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NUMBER 1518.—May 8, 2002 | Aesthetic Realism was founded by Eli Siegel in 1941 |
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Dear Unknown Friends: We continue to serialize Selves Are in Economics, the important, rich, sometimes humorous lecture Eli Siegel gave December 18, 1970. Much of the section published here has to do with education. And so does the article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Arnold Perey which we also print. It is from a paper he presented in March at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled "Good and Bad Ambition: What’s the Difference?" Both economics and education are human matters. And so both are fields for that fight which, Mr. Siegel explained, is the huge battle within every person. The fight is this: Is reality to be known by us, understood, valued, cared for; or is it to be conquered, manipulated, used to glorify ourselves while lessening other things and persons? "The large fight...," Mr. Siegel wrote, "in every mind...is the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality" (TRO 151). Contempt has its economic forms and also its forms in the educational field. Just as a person can see the material world, with its goods and wealth, as something he should have in a way that makes him superior to others—so we can look on knowledge and learning acquisitively, snobbishly, exploitively too. I’ll comment a little on the fight about using knowledge in behalf of contempt or respect. It is raging in the colleges of America, and elsewhere. I love Mr. Siegel for explaining it. There is nothing that means more to me personally, nothing larger in my life, than his enabling me to use education in behalf of a care for reality and people instead of narrowness and conceit. There Is Hal StearnsIn "Psychiatry, Economics, Aesthetics," chapter 10 of Self and World, a person Mr. Siegel writes about is the college teacher to whom he gives the name Hal Stearns. I quote some sentences about this man of academia, because in them the fight about education is described clearly, and in prose that is great: Hal Stearns teaches in a California college. He is a graduate of Columbia and received his Ph.D. there. At college he was competitive; could not abide the idea of anyone receiving higher scholastic grades or honors. Nonetheless, he felt a decided impulsion towards learning. He has given severe nights to the study of Anglo-Saxon and is a rising authority on the literature between Chaucer and Spenser. He wrote his PhD thesis on Social Problems in Tudor Poetry....Hal Stearns’ personality harbors competitiveness of all sorts; still it is in the employ of a desire for documented learning. ... He once wrote a review in a learned journal of a book on John Skelton—a review which swarmed with precise, learned arrows....There was an adroit and most vigilant setting forth of the reviewed author’s insufficiencies and missteps, and an astute obscuring of his qualities. Stearns is learned, but he sees learned people ... as adversaries. The charming and wide and subtle field of learning is for him a battlefield of egos. [P. 291] What Mr. Siegel describes here, thousands of people are suffering from and don’t understand. They may have many degrees, but they do not see that their wanting to be impressive, to get prestige, to beat out another, comes from something in them completely different from their desire to know, to look accurately at a subject. And they have the pain which Mr. Siegel later describes in Hal Stearns. Agitation, irritability, jealousy, wrath, and a feeling of emptiness, even as one is surrounded by cultural riches: these abound in the intellectual milieus of America, as they do in other milieus. To want to own a scholarly field, to see an aspect of culture as your monopoly or that of your set, to dislike the idea (in fact, not even conceive the idea) of many, many others excelling in the field and of humanity as such caring for your subject: this way of mind is quite prevalent; and it is like something prevalent and contemptuous in economics. It is like the basis of the profit system: that the world should be owned not by all, but by a favored few. The seeing of knowledge in terms of acquisition, competition, and private ownership is a chief reason so many persons have less and less feeling for their chosen subjects as time goes by. The Desire to Be LikedConnected with the desire to beat out others, there is the desire to use the field of learning to be liked by "the right people," those in high positions academically or culturally, to be in the swim. Your subject can be the most beautiful in the world—it can be Shakespeare, American history, the atom—if your purpose is to be liked, to be part of the lodge, you won’t be sincere. You’ll never get to or express what you truly feel about it. You’ll also be dull. And here I quote, with a gratitude equivalent to my very self, from an Aesthetic Realism lesson. I had begun work on my master’s thesis, on the Victorian critic and economist Walter Bagehot. And I was writing in the customary remote, thick academic manner, with adroit touches, I felt, of urbanity. I brought some of what I wrote to the lesson, and after reading it, Mr. Siegel said to me: "If you’re after an M. I’m quite sure you’re going to get it, because people are very much impressed with you. So as a person after a degree you have nothing to worry about. But I am thinking about your whole life. You are writing an acceptable thesis, but I don’t think you’re saying that which is in your heart." He explained that if people want to be snobbish and go after approval "they have to have the great disadvantage of not saying what is in their hearts. So you take your choice—which do you want?" Because of Mr. Siegel’s beautiful integrity, and his enormous kindness in fighting for mine, I did write a thesis that was sincere, and could feel the graduate degree it earned me was based on what I really saw, on my saying what was in my heart. Eli Siegel is the educator who showed that the purpose of education is to like the world through knowing it. That is the basis of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, which was described last week by New York public school teachers in a seminar with the title—so accurate and important—"The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Succeeds: Anger Changes to Respect for Knowledge and People!" The fact that education is for liking the world, is in opposition to another aspect of contempt among the learned: narrow specialization. Mr. Siegel was tremendously critical of such specialization. He was critical of it, I am thankful to say, in me. Certainly, we can want to give our thought more richly to some matters than others. But a way of conquering and despising the world is to say, "This subject I will make mine: I will own it, be glorious through it. Other things, I don’t have to see as mattering. And I certainly don’t have to be interested in people, because I am in a superior realm." That is a wonderful way to make one’s mind dry, dead, and mean, even as plaudits may come one’s way. No person loved knowledge more than Mr. Siegel did. I believe he was, in the true sense, the best educated person who ever lived. He wrote in his poem "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana": "The world is waiting to be known; Earth, what it has in it!" He literally wanted to know the world. His knowledge was wide, inclusive, and also deep, subtle, thorough. It was warm, alive. And it was always in behalf of people. —Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education |
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Self Is with Education
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Good and Bad Ambition
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1. The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis. 2. The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it .... Contempt can be defined as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it. 3. All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves. |
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PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS
First Thursday of each month, 6:30 PM: Seminars with speakers from Aesthetic Realism faculty
Editor: Ellen Reiss Coordinators: Nancy Huntting, Meryl Simon, Steven Weiner Subscriptions: 26 issues, US $18; 12 issues, US $9, Canada and Mexico $14, elsewhere $20. Make check or money order payable to Aesthetic Realism Foundation.
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