Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing Eli Siegel’s magnificent 1974 lecture Where Ethics Is. And Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy that shows that where ethics is is everywhere—from a kiss to the US Constitution; from a child’s ability to learn the alphabet, to the matter of who should really own America—a few people or all its people?

In this lecture Mr. Siegel is looking at statements about ethics that are of the history of philosophy. And he shows that ethics is always aesthetics too: it has what every instance of beauty has, a oneness of opposites—centrally, our very particular cherished self and the wide outside world. “To be ethical,” he wrote, “is to give oneself what is coming to one by giving what is coming to other things” (Self and World, p. 243).

Among the passages he speaks of here is one by Aristotle, who says in it that a person is not ethical, not just, unless he or she takes pleasure in doing justice. Mainly, people have not seen justice that way—at least they haven’t seen the justice due from themselves that way. Aesthetic Realism, however, agrees with Aristotle here. Mr. Siegel once defined ethics informally as “the art of enjoying justice.” In fact, Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy that shows being just is not only pleasurable but thrilling, self-preserving, confidence-giving, romantic, ever so happiness-making, as well as being sensible, the greatest practicality, the most urgent need.

The Division & Battle in Each of Us

Mr. Siegel speaks here too about the biggest rift in the self of everyone. In Aesthetic Realism, he has shown what that rift is and means. And in doing so, he has explained what no other philosopher saw, including the lovable and mighty Aristotle. The rift is between care for oneself and justice to other things, and it is the very basis of the most hurtful thing in us: contempt. Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And even as it’s very ordinary, contempt is also humanity’s greatest danger and ugliness, the biggest weakener in self, the source of every human cruelty.

How urgently do people need to understand contempt, including one’s own? The urgency is tremendous, both for everyone’s personal life and for our nation. And with that urgency is the need to learn from Aesthetic Realism why being just is pleasure and one’s true importance.

Let us imagine a person (and for the moment, we’ll make the imagined person a man). If this person does not feel that being just will take care of himself—if he feels that being just to something or someone will jeopardize his own comfort or importance—he will see possible justice as an enemy and he will want to be unjust. (Of course, he won’t call what he’s after injustice; he’ll give it some noble-seeming name.)

We have seen in America in recent months and years a tremendous playing out, in high places, of the rift between what will make oneself important and what other things deserve—and those other things include the American people, the Constitution, and truth itself. There has been on a stunning and massive scale something human beings have used for millennia: lying. And lying comes from only one thing: a rift between care for self and what the world is—between what pleases me and what’s true. Lying comes from contempt, which says, “I have the right to do whatever I choose with what, in the outside world, doesn’t make much of me, doesn’t give me my way. I have the right to change any fact I want about that outside-world thing or person. (I also have the right to punish it, him, her.)”

This way of mind, this rift between care for self and what the world deserves, this desire to change the facts about anything one takes as lessening oneself, can be present in relation to thousands of aspects of life—including elections. There can be the feeling, present at various times in history: “There was an election. It didn’t go in a way that made me important. Let’s try to overturn it.” The rift of care for self versus what something else deserves, can take the form of: “Our nation’s laws and Constitution don’t go along with what I want. So let’s try to undermine them, and encourage others to.”

It has happened throughout the centuries that many, many people have gone along with lies. They have done so because in various ways the lies suited those persons’ sense of self—a sense of self not at one with justice to the world, to facts, to other human beings. As Aesthetic Realism shows: the division between oneself and what other things deserve is an ordinary thing in human life, and also the most dangerous and terrible. And as I said: to see justice as the same as pleasure and one’s own glory, is not only beautiful, is not only the basis of art, but is a necessity, including for the safety of our American democracy. How to see in that true way is the beautiful study of Aesthetic Realism.

This Too Is Told of Honestly

In commenting on Aristotle and the rift in self, Mr. Siegel speaks a little—objectively, quietly—about how the philosophy he founded and taught was met. He says: “The fact that one could have a good opinion of something and be pained by having it is the saddest thing in the history of Aesthetic Realism itself.” Mr. Siegel says this simply, says a little more about it, and continues discussing, so justly, Aristotle and humanity.

And I will confine myself here to saying this: Throughout the decades Mr. Siegel met resentment from people, including critics, including his own students, because they, we, respected him so much. He was great. He was kind always. He was grandly and consistently ethical: he had pleasure being just, to every human being he spoke to or about, to every idea, happening, instance of reality. He explained what art is; he understood the human self. The greatest shame of my life—and it is gigantic—is that I too resented Eli Siegel because he made for such respect in me yet wasn’t famous, wasn’t touted by the “right” people.

Now we are in 2021. The philosophy he founded is here, glowingly immortal. And it is the happiness of my life to say and know that to try to be just to Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel is not only deserved but is the greatest of pleasures.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

There Is Aristotle—& More

By Eli Siegel

I’ll go now to something of Aristotle in the book I’ve been using: Ethics: Selections from Classical and Contemporary Writers, edited by Oliver A. Johnson. And as I said, I think in all writing about ethics the idea of what is deserved, what is coming to someone or something, can be seen. Aristotle writes in book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics:

Indeed, in addition to what we have said, a man is not good at all unless he takes pleasure in noble deeds. No one would call a man just who did not take pleasure in doing justice, nor generous who took no pleasure in acts of generosity, and so on.

That has to do with the full meaning of justice. “No one would call a man just who did not take pleasure in doing justice—” But there’s also a notion of justice that corrupts things. “—nor generous who took no pleasure in acts of generosity.” People have been uncertain about generosity, because the tendency is to see generosity as in the neighborhood of being a sucker.

Aristotle is saying that if one is just, or ethical, and doesn’t have pleasure from it, it’s not the complete thing, not the real thing. And the fact that one could have a good opinion of something and be pained by having it is the saddest thing in the history of Aesthetic Realism itself. It happens that ethics is in a world of power and prestige, and other considerations have seemed more attractive.

Toward the end of book 1, Aristotle says there’s something else in mind (or, as he puts it here, in the soul) beside reason. What he says brings up the old matter of man’s being intellectual and also beastly—that the same person who can work with fluxions or logarithms can also act like any living being whom one wouldn’t call human right away:

But we must nevertheless, I think, hold that in the soul too there is something beside the reason, which opposes and runs counter to it….There is…the faculty of appetite or of desire in general.

This is an implication that we are run by two things. What these two things are has been put in various ways: they’ve been called apes and angels; also angels and earthly creatures; beast and spirit—all kinds of things. Aesthetic Realism says that whatever you call it—beast and spirit, intellectual and Groucho Marx, whatever you call it—the two are related. And they are in an aesthetic relation.

What Is the Chief Disjunction?

Meanwhile, the self has worked for two bosses, and there is still a split and a junction in the life of everyone. As Aesthetic Realism sees it, the most beastly disjunction in people can be put roughly as Who in hell cares for truth—I’ve got myself to take care of! That is the most beastly disjunction. And it is everywhere in America. There are two hundred million instances of it. It can be put other ways.

The rift that writers on ethics have had to deal with is: necessary preservation of the me versus justice to others. The world is insisting that humanity do a better job between one’s preservation of me and justice to others. This better job is now being asked for in terms of economics. For example, what’s sometimes called a spiral, the spiral of inflation, will have to stop—which means that an ego at a certain time will say, “If I don’t raise my price, or don’t feel I have to raise the price, because it’s been raised on me, maybe somewhere it’ll be wise.”

One can see the tendency to use economics as a hidden mode of retaliation and ill will in any century whatsoever. It was present in the 4th century. It was present in the 7th century bc. It was present in the 16th century. Though today I’m looking directly at ethics itself, I promise you that on other occasions I shall try to make it clear why I say that ethics is the cause of what is happening in economics. I shall not skimp that.

What Good Is

I go now from Aristotle to a current book: Ethics, by P.H. Nowell-Smith. First, a sentence in which we have what is said often: that what good is, is indefinable. Nowell-Smith is speaking about the philosopher G.E. Moore:

Moore holds that “good” also stands for a simple, and therefore indefinable idea.

I do not agree with that view, for this reason: there are hundreds of instances of something good—and there is something they have in common. Twenty or thirty years ago, when a theatre sold you a ticket for a show, the seat was marked on the ticket; then you went to the theatre and you found the seat was there, in fairly good condition. (It might have had a little chocolate, or something, in front of it.) But that was an instance of giving you what was coming to you. Also, many contracts are fulfilled, and many dates are fulfilled. People act courteously, which is a way of giving another person what is coming to him or her. There are other ways. Anytime things have happened so that persons give others what they deserve, we have something like good, or ethics.*

What is in common among all the instances of good is a certain proportion, a certain likeness and difference. And that is in the field of aesthetics. For instance, when you listen to a person courteously and try to understand him or her, that is good; it’s equity.

The idea that good is what all instances of good have in common is a little like what yellow is. If yellow occurs in a flower, or occurs in paint, or occurs in an animal, there is something in common in the cause. Good is what all good actions have in common. I think as that is looked at there will be seen in common aesthetics and proportion in difference. I also think there’s something in common in every instance of the color yellow. The fact that a sense of yellow can be subjective does not change this.

That good can be defined needs to be stated, because one can say, “Who knows what good is? I have a partner, and what I say is good he thinks is very foolish. What’s good to me is not good to him.” This means that you destroy ethics. “I like the poetry that my niece writes—who’s this guy Hart Crane?!” This means poetic values are destroyed.

Nowell-Smith is valuable because he hints again and again that wherever there is something ethical, there is what he calls an A-property. The A-property is some general rightness, abstract rightness. Then, there is something empirical present too—just as, if a chair is fashioned well, it’s that chair but there is also some proportion that has to do with the outside world—which relates it to the Greek Parthenon. Wherever there’s proportion there’s something abstract present, and all furniture has some kind of proportion, including the metal furniture of now. This matter of the world and the object is present in ethics. You do something: you feel it’s good for you, but you can feel the world has been hurt. As soon as you ask whether something was hurt, you’re taking ethics seriously.

Nowell-Smith is talking about why a person likes a car, and he says this:

In each case the car must have some A-property and some ordinary, empirical properties on which its A-property depends.

For example, if you buy an apricot, one of the things you may like is that the shape—which is not exactly spherical but approaches that—has something immortal about it. It is what Cézanne felt as he looked at fruits: that every fruit was a study in abstract immortality. So the problem of aesthetics is the problem of ethics: how one can be just to a pulsating, yearning individual and at the same time just to the everlasting world in terms of form. This is what, in his fashion, Nowell-Smith says: “In each case the car must have some A-property and some ordinary, empirical properties on which its A-property depends.” Meanwhile, I don’t think that statement makes ethics as living as it should be, because it doesn’t present that most beautiful, ennobling thing about the human self: that everything one does has some meaning that is unconfined, everlasting, not restricted.

What Is in Choice?

Another aspect of the matter is the meaning of the word choose. Whenever a person wants to do something, we’re in the field of the unconscious. Why does he or she choose to do that? What is concerned? And it can be a very ordinary choice. Again we have as a factor the outside world—all of it. And then, the outside world is present as what’s in the neighborhood. For example, if you choose to pour tea for someone, you have to be aware that you have a guest; but at the same time, what makes you pour the tea and, for that matter, enables you to pour the tea, goes very far.

So what is the meaning of the word choice? What has come to be thought in recent years is that choice still exists but that there can be factors we don’t know that make for our choice. In the meantime, there can be factors that we do know. For instance, a person tomorrow will make a choice about investing. (He’s one of the few investors left in this world.) He could put his money into a Canadian goldmine. Or will he put his money into some Chicago farm implement company? He chooses the first, because he thinks there’s more money to be made from the Canadian goldmine. The choice here is based on consideration: what can bring more of a return? So choices can be very conscious—as, let’s say, a woman has just gotten a new apartment; she has furniture and she asks herself, “Where shall I put this?” That can be a very conscious choice: “Would it be best by the window or near the door?” Choice is a large thing in aesthetics. It’s a large thing in efficiency. It’s a large thing in ethics.

There’s the Unconscious

Nowell-Smith writes:

A man who says that he voted for a certain proposal because he thought it good has not explained why he voted for it; he has merely guarded himself against accusations of flippancy, irresponsibility, or indulging in complicated machinations.

When we decide that something is good, how do we come to decide that? Here is where Freudian psychoanalysis had a value: that of making the unconscious a source of a person’s choices. Meanwhile its value pretty much ends there on the subject—because the reason for the choice was not given wholly. For instance, Freud would say Leonardo da Vinci chose to paint something because it reminded him of a woman relative he had, that there was a sneer on the Mona Lisa because Leonardo da Vinci was aware he could have lady relatives who would belittle him—that kind of stuff as the reason for the choice. I do not think that is aesthetically sound. Too often Freud and the psychoanalysts said a person’s choice was based on some sexual situation, whether it was at the age of 3 or 33. Choice is a big topic. Meantime, I have to say again that Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most comic books in this world.