Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 of the magnificent lecture Long Ago for Liking the World, which Eli Siegel gave in 1974. Using as text John Devoe Belton’s 1891 Literary Manual of Foreign Quotations, Mr. Siegel is speaking about this central idea of Aesthetic Realism: The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest basis—and unless we do all we can to care honestly for the world, we will weaken and interfere with our life. He illustrates this with immediacy and beauty, urgency and erudition, depth and compassion and often humor.

In recent issues, I have written about the vital importance of that principle in relation to the coronavirus pandemic. I comment on it here in relation to a scourge that has gone on much longer: racism. As I write this, there have been daily protests for over two weeks in the streets of cities across America. They arise from the choking to death, by police, of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, who had been detained for a minor offence. He was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee down on Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly 9 minutes. Though Mr. Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe, the three other officers present did not object to the strangulation; in fact, they’re charged with aiding and abetting it.

The people protesting in American streets are men and women of every skin tone. In their ethnic diversity they stand for our nation itself. The demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful, dignified, passionate.

Millions of Americans see that this video-captured killing of Mr. Floyd represents something ongoing: the daily injustice toward black people, which takes many forms. And millions of Americans feel, This ugliness must stop! To fight for justice is to show care for the world.

Yet at this historic time in America, there are two big things people need to know for racism to end fully: What does it come from? And what can change it, really change it in the thoughts and feelings of people? The answers to these questions are in Aesthetic Realism.

An Attitude to the World

Eli Siegel explained that “the most critical thing” in our life is our attitude to the world itself. From the way we see what he once described as that which begins where our fingertips end arises how we see education, love, money, everything. Further: there is a fight in everyone between two ways of seeing the world. One of the contenders in us is that deepest of purposes: to like the world—to feel we’ll be ourselves, take care of ourselves, by seeing meaning in what’s not ourselves. The other contender, gigantic in people, is contempt: the feeling we’re more, we’re big, we’re safe, we’re Somebody, through looking down on what’s not us. From this contempt for the world, Aesthetic Realism shows, comes every injustice—including racism.

There are many things in the world we should object to. But they are not the world itself—which has blue skies, acts of kindness, and great art along with sleazy politicians, pandemics, and economic exploitation. People have wanted to see the world itself as an enemy—something that lessens them by mixing them up, humiliates them by making them feel they don’t know enough, defies them by not giving them their way. And they feel (without articulating this) that they need to beat out the world they meet, show they’re superior to it.

If we see the world as something to defeat and look down on, we’ll see people that way—especially people who seem to stand for reality as different from us. So there has been a satisfaction, a hideous satisfaction, in racism. There has been the feeling (again, unarticulated): “I’m unsure of myself, don’t like myself. BUT if I can look down on a whole race, I feel instantly superior—I don’t have to learn anything, or think deeply, or criticize myself.”

This feeling, that the way to like yourself is to look down on someone, has thousands of forms. It includes such things as preening yourself because you think, “That guy doesn’t have taste, but I do.” Contempt can be very ordinary; yet racism comes from it.

Then, if you’re a person with a certain kind of civic power, and you’re unsure of yourself, and don’t think well of yourself, there can be the sense that the way to feel you’re Somebody is to feel that many people are stupid, evil, and ruinous to the nation unless disciplined fiercely by yourself. We’re either going to like ourselves on an honest basis, through the justice of how we see—or we’ll try to like ourselves by being contemptuous, even brutally contemptuous.

To be truly against racism, we have to be against contempt, including in ourselves.

The One Real Alternative

What way of seeing is strong enough, attractive enough, to combat contempt, including the contempt of racism? It is the art way of seeing, described in this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The two biggest opposites in everyone’s life are self and world: oneself and all that’s other than oneself. We need to feel, really feel, we are expressed, we are large, we become who we truly are, by being fair to what is not ourselves. That is liking the world; and it is good will, which is equivalent to like of the world.

The people of America are looking at their government officials, and looking at each other. A person of color—perhaps a young mother—hearing an official speak on television, needs to feel, “He’s not just being smooth, not just trying to throw us a bone. He really feels justice to me is the same as taking care of himself. He feels that full justice to me would make him happy, make him think well of himself, give him real comfort—not that it’s something he’d be lessened by.”

That is the way of seeing that impels all true art. When Beethoven wrote his Fifth Symphony, he used all of himself to be just to the notes, the possibilities of sound. He was not grudging, he didn’t pretend, he didn’t try to give a little justice here and take it back there. He was not scared to see what a note, a phrase, a movement was demanding of him. And he didn’t feel sacrificial: he was being fully Ludwig van Beethoven through being fair to a world of sound that was not he.

I want to be clear: I am certainly for immediate action—for legislation and policy changes that are kind. I’m for voting, with all one’s might, to put people in office who care more for fairness than many others do. But that full, sincere, artistic good will is what Americans of all ethnicities are looking for, from those in government and from each other, and there won’t be real peace until they see it. It moves me to say: it is what I saw in Eli Siegel all the time.

Sameness & Difference

Along with the opposites of self and world, we have the opposites of sameness and difference. These are tremendous in art. And they are agonizingly tremendous in racism—because there someone uses what seems different in another, not to see a deep sameness with oneself, but to rob that person of his or her humanity. I wrote in this journal in June 1997:

What needs to replace [racism] is not the feeling that the difference of another person is somehow tolerable. What is necessary is the seeing and feeling that the relation of sameness and difference between ourselves and that other person is beautiful. People need to feel, with feeling both intimately personal and large, that difference of race is like the difference to be found in music: two notes are different, but they are in behalf of the same melody; they complete each other; each needs the other to be expressed richly, to be fully itself.

It is possible for millions of men, women, and children to have an emotion about race that is like an art emotion. And it is necessary. It will happen when America is studying Aesthetic Realism.

Twenty-three years later, I am more sure of that than ever.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Goethe—& a World to Value

By Eli Siegel

Belton includes in his book a series of quotations from Goethe. There is this, from part one of Faust (1808):

Gray, dear friend, is every theory, / And green the golden tree of life.

If a theory is gray, is it because it is true to life—or in some way skimps life, is insufficient? The latter would mean it’s gray not because it’s a theory but because it doesn’t have all the life which life has. And does that say the world should be liked or not? It’s often been said that if you’re intellectual you’re going to feel depressed. But Aesthetic Realism says: anytime intellectuality made one sad it was because it wasn’t intellectual enough. Anytime thought made you depressed it was because it wasn’t really thought. It was an imitation thereof, arranged and patted by ego.

Then, also in Faust, Goethe brings together the world and a woman:

It is one of Heaven’s best gifts to hold such a dear thing in one’s arms.

In that statement there’s a feeling that the “dear thing” had something to do with heaven as our source. And if a woman you like comes from heaven, and heaven has the meaning of the world with it, then the idea that the world might be liked is present again.

I could read every quotation in this book and, working a little hard, show it has something to do with the question of whether the world should be liked. Earlier I chose some of the quotations that are most obviously on the subject. But in this series from Goethe, I’m taking them as they come.

Custom Can Be Against the World

The next quote is this, from Faust:

Laws and claims are inherited like an everlasting sickness.

That has to do with something very sad: that when people see something has been going on for quite a while, they assume it has the propriety and the accuracy of the world itself. So custom may interfere with the truth of the world, and law does often too. There are laws that are not just to the full meaning of the world. That is why Goethe says “Laws and claims are inherited like an everlasting sickness.”

Can Pain Be Seen Truly—& Beautifully?

The next quotation brings up the constant matter Goethe was interested in, Carlyle was interested in, Heine was interested in. Heine has a famous statement: “Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen / Mach ich die kleinen Lieder”—“Out of my great grief do I make the little songs.” The feeling that pain has to be seen truly too—that is very much around. This statement from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister was quoted by Carlyle, and it’s very good poetry:

Belton gives the translation that is in Longfellow’s Hyperion:

The reason for that is: reality, being shadow and sunlight, being sharp and gentle—if you don’t want to know both aspects, you don’t want to know what the world is.

No one would deny that pain is knowledge. There’s a novelist whom I hope sometime to talk about. She chose (for, I think, some unwise reason) the pseudonym The Duchess. She is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford née Hamilton, and she was very popular. I see her, like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as knowing the novel well, and activity and thought well. In a novel of hers called Beauty’s Daughters there’s a person who is paralyzed. He’s just prone all day and the next day and so on, and in the meantime he’s talked to. One doesn’t expect that in Victorian literature.

Mrs. Hungerford lived from 1855 to 1897. And I think that, in terms of mind, she is one of the women who have been seen unjustly, as Miss Braddon was. Well, there is sorrow in that novel: the idea of being paralyzed, not being able to walk, but being able to think. This person is Kenneth Dugdale; he’s young. And The Duchess, or Miss Hamilton, wanted to get him in; she felt that the Victorian public might like it.

So we have this desire to deal with pain. The great interest in seeing pain is something that also Fannie Hurst in Humoresque made a lot of, and there are other writers who did. Why?

We are looking at these lines of Goethe, which I’ll translate literally: “Who never ate his bread with tears, / Who never the mournful nights / Has sat on his bed crying.” And then the strong line: “He doesn’t know you, you heavenly Powers,” “Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.” That last line is one of the crashing things in German literature. The question is: this doesn’t console one, but is pain educational?

Going for Justice Is Like of the World

We have the next quotation. And arising from it is the following: if justice is gone after, and Goethe felt it was, it’s a sign that the earth has something to say for itself. In recent years there’s been a good deal of evidence of this, including the fact that the Vietnam War is seen differently. It’s a long story; Mr. Halberstam told some about it in The Best and the Brightest. If you studied that, you got a feeling that people in Washington, no matter how high their jobs, could be low characters—in all sobriety. This is from Wilhelm Meister:

For all guilt is avenged on earth.

If that’s so, the world has something to say for itself.

Goethe, and Whitman, and in fact all great writers are repositories of evidence that the world can be liked, and that whatever else is true, people go for that liking, sometimes without knowing it.

There’s a song in Wilhelm Meister—Mignon’s song—which can be used badly: that is, to feel there’s a world which is prettier than this one. But if the world has such a possibility, if there is something beautiful let’s say in an island in the Pacific, the Bronx is helped too; or Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is helped.

The translation given by Belton is:

Knowest thou the land where the lemon-trees flourish, where amid the shadowed leaves the golden oranges glisten—a gentle zephyr breathes from the blue heavens, the myrtle is motionless, and the laurel rises high? Dost thou know it well? Thither, thither, fain would I fly with thee, O my beloved!

We come to this statement: Wherever you fly, the world was there before you. That can be taken as depressing or as cheering.

There Are Questioning & Compassion

Belton includes two other lines from the poem:

And marble statues stand and gaze at me: what has been done to thee, thou poor child?

The use of marble to be critical of oneself is felt by Goethe. Goethe went to Italy to see the sculpture there. But as one looks at sculpture, there is the fact that it’s there and remains as it is. To have a sculpture looking at you is to feel that one is, well, an erring mortal. Anyway, that is the way Mignon sees it. “Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an: / Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?”: there is sadness there, and there’s also pity. There’s criticism, and there’s pity. The translation can be: “And marble statues stand and look at me: / Oh, what has been done to you, you poor child?”

Belton comments:

Macaulay wrote in his diary at Florence, November 3, 1838: “My rooms look into a court adorned with orange-trees and marble statues. I never look at the statues without thinking of poor Mignon—‘Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an: / Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?’

“I know no two lines in the world which I would sooner have written than those.”

That should make Matthew Arnold respect Macaulay more.