Dear Unknown Friends:

We have the honor to publish in two parts, in our July and August issues, a discussion by Eli Siegel about that tremendous universal matter—and also that matter most intimate for each of us—mind. Our own mind is so dear to us; it is nearly equivalent to what we ourselves are. Yet our mind, too, is so bewildering to us. And sometimes a person’s own mind can even torment him or her. Mr. Siegel gave this 1975 talk the title Preface to Sensation, Understanding, Imagination, Emotion: A Lecture of William Cullen Bryant, 1825. (You’ll read his explanation of that title soon.)

I have seen that Eli Siegel is the philosopher who understood mind: he understood it in all its everydayness, and mystery, and history, and confusion, and grandeur. It is he who explained what the purpose of mind is: to like the world through knowing it. He showed that mind is an aesthetic matter, in keeping with this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Mind is trying to put together such opposites as for and against, change and continuity, motion and rest, affecting and being affected, one’s individual self and an unlimited world.

And Mr. Siegel also explained the greatest danger of any mind, the ugly and hurtful thing in it. This hurtful thing is contempt, the feeling “we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” Everything unjust, cruel, sleazy in a person comes from the welcoming of, and having, contempt.

I’m very happy to say too that Eli Siegel, in enabling humanity to see what mind is, has given us knowledge that’s not only terrifically needed but beautiful and delightful.

There’s the Imagination

In the first half of his lecture, Mr. Siegel speaks about that phase of mind which is the imagination. It is a subject he spoke on often, always newly. In this talk he refers to something that’s been stated and explained only by Aesthetic Realism: the fact that imagination is of two kinds. One imagination is beautiful; the other is ugly. One strengthens people and can make for art; the other weakens people, including oneself.

The good imagination, the art imagination, can be about any object or situation, whether elegant or homely or repellent. This imagination, wanting fervently, richly, to be just to the object or situation, finds and shows in it a drama, a mystery, a vibrant organization which is the structure of reality itself.

The other imagination, bad imagination, is a contemptuous fake-cleverness. It’s interested not in justice to the object but in making oneself superior and impressive. The bad imagination may be in a supposed artwork, or in conversations, or online posts, or one’s ongoing thoughts to oneself. But wherever the contemptuous imagining occurs, there’s this result: though the persons engaged in it may get a short-lived “high,” they feel empty and ashamed. That’s because they’ve perpetrated an injustice against what Mr. Siegel called “the other half of oneself,” the outside world. And therefore they’ve betrayed the best thing in themselves too.

A Poem about Mind & Bad Imagination

As a prelude to the important lecture we’re publishing, I include here a poem by Eli Siegel. It’s funny. It’s also musical. It’s an instance of true imagination used to tell about false imagination. “She Is Waiting, Dear Hippolita,” of 1958, is included in Mr. Siegel’s book Hail, American Development. (He meant the name Híppolíta to be pronounced with an accent on the first and third syllables.)

In his note to the poem, Mr. Siegel writes: “Hippolita stands for restlessness arising from disapproval of oneself. Hippolita stands for sloppy self-condemnation.” This woman, it seems, dislikes herself for her contempt, for having been unjust to the world. But instead of trying to be an accurate critic of herself, she tells herself that other people are against her. That is false imagination.

She can’t stand being alone in her own company, for she doesn’t like herself; so she’s a “gadabout.” But when she’s with others, she’s determined to see them as thinking bad things of her. She is a study in mind: the determination to be against things and people; the inevitable dislike of oneself for being unjust; yet the desire to feel her dislike of herself is not really coming from her, but from others. —Here is “She Is Waiting, Dear Hippolita”; the writer’s true imagination has made this at once humor and kindness.

Technically, the lines of this poem are a oneness, in their sound, of drag and lightness; also threat and yearning. The poem is musical and compassionate. There is satire in it, but, clearly, sympathy as well. This poem, like the lecture we’re publishing, arose from the mind that was the most beautiful I’ve known or heard of: the mind of Eli Siegel.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

What Goes On in Mind?

By Eli Siegel

The best definition of psychology is still the study of mind. And in Definitions, and Comment, I said that mind is the power for thought, for being affected by things without necessarily having oneself in direct physical contact with them. The being affected also implies knowing. One can know something about Denmark in a way that is different from one’s touching a wall. The study of mind is also the study of what is conscious and what is unconscious; and it should be seen that the unconscious as much belongs to mind—no more, no less—as any other aspect.

So what are the things that go on in mind? The old psychology very charmingly used to begin by trying to answer that question. Three faculties would be spoken of: sensation, reason, and will. And these should be looked at. Will is that which makes one want to do something, or makes one know that one wants to do something. It still belongs to psychology. Memory belongs. And whatever intuition is, intuition belongs. The greatest later addition is the unconscious, as a study in itself.

Often a psychology book would begin very simply: what is the nature of a simple sensation? You can begin that way; but it happens that a person can be using understanding, sensation, imagination, memory, all at once—and emotion too.

Poetry, I have seen, is a good way of dealing with psychology straight. I am going to use a lecture of William Cullen Bryant of 1825. (Sometimes its date is given as 1826.) And I call today’s talk Preface to Sensation, Understanding, Imagination, Emotion. Those are the things that I see as usefully to be looked at this evening. Certainly, there are many other things that one could include. There’s motivation. That belongs to psychology. And all the emotions do. But those four, if fully understood, will be a means of dealing with all the new terms that have arisen.

There Are Bryant, America, Criticism

William Cullen Bryant, in 1825, was seen by many as the most important American poet. And the Athenaeum in New York was the place where Bryant gave a series of four lectures on poetry. In order to see what psychology is, a person should ask about oneself: What makes it possible that the year 1825 in New York, in relation to poetry, means something to me? What gives me the power to find some meaning in that? One may say that mind is that which finds meaning. It finds color, and it also finds meaning.

Early in his first lecture Bryant has the phrase “The imagination is…”; and this already makes his criticism different from that of the 18th century. In the 18th century, the imagination was not seen as a term by itself. It had been thought that the novelists and poets and even painters had imagination, but one didn’t talk of “the imagination of Correggio.” That came later. So that phraseology of Bryant is notable in American criticism. Meanwhile, to be sure, he was affected by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who did write about imagination, and whose Biographia Literaria of 1817 had gotten to America.

We look for a while, then, at imagination. Imagination is that which enables you to picture a little child running in one of the streets of Quebec, and a moment later crying. It’s a different thing in mind from what enables you to say 7 times 8 is 56. And I’ll say about the title of the present talk: it is a Preface, because I don’t begin with those four aspects themselves, Sensation, Understanding, Imagination, Emotion; I begin with Bryant’s lecture. —This is Bryant, exemplifying some of the not so copious criticism of early America:

The imagination is the most active and the least susceptible of fatigue of all the faculties of the human mind; its more intense exercise is tremendous, and sometimes unsettles the reason; its repose is only a gentle sort of activity; nor am I certain that it is ever quite unemployed, for even in our sleep it is still awake and busy, and amuses itself with fabricating our dreams.

That is a long sentence. However, it is an important sentence.

Everybody has suffered from imagination. A person who hasn’t suffered from imagination hasn’t lived. And one of the remarkable things in this passage of Bryant is something we don’t see in Coleridge: Coleridge doesn’t talk of imagination as something that can harm one and from which one can suffer. Aesthetic Realism explains that there are two kinds of imagination: one which is in behalf of knowing the world, and the other which serves your own power. And when you serve your own power, you have a chance of serving your own distress.

Bryant doesn’t say there are two kinds of imagination, but he implies it. And when we say that imagination is what caused Goethe’s Faust and also what caused a father to kill his daughter, it’s hard to place the two. Through imagination we can look at somebody and think that this person is ruining our lives and we have to get rid of him. Most imagination doesn’t topple over into what is called “deed,” but it can trouble one very much. And people can want to get to that unendurable point, and if their imagination is of a certain kind, they’ll get to it.

We have this sentence of Bryant: “The imagination is the most active and the least susceptible of fatigue of all the faculties of the human mind.” That has to be looked at. Sometimes a person, imagining, can seem fatigued. A teacher may see that a child in her class is in a state of reverie. All reverie is imagination. And reverie can seem our best defense. Reverie, daydreaming, is an aspect of imagination, and imagination here is awareness of the world with a tendency to change it to suit your purpose. That’s bad imagination. You have to be aware of something about a person before you can hate somebody—you have to know at least that he exists.

Bryant has poems in which he’s near Monument Mountain, he’s near Green River, he’s seeing a gentian, a blue flower. He imagines. And the imagination is quite good: Bryant is one of the real poets of America. But I think he was troubled by the other imagination too, because we all are. Being moody is related to imagination. Brooding is related to imagination. So is being depressed.

The first thing to see is that if you imagine, it’s with the same mind that has sensation—that gets an impression if you touch a flat surface—or the mind that does some work in arithmetic. All psychology is a process in which a self is concerned, and something other than self, at that moment.

Bryant says of imagination: “Its more intense exercise is tremendous, and sometimes unsettles the reason.” Here, he is aware that imagination can get one insane. He puts it very nicely. Meanwhile, so far Aesthetic Realism is the one thing that’s interested in relating and differentiating between the imagination that lands one in an asylum and the imagination that enables one to write a poetic play.

We Come to Understanding

When Bryant says imagination “sometimes unsettles the reason,” we come to a distinction between aspects of mind that are in the title. Reason is with understanding. And while imagination and understanding are related, I think you will feel, as you look at them, that understanding seems less personal. When you say “my imagination,” you seem more personal than when you say “my concept” or “my understanding.”

And there are rest and motion in how these aspects of mind, imagination and understanding, are related. The placing of imaginative things is part of understanding. A novelist can think, “Where shall I have this incident—in an early chapter or in a later chapter?” And a playwright: “Where will Mr. Higham denounce his wife—in the second act or in the first?” That’s understanding. And here, understanding is more in motion than the imagined thing it’s dealing with. The two, imagination and understanding, assist each other. One of the questions in poetry and also in what is called life is the relation of understanding and imagination.

And we keep on imagining. A person can think, “What are they going to serve me when I come visiting there? Will I get the same old spaghetti?” That is not a wonderful topic of imagination. But people have thought such things.

So Bryant, commenting on imagination, has used that phrase “and sometimes unsettles the reason.” The purpose of imagination is very often defensive and self-enhancing: you get rid of your enemies through imagination. And in the meantime this imagination also “unsettles the reason” as people and things are wrongly seen as enemies to defeat: “Did you put anything in this soup?” “What are you looking at me that way for?”

Thought and imagination are going on all the time. Thought stands for outline, and imagination for material or color. They’re always present. When Bryant says of imagination, “Even in our sleep it is still awake and busy, and amuses itself with fabricating our dreams,” he is quite right. I’ll mention too: this is the kind of thought that Alexander Pope in the early 18th century and Boileau in the late 17th would not see as related to poetry. The relation of dreams to poetry took many years to get to. —Meanwhile, tomorrow various doctors will tell patients, “It’s only your imagination, Mrs. Stevens.”

The Personal Quality

Bryant continues his looking at imagination:

To this restless faculty—which…is ever wandering from the combination of ideas directly presented to it to other combinations of its own—it is the office of poetry to furnish the exercise in which it delights.

That shows the personal quality of imagination. We meet certain things and, just because we are ourselves, we’re going to do various things with them. For instance, I can say, “A cat jumped over a fence in Rhode Island.” Some people will think of the cat as tortoiseshell. Some will think of it as reddish; some as gray. And one person will insist that it’s striped. But the imagination is yourself selecting among the phenomena of the world.

The Purpose of Poetry

We come to the purpose of poetry. To put it somewhat playfully, the purpose of poetry is to make the world honestly prettier because you were around. That is, you make the world prettier, but the way you do it is honest. That goes for all the arts: the purpose of every art is to make the world honestly prettier, whether the art is painting or caricature. Even caricature makes the world more interesting, and interesting is a phase of the world’s being prettier.

The purpose of poetry is to get to imagination that helps the world along, that helps people see the world better, and that also is enjoyable. Poetry is helpful and enjoyable, which is another way of saying it is instructive and entertaining.

The reason I’m discussing this talk of Bryant is that (as you’ll see) he says three things are necessary in poetry: 1) imagination; 2) emotion, or passion; 3) understanding.

As to emotion: when it gets very big, and instead of your telling it what to do, it tells you what to do—it has become passion. Emotion and passion are simply quantitatively different.

(To be continued)