Dear Unknown Friends:

The lecture we begin to serialize here is great in its understanding of the human mind. And it is great in its rich explanation of a matter that now has wide tragedy and urgency and worry with it: mass shootings. Eli Siegel gave this talk, Mental Health Is about Perfection and Imperfection, on August 5, 1966, four days after Charles Whitman positioned himself at the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas, Austin, and shot down at people. The figures have been given as: 14 killed, 31 wounded. The lecture is a means of our comprehending something still not understood over half a century later: What is the large cause, the central thing, in a person’s mind that has him take a gun and mow down many other human beings?

At the time of this talk, Mr. Siegel was giving a series of lectures on mental health. He is the philosopher, historian, educator who identified the thing in humanity, in each of us, which weakens our mind and is the source of injustice. That thing is contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” Contempt is massive in its range. It takes such ordinary forms as the hope somebody flop so we seem better; the sneer of “I would never wear something like that”; the seeing of people mainly in terms of how important they make oneself. Contempt is in coldness to another’s feelings. And contempt is also the cause of racism, with its horrors: behind every racist thought and act is the feeling, I’m big, I’m somebody, because I can see those people as beneath me!

The connection between contempt as seemingly ordinary and contempt as brutal and disastrous is in this statement by Eli Siegel from his James and the Children:

As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.

In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel doesn’t use the term contempt as such. Rather, as he speaks about the opposites of perfection and imperfection, he is describing something fundamental to contempt. He is describing the texture of contempt as it exists deeply and also virulently, and sometimes seemingly blandly, in a mind.

This Is Mental Health

Eli Siegel is also the person who identified that in us which is opposed to contempt. It is the desire “to like the world through knowing it.” This desire not only is in behalf of mental health—but indeed, if it wins out over contempt, is mental health. For mental health is the seeing that our own importance and expression arise from our being just to what’s not us. Mr. Siegel showed that to like the world honestly is the purpose of our very lives. And therefore our contempt—while seeming for a time to elevate us—always makes us dislike ourselves, feel agitated and low and unsure.

It moves me to say quite simply that the understanding of mind is in Aesthetic Realism. Mr. Siegel showed in 1941 that “the useful way of seeing mind was to look upon it as a continual question of aesthetics.” And he described succinctly that aesthetic nature of mind in the following principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Two of the opposites we need to put together are care for self and justice to the world not ourselves. Two others are told of in the lecture we’re serializing: perfection and imperfection.

The Principal Cause vs. Art

What is the principal matter in all mental hurtfulness and unhealth? Is it, as Eli Siegel showed, contempt? And may contempt (so everyday yet always injurious) accumulate, increase, get to such a pitch that it is catastrophic—that it becomes what Mr. Siegel once called “the contempt that crosses the fence”? The answer is yes.

Art, Aesthetic Realism shows, may describe contempt but art itself is never contempt. Real art is always respect for the world; it is always love—exact and large—of the world. Let us take lines from one of the poems Mr. Siegel discusses in this lecture. The poem is “Porphyria’s Lover,” by Robert Browning, and the speaker in the poem has committed murder. These are the first four lines:

We hear in the sounds of the lines some of the sputtering displeasure of the person speaking. We also hear the structure of the world, perceived truly and lovingly and grandly by Browning: we hear a oneness of reality’s tumult and its order; we hear a oneness of the definite and the mysterious.

For example, there is the second line: “The sullen wind was soon awake.” It is firm, a bit thrusting, in its four regular beats. Yet, with the ss and ws; with the delicate whirl in the sound of “sullen wind”; with the long, reaching sounds in “soon awake”—we feel the world’s delicacy and depth are at one with its ability to insist and even annoy.

Art, Eli Siegel showed, is sanity; art is kindness; it is justice. Aesthetic Realism is the beautiful study of how.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

These Opposites Are in Mind

By Eli Siegel

The subject of mental health, which I’m discussing, has been illustrated in the last days as notably as it ever was. It seems right to talk about it in perspective, and the person who seemed to insist as a beginning point was the early Robert Browning. There are two poems of his that first appeared in the Monthly Repository in 1836, when Browning was 24, and that later he brought together under the heading “Madhouse Cells.” They are very different. One is exceedingly popular, sensational: “Porphyria’s Lover.” The other is “Johannes Agricola in Meditation.” I’ll discuss them as saying something about what happened in Texas, and also about what goes on in all minds. All mental ill health is related, and is a very easy thing to have.

There Is Smugness

Both poems are monologues; and this can be said about “Johannes Agricola in Meditation”: it’s one of the smuggest things ever. The idea of Johannes Agricola must have appealed to Browning because it stands for something in his mind, as in everyone’s. The disposition in every person is to see oneself as perfect, to have magic, to be chosen by God. That is why criticism is more needed than ever. The tendency in a person is to have perfection and imperfection too far apart. The same person who is as smug as anything—as a bar of soap that’s never been used—can also bemoan himself, and call himself a worm and kick himself. The way people see themselves as perfect and imperfect doesn’t make any sense. There’s a jumping from one to the other. There’s a seeing of one with a different part of mind than that which sees the other. Perfection and imperfection—two opposites—are in a very sad and pretty ugly state in human beings.

There’s the way they were in Charles Whitman. Many people have come to feel there was something very pleased with himself about this person. And there obviously was. It’s in the going to a lofty place and being concealed while you see all those other persons and feel you can affect them: there they go, ending their lives or getting wounded, and you were the cause of it all. We also know that he was very much against himself. One of the bad things about cultivating weapons is that you feel you have something other people don’t have; and it can make for a kind of smugness.

There are many ways of getting to smugness or wrong self-satisfaction, or self-satisfaction that doesn’t go with the facts and is too much insisted on. But being concealed is one of those ways—you look at others and they don’t see you. That was there. The loftiness is another. The being able to pick out a person is another. And self-satisfaction and murder were quite the same thing for a while. It seems an achievement to be able to end another person’s life, and an achievement that the person whose life is ended doesn’t know you.

It will be seen that Charles Whitman was pleased with himself. The idea of seeing that he actually wasn’t, was not welcome to him—in other words, the idea of self-criticism. That he bemoaned himself and cursed himself and also suffered a great deal is likewise clear. That’s why it’s important that perfection and imperfection be seen as one thing, because every person is a study in both. If you want to use one against the other, I don’t think mental health or one’s life will be served. Those are opposites, and are in an aesthetic relation. Browning’s work deals with the matter in many ways. Sometimes he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing, but he does try to present persons who do evil from their own point of view.

Johannes Agricola, whom Browning presents as speaking in the poem, was a later rival of Luther and Melanchthon; and the big question then was: Is man good because of what he does, or is he just chosen by God? Does he have grace? Does he have faith? The question is still not over. Agricola, who existed from 1492 to 1566, is an antinomian. An antinomian is one who feels that he can get to God without following “the law”—without behaving morally. In a note to the poem, Browning includes this from the Dictionary of All Religions:

Antinomians . . . say, that good works do not further, nor evil works hinder salvation; that the child of God cannot sin, that God never chastiseth him, that murder, drunkenness, etc., are sins in the wicked but not in him.

Every person has a disposition to see himself as perfect; this is sometimes called, well, just being oneself. There’s a kind of magic that one wants to lay claim to. It is part of having one’s way, and many other things. It is greatly present. Also, a human being sees a great mental use in being self-critical. The question then is: how to make sense out of this perfection and this desire to be critical. So far in human history, it hasn’t occurred. The two have never been wholly apart, but they cannot be said to have been working together. While a religious form of the desire of a person to see himself as perfect is in this poem, the desire includes the unconscious in the secular field in ever so many ways. Browning has Agricola say:

The desire to be one with God can be a very good thing. But anything that avoids criticism of self has a false mysticism in it. And the hardest thing for a person is actually to feel that oneself is imperfect.

There is a desire to be out of time, at the beginning of things. And all this can be justified if it is related to the other: the need to be self-critical.

There is a desire on the part of everyone to feel guiltless. But simultaneously with being “guiltless,” we find persons slapping their right cheek or left cheek; we find persons being unsure; we find persons cursing themselves, muttering things. The problem is of relating the “guiltlessness” with the constant sign that one is not sure of oneself, whether in terms of efficiency or in terms of ethics.

Philosophically, it is necessary to see the absolute and relative as one, and that the trivia of the world are related to the Supreme Being and the First Cause—that the absolute not be seen as in a stainless place by itself but seen as present in the less attractive and ultimate gulp of the kitchen sink. It is necessary that the world as we have it—immeasurable but also ordinary, and baffling in ordinariness—that this world be seen as having at any one moment immeasurable perfection and ordinariness.

An idea of perfection afflicts every living being in America today. It is the most secret but also the most pernicious nuisance, and works every hour interfering with the way one sees the world as it is and goes by and has been.

We Make Ourselves High, Above

Browning has Agricola compare himself to other people and say he’s like a tree, rising: “Yes, yes, a tree which must ascend, / No poison-gourd foredoom’d to stoop!” What went on in Charles Whitman’s mind had in it his seeming to be standing up and high while others were low. He must have thought of a place. There was a kind of self-satisfaction having something to lean on, and being able to move about and not be seen. The whole thing was a composition in smugness and death.

The possibility is there that Charles Whitman could look down on all those people, busy, and he at ease in homicidal Zion.

Another Man Speaks

The second poem, “Porphyria’s Lover,” is different, and easier to follow. Porphyria is a woman who’s uncertain; and the man who is speaking, who doesn’t want a woman who can’t make up her mind, never has liked this. He wants utter love, something like the God’s love that is in the Agricola poem. This woman cares for the man and also doesn’t care for him. And he gets tired of it, so he takes her yellow hair and strangles her: How dare you make me uncertain of myself! How dare you act uncertain! This wrath is very much present in people: we don’t give others the right to be uncertain.

What’s the relation between this poem and the Agricola poem? Well, one concomitant or result of feeling oneself unconsciously perfect, perfect not in the best way, is to be unjust to others and not see others as fully existing. —This is one of the best poems in the English language, simply as poetry. It begins:

The world chooses to be confused, and we don’t like it. The person telling this story is confused: what does Porphyria think about him? And the rain and wind seem to be active in confusion.

If there’s a desire to be perfect, and a feeling, even, that one is perfect, naturally the needing of anything else is either superficial, or not there, or it’s resented—and it’s usually all three. There is some need, but the need is not in the same field of reality as one’s perfection. Meanwhile, Porphyria makes the place more likable. She works quite hard to prove that she does care for him, but he seems sullen and doesn’t answer:

The feeling that we don’t know something, we’re not sure of something, it does anger us. Charles Whitman was interested in engineering and also architecture; and engineering to architecture is as fact to value: one is in the scientific field and the other in the aesthetic field. He seems to have been interested in both, and I’m sure both angered him.

The speaker in the poem says Porphyria was “too weak” to “give herself to me for ever.” So her compassion and aloofness get this person unbearably sullen. Sullenness has occurred often. And occasionally sullenness takes an expressive form. He wants perfection, and perfection can be found in death—she can’t change anymore:

In having a certain perfection ourselves, we don’t want to give other things complete life. While these poems certainly do not say everything about the person in Texas, they are relevant and valuable, and, if totally understood, would have people know more what is going on in people.