Dear Unknown Friends:

In our last three issues I quoted a question asked by Eli Siegel, because I think there is nothing more mind-strengthening, emotion-strengthening, for people to know in our so difficult time:

Is this true: No matter how much of a case one has against the world—its unkindness, its disorder, its ugliness, its meaninglessness—one has to do all one can to like it, or one will weaken oneself?

The answer is yes. And I have been commenting on what Aesthetic Realism means by liking the world itself, even as one is right to object to many things in the world. To like the world is no soft or “feel-good” idea: it is critical, solid, intellectual, organic, immensely logical. “To like the world through knowing it” is the purpose of our lives: it’s what a baby born today is living for, moving his or her little fingers for, drinking milk for, taking in sounds for. And it is what all art is about, and all science.

With this issue we begin to serialize a lecture Eli Siegel gave in 1974, titled Long Ago for Liking the World. In it, he comments on a number of noted quotations in various languages. Do some of the most cared-for statements go toward the idea that the world should be liked?

There Is Science

In these confusing and fearful days of coronavirus, the word science is very much with us. And so is the question of whether science is being respected or dangerously flouted by various public officials. So I’ll comment a little on what science has to do with like of the world. And I’ll comment too on what in a person is against science—whether the person is a head of state, or a scientist oneself, or simply an individual.

Eli Siegel has described science as the “known desire to know” (TRO 118). I love that definition, in its simplicity and exactitude. Science, Mr. Siegel showed, does not begin with laboratories or test tubes. Whether the subject is the new virus or a monarch butterfly or the weight of a planet, the scientist wants to know that thing, and knows that this is his or her purpose. The basis of science is: the world deserves to be known. That is equivalent, or at least close, to liking the world. Science is a care for the world even if the thing to be known is hurtful or evil. For instance, if the coronavirus can be really understood, we’ll be closer to its being defeated—a most loving event for humanity and reality.

The Enemy of Science

Science always has as enemy, Contempt. Mr. Siegel described contempt as “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Contempt is, he showed, humanity’s “greatest danger.” It is the anti-science force in the human self, as it is the anti-justice force. Contempt is the feeling one has the right to look on anything not for the purpose of knowing it, being exact about it—but to look at it in a way that makes oneself important or comfortable. So an anti-science feeling can be had by scientists themselves, if they’re more interested in getting ahead, winning a prize, wowing their colleagues, making a lot of money, than being entirely fair to the object. Such a war between ambition and knowing has been much present in the history of science.

Meanwhile, non-scientists can be against science, can be very angry with it, because the knowing, the facts, the truth that science is about are an interference with some notion of power for themselves, and self-importance. Galileo met this resentment. Darwin did. And there’s a lot of it around these days. We see acted out by various politicians: If science won’t make me look good or be popular, the hell with science—the facts are what I choose to make them! We should see that this is contempt—and use it to be against contempt in ourselves too.

A huge form of contempt that has hurt science—particularly medical science—and wounded millions of people whom science should be assisting, is the profit system. That is so in relation to something longed for these days: a vaccine for the coronavirus. The profit motive, by definition, makes the desire for profit the main impetus—not the desire to know.

I saw in the online Chicago Tribune of April 1, an article with this sentence about big drug companies: “Vaccine research has been seen as insufficiently profitable.”

And in an article in the April 26th New York Times Magazine, writer Jennifer Kahn reports: microbiologists “had long argued that it was essential to design panviral drugs and vaccines that would be effective against a wide range of strains” of coronaviruses. She quotes disease ecologist Dr. Peter Daszak: “The problem isn’t that prevention [of Covid-19] was impossible….It was very possible. But we didn’t do it.” The reason, says Daszak, is: “Pharmaceutical companies operate for profit.”

Ms. Kahn also quotes Vincent Racaniello, professor of virology. He says: “It’s definitely possible to make a drug that would work across a good range of coronaviruses. We honestly should have had one long ago….It would have taken care of this outbreak in China before it got out. And the only reason we didn’t is because there wasn’t enough financial backing.” He points out, Ms. Kahn writes, that panviral vaccines and drugs are seen by pharmaceutical companies as “a terrible business proposition” because vaccines are “a shot that people will get once a year at most” and for panviral drugs, the course of treatment is “usually just a few weeks,” while “for chronic diseases (diabetes, high blood pressure), patients take regimens of pills daily, often for years.”

The clear implication is: the profit system—specifically a pharmaceutical industry driven by financial profit for a few people rather than by justice, good will, and science—has brought us our current situation, with its massive distress and dying.

The Opposites & a World We Can Like

Aesthetic Realism explains that the chief reason we can like the world is its structure: the oneness of opposites. It is that structure, felt truly by an artist, which we meet in every authentic work of art. Whether in architecture, dance, music, sculpture, poetry—we see, hear, feel reality’s strength and grace as simultaneous; its motion and its repose, its sameness and its difference, as one. In science too, the structure of the world is present and beautiful. We find it in that very immediate matter, vaccines.

The Centers for Disease Control website gives this simply-put description of vaccines:

Vaccines contain the same germs that cause disease….‌But they have been either killed or weakened to the point that they don’t make you sick….A vaccine stimulates your immune system to produce antibodies….After getting vaccinated, you develop immunity to that disease, without having to get the disease first.

A vaccine is beautiful because it is a magnificent oneness of against and for, evil and good: it takes an infective agent that would weaken us, even kill us—and uses that agent instead to strengthen us. A vaccine is also a oneness of impersonal and personal: it is the same for millions of people, but it gets under our own particular skin and guards us.

—Now, here is the first part of a lecture that has Eli Siegel’s knowledge, kindness, grandeur, so needed by humanity.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Long Ago for Liking the World

By Eli Siegel

Is the greatest desire of a person, including at this time, to like the world? In a rather miscellaneous way, I am going to provide evidence that it is. What I’m presenting, and have all these years, can be put this way: The world can be liked more than you like it at this time.

I think the idea that you can like the world and feel you’re not fooling yourself—if you can do it even ten percent more and not fool yourself—is the greatest present you can give yourself. Even the possibility is. So I am going to present evidence, with what I call an astute helter-skelter quality, for the fact that the world might be liked.

I’m using a book of 1891 called A Literary Manual of Foreign Quotations, Ancient and Modern, compiled by John Devoe Belton. On page 4 we have a phrase in Latin:

Ad majorem Dei gloriam. For the greater glory of God.

Belton says that “this is the motto of the Society of Jesus,” the Jesuits.¹

What does “for the greater glory” mean? The meaning of like is in it—which is much larger than any person has realized. Why should existence as such go for being liked? That is a point where the impersonal meets the personal, and much can be said about it. If the Jesuits, during the 16th century and later, felt that they were teaching for the glory of God, I think that has to do with the need to like God and reality.

Then there’s a Latin statement on page 9. Belton does not give the origin of it, but apparently it has to do with Plato:

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. Plato is dear to me, but truth is still dearer.

To love truth is equivalent to liking the world. Truth should be loved because through truth you have a chance of liking the world honestly, and through untruth you’ll have a chance to like your own invention.

I have said, and say to anyone: if you do anything, whatever it is, that will make your like of the world less, you’re a fool. It is hard to see that we are trying to make our like of the world less, or trying to stop our like. But whether we’re doing all we can to like the world honestly, is the criterion in every aspect of life, including love. So I have said to people: if you are using a person to like the world less, stop it. No one can afford to like the world less, and no one can afford not to do everything to like it as much as possible. And if any person feels that what I’m saying is not sensible, then on any occasion argue about it—but don’t just listen complacently.

I say very plainly: if you could like the world more and don’t do what you can to do that, you are, as they say in England, a blithering fool. That is the one thing that will make one’s life liked by oneself, and also strong. If this seems to be exaggerated, then it is well to ask as much as one can about it. But it’s in keeping with the statement “Plato is dear to me, but truth is dearer.” If truth is dear, it means the world really known is dear—which means that it can be liked. If the logic here is faulty, that should be pointed out. To say that truth should be respected is a way of saying that the world should be liked.

Art, Life—& Joy

There is a statement by Schiller about life and art, and seriousness and joy. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) had the “play” theory of art, which is somewhat true; but in the long run, art makes life both heavier and lighter, gives it more substance and also makes life less of a burden. This is from Schiller’s Wallenstein, which Coleridge translated:

Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst. Life is earnest, art is joyful.

This doesn’t say that art itself will deal with life in such a way that the joy in it can be better seen, but that is what Aesthetic Realism believes: that art is knowledge. The purpose of art is to see something more truly, so that often it will be less oppressive. That is a hard thing to understand, but my purpose is to encourage one to see it. I don’t think anybody will, just so, agree with me; it’s not easy. My seeing of it came before 1925. It came through a lot of work, including in definitions.² So to anyone who expects to like the world simply on the basis of liking an aunt, I’d say you’re fooling yourself.

I’m presenting more evidence for this fact: that the world can honestly be liked indefinitely. I’m not going to say how much. But anytime one likes something said about it—whether in the field of art or anywhere else—one is that much liking the world itself. If you like music, you like the world that much, because music arises from the world.

Does Reality Ask Something of Us?

There is the French critic, teacher, and philosopher whom Matthew Arnold wrote about, and whom a relative of Arnold’s, Mrs. Humphry Ward, translated: Henri Frédéric Amiel (1821-81). His Journal intime is one of the famous diaries of the world. In it he quotes this French statement, which Belton gives on page 63:

Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra. Do what is right, come what may.

Then Belton quotes this passage from Amiel’s diary:

Even if there were no holy and merciful God, if there was only the great universal being, the law of all, the ideal without distinct existence or reality, Duty would still be the solution of the enigma, and the polar star of humanity in its march. Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.

This goes along with an idea that’s been had by many people and should be looked at freshly. First everyone should ask: Is the world interested in what I’m doing, in any way? And if it is interested in any way, what is the way? Or are the choices I make just between me and whom I directly affect?

There was a great deal written about duty in the 19th century. Victorians have been made fun of for it. But is there something which is interested in our choice, outside of our own desire for comfort?

The large matter is: what makes us do things, or choose things? The fact that we like the taste of an orange doesn’t seem to be our own invention, because something enables us to like the orange or some candy. But the question is, what enables us to respond to things? We none of us ever invented taste buds. And if the world is working in us biologically, does it end there? Everyone would say they know that if they can walk across the street, their mother had something to do with it; but you don’t have to go very deep to say, “Who caused my mother? She alone doesn’t enable me to walk.”

So there is something large. And then, how much it has to do with our decisions, how much it is interested in our decisions, is a big thing. What makes us regret something? Is it only our foolishness? What makes us feel in some way we were unjust? People have said guilt is an invention of society; it’s the last relic of the era of William Ewart Gladstone, or the Victorian era. The thing that makes us regret, or have guilt, has been described as society and custom. But that hasn’t worked: there is something else. Even in anthropology there is the sense that when a person felt regretful or worried it wasn’t just because he hadn’t followed the monitions of the tribe.

So Amiel says that even if there were no God, it would seem that there was something asked of us.

What we’re looking at was a large matter in any age, including the Renaissance. In Rabelais’ Gargantua there is the phrase “Fais ce que voudras” (“Do what you wish”), but there’s a great deal of talk about what is it that you wish? The phrase “Do that which you wish” is true—but the question is, what is the you that is talked about, and what is the wish that is complete? Everyone knows he or she has two wishes: one, to buy some expensive food, and the other, to save money. So it seems that the wishes are not so easily placed.

Obligation & Liking

Even if there were no holy and merciful God, if there was only the great universal being, the law of all,…Duty would still be the solution of the enigma.

The question, then, is: if the world wants us to do something, does that have to do with our like of the world? Does the idea of obligation, duty, responsibility, intimate that the world should be liked? In liking something, two things are present: one, respect for that thing; and the other, that that thing is friendly to oneself. Respect and friendliness are the two elements in like.

Those who know Amiel know how cautious he is not to be fooled. He is one of the most cautious people who ever lived. Although he wrote no large work, he is a great deal like Matthew Arnold. Arnold has the phrase “the something not ourselves which makes for righteousness.” That is what Amiel is illustrating. That’s Arnold’s definition of God—“the something not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” which is repeated with slight variations in his Literature and Dogma and elsewhere in his work.

So, is there what we ought to do, along with what we want to do? And what is the relation between these? If the relation is clashing, then the world doesn’t make sense and it should be given back to the anarchists, particularly those who are disreputable. If there is really a clash between what we ought to do and what we want to do, the world is badly made.