Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

What are our senses for—both physically and in terms of justice to the world?  Does our ability for sensation—for taste, touch, smell, sight, sound—have an ethical meaning, a meaning we need to see and honor in order to like ourselves?  Humor, science, and magnificent poetry meet in “The Senses Are Ethical,” the great new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the final section of the great 1964 lecture we have been serializing: Aesthetic Realism Looks at Sensation. In this talk, Eli Siegel speaks about the senses scientifically, sometimes playfully, richly, surprisingly, always deeply. And as he does, he makes vivid in terms of our very own bodies this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The means by which we hear, see, taste, smell, touch are always a making one of what’s outside us and what’s within our own dear being. Sensation is the oneness of the world-not-us and our intimate, particular self.

Science & Art, Seriousness & Delight

As in so many of Mr. Siegel’s talks, the combination of texts he uses is remarkable. Here, he quotes from works on psychology and neurology—and also from poems (Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes” and Baudelaire’s “Correspondences”); and along with some quite sophisticated scientific descriptions, he uses a charming passage from a high school biology book, about how the scent of peppermint crosses a room. Eli Siegel saw science and art as of each other. He saw real seriousness and real delight—even real humor—as inseparable. And through the way he spoke, he enabled other people to feel that.

The translation of the Baudelaire poem discussed in this talk is by Mr. Siegel himself, and it is beautiful. Kenneth Rexroth, in his New York Times review of Eli Siegel’s Hail, American Development, wrote: “His translations of Baudelaire and his commentaries on them rank him with the most understanding of the Baudelaire critics in any language.”

And since Mr. Siegel concludes this lecture with a poem of his own, and since I’m quoting the Times review, I’ll include just a little more from that review. There is this, about Eli Siegel’s poems: “…all with the same incomparable sensibility at work saying things nobody else could say.” And Rexroth so rightly continues: “I think it’s about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets” (NY Times Book Review, 3-23-69).

His poem at the end of this lecture is titled “Sense Poem; or, Another Word for Sensation.” That poem itself, in what it says but also in the music of its lines, is a oneness of factuality and wonder. The statements in it are so definite, so matter-of-fact—yet one feels mystery. Take, for instance, the ninth line (which, of course, arises from the lines that came before it): “The difficulty was with the ammonia.” There is a humorous, poking little dance in the line through its rhythms and those short i sounds—yet there is also that culminating width, murmur, moan, and delicate traveling in the sound of ammonia: “The difficulty was with the ammonia.”

Beauty & Ethics

Commenting on the first part of this lecture, I spoke about what Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy to show: that there are both beauty and ethics in the very functioning of our senses. They have in their makeup and operation the purpose of our lives: to like the world honestly, to become ourselves through meeting with fullness and exactitude the world other than ourselves….Read more