In the 1968 lecture It and Self, which we are serializing, Eli Siegel shows something that persons of thought have long hoped to understand: the relation between art and science. What he shows — so central to culture — is also central to the immediate worries of people now.

     The relation of art and science is to be found in this Aesthetic Realism principle: "Self, the arts, the sciences explain each other: they are the oneness of permanent opposites." The opposites Mr. Siegel speaks of in the present lecture are Self and an It — the object with which the self is dealing. He shows, mightily and also with playfulness, this fact: in both true art and true science, a person is oneself, takes care of oneself, through trying to be just to what’s not self.

     All the unkindness in human history has come from a rift between those opposites — from a feeling which is mainly unarticulated yet which people have hour after hour: the feeling, "I don’t have to see truly this thing or person not me! I’m me and therefore more real and important than what’s not me. I can think about anything or anyone however I please, and that includes changing the facts to suit myself." Such a way of seeing is contempt. Mr. Siegel defined contempt as "the addition to self through the lessening of something else" and showed it is the most dangerous thing in humanity, though infinitely common. 

     This contempt was in the persons who arranged the horrible attack on the United States and turned thousands of men and women who never hurt them into corpses, fragments, dust. The evil of that attack was enormous. Yet, as I have been saying in recent weeks, there is other contempt in this world too: Millions of persons — who are not terrorists — resent the contempt they feel our nation has had for them. They see us as having made for years of suffering and death. Unless we want to understand their objections, and want to be in such a way that they cannot legitimately have them, they will not be our allies against terrorists. They will feel a country that hurt them is being punished (though they may not approve of the mode of punishment).

     There are many, many people whom most Americans haven’t thought about. They are, for instance, in Karachi, Amman, Riyadh, also such places as Nairobi and Lima. And now, unless these people care for us instead of loathing us, terrorists will meet with sympathy and even admiration.

Here is how much of the world sees us: ... They feel attacked economically and culturally .... They measure our 6,000 dead against their millions who die destitute or sick .... Poverty and a lack of meaningful choices create millions of sympathizers and supporters for the few [terrorist] murderers.

     Now the millions of misused, rooked, seemingly impotent people have a certain power. They have the power to worry persons living in American cities. Their power was brought home to us in a horrible form on September 11. We have to want their power to take a beautiful form, good for all humanity.

     Before 1775, the well-heeled of Britain did not think that Massachusetts farmers were worth considering; they didn’t think the persons who worked the earth of New England were at all formidable. Then in April 1775, as Emerson writes, those "farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world." And in 1789 the French aristocracy were surprised to find that ever so many people they hadn’t thought about, not only had a huge objection but had power. I am not saying the attack on the US was like the American and French Revolutions. Those revolutions, with all their pain, were in behalf of people, in behalf of justice, and the September 11 horror certainly was not. What I am saying is: people who have been pushed around, exploited, subjugated, deeply robbed, are now seen as having a certain power. This is a new world-happening.

     Again: we have to be for their power and want it to be beautiful, or it will take forms that are awful. To want their power to be beautiful is for America to say — and act accordingly: "This earth should belong equally to everyone — to an obscenely paid worker in Saudi Arabia as well as to a sheik, to a Palestinian as well as to an Israeli Jew, to a child sewing garments in Central America as well as to the stockholder who now enriches himself from her labor."

     People want to live in dignity, and that includes financial dignity. This is no longer just an aching hope, but an insistence. The insistence will either be made use of hideously by terrorists — or it will be respected, honored, by the US and others.

     So many men in the Muslim world who have felt humiliated and robbed, find in fundamentalist Islam a means to feel important at last: they are close to God, closer than other people are, for they are the faithful, the ones who matter; they have turned the tables and are superior to those who lessened them, for those persons are the infidel, to be crushed to the ground. The importance this approach to divinity and earth provides is a false importance. It is the importance of contempt. It is related to other contemptuous ways of making oneself important. It is related to the feeling of a Jewish "settler" on the West Bank that he is closer to God than a Palestinian; that God has somehow given him land which Palestinians have been living on; and that if these lesser persons don’t behave the way he wants them to, his government should bomb them or bulldoze their homes.

     Meanwhile, the swift self-esteem and chance for retaliation which Islamic militancy provides, has a terrific appeal. Unless we want to honor the true importance of millions of people, an awful, contempt importance will have its allure.

     And whatever one may think of socialism in its various varieties, it is simply a fact that the CIA’s successful weakening of it in many places has given strength to terrorists. Many, many people who would have looked to the Left to have their lives better, who would have gone after dignity and economic justice through having their nation owned by all the people, do not now see that option as so feasible. Instead, they look to fundamentalist Islam and a jihad. Did our government try to undo in various nations an economic way different from ours because that way was really bad for the people, or because it was not conducive to big profits for rich Americans?

     In the 1970s, Eli Siegel said that the following is the most important question for America: "What does a person deserve by being a person?" With his tremendous honesty, scholarship, knowledge, he showed that this question is not only urgent but beautiful. This question is now a power, for we won’t be safe until we ask and answer it truly. If we love its beauty and want to see that people everywhere in the world are as real as we are and deserve what we deserve, America herself will be not only happy but more beautiful than she has ever been.
 

Note. Mr. Siegel is discussing a passage from Walter Pater’s 1888 essay "Style."

Pater has said that a historian may begin with an "absolutely truthful intention," and then "amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs select."

     There hasn’t been a time in conceivable reality or conceivable history when there haven’t been facts. And that’s a comfort if you care to look at it, because no matter what else is happening, there are some facts around. Consequently, an artist works with something called facts, a scientist works with something called facts, and neither of them says he or she is going to lie. What is that which is in common between true art and true science? The facts are in luck in both instances. That can be a kind of answer to the question.

     It happens that in art and in science the facts are both things you have to go out for and things that will come your way. For example, no one has to go out in order to study what feeling not so good is. It’s likely the laboratory will be the self. But to find out what somebody in southwest Australia whose forebears didn’t come from England does when he feels bad — that you have to go out to see. And in studying history you have to go the British Museum, to county archives in southern Illinois, to a monastery in Wisconsin, in order to get facts.

     Then, some facts you can’t get away from. You can’t get away from the feeling that there’s something around which just isn’t you. It’s awfully humiliating, but that’s one fact that insists. What kind of fact that is, is something else.

     So facts sometimes insist on being around. Some facts just are like puppies: they’ll hang around your feet; they won’t go away. Others are exceedingly elusive.

     However, there are data and facts in both art and science — and there’s a self working. Darwin had a self and Rimbaud had a self. Pater says the historian

amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something that comes not of the world without but of a vision within.

     We find that if a scientist describes a flower, unless he has a formula in advance which he has to copy, there will just be a difference between the way one scientist describes it and the way another scientist describes it. — And while botany is very precise, botany has made, as with Keats, but also with a prose writer like Richard Jefferies, for some pretty powered, subtly-powered and high-powered, writing.

     Then, we have such a thing as the history of botany. It seems that very few Romans and Greeks were interested in botany. It’s a great shame, and we should give up the classics for that reason. In the Greek Anthology some flowers are mentioned, but we don’t have botanists as later we have. A person who studied flowers very carefully was the Swede Linnaeus, and there have been others.

     In the meantime, whatever I’m talking about now, one can see that there is self and something which can be called, with a capital I three feet high, It, It. The It changes, but there is always an It.

     " ... must needs select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour." As to selecting: there are some scientists who write reports and the editorial office of the scientific journal simply has to cut them down and change some of the expressions, because these scientists are verbose, don’t know what’s important. They sometimes take the stem to be more important than the petal, or the petal to be more important than the stem, and that’s shameful. Scientists have not had a sense of proportion. As soon as you have a sense of proportion, which is supposed to be a scientific thing, you also can be in the field of art, because to select among reality can intensify reality.