Dear Unknown Friends:

We have been serializing the lecture Long Ago for Liking the World, which Eli Siegel gave in 1974, and we have reached the final section. With its exactitude and ease, depth and charm, urgent importance and humor, erudition and down-to-earthness, the talk is about this Aesthetic Realism principle: the fundamental, imperative desire of every human being is to like the world through knowing it; and unless we are doing all we can to like the world honestly, we are hurting our minds and lives.

In Long Ago for Liking the World Mr. Siegel illustrates that principle, using as text J.D. Belton’s Literary Manual of Foreign Quotations. And he is speaking about what we, in 2020—amid a fearful pandemic and the thrilling insistence on racial justice—need desperately to know. In the final sections of the talk, he comments on quotations from the great and truly lovable Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).

Damned Welcome Has This

To introduce the conclusion of this lecture, it seems fitting to comment on several quotations from Eli Siegel himself. In the Belton book, the quotations are mainly extracted from larger works by the authors—and certainly the works of Eli Siegel abound with sentences and passages that could be similarly extracted and would glow in meaning, beauty, and power in their own right. However, I am going to use five maxims from Mr. Siegel’s Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. A maxim is a statement, meant to stand on its own, which presents an idea with pithiness and style.

All the over 800 maxims in Damned Welcome comment on what like of the world means. But those I’ve chosen are among the maxims that do so perhaps more overtly. And I begin with the much-quoted first maxim in the book:

Don’t shake the hand of reality with one finger.

This maxim is about the big thing in us against care for the world. That thing is contempt, the feeling we are more if we can look down on, take value away from, what’s other than ourselves. Here is the wide, diverse world different from us, holding out its hand to us—and do we meet it limply, disdainfully, “with one finger”?

The maxim is tough and playful at once. It has a no-nonsense firmness and concision, yet also has nuance—for example, it ends with the delicate phrase “one finger.” It is satiric, makes fun of our tepidity and self-love, yet it is kind. It, and the other maxims I’ll comment on, have what Aesthetic Realism shows that beauty always has: the oneness of opposites.

To place further that first maxim, I’ll quote a statement by Eli Siegel which is not a maxim but a passage from his book James and the Children. I quote this because contempt, which can be tepidity and aloofness, is also the source of every cruelty, including racist and economic brutality. This passage is immortal and also blazingly of our time:

As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.

In Behalf of Reality

The next maxim I’ve chosen from Damned Welcome is number 127 of part one:

The fact that stormy weather can be described in measured prose should give one hope.

That concise statement has to do with a tremendous matter, which Mr. Siegel describes in the lecture we’re serializing. Nothing, he explains, is more in behalf of reality as to-be-liked than the fact that if something distressing is written of with sufficient honesty, the result is beauty.

There is beauty in that maxim itself. We meet the stark difference between “stormy weather” and “measured prose.” Yet listen: there is a likeness in sound between weather and measured; also between stormy and prose (with their os and rs and ss). So we feel difference and sameness at once. Also there’s a oneness of stir and definiteness in the sound of both phrases, “stormy weather” and “measured prose.”

If honest writing about a storm has true measure, authentic order in it—does that speak well of the world itself? An answer is in the last phrase, which rises from the rest of the sentence and lingers in its firm, happy monosyllables: “should give one hope”!

Ourselves & Ethics

The next maxim I’ll quote has also been very popular, and deserves to be:

If you like yourself for the wrong reason, you will dislike yourself for the right reason. [I, 229]

This—with zip, neatness, solidity, playfulness—answers a question people ask desperately: Why don’t I like myself? Elsewhere Eli Siegel has given the answer with great richness. The reason people dislike themselves, have low self-esteem, have guilt, feel profoundly ill-at-ease, is that they have tried to like themselves “for the wrong reason”: through contempt, through making less of the world and people. But the contempt way never works, because our deepest desire, as fundamental as our heartbeat, is to see justly reality other than ourselves. Here are some sentences on the subject from Eli Siegel’s Self and World:

There is such a thing as the ethical unconscious…. When we are unfair to the world, it can be shown that something in us which is the world itself, doesn’t like it…. The unconscious, as judge, has said: “Do not separate yourself from reality. If you do, you are not being yourself entirely, and one side of you will punish the other.” [Pp. 55, 45, 53]

I think it speaks well of the world that no matter how sleazy a person is, no matter how mean, and no matter how much he puts on a show of ease and self-congratulation, he inwardly despises himself because of his contempt. The maxim puts this grand ethical triumph snappily (and musically): “If you like yourself for the wrong reason, you will dislike yourself for the right reason.”

How Delightful Is Justice?

I have loved the following maxim for many years:

The defeat of ego and prejudice by lucidity and energy makes the angels roll in the aisles. [I, 217]

This is luscious and speedy. It has something big that people need to see: that justice is a good time. So often, people who concern themselves with justice feel that it has to do with something necessary, even grimly necessary, but delight is to be got in other territory. That is not how Aesthetic Realism sees justice. There is lusciousness, a good physiological relish, a mouthwateringness in the sound of the maxim’s first part: “The defeat of ego and prejudice by lucidity and energy.” That is followed by another aspect of delight, a grand letting go: “makes the angels roll in the aisles.” So there are beings of great seriousness, angels, having a good time; and these angels, who are of spirit, become quite material: they “roll in the aisles.”

This maxim uses two words that are so important in the going after justice: lucidity and energy. As to energy—we know that in a long fight for fairness, it is easy to get tired. And along with energy, the going for justice also needs lucidity: sufficient clearness, depth of seeing, the desire to understand and keep trying to understand. Through Aesthetic Realism, we can have more of both lucidity and energy about the justice humanity is longing for.

The last maxim I’ll quote is amazingly brief:

Soapsuds on a brute are still soft. [I, 241]

What is this sentence, with its logic and charm, about? A brute is real, and we should be against such a person, in all his or her hardness and ugly force. Yet the existence of a brute does not change what reality itself is, does not change the structure of the world. The world is a oneness of opposites, including the opposites of hardness and softness, force and gentleness. Brutes may betray the opposites, may horribly exploit hardness and unfeelingness—but the opposites are the world’s, forever. And therefore: “Soapsuds on a brute are still soft.”

As we conclude our serialization of Long Ago for Liking the World, I am impelled to say: I think Eli Siegel was the greatest friend reality ever had. He is, culturally, as poet, philosopher, historian, with persons he commented on in this lecture: for instance, Horace, Virgil, Schiller, Heine, Keats, Aristotle, Goethe, Carlyle. But it is he who gave the world Aesthetic Realism: the means of our understanding ourselves—and of our seeing justice to people and reality as the same as liking ourselves and having a wonderful time. And Eli Siegel was, all the time, beautifully true to his lifework.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Goethe: On People & the World

By Eli Siegel

Belton includes these lines of Goethe, from the prologue to Faust:

A good man, amid his dark strivings, is conscious of the true path.

That means there is something that’s driving this “guter Mensch.” Goethe’s statement goes along with the passage of Amiel I commented on earlier—where Amiel quotes the phrase “Do what is right, come what may.” As I said then: where does the drive to “do what is right” come from? Is the world working in us? One of the things that have been used to show it is, is the fact that the human being is a critic of oneself.

This, Also, Is Care for the World

Goethe stands for two things. There are lyrics of his which are joyous. Then, he also says a part of being happy is what you choose not to do—as in the following, from Faust:

Thou shalt abstain, / Renounce, refrain.

So, what has refraining to do with happiness? When a person, a few hours after dinner, says, My God, am I proud of myself! I didn’t eat that extra thing!—what does that come from? Is it just the feeling that you’ll look better two weeks from now? The idea of refraining is a big matter: art is a mingling of luxury and subtraction. —Belton comments:

This verse has been said to be the key to the meaning of Faust,—life must be a resignation. Tourgeneff took it as the motto of his story called “Faust.”

Turgenev was much interested in the idea. And there is Tolstoy, who is the great refrainer in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” a crazy and sensible work. Somehow it manages to be mad and still sensible, and begins with a composition of Beethoven. —But Belton is writing about Turgenev:

The hero of that story says, towards the end: “…The conviction I have acquired in the experience of these last years is that life is not a jest…but a difficult task.”

If the world gives us a task, should we resent that? If it gives us a task, is there something like respect for us in that? If somebody said to us, “I don’t want you to do anything around the house,” we could take it as an insult.

Belton includes this, from Wilhelm Meister:

If I love you, what business is that of yours?

Which means that the world is telling me to, and, as such, it has nothing to do with your permission. Then Belton quotes Goethe’s own comment on the line, from his autobiography:

That wonderful saying (of Spinoza) that he who loves God truly must not ask that God should love him in return, with all the principles upon which it rests and with all the consequences which flow from it, filled my entire thoughts. To be unselfish in everything, most unselfish of all in love and friendship, was my highest wish, my maxim, my endeavor, so that that later saucy saying, wenn ich dich lieb habe, was geht’s dich an, came right from my heart.

A False Acceptance Insults the World

Another phrase of Goethe included by Belton:

What binds us all, the commonplace.*

Matthew Arnold quotes that a good deal, as this writer says. “The commonplace” (as it’s translated here) is bad not because it’s common but because it’s not complete. There’s a certain indolence about what is accepted.

Belton writes: “Matthew Arnold comments on the saying in his essay on ‘The Literary Influence of Academies.’” And I’ll mention: it’s very interesting that Carlyle, who is so different from Arnold, should be like Arnold in using Goethe so much and resting with him.

Pessimism vs. the Desire to Know

Another quote from Faust:

She is not the first.

Belton notes: “This is the remark of Mephistopheles concerning Gretchen.”

What Mephistopheles is saying is: Gretchen has trouble and she’s not the first to have trouble—she should just expect it. Which is part of the boredom of pessimism.

But something different from that pessimism is in the next quote:

He who would understand the poet must go into the poet’s country.

That statement can be very useful. It means: try to see what the poet is really saying.

A Cause in Common

There is the following statement—one of the greatest ever—saying that art and women have some cause in common:

For the nature of women is closely allied to art.

Does that say the world is to be liked, or not?

Again from Faust:

Who can think any thing stupid or any thing clever that older times have not already thought.

That is not so grand, but essentially it means that whatever clever thing (or foolish) one gets to, the cause is in the world itself.

This, from Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, is on the subject of whether we should welcome the outside world:

He who gives himself over to solitude, ah! he is soon alone.

And Belton includes these two lines of Gretchen, from Faust. They’re an instance of what I spoke about earlier—that pain can be told of musically:

My peace is gone, my heart is heavy.

A Person & the World Are Here Too

Belton quotes lines from Goethe’s lyrics:

Wie einer ist, so ist sein Gott,

Darum ward Gott so oft zu Spott.

As a man is, so is his God; therefore God was so often an object of mockery.

As we are, so—we think—is the greatest thing we see in the world. There is the following comment:

Lichtenberg long ago said: “God created man in his own image—that means probably man created God in his.” And one of Feuerbach’s aphorisms is…“Theology is anthropology.”

Still There: The Tumultuous World

Belton includes the first line of the most famous lyric of Goethe:

Beyond all the peaks is rest.

But it’s also true that no matter how far we go into space, the tumult of Third Avenue and 149th Street is in some way still there.

I’ve presented things in Western culture, with some concentration on Goethe, saying that there is that in the human self which wants to like the world. We have to ask why that is. In one way or another, every talk I have given on poetry has been in behalf of that, every talk about art, about music, painting, the dance, has been in behalf of that. And since very often the need to like the world is against one’s personal notions, one’s personal acquisition, why should that need be? What is the relation between acquisition and art? The matter is with us now.