Dear Unknown Friends:
We publish here the first part in our serialization of Beginning with Sentences, by Eli Siegel. This lecture, given in 1976, has enormous meaning for literature—and for the life, the feelings, the choices of every person now.
In it, Mr. Siegel reads and discusses sentences that are of English literature, and that arise from and can make for great emotion. Early in the talk he says something that, to my knowledge, no other philosopher or writer on the human self has said—and he says it in a sentence that is, itself, powerful and graceful, simple in its richness and kindness: “Success in life can be described as having the greatest emotions from life.”
I love that quietly electric sentence, and have seen that it is true. As a means of commenting on it and introducing the first portion of the lecture, I am going to say some things about the tremendous matter of emotion—and great emotion. And I’ll do so through a series of points.
1. There is the statement I quoted, “Success in life can be described as having the greatest emotions from life.” It contains the reason people so often feel there is an emptiness in their lives—the reason they have the is-that-all-there-is? feeling. It’s safe to say that, largely, people do not think success is “having the greatest emotions”—they think other things constitute success. And yet, if we achieve those things—if we reach the pinnacle in our chosen field; get much praise, including amorous praise; have a lot of money—unless we have big, deep, true, large emotion, we feel to ourselves that we’re flops. And what is great emotion? I’ll comment on that as these points go on.
2. It is important to see that people want to have big feeling, but people are also against having big feeling. It has seemed safer to feel not so much, to be cool. And yet, to be cool is to be not entirely alive.
Emotion & a Principle
3. This principle of Aesthetic Realism, true about every aspect of life and reality, is true about emotion: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The emotions we are really after, the only emotions that will satisfy us, look good to us, are a oneness of opposites. Notably, they are a oneness of feeling and logic.
When people see themselves as feeling a lot, they usually think their feeling is apart from exactitude, accuracy, reason. Often it is, because people can have a lot of feeling that is inaccurate—isn’t fair to the facts about reality and people. Yet there has been a huge tendency in men and women to see logic itself as unfeeling and cold, and emotion itself as illogical and messy; so whichever they go for, they feel there is something amiss, something lacking. And they’re ashamed of themselves and angry with the world. What we want is to have large feeling, even sweeping feeling, that we respect ourselves for because it is also logical, sensible, accurate.
A Contest about Emotion
4. A contest about emotion is going on in every human being. It is a form of what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the central fight in us all: the fight between respect for the world and contempt for it. Contempt is the getting an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And it is, Aesthetic Realism shows, the source of every injustice, including unjust emotion.
5. The central distinction between, say, a good anger and a bad, a good hope and a bad, good affection and bad, is: does the emotion arise from a desire to respect the world or have contempt for it? (For example, some persons have a horrible affection for the days when America was run more fully by the “right” people, and are hoping to bring those days back.)
6. All the emotions arising from contempt have in common an ugly false superiority to things and people. With this fake superiority comes, too, an abiding unsureness and self-dislike, because the superiority is based on injustice.
7. The other contestant in the battle within us—the desire to like the world, respect what’s not ourselves, see meaning in things and people—makes for emotions that are big, logical, pride-giving. From this desire arises, for instance, the thrill of trying to know, of learning, of knowing as such. The desire to see meaning in things and reality is the source of every good emotion, including authentic love. And it gives one the emotion of truly respecting oneself.
8. Meanwhile, we can be angry at our own good emotions. That’s because contempt in us says: Don’t be a dope—to see meaning in something other than yourself lessens you. Get rid of those feelings!
The Art Emotion
9. What is the emotion that humanity has had from art? Aesthetic Realism explains that it is always—with all the variety and subtleties—emotion arising from the fact that the world has shown itself as beautiful through the way an artist felt and presented reality’s opposites as one. Historically, there has been no larger source of great emotion than art. Yet people have felt that when the art experience ended—when the concert, for instance, was over and they went back to their lives—the emotion stopped too.
Aesthetic Realism enables the emotions had from art to be had in, and from, life itself. The reason is in this principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Through Aesthetic Realism, a person can see opposites as one in the things and people one meets—and have, with that seeing, emotion one is proud of. I am stating very rapidly one of the greatest victories for human knowing and feeling in all of history. What it means, with its tremendous specificity, is presented in the whole curriculum of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.
10. Aesthetic Realism, then, has enabled large emotion—emotion that is also logic—to be in people’s lives in a much fuller and more comprehensive way. A fundamental reason is its showing that, as Mr. Siegel put it, the world is the other half of yourself. You are related to every thing and every person, because the opposites you are trying to make one are in them too—such opposites as freedom and order, sameness and difference, gentleness and strength, separateness and togetherness, depth and surface. Your opposites are in that tree. And that man you saw as so different from yourself is trying to put those opposites together, as you are. To see this, as one goes about one’s life, is to have knowledge and feeling that people have longed for and that is vital for our nation.
What Is a Great Emotion?
11. For now, I would describe a great emotion this way: It is an emotion that has an immediate object (a person/situation/thing) felt vividly, and simultaneously includes a sense of the whole world as present and cared for and as having something like structure, or form. These qualities are, I believe, in the sentences Mr. Siegel discusses. Like of the world is in all great emotion. Even when the emotion has anger in it, the world is loved, because in a true anger one objects to something in behalf of justice to the world itself.
12. I’ll mention swiftly now two more ways that Aesthetic Realism brings to a new fullness the great emotions humanity has had and desired. A) There is the great emotion arising from seeing that another person is really trying to know you. That has happened only very occasionally in human life. B) Even rarer, there is the emotion arising from seeing you are being comprehended authentically by another.
The persons who studied with Eli Siegel saw in him that beautiful trying to know every person he spoke to. And we met also his grandly successful knowing through principles that are clear, logical, and true. My own life-questions were seen truly by Eli Siegel, seen as aesthetic questions, seen with exactitude that sometimes included humor. About this, and my whole Aesthetic Realism education, I have emotion at one with a careful critical opinion—great, great for all time. And today, this principled understanding of people continues in Aesthetic Realism consultations.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education
Beginning with Sentences
By Eli Siegel
I thought it well to present today the idea of literature itself as containing the largest emotions of people put in a way that other people have felt it right to remember. English literature, like French literature, German literature, Latin literature, consists of emotions. And it should be the purpose of every person here to familiarize themselves with the largest emotions that human beings have had.
Sometimes those emotions are in events themselves; it can be presumed that on great occasions people have sometimes felt greatly. But literature is the place where the emotions of humanity have found a safe territory to be in, and can be looked at. The reason for studying literature is to have our own emotions as great as possible.
Success in life can be described as having the greatest emotions from life. How this can be brought about is a subject of Aesthetic Realism, and sometimes it’s brought about because people hear the right questions. I must say, that has occurred through Aesthetic Realism: to hear the right questions is very often the cause of great emotion in oneself—and to try to give the right answers. But today I’m going to accent the other way of getting great emotions: literature. We should see that words arise from feelings always, and no words are greater than the feelings that cause them.
Statements That Remain
In this talk, which I call Beginning with Sentences, I’m going to use some of the statements in English literature that have remained. I’m reading from Prose and the Essay, edited by Celia Townsend Wells (1962). And I begin with that persistent, bothersomely persistent, classic, Sir Thomas Browne. He is supposed to be a master of the ornate prose—prose that goes along, even though it’s personal, as if it were an orchestra in its own right. And, as very often happens, the persistent reputation of Sir Thomas Browne is justified. There is a great beauty in the way he saw the world and in his sentences. You’ll hear a music. All great prose has music, just as poetry has, and just as music itself has.
In the first noted work of Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (or Religion of a Doctor), we have some of those sentences. The work appeared in 1642, when Browne was 37. It happens to be one of the great works of the world. And if the prose repels you, all I can say is, endure it a little—it may make sense for you in time. There are many lovely sentences in it, and one of the loveliest is where Browne describes nature as the way God works. He says it has the hand of God: that there is a cause which we don’t see; and that when God chooses to show himself by what he does—showing the blacksmith shop is busy—we call it nature. This is all one sentence, from section 16:
And thus I call the effects of nature the works of God, whose hand and instrument she only is; and therefore, to ascribe his actions unto her is to devolve the honor of the principal agent upon the instrument; which if with reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honor of our writing.
Browne is saying that when people praise nature in the skies and stars and mountains and seas, they should know they’re praising the cause of it all, which Browne—one of the great doctors who were also religious—says is God. Nature, he says, is the way God chooses to show how he works.
Even in the 17th century there was a big debate: do we have to call all this a work of God, or can we simply say that matter has some principle within itself? There was some awareness of atoms, and there was a feeling that a tree grew by some force in itself, and the roots were part of the good sense of a tree—the trunk was, the leaves were, the twigs were. Very soon, nature will do its stuff once more, and there will be a lot of that going on in every state of the union, despite the primaries. For some reason, the birds will sing as they have. There are two possibilities: one is that nature shows a God exists who arranges it; and the other is that nature is that sensible it doesn’t need a God. And if nature is sensible, then matter has some possibilities within itself.
Looking at this sentence: “And thus I call the effects of nature the works of God, whose hand and instrument she only is—” Then Browne says, See to it you don’t ascribe good things to the instrument when honor is due to the great cause behind the instrument: “and therefore, to ascribe his actions unto her is to devolve the honor of the principal agent upon the instrument—” It’s as if you hear Beethoven played on the piano and you start praising the piano for its wonderful musical education. But no piano ever did anything great by itself. (Even the player piano somewhere had a person behind it.)
“—which if with reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses—” This is Browne when he gets very vivid. Something noticed about him is: with his great religious feeling and ornate prose, he does have humor. Some of the most humorous sentences are in Browne. He has music in his prose. He also has a lot of good sense. But he likewise has a sense of fun.
A King & a Storm
In the same Religio Medici, in section 17, Browne deals with the battle in 1588 when the smaller English fleet defeated a larger Spanish fleet, the Spanish Armada. And in the following sentence, he shows his sense of fun in words:
King Philip did not detract from the nation, when he said, he sent his armada to fight with men, and not to combat with the winds.
Since a storm arose, hurting the Armada very much, it could be said that the Spanish Armada was not defeated by men of England, but rather by the winds. Yet Browne says: still, the English nation deserved a great deal.
What makes the sentence important is that while the petulance of a king is present, there is also the power of the world, shown in storms. There is a mingling of human peevishness and universal force. Then, there’s a certain rhythm in the sentence. It ends with a word that’s very much in motion—winds—but the sentence does end.
Sir Philip Sidney Is There
The first esteemed English critical work about poetry is Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, published in 1595, nine years after Sidney’s death. There is a very good sentence in which Sidney refers to the fables of Aesop. In Aesop’s Fables we have animals very wise. Some are even in business. Here is Sidney’s sentence about those fables (he has just said that a poet is a philosopher for the people and teaches them):
Whereof Aesop’s tales give good proof; whose pretty allegories, stealing under the formal tales of beasts, make many, more beastly than beasts, begin to hear the sound of virtue from those dumb speakers.
It is very taking to see the animals, nearly all of them, speak so wisely, and some of them so thoughtfully. This has been felt—because Aesop’s tales are still classic. Why should a fable be necessary? Why does something sound more effective said by a hedgehog than said by a professor? But in Sidney’s sentence we have rhythm.
He says that through the tales’ “pretty allegories”—and allegories have to do with sameness and difference—people “begin to hear the sound of virtue from those dumb speakers.” There is the kind of wisdom which is prudent, but also the kind of wisdom which is ethical, in the Aesop stories.
Later, Sidney says that various persons who are against poetry claim that poets lie. A lie, in the real sense of the word, is the saying of something not true in order to have contempt for the person who believes it, and in order to have a bad motive succeed. Once you tell something that is “untrue” for a good motive, in the deepest sense it is true. That is what happens through the imagination that makes for art.
For example, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is made up of the most absurd lies: a man, living with his daughter for many years, gets tired of being a magician, and he wants his daughter to meet life; he arranges to have his relatives come to the island so he can punish them, and a storm behaves in the right way, and brings those bad relatives. You just never heard of anything more absurd—you don’t have to believe a word of it. But in the meantime, you feel it’s somewhere true.
In combating the accusation that a poet lies, Sidney says that other people lie, including physicians. This sentence has a history in it, and is a little bit like a range of hills:
How often, think you, do the physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses which afterwards send Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion before they come to his ferry?
Charon, in Greek mythology, was the person who rowed the souls of those who had died over into the other land.
We have the first part of the sentence: “How often, think you, do the physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses—” They say, This is good for sickness. Then, the second part is very surprising: “which afterwards send Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion—” This “drowned in a potion” puts together the liquid of the medicine and the liquid of the water for the ferry: “—before they come to his ferry?” There is a cadence there.