Dear Unknown Friends:

There is no bigger subject, historically and philosophically, than that of the lecture we begin serializing here—and no bigger subject in the daily lives and feelings of people. The subject is the relation of value and fact, of feelings and facts. The 1969 lecture, by Eli Siegel, has the title Is Hope Worth Money?

The two, value and fact, have been seen by people as ever so divided—as in different divisions of reality and different divisions of oneself. The Me who tries to be exact (and this Me is in some fashion in everyone) seems a different Me from the self who hopes, despairs, is enraged, or ashamed, or exuberant. And the rift—whether one is conscious of it or not—has weakened the life of every human being. This great lecture is about the fact that such a rift need not be—and, indeed, is false.

For Example

I look out my window and see shadows of leaves and branches against a glowing, white-painted wall. Those shadows could not exist without the particular position of the sun in relation to that of the tree branches and the angle of wall, all of which is measurable and calculable. What I just mentioned, and similar matters, have been called fact. But I also see that those shadows are beautiful: that there is a mystery in them even as they’re quietly and simply there, outside my window; that they have gentleness yet delicate tumult; that they seem distinct from the wall yet of it; that they feel very new to me yet remind me of other shadows I have seen. All that, the beauty, the mystery, the feeling of present meeting past, would be called value. Yet are those two aspects I described, which might be called “fact” and “value,” only apart? They are different, of course. But how much are they of each other? And are they both real?

One of Eli Siegel’s earliest writings was about the need to see value and fact more truly, exactly, and respectfully. This carefully reasoned essay, “The Scientific Criticism” (Modern Quarterly, March 1923), was published when he was 20 years old. Commenting on it decades later, he wrote:

The Scientific Criticism has as its basic idea the need to see everything subjective, “in one’s mind,” “intangible,” “deep in oneself,” “imaginative” as an object. I felt, as I do, that just because a person is not clear about something in himself or in another, doesn’t mean that this insufficiently seen thing is less of an object than what is seen clearly—say a spoon, a ring, a newspaper. From this came the idea that if values exist at all, they exist no less than what are usually called facts. Goodness exists as much as a rubber ball; beauty exists as much as a bar of iron; honesty exists as much as a chair. Something may be more poetic than something else, just as something is drier or wetter than something else.

In his study of reality—including philosophy, art, history, and people—Eli Siegel came to the principle which is a means of knowing better and better the value of anything, from the Mona Lisa to a quadratic equation. It is this: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Further, in Aesthetic Realism he showed that there are two big values at war in everyone, and what we do as to them is how our lives will go. One is the value which is respect for reality, our seeing meaning in things and people and wanting that meaning to increase. The other value is contempt, “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” From love for that first value—respect for the world—come all art, true science, justice, real intelligence, real kindness. From the second, contempt, come all injustice, cruelty, unfeelingness. And from the having of contempt comes too a self-dislike, which can take the form of deep agitation and unsureness—because the purpose we were born for is not to look down on the world but to see it justly and like it honestly.

It is contempt for the world that has people deal falsely with values and also with facts. People have felt: “What I value, what seems right to me, of course is right. I don’t have to be exact about it; I don’t have to ask and keep asking, Is this notion I have, this feeling I have, fair to what things are, fair to the world? It’s mine, I feel it, it suits me to feel it—therefore it’s right.” What I just described is so immensely common. It is, largely, the way humanity has lived—with the inevitably accompanying, though usually unclear, self-discomfort for having made such a choice.

Meanwhile, it has become vivid in recent years that one can treat contemptuously not only values but straightforward facts. Throughout the centuries, in governments and economics and social life, this has been present: “I am not going to let little things like facts deter me in what I’m after. A fact is what I say it is; and I can make nonexistent any fact that doesn’t suit me.”

Now, because the principles of Aesthetic Realism exist, and because of the rich, deep, delightful, kind, exciting education which is Aesthetic Realism itself, we can learn how to be happily just to both value and fact, emotions and facts, and therefore just to our own intensely hoping selves.

About Love, & a Poem

In the present lecture, Mr. Siegel speaks about the confusing emotions and values present in relation to love, some of which are at odds with others. So I quote this definitive (also beautiful) sentence by him from Self and World: “The purpose of love is to feel closely one with things as a whole.”

Humanity’s two warring values have been in people in relation to love, and there they take this form: The authentic, truly tender, truly passionate value is to see meaning in the world itself through knowing deeply a particular representative of the world. The other value—really treacherous to love—is contempt: through this person I can conquer what’s not me, have it serve me, own it, use it to make myself magnificent.

In this TRO, following the first section of the lecture, you will find an early poem by Eli Siegel about love. It was written in 1923, the year “The Scientific Criticism” was published. “Trees in Rain” is now included in his Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, with the following note by the author: “Trees and girl are meant to be about the same thing.” The poem is exceedingly musical.

As in the poem of Matthew Arnold that you’ll soon meet in the lecture, there is in “Trees in Rain” the desire to see emotion accurately—and in the poem of Eli Siegel that desire is fervent. The music of “Trees in Rain” arises from and has in it an exactitude about turbulence and mystery; it is a oneness of yearning and factuality. The poem is beautiful.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Is Hope Worth Money?

By Eli Siegel

I have called today’s talk Is Hope Worth Money? My purpose in using that title is this: There’s a relation between value as the Chase National Bank understands it and value as Thomas Aquinas understands it—or the philosopher Samuel Alexander, or the philosopher G.E. Moore, or anyone else in the philosophic field. Value is, quite clearly, related to fact. And I may mention that there is no fact without value. Then, the next question is whether every value itself is a fact. I put the title as I did because if hope can be worth money—and it can—then a value is a fact.

As to hope’s being with money, we can have the following: Let’s assume that somebody is very much worried about something and feels tormented. If he could get 20% more hope than he has, would he pay something for it—say $50, if he’s well equipped? I think he would. The mere lessening of worry is an advantage, like going to the theatre, even though the hope one gets may not be the most complete.

Two things are proven by the fact that to have hope is something a person might pay for. One is that hope exists, and if it exists it’s a fact—anything that exists, taken by itself, is a fact. And the other is that it has value. Value is a fact, and I say that definitely. There’s a great desire not to see that it is. The purpose of thought is honestly to see value as a fact. The purpose of art and science is, in its simplest sense, to show that the value which is in art is a fact, and that the facts which are in science are values. That is one way of putting it—there are other ways.

There Is Emotion

The next thing to see is that wherever there’s a value, there is an emotion. All emotion, as I have also said, is about value, any emotion whatsoever is. So, the longer title of this talk is a poem. It’s called “Is Hope Worth Money?”:

The emotions mentioned in that poem are the principal emotions. They are the big six. But they have at least 8,000 subdivisions, and they’re on the move—and when I say 8,000 I’m being accurate. The subtlety of these emotions is beyond computation. They can be mingled in every kind of way, and a purpose, somewhat, of this talk is to show how the emotions are of such mingled yarn that the fabric is something heaven itself has a hard time keeping up with.

In Drama

Every effect in drama is an effect of value, is an effect of emotion. Dramatic emotion is the emotion of life given that universal form which is art, which is another dimension, which is aesthetics. Aesthetic emotion is ordinary emotion seen in terms of an unperturbed universe.

To show something of the complexity of emotion, I am going to read part of a play by E.E. Cummings, Him. The play was first performed in 1928, in New York. And as I read it again recently, this part toward the end still seemed to me the most stirring thing in it. One reason is, it showed the contrarieties, the opposites in emotion, and particularly the opposites in love.

It should be said at this time that when I talk about values, the opposites are all over the place. All value has opposites in it. The value of a thing is made full and dramatic by a sense of what is different from it. That’s why people so often talk about love and hate, hope and fear, pleasure and pain. But there are not only the large dramatic contradictions. There are all kinds of subtle things.

There is the fact, for example, that we have the famous statement “God is love”—which is still true, which we find in the New Testament, and which is an idea we can find in all religions. It’s in the writing of Swedenborg and others. Love has been associated with God. Yet the word love, of course, is used in other ways—as, let’s say, a woman approached a young Eton boy with the phrase “Interested in a little lovin’ my lad?” Now, we know we’ve gone away from Swedenborg at that time, but the word is there: “How about a little love?”—and the word is used that way and pronounced right.

The word love itself has in it a whole psychical menagerie. It has in it doves and lynxes and alligators and gazelles, unicorns, everything—and shadows of these things.

The whole purpose of fiction and drama and poetry is to show the many colors, divisions, gradations, relations of the large emotions: love and hate, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. These, again, are the big six. We find the contrarieties in the idea of love ever so strong. They are present in Dostoyevsky; for example, they’re present in Sonya in Crime and Punishment. And they’re elsewhere. There’s a certain mingling of body and meaning that people can’t make sense of.

In the Cummings play there was nearly all the bawdiness that the 1920s permitted—which was one tenth of what’s permitted now, maybe one fifth. In the play, as it was produced at the Provincetown Playhouse, there was a mistiness, an aroma of time, an aroma of the unknown, and in the meantime body was present. That effect is there in different ways in art. It’s present in a good performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

Concerned with Values

Well, this—act 3, scene 6, of the Cummings play—goes very far. And it’s concerned with values. The scene has a barker introducing what used to be called an “Oriental dancer” with flamboyant and fetching language, and then asking all the men to step closer because of what they’re going to see. Then when the curtain is taken away, there’s someone like a Madonna with a child. The two aspects of “love” are brought together. This, in performance, was ever so effective. Somehow, the starkness of the difference is believable; the dancer is the Madonna. This is how Cummings has it in Him:

Barker (…Gestures fervently and shouts). Evrybudy dis way please —Now we comes tuh duh cornbeefuncaviare uv duh hole shibang duh jenyouwine P.S. duh resistunce duh undielooted o-riginul milkshake uv duh ages Princess Anankay duh woil’s foist un foremohs exponunt uv yaki-hooluh—hiki-dooluh udderwise known us duh Royul Umbilicul Bengul Cakewalk comes frum duh lan were duh goils bade in nachurl shampain tree times uh day un doan wear nutn between duh knees un duh neck duh managemant is incloodin Princess Anankay’s soopurspectaclur ac widout extruh charge tuh nobody youse see her strut her stuff fur duh o-riginul price uv admission You walk right up gents youse can stick her full uv looks like she was uh pincushion. (With a vivid gesture, he pulls aside the curtain. A woman’s figure—completely draped in white and holding in its arms a newborn babe at whom it looks fondly—stands, motionless, in the centre of the diminutive room. The crowd recoils.)

That’s one scene. I still see it as important in American drama, with all its expressionism. And what it’s about is something we see every time emotion is concerned: what is value, and is value a fact?

[Editor’s note. To avoid any confusion, I mention the following: With all the starkness of flesh and purity, what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the essential fight of values in that scene is not between body and holiness. The essential fight in it is the fight of contempt for reality and a person—here, the using body to have contempt—versus respect as tenderness, grandeur, and good will, which a Madonna can represent.]

We Go to Matthew Arnold

Today there will be some relation of Matthew Arnold and E.E. Cummings and others.

There is a short poem of Arnold about why one cannot make sense of oneself—which means sense of one’s values, sense of one’s emotions. The poem, published in 1852, is called “Destiny”:

In other words, there is something warm and something cold in man, and they don’t go together. Arnold noticed it.

“Why each is striving, from of old, / To love more deeply than he can?” That is, we think we have more emotion than we really do: we try “to love more deeply than [we] can.”

“Still would be true, yet still grows cold?” So, while a person is trying to be true, there’s something in him that makes him cold. He has “a heart of ice, a soul of fire”—meaning that the relation of warm and cold is not very felicitous.

Arnold saw that the human being is pretense and is also authentic.

This large thing has to be asked in terms of art and science: Do values exist? The answer of Aesthetic Realism is: Do they! Well, they do.

Trees in Rain

By Eli Siegel