Dear Unknown Friends:

We conclude here our serialization of the rich, vivid lecture Things Are Likened to Each Other, which Eli Siegel gave in 1971. In it he illustrates, through “two of the beginning opposites of the world,” this Aesthetic Realism principle: “Self, the arts, the sciences explain each other: they are the oneness of permanent opposites.” Both art and science, he explains, are constantly showing that things different from each other are not only different but like each other, related, deeply and mightily akin.

In this final section he is using an issue of an important 19th-century American magazine to illustrate those opposites. He looks at an 1838 review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and comments on how the anonymous reviewer’s sentences, phrases, choices of words represent the likeness and difference in reality, and represent too the drive in people to see these opposites as of each other, not as battling.

Yet people have also pitted likeness and difference against each other, with results that are always ugly and weakening and are often horrible. Our dishonesty, however unconscious, about these opposites—the way we falsify the sameness and difference among things, among people, between ourselves and what’s not ourselves—is basic to contempt. And contempt, Aesthetic Realism shows, is the most hurtful thing in everyone: it’s “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” For example, from the desire to look down on people different from us, not see that they are principally like us too, comes all the cruelty in the world.

1838—and Earlier and Later

Let’s take the year of the review Mr. Siegel is looking at: 1838. Here, his purpose is not to discuss American history. Yet there was no historian greater than Eli Siegel, and I remember his speaking passionately, deeply, about the decades before the Civil War. There was that hideous, brutal lie about sameness and difference which took the form of slavery: the lie that some people, because of their skin, were essentially different from oneself—so different that one could own them, sell them, buy them, beat them, kill them. That is contempt as utter. And many seemingly polite people had it.

And I remember Mr. Siegel pointing out that in the 1830s and ’40s people who spoke out against slavery were so very few. The abolitionists—like William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child—were seen as radical, dangerous, or simply irrelevant. And yet, said Mr. Siegel, in 1861 there was the Civil War—in behalf of that very cause which millions of Americans not long before had considered unimportant. Thousands of Union soldiers marched to battle singing “John Brown’s Body”—honoring an abolitionist unsurpassed in his intensity. The change from 1838 America to 1861 America is a relation of tremendous sameness and difference.

Four Hundred Years Ago

The 1838 reviewer mentions an early document seen as standing for what America is: the Mayflower Compact. It was written 400 hundred years ago, in November 1620, when the Mayflower was anchored at Cape Cod. And it was signed there by the men on that small ship, weeks before they set foot on the American land at Plymouth. It has not been seen that this document is a making one of sameness and difference as the basis of government. And this true seeing of sameness and difference is what America is demanding now. The Mayflower Compact signers say:

We, whose names are underwritten,…solemnly and mutually…combine ourselves together into a civil body politic…to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices…as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience….

When people “combine [them]selves together,” they say that while they’re each an individual, different, they all see themselves as alike too: as together, as one.

Then, together in this difference-as-sameness, they will enact laws—and those laws will be “equal,” applicable to all alike, the same for everybody.

Further, the laws, ordinances, constitutions will be for “the general good”—and that means for the good of all those different people seen as related, as of each other.

The Mayflower Compact signers say that even as they will together make the laws, they will also submit to them and obey them. They are, then, making assertion and yielding one: they’re making two aspects of self that are different become joined, inseparable, akin.

In a 1952 lecture, Mr. Siegel said of the Mayflower Compact:

It presents the notion of people coming together, maintaining their liberty, and saying they all have to do with each other.

This oneness of opposites—of difference and sameness, individuality and relation—is the true purpose of America. That is so even as, throughout our history, there has been much betrayal of that purpose. And today there is a big fight. There are the forces that are trying to keep those opposites apart and have America owned and run not “for the general good” but for the benefit of a few individuals. And there are the millions of people who say, who insist: America should be owned by all of us, for we “all have to do with each other”—in keeping with that 400-year-old document at the very heart of our nation.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Likening Goes On

By Eli Siegel

In the July 1838 number of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review there is a review of one of the famous books, by a foreigner, on American institutions. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America had just been translated, and a reviewer questions some things in it.

With every government there are things like each other. For instance, there’s the government itself; there’s the people; there are the courts; there is business; there is woman. In a certain way, every one of these stands for all people. The question at this time, 1838, about fifty years after the Constitution—and the rest of the world was watching—was: will the government of the United States be stable? It was stable in 1838. At that time, Mr. Van Buren was president. In 1832 there had been some difficulty, called the Nullification Crisis. And it’s true there had been a panic in 1837, and there was a lot of selling of land that didn’t exist. But the government was steady. The reviewer says:

During the fifty years that have since elapsed,—the most tumultuous and revolutionary half-century that has ever been known in Christendom,—the Government of the United States has suffered no essential, and hardly any formal changes; for we cannot consider as changes in the laws and constitutions* of the country the occasional variations of practice that occur from year to year in the details of the administration of the Union or the States.

Changes also have their likenesses. Most changes are hardly noticeable—as somebody says, The same old Sullivan—great guy. And we see ourselves that way: we know we’ve changed, but we have to feel that something is remembered.

If we look at those sentences from the review, we’ll see them as rife, replete, with likeness and unlikeness.

“During the fifty years that have since elapsed…the Government of the United States has suffered no essential…changes.” When one looks at the Constitution of the United States, one can see mostly a resemblance to what was published in 1787. There are amendments, but they are continuous with what the Constitution is.

Later historians, though, have seen some very big changes in those seemingly quiet years. The advent of manufacturing made for differences. And other changes were seen, making for 1861 and later.

A Drama of Likeness

Every year is like another year. There’s no year that isn’t a little like any other year. In fact, there’s nothing in this world that isn’t a little like any other thing. You can take a lily and a nail and think how very different they are. But then, as you look, you will find that there are resemblances. A nail can seem proud as it goes toward the ceiling, and so can a lily. There’s a roundness in the lily; there’s a roundness in the nail. There’s a brightness in the lily; there’s a brightness in the nail. The lily, it is true, has parts; but it is possible also to see the nail as having parts. The lily has an impact that is different from that of the nail: the lily has no point, just an appeal, but the appeal of the lily corresponds to the point of the nail. It’s possible also to see the nail as just a line, and the lily as a line.

There are many other means of comparison, including something that used to be a favorite of mine: both lilies and nails can be used as bookmarks. Another thing about a lily and a nail is that both are cool. Then, we can imagine a symbolist poet saying, The lily that Mathilde was in the summer of 1843, when those joyous days on the Rhône were spent by us, has now become a nail.

Any two things can be compared, but you have to compare them passionately. When you find, through the passion of perception, or the perception of passion, a likeness among things, then one can say something like The heavy wet sweater of confusion covered the whole county.

There is a comparison in the next passage:

Like the miraculous tent in the Arabian tales, which could be held in the palm of the hand, but when expanded…was large enough to cover an army of a hundred thousand men,—our constitutions, of which the germ may be found in the brief contract concluded between some thirty or forty poor pilgrims on board the Mayflower in Plymouth harbour, have adapted themselves without essential change,…until they now embrace under their broad protecting canopy a confederate Republic of twenty-six States and nearly twenty millions of men.

The idea is that as Missouri came along, and Kentucky, and Florida, the Constitution was able to take all these states to its bosom comfortably. That’s a metaphor: The wide bosom of the Constitution was able to enfold Missouri, Kentucky, and Florida. In this review, it’s a “protecting canopy.”

The ceaseless fluctuation of opinion upon matters of personal preference and mere administration,—the alternation of triumph and defeat that marks the progress of contending parties,—the acrimony with which every majority that obtains possession of the government of a State or of the Union, is assailed and opposed…—these are the daily signs in our political firmament, not less apparent…than is the steadiness with which our essential institutions look down in quiet majesty from their loftier height, upon this war of the elements that is constantly raging around their base.

Daniel Webster and others were very fond of pointing to the Union and the Constitution as unruffled, undisturbed, unaffrighted, unshaken, unterrified by the changes of the world. They saw the Union and the Constitution as like Arcturus or some star that doesn’t give a damn. The unchangeable as to the changeable is a cause of emotion. To see a lighthouse going about its lighting business while the waves are cutting up, rising, circling, is something. It’s almost as beautiful as seeing a large pussycat lying still while eight kittens are bothering her.

There is “the ceaseless fluctuation of opinion upon matters of personal preference and mere administration.” Fluctuation means something of the kind that waves do and leaves do—wave back and forth. So we have likening in the form of a metaphor—as one could say, The report of the Labor Department, in all its dullness, is a straw in the wind.

“…the alternation of triumph and defeat that marks the progress of contending parties…” Alternation, the continuing replacement of one thing by the other, is a big thing in the world and is part of the pattern of reality. And alternating, quite clearly has to do with likeness. In a dance, there can be alternation.

Along with alternation, which is one of the aspects of the sameness of motion, there is the completely surprising—as, let’s say, there’s a ticking of a grandfather’s clock and then someone sends an arrow into it.

“…the acrimony with which every majority that obtains possession of the government of a State or of the Union, is assailed and opposed…” That has a metaphor with it too: acrimony means bitterness or sharpness, and it is also a way of talking and feeling.

“…these are the daily signs in our political firmament.” Giving politics a firmament is in keeping with an old metaphor—as in There’s a star in the political firmament: his name is Muskie; he’s from Maine. And, There’s another star in the political firmament: McGovern of South Dakota.

The reviewer uses the phrase “the steadiness with which our essential institutions look down in quiet majesty from their loftier height.” If you have a good time thinking of our institutions looking down from their loftier height—and I could think of a worse time—at least you’re in the field of likeness, because our institutions are compared to stars and also to people, at once. There’s a double comparison. That means the institutions are really in luck.

“…upon this war of the elements that is constantly raging around their base.” In Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village there’s a famous simile about how a mountain remains while the waters at its base are turbulent. I think the writer here was affected by that.

Moneyed People & Their Lawyers

The reviewer talks of the wealthy, the men of money who are the aristocracy of the time. He disagrees with how Tocqueville sees the matter, and this is one of the passages of Tocqueville he quotes:

To the democratic instinct of the mass they [the moneyed people] oppose their aristocratic tendencies; to its love of innovation their superstitious respect for antiquity; to its vast designs their narrow views;…and to its fiery ardor their habits of slow and cautious action.

That makes “the mass” look very good. And the phrase the mass—or the masses, as they were later called—is a metaphor too: it means what is largest in something.

“To the democratic instinct of the mass they oppose their aristocratic tendencies.” So we have something of a fight. On the one hand, there’s somebody who can be called Valorous Democratic Instinct of the Mass; on the other, Aristocratic Tendencies. The Tendencies are fighting an Instinct.

“…to its love of innovation their superstitious respect for antiquity.” It has been said that the masses don’t have so much love for innovation, that they really are very conservative—they like not being bothered. The idea of the unruly masses is silly, as such. It’s only when they can’t be quiet that they show unruliness.

“…to its vast designs their narrow views.” That’s an interesting contest: views fighting designs.

While this is about the aristocratic element, or moneyed element, Tocqueville is writing chiefly about the lawyers employed by the aristocratic element. He had said that the lawyers run the country, nearly. But the reviewer says the lawyers are the servants of the aristocracy. Here we have another example of likeness: an advisor, a steward, a solicitor, an attorney are very close to the persons they serve. This is the reviewer:

The members of the legal profession in this country are not the aristocracy but the agents, organs, or, to use a more appropriate term, the attorneys, of the aristocracy. The aristocracy is constituted by the owners of accumulated wealth, and chiefly by the moneyed men of the great commercial cities.

Accumulation is another example of likeness and unlikeness. To have a heap of ashes, or a heap of snow, for that matter, a heap of money in a bank, is accumulation. Accumulation is sameness and difference having a quiet marriage. It’s present also in the way people may gain weight sometimes.

The reviewer says “the moneyed men” are usually

not very capable of pleading their own cause before the public. The lawyers undertake to do this for them….They take the responsibility, and bear the unpopularity, of keeping up a perpetual warfare upon the democratic tendencies that are constantly in action.

So this is a study in the likeness of moneyed men and the lawyers they employ.

A Tendency of the World

I’ve presented, from various fields, some of the tendency, in the world, of things’ being like other things—which is a critical, permanent, lovely matter in poetry. I have used poetry a good deal, but anything can be used, because reality is proclaiming and hiding and hinting and implying its likeness and difference. The more we make of reality as having things in it that want to be like all other things, the more we see the world scientifically and poetically. To see things as like other things is to serve the two great disciplines: the discipline of beauty and the discipline of exactitude.