Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue and the next we are publishing portions of a lecture that Eli Siegel gave in February 1965: Instinct Makes for Praise and Good Wishes. It is part of a landmark series on instinct that he was in the midst of presenting.

Mr. Siegel defined instinct as “desire not known or seen as an object.” And in this lecture he speaks on what he showed to be the deepest, most beautiful, most powerful desire in the self of everyone. It is good will: “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” Mainly, people don’t think of good will as powerful at all—but as self-deprecating and pale, a way of being that one may pretend to have while really engaged in more “practical” pursuits. Mr. Siegel, however, showed that good will is not some sacrificial matter, lauded by people who are either deceptive or foolish. On the contrary: real good will is thrilling. It is utterly practical. And we will never like ourselves, or be ourselves, without it.

Good Will Is a Oneness of Opposites

This central principle of Aesthetic Realism is true about good will, as it is about every aspect of the world: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Good will is a oneness of care and criticism, for and against. If we have good will for a person, we want to value that person truly, not miss anything that’s fine. We also want to be as clear as we can be about what’s unjust in that person, because we want the person to be fair to what’s other than him- or herself, not unfair!

And always in good will—the beginning and continuous thing in good will—is the desire to know and keep knowing. With this knowing comes its opposite: feeling, including emotion that is large and deep. It is good will that enables us to have the big, true emotions people thirst for.

A Representative Person

That good will is an imperative within everyone is shown in the fact that we will never feel at ease unless we have it. The big opponent in us to good will is contempt: the desire to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” In every aspect of life, people do go after contempt, fiercely but also purringly.

Take a person of now, whom we can call Kiley. Like so many others, she judges people on how important they make her. That is one of the most frequent forms of contempt. Kiley was fairly successful getting the praise she sought—from men, and at jobs she had. But there was a deep agitation and sense of emptiness in her. She felt she would like herself, be sure of herself, if she married a man who adored her, who had a lucrative job and some stature in his chosen field. She met, felt swept by, and married such a person: Ron. But now, after two years, she doesn’t feel as she hoped. She tells herself Ron doesn’t praise her enough. She feels angry and bereft.

Last year, when Ron had a bad flu, Kiley took care of him; certainly there was good will in that. And she makes sure the cookies he likes are in their home. But she has never thought of Ron as someone whom she needed to know deeply, think about widely—as a person who has to do with all of history and the immediate moment; as someone who is affected really by people and things besides herself. (Ron has not thought of Kiley in that large way either; but I’m writing about why she is so displeased with herself.)

Last week, when she complained that Ron didn’t speak to her ardently anymore, he said, “Kiley, what do you want from me? Don’t I tell you at least twice a week how beautiful you are and how much I need you?” “Yes,” Kiley said, “but I don’t believe you. Can’t you be more convincing?”

We can get the things we thought we wanted, have victory after victory, but if we don’t have good will we’ll never feel at ease. Kiley has been flirting more intensely with other men, at the accounting firm where she works. They have responded, and she has felt victorious, yet more and more empty and agitated. A doctor has prescribed medication “to take the edge off things.” But the big trouble within Kiley is that she doesn’t have good will—for her husband, for others, and for the world she is meeting. To a large extent, she has turned these into mechanisms for glorifying herself.

In his teaching of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel has shown what good will is, and given evidence for the fact that it is the smartest, toughest, most charming, most intellectual, most powerful force in the human self. I have just presented, very briefly, an aspect of that evidence. In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel gives other evidence—in, as he says, “the lighter” field. He does so with simultaneous humor and depth—he, whose own life embodied so magnificently the kindness and power of good will.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Instinct, Praise, Good Wishes

By Eli Siegel

Today’s talk is called Instinct Makes for Praise and Good Wishes. The aggressive instinct is perhaps the one most dramatized, and these days it has taken on a new subterraneity. Within instinct—as elsewhere—there are pairings that have to do with opposites. And the pairing, deep as any, is the instinct for good will and the instinct for ill will, for good wishes and bad wishes. Good wishes can take the form of love, and bad wishes can take the form of aggression.

In order to understand these things, the lighter aspect has to be seen. Nearly every night in the land, some kind of gathering is taking place in which people toast each other or at least toast somebody. And the fact that the toast has become an institution—I have noticed ten collections of toasts printed in America alone—is a sign that good will can be a business.

A toast is a formal expression of good will, occasionally quite funny, occasionally quite flat, occasionally quite surprising. The fact that there should be toasts at all is a sign that the human self wants to have good wishes. Where there is a sign of something, there is usually that which is the real thing. There can’t be something hypocritical until the real thing exists. Hypocrisy is a sign that the thing pretended to exists. This has been said frequently. But the fact that toasts, in all their fulsomeness, exist shows that good will exists.

Along with good will, and sometimes part of it, is the desire to praise. That desire is tremendous. Right now a boy, or young man, of 16½ is looking for an angel. And somebody, corresponding at least for a while to the idea, will be found. A girl also is looking for her flawless hero, the male angel. She will perhaps find him, and then be puzzled.

Some Examples

Toasts are to be looked at, because they express very often the unconscious of humanity in a notable fashion. Today I’ll chiefly use a book of 1923 by Paul W. Kearney, called Toasts and Anecdotes. It’s important that persons felt there should be a book of toasts meant for many people who are going to be at a party or some gathering and will be called on to say something: it’s good to know what your good wish is in advance. The book begins with original toasts, by the author, Kearney. There is this:

To my friend. If we ever disagree, may you be in the right.

This shows that human nature is dissatisfied with itself. That a person can wish another person be right, with whom one disagrees, is good sense. For this to be in the form of a toast shows that human nature is scratching around for better things. So many of our notions are in the well-got-rid-of field. I say this very carefully, because even when our notion is correct, the way we have it is so often not good. I’m not trying to be pessimistic. But this particular toast is a sign that we do wish our notions to undergo revision. It is hard, on a major subject, to be wholly incorrect, but it is certainly easy to mottle and stain our correctness with some attitude that doesn’t belong there. —Another toast:

To our best friends, who know the worst about us but refuse to believe it.

Mr. Kearney here is showing that he is uncertain. If we “know” something really, we have to believe it. And where we don’t believe a thing known, it’s because our knowledge is incomplete. To know anything, really know it, and not believe it, is the same as saying, I’m wet but I’m not humid, or I’m walking but my feet don’t touch the ground. What that toast is trying to express is this: To our best friends, who know the worst about us but refuse to see it as having the same meaning as that worst would have in someone who wasn’t called a friend. That would be more exact. If we have something bad, we usually see it as meaning less than if somebody else had it. And if someone having the bad thing is a friend, we also tend to make that bad thing mean less.

Continuity & Discontinuity, & Marriage

Under “Wedding Toasts,” there is a witty toast using the idea of contrasts:

A toast to these cooing doves—may they never become pecking hens.

That, I imagine, is for two people who have just been wed. And it’s necessary, because doves in human form get tired of being doves. And if they remain doves, they usually get so dull they might as well change to something else. The contrast of cooing and pecking is to be looked at. It brings up one of the biggest contrasts in art. A dove that coos is given to the universe as sliding, as continuous. A coo is not the same thing yet as one continuous sound, because coos stop, interrupt themselves—but compared to a stutter or peck or simple outburst, a coo is continuous. A peck is jumpy.

The universe is made up of the continuous and the discontinuous, in every field whatsoever. Music is the form of art that people perhaps are most affected by, and there, continuity and discontinuity is something so unmissable. But it is present in all the arts and also in anything whatever, whether a substance or an action or something seen.

Take, for example, what’s going on right now: the winds are blowing. Winds have a likeness to cooing, though they’re not exactly cooing. A breeze can coo—in fact, breezes have been called cooing. But a wind, even a gale, is continuous. It is different from firecrackers.

In the toast we’re looking at we have, in cooing, continuity with some interruption, as with winds. (Winds, like cooing, stop and then begin again.) Then there’s the idea of pecking, and the difference that the cooing and pecking stand for is tremendously fundamental: continuity and discontinuity, or interruption. Something that is interrupted has always been seen as more ignoble than that which is continuous. So when we consider that toast, it seems true: there is a feeling of sigh at the beginning of love, which is changed in time to something more interrupted. And that sentence of Kearney, though not too important as art, is about something we simply can’t miss, because we exist: continuity and discontinuity.

Then, another toast:

The newlyweds—may they strike no detours on the highway of life.

Here the notion of interruption is present again. The idea of life’s being a highway is old, and a highway is broad and continuous. A detour is an interruption. The word detour has come to mean something usually quite sad. When one detours, it’s sad and tricky. The interruption to a line which may be vertical, by a shorter horizontal thing, has often been seen as pretty ugly. To have a long line with a jagged bit of horizontal coming from it makes one feel that life doesn’t know itself, isn’t all that it might be.

There is a toast to the officiating clergyman:

A toast to the Clergyman who tied the knot. More power to his arm and more skill to his knots so that those who try to untie them will break all their fingernails.

The getting in of fingernails at all is an aspect of specificity that toasts usually don’t have. But fingernails are exceedingly important since they represent what we end with and what something else—the outside world—begins with for us.

Lightness and the Fearful

There is this toast to the groom:

To the Groom: Happiness, prosperity, and a sound-sleeping wife.

This is in the light field, but as soon as the idea of “sound-sleeping” comes in we have some of the grimness of life. It can be said that with each decade fewer people sleep just the way they want to. More and more, civilization is becoming either wakeful or sleepless or restless or anxious. Meanwhile, one frequent important thing in the relation of two people who are married is that one, after a while, insists on sleeping even when really there’s no good reason for it, and the other can’t sleep. Often it is the wife who can’t sleep. So this toast, while having its light aspect, is also fearful.

Another toast written by Mr. Kearney:

To the Bride: May her husband never go broke.

In the last hundred years, three reasons have often been given for marriages’ not going so well. One is what’s been called sexual incompatibility: you don’t see sex the same way. It has been felt that there was something of the sort, and it was included in the term incompatibility—which also can take in the fact that the husband wants, say, to read wild west stories and the wife wants to look at television.

Money is the second reason that’s been given: the fact that a husband doesn’t make enough money, or the way he doles it out or doesn’t dole it out, or the way the wife makes money. Money is a big interference. Then, there’s the third cause often given for trouble in a marriage: the in-laws. But the second reason is here in 1923 in a toast: “To the Bride: May her husband never go broke.”

For Graduations Too

There are “Graduation Toasts.” Toasts are for various occasions recurrent in American life. We have a metaphor here that I don’t think is the best metaphor, but it’s interesting:

A health to the Graduate. May his (or her) diploma make a tent large enough to cover all of his cares.

The changing of a diploma into a tent “to cover all of his cares” is something that perhaps need not have been done. Still, it was felt in 1923, when this book was first published, that having a diploma was not necessarily a means of having enough money. There was the poor college graduate, who had to take some strange job very often—assistant to a poultry dealer, something of the kind—the poor college graduate who met his worst in 1929, 1930, with the Depression. So a diploma as “a tent large enough to cover all of his cares” is a good wish. The best wish about education is this: May your diploma be backed up by your unconscious. That is a wish that is an Aesthetic Realism wish.

We also have a toast to the Hostess. This sounds a little grim, I must say:

To the health of our Hostess. If wishes were invitations we would be your guests every evening.

Being her “guests every evening” does seem grim. Dressing for dinner and having someplace to go to in a formal manner every day—there’s something frightening there.

Then we have, for the Host, the opposites present in a certain manner of writing, a manner used in the 18th century a great deal: things like To General Wolfe, whose courage is equaled only by his gallantry, and whose patriotism is equaled only by his graciousness. That sounds very good. There’s this:

Our Host—his hospitality is rivaled only by his geniality; our gratification rivaled only by our obligation.

This way is a using of opposites in a formal fashion: “his hospitality is rivaled only by his geniality.” Hospitality is an outward thing, and geniality is the something within. The implication is that his hospitality is very good but the pleasant feeling he has is even better, or at least is just as good. Then, there are two other things, corresponding to content and form: gratification being content, or color; and obligation being form. This way of putting things is recurrent, and should be studied closely. I can imagine this toast actually being given with good effect: somebody, having seen this book, rises, saying, “Our Host—his hospitality is rivaled only by his geniality; our gratification rivaled only by our obligation.”

There’s also this, under the heading “To the Governor:

I pledge a health to the personification of the law of reciprocity: a man as big as his job—Our Governor.

The phrase “as big as his job” is an American phrase. Is he big enough for his job? was constantly asked. This is resounding, for one thing, because it changes a human being into something impersonal. When that is done, there’s always an effect.