Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the magnificent lecture How Effective Are We?, given by Eli Siegel in his class of July 24, 1970. It is one of his many talks under the heading Goodbye Profit System, a series begun that year. Mr. Siegel was describing then something that people today need to know if we’re to understand what we’re in the midst of.

Mr. Siegel showed that an economy based on the famous profit motive had failed. The profit motive—in keeping with its name—is the seeing of other humans in terms of how one can financially aggrandize oneself through them. It is the having, as one’s motive with people, to use them to get a lot of money. In 1970, Mr. Siegel saw, people were increasingly disgusted that jobs and buying and selling had such an ugly basis. They felt increasingly that they were being rooked.

That feeling has become clearer and more intense over the years. Americans, struggling to get along financially, know that a huge percentage of their nation’s wealth is held by a small number of individuals—and they don’t look upon this fact with pleasure.

Each of Mr. Siegel’s Goodbye Profit System lectures is a classic, and each is different. He used not only history and events of the time, but also literature and world culture, to show why profit-motivated economics had foundered and flopped at last. In the present lecture he uses Christopher Marlowe’s play of 1592 or so, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.

Which Is It?

Are the world, and the people and things in it, for us to know, value, see justly—or do they exist for us to conquer and use for our self-glorification? Aesthetic Realism explains that a fight between those two ways of seeing goes on within everyone, usually unarticulated. It’s the fight between respect and contempt—the largest fight in the human self. It affects how we see love, how we see learning, eating, how much we want to remember, and more. Since the economy of a nation arose from selves, it is to be expected that the human fight between contempt and respect would be present as to economics.

In this section of How Effective Are We? Mr. Siegel begins to speak about the Marlowe play. But first he reads something very different: a newspaper ad. In it, people engaged in a definitely for-profit business, auto sales, try to act as though their business is based on kindness to—even love for—a customer. And they say this, as Mr. Siegel points out, in a charming way. Is there a hope there, a longing even, for what economics could be?

The Faustus legend has affected people for many centuries, very much through Marlowe’s use of it, and then Goethe’s more than 200 years later. It is the story of a scholar who feels that knowledge did not get him what he wanted—which is to have tremendous power over the world, to have the world serve him. So he is invited by an agent of Lucifer—Mephistophilis (as Marlowe spells the name)—to make a deal. Mephistophilis will give Faustus anything in the world he wants, in exchange for Faustus’s giving his soul to Lucifer at a designated time. That is the famous idea. But people haven’t seen how much it takes in: that it has to do with our own very lives, every aspect of life; that it has to do with world economics. This is what Mr. Siegel is showing in the lecture now serialized.

In the Preface to his Self and World, Mr. Siegel speaks too of Marlowe. About what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the most hurtful thing in everyone—contempt—he writes:

Doctor Faustus had contempt for the world as obstructive. . . .The world makes for anger and fear; but oh, how we should like to convert fear and anger into contempt!

Marlowe, like some other Elizabethan dramatists, is good at describing contempt latent, working, in every person. [P. 12]

What Should Knowledge Be?

Faustus was a scholar. And the discrepancy in him between wanting to know the world and wanting it to be his—commanded by him, serving him, giving him whatever he pleased—is dramatic. Yet the fight between respect for reality and contempt for it can be within the field of scholarship itself.

In the universities of the world there are faculty members competing with each other, doctoral students who want to outshine all the rest. This is quite ordinary. But the desire of a person really to know a subject, and the desire in the same person to beat out another, use knowledge to show one’s superiority, even have another scholar trip up—these desires come from two different aspects of self. And the inner fight is deep and makes, within, for a certain agitation and sense of dullness.

In this section of his lecture, Mr. Siegel refers to Hal Stearns, a fictional (but very real) academic whom he writes about in Self and World. There, toward the end of his immensely kind discussion, Mr. Siegel says:

The acquisition of knowledge is a happy exposure of oneself to facts. That exposure should be electric, and accurate, and loving; it should give and embrace. . . . Otherwise, the acquisition of knowledge is just acquisition; . . . it is just possession. [P. 294]

For now (and at the risk of seeming dramatic) I’ll say simply: I love this way of seeing knowledge; it has saved me from disaster and given me a thrilling life.

Eli Siegel himself was the greatest of scholars. His description, in the passage I just quoted, of how knowledge should be seen, is the way he saw it always. It is the way he lived.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

What Is the Greatest Power?

By Eli Siegel

There are signs, some a little funny, I must say, that love is seen as necessary in business. An instance was in a newspaper that’s published in Middletown, New York, and serves the whole of Orange County, and Sullivan and Ulster Counties too. It’s one of the most interesting papers I ever saw—it can make for a feeling for New York State. There was an advertisement in this paper, the Times Herald Record, for a Ford dealership, and it uses a cherub by Raphael, with a touch of Reynolds. Very engaging. It’s a sign that love, or good will, had better be understood:

We don’t love you and leave you. Most dealers love you fine in the showroom. But what about after you buy your car? At your Ford Dealer’s the loving never stops—from the very first day. Pick your model and color. Name your options. If we don’t have your car, our computer will find it—pronto. Talk price? Talk deal? We love to make you happy. And we don’t love you and leave you. We’re still with you when you drive away. With service people who are pros who love to get your car back to you—as promised—on time. Even if you keep your new Ford forever—we’ll welcome you with open arms, forever. And that’s love.

I must say, I was surprised by that ad. The idea of being friendly with a possible customer has been around, but not this way. It shows what charitable winds are blowing in this land.

What’s present in this ad is related to the problem of love as such. Love is the being able to get power through kindness. It’s the being able to see power as kindness and as respect. And real love, or good will, is very much related to knowledge.

Some Phases of Power

The play I’m going to discuss somewhat, as something that says much about the present time, is The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe. Faustus seemed to want to have the power that other characters of Marlowe wanted to have—for instance, Tamburlaine, with his desire to manage a continent. Doctor Faustus is, in a way, like a person I wrote about in Self and World: Hal Stearns, who wanted to use knowledge as a means of being a potentate. Every power can be used badly, including the power of knowledge, including a power that seems to be like that of art.

At the same time, Doctor Faustus is after other phases of power too. Early in the play he talks with two men who deal with the supernatural, Cornelius and Valdes. Cornelius is supposed to be Cornelius Agrippa, who was seen as one of the greatest masters of the supernatural ever. Valdes says, describing what certain supernatural spirits can do for Faustus:

So Faustus is after more money than is usually had, more treasure. He’s told that these supernatural beings will “drag huge argosies” from Venice for him, “And from America the golden fleece / That yearly stuffs old Philip’s treasury.” (“Old Philip” is Philip II of Spain).

We have here that tension (to use a word quite popular now). The tension is present in everyone, and it’s unfortunate that it’s seen as something that can be described in one word. Tension has in it the riches of the universe. It is a word that has to do with everything. The tension that is in knowing and possessing is about knowledge itself; but then, it’s about people. It is about everything that one can be interested in. Faustus has this tension. He is definitely a scholar. He wants to know. But why he wants to know, he doesn’t make clear—because he isn’t clear. Does he want to know in order to see the world better and, through seeing it better, see it as more beautiful? Or does he want to know to distinguish himself in a certain way?

Any power that doesn’t want to make the world look more beautiful is fake, ugly, and people should have enough sense not to want to have it. The two kinds of power are in Faustus, as they are in other characters of Marlowe, and many characters of other writers. You can never know these two kinds of power too well. They are in play at the moment, because any person going much after money also has a notion of the world as gorgeous, of the world as more splendid. A person could feel, The reason I want to have two million dollars is to be able to see the splendors of the Atlantic and the Caribbean better, also the splendors of old Rome and pious Toledo in Spain. So we have that speech of Valdes—with Faustus, in a romantic way, going after money. The going after power can seem gorgeous, splendid, opulent, dazzling, almost equivalent to sunrise in the world.

Cornelius says to Faustus:

The getting of wealth from the earth is taking. People have had something of a romantic frisson in thinking there was oil in Ontario or in northern Canada—and there was some. That is an aspect of Faustus’s desire. At the same time, another aspect of power is the liking to tell people what to do. It’s interesting how, in this play, Faustus shows an inclination to tell Mephistophilis what to do. There’s also a touch of wanting to tell Lucifer—and that’s a little bold—what to do.

What Did Mephistophilis Feel?

Mephistophilis is uncertain, particularly in the beginning of the play, and he makes some speeches. I hope, in time, to deal again with Goethe’s Faust. Goethe was troubled by the question of power very much, as his friend Schiller was. Here, Faustus and Mephistophilis are talking. Faustus asks: “Where are you damn’d?”

That is not the orthodox role of Mephistophilis—he’s not supposed to talk that way. However, this presentation of him may have something right about it, because the hell in Mephistophilis is the inability to see something a certain way. What Mephistophilis says is put in a religious form, but it means there was a time when he felt that his self did not hinder him from seeing the world rightly. That is the awful thing about having the profit motive: it makes the soul cockeyed, it makes the self dully apprehensive, though acquisitively apprehensive. That is the worst thing about the profit motive: it cheapens one’s perceptions. And to accept the cheapening of perception, Mephistophilis implies, is to be in hell.

A notion of “the eternal joys of heaven” used to be made fun of: the idea that to be in heaven was to have a harp, and then, as you twanged the harp, to contemplate space and the goodness of the Lord. There is something wrong with that. Nonetheless, there is in the statement of Mephistophilis the idea that seeing, knowing, is the greatest power; and that is true. The greatest power in the world is to be able to see it right.

There are various kinds of power, and everybody has a desire for all of them. And they’re all in a flurry. They’re in a commotion, and they fight each other. They’re like eight interesting cats, all of whom want to get a little soft stool on which to lie for a while. And they all have it for a while. They all have the place of soft honor.

We have to ask, Why does Mephistophilis talk that way? Something like it is said in Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” There’s a feeling we’re not seeing as well as we’d like to. Depression is an interesting juxtaposition and coalition of opposites. On the one hand, you think you’ve come to eternal dreary truth. On the other, if you’re asked whether you think you are clear, you can’t say you are. So there’s the exulting in a certain perception, and a great doubt of it. There’s fuzziness and imperialism. There is the pit and the splendors of unseen Venice.

It can be well to ask: Is Mephistophilis here saying, in one of the many ways it can be said, that he’s alienated—that is, he cannot feel God and the world in a way he’d like to?

Faustus Is Doubtful

Then, Faustus is doubtful about his plans. Everybody who ever had any plans was doubtful. To have plans is to be doubtful. The reason that drugs are so popular is, they make it seem for a while that you’re not doubtful. Faustus says to himself—he’s in his study—

Faustus has the feeling many people have had: that God doesn’t pay any particular attention to you, and his plans are not your plans.

As Faustus gets nearer to making his bargain, the Good Angel and Evil Angel who have been fighting over him speak:

I would change that and have the Good Angel say to someone now: “Sweet Simpson, think of America and what it hopes for.” The other angel says: “No, Simpson; think of owning and of wealth.”

As Faustus agrees to sell his soul to Lucifer for the power Mephistophilis is offering him, we have some of the business procedure which, later, Huckleberry Finn imitated: the writing of a deed in one’s own blood:

Faustus asks Mephistophilis, “Tell me, what good will my soul do thy lord?” And Mephistophilis answers, “Enlarge his kingdom.”

Charles Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization, talks in the latter part of the book about the pleasures of accumulation, the feeling that one had another branch to one’s railroad. So if Mephistophilis can tell Lucifer that he, Lucifer, has another soul in his kingdom, Lucifer is very pleased. Evil is a chain store. —Mephistophilis says to Faustus:

So the arrangement is made. And Aesthetic Realism says definitely: anytime you go after profit, you make an arrangement with the Devil, and it’s a dull Devil. To make money through having a good effect on people, through what one does, what one knows—that is all right. But to make money because of some advantage, or because you can outwit somebody—that’s something else.