Aesthetic Realism and Learning, Part 3

By Eli Siegel

The Reason We Can Learn

The reason we can learn anything at all is the fitness of our minds to what we have to meet. The eye has some relation to light and objects. We have a nose, and we wouldn’t have a nose if there weren’t smelling possibilities in the world. We touch things because reality is touchable. We taste things because reality is tasteable. Particularly, we hear things and see things because hearing and seeing are ways of telling what reality is. So there is this fitness; and it does seem as if reality wanted to be repeated through ourselves. It does seem as if tables wanted to be seen, skies wanted to be seen; and what the world can do wants to be known. If we have eyes, it would be foolish to think that there wasn’t something in the world that corresponded to eyes. Yes, there are aspects of man that seem to be wasteful, but it does seem that the ear fits in with something and the eye fits in with something. If there weren’t this parallel, this fittingness, this counterpoint, this reciprocity, we couldn’t learn. That is what we have to respect: that our eye fits in with something, our ear fits in with something, our tongue fits in with something, alI of us fits in with something.

It can be said that man is an animal more bent on learning than other animals, though all animals learn; and he is so bent on learning that he is different from other animals. There is a quality of being aware of how he learns—that is, himself and the means in himself—and what he learns, which we don’t see in animals, though we see many things like it.

I read a few lines from a poem that I wrote in 1930 about a marriage. These lines are somewhat difficult but they are about the fittingness of what we are and what the world is. This fittingness, put into action, is learning. To learn is to find out just how what we are fits in with what is around us.

I can prelude discussing this poem with a question I once asked a person in an Aesthetic Realism lesson: Was there ever anything that happened to you that you couldn’t have learned something from? She had to say, No, she didn’t think so. The one thing that bad things and good things have in common is that we can learn about both. At the present time, cancer is a subject of more interest than nine-tenths of the flowers of the world, because it would be nicer to know what cancer is than what a rhododendron is. This poem deals with the beginning of learning: the makeup of our bodies, the makeup of our selves, the fittingness of our selves for learning:

There is a fittingness of eye and rose as there is a fittingness of eye and lily, or eye and warehouse.

This something else is the combination of ourselves and the object. Objects are decidedly important because objects truly seen, truly learned, can always tell us something new about ourselves. If we see, for example, a chestnut or an acorn, from then on we’re Joe-plus-acorn, Joe-plus-chestnut. And Joe-plus-chestnut is more important than Joe-without-chestnut. That is what learning is: an organized addition to ourselves; not addition in any narrow sense, because growth is not just addition—something becomes part of us in a more subtle way.

“And thus and thus / This thing goes about its business.” Feeling or learning has gone on: when, for example, blood pressure is measured, there is another way of apprehending things. When little things are seen, smaller than had been—when the electron, for example, can in some way be apprehended—it means that we are learning about the world in a more delicate fashion. The history of man, where it is good, has been on the one hand, his enlarging his point of view, and on the other, the making of it subtle. Learning consists of both: widening and subtilizing; the becoming general and the becoming very specific at the same time. And it seems that this is what reality, at least, doesn’t mind.

“And for eyes is nothing less / Than a world and a rose.” We have the general thing, the world, and the specific thing, a rose. Learning consists, in fact, of being able to be fair to specific things by finding some principle; finding the principle illuminated by the specific thing, and the specific thing given meaning by the principle.

All reality has something in common. Since the rose has the world in it and we have the world in us, and we meet lines and victories, despairs, defeat and hate, ugliness, terror, shocks—the rose in some way is related to these too.

“The rose has all of fate, / The world has all of fate.” Fate is a composition of chance and inevitability. It is very interesting; it is also very difficult. But the rose has fate, and we have fate in us, and the world has—meaning a certain composition of law and chance.

“And don’t you, however, suppose / The eye is for the rose?” This beautiful combination of the rose being for the eye and the eye for the rose, when fully felt, means an interest in learning. If we see that we are for knowing the world and the world is for being known, then we have the greatest love affair the world has ever seen.

“Surely the world mocks / Us and so does the rose.” The world is tricky, definitely. In Greek you have conjugations that don’t work in the right way. There are all kinds of breakings of the rules. However tricky reality is, still reality wants to be known, like a mischievous child. To be interested in learning, there must be some kind of courage. You must be able to feel that something goes on, with all the changes and all the surprises. That is what this means:

Learning is a mingling of courage and love—from courage and love to get to accuracy. Learning is a desire, then, through love to be beautifully fair to things. This means that learning is one way of stating the Aesthetic Realism purpose, which most undoubtedly is: through learning we come to be what we have wanted to be all the time. And the most important thing about learning is that we can even learn what we want.

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