Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue, we begin to serialize the magnificent lecture Where Ethics Is, which Eli Siegel gave in 1974. He is speaking about the biggest matter in our nation and in the world itself—though it’s generally not seen as that. “Aesthetic Realism,” he says, so truly, “sees ethics in a fuller way than has been.” I love his understanding of ethics, his tremendous logic and feeling about it. And so, by way of introduction, it gives me much pleasure to comment some on Aesthetic Realism’s great comprehension of ethics. While that way of seeing ethics is new, it is backed up by the most important statements on the subject over these thousands of years.

Later in this lecture, Mr. Siegel gives three definitions of ethics. But I’ll quote here a description of it from his book Self and World. “To be ethical,” he writes, “is to give oneself what is coming to one by giving what is coming to other things” (p. 243).

What It Isn’t & Is

Aesthetic Realism makes clear that ethics is not a narrowly philosophic term; nor is ethics a curtailing, repressive thing, some set of rules stopping us from doing what would really please us. Ethics, Aesthetic Realism shows, is as much of us as the blood in our veins. It is the most intelligent thing in the world—also the most romantic thing. It is that on which love depends. It’s the basis of all art. And it is, within us, that which determines whether we like ourselves or dislike ourselves.

This Aesthetic Realism principle is about ethics, as it is about everything in and around us: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Ethics is about the two biggest opposites in our lives: self and world. The great need, from the time we are born until our life is over, is to make those opposites one: to be fair—inseparably—to what is not ourselves and to ourselves. In chapter 9 of Self and World, “The Child,” Mr. Siegel writes:

It is to be expected that when a new entity, a baby, arrives in that larger entity, the world,—the baby do all it can to establish its own existence by being able to make, all the time, happier and freer and more accurate relationships with the universe into which it has entered. [P. 215]

That means that the drive, deep in the self of everyone, to grow, to know, to become oneself, is fundamentally an ethical drive: it’s the drive to be oneself by meeting the outside world truly, justly. Meanwhile, there can be interferences with it—both from the outside and from within us.

Aesthetic Realism explains that the big inner interference with ethics—the interference within everyone, from first grader to senator—is contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” Contempt is immensely ordinary and immensely ugly and dangerous. It has a boy of six feel he’s a big shot if he can make his little sister cry. And contempt in a senator (of some country, who knows where) is what has him lie, and engage with others to overthrow democracy as a means of advancing his own career.

At the same time, no one can get away from what Mr. Siegel described as the “ethical unconscious” in us all:

There is such a thing as the ethical unconscious…. When we are unfair to the world, it can be shown that something in us which is the world itself, doesn’t like it. [Self and World, pp. 55, 45]

When we’re unfair to something not ourselves, we dislike ourselves, period. This ethical cause-and-effect is as inevitable as gravitation. We can try to cover up the self-dislike. We can put on a show. We can blame others. We can come to all sorts of “logic” for our injustice. But there will be a profound, often angry agitation in us, a deep shame—though we may swagger and attack. The fact that we cannot be at ease with our unfairness is a tribute to the ethical nature of the human self.

Ethics: The Central Thing in Economics

Aesthetic Realism shows that ethics is the central matter in economics. In 1970, Eli Siegel explained that a certain point in human history had been reached. For centuries, the way millions and millions of people had been forced to live, the way the wealth of the world had been owned and dealt with, had been deeply and gigantically unethical. In his Goodbye Profit System lectures, he explained that now an economy can no longer work if it continues to be based on the contempt which is the profit motive: on seeing one’s fellow humans, not as they deserve, but in terms of how much profit one can extract from them for oneself.

In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel refers to an aspect of the profit system’s failure, an aspect very salient at the time: a worldwide, intractable inflation. I’ll describe a little what he explained in this journal in 1974.

It is generally agreed that inflation has to do with the “passing along” of a raised price. For instance: a manufacturer, Mr. X, has been forced to pay more for the materials he needs. Angry and resentful, he will try to maintain his profits by raising the price he charges Ms. Y, who has been purchasing his product to sell at her store. Ms. Y is furious at being made to pay the “adjusted” price, and she in turn will make her own adjustment—raise the price she charges. All this is ordinary, but it makes prices be such that so many people cannot afford what they need. Wrote Mr. Siegel in 1974, “So much ‘economic adjustment’ has retaliation in it, and ill will right in its diplomatic midst” (TRO 75). The ill will behind inflation and behind other saddening and agonizing economic states, has been present on a global scale, because economics has been based, not on justice to people, but on the desire to “get yours” by lessening another person.

For instance, over the centuries the chief way employers have tried to make and increase profit has been to pay workers as little as possible. And so, year after year, men and women—children too—were made to work long hours and earn very little, often not enough to buy sufficient food. Meanwhile, one of the greatest forces in human history has fought and interfered with that unethical use of people. This glorious force is labor unions. And that is why those who want to keep profit economics going have tried to kill unions.

Inflation doesn’t have the salient visibility it had in 1974. But there is no question that people across our nation object to, are furious at, the unjust way they have been made to live in this profit economy. And they feel that the matter won’t be solved by putting some bandages on the situation.

Something people have come to be very much aware of is what’s called “income inequality.” That is: millions of people are becoming poorer and poorer; the middle class is drastically diminished; and fewer and fewer people own more and more of our nation’s wealth. All this, in its cruelty, has been necessary to have the profit way continue. The untenability of the situation, and people’s fury at this economic injustice with its horrible discrepancy, are forms of what Mr. Siegel described as the force of ethics working in the world. “Ethics is a force,” he said in a class in 1970: “Ethics is a force like electricity, steam, the atom—and will have its way.”

Ethics, working in history and in what our world has come to be, is insisting that the basis of economics must now be ethical. The US economy must be based on a true answer to the question Eli Siegel described as the most important for humanity: “What does a person deserve by being a person?”

Art Is Ethics

To see what ethics is, and how attractive it is, we need to see what Aesthetic Realism explains: that the very basis of art is ethics. Art is ethical not because it may deal with certain “ethical” subjects, but because art arises from the “giv[ing] oneself what is coming to one by giving what is coming to other things.” When Vermeer wanted to be fair to a young woman pouring milk from a pitcher, when Shakespeare wanted to be fair to the eloquent bewilderment of Hamlet, when Sappho wanted to be fair to living creatures coming home at evening, when Brahms wanted to be fair to the order and tumult sound could have—they all felt, without articulating it, that they were giving what was coming to themselves by giving what was coming to something else. When we are thrilled by art, we are also thrilled by ethics.

The subject, ethics, is tremendous—and it is of our very being, and our very nation. Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel are grandly fair to it.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Where Ethics Is

By Eli Siegel

I ’m going to continue in another way what I began to show on Friday. I used, on Friday, a large book of economics to show that constantly in economics one can see ethics working; the novelty, the strangeness, the ordinariness of its presence is really very beautiful. And it is important that this statement be understood. So today I present a talk beginning with ethics itself, called Where Ethics Is.

I have said that Aesthetic Realism sees ethics in a fuller way than has been. Ethics is, on the one hand, the simplest thing in the world. For example, if we saw anybody climbing into a window, apparently in order to steal something, we’d say the ethics of the neighborhood is being outraged, and we wouldn’t feel comfortable unless we called the police. All law is supposed to be based on ethics, and some of it is very obvious. If we saw somebody throwing stones through a window and maybe hitting people, we’d feel there was something wrong. But then, there are the other reaches, which are unconscious. And the present inflation is, as I see it, the result of some very bad ethics that has been ratified for hundreds of years.

I’m going to use first a recent, pretty careful collection of writers on ethics. It is Ethics: Selections from Classical and Contemporary Writers, edited by Oliver A. Johnson (1965). Whatever else, we see in it that ethics has occupied people’s thought. It occupies people’s thought a great deal now. And I think it is having its greatest chance, because if inflation, as I believe, is owing to tolerated bad ethics for hundreds of years, with ethics now protesting, this inflation will make ethics more thought of.

“The Examination of Life”

Oliver Johnson has an editor’s introduction, and there are some sentences from it that should be looked at. One is:

The examination of life, to which Socrates had devoted most of his own life and for which he was willing to die, is the pursuit to which philosophers give the name ethics.

The important word here is examination. Most life goes on without its examining itself. There is no tested story yet of an eel asking, “How am I doing?” Crocodiles also lack such statements in the records. And horses seem to be concerned, but they don’t put down what their thoughts are.

We have this word examination; and life can be divided into two fields: the life that examines itself and the life that doesn’t. Life that examines itself can be given a further subdivision: the life that writes something about its examining or says something that can be recorded, and the life that doesn’t. The examination of life by the living thing concerned, is as much part of evolution or biology as anything.

There is the desire, which every person has and most persons are not exact about, to ask how one is doing. We’d like that looking to show good results. But in order to understand the field of ethics, it is well to see this triplicity: bad results in one’s life are owing a) to bad ethics; or b) to unwisdom; or c) to misfortune or chance. So there are three kinds of bad results. If a person has bad results in his life because of chance, or because he’s unwise but not unjust, then the field is not for the study of ethics. Meanwhile, the relation of foolishness to wickedness is a most subtle subject. When people condemn themselves, they say they’re either mean or dopes or both. And there’s not a person here who hasn’t delivered such utterances to oneself.

So to give “the examination of life” as a definition of ethics, is quite correct—though certainly it’s not everything. A human being has to ask, “How am I doing?” The next thing is: if he or she is not sure they’re doing well, why?

It’s a truism in cultural history that Greece was the first country in which this was talked about. In other lands, gods appeared; also, precepts were laid down, for instance by Mencius and Buddha; and in Israel the precepts came from heaven, were put on tablets, and there was lightning and thunder. What’s more, the Ten Commandments are the most noted set of ethical precepts we have. But it’s a remarkable thing that in the fifth century bc we have records of ethical discussion.

Conduct

In Johnson’s next sentence the word conduct is used, a word that meant so much to Matthew Arnold. Arnold can be considered one of the graceful presenters of ethics. He’s not exactly a moral philosopher, but he’s important and graceful, graceful and important. Johnson says:

Or, to reformulate this conception in the more technical terms of a contemporary philosopher, “Ethics is the science of conduct.”

There are many things one can show as relevant to the word conduct. One has to do with music: there is the conductor of an orchestra. But we also conduct ourselves. We’re doing it all the time. There are two things a human being is involved in all the time: one is thinking, and the other is making decisions. Sleep is a time when you don’t have to be aware of your decisions for some hours. Then, when you’re awake, whatever the cause, you make a decision. But before then, the matter of decision is in process.

Ethics Is in All of This

It’s the viewpoint of Aesthetic Realism that there’s nothing in this world, can be nothing in this world, never will be anything in this world that isn’t about ethics centrally, once the meaning of ethics is seen truly. The editor says:

When economists talk of “underprivileged areas,” political scientists of “civil rights,” psychologists of “abnormal personality,” or sociologists of “slums,” their very language presupposes value concepts.

There are many terms that are part of the news, and as soon as we ask what the cause is, we are in the field of ethics, because a bad cause is a great part of ethics. The question of what does bad ethics include?—that is large.

“When economists talk of ‘underprivileged areas’…” What does it mean to be “underprivileged?” It means that persons are not getting what is coming to them. This, I am saying, is one of the causes of inflation. While people can permit, and give all kinds of fancy reasons for, persons anywhere not getting what is coming to them, they deserve inflation, and what’s more, if they wait long enough they’ll get it. There’s been so much fancy talk about the “underprivileged”—talk which sounds so reasonable that people think it isn’t wicked. On the other hand, there have been some important statements, some of which appear to be reckless. There’s one of Proudhon, who is in much favor: “La propriété, c’est le vol,” “Property is theft.” Well, I admit that sounds quite exaggerated. And there’s the statement of Tolstoy about the rich who are driving the poor, who call the poor a horse or a camel: they say nice words to the horse, nice words to the camel; the only thing they won’t do is get off its back.

Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, all great novelists—as was seen in our discussion of George Eliot’s Middlemarch—have dealt with ethics. And Oscar Wilde, who made fun of morality, wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is ethics on about every page.

In what I quoted, Johnson refers to the phrase “civil rights.” And there are women’s rights, children’s rights, animal rights. As soon as the word right is used that way, we’re in the field of ethics.

Then, “[When] psychologists [talk] of ‘abnormal personality’…” A question that is still with us is how to relate ethics and psychology. “…or sociologists of ‘slums’…” As soon as the term slums is used, we feel there is something unjust. And there is.

Value as Powerful

There are three large studies having to do with values: aesthetics, ethics, religion. There are more than that. Many people would include politics, include sociology, even anthropology. But the three that are mighty on the subject are religion, aesthetics, ethics. And how they are related is important for these days. If the world can punish a disregard of it, as I think it is doing, then the world becomes a little like an avenging Jehovah, which makes the world, in its secular form, somewhat religious. That idea is frequently used. Very often a doctor would say, 40 years ago, “If you go on drinking, Mr. Mulgrave, your liver will punish you.” Often that language is used. You don’t have to have a particular God in mind in order to see the world as doing any punishing.