Here is part 9 of the great 1973 lecture Educational Method Is Poetic, by Eli Siegel. He is the educator who has explained what the purpose of education is: "to like the world through knowing it." Because this purpose has not been consciously seen and pursued, and because the way to achieve it has not been known, and because the opposition to it in the human self has not been understood — education these centuries has not enabled people to like the world in the deepest sense. It has not stopped people from being cruel. That is why the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism is necessary for education to fulfill its purpose. In this issue I comment on the fact that for cruelty to end, humanity needs to learn from Aesthetic Realism about contempt.

     A means to see this is a document that came my way recently. It concerns a tremendous form of human cruelty: slavery. But first I quote the principle in which Mr. Siegel describes contempt — that thing in self which he identified as the source of all injustice: "The greatest danger or temptation of man," Mr. Siegel wrote, "is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt."

     The document I refer to was printed in an 1861 newspaper. Someone of then cut it out, and the clipping was placed inside a book and saved there. Then several days ago, in my neighborhood where many homes are over 150 years old, someone threw out that book along with others. My friend Timothy Lynch found them, and so I read recently, on yellowed and crumbling newsprint, the "Address to the People of Maryland" by Governor Thomas H. Hicks, January 3, 1861. (The name of the newspaper does not appear on the part of the page I have, but the place of publication does: Frederick, Maryland — the city Whittier would write of two years later in his poem "Barbara Frietchie.")

     What Mr. Hicks' Address tells of is why he kept Maryland from seceding from the Union. After the election of Abraham Lincoln, 7 Southern states proclaimed themselves no longer of this nation; and then various Maryland state senators asked the governor to convene a special session of the legislature at which they could vote to secede too. Hicks refused. In the Address he gives his reasons. A Maryland on the side of the South would, he says, because of its proximity to the Capital, "inevitably become the chosen battle ground ... in the event of civil war." There would be, he writes, "loss of life,... ruinous depreciation of property"; and he continues:

As a border Slaveholding State she would especially suffer in the utter destruction of a cherished domestic institution with which all our sympathies are firmly united.

The fact that most people have felt ... they had the right to see other people and other objects in a way that seemed to go with comfort — this fact is the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world. It is contempt in its first universal, hideous form. [P. 3]

As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don't want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person. [P. 55]

     The robbing a person of his fulness and the seeing him "in a way that seem[s] to go with comfort" are together. A woman, for instance, can see a man very much in terms of comfort — what nice things he will do for her, how important he will make her. She is not interested in who the man deeply is, what he feels about things other than her; she is interested in whether he honors her sufficiently. She can decorate this selfish interest and call it love, just as a Southern governor could call slavery a "cherished institution."

     The owning of human beings definitely "seemed to go with comfort." It was profitable. And it enabled a Southern lady to be served as she wanted to be. Similarly, the wife of a New England factory owner liked the fact that children worked in that factory, because she could buy such pretty things with the profits from their labor. 

     As Governor Hicks' Address goes on, he assures Marylanders of his love for slavery:

I am a slaveholder, not by accident, but by purchase, out of the hard earnings of a long life of toil .... I have never lived and should be sorry to be obliged to live, in a State where slavery does not exist, and I never will do so if I can avoid it.

     There has been a desire on the part of Southerners and others to say that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about states' rights. That is bunk, and this document by Governor Hicks makes clear that it is bunk. I have had the honor to write before about how passionate Mr. Siegel was on this subject. He said that the much romanticized "lost cause" of the South was slavery, period — and that the only good thing about it was that it was lost! The Hicks Address makes clear — as other documents of the time do — that the "states' right" in question was the right to own a person and do whatever one wanted with him, including beat him and kill him. But to understand how slavery could be seen as a "right," we have to understand contempt, including in ourselves.

     Governor Hicks complains that his enemies slandered him by putting out a rumor "that I had invited the slaves to a public dinner, on Christmas day." He also complains of the people in the "Cotton States," who want to drag Maryland into a war; and of course he complains about the "fanatical demagogues" of the North. Every person who has contempt (that means every person) is very ready to see himself as hurt but not ready to see where he may be hurting another. So a man who bragged of purchasing human beings shows how wounded he is.

     The two good things about contempt are: 1) we can never like ourselves for it — our contempt, Aesthetic Realism shows, is the reason we are nervous, lonely, depressed, deeply unsure; and 2) when we see contempt clearly, we don't want to have it. Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that enables people at last to see contempt clearly!

     That great principle, which is the means for successful education, is also the means for victorious kindness. When we see that a person has the structure of the world itself in him or her — a structure that we also share — we cannot have unjust contempt for that person. Eli Siegel, through what he taught and how he himself was all the time, showed that respect for people and reality is the strongest, most imaginative, most intelligent, most pleasurable, most exciting, most beautiful thing in the world.

One of the best writers on education - he has a lecture on education — is Jacques Delille. He is looked on as the chief of the French academic poets of the 18th century. He translated Virgil and Milton, and was very much interested in showing the world to be a composition favorable to man. Delille and Fontanes are the two representatives of non-romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

     The French Revolution wanted to change education, and it didn't wholly do so. It made the same mistake, I must say, that China and Russia made. They didn't say: "The purpose of education is to like the world and know what you mean by the word like." Everyone is invited to be critical of that statement.

     So I read from John Maunde's translation of Delille's Les Jardins (the gardens). This section has the heading "The Enjoyments of the Educated," and in the English translation the lines are poetic:
 

     The idea of a deep contemplation, a pleasant contemplation, is present in Delille. He talks of nature, and praises the naturalist Buffon, who attempted to make some sense out of the world as broken and the world as continuous. Something of that relation is in the following lines:
 

     But there is the big thing: that the purpose of education is, while seeing the worst in the world and not fooling oneself, as honestly as possible so to organize the world that — at least through seeing it might be organized, as in art — one can like it. The big thing, then, about education is to see how much knowledge and organization of the world, the oneness of the fact and the feeling about the fact, can make for a world which deeply we don't see as a mistake in relation to us.