Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing a 1974 lecture by Eli Siegel that is of beautiful importance in terms of philosophy, literature, and the life of everyone. It is titled Long Ago for Liking the World. And it is very much about the question I have been commenting on in recent issues, ever since life in America and elsewhere changed markedly because of Covid-19. Here again is that vital question, presented by Mr. Siegel—which, for the good of our minds and lives—we urgently need to ask and try to answer:

Is this true: No matter how much of a case one has against the world—its unkindness, its disorder, its ugliness, its meaninglessness—one has to do all one can to like it, or one will weaken oneself?

Early in the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel says: “Whether we’re doing all we can to like the world honestly, is the criterion in every aspect of life.” Using J.D. Belton’s Literary Manual of Foreign Quotations, he discusses phrases and statements valued in literary history. His purpose, he says, is “to present evidence, with what I call an astute helter-skelter quality, for the fact that the world might be liked.”

As he does, he is also commenting on this great Aesthetic Realism explanation: The one solid basis for liking the world is to be found in all authentic art. That is—art sees reality so truly that the structure of the world, the oneness of opposites, is what we hear, see, feel, perceive in a work of art. A loved melody is always, like reality itself, the oneness of continuity and change, depth and clarity. In a good work of science fiction, the strange is not only strange, but inseparable from the everyday. When dance of any kind is beautiful, it is reality’s weight and lightness at once. And this very structure of the world, brought truly to us by the artist, is felt as beauty, and is beauty. That is true whatever the artwork’s subject, whether happy, sad, or bewildering.

A Virus—What Does It Stand For?

I have been writing in recent issues about what it means to use this time of pandemic to like—not it, of course—but the world. I’ll continue to do so now, in relation to the functioning of a destructive virus itself. A virus is horrible, and this “novel coronavirus” certainly is. But what is the principle in it? Does a virus represent anything besides itself? Does it stand for a way of seeing, a way of being and acting, that is in people? And can we, must we, use this awful thing that has come to us to be against what it stands for, what’s like it anywhere, including in us? The answer is yes. And if we use the coronavirus that way, we will be using it to like the world.

I’ll be very plain. A pathogenic virus symbolizes contempt—that in the self from which, Aesthetic Realism shows, all human evil arises. Mr. Siegel defined contempt as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

A virus enters a cell, perhaps a human cell. And it uses that cell to make itself mighty. It uses the cell to increase itself, aggrandize itself, multiply itself, make itself proliferate and burgeon, all through weakening “something else”—the cell and soon other cells and the person who has them. Getting importance for ourselves through making something else be or seem weak, through diminishing or destroying its meaning, is elemental contempt. And it has thousands of forms.

An everyday form is: if we can feel another person doesn’t dress well, or if someone says something that seems foolish, we feel elevated—we’re superior, big. There’s a hope that others are weak so that oneself is superior. Day after day, people depend for their sense of strength on seeing others as weak. This is foolish and doesn’t work; it also makes us dislike ourselves and feel unsure; it happens to be evil. We should see that it’s a twin to the coronavirus—because what we rightly hate and fear about the virus is: it makes itself big, strong, through diminishing what’s not itself.

A virus isn’t conscious and can’t make a decision as to its purpose. It seems the evil it embodies is fundamental to what it is, is in keeping with its very being. That isn’t so of us. To have contempt is not what we were born for. Our contempt always makes us ashamed because it’s against the purpose of our lives: to like the world through knowing it. So if we use this thing we hate so much, the coronavirus, to be courageous, effective critics of our own contempt, we will be using it to like the world.

A virus stands for another aspect of contempt too: for what Eli Siegel describes as “contempt in its first universal, hideous form.” He writes:

The first victory of contempt is the feeling in people that they have the right to see other people and things pretty much as they please…, in a way that [has] seemed to go with comfort. [Self and World, p. 3]

That “first victory of contempt” goes on in every aspect of life. It’s central in the love which is not real love and which is so frequent. Take a young woman we can call Abby. Amid kisses and coziness and seeming devotion, she essentially sees her boyfriend, Rod, in terms of herself: as existing to glorify her. She does not see him as having to do with everything, as having a vibrant life of thoughts and feelings within him, which she should want to know and be fair to. This common way of seeing another—in terms of what makes oneself comfortable and important—is represented by a virus: after all, a virus deals with a host cell “pretty much as [it] please[s],” entirely in terms of its, the virus’s, own comfort. Again, the virus apparently does not have a choice in the matter. But we should use the virus to understand the ugliness of our choice to lessen the full reality of a person or thing—the ugliness of seeing him, her, it any way we please.

Trickery

In a website of Arizona State University, which seems to be composed for children, there is a description of the virus’s methods. And we see that way of contempt which is deviousness, deception, trickery. A virus, we’re told, enters a cell

by tricking it into thinking it [the virus] is something else that the cell needs….The cell thinks the virus is a nutrient, and pulls it in….Once inside, the virus adds its genome blueprint to the cell. The cell doesn’t know that the new blueprint is from the virus, so it follows the instructions to make virus parts.

A big form of trickery is lying, so frequent and horrible now and in other times. Without being fanciful, we can describe lying in viral terms: lying is an incursion into that magnificent cell which is the Truth About Something, and an attempt to destroy the facts which make up that cell and substitute for them whatever pleases oneself. It is contempt, and truly against life.

Meanwhile, people have tricked themselves and others about contempt. They’ve tried to feel they need contempt, that it is “a nutrient,” while it has really been humanity’s vast weakener.

That is very much so about a particular aspect of contempt, which has damaged people’s lives for centuries: the profit system. It is economics based on seeing persons—not in terms of who they are and what they deserve—but in terms of how much money one can wring from them, their needs, their labor. The profit motive is like what impels the virus. The profit motive is: to increase yourself by diminishing other human beings—to have someone work for you for as little pay as possible, or someone shell out as much as possible for your product, so you can make as much profit from them as possible. There is a good deal of trickery involved in it, but one aspect of the trickery has been to get people to think (as the cell thought about a virus) that it’s somehow something one needs. This trickery has become increasingly and mightily unsuccessful.

There have been epidemics of contempt. People have encouraged, elicited, brought out contempt in each other. People have encouraged each other to be racist. People have encouraged each other to bully someone, in a schoolyard or on the Internet. People have encouraged each other to join in a lie.

So we can think of Novel Coronavirus as saying:

It seems, for some reason, I was made to stand for evil, to embody contempt. I don’t know any other way to assert myself. I wish I had another choice. But you, human beings, do: you can be yourselves by being fair to what’s not you. Please use me to make the right choice. That would mean something good could finally come through me.

By the way, I hear there may be some good viruses. Perhaps someday I will mutate into one.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Truth & Like of the World

By Eli Siegel

Virgil can be described as one of the smartest people who ever lived. The principle of art is felt again and again by him, and also by Horace: that is, that humanity, given the power to judge and see and place things, is indebted for that, and one should like the world because one is able to be a critic of everything that comes along. The fact that a bad thing can be described beautifully, that an ordinary thing can be described beautifully, and that a happy thing can be described beautifully, is a sign that the world has more to it than people surmise—because if we can like the way we see a very painful thing, the pain of the world is combated.

In ancient Greece and Rome there are three persons—Aristotle, Virgil, Horace—among others, who went toward that. Aristotle, writing about tragedy, said that if a painful thing is poetically placed, the painful emotion changes. This is really the meaning of catharsis, the purging of the vile emotion. Horace said many things like that. And one of the most famous quotations in Latin is this, by Virgil, included in the Belton work; it’s from book 1 of the Aeneid:

Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. Perhaps, hereafter, it will be a delight to remember these things.

There are painful things in the first book of the Aeneid, and Aeneas doesn’t know where he’s going. Again: that painful things can be dealt with beautifully is one of the largest facts in behalf of the world, and something of this is in the statement “Perhaps, hereafter, it will be a delight to remember these things.”

The Unknown: How Kind Is It?

There is the relation of the unknown to like of the world. A large question everyone has is: is what we don’t know kinder to us than what we know? If the unknown is not kinder than the known as customarily had, the world isn’t very good.

There has been a feeling that the unknown is in art and is also very kind. That idea is in the saying that something really beautiful has a je ne sais quoi. The phrase is most often used wittily, and also is used to justify impressionist criticism, to say you can’t explain art. But the idea that everything beautiful has a je ne sais quoi that makes it beautiful, is a great tribute to the unknown. The world can be described as the unknown, because the unknown is just as much a part of the world as the known is. This is shown in the history of science and art.

So we have one of the most used of French phrases:

Je ne sais quoi. I do not know what.

Belton calls it “an expression of great scope in French, applicable to any undefinable quality.” And he quotes Guy de Maupassant to illustrate it. This is from Maupassant’s Mont-Oriol:

…Ah, madame, beauty, harmonious beauty!…How few there are who understand it. The lines of a body, of a statue, or of a mountain, the color of a picture, or of this plain, the je ne sais quoi of the Joconda, a phrase which bites to your very soul, this little additional something which makes an artist as much a creator as God—who can distinguish it among men?

What is the thing that makes something beautiful, makes a painting beautiful? For instance—we can put it in a mercenary way—it happens that one painting of Picasso is worth a hundred paintings of so many other artists who were in Paris. A dealer would not even buy at a very low price a good many of those paintings. There’s a feeling Picasso saw something in the world that a painter whose work a dealer would not want to buy or represent didn’t see. What could that something be? What did Picasso have that Corot had, or Masaccio?

Is the je ne sais quoi against the world, or is it for the world? If it goes deeper, if the artist sees something more in the world than a lesser painter might, is this seeing in favor of the world or against it? As soon as we say that Picasso makes curves in wood more interesting, or makes the relation between the edge of a table and the face of a woman more interesting, is that in behalf of the world or against it? Every art problem is about another way of liking the world. I’m not proving that now, but I’m talking about what Maupassant is quoted as talking about: the je ne sais quoi, the certain something, “the light that never was, on sea or land” (that’s Wordsworth’s phrase).

When somebody sees something unknown, is it a new cause of disgust with the world, a new cause to sink, or is it a new cause to be for the world? That is a technical question, and it is also a question about how to see reality. The fact remains that the unknown is as much a part of the world as anything we’re familiar with. Hardly anybody would deny that—because once we say the unknown exists, we’re saying it’s real.

Is Truth Strong?

We have a statement from the Apocrypha—1 Esdras 4:41:

Magna est veritas et praevalebit. Truth is mighty and it will prevail.

Occasionally people feel that truth, with all the chances for concealing it, is still doing business rather well. There’s what occurred in recent years, as to the Watergate matter: our Chief Executive did a bad job of concealing what he wanted to conceal and his friends also did a bad job—then, because America was angry and didn’t like the way economics was going, instead of saying those persons were sharp, Americans wanted to prosecute them. The meaning of it all is that with the right circumstances, truth is still pretty strong.

Also, there is the fact that people are still studying the Civil War: what really caused the American Civil War?; what kind of person was Lincoln? And for the English Civil War: what kind of person was Cromwell? It does show that truth is still busy and strong. How strong it is has something to do with how much the world should be liked, because if truth is insistent and doesn’t want to be pushed aside, does that go for liking the world or not?

Many persons can say that the truth about the world is much worse than we know. However, there is a good deal of evidence that that is not so, because when one thinks of art, the general idea is that there is a meaning in, let’s say, an eggplant or an artichoke that hasn’t been seen so far. When one studies the history of art, one finds it’s a constant inclusion of things that could be seen beautifully but weren’t before. Also, the present interest in discord and dissonance is a saying that beauty is in more places than was thought.

One thing people would agree on now is that both aspects of mind, science and art, go after truth. Darwin went after truth and so did Bach. And in his way, so did Delius—they’re alliterative, Delius and Darwin. Even today, no painter would say he or she goes after untruth. Abstract artists would still say they go after truth.

“Truth is mighty and it will prevail.” What does that mean? Does the world insist on being seen truly so that it can be disliked? Or if there’s something in the world that makes for truth and makes truth “mighty,” is it a sign that the world’s being seen accurately is a preliminary—that the world also wants to be liked? If someone said to you, “I want to know the truth about you,” and you felt that this was what he really wanted to know, not that he was trying to get anything on you, every person would say that was friendly.

How beautiful can truth be? There is the feeling, very much had, that truth is less beautiful than untruth. But when art is praised and called beautiful, in every instance, in every art, this holds: great art is seen as true. Michelangelo is seen as true, Beethoven is seen as true, Cervantes is seen as true, Dante is seen as true—no matter what they write about. And why? This goes along with what is seen as the most irresponsible statement of any poet, Keats’s statement “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” But the fact is that the relation has been very close: the greater the art, the greater the feeling that truth is there. Noel Coward can play around with truth, but Dante, not being Noel Coward, can’t.

I also have to say that even if one is going after comfort, in an off moment one finds one is interested in truth too. No matter how much you try not to be interested in truth, you’ll find that you get a little careless and become interested. What does that show?