I'm tremendously happy to join the people of Baltimore in celebrating Eli Siegel, whom I love, with whom I studied for many years, and whose understanding of humanity the world needs so much. I’ll speak a little about his thought and writing in the years he lived in this city. They contain the basis of the philosophy he would found later, and stand for who he was.

     About himself as a young man in Baltimore, he wrote: "I felt that every person owed something to every other person and, indeed, to every other thing [, that] ... the need of every person [is] to be precise about what is not himself." The constant, propelling desire in Mr. Siegel then and always was to know: to see truly things, people, the world itself; to be exact about them. In his 1923 essay "The Scientific Criticism," written in Baltimore, published in the Modern Quarterly, he wrote: "Man should know that there are no limits to his mind .... Only a part of him has been used .... Man’s mind was made to know everything." The sincerity of his desire to know made him 1) the greatest of scholars; and 2) passionate that justice come to people — including economic justice.

     To give just a slight indication of his love of knowledge, I quote from a very early document, written when he was in high school, at Baltimore City College. This is from a letter to his friend A.D. Emmart. Eli Siegel, a month before his 16th birthday, writes about just having finished reading all the works of Shakespeare. And then he writes:

At last! At last! Finally! Finally! I have bought some books. Not a great deal of money expended, it is true, but some. I don’t have to get the best editions of the poets, deluxe, morocco, illustrations .... In fact, I prefer old editions to new. The books I have bought are an edition of Shakespeare and a Goldsmith. The sums that I paid are very, very small. The Shakespeare is an old Globe of 1866, but good enough to be read .... If I can ... get my share of shekels, I’ll buy an eighteenth century edition ... and like Macaulay, make comments on the margin. That is all of Utopia in this life that I want.

     In a 1944 article in the Baltimore Sun, Donald Kirkley wrote this about Mr. Siegel’s purpose 20 years earlier:

He thought "all knowledge was connected — that geology was connected with music, and poetry with chemistry, and history with sports." ... He wished to find ... some principle, unifying all the various manifestations of reality.

     Now I read a short poem he wrote here in Baltimore in 1922. It’s about the hope to know things exactly — which is what he means by the word "objectively." It’s called "A Man in a Far Countree." It’s about him:

     While still a young man, Eli Siegel expressed with logic and passion something it’s urgent for people to see now: that every person, past or present, is as real as oneself is. In a 1923 Baltimore essay published in the Modern Quarterly and titled "The Middle Ages, Say," he writes:

There were people who lived in the Middle Ages and, who, so, suffered and enjoyed; the one difference between us and them is that their pains and pleasures are over and ours are not. These people are our fellowmen over the years.

Mind needs nourishment, care and training all by itself .... And ... millions and millions of people from the beginning of the world ... have not got this mind’s nourishment, care and training. Their lives were forced to be led so, to get food enough for their stomachs, was all that they could do .... Now if nobody made the land, it is evident, to a really normal human, that everybody living has a right to own it and should own it. 

     Beginning in Baltimore, Mr. Siegel caused enormous love and respect in people. But he was also met with anger, because he had so much knowledge and was completely honest. People in established positions, and others, were furious they had so much to learn from him and couldn’t feel superior to him. Therefore this memorial celebration stands for ethics and the future of America, because it says: We’re proud to respect what’s honest and great; we’re proud to honor Eli Siegel!

One of the greatest contributions to humanity is Eli Siegel’s understanding of love. What love is and why it fails have eluded people for thousands of years, but no more! The purpose of love, Mr. Siegel stated, is to like the world. Through loving another person, we should care more for everything — our families, justice, objects, history, books, the feelings of people near and far. We’ve studied and taught this principle for over thirty years, and seen, without exception, it is true, and it meets people’s hopes to love another and feel they deserve to be loved.

     Mr. Siegel showed that love fails because we use a person to get away from and even despise the world. Both of us once saw love as a haven from a dull, often cruel world — where we could be adored and superior to everyone. Then in Aesthetic Realism classes, Mr. Siegel taught us that this contempt was the cause of the fighting, sarcasm, and hopelessness we thought inevitable in love. We heard beautiful questions. For instance, he asked me [Margot Carpenter]: "Do you see a man as someone to know or to show off with?"; "What do you want to depend on — who you are or how pleasing you can make yourself?"; and "Do you want to manage a man or use him to see the whole world better?" And Mr. Siegel asked me [Robert Murphy]: "Do you use a woman to feel you have a victory over the world?"; "Do you believe you deserve to have a woman like you?"

     Love, Eli Siegel taught us — and people learn in consultations — is good will: "the desire to have [another person] stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful." It’s the oneness of approval and criticism — not unconditional approval. Because we love someone, we want to see that person exactly, be intensely for the best thing in them and against where they are unjust, so they can be "stronger and more beautiful."

     We love Eli Siegel for his honesty, his courage, his immense knowledge and personal kindness, which we saw firsthand and which shine through everything he wrote. He brought sanity and dignity to love and showed its relation to all culture, science, and art.

I am tremendously moved and honored to have designed and sculpted this memorial to Eli Siegel with whom I began to study as a young artist in November 1940. I want this bronze, which I first modeled in clay, to add to the true knowing and celebrating the grandeur and depth of his mind and utter good will in how he saw all people, including myself.

     My idea began with a simple pencil sketch of a plaque mounted on a rock. I wanted a combination of a sense of earth and the permanence of truth. I wanted the plaque to have a classical shape, dignified and also warm, a rectangle with a curve on top. I centered Mr. Siegel’s head above his great lines from "Hot Afternoons." On his right, I wanted, through the low relief of many figures, to give a sense of the humanity he so magnificently understood and was fair to; and on his left, to symbolize his unparalleled love of scholarship and books.

     I looked at photographs of Mr. Siegel, taken over the years, as I knew and remembered him. Modeling his noble forehead, his face, sculpting his cheek, I wanted to get within his deepest self, to show his honest eyes, his mouth, his ears, and have him made tangible and lovingly real. As I sculpted Mr. Siegel’s mouth, I wanted his lips to show his honesty, sincerity, sweetness, charm, fierce love of truth, humor, and that he had the same purpose talking to a child and speaking on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It is a pleasure with this memorial to join the people of the city of Baltimore in honoring Eli Siegel, great poet, critic, and more than ever needed teacher of America and the world.

We have seen that with a steadiness and beauty akin to the rising of the sun, the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method enables young people — including the most disadvantaged — to LEARN! We teach students from the toughest areas of New York City; students who are angry, jaded, have given up on themselves, and mistakenly use the economic injustice, prejudice, and violence they witness daily to feel, "I hate this world." They come to love learning as they see what Eli Siegel was the first educator to explain: "The purpose of education is to like the world through knowing it." They see that each subject in the curriculum represents a world that can be honestly respected because it has a logical, sensible structure of opposites — the same opposites that are in them.

     As I [Rosemary Plumstead] teach a unit on the heart, for example, I show that the valves in our heart are delicate AND strong at once. As I [Lois Mason] teach US history, I show that Abraham Lincoln put together mightily toughness AND gentleness. This is how we want to be. Mr. Siegel’s seeing that the opposites relate world, art, and self has ended the agonizing rift in education between fact and meaning! Students from city to suburbs learn successfully, remember facts, and not only pass their required exams, but are kinder!

     And as they see what Mr. Siegel explained, that contempt is the cause of every instance of brutality between people — slavery, the Holocaust, the horror of 9/11 — and that the same contempt is in them, they don’t want to have it. The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method brings out students’ true intelligence and their finest ethical sense. That is why we believe that Eli Siegel is the greatest educator ever to live and the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method is the birthright of every student and teacher.

For centuries there have been people of science and thought who wrote against racism. As an anthropologist I have read many, including the great Montesquieu. But no one understood the CAUSE of that vicious thing — until Eli Siegel did. He himself was completely without prejudice. And, as I know personally and professionally, the education he founded enables racism within a person to end!

     He explained that prejudice and racism — responsible for such horrors — don’t begin with an attitude to people of different skin color. They begin with the ordinary contempt people have day by day for what is different from oneself: the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world."

     From the first class I attended with him, Eli Siegel taught me what no professor ever had, or could. Looking at me with the kindest, keenest eyes I had ever seen, he asked, "Are you more interested in being better than other people or as good as you can be?" And he was to ask if I felt superior to the people I had lived with and studied in New Guinea. Yes, I had.

     I had often criticized racism in others. But for all my study of culture in Africa, the Amazon, India, the Pacific — like so many other social scientists who saw themselves as liberal — I myself still had prejudices and scorn that no university education ever took away. Mr. Siegel taught me their cause: he wrote, "As soon as we see that other human beings are placed differently from ourselves, contempt does what it can to include them." I have studied hundreds of cultures, and in every one I have seen how contempt has impelled people without their being able to identify it or combat it. And when a person’s contempt is criticized — as the philosophy Eli Siegel founded makes possible — prejudice ends.

     Mr. Siegel taught me to see how people of skin tones different from mine have the same feelings I do and deserve the same respect and dignity. He was great. And part of his greatness was to enable racism to change from inside out: in the human heart and mind.

I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I am of both African and European ancestry. In Aesthetic Realism and in Eli Siegel I found the knowledge and the person who understood the cause of all racial prejudice and were completely against it. I also met the education that made sense of and ended the painful confusion I felt about my mixed ancestry. As Dr. Perey said, Mr. Siegel identified the seed of all prejudice as contempt.

     My family moved to America in the early 1960s into an all white neighborhood, where we were seen with suspicion because we looked different. While this prejudice had a bad effect on us, I did not know that the scornful way I myself saw people who were different from me was also unjust and hurt me very much.

     Early in my life I got the message that being white was far superior to being black. For instance, I was told that I should not marry a black man because we had to become lighter rather than darker as the generations went on. For most of my life I felt I was better than anyone who was darker skinned and poorer than my family.

     When I learned from Aesthetic Realism what Mr. Siegel showed about contempt, I felt deeply understood and so relieved. It explained the prejudice I had been met with and also my own injustice. I saw that it was my desire to look down on people that made me nervous around them. It also made me unable to value my African ancestry. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Ellen Reiss writes:

For racism to end, ... what is necessary is the seeing and feeling that the relation of sameness and difference between ourselves and [another] person is beautiful. People need to feel ... that difference of race is like the difference to be found in music: two notes are different, but they ... complete each other; each needs the other to be expressed richly, to be fully itself.

     Eli Siegel’s understanding of the cause of racism is one of his many great contributions to humanity. When studied worldwide — and my life is evidence for this — it will make honest kindness and respect alive in the hearts and minds of all people, and will make the world safe and civilized.

It is hard to be black in this country and feel that justice is going to come your way, because black people have endured horrific injustice for years, from slavery to racial profiling. This has made for tremendous anger in our nation. For example, I was angry and humiliated being stopped on Route 80 by a state trooper for no apparent reason, as my private belongings were systematically strewn out on the roadside.

     I join my wife, Monique, and fellow speakers in saying I know that Aesthetic Realism is the means to end racism. In fact, the Aesthetic Realism education is living proof that through what Mr. Siegel explained, people of one background not only can be fair to others, but can understand them. It was through the thought of Eli Siegel, a white man, that I was able to understand the deepest things in myself; and this points to a fundamental hope for all races.

     In beautiful prose, Mr. Siegel stated:

It will be found that black and white man have the same goodnesses, the same temptations, and can be criticized in the same way. The skin may be different, but the aorta is quite the same.

When I came to New York from Puerto Rico to study at Fordham University in the 1970s, I was outraged by the daily discrimination blacks and Puerto Ricans endured. I was denied housing, told I was admitted to college because of a quota, and discriminated against because of my accent. But my sense of outrage was not enough to change my own prejudice and how I saw other people, whom I often judged by their skin tone, the texture of their hair, and how little or much money they had. Contemptuously, I gave myself the right to see anyone as I pleased, but also felt disgusted and painfully lonely.

     Today I stand here as a person representing millions of Hispanics, saying, Gracias, Eli Siegel, for understanding that the fundamental cause of prejudice and racism is the human desire for contempt.

     Contempt, I learned, is behind every act of discrimination — from the way I refused to join clubs in college that had African-Americans and New York-born Puerto Ricans, to the horrors of lynching, the beatings, racial profiling. I thank God I met the kind thought of Eli Siegel in Aesthetic Realism consultations and heard criticism of my contempt that changed my prejudice. I learned that trying to know and be fair to someone different from me is the same as my self-expression, pleasure, and pride. It is an emergency in this country that we like the way we see other people. Tolerance by itself will never do, because it doesn’t satisfy what every person wants most: to feel that through whatever and whomever we meet, we can like the world and ourselves more.

Having organized many workers and studied labor history, I have seen that Eli Siegel understood what other economists and historians have not. He explained that the central matter in economics is ETHICAL: the fight throughout history is not the class struggle; it’s the fight between respect for people and contempt for people. 

     Mr. Siegel showed that the desire for contempt — to make oneself more by lessening someone else — is the only reason why there is poverty in this world. Contempt is what has a person see another in terms of money for oneself — not in terms of who that other person is and what he or she deserves. I’ve seen many people who were maimed or diseased because of the contempt which Mr. Siegel showed is at the basis of profit economics. I know men whose fingers were severed on table saws because the boss didn’t want the flow of profit slowed down by safety mechanisms. I know workers whose lungs are damaged from years of inhaling dust because employers didn’t want to lose profit by remedying the hazardous conditions. Mr. Siegel was clear early, here in Baltimore, and all his life: jobs should be for usefulness, not for profit.

     In many lectures he gave, he showed that unions have been one of the biggest opponents to contempt and forces for respect in world history, because unions have insisted, with power and often beautiful rudeness: These are people, not mechanisms for someone’s profit! A statement I love and believe needs to be known by everyone is this, from a 1970 lecture by Mr. Siegel:

The most important thing in industry is the person who does the industry, which is the worker. That ... can never change. Labor is the only source of wealth. There is no other source, except land, the raw material .... Every bit of capital that exists was made by labor, just as everything that is consumed is.

Eli Siegel explained the true meaning of art for our lives, and I am proud today to say only a small part of what that is. He said this: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." No one — no scholar, no artist, no person — in all the centuries ever saw this before: that we can learn about ourselves from the very technique of art!

     The opposites are around us and in us now. Take one tree: it is firm and its limbs are flexible; it is rooted, attached securely to the earth, and those delicate leaves sway in the wind. That is how a person wants to be: feet on the ground, firm and flexible, secure and happily responding to what’s not us. We want the many aspects of ourselves to go together the way many branches of a tree are so gracefully one tree. These opposites — firmness and flexibility, oneness and manyness — are together in all good art.

     One of the worst things that people, including artists, have done is separate art from life. Art is seen as a superior make-believe world used to get away from the real world of family, worries, the world’s turmoil, our miseries. Eli Siegel described that mistake and opposed it with the bravest constancy. He showed that far from being in a separate world, art has the answer to the trouble in this one.

     In an Aesthetic Realism lesson I attended as a young artist, at a time I saw myself as very separate from most people, Mr. Siegel asked me: "Are you unique and related?" I felt a great relief seeing that I was. And I learned that is the purpose of every line in a painting: it separates and joins at once. Each apple in a Cézanne still life has a boundary, is unique, separate, and yet is joined with, related to, enhanced by every other red and yellow and green apple on that white tablecloth. We need to feel we’re more ourselves, more individual, through seeing and liking our relation to other people, both near and far. That, Eli Siegel taught me, is the message of all art — and every person, every family, every nation needs to hear that message and learn from it.

     I’m very glad to read a short poem by Mr. Siegel that I love, titled "This Is Asked":