In his definition of courage, Eli Siegel, the founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, writes: “Courage is the belief that the way things are is not against oneself, and therefore that these things should not be gone away from.”

            Aesthetic Realism has given people the means to study consciously how to honestly like and believe in the world, which is the one means for our being truly courageous. And it also explains the constant opposition in a person to liking the world: the desire to build oneself up by having contempt for it.

             I once felt like a terrific coward because of my fears, which I was ashamed to speak of. I was afraid to stay home alone and afraid to leave my home. On the other hand, I saw myself as politically courageous. Having lived through the Depression of the 1930s, I felt an economy that permitted so much poverty and suffering needed to be changed. I spoke out about my views when I was employed, and also with people I met. But I knew I was very suspicious of, and cold to, the individual people I came in contact with. I could not make sense of these two ways in myself. I did not know then that I was in a fight between wanting to care for people and the world and wanting to have contempt for them.

    I am grateful for what Eli Siegel explained: that my fears came from my desire to dismiss and have contempt for the world and people. I learned that contempt is the cause of a person’s timidity, cowardice, and fear—some of the painful ways the self will punish itself for being unfair to the world. And I was to learn that wanting to see the depths of another person means you have to give up the false concentration on yourself, as against everything else. This is one form of courage.

The Beginning of Courage: Wanting to Know

From my earliest years I had felt that this is a world that should be looked on with suspicion, and that the family seemed the only safe place.

            By the time I began studying Aesthetic Realism in 1947, at the age of 32, I was having less and less to do with the world—my contempt was dangerously close to incapacitating me. I had gotten to a painful state where a comfortable preference on my part had changed to an inability: a fear of going out in to the world. In a beautifully critical counter-offensive to my contempt, Mr. Siegel said to me in an Aesthetic Realism lesson:

            “You think you are too interested in yourself and not just enough to other things….The first relation of a person is with the world. You should use your mother, sister, husband and child to symbolize this relation.”

            I had made what I saw as a cozy world of my family as against the whole world, and I learned we cannot be courageous in a world we see as inimical. Mr. Siegel’s purpose always was to encourage me to have a belief in the world based on the facts. He said to me:

            “To be learning something, means that you are saying the world has to do with Irene Reiss. When you are alone you don’t welcome the world….The more you go after knowledge when you are alone, the more courage you will have when meeting things.”

            He was right, and I love the way he fought to stop me from going away from the world. He taught me to see differently, and my life began to change as I learned to see people with more depth—people I met, and people in literature. “The world, art, and self explain each other” Aesthetic Realism explains, “ each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”   I learned about myself from characters in novels, such as Madame Bovary and Jane Eyre; and I saw with wonder and excitement how opposites were in the very structure of the work I had done in the past: bookkeeping—for instance, receipts and disbursements, assets and liabilities, debits and credits. As I learned how the world and people have an aesthetic structure in common—the oneness of opposites—I felt I was related to more and more things, and the contempt that had made me feel so afraid was effectively opposed.

            In his definition of Courage, Mr. Siegel writes: “Courage is an organic like of the facts, making for a wish to know them.” Every woman and man needs to learn what I did: that wanting to know what is true in any situation that may arise, enables us to honestly like ourselves. I had always looked to feel slighted and hurt by people. It was a way of justifying my case against the world. Because of the education I received, I began to ask myself questions such as: How does this person see the world? Is she or he just out to hurt me, or trying to be happy, as I am? Trying to understand made me feel kinder and more courageous.

            For more than 30 years I witnessed Eli Siegel’s constant desire to see what is true, as I attended magnificent classes on economics, literature, history, the arts and sciences, and the everyday questions of humanity. And I witnessed his great courage as his work was subjected to a cruel boycott by the press and literary establishment— people who were jealous of his honesty and tremendous knowledge. “Real courage,” he wrote, “which wishes to be graceful, is always after the facts.” This is the courage I saw.

A Woman of Great Courage

I speak now about a woman of South Africa, Emma Mashinini, who I admire very much. As a black woman living under apartheid—the brutal system of institutional racism—she devoted her life to fighting for the rights and dignity of her people. In 1975 she founded the militant Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union of South Africa, which by 1992 had grown to 80,000 members. As a leading woman in the trade union movement, she was harassed constantly by government police. She was imprisoned in solitary confinement for six months and was tortured. This did not stop her struggle for justice.

            In her autobiography titled Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life ( Routledge New York, 1991), she tells vividly of what apartheid did to a person, a marriage, children—and the pain is palpable. Through her experience, we can see what millions of black people endured. She was courageous and used the pain and degradation she was in the midst of, not to think only of her comfort, but to care more for people!

Contempt, the Cause of Racism and the Profit System

            Emma Mashinini was born in Johannesburg in 1929. All of her life—until 1994 and the first all-race elections—she lived under the brutal political and economic system in which 95% of South Africa’s 36 million people, because they were not classified as white, were subordinated and exploited by the white minority.

            In his definition of Courage, Mr. Siegel writes: “Courage is a love of the external, and a belief in it, even as we fight it.”

            The world Emma Mashinini met was a fascist country that exemplified a double affliction of contempt: racism and also the profit system, which is based on one man’s making money from the labor and very lives of others, without regard for their welfare. That millions of men, women, and children in South Africa had ravaged lives was unmistakable and criminal. Most of them lived in abject poverty, were denied the right to vote, deprived of decent medical care and education, restricted in their travel, and told where to live.

            Under these conditions, it is a beautiful thing that instead of feeling hopeless in the face of the powers stacked against her, Emma Mashinini had a belief in the world large enough to feel it was a world worth fighting for.

   When Emma was 7 years old, she and her parents and her six sisters and brother were forced to move. Their home was bulldozed to make way for the building of a white suburb. This was the fate of 3 million Africans forced to leave their homes and move to poor areas, euphemistically called “homelands.”

            Her mother was a dressmaker and her father worked for a dairy, at subsistence wages for long hours, but their circumstances were better than those of many other black people. Emma writes:

            “The memory of our little home…always fills me with happiness….There was one room and a kitchen. This one room served as a dining room and a bedroom. Six of us slept on the floor, with thick blankets as mattresses…no bathroom or running water in the house. On our kitchen dresser hung blue Delft china cups, and on the dresser were crystal glasses and shining brass vases.”

            And she tells of how, when her mother went to town, she would wear gloves and always returned holding a bunch of flowers and a cake. Her mother wanted to feel, with all the misery and injustice around her, there were still things in this world she could like. Emma Mashinini writes: “From my childhood, because of my mother, I grew to love beautiful things.”

            It is very moving to see this desire to like the external world in the face of desperate and brutal conditions—conditions which contributed to her father’s desertion and breakup of the family.

            Next week, the conclusion.

        Irene Reiss’s article, “We Can Feel More Alive at Any Age,” has appeared in Idaho Senior News and other newspapers. She and her husband Daniel Reiss, both of whom are now in their nineties, have published letters on the answer to the catastrophic cost of healthcare for everyone including senior citizens. Mrs. Reiss's seminar papers at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation, given with the consultants of The Later Surprise, have included discussions of Lillian Wald, Frances Perkins, Sarah Delano Roosevelt, Imelda Marcos, and Mary Pickford. Some titles of these seminars are: How Can We Look Good in Our Own Eyes?; The Fight in Women Between Energy and Weariness; How Much Feeling Should We Have for People?; Honest Criticism—Are Women Looking for It? 

 
Irene and Daniel Reiss