Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the third part of Eli Siegel’s 1970 lecture How Effective Are We? The lecture is great—great in its comprehension of life, economics, the self of everyone, and literature.

How Effective Are We? is about power—and the fact, described by Aesthetic Realism, that there are two kinds of power, one good and one bad. In the present section, Mr. Siegel is in the midst of discussing Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, a play about the legendary scholar who wanted a power which, he felt, scholarship and trying to understand would not give him. It was a power over reality itself: to get—quickly—and manage anything he pleased. And he sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for it.

It has been felt for centuries that the power gone after by Faustus is wrong. But just what is wrong with it wasn’t explained, either by Marlowe or those commenting on his play. There was only the idea that such power has been forbidden by God, that there is, as John Gassner writes in his Treasury of the Theatre, “a transgression” in it. Aesthetic Realism explains: bad power, like all injustice, is bad because it is impelled by, and is a going after, contempt, the “false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” The seeing of what that means is part of the magnificent study of Aesthetic Realism.

There has also been a sense, through the years, that such a thing as good power exists. True art has been called powerful. Life-saving medicines have been called powerful. The right of every citizen to vote has been felt as powerful—and that’s why unethical persons have tried to undo this right. Yet just what good power is has not been clear to people either. It is, Aesthetic Realism shows, the power of respect for reality. And again: the down-to-earth meaning of that explanation is in the study—immediate, wide, deep, delight-giving—of Aesthetic Realism.

Marlowe Himself

I think Marlowe himself was hugely troubled on the subject of good power versus bad. As writer, he added to the beauty of the world. Yet as human being, he didn’t think there was a respectful power that could bring the thrill, the sense of one’s own might, which that other power seemed to give—the contempt-power of dealing with things and persons however one chose, with oneself superior to them. Here, he was like millions of other people. The power of being just, of respecting, has so often been taken as tame, even sacrificial. Aesthetic Realism can make the following clear at last: the power of knowing, seeing meaning in, being just to, the world of things and people is vivid, exhilarating, real-self-importance-giving. And it is all these far beyond what the fake superiority of contemptuous power can provide.

We need to know this, because we’ll never believe fully in justice unless we can feel that the power of being just is something that warms our bones and makes us glorious.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) saw that there was a tremendous desire in the human self to misuse things and people, have victories over them, and that this was bad. In his plays he made powerful drama of the matter, and often true poetry. Yet I think his not seeing that this contempt had any potently glorious competitor in the self, was a cause of the ill nature, the careless bellicosity, he is described as often having. This contentiousness culminated in his being stabbed to death at age 29 while fighting with an acquaintance in a tavern.

Marlowe, I believe, was furious and ashamed that he could not believe in the power of beauty with all of himself. Also: though we may not, like Faustus, be dragged off to a theological hell for having engaged in contemptuous power, we always deeply despise ourselves for it, though we may put on a show of confidence.

Always There—the World

Christopher Marlowe had no idea that the power which is in poetry—including, often, his own poetry—was the power he was looking for in life. Aesthetic Realism shows that in every good line of poetry, the world itself is present: poetry “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” When a person makes for true art in any field, that person is having a power that is simultaneously a yielding to and a shaping, a bringing into new composition what the world in the fullness of its structure is, the oneness of opposites.

Take, for instance, a line, said by Faustus toward the end of the play: “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!” That line, in its grandeur of music, is a oneness of the world’s wildness, uncontrol, and its firmness. The line is a oneness of anguish and glow. It is a oneness of immediacy and vastness.

Then, there is our daily life. Aesthetic Realism explains that every object, person, happening contains the world’s structure of opposites—and so, the world itself. Therefore, if we’re trying to see justly what things are, what people are, each having (for instance) reality’s tumult and calm, past and present, separateness and continuity—we’ll feel a bigness in things, a bigness in our own seeing. There will be for us a thrill, a living pride, a size of meaning that not only can compete with but can leave in the dust the biggest contempt-power one might have.

So we go to the third part of How Effective Are We? The lecture represents the kind power of Eli Siegel’s seeing, alive for all time in Aesthetic Realism.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Which Power Is for Humanity?

By Eli Siegel

Note. At the point we’ve reached in the play, Faustus has written out the deed in which he gives his soul to Lucifer in return for receiving supernatural abilities. But before handing the deed over, he asks a question.

Faustus asks Mephistophilis, “But may I raise up spirits when I please?” Mephistophilis answers: “Ay, Faustus, and do greater things than these.”

Those lines of Faustus have something like the medieval French way of assonance, and the Spanish way: the same vowel in the last syllable of one line after another. Here, it’s the o: every line here ends with something like an o sound. So in this passage, by chance, an English play has something of the quality of the Spanish cancionero.

But we must look to what is being said. Faustus has given the document, written in his blood, to Mephistophilis. And it’s interesting to have this business terminology present, as in “But yet conditionally that thou perform / All articles prescrib’d between us both.” It means something. The motto of Beelzebub, Mammon, Satan, is: Business is business.

He does read this document, written in his blood, and it sounds like a business contract:

First, that Faustus may be a spirit in form and substance. Secondly, that Mephistophilis shall be his servant, and at his command. Thirdly, that Mephistophilis shall do for him, and bring him whatsoever he desires….I, John Faustus, of Wittenberg, Doctor, by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer prince of the east, and his minister Mephistophilis: and furthermore grant unto them, that, twenty-four years being expired,…full power to fetch or carry the said John Faustus, body and soul, flesh, blood, or goods, into their habitation wheresoever.

Just another deed, that’s all, this talk of what it means to be damned.

Faustus, being very modern, thinks all of it is a bunch of rubbish: salvation; damnation; and purgatory is only indecisive rubbish. Mephistophilis, however, disagrees. He says: “But, Faustus, I am an instance to prove the contrary / For I am damn’d, and am now in hell.”

They have a conversation about who made the world, and Mephistophilis is very uncomfortable. Just before that, Faustus asks why should the world be so uncertain, even in its planetary motions?

Faustus. Well resolve me in this question; why have we not conjunctions, oppositions, aspects, eclipses, all at one time, but in some years we have more, in some less?

Why should God be so irregular? It’s a very good question. Mephistophilis answers in Latin: “Per inaequalem motum respecta totius.” That means “Because of the unequal motion with regard to the whole universe”—which I don’t think is a sufficient answer.

Because he knows who made the world and he wants not to say.

The Fight for Power

Something like that conversation, and also defiance, and also demurring, is present in the conversations of people. It was present between the two people, Dan and Jane, in the story I discussed, because when they were married both were after power, and they disagreed about it, and so they separated. The fight for power is present between people, including married couples. It makes for discomfort. But then, if it’s present in a certain way—as Edward Albee knows, and many other writers—it cannot be endured anymore. And there’s a feeling that with another person, one won’t go after power. What really happens is that the going after power is done more discreetly.

But this is what so often is found between two people: that a person was interested in power in a way we did not surmise. We thought that person was interested in pleasing us.

Faustus goes on. He has this problem: he wants to be humble, and he also wants to be proud. Knowledge, real knowledge, is the oneness of the two. In truly wanting to know, and in art, you are humble to the object. No artist was ever otherwise than humble. If an artist had to paint a tadpole, he’d be doffing a hundred silk hats to that tadpole. The humility of art is infinite. Pride is also there. And in art, pride and humility are one.

Faustus has trouble about this. He wants to know the world, but he cannot see his pride in only knowing it. He feels he has to do things too. Seeing, knowing, is seen as less important than being able to arrange or manipulate or have things come at one’s call. A subtitle of the play could be Is There Power in Knowledge as Such?

In not getting to the power that we truly want, or that we can be deeply pleased with, we are not effectual. That’s why the title of this talk is How Effective Are We? We’d like really to please ourselves—we’d like to have good power over ourselves. What is that? Every play of any worth, any keenness, says something about this. And Marlowe’s play does.

Then, Lucifer is present:

Lucifer. Faustus, we are come from hell to show thee some pastime: sit down, and thou shalt see all the Seven Deadly Sins appear in their proper shapes.

That statement of Faustus is one of the best praises of knowledge—because the idea is that Adam, before he came to be Adam, didn’t know anything, didn’t see anything; and when he came to be Adam and was able to see, he saw. Adam then had a great sense of power. There weren’t any laborers to manipulate. The only laborers were a few doves, some strange things that went along the grass, and some plants. And there was space. —But Lucifer gets annoyed, and says, “Talk not of Paradise nor creation; but mark this show.”

The Seven Deadly Sins enter. They could be talked about. They all have a disproportion of self in them: Pride (the better word now would be Vanity), Covetousness, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth (which would now be called Pompous Boredom), and Lechery.

Later, Faustus is with some scholars—and through Mephistophilis he will bring Helen of Troy to them. She does come. She will be present in lines I’m not reading now, and a poetic highpoint is reached there. There is great beauty. But the being able to have effects, have things happen and come to one without the world’s being met with sufficient process, without cause sufficient—that is a disrespect for the world. Profit, as it has been in economics, can be seen as having the riches of the world without caring whether the cause is sufficient or not, whether how one came to have them was sufficient or not. So Helen will soon come in a passage that is one of the great places in poetry; but the cause of her coming does not have the respect that is in knowledge.

The Time Comes

The contract will soon, well, take another form. Faustus is talking to the scholars, and says: “I writ them a bill with mine own blood: the date is expired; the time will come, and he will fetch me.”

A great point in poetry is how the hour comes. I could read that, but what I’m presenting this play for is not, at this time, to present the best things in poetry. It’s to present an idea of profit: the having of things not out of respect for the world, but because you want them. That is in this play. And as the time comes, Faustus wants to be like nothing. The desire to be like nothing is next to the desire to be adipose with riches you don’t respect.

When we are ashamed, we’d like to be like nothing. That is a time when we want to vanish, but utterly.

Is there a relation between the power that was sought at one time by Jane and Dan, that made them separate, and power as we can see it in Faustus and others?

There is at the end the idea of a life being incomplete:

What makes us ineffectual; what makes us incomplete? is a question ever so current, which Aesthetic Realism is very much interested in, busy with.

The phrase “unlawful things” is important. Reality does not say that profit is lawful. A thousand congresses can say it is, and a thousand conventions, and eight million chambers of commerce, and nine million manufacturers’ associations, and God knows who else. By profit I mean profit with disrespect for the means, profit from the use of cunning. It has always been as lawless as cancer, which is fairly lawless. That is the thing that I believe will be seen: that America has taken something to be lawful because people agreed that it was lawful. That is not the only criterion. There is another criterion. The criterion having to do with justice and beauty, the criterion that is in art—that says something else. It says that to get profit through a disrespectful way of seeing is not a way one should use the world, and it is not a way one should use oneself.

So the debate is still on. The idea of profit is something which is really unfettered. Anybody who believes in profit finds it very hard to stop anywhere. This was dealt with by Philip Barry in the play Holiday. There’s a feeling that the self can do anything that it can’t be stopped from doing. That’s in this play.

What Faustus Was Troubled By

But the big thing is to see that Faustus is troubled by the great problem of humility and pride. There is a power in humility, the power of rightly being affected by what is real. There is the power of seeing. Then, there’s another power. So let the powers meet, and let us see which power is for reality and humanity.