Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the wonderful 1970 lecture by Eli Siegel titled The Renaissance Shows Self.

There is the self that is, for each of us, our very own, with our own thoughts and stirrings and confusions and private hopes: the self we feel as just me. What’s the relation of that self to the selves of all times and places—including those expressed in poems more than four centuries ago? In his lecture Mr. Siegel speaks of some of those poems, using the book English Renaissance Poetry, edited by John Williams.

As we serialize this lecture—with its vividness, erudition, and style—I have been relating it to Aesthetic Realism’s great explanation of the self as such. And I’m grateful to say again: Eli Siegel is the philosopher who understood the self, in its individuality and its inclusiveness, its grandeur and its lowness.

In the portion of the lecture published here, the second poem has to do with an enormous aspect of self. It’s something that the psychologists still don’t understand, but that Aesthetic Realism explains magnificently. This enormous matter is: why can a self be against itself? Why do people—selves—dislike themselves, their own selves? Why can they be disgusted with that self which is theirs, condemn themselves, be ashamed of themselves? After all, our self is ours: one would think we would always be in favor of it.

In recent decades, the chief advice given to persons who present themselves as self-disesteeming comes down pretty much to this: You should accept yourself. You should see yourself as worthy and special. And what you need is for others to be supportive of you.

In keeping with that prevailing view, people these years have barraged one another with a certain “supportiveness.” Hugs have been given in abundance. Millions of telephone conversations and visits (virtual and otherwise) between friends, family members, colleagues, end with the affirmation “I love you” or just “Love you!” Those words are now nearly as standard a closing phrase as “Goodbye” or “See you later.” And yet—self-unease, self-disesteem, low self-regard, agitation, unsureness, go on.

The reason is: even honest assurances of affection, while kind, do not get to the source of one’s self-objection, a source that won’t be altered by a friend’s verbal or tangible embrace. Certainly, one can be unsure of oneself because one has been misseen or mistreated, and that fact is real and important. But the biggest source of people’s self-againstness is something else.

What We Need to Learn

To understand why a self can disapprove of itself, we need to learn what the self is, what its large purpose is, and what in the self—in our self—is against the very purpose of our lives. In 1941, when Aesthetic Realism began, the Freudian view in all its inaccuracy reigned supreme. With exactitude and courage, Eli Siegel explained that the human self is something very different from what Freud and others were presenting. The self is an aesthetic situation: in everything we do, our need is to make a one of opposites, and centrally the opposites of self and world. He wrote:

The basis of the Aesthetic Realism method is that every human being is a self whose fundamental and constant purpose is to be at one with reality. It is impossible for that self to evade this purpose, although he can curtail it, obscure it, limit it….The chief or ultimate purpose of every human being is to like himself or herself and at the same time like the reality that exists along with himself or herself. [Self and World, pp. 51-52]

Mr. Siegel explained that self-dislike, which was then largely called guilt, comes from the following truly magnificent and inexpungible fact:

There is such a thing as the ethical unconscious…. When we are unfair to the world, it can be shown that something in us which is the world itself, doesn’t like it. [Pp. 55, 45]

That last, beautiful sentence is as great a tribute to the human self as was ever given. The sentence is true, and immensely, scientifically hopeful. Further, Mr. Siegel described where the self’s unfairness to the world begins. It begins with the desire for contempt: the desire “to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” From this contempt arises everything ugly and cruel in human thought and activity. Our self-objection, our dislike of ourselves, is an objection by us to our own contempt in its various forms. Because we don’t want to be clear about the objection so as to have it become accurate self-criticism, or because we’re unable to be clear, our objection to ourselves can take an inaccurate, sloppy form.

“Faking Away”

I ’m going to quote now a poem by Eli Siegel that has humor and is satiric of something in self. It’s about a form of contempt—a quiet, everyday form. Meanwhile, the way of mind described in the poem is a huge reason why people dislike themselves. The poem is “A Woeful Ballad on Faking Away.” It’s about insincerity.

People think that in order to take care of themselves they need to do the “faking away” described in the poem. And they feel they’re oh-so-clever as they engage in it. It is, in fact, a way of life persons have taken on: they put forth to others something different from what they feel or know inside; and they feel quietly triumphant doing so. The poem appears in Eli Siegel’s collection Hail, American Development. I’ll quote some sentences from the author’s note, then the poem itself:

Falsity beckons successfully to nearly everyone and is always beckoning in some manner….We like to have a secret interpretation along with the one we give audibly….Strategy thrives on our being able to be dual, to be part of a double narrative, or, if one wishes, have a double narrative part of us….

As poem, this is beautiful. It has in its sound a oneness of thrust and nonchalance. Those opposites are used hurtfully in the state of mind told of: to be insincere is to be horribly nonchalant about truth and to thrust forward one’s dishonest version. But the same opposites, thrust and nonchalance, are at one, are musical, in the poetic lines telling of that way of mind. And at the end, the nonchalance takes on a poignancy.

So we are looking at why people don’t like themselves. It is because they have contempt: make less, in various ways, of the world, other people, truth. And we’re looking at an everyday form of contempt: insincerity. Insincerity is a form of lying. This is a time in America when lying has been taking place on a massive scale. We should certainly be against it in its massiveness. But to be fully against it, we need to be against lying where it begins, in ordinary “faking away.”

What We Need to Learn

There is nothing everyone needs more to learn than how to be a good critic of him- or herself. Otherwise, as I said, our dislike of something in us will be present messily—also dangerously. In the 1940s, Mr. Siegel described a way of self that makes for cruelty in both personal and national life. He explained: when we dislike ourselves but don’t welcome the idea of questioning ourselves, of thinking about where we may have been unjust—we’ll want to blame others for our feeling bad. We will want to get angry. The anger we’ll come to and stoke in ourselves is not an authentic anger. There is such a thing, Mr. Siegel wrote, as

an honest, accurate…anger. When we have anger which comes from an awareness of ugliness, injustice, this anger we are proud of….[However,] there is a kind [of anger] which, in ordinary life, takes form often as hectic peevishness, a smug sulkiness, an ugly outburst, a covert sarcasm, and sometimes a sudden or brutal violence: this kind of anger…is a changing of displeasure with oneself, or guilt, into displeasure with what is not oneself. [Self and World, pp. 56-57]

This transforming of discomfort with self, displeasure with self, disapproval of self, into a boiling, self-righteous, aggressive sense of phony grievance is very much in America now. It has, of course, been encouraged by politicians, and by persons in the media, social and otherwise.

A fake, cooked-up angry grievance can mingle with a true grievance. For example, because of our unjust profit-based economy, millions of Americans are truly worried about money and rightly angry at having to be. However, a real concern about money can coexist with a terrific desire to evade one’s objections to oneself.

A chief cause of self-dislike in everyone is a contemptuous way of seeing other people. We all have a tendency to see others as less real, less important, than we are. We are not interested sufficiently in seeing the feelings of our fellow humans—and sometimes the non-interest is stupendous and brutal.

Well, when people are deeply displeased with themselves and don’t want to question why, and want to continue the way of seeing that makes them dislike themselves, they can be susceptible to various ugly lures. This is a central reason why millions of people have found certain conspiracy theories, certain bald-faced lies, attractive. For a while, you feel you have expunged your self-doubt and see yourself as on a noble campaign. Yet the self-doubt keeps coming back. So you have to have more anger; make the anger more active; nourish even more the feeling that you’re superior to various people—people seeming different from yourself. And still the self-dislike goes on; indeed, it intensifies—because the human self is ethically made.

The Self, Looking Out

There is another poem by Eli Siegel that I will quote. It is about the aesthetic situation of every self. In “Looking for Something, Finger in Mouth,” Mr. Siegel describes that aesthetic situation in terms of a child of long ago.

The title shows what the self is. The self is “finger in mouth”: it affirms its own individuality, wants to feel what it is. Yet the self is always in relation to the large world, and is “looking for something” from that world. It is looking for meaning. It is looking to feel that the world outside it is a friend. It is looking to like itself through knowing a world other than itself. The music of this poem is wide and tender. I am guessing the poem was written around 1926.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Fulke Greville Was a Self

By Eli Siegel

In the next poem we have a motif that is large in English poetry and all poetry: that you don’t understand and are not understood in this world, you toss about in this world; but there is Something that understands. This is philosophic and also religious. It’s one of the continual modes of poetry and literature. The idea is in the Psalms. It is somewhat a theme of Greek tragedy. And every land has poems of this kind.

The poem is by a friend of Sir Philip Sidney: Fulke Greville (1554-1628), a poet who has risen in esteem. He wrote for himself a famous epitaph: “Fulke Greville, Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Counselor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney.” And Greville has this poem saying, along with St. Paul, that understanding is elsewhere, that philosophy will not get the answer: God is the only one good at large enigmas; he is the great puzzle-solver. Greville’s “Man, Dream No More” is poetic. This is the first stanza:

The war between religion and science, as science is now seen, didn’t have much of a chance to be then. It began in a conspicuous way with Galileo. But in the England of Greville’s time, a man of God, a bishop or pastor, could look askance at a person giving himself to the study of Greek—except for the purpose of translating the New Testament—or to a work of erudition, because it was felt that there was a greater kind of knowledge. There was likewise a feeling that the Book of Revelation was knowledge of a mightier sort than finding out what Horace meant. So there was an objection.

The disagreement can be called between the God-seekers and the verb-seekers, or the erudite—the inflection-and-declension-seekers, the conjugation-seekers. A phrase that has taken on meaning is religio grammatici, the religion of the learned person, who studies words. And there is the phrase that Thomas Browne used as the title of his book Religio Medici—religion of the man of medicine. Fulke Greville was quite learned, but then he felt there is knowledge that only God could have.

“Man, dream no more of curious mysteries, / As what was here before the world was made.” To be interested in that was seen as profane: Don’t you have the Old Testament and New Testament? What are you worried about?

“The first man’s life, the state of Paradise, / Where heaven is or hell’s eternal shade.” Some decades later, in John Donne’s time, such questioning was seen as a kind of love. You could be Dean of St. Paul’s and ask any question, nearly, you wanted to.

There Are Style & Self-Questioning

Elizabethan poetry, and Tudor poetry somewhat, can be divided in quite a few ways. But one way—and this is true of prose also—is the plain and the aureate. The word aureate is a word used at the time for style that has become very rich. The person in Elizabethan poetry whose style perhaps is richest is George Chapman. His translation of Homer makes Homer look as if he were one of the subtlest beings who ever lived. Fulke Greville also writes in the aureate style. He likes long words.

In the poem “Down in the Depth of Mine Iniquity,” Greville says that his self has an “ugly center of infernal spirits.” This poem begins:

“That ugly center of infernal spirits”: people have felt that things of a bad kind come over them. And it is a current feeling. We don’t know what makes us do things, and we can ask, What the devil did I do that for? In a sober manner, Greville says there is iniquity in the depth of himself, and this iniquity is the “ugly center of infernal spirits.”

“Where each sin feels her own deformity.” So the sins are distinct. The Middle Ages came to a few discoveries, and one is the Seven Deadly Sins. The sins can be seen separately.

“Even there appears this saving God of mine.” The opposites meet: in this “ugly center of infernal spirits” God is to be found too.

The third stanza has these lines:

It seems that sin is desolate here because of the “truth, almighty and eternal” and “power…, almighty and eternal” that reach it. “With glory scourging all the spirits infernal.” That is something—“the spirits infernal” are scourged by glory. So “Even there appears this saving God of mine.”

The Self Is Being Shown

Anything the self is busy with shows the self. If the self is busy with farming, farming shows the self. If it’s busy with family life, family life shows the self. If it’s busy with learning, that does. And if it’s busy with religion, religion shows the self.