubled me so much, ended. This is a magnificent change for which I am unboundedly grateful. I love my wife, both body and mind, with a fulness and physical completeness that means so very much to me. I love her depth of thought--her desire to be just to the grandest and subtlest thought in history. I respect what has come from that desire: a new understanding of music and of the flute's capability to cause melting and stirring beauty as she plays it; and the way she teaches what she has learned to men, women, and children. And I am proud to be able to be close to her.

4. A Young Man Learns Aesthetic Realism Today

I describe and comment now on the consultations of Daniel Venner. Born in Maine, where, he told us, "I went fishing, hunting, and had many good times," he also cared for the piano, the mountains of Maine, literature, and computers. After he graduated from college in New York, he began to work in the engineering department of a nonprofit organization, where he is valued for his terrific efficiency, his ability to be calm under pressure.

Mr. Venner had a large desire to care deeply for a woman, to be devoted to someone, but, he told us, he was ashamed of angers that seemed to explode out of nowhere, including towards women. He was at the point of leaving New York to see if somewhere else he would feel better--would "figure out what was causing me to feel I had this great void to fill. I ached for happiness," he wrote. [8-14-99] Then, he learned of Aesthetic Realism.

In his first consultation, he told us he wanted to change his "relation to people--and women especially." We saw a cheerful but serious looking young man with a warm smile, glad to be there, who said, factually, "I can feel a rage with people and then shut down--feel stifled and be unable to express myself."

When we asked which was greater--his temperature when he was angry and protecting himself, or his temperature about understanding a woman, he said wryly, "My temperature about understanding a woman wouldn't melt metal." He was in the midst of a man's confusion about coolness and warmth--a confusion that arises from contempt for the world, which didn't know he had. From this contempt came that feeling of void he wrote of.

We asked him, "Which is more complicated, a woman or the electronic pathways of a computer network?"

DV. The pathways. To me they are more unpredictable and unknown.

Cons. That answer, Mr. Venner, shows lack of respect for the self of a woman.

Many men have felt that women were predictable: all they need to be happy is oneself. Dan Venner said women turned to him for understanding. "All my life," he said, I wanted to please women -- show I care for them by adoring them -- filling their needs at the moment." But there was another side: "If I don't get my adoration in return," he said, "I can get very angry." His previous relationships had failed, and now that he was seeing a woman he hoped to care for, Sharon Kelly, God, how he wanted to be different!

We saw that Dan Venner had a notion of warmth which was simply false. Ellen Reiss describes in The Right Of,

Our egos define "warm" as "making us the most important thing in the world, the way our mothers perhaps did"; and anything that does not do that seems cold to us. [The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, issue no. 1300]

This way of seeing began with Dan Venner's boyhood. "My aunt," he wrote, "was always doting on us and her place had fruit trees. Deer came to eat the apples in the fall. It was a wonderland." He felt his devotion was indispensable to her. When we asked why, he said:

DV. I thought my aunt was missing affection from my uncle and wanted to make up for it with me.

Cons. Do you think that you made it too easy? You thought what she was looking for from life was you?

What does a woman really want, what is real encouragement, real warmth? To be equipped to answer this question, a man has to become intelligent about the women we first knew -- see their inner lives scientifically and artistically. We assigned Mr. Venner to write about his Aunt Tanya: What was she hoping for? Get within her feelings. What criticism did she have of herself? "I see now that I did not care to know her as she hoped," he said. "I looked more for how I affected her."

Daniel Venner had a true desire to be sweet, to be honestly warm--but this was right next to a feeling that he had to be on his guard. He would begin thinking suspiciously about a woman: "What is she up to???" and quickly get to what he called a "misty rage"--at the outset of which, he said, he often would "shut down." We asked if this meant he got to the repose of contempt: "Who cares what I feel--None of you matter--I'm somewhere else." And he said it did.

In one consultation he spoke about a quarrel he had with Sharon Kelly.

DV. We made arrangements to go to a concert with our friends, but that day, Sharon came down with a bad cold and I had to cancel going out. Meanwhile, she felt well enough to go to work anyway. All I know is I started to get into a bad mood and somehow when she came home, I blew up at her.

Cons. Let's look at this scientifically. Was there a certain structure of logic that led up to this anger, or is it like a thunderstorm that flies out of the sea onto the Maine coast?

DV. That's what it feels like.

Mr. Venner told us he had stayed home from work that day to do domestic chores, so Sharon could rest when she got back from work. He cleaned the house, put the laundry in the wash, and waited--but he was saying to himself:

DV. "This would have been a nice day to go out. But Sharon is sick. And look at what I have to clean! The laundry isn't even done yet--the dryer isn't working. When she gets home she'll probably just waltz out to the concert anyway, and I'll be stuck in the house with wet laundry, trying to get it dry for tomorrow."

Cons. The cleaning, the laundry--and Sharon's cold ... were you looking to hate one thing after another?

DV. Yes, I was

Cons. Did you see them as in a conspiracy to get you? -- Then you felt like a hero fighting against some big enemy?

DV. Boy that's the feeling...it just builds and your adrenaline starts to get going!

Cons. Do you think Sharon has enough goodness and sense to see what you are doing and appreciate it?

DV. Yes I do. Thank you. I felt awful.

In The Right Of, Ellen Reiss describes what was going on in him, when she writes:

In our desire for contempt, we hope the outside world is cold, because a cold world is a world to which we, in our sensitivity, can feel superior. If things are truly warm to us, we will have to feel grateful to them! [TRO 1300]

"It really started to get clear in my mind," he told us in a later consultation--"that I have an attitude to the world!"

Dan Venner is changing, because the way he sees the world and the inner lives of women is changing. His colleagues at work have seen he only rarely gets into a "mood." He is studying the opposites in objects, and people, and has written about, for example, freedom and order in a musical composition; heaviness and lightness in an East Side building. The young man who felt, with desperation, that life was a void is coming to feel that the world itself is not the cold, inimical place he had once thought--that, in fact, it can be a warm, and unexpected friend. He and Sharon Kelly have been closer and their conversations are deeper.

My colleagues and I are proud to be part of this ongoing education--and that men like Daniel Venner are learning how to make sense of warmth and coolness in their lives: making them happier and kinder.

____________________________________________________

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.

The Terrain Gallery / Aesthetic Realism Foundation

2005-04-02T13:07:00.000-08:00

This is the 50th year of the Terrain Gallery's steady artistic and philosophic presence in the New York City art scene. And the Terrain is celebrating its 50th Anniversary!

Soon there will be an anniversary exhibition--look for it, and the exciting works of many artists which will be shown.

Visit the Aesthetic Realism Foundation / Terrain Gallery website -- learn about the history of the Terrain -- and read the articles in the news about the Terrain, its exhibitions, and the Aesthetic Realism art history and criticism that are unique to this Gallery.

Additional Links

[ HISTORY ][ SITE MAP ][ ELI SIEGEL on BEAUTY ][ EXHIBITIONS ][ SPEAKERS ][ CLASSES ]

More Resources Sustaining Rev. Wayne J. Plumstead

2005-03-15T12:46:00.000-08:00

I am glad to bring to your attention two articles. One is by Winnie Stubbs, the lay leader and Chairperson of the Personnel Committee of the church pastored by Rev. Wayne Plumstead whose writings I tell about in a recent entry. And one article is by Jack Plumstead, the father of Wayne Plumstead.

The careful article by Mrs. Stubbs is posted on "Friends of Aesthetic Realism--Countering the Lies" under this title: Statement by Winnie Stubbs, Lay Leader, Park United Methodist Church (Bloomfield, NJ). To read her Statement about Rev. Wayne Plumstead, click here.

And the moving article by Jack Plumstead, whom I have had the pleasure of knowing for many years, can be seen too on the "Friends of Aesthetic Realism" website. You can find it under the title Statement by Jack Plumstead (Father of Rev. Wayne Plumstead).

Under the title Aesthetic Realism, Ethics, & Literature: February 2005 further links are provided to the above pages sustaining Wayne Plumstead, United Methodist minister.

An article that you should know about is one in which Rev. Plumstead is quoted criticizing "dotbusters." This is a term used in Jersey City, where he was then pastor, for persons who attacked Indian-Americans of Hindu faith. The article was in Hinduism Today, November, 1987, and can be seen on their website. To read Wayne Plumstead in Hinduism Today click here.

Anti racism resources

[ "On Racism & How to End It" ] [ "Poems by Eli Siegel about Martin Luther King and America" ] [ Aesthetic Realism and the Answer to Racism ] [ "The Genome & Equality" ] [ "Words, Truth, & the Confederate Flag" ] [ "Fascism, Understood At Last!" ] [ "Aesthetic Realism: The Solution to Racism" ] [ "Contempt, the Cause of Racism" ] [ "Queen's Visit to Amritsar" ] [ "In Contempt the Root of Racism Lies" ] [ "Prejudice Changes to Respect" ] [ "Students Learn, Prejudice Is Defeated!" ] [ Mathematics vs. Prejudice" ] [ "Aesthetic Realism and the Anthropology of Africa" ]

Eli Siegel: A Brief Biography

2005-02-19T14:16:00.000-08:00

I am glad to reprint this biographical information about Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, with whom I studied from 1968-1978. I want this information, which is exact although it is brief, to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. And so I am reprinting it on this weblog to add my voice to many others.

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ELI SIEGEL (1902-1978), poet, critic, philosopher, educator, grew up in Baltimore, Maryland.* In 1925 his "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" won the esteemed Nation Poetry Prize. "I say definitely," William Carlos Williams was to write of it, "that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world." Beginning in 1941, the year he founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, Mr. Siegel gave thousands of lectures on poetry, history, economics — all the arts and sciences. And he gave thousands of individual lessons to men, women, and children, which taught a new way of seeing the world based on this principle: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."

These lessons are the basis of Aesthetic Realism consultations now given at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York and by telephone worldwide. There are also public seminars and dramatic presentations, and classes, including a workshop in the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method — the educational method used with historic success for over 25 years in classrooms from elementary school through college.

Among Mr. Siegel's many published works are Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism; Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1958 (John Henry Faulk, speaking of the poems in this book, said on CBS radio, "Eli Siegel makes a man glad he's alive"); Hail, American Development, containing 178 poems, including 32 translations; James and the Children: A Consideration of Henry James's "Turn of the Screw"; and Goodbye Profit System: Update.

Eli Siegel taught how crucial it is for people, in order to like themselves, to want to know and respect other people and the world. The following passionate, logical, musical lines from "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" stand for that just way of seeing — which he had all the time:

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;
And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world!

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MORE ABOUT ELI SIEGEL

[Preface to Self and World by Eli Siegel] [Poetry of Eli Siegel] [Lectures by Eli Siegel] [Essays by Eli Siegel] [Tribute written by Hon. Elijah H. Cummings, of the Congressional Black Caucus, in the U.S. Congressional Record.]

Rev. Wayne Plumstead Writes on the Aesthetics of Religion

2005-02-12T13:46:00.000-08:00

Over the years I have had many conversations with Rev. Wayne Jack Plumstead of the United Methodist Church. How he sees the aesthetics of religion is important in the history of religious thought. The junction of religion and art is a deeply traditional junction, honored by people for thousands of years. There is religious painting in the Sistine Chapel and in the spacious underground temple chambers of the Hopi in Oraibi, New Mexico; religious dancing not only among the ancient Greeks but among the ancient San people of the Kalahari Desert, South Africa; religious singing not only in Irish monasteries of the 14th century but Egypt, the Congo, India, China, Tibet since time immemorial.

And yet what Reverend Plumstead says about the relation of religion and aesthetics is new. In his education with Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, and with Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, Rev. Plumstead has been encouraged to see with ever greater width and and scope just how much that relation takes in.

To inform you as well as I can about his work, I place the following links on this weblog:

"How Much of the World Does Jesus Ask Us to Include?" by Wayne Jack Plumtead. This was published in The Circuit Rider, the national journal of the United Methodist Church.
[Another link to this article is in the United Methodist Publishing House online index to the Circuit Rider.]
In his weblog, "The Aesthetics of Religion" Rev. Plumstead writes a message to his visitors which begins: "On this blog I will be posting writings of mine and others that tell what I have learned from the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, founded by the American educator and poet Eli Siegel in 1941, about the relation of religion and aesthetics. What I learned has revolutionized not only my way of seeing religion, but my entire life as well. I am pleased and very excited to share it with you all."
In an article announcing a Parenting Workshop in Bloomfield Life, Rev. Plumstead is quoted as saying that the panel of Aesthetic Realism consultants "will speak about what parents need to know in order to get the true respect of their children." -- A most crucial subject!
Also in Bloomfield Life, Rev. Wayne Plumstead writes about the student massacre in Littleton Colorado, under the title "Contempt Kills." Here he tells of the deadly effects of that lessening of other human beings, and the world itself, which Aesthetic Realism explains. And states: "I have seen vividly that no person can commit an act of violence against another if they see the depths of that person’s feelings as real as their own. " That kind of seeing--to see as real others' feelings--is one of the most essential things in successful art.

I hope everyone sees the immediate practicality of aesthetics for religion--in the striking meaning given to it by Rev. Plumstead.

Sincerely, Arnold Perey

On Socrates' Death. An allegory concerning Eli Siegel and an unimportant liar.

2005-02-04T16:19:00.000-08:00

A Dramatic and Cautionary Tale about an Unknown and Very Unimportant Person

There once was a young man of ancient Greece named Milos. And Milos knew Socrates. He did not like Socrates because the great man asked far too many questions. And even worse, though he said he knew nothing, he knew more than Milos.

Now Milos had a mother who regarded him as a gift to Greece. And she thought of Socrates as a much-overrated busybody and heretic. And Milos was not immune to either the praise his mother gave him or the blame she laid upon others.

Milos was interested in power. And when he attended the Dialogues of Socrates he felt he should be teaching the students, not that old philosopher. Listening to Socrates made him sleepy. When the youths would exclaim “What a great man!” and eagerly discuss new ideas, as they came from afternoons when Socrates conversed freely with all, Milos was angry. He wanted them to say “That Milos! What a great mind!” and discuss his exploits at gaming and not the arguments of Socrates. But they didn’t. “I should be the toast of Athens,” thought Milos, and grumbled to himself while looking as pleasant as he could.

“He forces them to attend,” he would say about the people who couldn’t get enough of listening to Socrates, the people who came again and again, the people who felt a man like Socrates was born once in a hundred years (if that often). “It’s expected of them to come,” he grumbled. “If they don’t come to 9 out of 10 dialogues they are chastised. It’s that infamous student of Socrates named Plato that makes them come. Perhaps if I blacken the name of Plato they will stay away.” And he tried.

In the Dialogues, when the students in their turn questioned Socrates, and he answered even the most difficult questions with depth and sweetness and thorough (and modest) logic, it made Milos angrier than ever. “How could he know so much,” he would say under his breath and grit his teeth.

“Perhaps,” thought Milos, “if I remove my garments and run naked through the marketplace people would see the originality of my mind.” And so he did. But the people of Athens went on buying their vegetables and fruit, and fish, and bread as always and were neither sufficiently scandalized nor sufficiently impressed to suit Milos. “Never mind, I’ll try it again another time,” he said comfortingly to himself.

Milos began to lie in earnest about Socrates. He made up offenses which had never taken place, for the great man who only had spoken to Milos a few times wished him well. He’d tried to teach Milos, but without success. Unfortunately, in asking Socratic questions of Milos, a person was addressed who hated to learn from another. “Too many questions!” said the young man sneeringly to his mother, meaning, “Too many questions for me to maintain my usual level of narcissism.”

Milos sought revenge. He told everyone he could, in the council, the marketplace, the homes of friends, that Socrates was trying to tear down the great tradition of Greece: the worship of the living gods—Apollo, Zeus, Dionysius. He told the priests how the old man believed in a higher power and had questioned the gods’ very existence, despite the fact that everyone could see them, made of marble and wood and gold and paint, in the city’s “cultus” temples of worship. He accused Socrates of leading a new and heretical cultus in which he was the object of worship himself.

There is no record as to whether the lies of the young vermin, Milos, had an effect or not. For there were already some local officials and jealous intellectuals whose lust to be superior had spurred in them a sullen and restless anger at the brilliance and plentitude of ideas coming from the philosophic school of Socrates.

And so, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, more than 2000 years afterwards, Professor Edward Taylor of Oxford and Edinburgh tells how a "half-witted" and "fanatic" prosecutor indicted Socrates for “impiety.” And at the trial vague charges like "corrupting the youth" were made. And the court, “incensed” at the great man for telling them truthfully that he “merited the treatment of an eminent benefactor”—and not a trial for crimes he did not commit— sentenced him to death by drinking the cup of poison hemlock. The greatest philosophic innovator of Greece was to pay with his life.

In the famous depiction of Socrates by the French painter David, the man of thought, condemned to death by suicide, discourses serenely in prison with his friends and students—the poisoned cup in his raised hand. In the Dialogue Crito, his friend begs him to escape, to flee Athens, and not take his life as the law has dictated. But Socrates cannot not bring himself to flee. He has done no wrong and will not break the law now.

After Athens mourned the loss of the man who reasoned nobly about beauty, ethics, life and death, and equality—the man who believed knowledge was happiness—Milos continued his campaign of revenge. He wanted to demolish utterly the contemporary who dared to know more than himself. And so he started in on Socrates’ posthumous reputation. He would whisper to known purveyors of the lowest gossip; he would grasp the collar of whomever he could in the marketplace and say, spitting ever so slightly, “How great was Socrates, really? He said self-knowledge made for a happy life. But how happy was he? He committed suicide.”

Yes, Socrates is safe in the bosom of history. And Milos is no longer remembered. The perfidy of ancient Athens, however, is remembered; and it always will be. Now, in our time, we have to ask: How much is this injustice, oh this murderous injustice, in action this very day?

Ellen Reiss has written about the death of Eli Siegel every year since 1987. The issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known titled "Always: Love of Reality" is online now.

Rev. Wayne Jack Plumstead writes about Eli Siegel's dying in the Countering the Lies website (see his statement).

Dr. Arnold Perey writes about Eli Siegel's death in the Countering the Lies website in relation to the death of George Harrison and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (see his statement).

Devorah Tarrow, sociologist & Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes about death with dignity in the 2005 Academy Award winning film Million Dollar Baby in relation to the loved New York actor Jerry Ohrbach's death and that of Eli Siegel in 1978.

Countering the Lies about Aesthetic Realism, about Its Founder, Eli Siegel, and about Others

2005-01-30T19:41:00.000-08:00

Some of the vilest and yet most transparent lies I have ever seen are to be found in web pages written by Michael Bluejay (formerly Michael Fabrizio) whom I knew, slightly, when he was a small child.

I was friendly with his mother and father at the time. I very briefly studied dance in a class his mother gave, together with a number of other students, but I soon realized that dance was not my strong point. Nevertheless, I found that her employment of the Aesthetic Realism method made her an excellent teacher and I benefited from what I learned about movement and enjoyed the way she taught. At the time she was on the faculty of Long Island University.

Along with his own lies, Michael Bluejay has posted literally pages of lies by some anonymous individuals. These anonymities he obviously encouraged by offering to put their quite unbelievable writings online.

I despise the desire to hurt people by lying about them publicly. And so I recommend to anyone who encounters this "flotsam of cybespace" while you are surfing the web--go to Friends of Aesthetic Realism--Countering the Lies, visit the Aesthetic Realism Foundation web site, read some of Eli Siegel's beautiful prose. And I imagine I'll reprint some of the funny satires that are now on "Countering the Lies" right here on this blog.

More later,
Best regards,
AP

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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?'

Look for me on ebay

2005-01-20T13:36:00.000-08:00

I have just put a short listing of myself on ebay. You can find it here: Arnold Perey, anthropologist, Aesthetic Realism consultant.

If you're registered on ebay yourself, you can have a page too. It's a very visible Web site and people can pretty easily find you there and see what you want to say. Some of my enthusiasms are posted there, in outline form, and soon I'll go back and write a bit more.

Eventually I'd like to have my new book Gwe,Young Man of New Guinea: a novel against racism on ebay and see if it's practical to sell copies there.

Till later,
AP

Photography As an Art Form

2004-12-15T08:20:00.000-08:00

I wrote an essay on this subject for Wikipedia

The aesthetics of photography is a matter that continues to be discussed. Is photography an art? --or is it just mechanical reproduction of an image. If photography is authentically art, what makes a photograph beautiful?

The controversy began with the earliest images "written with light," i.e., photographs. Niépce and later workers were met with wonder--the image was so exact--and yet was it really an art form? What is the criterion that differentiates art from mechanical replication? Does the camera function in a way analogous to the Cezanne's brush, Ingres' pencil?

Clive Bell in his essay "Art" states that only one thing can distinguish art from what is not art: "significant form." Bell wrote:

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art. Click here to see Bell's seminal essay, "Art"

That quality, significant for itself, is described in this principle by Eli Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites." Put another way, he wrote: "In reality opposites are one; art shows this." See Eli Siegel's "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?"

Can this criterion be applied to photography? If so, is it the opposites in oneness that make some forms "significant" -- so they stir the aesthetic emotions -- and some forms NOT significant? Why does the image of a child on crutches playing in Spain, 1933, by Cartier Bresson stir the aesthetic emotions when a poorly composed photograph of the most perfect rose may not?

This question has been dealt with successfully by the Aesthetic Realism understanding of beauty. It is through this understanding that one can show definitively that photography is art, not mechanical reproduction of an image.

So again, what makes one form significant and another form not significant; one photograph beautiful and another perhaps not beautiful?

Some of the most important writing on this subject is to be found on the web site of Len Bernstein, hotographer, historian and critic. Bernstein describes, in a notable way, the Aesthetic Realism understanding of photography as an art form.

His essays have been published, for example, in Apogee PhotoMagazine and Photographica World: The Journal of the Photographic Collectors Club of Great Britain.

On his web site he introduces the subject as follows:

"When I began to photograph more than 25 years ago, I felt I found a way of expressing myself that met something so deep inside me that I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. Walking with my camera, the city streets seemed transformed--friendlier, more interesting--and I spent hours searching for dramatic situations, trying to capture the right moment. Looking through the viewfinder, what I saw had new value for me, boredom and loneliness seemed to vanish, and I wished I could feel that way all the time. And hoping to learn what made a photograph successful, I avidly studied the history and technique of photography.
"My hopes were met when I first heard this magnificent statement by Eli Siegel, the American critic and founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism: 'All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.' This is the criterion for beauty that centuries of artists, philosophers, people in all walks of life, have searched for; the explanation of what makes a photograph good and how our personal questions are the questions of art--dignified and cultural! I've had the thrill of testing it in thousands of instances, from the first known photograph taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826-27 to the most modern work of today."

See an online exhibition of Bernstein's photographs.

Likewise, important articles on photography as an art form, written from the Aesthetic Realism point of view, will be found on the "Dienes & Dienes" web site. See, for example Louis Dienes's "On a Photograph by Eugene Atget" and his illustrated poem "Black and White," originally composed for his own exhibition of photographs, which begins: "The day black and white got a break..." .

For more on Aesthetic Realism and art, including photography, see the Terrain Gallery website.

--Arnold Perey, PhD

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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.

Art and Science Reconciled

2004-12-01T10:33:00.000-08:00

On the stucture in common between art and science

Important new work is being done by Rosemary Plumstead and Donita Ellison, both of whom have taught at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York City.

Ms. Plumstead, now retired, a distinguished science teacher whose students passed their statewide examinations at a rate unheard of elsewhere, and Ms. Ellison, a sculptor as well as a teacher of art history, have presented pioneering papers on this cutting-edge subject.

One of their joint papers -- "The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Shows the Thrilling Structure in Common Between Art and Science!" -- was presented at the 31st World Congress of the International Society for Education through Art, August 2002, New York City and is published in the Proceedings of the society.

This paper considered the opposites of delicacy and power common to both the anatomical structure of the human hand and the composition of paleolithic cave paintings -- in particular, the technique of the paleolithic artist in rendering such animals as bison and deer.

A truly pioneering exploration of what art and science inevitably have in common.

Most recently, at the New York State Art Teachers Association annual meeting in Rye, NY, they presented an amazing paper on the relation of embryonic development to the creation of a work in clay, focusing on the opposites of sameness and change underlying both.

My heartiest congratulations to Ellison and Plumstead!

See http://www.donitaellison.net

Their basis, the great "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" by Eli Siegel -- the first publication formally expressing the Siegel Theory of Opposites in Relation to Aesthetics is to be found on the Terrain Gallery website.

A Novel Against Racism

2004-11-30T10:38:00.000-08:00

A new novel, Gwe: Young Man of New Guinea, is nearing completion. It should be available within the month.

I have subtitled it "A Novel Against Racism," and it deals with the cause of prejudice.

The basis of this work is in Aesthetic Realism, the great philosophy founded by Eli Siegel in 1941 -- the basis for my website A New Perspective for Anthropology, http://www.perey-anthropology.net.

The book brings real anthropology together with respectful imagination about the inner lives of people of an ancient culture. It is based on real events some of which I witnessed and took part in, and some of which I learned of by people living in New Guinea when they happened.

Best,

AP

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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?'