Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 of the great 1972 lecture A Poem Is in the World, by Eli Siegel. In it he relates three huge things: 1) what an authentic poem is; 2) what those works called “the great books” have, making them worthy of the phrase; and 3) the structure of the world itself. These large matters, Aesthetic Realism shows, are not fancy things, existing in some territory apart from our daily lives, apart from our agitations, yearnings, thoughts about work and money and love. At the basis of the lecture is this Aesthetic Realism principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

A Person, Centuries Ago

Thus far in the lecture, Mr. Siegel has been commenting on statements in Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. And in the present section he begins discussing passages from a work about which Adler speaks a little. It is, says Mr. Siegel, “one of the great books, undoubtedly”: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, written in the 4th century bce.

Mr. Siegel loved Aristotle. That love is present even as he criticizes some of the Aristotelian statements he’s discussing. I am moved, for example, by these sentences of Mr. Siegel, so casual yet so exact, and, in their exactitude, tender:

But we are with Aristotle. And we have Aristotle trying to express his own feeling, as all writing does, and something about possible good in the world.

That Aristotle—the grand, classical, seemingly forbidding Aristotle—had human feeling which was his own, is not something generally thought of. There is warmth as Mr. Siegel speaks of it quietly, and places it simply with Aristotle’s saying “something about possible good in the world.”

As Mr. Siegel speaks about ethics, he describes too Aesthetic Realism’s disagreement with Aristotle on that big subject. A central disagreement with Aristotle is in Aesthetic Realism’s showing that ethics is in everything, because ethics is in the structure of reality itself. Ethics is not something confined to humans, though it is the biggest matter in the life of each person, from three-year-old child to senator. I’ll say just a little here about what that may mean.

First, this beautiful description by Mr. Siegel about ethics in how we conduct our lives: “To be ethical is to give oneself what is coming to one by giving what is coming to other things” (Self and World, p. 243). In this description of human ethics, there are opposites: the individual—one’s own treasured self—and “other things,” the world outside of us. That is about people’s ethics, ours. But the ethics that’s in reality always and is present in everything is also a matter of opposites. Very much, it is a matter of each item, each individual thing, and a whole world different from that thing.

Ethics & New York Flowers

For example, right now it is early spring in New York City, and flowers are blooming. They are in gardens. They are in areas along the sidewalks. They are in parks. And they are beautiful. Do they have to do with ethics? As I begin to say they do, I quote a very short poem by Eli Siegel, from his Hail, American Development. The poem was written in 1924 and is titled “Come, Spring Flowers”:

Whether daffodil, crocus, primrose, or the early rich-yet-modest Lenten rose, each flower is an individual. Yet this poem says that the whole world has to do with these individual flowers’ coming to be. Is that true? Yes. The full reason would take a long while to show. But we can see some things rather swiftly. It took water for these flowers to be. And the water that came to a particular daffodil, through rain and perhaps a friendly gardener, is connected with the earth’s constant water cycle. The water now sweetly meeting yellow petals is, it seems, perhaps 4.5 billion years old and has been in ever so many places of this earth.

Also making today’s flowers come is the sun, which warms the earth. This same sun has affected every aspect of our planet and others, and the history of its vast relation with so much is part of the sun now shining on a New York forsythia.

Then, there are seeds (even bulb flowers began with seeds). We’re told that seeds have crossed continents and oceans; also that various seeds of now have evolved from seeds of a million years ago. How much history and reality is in the seed of a flower you walked by yesterday?

Moreover, the bee that is now assisting and getting value from a particular flower was born of generations of bees, millennia of bees—and her heritage is now buzzing with her.

The fact that an individual—say a particular primrose—was brought about by reality in its fullness, is an ethical matter. It’s a matter of opposites as one, of self and world, sameness and difference: of a primrose and the world different from the primrose enhancing each other. (A primrose, as Wordsworth felt, does enhance the world.)

Meanwhile, there can be a going wrong in flowers as to what’s not themselves. For example, certain “invasive” flowers can take over a whole garden and rob other flowers of what those others need to live. One does feel this is evil. Or a certain chemical gets into the soil and kills flowers that are trying to grow there. Good and evil are the warring aspects of ethics. And, as Mr. Siegel says, they’re not only in people but in reality itself.

Along with self and world, and sameness and difference, other opposites have to do with ethics—indeed, all the opposites do. Take delicacy and strength. The way a daffodil seems gentle, fragile, yet comes forth early and withstands winds and then is upright and firm again—the way even the color of a “golden daffodil” is strong and gentle: this oneness of opposites makes for good. It is also beautiful. Both ethics and beauty, Aesthetic Realism shows, are a oneness of opposites.

For Example

There is the beauty of the poem by Eli Siegel that I quoted, “Come, Spring Flowers”:

In the music of the first line, we hear initially a largeness, a swelling and rotundity along with gentleness: “Though the whole world.” Then, as the phrases of that line become more divided, we feel something different, the effort of labor: “will work to make you to.” The second line is much shorter. It has the writer’s robust agreement with what the world is working for—“I say, Come”—and the final phrase is both firm and tender: “spring flowers.”

Every thing and person, Aesthetic Realism shows, has to do with the whole world and its structure of opposites. The ethics in reality now is saying: Not only flowers but people, all people, all children, deserve to be placed in this world gracefully. They deserve to have a good home and food and a chance to bloom in the world—a world that is rightfully theirs as much as anyone’s.

The more one sees that ethics is in everything—the more one studies what that means—one will see, increasingly, justice as smart and beautiful. One will see that to be just is not a sacrifice but takes care of oneself. How humanity needs to see justice that way!

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

His Own Feeling, & the World

By Eli Siegel

I ’ll go now to a work Adler comments on, one of the great books, undoubtedly: the Ethics of Aristotle. Since a purpose of mine in this talk is to present something of what a great book has, I’m going to look at some matters in Aristotle’s Ethics.

We are in the 4th century bc, in a place where people were asking what were they doing? and why? Every isle in the Ionian Sea had people wandering about asking, Why am I doing this? That also happened on the mainland. Also on the large island of Crete. Also in Asia Minor, where some of the more enterprising Greeks had gone, for instance in Halicarnassus.

The book I’ll now read from is Great Traditions in Ethics: An Introduction, by Ethel M. Albert, Theodore C. Denise, Sheldon P. Peterfreund. It is worth having, and it includes that very lovely student of ethics whom Matthew Arnold admired, Epictetus.

But we are with Aristotle. And we have Aristotle trying to express his own feeling, as all writing does, and something about possible good in the world. Is there any such thing as good—or are we simply among people and want to say nice things about (let’s say) Hippias, and bad things about Thrasymachus. What has us say things?

A distinction is made by the book’s editors between Aristotle and Plato. On the one hand, both Plato and Aristotle don’t see good as having its source in society. One definition of good that people have gone by is: that which society approves of and that which is in accord with the law. But both Aristotle and Plato are deeper than that. Good goes deeper than codes of law or customs or attitudes of society. However, it seems that Aristotle thinks Plato is too abstract in his notion of good. The editors say:

Aristotle rejects the Platonic view that the moral evaluations of daily life presuppose a “good” which is independent of experience, personality, and circumstances.

Does Good Exist?—and How?

The question is this: does good now exist, the way space does? Does it exist the way time does? The way change does? Aesthetic Realism says, Certainly. No question! Good exists in the same way that time, space, matter do.

That is the utter attitude to good, the unabashedly idealistic and impractical attitude: that good is implicit in reality, and isn’t come to by man as usable for his own social convenience. Something like that is felt by Aristotle and Plato, with Plato being even more abstract than Aristotle—and, I must say, with Aesthetic Realism being more abstract than Plato. So if Plato is wrong there, Aesthetic Realism is even wronger. Aesthetic Realism goes as far as one can go: wherever reality is, good and evil are present. Man has nothing at all to do with the existence of good—all he can do is give it addresses and write labels for it.

The book’s editors say Aristotle “rejects the Platonic view that the moral evaluations of daily life presuppose a ‘good’ which is independent of experience.” Plato felt people are compelled to ask what is good, and therefore some good may be presupposed outside of experience. Aristotle doesn’t agree with that. However, he doesn’t completely disagree:

He insists that the basic moral principle is immanent in the activities of our daily lives and can be discovered only through a study of them.

The first part of that statement seems in agreement with Plato—because if a “moral principle” is “immanent” in activities, this moral principle is something in itself, which can be found in them. Aesthetic Realism says ethics is in things, not just activities. Ethics is present in a bit of metal; in a ripple of water; in the curve of a bird’s flight.

So Aristotle is also abstract, even though he disputes the non-empiricism of Plato.

He Describes Two Kinds of Virtue

Before reading directly from the Nicomachean Ethics, I’ll read the editors’ summary of the passage:

The virtues corresponding to the two functions of reason are the intellectual and the moral. The wise man personifies the intellectual virtues, whereas the continent man typifies the moral virtues. The former’s excellence is attained through instruction and evidenced by knowledge. The excellence of the latter is produced by habits of choice and expressed in practical actions.

A question about ethics is this: Is a baby born with good and bad, or is the baby just a whole bundle of infuriating possibility? Aristotle says there are two kinds of virtue the baby will go after: 1) He’ll want to get a little knowledge, want to see—the baby gets interested in color, gets interested in touch. Though he also wants to have his way, if the baby is really interested in knowledge he has that virtue which is intellectual virtue. 2) Then, the baby may have the virtue which says, I don’t want to have everything my way. When people are talking, I’d just as soon not cry as cry. This is the other virtue Aristotle writes about, moral virtue.

The editors say that for Aristotle, “The wise man personifies the intellectual virtues, whereas the continent man typifies the moral virtues.” The continent man, according to Aristotle, was a person who wasn’t sloppy about his feelings. He could see a woman and be a little more sensible rather than a little more disturbed.

“The former’s [the wise person’s] excellence is attained through instruction….The excellence of the latter [the moral person] is produced by habits of choice.” We come to the problem—which Socrates was interested in—can character be taught? Can we make persons better? Aesthetic Realism says: Definitely, character can be taught.

Knowing, Being Good, & a Question

I’ve quoted the editors; now, the writing of Aristotle himself:

In speaking about a man’s character we do not say that he is wise or has understanding but that he is good-tempered or temperate; yet we praise the wise man also with respect to his state of mind.

The question arises: Can we be good without wanting to know? Aristotle doesn’t deal with that fully. Also, at the moment, we don’t know how we judge people. We may say “He’s a good guy,” but don’t know on what basis we say it. The judgment of another is really running around in one’s mind. Also the judgment of oneself: people have had no basis for judging themselves, only moods in judgment. Aristotle says:

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching…, while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit.

This would be disputed by Leibniz. Aristotle takes the viewpoint here (he changes later) that when we are born we just have possibility. We are what’s called a tabula rasa (a blank slate), a white sheet of paper. The idea is that a child is born and we can train that child to be a little rascal or a little monsignor. —Aristotle continues:

From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.

The history of habit is a big matter in the history of ethics. The interest is still going on. William James’s writing on habit is one of the noted things of this century. And habit took the form of Pavlov’s conditioned reflexes. But I don’t think Aristotle is clear enough here.

As Aesthetic Realism sees it, every child has already a very tremendous impulse to know as much as she can and to feel as good as she can, and to make a one of these. There is a tremendous possibility of having as much power as one can and also wanting to respect oneself as much as one can. That’s why a baby can start crying when she’s reproved, even at the age of six months. Her conscience is affected.

Are the opposites present in a baby? Does a baby have a tendency to say she doesn’t care about anything as long as she feels good, and does she also have a tendency to say, “Yes, I want to feel good, but I have to think about Mom, and maybe other people”? We have the possibility of being mean and the possibility of being generous, and those possibilities are indefinitely large in every person.

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather, we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

The question that Leibniz would ask, and somewhat Locke, is: if a child has virtues and/or vices, how did these come to be? How could situations evoke things from a person unless there was something already there waiting to meet the situations, or waiting to use them or be used by them?

In Aristotle’s Metaphysics there’s a great deal said, and it’s keen, about potentiality and actuality. For example, a person is not screaming now, but if someone began cutting him with a Revolutionary War sabre he might scream. So he has within him the possibility of screaming. That has meaning.

The Ethics of Aristotle, as I see it, is not as well related to the Metaphysics of Aristotle or the Politics of Aristotle as it might be.

Our Senses & Our Virtues

In this section of the Ethics, Aristotle says we have our senses, like sight and hearing, from birth, but not our virtues: “the virtues we get first by exercising them.” I disagree with Aristotle: the virtues and vices are both there in a child, as the eye’s retina, iris, pupil are there. What we do as we grow up is use the body-form junction that we are.

The intensity of this writing and reasoning of Aristotle, and the fact that Aristotle is looking at ethics so early, is stirring—as a poem might be. Still, one can ask questions.