Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the final section of the 1975 lecture we have been serializing—a lecture by Eli Siegel great in the understanding of people, literature, and also government.

He speaks about the American writers James Russell Lowell (1819-91) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-62). Lowell wrote an essay criticizing Thoreau—sometimes rightly, sometimes in a way unjust to the large value of the author of Walden. Mr. Siegel comments on the essay in the process of showing something no other critic saw: that Lowell and Thoreau stand for a matter as tremendous as any in the life of every person—including every person right now.

The tremendous matter can be described this way: there is in each of us a feeling of ourselves as apart, as just us, with our own particular thoughts; meanwhile, we’re also a self that has to do in ever so many ways with ever so many people. And that self which seems just our own and our self that interacts with others can feel like two different selves.

These are opposites: the self as just one, for ourselves alone; and as many, connected with, really, millions of things and people. Everyone has and is both those opposites. Yet, Mr. Siegel shows that Lowell, in a big way, represents the self as many, as social—he “is one of the busiest persons who ever wrote a poem. He was ambassador to Spain and also to England, took part in politics”—while Thoreau “is a laureate of profound loneliness and separation.” What each of them was looking for, and we are looking for, is described in this central principle 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.”

The Rift & Contempt

The division in a person between a self within and a gregarious outward self has pain with it. It’s the pain (largely taken for granted) of feeling that the whole of you doesn’t act in this world, and that there’s a self you have that nobody sees. Meanwhile, this rift is also exploited by the person having it, through what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the most hurtful thing in humanity: contempt: “the disposition…to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

For example, a person can have a certain triumph in feeling, “I have a self I don’t show; I can be with people, charm them, fool them, manage them, and hide my purposes and thoughts.” And there is the feeling—not clearly articulated yet immensely frequent—that “the self I see as just mine is the most important thing in this world. I don’t have to see what other people feel—what goes on under my skin is what matters. In fact, I take care of myself by looking down on them. I judge people as good or bad on the basis of how important they make me.”

Government: A Oneness of Opposites

In this final section of his lecture Mr. Siegel speaks about Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.” He explains how and why Thoreau is both right and wrong about government, and this magnificent explanation is mightily relevant to our own time. For example, Mr. Siegel shows that central to “Civil Disobedience” is Thoreau’s seeing “that private persons can get control of government” and Thoreau’s authentic fury at that.

So we come to the fact that the opposites of oneself alone and one’s relation to all people are not only intensely personal but are central in government. All government has to do with many people, even millions of people, each of whom—man, woman, or child—is an individual. The purpose of government, Aesthetic Realism shows, is an aesthetic purpose: to make these opposites one. The purpose of government is for each individual person—say a child of 8 in Detroit—to feel that the nation, the people of America as a whole, are trying to have her get what she deserves and be all she can be.

As I write this, the United States is in the midst of the longest government shutdown in our history. And Americans have a hard time feeling it’s for their good, the good of the people. Over 800,000 federal workers are not being paid and many must go to food pantries to feed their families. Services needed by millions of U.S. citizens are suspended or lessened—including services to ensure that foods and medicines are not tainted, and services to ensure safety at airports. This is happening at a time when Americans have an increasing clearness that government should be in behalf of ALL people: that government should not be manipulated for the ego or financial aggrandizement of one person or a few individuals.

Here, then, is the conclusion of Eli Siegel’s beautiful lecture on the opposites that are ourselves. They are looking to be truly one in us, kindly and grandly one in our nation.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Self, Government, & Thoreau

By Eli Siegel

At this time the most famous writing of Thoreau is “Civil Disobedience.” The large thing that Thoreau says, the thing that stands up, is that private persons can get control of government. That is still so. There are persons in America who feel that ownership and management of government belongs to them. And because of this private ownership of government we have had the saddest war in American history, the Vietnam War.

Thoreau writes about the Mexican War (1846-8). And there Thoreau, Lincoln, and Lowell are one. They feel there is something wrong with the Mexican War, that the slaveholders are using President Polk to get more territory that can have slavery in it—Texas and adjoining places. Thoreau is quite correct. He saw the private management of government:

Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.

If Lowell had said at least that Thoreau saw the Mexican War as privately fomented, and praised Thoreau for that, it would have been good—because that is what Lowell himself saw. Lowell became nationally known because of his opposition to the Mexican War. I’ll read, from his Biglow Papers, lines from one of those poems in Yankee dialect against the war. (General C is a candidate for office who is for the Mexican War.)

Those poems had an effect and made people less fond of the Mexican War. So it’s well to know that Thoreau and Lowell and Lincoln—Lincoln made a speech against the Mexican War when he was a member of Congress—were on the same, right side.

The Government & People

Thoreau says things critical of government as such. What he says is often useful, but also can play into the hands of the persons who feel that business would be all right if the government didn’t put its two cents in. He says of government:

It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

Government can be in the way of people, but it also can help people. The thing that makes “Civil Disobedience” not so good is that occasionally government can be correct. I think that when the Civil War broke out, Thoreau—who died in the second year of the Civil War, 1862—didn’t know what to make of it, because the government was asking people to compel the South to look differently on the fact that black persons were people. In that, we have government compulsion (which Thoreau had been writing against)—but it is what John Brown wanted, and one of the greatest friends of John Brown was Thoreau. John Brown used direct action in order to lessen slavery and the power of the slaveholders.

Thoreau writes about the need to rebel against government and governmental structure. But if there are rebellions, they themselves have to have a little structure. That is where the hippie movement sank, because as soon as the hippies got any power they had to have structure, and that seemed to be all against the hippie ideal, which is a little close to the dazzling anarchist ideal.

Too much of Thoreau’s writing here is like saying: There’s a child who’s in a room on the third floor and the whole house is burning. Let’s save the child. Yes—but it happens that a ladder is necessary for that. You just can’t leap up to the third floor and save the child, even though you have a good purpose. There is what to do, but also how to do it.

Government can be in the way, quite truly, and government of course can be corrupt. But it has happened that government has been the embodiment of people’s hopes. If there was government in the soldiers at Bunker Hill, it was still government. And there was some relation between the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the organization at Bunker Hill. —Another sentence:

Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But government can occasionally do the right thing. And a good deal of sadness for the American people has been that a good law was passed—some of those laws have to do with the rights of black people; some with welfare—but persons in charge of the law’s being enforced were not interested in making it strong. That, Thoreau does not deal with. If government stuck to its laws we could have something, but the laws are not kept to. Private interests interfere with the hope that is implicit in a statute.

Thoreau was against government. He was very suspicious. One can be suspicious of anything, but I have to say that Thoreau didn’t know enough about government. (I don’t like to reprehend classics.)

He’s very much against marines. A marine is a putting together of opposites: land and water. The marines came to be in the American Revolution: it was felt that if somebody could be useful both on a ship and on land, that should be. So there were the marines, and they’ve had a sad history. But Thoreau looks at a marine, and doesn’t like him:

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts,—a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity….The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines.

It’s true that a soldier can be a mechanism; but it has happened sometimes that a soldier is the means of the right thing occurring to people. That was so in the French Revolution. “The Marseillaise” has the line “Formez vos bataillons,” which means “Form your battalions.” Thoreau was reckless. Could there be a person in an army uniform who stood for the people?

He is somewhat right: soldiers have been used in a horrible way. But soldiers can be used, as government can be used, in a good way. Government at its best is the somatic organization of sentiment: it’s many bodies and many discussions trying to be just to the sentiment of the land.

And government is the oneness of many individuals and one individual—in every instance, whether it’s the government of a boys’ club or a city. Sometimes the individuals are very many, as in the whole government of the United States. Thoreau didn’t think of all possibilities. When you’re dealing with a subject, you have to see what you have before you and also possibility.

His Great Rightness, & His Mistake

Thoreau is quite right that any government which tolerates slavery and gets fancy reasons, and passes a law saying it won’t receive any more petitions on the subject is a government one should not be for. He is very strong:

I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.

Meanwhile, it happens that after the Civil War certain good laws, made by government, were not kept to; during Reconstruction there was much evasion of the laws of Congress. And making a black person a complete citizen is still somewhat evaded. But the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution and statutes implementing them are good. Thoreau didn’t see that a government could be against the existence of slavery in America. But it happened.

Sometimes, because we’re such “individuals,” we feel it’s vulgar to have 2,000 people agree with us, or 20,000. Thoreau had some of that. If anybody agreed with him he got suspicious of himself—which is hinted at, and more, by Lowell.

Thoreau says in another way, This government ought to be opposed. Yes, it should be. And the way it should be opposed is to have a government that’s honestly against slavery. That has never yet fully happened. Still, after the Civil War there were developments—because another thing that’s in self is a certain mingling of perfection and imperfection, which everybody is. Every person is a mingling of complete and incomplete, wholeness and fragmentariness, entirety and brokenness, fraction and integer. Thoreau was restless about that.

In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves,…I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

But suppose the revolution succeeds—then what are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to organize your success. But that seems very dull, because you look like the establishment.

Thoreau’s statements are very likable: that this government should change! He tells about his day and night in jail because he didn’t want to pay a poll tax to help a government that allowed slavery. And he’s very strong:

This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.

But then we have Thoreau’s great exclusiveness: “There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.”

The Problem about Compromise

The idea of being imperfect, and how to relate a part to the whole, how to go for something but not lose your interest in the rightness of the large thing, the whole thing—that is a problem, and it’s an aspect of the opposites: how to accept a fragment without becoming weaker in your attitude to the whole purpose. In other words, let’s assume a person reads a book: he doesn’t know all about literature, but he should be able to read that book as a part of French literature or English literature or Russian literature.

We have Thoreau’s lively criticism of mildness. (The Independent Order of Odd Fellows was a big organization then, a bit like the Rotary Clubs of later.)

The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,—one who…ventures to live only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.

Thoreau is with Emerson—against the going after small purposes.

But I believe that the insufficiency of reasoning in this essay and other writing joined with whatever was tubercular in Thoreau to have his life end sooner than it might. Meantime, there are some fine sentences. And the general idea is important: that a government that is unfair to the beginning of ethics should not be advocated or favored.

So in what way can we oppose a government that we think is not sufficiently ethical or for the people? That’s a problem. It’s gathering speed at this time. People have this question: Without being incendiaries or insurrectionists, and without losing our God-given distaste for our chief executive, what can we be for?

In the other writings of Thoreau there is a going for the life that is not acquisitive. That’s the whole point in Walden and also in “Life without Principle. ” But I have to say that there is a certain lack of fulness, a certain absence of the use of individuality and the secret thoughts of oneself to be fair to what can be beautiful in a crowd discussing things, or in a seemingly inferior object. There’s a certain kind of abstract entirety in Thoreau which I think hurt him, and which is connected with his feeling for himself.

The Aesthetic Problem

Lowell and Thoreau are different, but they often meet, and they have this problem of how can the self keep company and still be true to itself, which is another way of saying self and world. The world consists of the company we yet might have.