Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue serializing Eli Siegel’s great 1969 lecture Is Hope Worth Money? It is about the relation of two opposites that are central to philosophy, magnificent in art, and bewildering in people’s lives: fact and value. This landmark Aesthetic Realism principle is true of them: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

In the part of the lecture published here, Mr. Siegel speaks about opposites that are within value—including the opposites of absence and presence, and even nothing and something. And he speaks about the much debated question concerning value: is there such a thing as good that’s not just someone’s opinion; is there such a thing as real meaning?

Aesthetic Realism is at once philosophic, exact in its reasoning, and immediate, down-to-earth, human. Here, the way Mr. Siegel speaks about meaning and meaninglessness is utterly logical—also thrilling and often humorous. But since the nature of this discussion is so richly philosophic, I wanted to join to it another way Mr. Siegel spoke about the matter of meaning. So, following this segment of his lecture are passages from a 1965 Aesthetic Realism lesson in which Mr. Siegel spoke about meaning in relation to love—to love as both mind and body.

I’ve titled that second discussion “Meaning—in Love & More.” And in it too there is grandeur; and there is such kindness in a field about which people have been distressed. Men and women have been ashamed because amour in its corporeality did not seem to go along with something large and wide that one longed for. My own gratitude for what Mr. Siegel explains in this discussion is without measure.

The Fight about Meaning

I think there is nothing more urgent for people to know about themselves than this fact shown by Aesthetic Realism: the biggest fight in every one of us is between the desire to see more meaning in things, people, reality, and the desire to see less—to lessen and annul meaning in what’s not oneself. This battle is the battle between the desire to respect the world and the desire to have contempt for the world. We may not know what meaning is, and how much there is—but the most hurtful thing in everyone is the hope to find things not meaningful: to rob things and people of their meaning, their value, so as to feel superior to them.

Meaning & Justice

How just or unjust we are depends on whether we want to see the meaning that is within people, or want to lessen or wipe it out.

Aesthetic Realism shows that the fundamental—and infinitely large—meaning of every person is the fact that everyone has to do with nothing less than the whole world. Reality itself, through its structure of opposites, is in everyone. Take a child of eight, named Chloe, in Detroit. Sometimes she wants to run and keep running; sometimes she wants to sit quietly, and draw. Those two drives can puzzle her: they can seem not to come from the same girl. But they are the world working in her—the world which is always rest and motion, which has the quietude of a sandy shore and the motion of waves breaking on that shore.

Also, Chloe at times can smile glowingly, and at other times can have gloomy thoughts. She doesn’t know that the reason she loves the sunset is that it puts together, as beauty, those very opposites: brightness and dark, glow and gloom.

Chloe has more of the opposites that constitute reality; indeed, she has them all, including hardness and softness, being and change, freedom and order. She has infinite meaning, because she has the structure of the whole world in her, and has that in her particular way. She is Ms. Chloe Related-To-Everything.

Yet Chloe is poor. Sometimes, even, she goes to bed hungry. It is horrible. It is abhorrent. There are millions of people in the same situation. If we see that every human being has meaning, the meaning of the world, we know that it is wrong for some persons to have vast amounts of the world’s wealth and other persons to be monumentally deprived of what the world has. And we know that this injustice should stop immediately. Meaning has to do with philosophy. It also has to do with justice of all kinds, including economic justice. It has to do with the question Eli Siegel said was the most important for America and the world: “What does a person deserve by being a person?”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

The Beginning of Value

By Eli Siegel

It can be said that all emotion has a philosophic cause. Emotion has to do with two possibilities of value, the fact that a thing is present and the fact that it isn’t. The absence of something can be exceedingly useful and pleasant. So can the presence of something. Part of the philosophic basis of emotion is that nothing and something both have value.

Nothing is as rich a subject as any. Why is the absence of a tree different from the absence of a brook? And why is the absence of a brook different from the absence of a sink? The subject of nothing is so rich it simply will never be depleted. And all thought is an interchange of nothing and something.

Tennyson, in In Memoriam, deals with the change of things: something was present once, which isn’t present now; something was not present once and it is present now. Both of these can make for emotion: a thing gone and a thing come to be. In section 123 of In Memoriam we have the following:

Looking a little at what is being said: “There rolls the deep where grew the tree.” Once a tree grew, and now where it was there’s ocean, water. That sometimes happens. Then, geologists have shown that where streets are now, once there was water: “There where the long street roars hath been / The stillness of the central sea.”

We have this, about presence becoming absence: “They melt like mist, the solid lands.” We want to clutch something, and we also want to be able to let go. Our life consists of these.

What do we want to say farewell to, and what do we want never to say farewell to? In Memoriam is concerned with that. “For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu, / I cannot think the thing farewell.” Is there something we just don’t want to be absent? It seems there is.

The Toughest Notion

Another section of In Memoriam is more overtly philosophic. The toughest notion having to do with value is that there’s nothing good in the world—the universe is the great uncaringness, the great indifference, the great blank, the great vacancy, the great neutrality, the immense meaninglessness—and that man, being a strutting creature, felt that such a universe didn’t suit him and he’d better give it a little value. So humanity, being sentimental and conceited, invented a few values. Clouds and sunset and sunrise don’t have any value: value is all an arrant invention of scared humanity. —Well, I don’t believe a word of it.

The position of Aesthetic Realism is that there’s more value than people have found—not that they have found value that wasn’t there. There’s a hundred times more value in the world than all the human beings put together throughout the ages have been able to find.

A famous dealing with the subject is in section 54 of In Memoriam:

So, the question is: is there value in the world, and what is an instance of value?

“O, yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill.” If good is imposed on things by humanity, then all things simply are what they are and nothing is better than anything else. But it happens that one of the first things paleolithic persons did was find that they could put in their mouths things that grew but that rocks weren’t so good to put there. It seems nutrition was desired, and some things were better to put in one’s mouth than others. They also found that a certain kind of grass was better to lie on than jagged paleolithic rock. That was an early discovery. So value arises not from the imposition of philosophic persons but because to live is to have purposes, and the achievement of purposes is done more this way than that. If a baby tries to get nearer to warmth, as a cat does, also nearer to softness, there’s value there which does not come from philosophic presumption.

“O, yet we trust that somehow good…” Good can roughly be defined as meeting a purpose. And are one’s purposes, desires, propensities, inclinations things that one invented, or does one have them?

So, do things fulfill a purpose—and do purposes exist? Purposes do exist. Purpose and value are present when we see something going for this rather than that. A mole tries the light and goes toward dark. A mole finds value in the dark which it does not find in the light. It’s a philosopher. And if it’s more comfortable in the ground than, say, on the branch of a tree, it finds a value being in the ground. That is not philosophic presumption.

Reality, then, is that which instigates to seek for value, and is the only supplier of that search. We’re looking for something. It can be presumed the reason a kitten opens her eyes after a while is that she’s looking for something.

Aimless?

“T hat nothing walks with aimless feet.” It is hard to prove that anything is wholly meaningless or wholly aimless. If something has a tendency to be, can it be called aimless? Here, we get to the field of evil. Take viruses. There is such a thing as a “nebbish” virus—it doesn’t do harm; it doesn’t do good. But it does have a tendency: it wants to be, for some reason. So it continues to be. Some viruses are less fierce than others. They try to get you sick, but you’re in good shape so they give up very soon. Others, though, are very persistent. They’ve studied the laws of perseverance.

What does it mean for a thing to be aimless? Once it is a thing, it has the aim to be that thing. Existence is an aim in its own right. Then, some things have as a purpose to vanish. A cloud is definitely undecided. A purpose of a cloud is to occupy the sky nobly. But we find, also, that a purpose of a cloud is to vanish. Another purpose is to change its shape. So clouds are not aimless. Anything that has three purposes should not be described as aimless.

Then, there is the matter of meaninglessness. An important question, one of the loveliest questions—I’ve never seen it not to be lovely, if persisted in—is: What is the meaningless? A person should ask that for three hours. Once you ask for three hours and don’t let go, you’ll find that answering the question What is the meaningless? gets you into territory you didn’t expect.

What makes a thing meaningless? It’s a very lovely question. And if you ask of a thing Why are you meaningless? for three hours, naturally you have to show that it isn’t meaningless, because it kept you busy for three hours. There is the question Why is life so empty? Once you begin spending a lot of time on the emptiness of life, it doesn’t seem to be so empty. It keeps you busy. The study of vacancy is an exceedingly opulent study. The study of the meaningless has so many unexpected footnotes.

“Behold, we know not anything; / I can but trust that good shall fall / At last—far off—at last, to all…” The big matter is not whether there will be good “at last.” It’s whether good is at all. A person might say: The reason I go to hear her sing whenever she comes to New York is, I think she’s good. Even if the reason in I think she’s good is unclear, this good is still effective: it does get the person to the place where she sings—Town Hall or somewhere else.

We have this question: Why does the human self hope for things? Is it because of humanity’s presumption, foolishness? Or is there some other cause? If human beings represented by the Greeks sought beauty— the beautiful—they were impelled by something. And when we see in Polynesian art, or in Egyptian art, or in an Assyrian relief, the going for something, what was impelling these persons? Was it just a desire to have an illusion?

A desire that’s unfulfilled still exists. What is the cause of desire? Is the cause only in oneself, or is there something else that is part of it? These questions will be present some more. They have to do with the beginning of emotion and the beginning of value.

Meaning—in Love & More

By Eli Siegel

The big question is: How strong is our desire for meaning? To have meaning, to get meaning, is a means of liking ourselves.

It happens that D.H. Lawrence, whatever else, shows that even with sex, people pant for something further. The first thing that is necessary is to be true to ourselves, which means being true to all of ourselves. All of ourselves has something to do with the nature of meaning.

Meaning is the beautiful relation of something to the world, and the beautiful way in which it contains the world. The artist goes looking for that.

The chief reason people feel bad as to love and sex is: they feel they have rooked themselves because they did something to have themselves triumph which didn’t have enough meaning: it took things out of relation instead of making the relation to the world larger.

Relation and meaning are quite akin. The purpose of love and sex is to see oneself better and everything else better. If they are used as an isolated triumph, then our desire to be of things and have things of us rightly has been squelched, and we feel we rook ourselves. The person who is a lover is seen as an accomplice, and we can get very angry with him or her.

We can use anything—whether mathematics or sex—for false ambition, false achievement, possessiveness, and the rest: that is, the self can be disproportionately served. The purpose of studying mathematics is to see the world that mathematics is about, that mathematics came from, as friendly to oneself and having meaning for oneself.

In making a thing just for us, we take away its meaning. And that is the danger of possessiveness: it is the great destroyer of meaning.

Beauty and meaning are quite the same thing. When Cézanne looked at a fruit, he found more meaning in it and therefore gave it form; and in giving it form, he gave more meaning.

Meaning is the possibility of a thing’s becoming more itself by having relation with other things. And this is the way Aesthetic Realism says people want to become themselves: by having a relation with, seeing their relation to, other things. The enclosing way will not work, the achieving way, the possessive way, the sly way.

The only way one can be sure in love is to feel, “Being close to this person makes me love the world more; and that is how I want to use the person.” You like a person when you can say definitely, “I like the whole world more because that person exists.” Anything else is hogwash, however attractive. And the basis of that is: a human being is, most deeply, trying to look for meaning. This looking for meaning is the same as liking the world.