Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 of the great 1971 lecture Things Are Likened to Each Other, by Eli Siegel. He is illustrating this principle, the very basis of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” There are no opposites more central to the world and our lives than sameness and difference, or like and unlike—and through this talk we see how art is a showing that things different from each other are not only different, but also akin, related.

Then, there is our own life, so intimate, distinct, just ours. Aesthetic Realism makes clear that how well we learn, how well we express ourselves, how well we are able to love, how truly kind we are, how much we can honestly respect ourselves, depend on what we do with sameness and difference. All these depend on how much we see things and people different from us as being also of us, like ourselves.

Further, our false use of those opposites is central to the thing in us that weakens us, the thing that makes us cold, unkind, and deeply foolish. That most hurtful thing is contempt, which Mr. Siegel described as the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” With contempt, we see ourselves as fundamentally not like other people (or akin only to certain select people), and we feel superior in our presumed non-relation.

The Most Everyday Form

The most everyday form of making ourselves falsely different from other people is our not seeing that they have feelings as real, as keen, as deep, as alive as our own. From this not granting to others the kind of feeling we have, has come cruelty of the steepest kind, including racism, bullying, the tormenting of someone. But, as I said, making other people’s feelings nonexistent is also ordinary. As illustration, it moves me very much to quote from notes of an Aesthetic Realism lesson, taught by Mr. Siegel, which I had many decades ago, when I was six years old. The notes were taken by my mother, Irene Reiss. And I see in her handwriting of so long ago, Mr. Siegel asking me about two people I was having trouble with.

First, he asked: “How do you see your grandmother?” I thought my grandmother was mean. But Mr. Siegel said I needed to ask myself “how a person feels.” He wanted this little girl, so representative of humanity, to see that a person whom I didn’t necessarily have to praise had feelings as real as my own. He asked:

Do you think your grandmother feels lonely? Maybe when she is not nice to you she doesn’t feel so good herself. If she sometimes does the wrong thing, ask if she feels good.

The other person we spoke about was my teacher, whom I disliked. I said, “I don’t like it when the teacher yells.” And my mother’s notes record Mr. Siegel saying this:

Why does the teacher yell? Life can mix anybody up, including teachers. Do you think sometimes your teacher thinks she can’t manage the children?…Do you think she ever cried in her life? Could she even think she made a mistake? Do you want her to be happy? She yells because she is unhappy.

And he said: “The first thing that is necessary to get along with people is to ask what they feel. You are here to learn how you want to feel about the people you know and the people you might know.”

I was beginning to learn what is so necessary for people now to learn: that persons different from me had feelings just as I did; an inner life, just as I did. That is the first thing in seeing the sameness and difference between oneself and another: this person is as real as I am.

With grandeur and exactitude, Mr. Siegel himself was richly fair to the feelings of every person he spoke to or about, including a six-year-old child.

A World That Is Everyone’s, & the Vote

In the section of his lecture included here, Mr. Siegel comments on an 1838 review of Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. The great American and French Revolutions (with all the incompleteness they may have had) were both about something Mr. Siegel said is a question as important as any for our time: To whom should a nation belong?—and the world belong? Now, in 2020, that question has become more insistent than ever. Should our nation, with its wealth, belong to some people, or all people? To a few rich people who use others as material for their profit-making, or to every citizen, including a little boy now hungry in Michigan? Eli Siegel was very clear about this matter. “The world,” he wrote, “should be owned by the people living in it….All persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs” (Self and World, p. 270).

The idea—which will become fact—of a nation truly owned by all its people, is a oneness of sameness and difference. Each person is different, yet the nation will be as much his or hers as anyone’s, and will exist to strengthen the true individuality of everyone.

Historically, every advance toward a more just owning of a nation and the world, has been met with a fierce effort to stop that advance, to kill it. The reason is always the same, though rarely stated honestly. The reason is always: to make sure a nation continues to be owned by, and for the benefit of, only certain people.

An aspect of the fight about who should own a nation is the history of the vote. It’s a long history, both in America and elsewhere; it takes in a great deal of cruelty and beauty, and I’m not writing about it with any detail here. But One person, one vote is a beautiful phrase. It happens to be, both as phrase and meaning, a oneness of sameness and difference.

The attempt to interfere with One person, one vote is apparently with us today. The attempt to stop people from voting and stop votes from being counted, the attempt to suppress the vote, has been huge in history and is always horrible. Our just anger about it should be a means of our seeing and valuing more clearly the beauty it’s trying to stop. That illegal, un-Constitutional attempt is going on because something grand in sameness and difference, grandly American, is going on: Americans are more insistent than ever that our nation should be owned by all its people.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Likeness, Unlikeness, & Carlyle

By Eli Siegel

I’m going to use for a while an important American journal of 1838. We have to think of that year as having a likeness to this year; also, to be sure, it’s not this year. I’ll read from the July 1838 number of the Democratic Review.*

One of the big things of that year for America was the publication here of Carlyle’s French Revolution. (It had been published in England the year before.) Every revolution does impetuous, noticeable things with things as is.

There is a review, unsigned, of the American edition of Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History, and the review is quite good. Early in it the reviewer mentions a jest given to Talleyrand, which has to do with likeness and difference:

One of the many poisoned sarcasms ascribed to Talleyrand, is that on one occasion when Rulhières complained of being so generally reputed a wicked man, whereas he had been guilty of but one act of wickedness in his life, the witty but unprincipled bishop replied, “but when will this act be at an end?”—as though his whole life were but one crime.

Here oneness and manyness are related. Many incidents are made one—“as though his whole life were but one crime.”

Then we have a comparison. One of the ways of likening things is to take the mental world and change it to the physical world—as let’s say, There was a storm on the first floor of Woolworth’s, meaning that the salespersons were quarreling. So here the French Revolution is compared to a convulsion, somewhat of the kind that occurs with earth. As is well known, geology is often misbehaved. And when it’s misbehaved, we can have an earthquake. Geology is usually tempered and takes a long time changing, as with the Ice Age: that was a very leisurely procedure. But earthquakes also belong to what earth does, and volcanoes do too. The French Revolution is compared to a convulsion of a physical kind, though not too definitely:

That event was a convulsion of all the social elements,—the tumult and wild uproar of myriads of disimprisoned ideas and forces, under a terrible reaction from a long period of unnatural restraint,—the overthrow of all the established formulas of order, government, and power.

This idea is put sometimes in a famous metaphor: The lid came off. “The tumult and wild uproar of myriads of disimprisoned ideas and forces”: there’s a mingling here of the mental world and physical things. Uproar has roar in it, and no idea ever roared. But with that word, an idea is compared a little to something like a lion.

“The overthrow of all the established formulas of order, government, and power.” The word overthrow is a physical word, or began as one: you throw something over—a statue, a table. But it’s come to mean something else.

Prose Style Has Sameness & Difference

The writer says (as would be said later) that the Carlyle work is a poem. But first he complains of the disjointed style. Two kinds of prose style have been objected to. One is a flowing prose; everything is made alike—sometimes too sweetly and smoothly; every sentence is alike. People have complained of prose for that reason: the mellifluous style in which the words are different but they all sound the same. Carlyle, writing of history, brought in the broken style, and the reviewer objects to it. Jingle, in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, has a disjointed style too: I met the father of the girl. I looked at him. He trusted me immediately. He knew I was the man for his daughter. He said, “Will you have dinner with us?” I said, “I have a slight engagement. Will be back in a moment. Glad to.” Well, that’s Jingle when he’s happy.

Later, the reviewer finds a use in Carlyle’s style:

We have even to confess that that very uncouthness and abruptness of style which we have already so strongly reprobated, sometimes contribute to increase this remarkable effect of the pictures that he draws, in a manner entirely peculiar and original, and startling and striking beyond description.

There are words that accent the unlikeness of things, and some are in that sentence. Peculiar is one. Original is another. Startling and striking are others.

There’s a chapter in The French Revolution with the word “Sansculottism” in its title Sans-culottes can be given two meanings. One is: people so poor they didn’t even have breeches. (Sans is without; culottes are breeches, short pants.) The other meaning is related to a change of style, because toward the end of the 18th century the wearing of shorter pants, or breeches, particularly silken breeches, was looked upon with some disfavor—especially, in France, by those who were for the revolution. As the 19th century came along, breeches were not worn in England, France, or Germany. You had to settle for pantaloons, which had various styles. But a person who didn’t wear breeches in the 1770s was usually seen as a poor person—a sans-culotte. Culottes is a word much used in fashionable stores now. It has been for a long while.

This is a famous chapter of Carlyle. He uses the word sansculottism to mean something like what I described in relation to the profit system: that the ethics of the world is angry, and is saying, This should come to an end! Why the French Revolution occurred just when it did is a big question. Why it came to a head on one of the great days of all history, Bastille Day, July 14, 1789, the year in which Washington was inaugurated—that is something to answer. Carlyle sees ethics as latent and as a great force. The early part of The French Revolution presents the wrath of reality at what was in Europe and elsewhere—though this book describes things chiefly in France. The reviewer quotes the following, of Carlyle:

Sansculottism will burn much; but what is incombustible it will not burn. Fear not Sansculottism; recognize it for what it is, the portentous inevitable end of much, the miraculous beginning of much….As an actually existing Son of Time, look, with unspeakable manifold interest, oftenest in silence, at what the Time did bring; therewith edify, instruct, nourish thyself.

A phrase that has been used a great deal is the womb of time: What is stirring in the womb of time? In the womb of time, Carlyle makes clear, this French Revolution was stirring. How much is the womb of time an ethical womb? That is a question. And what is stirring now? The idea that all the things that were complacently accepted are going to change into a powerful whirlwind; that the finger of God will change everything: in Carlyle’s French Revolution, there is that.

We have the problem of how the quiet France of 1788 could change so much—the seemingly quiet, because, to be sure, there were many things that weren’t. I have read diaries of the time, and it seems that France was going on speaking good French and pleasing itself. There were even a few plays and poems written. Some of the philosophes were still around—not many. How, from the quiet of 1788, did there come that great thing called the French Revolution?

Then, there are minor questions: how, from the French Revolution, came the Directory, preceded by Robespierre and others, and then Napoleon, and the Bourbons again? What is history up to?

From the French Revolution, a good many persons in England acquired a fear, which sometimes was shown needlessly—as with the fear of Chartism. What you fear truly and what you fear needlessly or untruly have a likeness.

Another Carlyle Sentence

Another of the Carlyle sentences is in this review, and it has in it unlikeness and likeness. A beautiful thing in England or America is the church spire, having lower buildings and also the landscape underneath it and the sky above it, but standing out by itself. Every spire is haughty and singular. So the kirk (or church) in Scotland is seen by Carlyle as singular, surrounded by things that are different from it:

In the heart of the remotest mountains rises the little Kirk; the Dead all slumbering round it, under their white memorial-stones, “in hope of a happy resurrection”: dull wert thou, O Reader, if never in any hour (say of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and Being was as if swallowed up of Darkness) it spoke to thee—things unspeakable, that went to thy soul’s soul.

If a person has strange notions at night or gets strange feelings, those feelings must have some kinship with him. He may say, I don’t know where they came from. But why they should come to him and affect him is a study in things becoming like each other. When we can’t understand how we felt a certain way that was so frightening or unusual, the likeness to ourselves still has to be granted. There is nothing, in other words, with which this matter of things being like each other, becoming like each other, has not to do.

The Reign of Terror—What Caused It?

Then, in terms of history, the reviewer points out that the Terror was owing to the obstinacy of those who didn’t want to see anything good in the French Revolution. How, by being too insistent, we can be foolish, is implied here. The reviewer says:

By their obstinate struggle against the Revolution at every step, and by their known traitorous alliance with the bayonets of despotic Europe, which were bristling around France in every direction, and pointing towards Paris…, they gave to the contest, between themselves and the French Revolution, a degree of bitterness and desperate extremity, in which self-preservation became the sole law, driving the men of the time into the midst of the most horrible measures of terror and carnage, by a necessity superseding all considerations of the abstract right or mercy of such dreadful expedients, in individual cases.

People wondered how persons who were quietly leading lives in the South of France, in the Northeast of France, in the West of France, became persons on the Committee of Public Safety, condemning someone to death rather easily. How could that be? The matter of likeness and unlikeness is here.

With the phrase “the bayonets of despotic Europe” we have a famous way of presenting likeness and unlikeness. The bayonets stand for the kings, the rulers of despotic Europe. You can call it metonymy; and there’s synecdoche. These mean something related standing for what it’s related to; and a part standing for the whole. Let us say somebody is wearing a flashy bandana, and he’s called Mr. Bandana. A good example is when a captain of a ship says, I have twenty hands I can trust on this ship. A more popular example is somebody’s being described as Ham-and-Eggs by a waitress: Ham-and-Eggs wants some salt.