Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the 1970 lecture The Renaissance Shows Self, by Eli Siegel. What is that thing, the self, which is so particular to each of us, so personal, so just our own—and which yet is fundamentally related to every self that has ever been? After all, that intimate term self, as in myself, is the same as that so inclusive noun in the phrase the human self.

Eli Siegel is the philosopher who understood the self. It is he who identified the central purpose of our intricate, subtle, insistent, often bewildered, hoping self. And he explained too what it is in our self which interferes with our largest purpose—interferes with our very life.

He showed that the self of everyone is an aesthetic situation, described in this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” For example, every self, whether child of 5 or professor emeritus, wants to be like a good melody: We want our power and our gentleness to be melodious—friendly to each other. We want to be excited and calm for the same purpose, as the melody is; and to have feeling which goes along with logic. We want to have—like that melody—continuity and change at once, stability and adventure.

The biggest opposites in everyone’s life, Mr. Siegel showed, are self and world. Whoever we are, the self which is our own is always in relation to the world outside of us. Our deepest purpose is to like that world, find meaning in it, and to feel that trying to be just to it is the same as taking care of ourselves. Meanwhile, in every life the desire to like reality has been in a fight with the desire to have contempt. Contempt is the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” It has thousands of forms, from ordinary coldness and snobbishness to racism and exploiting people economically. It is, Mr. Siegel showed, the source of all injustice. And contempt—the looking down on, diminishing, feeling superior to what’s not us—is the greatest weakener-from-within of every self.

We Come to a Matter of Our Time

Last month the New York Times published an opinion piece with the title “There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing.” Its author, psychologist Adam Grant, describes that “blah” state of mind as “a sense of stagnation and emptiness…as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.” And he says that this “might be the dominant emotion of 2021.” He describes it further as a “dulling of delight,” “dwindling of drive,” an “indifference,” which “disrupts your ability to focus.” He indicates that he and people he knows and millions of Americans have, over the last year, developed this “chronic condition.” It is, he says, part of “the emotional long-haul of the pandemic.”

Mr. Grant is writing about a situation of self. And to understand it we need to see what Eli Siegel explains in the present lecture: “The self is an object that has an opinion about the world as object….This is the main thing in self.” The word languishing as Mr. Grant uses it is, I believe, a euphemism for a certain response of a self to the world, an opinion about the world. And it is important—in fact, it’s urgent—to ask this: is there a desire in self to find nothing interesting, to be unaffected, to make life dull?

The first maxim in Eli Siegel’s book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims is this: “Don’t shake the hand of reality with one finger.” That maxim, which people have loved, which has humor and style and kindness, implies that there has been a desire to be limp in meeting the world, to keep oneself unengaged with the world.

It’s understandable that one could use the pandemic to be tepid, dull, apathetic, flaccid about reality. When you have been shocked, and have worried, and feel tossed about, there can be a desire to get to a certain repose through feeling not so much. But it is what Mr. Siegel called “the repose of contempt.” We need to ask: Is there a desire to get a miserable solace by sneering at it all and saying, Nothing is worth much of a response from me?

At the very beginning of the pandemic, over a year ago, I wrote in this journal:

As people in America and the world are faced with something dangerous that we don’t understand, what does it mean to think about it in a way that strengthens our minds and feelings and makes us proud?…How can we have a state of mind we truly like ourselves for having? [TRO 2028]

I quoted the following all-important question asked by Eli Siegel decades before:

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, I am immensely grateful to say, is Yes. And in issues of this journal last year I wrote in detail about what it means to use the coronavirus to like the world—not to like the virus, of course, but to use it to see real, vibrant meaning in the world, in things, in people.

Central to understanding what Mr. Grant writes about is this question: Is the self’s response to the world always an ethical situation? That is, is the self always having either respect for the world or contempt for it, or some combination of both? Yes. Mr. Grant quite wisely says, “We still have a lot to learn about what causes languishing.” I am describing the large thing that needs to be learned—the really great, beautiful, grandly critical, magnificently kind, true thing that needs to be learned. It was explained by Eli Siegel and can be studied in Aesthetic Realism.

Are We Just?

Contempt has various aspects, but we should see that the state of mind written about by Mr. Grant is one of them. The self, as I said, is ethical: how we meet the world is always a matter of whether we’re hoping to be just to it or not. For instance, if we’re listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and we yawn and think about what we’ll have for dinner—along with having a dull time, are we being unjust? Does the symphony deserve better from us?

If we feel dull, tepid, flat, foggy, are we responding justly to how the world really is? Is there such a thing as the response that instances of reality deserve from us? How much feeling does a tree deserve from us? A novel of Dickens? An event in American history? The Hudson River? A fellow human being? It is because the self is deeply ethical that being apathetic, meeting things dully, makes us feel ashamed. Meanwhile, we also feel triumphant, because we have dealt with a confusing world by showing how little it can affect us. We show we’re too good to be wholly in it by making a veil, a fog, between it and us.

This apartness from things and flattening of them, and fogginess, is related to something else that has been noted these months: people, it seems, are drinking more. Alcohol gets you away from a world you don’t like—and so does that muffling and dulling which the article is about.

Another Emotion

As to this tepidity’s being the “dominant emotion of 2021”: I question whether history will see it that way. There is another emotion, a way of feeling and seeing, that is ever so notable now, that is historic. It is the growing feeling in millions of Americans that people they’d seen as different from them are as real as they themselves are, and deserve to be seen and treated justly. That greater feeling about justice is also an “emotion of 2021.” Further: the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is about the self, and there is an emotion and also a tremendous logic in it. There is in it the feeling that the human self is something we all have and are.

This emotion and clarity about what’s owed to all human selves is growing even as it’s combatted by various people, including politicians, through lies and a terrific effort to restrict voting. I’m not discussing these matters at length now. But I mention them because tepidity, dullness of feeling, can be present in the same months as there is an important ethical agogness. And sometimes the same person has both.

The feeling Mr. Grant writes about, with its sense of seemingly organic boredom, existed in human beings long before the current year. These sentences by Eli Siegel from Self and World are a central—and thrilling—means to understand it:

We are in a fight between being bored and being aroused. Being bored is a victory for ubiquitous contempt. Interest is on the side of respect as one’s bloodstream.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Self, Then & Now

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel is using as text the book English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson, edited by John Williams.

A statement about John Skelton is a means of looking at the self. Skelton (c. 1460-1529) is one of the swiftest writers in English, or any language. And swiftness, in its various ways, can be an attribute of self, a manifestation of self, a property of self, a quality of self, and an indication of self. The editor says of Skelton:

His work is primitive; but within the limits of that primitivism, it is—like the work of a greater modern poet whom he curiously resembles, William Carlos Williams—always skillful and frequently moving.

I was surprised by that comparison. And we get a moral from it: you can compare any self to any other self. A comparison I once made that entertained the company then present was of Theda Bara and George Washington. The chief thing that everybody agreed with was: one didn’t know what Theda Bara was going to do next, and one didn’t know what George Washington was going to do. Therefore, they were born of the same mother. Well, to have William Carlos Williams compared to John Skelton—it does add something to Skelton, and it adds something to Williams.

I never thought Williams would be compared to Skelton. Since, as we know, Williams didn’t like the Elizabethans, I’m sure he wouldn’t like the pre-Elizabethans any better—and Skelton happens to be a Tudor, which is the Elizabethan in process, before it’s really grown up. Skelton always wrote in rhyme, which Williams did not. And Skelton does have some stanzas that are really grandiose, very elaborate, which is not Williams’ way. Also, Williams’ effect is hardly like that of “The Book of Phillip Sparrow.” But there is a comparison.

There are two things that can be easily compared: things that are like each other and things that are unlike—as a piano can be compared to an organ, but it can also be compared to a filing cabinet or a desk.

Thomas Wyatt Tells about Self

I go to the person who is seriously seen as beginning the fairly early poetry of the 16th century, Thomas Wyatt. He has been undergoing scholarship, and we’ll find this editor telling us that Surrey has gone down and Wyatt has risen. They are contemporary. Wyatt is older. The lives of both Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were tumultuous, and both knew what a prison was like. Surrey met death through one of the last commands of Henry VIII, in 1547.

A poem that says a great deal about self is Wyatt’s “And Wilt Thou Leave Me Thus?” The self does a lot of complaining. If a self couldn’t complain, it would lose its stature and its certificate. The self can resent, and poems have, often, resentment and complaint. The Psalms very often are complaints, and a good deal of the Book of Job is complaint. A self, then, can complain. Everybody is given to it. We don’t have any figures—we don’t have some means of seeing how much energy is put into complaint, but a great deal is. And a complaint may be poetic.

Very often as you complain you can accent the sadness but also accent how ill the person looks who makes for the complaint. You reprove the person. King Lear does a lot of poetic complaining. Hamlet does some. Oedipus was not a chatterbox, but we have complaint from him. —This is the Wyatt poem, and it is a beautiful poem. In the 19th century it was seen as the piece of Thomas Wyatt. (The word grame means sadness.)

This is a naïve poem, and one can say it prattles mournfully. However, it has lived.

Complaints take various forms. Sometimes a command results, sometimes a request. “Say nay, say nay!” is a command/request. You can say, Oh, no, no!—you don’t know whether you’re commanding or requesting. A command and request are hard to distinguish sometimes.

The self has very often the need and the opportunity to say no. So: “Say nay, say nay!” And Wyatt felt this should be a refrain. He must have seen something comforting and effective in “Say, nay, say nay!” There is something strong, comforting, effective there. It is quite musical.

“And wilt thou leave me thus, / That hath given thee my heart / Never for to depart / Neither for pain nor smart.” A good many poems have the self laying down ethical propositions. Here Wyatt says, I have given you my heart, and I said I wouldn’t leave you for pain or for smart, so should you leave me this way? No! Kant would object to the logic. John Stuart Mill would object. Socrates would object.

“And wilt thou leave me thus / And have no more pitý…” Accents had a difficult time in the 16th century. But it’s quite clear that Wyatt wants pity accented on the second syllable. “Alas, thy cruelty!” So Wyatt felt that accenting long vowels would serve himself. It did. At least accenting those vowels served him in poetry, because this poem has remained, with its ee sounds and ay sounds. The self has to be adroit in poetry, as it has to be in business. The self is compelled by the exigencies of the world to be adroit, also planning.

Another Mood of Self

The moods of Thomas Wyatt’s poems are not too many. They’re mostly that this woman whom he loves is unfair to him. That is a motif, and is enough to keep you for a while. But occasionally there is something else. There is a book I once quoted from called The Devil Take Her, which deals with poems in which a woman is defied. Wyatt doesn’t get to anything as bold as that, but I’ll read something of his that is in the field. (The phrase “The Devil take her!” is from Sir John Suckling, of the next century.)

In the poem of Wyatt that I’ll read next, “Hate Whom Ye List,” we see him arranging his lines. “And Wilt Thou Leave Me Thus?” was very cunning too, yet it’s simple, it prattles, though it prattles as if it were represented by chess, or jewelry.

The poem is written around the word not, which is important in the unconscious. A child very early says I will not, and says it in a certain way.

The Matter of Sincerity

As to the sincerity of the poems: what one can see is that the self had problems about sincerity in every century. There is no such thing as a sincere century. There is a sincere moment, perhaps; but not a sincere century. And how sincere Wyatt was in the first poem, or in the second poem, is still to be seen.

The question that arises is: is it good for the self to be sincere? A question Matthew Arnold was deeply asking about is: Can there be great poetry without sincerity? Arnold felt that the greatest thing in poetry was “high seriousness”— which was based on sincerity, which couldn’t be without sincerity.

This poem of Wyatt is obviously fashioned carefully; it is complainingly clever. Yet, in its strange rhythm, it is poetic.

Meanwhile, for now the point is: the self can defy. The self can say, All right, take back your cabin! or Take back your houseboat!