Dear Unknown Friends:
In this issue of TRO, we conclude our serialization of the definitive, immediate, often humorous 1972 lecture A Poem Is in the World, by Eli Siegel. He has been speaking about those works called “the great books,” and about what such a book has to do with us, with our hopes and worries.
In the present section, Mr. Siegel continues commenting on passages from the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. And we come to one of the biggest matters in the history of philosophy: is there such a thing as the highest good, the summum bonum, that which the human self is most deeply after? Is there an end, or purpose, or utmost value we need to go for, through everything we desire or do? Over the millennia this has been written of, variously, by many philosophers after Aristotle—for instance, Cicero, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, Jeremy Bentham.
Aesthetic Realism says, Yes, there is a largest purpose, for and in the human self. And Aesthetic Realism meets the hopes of philosophy and every person in showing what that purpose is, and identifying also that in us which would like to evade it.
The purpose for which we were born, the purpose of our very lives, is “to like the world on an honest basis,” to want to know and value it truly. Meanwhile, there is also another purpose in us, a gigantic purpose, warring against our desire to value the world. This other purpose is contempt: the desire “to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” From contempt comes every injustice and cruelty—including racism; economic exploitation; wars with their hideous brutality; and also the everyday coldness in people toward the feelings of persons other than oneself.
Aspects of Philosophy, & What We Want
Soon you’ll read Mr. Siegel’s important comments on Aristotle. But by way of introduction, I’ll say a little more about Aesthetic Realism’s dealing with that matter of the greatest good. And I’ll try to do so in terms of the various aspects of philosophy. That is, what Mr. Siegel described as our deepest desire—summum bonum—to like the world on an honest basis, concerns every phase of philosophy. It of course (as I’ve been describing) concerns Ethics. And it concerns Teleology, the study of purpose. Our underlying purpose in everything we do is either to like and be just to the world or have contempt—even as valuing the world justly is what our hearts beat for and blood circulates for.
Then, this matter is certainly of Epistemology, the study of knowing—because in order to like the world honestly we must want to know the world. The aim of all education, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to like the world though knowing it, whether we’re learning the alphabet or studying the structure of galaxies.
Like of the world is also of Ontology, the study of being, of what’s real; and Aesthetics, the study of beauty. These are both in the very name Aesthetic Realism. “The world, art, and self explain each other,” Eli Siegel showed: “each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” As we feel rest and motion together in a dance, intensity and ease at one in music, order and surprise in a painting, personal and impersonal in a poem—we are feeling 1) beauty, 2) what the world itself, or being, is, and 3) what we are and how we long to be. Indeed, the way we can honestly like the world is to be seeing that it, like art, is a oneness of opposites.
I’ve just written very skimpily on the subject. But, with much feeling, I add: Aesthetic Realism in its philosophic exactitude and scope is also always immensely, humanly kind.
Two Poems
Included here, after the final section of the lecture, are two poems from Eli Siegel’s Hail, American Development. Both represent, in different ways, a subject of this lecture: “books…that humanity chooses not to forget.” The first poem is Mr. Siegel’s translation of “The Wolf and the Lamb,” by Jean de La Fontaine (1621-95).
The Fables of La Fontaine has been considered to be among the “great books,” while it has caused less awe than many others. People (including French schoolchildren) have really enjoyed these parables presented in verse. And the verse is the real poetic thing: lines having at once, in the French, matter-of-factness and mystery, the wild and the neat—sometimes even, as in this poem, the gentle and the terrible. Eli Siegel’s 1949 translation of “The Wolf and the Lamb” is one of the great translations in world literature: one hears in its English music the music of La Fontaine’s original.
Following the translation is Mr. Siegel’s note to the poem. And it is writing of major import in itself. It describes a central way contempt has worked in people. It describes, and makes kind clear sense of, much that is happening now.
In the poem “Reminiscential Questions,” which Eli Siegel wrote in 1957, we find six English writers of much importance told of in six rhymed couplets. We meet them, not in their might, but in a certain everydayness.
There has been a big tendency, when presenting an important artist in terms of his or her everydayness, maybe even human weakness, to have that person seem less worthy of respect, to dilute or even annul the person’s grandeur. That doesn’t happen here! Rather, we feel, even more, the wonder of each of these writers. We feel that ordinariness and might are together in this world—with respect for the world and people ensuing. This happens through Eli Siegel’s words, with their oneness of meaning and music.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education
Aristotle Saw This Way
By Eli Siegel
Note. The collection from which Mr. Siegel has been quoting is Great Traditions in Ethics: An Introduction (E. Albert, T. Denise, S. Peterfreund, eds.).
I ’ll read a further passage from the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, a passage about ethics and politics. But first, there is this statement in the editors’ summary of it:
The science of politics can have as its proper end nothing less than “the good for man.”
In another work of Aristotle, the Politics, there are places where a good citizen is said to be one who likes the city-state. Since Aristotle was given mostly to the city-state and didn’t have an international sense—he wasn’t worried about what went on in South Africa—that is the nearest one can get to his speaking about the need for citizens to like the world. There were people called Doric or Dorian, and people in Sparta, in Thebes, and in Thrace—different kinds of Greeks, not Attic. Nonetheless, there was the feeling that if you are in Megara or in Sparta or Thebes or Locris or Chios you’re supposed to like these places.
Here is Aristotle, in the Ethics, at the beginning of the passage in which he’ll say that politics should be in behalf of the greatest good, the largest purpose or “end”:
If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this),…clearly this must be…the chief good.
He says there is some “end,” or “chief good,” or greatest good, and whenever we want to do something it’s for that. It’s like a person’s saying, “I want a bacon sandwich at this time very much,” and someone asks him, “What do you want a bacon sandwich for?” “Well, I need to be nourished. I have to survive. And I can’t contemplate the world unless I have something like food—and if you have to have something like food you might as well have food you like; that is, a bacon sandwich.” There’s always a here purpose and a there purpose.
Is There a Larger Purpose?
In anything we do, is there something we’re going for? Does any purpose end with itself? Is there a larger purpose that includes it? Aesthetic Realism says: Yes, there’s always a larger purpose. You either want to like the world or not like the world, whatever you do—whether you’re playing checkers or listening to music. We do not know it, but we choose everything we do either to like the world or to dislike the world, with all that this means.
Will not the knowledge of it [of this chief good], then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right?
In the last book of the Ethics, Aristotle will say that all of man’s activity is for the contemplation of the good—which does sound a little like liking the world. Meanwhile, the passage I’ve been reading continues:
If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it [the chief good] is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state.
The difference between Sparta and Athens was: In Sparta, if you wanted to be good for Sparta, you learned how to bear your little spear and your little shield, and knew that you were different from other people—for instance, those lazy Athenians over there. But in Athens, you felt that it would be good to express yourself.
You didn’t have philosophers wandering around Sparta. There were no Sophists in Sparta—they’d be kicked out right away. However, Sparta thought a great deal of Tyrtaeus, who made people more courageous with his song and music. So in that sense, Sparta was interested in music.
Aristotle says:
Since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man.
The need to like the world is somewhat in those words.
At the moment, it must be said that politics is using—is forced to use—some knowledge of what the human mind can go through. Even today there was a bill introduced saying that all senators and congresspersons should make their medical history public.
Is There a Chief Good?
We are still in book 1 of the Ethics, and we come to a passage that the editors describe this way: “Aristotle then proceeds to discuss the general criteria which make possible the identification of man’s chief good.” Then, Aristotle himself:
Let us again return to the good we are seeking, and ask what it can be. It seems different in different actions and arts; it is different in medicine, in strategy, and in the other arts likewise. What then is the good of each? Surely that for whose sake everything else is done. In medicine this is health, in strategy victory, in architecture a house, in any other sphere something else, and in every action and pursuit the end; for it is for the sake of this that all men do whatever else they do.
One could ask, “Why are you seeing a doctor?” “In order to be well.” “Why are you being well?” “In order to support my family, and also in order to get into politics.” “What do you want to get into politics for?” “America needs me.” “Why do you think America needs you?” “I’ve consulted my pastor, and he agrees with me.” But what is the large thing this person is going after? There is the popular phrase What makes him tick? –Aristotle continues:
Since there are evidently more than one end, and we choose some of these (e.g. wealth, flutes and, in general, instruments) for the sake of something else, clearly not all ends are final ends; but the chief good is evidently something final.
Aristotle—and this is good—seems to show a tremendous interest in flute playing. He gets it into the Poetics. But, as he implies here, a person could be asked, “Why are you learning how to play the flute?” “In order to celebrate the Divine Principle.” “Why are you celebrating the Divine Principle?” “God will be just to Athens.” “Why do you want justice to Athens?” “Because I want to like Athens—it represents the world to me.”
Aristotle says: “But the chief good is evidently something final.” That is important, the sense of something final. And does it mean that good is also exceedingly deep, exceedingly wide; also has something to do with all time, is exceedingly everlasting? I think so.
Unease about Great Books
There has been, as I described earlier, unease about what are called great books. It comes principally from the fact that we seem to stand for something more than our particular self but also for just our own self. Then we can meet a coming together of these in a work that has volume: one person (the writer) and a sense of the world itself. There has been an unease: as soon as the impersonal and personal meet, we may not know what to do with them. I write about that in “Great Books; and the Kick.”
In this discussion, A Poem Is in the World, I have been trying to show something of the relation among three things: liking the world and good will; poetry; and the history of the world as shown in books that have remained for centuries and that humanity chooses not to forget.
The Wolf and the Lamb
By Jean de La Fontaine
Translated by Eli Siegel
The reason of those best able to have their way is always the best. We now show how this is true.
A lamb was quenching its thirst
In the water of a pure stream.
A fasting wolf came by, looking for something;
He was attracted by hunger to this place.
—What makes you so bold as to meddle with my drinking?
Said this animal, very angry.
You will be punished for your boldness.
—Sir, answered the lamb, let Your Majesty
Not put himself into a rage;
But rather, let him consider
That I am taking a drink of water
In the stream
More than twenty steps below him;
And that, consequently, in no way
Am I troubling his supply.
—You do trouble it, answered the cruel beast.
And I know you said bad things of me last year.
—How could I do that when I wasn’t born,
Answered the lamb; I am still at my mother’s breast.
—If it wasn’t you, then it was your brother.
—I haven’t a brother. —It was then someone close to you;
For you have no sympathy for me,
You, your shepherds and your dogs.
I have been told of this. I have to make things even.
Saying this, into the woods
The wolf carries the lamb, and then eats him
Without any other why or wherefore.
Note by Eli Siegel. Jean de La Fontaine’s “The Wolf and the Lamb” is one of the cruellest instances of literature. The poem or fable is doubly cruel, for while it tells of an unjust occurrence, it also intimates that there is a way or trend in the human mind undeviatingly unkind. La Fontaine tells us that between having one’s way and being just, having one’s way is more powerful.
It has been so, ever so many times. The most dangerous and ugly possibility inherent in the individual as individual is that the desire to have one’s way seems strong, while justice seems flat and interrupting. The wolf wants the lamb and the want itself is justice. This is the way we are. If a want increases, just because it does, the want may seem the more just, well placed, accurate, right. The unconscious tendency or likelihood of making our want the same as universal justice is the ugliest adjunct of the heart of man.
It is so easy to find an inclination interesting and necessary; and it is so hard to see and care for what is proportionate, equitable, ethical—it is no wonder persons are angry with others and can see themselves with confusion, dimness, scorn, uneasiness, loathing, displeasure. Our desire may seem so powerful, beckoning; and later so unhandsome.
Were the life of La Fontaine’s wolf pursued in a novel, with the wolf, of course, endowed with the self-objecting-to system man has, we should see the wolf undergoing the doubts of a Julien Sorel or a Raskolnikov. We have the tendencies of the wolf of the fable, but also the uncertainty this particular wolf has not been able to manifest, or permitted to manifest.
Reminiscential Questions
By Eli Siegel
Where now is the mood
Of James Anthony Froude?
Where now is the feeling, unusually jaunty,
Of Charlotte Brontë?
Where is that sudden smile
Of Thomas Carlyle?
Where is the gesture, rather blasé,
Of Thomas Babington Macaulay?
And where is the stomach-ache
Of William Blake?
And the mood, so far away,
Of William Makepeace Thackeray?