Happiness—& What Makes a Person Unkind
Dear Unknown Friends:
On November 18, 1946, at Steinway Hall, Eli Siegel gave his lecture The Purpose of Aesthetic Realism. We are honored to publish it here, from notes taken at the time. He is, as he says, speaking principally about the purpose of that “phase of Aesthetic Realism which is individual lessons.” Meanwhile, there is Aesthetic Realism in its philosophic and cultural entirety, about which he writes in Self and World:
Aesthetic Realism is personally useful; it is all for personal development; but it is always a seeing of the whole world, and a hope not to miss anything which tells us what the world is. Aesthetic Realism, then, is unabashed philosophy, as it presents the moment as friendly to a person; as perhaps wider, deeper, more of oneself than was thought. [P. 20]
In the 1946 lecture, Mr. Siegel is explaining something that no other philosopher, and certainly no psychologist, has understood: the way of seeing in everyone which makes the person unhappy, nervous, and also unkind. This way of seeing is contempt, and he describes it in the following statement: “Something in everyone can’t see itself being happy or important except through...lessening what is not oneself.”
To comment on that statement and on some of the ways people now, as in other years, damage their lives through contempt, I’ll look at lines from a poem of 1798.
The Fundamental Crime
William Wordsworth’s Peter Bell is a long narrative poem, and its protagonist is an itinerant seller of earthenware goods. Wordsworth says that Peter Bell, age 32, travelled throughout England and saw ocean, hills, skies, and more, yet was not much moved by any of it. For example:
He roved among the vales and streams,
In the green wood and hollow dell;
They were his dwellings night and day,—
But Nature ne’er could find the way
Into the heart of Peter Bell.
In vain, through every changeful year,
Did Nature lead him as before;
A primrose by a river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
Those last three lines are famous, and Wordsworth is describing what to him was a horrible crime: You don’t want to see the wonder and meaning a primrose has?!!! It’s hideous to meet all this and keep yourself immune!
Wordsworth is right. Fundamental to contempt is the robbing things of their value. People every day feel life is empty, dull, flat. But they don’t see that they have wanted to be unaffected by things. They have wanted things not to mean much to them—because the minute we see meaning, value, wonder in anything, we can’t feel superior to it. We may not be as thorough in our flattening, dulling, and imperviousness as Peter Bell is—we may occasionally be stirred by a sunset or think some landscape is beautiful—but there are thousands of objects and happenings and certainly people, the value of which and whom we’ve made ourselves dead to. Contempt in everyone sees treasuring oneself as in competition with being affected by what’s not oneself. And so, people everywhere are too much like Peter Bell: through a notion of self-importance, they make themselves dull and hard.
Wordsworth says of Peter, “There was a hardness in his eye.” Also, he had an “air / Of cunning.” Cunning, or craftiness, is frequent in people, because if you see the world as an enemy (and most persons do), you feel you have to trick and outsmart it. Our present economic system, the profit system, is based on this manipulating; and despite attempts to present economic slyness as impressive, everyone deeply resents and is ashamed of it.
What’s wrong with Peter Bell’s and anyone’s cunning is the contempt and ill will in it. And so much of people’s thought is, really, cunning: how can I manipulate this person to do what I want him to do? How can I arrange it so I get my way? As soon as we’re more interested in having our way than in seeing and honoring what’s true, we’re in the cunning field. Meanwhile, that kind of thought—however popular, however seemingly necessary—makes us ashamed, because our largest purpose is to see the world justly, care for it honestly.
Ethics & an Animal
The poem tells about Peter’s mistreatment of a donkey, or ass; then about Peter’s changing—to a large degree because of the animal’s ethical beauty, its kindness and fidelity.
Peter, traveling about Yorkshire, sees “a solitary Ass,” immobile, looking into a river. He wants to seize and take away the ass in order to work him. Peter leaps on the donkey, kicks at him fiercely, pulls at his halter with terrific force. But the ass won’t move—because his master has drowned and the animal has been standing faithfully for days looking into the water where the man’s body lies. Peter is furious, and says, “There is some plot against me laid.”
There is a huge proclivity in people to feel, as Peter does, that the world is against them. Unless we see the world as something to know, feel, value, we’ll see it as something from which to wrest what we want; and if we don’t get our way, we’ll give the world the purpose we ourselves have: we’ll feel it wants to defeat us as we want to defeat it.
Why People Are Cruel
Peter Bell beats the ass viciously. The animal drops to the ground but will not leave his place.
Wordsworth wants us to feel there is a relation between Peter’s not being moved by a sky or primrose, and his cruelty. He is right. If we don’t like reality, we’ll want to punish representatives of the disliked world—to have a victory over it by making someone feel bad. And people go for that victory. It may take the everyday form of humiliating someone through sarcasm, or calling a person a demeaning name.
Wordsworth wanted to show in Peter Bell that kindness is real, and is stronger than unfeelingness and cruelty. He has the ass represent that kindness. For instance, when Peter, unable to conquer the animal, finally tries to see what is affecting him and looks into the river where his master lies, the donkey is so grateful to Peter that “The little Ass his neck extends / And fondly licks his hands.”
Much happens. Peter comes to have more feeling. And toward the end of the poem he speaks this way to the donkey:
“When shall I be as good as thou?
Oh! would, poor beast, that I had now
A heart but half as good as thine!”
Various persons, early and later, made fun—wrongly, I believe—of some aspects of Peter Bell. It is a true poem, sincere and musical. Peter Bell is a portrait of dislike of the world. And what it means to like the world, honestly, logically, critically, is the study of Aesthetic Realism.