Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the final section of the lecture we have been serializing: Where Ethics Is, by Eli Siegel. From one point of view, this 1974 lecture is firmly philosophic. In it, Mr. Siegel comments on statements of Plato and Aristotle, and then uses, as text, passages from a 20th-century work that he respects: Ethics, by British philosopher P.H. Nowell-Smith. Yet while Aesthetic Realism on the subject of ethics is certainly related to the best considerations of the matter in philosophic history, the Aesthetic Realism understanding of ethics is New. It has a vitality, a down-to-earthness, an immediacy not present elsewhere: a relevance to the living, breathing, bewildered, hoping, wondering, worried lives of people every day.

Ethics Defined

In the course of this lecture, Mr. Siegel defines and describes ethics. Ethics, he says, “is the study of what the outside world deserves from you.” And he continues: ethics is “the study of what is coming to yourself and what is coming to all other things at the same time.” Here, we have one of the big ways Aesthetic Realism is groundbreaking: it shows that ethics is also aesthetics. That is, ethics has what all true art has—the oneness of opposites; it has, centrally, the oneness of Self and World, care for just-me and care for the world-other-than-me. All humanity’s trouble about ethics, be that trouble national or personal, has come because people’s sense of what they deserve has not been the same as an interest in what other people and things deserve. Mr. Siegel explained: “Once you feel what is owing to yourself is more and what is owing to other people is less, you can rob people’s purses, tell lies, keep back things that would do good to people, start wars.”

In this talk about the meaning of ethics, Mr. Siegel sometimes refers to other talks he was giving at the time: his Goodbye Profit System lectures. In them he showed that by the 1970s, history had reached a certain point: for an economy to work well, it now had to be based on ethics. It had to be based on justice to each person and all people. Profit-motivated economics is not based on looking at one’s fellow humans in terms of What do they—people as real as I am, with feelings as deep as my own—deserve? It’s based instead, by very definition, on the profit motive: on looking at a person in terms of How can I make money—as much money as possible—from this fellow, this woman?

The failure of profit-driven economics is with us today, with more intensity and more repercussions. The enormous worry about money, the miles-long lines of cars trying to reach food pantries, the ever-increasing poverty, the diminishing of the middle class: these exist because an economic way is 1) fundamentally unethical and 2) is therefore mortally ailing. And Mr. Siegel was right in showing that what people are looking for is something that has never been fully in the world before: an economy based, with terrific practicality, on good will rather than ill will.

He speaks about good will in the section of the lecture included here. Good will is ethics as an active desire in a person: it is the desire to be just to what’s not oneself as the means of being just to oneself.

How We See the World

In our last issue I commented on Aesthetic Realism’s explanation of ethics in relation to the big fight going on in America. It is essentially a fight about whether our nation should belong to and be owned by all its people, or only certain people. In the present issue I’ll comment a little on how the matter of ethics is central in the everyday personal feelings of people. And I’ll use a poem by Eli Siegel to do so.

The poem is “A Lady, Sun and Rain,” written in 1925. It is included in his collection Hail, American Development. It’s a poem I love.

How we are about ethics begins with how we see the world itself. This poem is about how a person sees the world, quietly in an ordinary day, the world of rain, leaves, wind. Does the question of justice and injustice have to do with such matters? Is there such a thing as a just or unjust response to rain? This poem and Aesthetic Realism itself say there is. The person in the poem doesn’t give—in terms of interest, feeling, like—what rain, twigs, leaves deserve. How frequent such injustice is; everyone is culpable of something like it. Yet is there something rain deserves from us, and should we want to give it? Is there a meaning it and the many objects of the world have that we should hope to care for? And can we say that injustice to rain is entirely different from injustice to a person?

In his note to the poem, Mr. Siegel writes: “Though this lady’s life was in reality, she saw reality too much as an interference, not enough as material for self-increase, self-evoking.” However ordinary that way of seeing is, the lessening of the value of things makes one cold, not only to things but to people. It also makes one dull, ill-at-ease, displeased with oneself, and unsure.

It is the very contrary of art—because art wants to show the life in things, including twigs, leaves, rain. Art, in any field, arises from the proud and grateful desire to give things—objects, sounds, motions, happenings—what they deserve. This poem itself is art. It is musical. We hear in it, at once, both criticism and warmth. We meet in it, at once, both factuality and wonder. Through the writer’s justice, Eli Siegel’s justice, we feel the life that is in both the lady herself and the very things that she diminished.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

What Ethics Has to Do With
By Eli Siegel

In this book there is something about good will. In all ethical writing, there is something about good will. But I have to say that good will, as far as I know, is not seen as Aesthetic Realism sees it: the greatest unconscious hope of the human self, a hope which is present in everything that one does and which can be seen as the most dramatic thing in one’s life. That would be seen as exaggerated by nearly every writer on ethics. However, the idea that there is an instinct toward benevolence, and that it has its place among the instincts, is to be seen: that a child may want to break a dish, scream at an aunt, also kick a visitor, but at the same time has a desire to be useful; and the child who kicks a visitor may ask a little later, “Would you like a more comfortable chair?” So on page 249, in a chapter called “Conscientiousness,” Nowell-Smith says:

A man may have a natural disposition to be beneficent, that is to say a natural pro-attitude towards the good of others, and he is called “benevolent” if this is so strong that he regularly acts for the sake of doing good to others.

As I said of an earlier statement, this is not strong enough. Still, it says that there can be a “natural pro-attitude,” a natural benevolence—which puts benevolence deeply among the instincts. How strong that instinct is, and how strong the opposing instinct is, is something to be seen.

Does It Pay?

Now, a longer passage about benevolence. Does benevolence pay? Does injustice not pay? If you’re mean, are you wise? Every day, people have that problem. They sometimes feel, “I’m mean.” Then occasionally they think maybe they weren’t so smart. An important subject is: is meanness smart? It’s an old subject. Nowell-Smith writes:

Now benevolence is the desire to do good to others, and it is fairly obvious that men are more likely to succeed in doing good to others if they try to do so than if they try to do harm. We could easily imagine a world in which this was not so, a world in which people were so stupid and inefficient that the more good they tried to do the more harm they did. And, if we lived in such a world, benevolence would be a vice and malevolence a virtue.

Nowell-Smith is concerned with what kind of world we have, and how welcoming it is of ethics, and what kind of ethics—which is sensible. Does benevolence find itself out of tune in a world like this? That’s the question in that paragraph. And Aesthetic Realism might give this answer: “Benevolence is the world, bud”—which of course needs to be explained.

On What Basis Do We Choose?

The next statement I’ll read is about conscientiousness. Nowell-Smith is saying that you have certain standards (you may not know what they are), and also other people are telling you something. A person can feel, I didn’t know what I wanted to do before you started talking. (And maybe also, Now I know less.) Nowell-Smith writes:

Now to be conscientious is not to conform to an accepted moral code, but to conform to rules to which the agent himself thinks he ought to conform. But, although it is possible for some individuals to adopt rules that conflict with the accepted code, it is logically necessary that such cases should be rare. [P. 257]

That is very careful writing, and I don’t think so very useful. It means that we have two notions of what is right: one, what seems to be in the air, a “code” outside of us; the other, rules that are in ourselves.

“But, although it is possible for some individuals to adopt rules that conflict with the accepted code,…such cases should be rare.” They may be rare, but they’re around. And whether it’s a code outside of you or a code in yourself that you think you know, everyone has a code. I haven’t yet talked to a person who didn’t. If anyone thinks they don’t have a code, I would say: please look at the matter some more. For example, codes have included I never kiss a boy on the first date. That’s part of a code which has been a little shattered lately.

What One Feels

There’s a passage about asking people what they feel. And it brings up the matter of why people can look as if they were sad:

From Jones’s posture and demeanour I cannot tell whether he is listening intently to Bach or so stricken with grief that he hasn’t heard a note. To discover which is the case I have to ask him; and I trust what he says, not because I can correlate his statements with states of his mind inaccessible to me, but because I have found him to be trustworthy on occasions on which I am in a position to check what he says. But Jones’s position is different; he can tell whether he is listening or not. [P. 130]

Nowell-Smith takes for granted excessively that people know their feelings. Also, the way different causes can meet in what we do is something to see; that is part of social history.

The Ethics Here Too

Then, the fact that even ethical philosophers have to yield to something is to be seen in a little biographical note about Nowell-Smith, at the front of the book. It has this sentence: “During the war he served in the Army in the Middle East and in India”—which means he had to give England what it deserved. Today, in answering the draft, some people think they’re giving the United States what it deserves; and also, other people, in not answering the draft and in going to Canada, show they think answering it is not something the United States deserves. But the ethics here too is about what we think is coming to something.

A Phrase; Choices; Quiet & Activity

In another passage, the matter of specific choices is related to a phrase that has been much in ethics this century:

Such a man has obviously misunderstood the philosopher’s talk about the Good Life. For this talk was never intended to be a description of anything; it was from the start assumed to be an injunction to do something, to adopt this or that course, subscribe to this or that moral code. [P. 12]

Ethics, like other things, has a static phase, a basis which is quiet, and then something which follows from this basis: what should I do? The Good Life can take the form of a choice at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Ethics Is about Accuracy & Inaccuracy

The richest sentence, which I won’t be able to deal with wholly, is on page 20, in the chapter called “The Task of Ethics.” Nowell-Smith mentions words that have to be looked at in order to see what ethics is about:

We have a specific vocabulary for dealing with moral questions. It contains such words as desire, appetite, will, voluntary, choice, approval, conscience, remorse, guilt, deserve, pleasure, pain, duty, obligation, good, and evil.

Every one of these words—and some others too—has the possibility of accuracy and also inaccuracy. Take appetite: there’s such a thing as a distorted appetite. And there’s desire: we can have a desire which, the day after, we feel very bad about having had. But, to be sure, there are such things as appetites and desires that are accurate, good.

Nowell-Smith is right: all these words have to do with ethics. Appetite is a form of desire given usually to sex and food. Also, there’s the phrase He has a great appetite for punishment. We have the word will, and will can go wrongly or rightly.

I’ve been speaking about the seeing of the whole world in terms of what happens in ourselves, as drama, as having two possibilities. And I’m reading this list because it points to the necessity for that seeing.

The next word Nowell-Smith mentions is voluntary. What we do voluntarily can be wrong, and what we do involuntarily can be wrong. What is done voluntarily may be as foolish as anything. Then there’s the word choice: a choice, obviously, can be not only good but bad; otherwise people wouldn’t lose on the horses. Then, approval: you can be approved for the wrong reason. A great frailty of people is wanting to be approved for a reason that is not good enough—much suffering has been because of that, ever so much suffering. For what do we want to be approved?

Conscience: when we have guilt that is inaccurate, our conscience is not working so well, which can happen. We can do a bad thing, and then the way we regret it may be inaccurate. Remorse—which is conscience a little more intense—can also be inaccurate. Then there is the word guilt. There are good guilt and bad guilt. There’s a guilt that makes for progress and a guilt that makes for being stuck.

Deserve: what we think we deserve can be wrong and also right, and that makes for a great deal of trouble. Meanwhile, if ethics has to do with what we deserve and what we think others deserve, the word is very important.

Pleasure can be good and bad; otherwise there wouldn’t be the drug addiction clinics. Pain can be good and bad; otherwise there wouldn’t be so much domestic disagreement and other difficulty—because you can be pleased in the wrong way and be pained in the wrong way.

Duty: your notion of duty can, as they say in the Marines, be cockeyed. You can have a certain sense of duty that just isn’t good for anybody. Obligations can be wrong. Even the idea of good and evil can be.

In other words, ethics is pullulating. It’s a little bit like what would be if all the tadpoles in a summer brook could be an orchestra. It’s very lively.

Ethics—How Welcome?

So I have been presenting ethics in some of its richness. On Friday, I spoke of how it just keeps on happening in economics. And I hope to have it seen with more pleasure, with a sense of welcome. Every person should feel, God, am I glad ethics exists! If you don’t feel it, you’re unfortunate. A way to see that is by asking yourself, Suppose you didn’t have any possibility of saying something is better than something else, or this was better done by a person than something else? Then see what would follow.

As soon as we have a judgment, ethics is present. Whether we are interested in ethics or not, we are always giving people marks: he’s a good guy or he’s not. And I liked that and I didn’t like that. And that was good for me and this was not good for me.

So I hope that ethics, however much it was loved before, is loved even more. The love of it might make for seeing it in its fullness. And that might make for understanding what is happening economically in America today.