The purpose of Aesthetic Realism is to present a philosophy of the world and of the self. It is to show what it is a self wants, what it must go after if it is to be wholly happy. Aesthetics is absolutely necessary for this, if the word is fully understood and wholly seen.

Mr. Siegel discussed the meaning of art and how what the artist is going after all the time is what every person also is going after, and must go after to feel good. Where people have been happy, whether they knew about Aesthetic Realism or not, he said, the principles of art have operated.

Mr. Siegel read the Aesthetic Realism definition of art--the joining of self and not the self so that they are one, showing sameness and difference, togetherness and separateness--and the Funk and Wagnall dictionary definition. The dictionary definition is useful in that it emphasizes original meanings of art that have been lost in the popular and sloppy connotations of the word. Art has always had to do with skill, with organization, with knowledge, with work, said Mr. Siegel. The artist of the middle ages was an artisan, a worker or craftsman. He took materials and organized them. How good a job he did depended on a combination of himself the object. Mr. Siegel pointed out that this is every person's problem. How he, as self, is going to meet objects of the world. The neurotic, whether he knows it or not, is deeply against art and aesthetics. He meets reality and pretends to like it, when actually he is against it, sees it as an enemy. How good a job could a painter or a cabinet maker do if he really hated his tools, his canvas, or his piece of wood? The utmost in art is a complete fairness object. There is a making one of artist and material, and the result of this is art. This combination is also work, said Mr. Siegel. It is a person doing something with something. Aesthetic Realism's purpose, he said, is to show that this is exactly what is going on with a person.  We are meeting objects, reality all the time. How much we can make a happy one of self and world, that much we will be happy or aesthetic. Like the artist, we must be fair to objects.We must like reality.

Mr. Siegel said that the useful phase and the aesthetic phase in art are really one. For example, a portrait can please a family because it is of a member of the family; it can also hang in a museum as a work of art a hundred years later. A building can be useful as a library, and still be a beautiful example of architecture. The work and aesthetic phases can really be seen as doing good, said Mr. Siegel.

Life, he said, in the same way is an aesthetic problem of having the world do the utmost good to us, and we doing the utmost good to the world. Life is different from art, he said, in that we don't know the end. Still, a person knows he wants to be happy; that is to have a sensible relation with things. Happiness, Mr. Siegel said, is an organization of facts with what we are. But before one can please himself he must know himself; and the reality being dealt with. Wherever good art has resulted, this has been true. There has been knowledge. And to be happy, one must be interested in all of oneself and all of reality. We would not be satisfied with a coat that only covered one arm. Like the artist, said Mr. Siegel, if self and world are to be dealt with beautifully, a good job must be done with reality as a whole. Where art reaches it highest point of relation of a self and everything else, it is the highest good sense, beauty and usefulness.

The basic principle of art, of making a one of opposites, is clearly seen in the Aesthetic Realism definition of art: the joining of the self and not the self so that they are one, showing sameness and difference, togetherness and separateness. But this can be seen in many other opposites, all of which are put together in good art and which have to be put together in every person.

To show some of these opposites, Mr. Siegel read one of Francois Villon's most famous poems, which contains the well-known refrain: "But where are the snows of yester-year?"

Every person, said Mr. Siegel, wants to be free and precise at once. He wants to be able to do what he wants, and yet be orderly and accurate. This poem of Villon's brings these opposites together beautifully and aesthetically.  There is a feeling here of going into strange places, when Villon wonders what has happened to famous women of the past: Heloise, Joan of Arc, Charlemagne's mother. Yet the poem is written in a strict, exact form, the ballade.  Also the form is complicated and intricate, but at the same time the poem is simple, sentimental. There is also the mingling of conscious and unconscious in the poem. This is from the translation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

Said Mr. Siegel, Villon has said what he wanted, which comes from his unconscious--that is, the selecting of these ideas, these objects; but it has been given a conscious form, a certain arrangement. And just as a person wants to feel that things can change but also are, so Villon has accomplished that here. In the rhymes we feel movement, difference and yet the rhyme gives also a feeling of sameness, being like another word. And the opposites of speed and restfulness in the poem, of unity and diversity, are ones that a person is dealing with and which a neurotic person is dealing with badly. For example, the neurotic will go from doing nothing, being as motionless as possible, to a great deal of furious activity. He has not put together speed and restfulness, not made a one of rest and motion the way a symphony of Beethoven's does, for example.

Mr. Siegel then discussed Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism, and showed how Pope was also aware of the necessity of putting opposites together if good poetry was to result: