Nancy Huntting , Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
This issue of The Right Of is about a hugely important matter: art is a guide to justice in this world. Through “A Literary Device—& Everyone’s Own Self” you will see people of the past and now with greater respect, including yourself. You will learn how an artistic technique represents our largest desire. Read this groundbreaking—and delightful—new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!
The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:
Dear Unknown Friends:
We are serializing The Renaissance Shows Self, by Eli Siegel, an amazing and beautiful lecture of 1970. Using the book English Renaissance Poetry, edited by John Williams, Mr. Siegel discusses poems, and passages from poems, written around 400 to 530 years ago. They could seem distant from our lives now—yet oh, how not distant, how immediate to us, they are. Through them Mr. Siegel is illustrating what the self is: the self so personal and particular to each of us, which yet is the human self, something all people of every time and place have in common. Those poems have our own lives in them: they’re a means of our seeing who we are.
As I have described during this serialization, Eli Siegel is the philosopher who understood and explained the self. The explanation is outlined in this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The central opposites in everyone are self and world. In everything we do—whether we’re walking, kissing, studying, eating, arguing, hoping, voting—our self is always affected by and dealing in some fashion with that which is not ourselves: in other words, the world. And the self’s great, continuous need is to make those opposites one: to care for and assert what we are and at the same time be just—deeply just, grandly just—to a world of things and people other than ourselves. The fact that billions of people day after day do not fulfill this self-need does not change the fact that it is the largest we have.
Mr. Siegel described too the central fight in the self. It is between the desire to respect the reality outside ourselves, and the desire to have contempt for it. Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And from it come all the injustice in history and all the coldness, unkindness, and cruelty in everyday life.
A Literary Device Represents Us
In the section of the lecture published here, Mr. Siegel speaks about something that can seem so literary, so technical: personification. Personification is among those things that have been called literary devices. And it is one. Personification is the giving of human qualities and ways to inanimate objects or abstractions. Yet Aesthetic Realism shows this: everything that is part of artistic technique arises from something elemental and insistent in the human self, and embodies what we’re looking for in our own daily lives, in our feelings, thoughts, and actions.
Here, Mr. Siegel says that personification has fundamentally to do with what the self is, including our own self. That is a tremendous idea, new in art criticism and human understanding. In this talk he does not state specifically what personification says about the self; but based on the rest of the lecture and on Aesthetic Realism as such, there are some things we can see about personification as standing for the self’s desire. And those things are of urgent importance—also hope-giving importance.
There has been in humanity over the millennia a drive to personify. Something of it was present in ancient Greece when (for instance) trees, groves, brooks, were seen as inhabited by, represented by, made inseparable from and equivalent to a being with human thought and feeling: a dryad or naiad…Read more