Dear Unknown Friends:

We begin to serialize here The Renaissance Shows Self, a 1970 lecture by Eli Siegel. With all that America is in the midst of right now, there is this—which is historic and beautiful: a growing insistence that every person be seen as having a self that is as real and full as anyone else’s. In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel uses English Renaissance poems to speak about the self that is everyone’s. And as introduction, I’ll say some things about the way Aesthetic Realism sees the self, a way that is different from other approaches and is great and true.

We need Aesthetic Realism’s explanation of the self in order to know our own selves, be ourselves, be true to ourselves. We also need it in order for people to see other people with real justice. As I speak about Eli Siegel’s historic understanding of the self, I’ll quote some passages from his writing on the subject, passages beautiful as prose and comprehension. And I’m sure that in the course of this serialization, I’ll quote others.

The Constant Situation

In the very title of Eli Siegel’s book Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism, is to be found the big, constant situation of every self. We each have to do centrally with nothing less than the world, the whole world. He wrote:

We all of us start with a here, ever so snug and ever so immediate. And this here is surrounded strangely, endlessly, by a there. We are always meeting this there: in other words, we are always meeting what is not ourselves, and we have to do something about it. We have to be ourselves, and give to this great and diversified there, which is not ourselves, what it deserves. [Self and World, p. 91]

There is nothing in the world, Mr. Siegel showed, that is disconnected from the self of each of us. We are the results of history, of evolution; the atomic structure, present in all things of matter, is intimate to us—we could not be without it. The language we use to speak with, and think privately to ourselves with, was created over centuries by millions of people we never met. If we hear a thing mentioned, even something we never heard of before, it’s now in our mind in some fashion—and our mind always had the possibility of containing it. In chapter 9 of Self and World, “The Child,” Mr. Siegel writes:

The first purpose of a self is to be. It therefore has to be asked: What does it mean for a self to be?…A baby at birth is pushing towards freedom and inclusiveness of perception. By this I mean that a baby wants to feel that it is; and at the same time, wants to feel all that is besides its own life. [P. 238]

Our learning about this is the beginning of justice not only to our own selves but to all people. A person of any background or skin tone is a self, richly individual yet born into and having to do with everything. When you see a person this way you cannot be brutal to him or her.

Further: everyone’s particular self is connected to anything that exists, or will exist, or did exist, because we have reality’s opposites. That fact is told of in a principle of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” In Aesthetic Realism: Three Instances, Mr. Siegel writes:

Every thing, let alone every person, says something about us, explains ourselves. The structure of what thing cannot illuminate our own structure? Does not a sheet of paper in its wideness and narrowness bring some essential likeness to us, to ourselves? Is not a twig, on or off a branch, in its simplicity and complexity, continuity and discontinuity, an abstract and tangible presentation of what we are?…A card is flexible and firm. We are flexible and firm, and we mean to do a better job as to the relation of these two adjectives.

That is so of our own self—and the self of a person we’ve seen as very different from us.

The Central Fight in the Self

Eli Siegel is the person who identified and described the big continuous fight in self—in all of us. It is the fight between respect for the world and contempt. We want to see, meet, know the world, with its things and people, truly; make them of us, with accuracy and feeling. That is respect. But our contempt says to us, sneeringly, sometimes purringly, soothingly: “You’re superior, too good for all that. You don’t have to know people and things—just look down on them, and use some of them to glorify yourself.” Meanwhile, the fundamental purpose of self is to value that world which Mr. Siegel described as “the other half of ourselves.” This is the purpose we were born for. And therefore our having contempt instead, always weakens us and makes us ashamed.

There Is Pride

The study of Aesthetic Realism has brought to people a feeling, new in history, of a certain deep pride in the human self, including the self that is one’s own. There is pride in seeing that one’s self is so large, related to all things and the world in its fullness.

There is also a pride in seeing that one’s self has, inevitably and always, an imperative to be just—and that this is why one dislikes oneself, feels agitated, low, uncomfortable under one’s own skin: because in having contempt one has gone against an inner ethical principle as vital as the circulation of one’s blood.

A third cause of historic new pride in one’s human self is the learning from Aesthetic Realism that the self is an aesthetic situation: our great need, ever so personal and ever so large, is to be like art. It is not what the various psychologists and therapists (including Freud) described. Rather, the need of our puzzled and hoping self is to do what all art does: put opposites together. For instance, Mr. Siegel writes this about the poetry of Walt Whitman and our opposites of pride and humility, assertion and yielding, self and world:

Take Whitman’s Song of Myself. Whitman yields himself to what he sees; to earth, to people; and he is proud doing so….In Whitman’s Song of Myself, a man becomes exultant through modesty, modest through exultation. The intense, wide, great fact sweeps Whitman truly; he yields and he has a feeling of deep independence and pride. [Self and World, p. 97]

That the self is an aesthetic situation, needing to do what art does, is, I believe, the greatest praise of the self. That art is a guide to how we want to be, is the never-before-seen thorough practicality of art. And it is Aesthetic Realism which explains this living relation of self and art.

The lecture we are serializing has Eli Siegel’s simultaneous depth and vividness, exactitude and ease, scholarship and feeling. He is the person who understood the self, including myself, and I love him for it with all my heart.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Renaissance Shows Self

By Eli Siegel

For the purpose of today’s discussion, I am giving this definition of self: “Self is anything that feels the world and knows it, or that sees the world and knows it.” As soon as that occurs, whatever the time, we have something almost like physics: There’s a self. There’s a world. The self sees the world. And then the self looks at itself and asks, What is it that I saw?

This is the main thing in self, and everything in civilization is only a diversification of it. Aristotle and a person today who never heard of him have that in common. It is the most important thing, because the self is an object that has an opinion about the world as object. It has it; if it doesn’t have it, then it’s not a self. The reason there’s a difference between a self and a pool of water is that a pool has a reflection of the outside world but it doesn’t have a diary. That is, it simply reflects the outside world, and does it quite well. A self, though, has an opinion. A person who says, “Crummy world,” is a self.

So selves persist, and at every time and place in history they are different, because the world is different. The purpose of history is to keep up with the change of the world and the change in what the self sees, which means the change in self—because if the self sees another kind of world, the self has to be different. The self is different reading an 18th–century book from how it is at the time it’s eating sponge cake. The self meeting a relative is different from the self asking someone in, say, Taiwan, if there’s any vehicle one might use. The self has to change in keeping with what it’s concerned with. To keep up with the changes of self and to see how something about self goes on, is part of culture. It is also part of what I can call insurance—because as soon as we see how different the self can be and how, through it all, something persists, we get surer of ourselves.

The self has been around. One of the things that documents do is show that it has been around. No one can deny that Thomas à Becket had a self, with all the penance that he had. And no one can deny Henry II had a self, with all his penance for having not stopped the murder (as T.S. Eliot tells us) of Thomas à Becket. Selves can be seen at any time. You look in Persia, and they’re there. In medieval times, they’re there. You don’t have to have a name that other people know, to be a self.

Self Was Present Then

The time in history with the most cheerful name is the Renaissance. Right now, if you’re an intransigent scholar, you say there was no Renaissance—that one century just changes into another. But the feeling persists that there was a Renaissance, a rebirth. I’m sure that the whole medieval period would have been insulted: What do we have to get reborn for? We were born. We don’t need a Renaissance—what do you think we’ve been doing all this time? And it was shown that the Middle Ages did have Gothic cathedrals. And quite a few other things happened: there was the Chanson de Roland; even the Roman de la Rose was in medieval times, late medieval. Still, there was a Renaissance.

For this talk, The Renaissance Shows Self, a book I’m going to use is English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson, edited by John Williams. It is important to see how selves were different in different times, and use the difference to feel that the world wants to be seen. A person can ask, What have I been seeing all this while, maybe not so well?—but one thing you can’t miss is the world: it’s just there.

In keeping with this book, English Renaissance Poetry, the Renaissance was in England. It was different in various countries. It was different in Spain. Italy had three of them in three centuries: Trecento, Quattrocento, Cinquecento—it had the Renaissance through the century, and another century came around and Italy had another Renaissance. The English Renaissance is difficult in terms of time: when did it begin? The French Renaissance is difficult there too. The German Renaissance is so mixed up with Luther that historians don’t know whether to say Reformation or Renaissance. But the German Renaissance has Grünewald, and certainly there are others. Something did occur.

The Renaissance is in poetry. It’s in painting. There’s much to say about how it is in music. There’s a new feeling about architecture. Sculpture is different. The subtitle of this talk is Self, Self, Self—and the way self is shown in the Renaissance is something. Poetry was quite busy. One can say things about poetry in France and in Germany. But again, the book I’m using is about poetry in England.

He Looked at the World & Himself

A person of the later English Renaissance is Sir Philip Sidney. In the book’s introduction, the editor, trying to distinguish the styles of poetry, gets to one of the best poems of the 16th century. It is definitely musical, but it is a way of seeing self. With great seriousness—gravity in fact, solemnity, a touch of rhythmic dolor—Sidney compares himself to the moon in a way that has lived.

I’m reading some poems to show what the self can be, because every time a metaphor about self occurs in poetry, or something of the kind is in fiction, or in painting even, the self is added to. All the symbols of self say what it can be. And art does have symbols. I don’t want to be portentous, but things do stand for things. A symbol, for example, is in the idea of General Jackson standing like a stone wall. That has lived: Jackson has become a stone wall. The name his mother gave him was taken away from him and he is Stonewall Jackson: there’s a symbol. (People would like to be a stone wall. Instead, they feel too much, often, like coffee grounds.)

This poem of Sidney, if studied technically, would still be the self being studied, because everything in the technique of all the arts says something about self; but, as I said, I’m accenting self, self, self. The poem is lovely. You’re hearing some of the best music in the 16th century:

The poem doesn’t end as strongly as it should. But we have the first line: “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climbst the skies!” That does convey a person tired, and not too hopeful, and not knowing what he’s doing. Astronomers know what the moon is up to, but the poor thing doesn’t know itself. It just seems to be dignified and sad and rather aimless. It isn’t free, because gravity is a tyrant. And every now and then it undergoes the tremendous indignity of being eclipsed. Sidney identifies himself with the moon. That can be, but it has to be done sincerely. It happens that the self can identify itself with about anything. But it cannot be done in a tricky fashion: you have to feel it.

Everything can 1) be identified with self; 2) be seen as saying something about oneself. And from these two things it follows, as Aesthetic Realism sees it, that everything can be a useful critic of oneself. You can be a critic of yourself by seeing a bit of a saucer that’s been broken, or the whole saucer, or lemon juice in a saucer, or oil in a saucer.

“How silently, and with how wan a face!” The way the moon has looked, its complexion, has been observed. Also, how slim it is or how rotund. The Indians felt a full moon meant a great deal. The quarter moon also had a meaning.

“What, may it be that even in heavenly place / That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?” Here Sidney supposes that Cupid (who made people love by shooting an arrow at them) may have affected the moon. From a strict Gilbertian or Baconian point of view—that is, from the point of view of the science of the time, let alone the science of later—it is hard to think that Cupid’s aiming an arrow at the moon would do any harm. But this is part of a metaphor: once the moon is like Sidney, then Cupid might also hurt the moon.

Sidney says to the moon: “Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes / Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case.” The “long-with-love-acquainted eyes” are those of Sidney.

And he says the moon looks wan enough to be in love: “I read it in thy looks: thy languished grace, / To me that feel the like, thy state descries.” (The word descries apparently is used for describes.)

There’s a certain personality given to the moon too—because once you begin adding to your personality, you can begin adding to the personalities of other things. And you become anthropomorphic in behalf of art.

All That the Self Can Be

I’m not commenting on every line, and the final line isn’t as clear as it might be. But we can gather from this poem that the self has the moon in it. In the Bible, a person who is proud is described as like the sun coming from its chambers, from the East. And Wordsworth, in his sonnet “London, 1802,” says about the poet Milton, “Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart.” Milton is compared to a star.

So the Renaissance had the self equivalent to the moon, which is important and has a meaning now. The self can be learned about through all the things it can be, and that implies knowing what humanity has been like.