Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
How can we understand the relation of good and evil, what can be respected and what can’t—in ourselves and in other people? You will be thrilled to read great and exciting answers, including a magnificent comprehension of children, in “The Grandeur of Knowing—versus Contempt,” the newest issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.
The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:
Dear Unknown Friends:
In this issue we begin a three-part publication of a great lecture by Eli Siegel on a tremendous subject. It is his talk of January 19, 1953, When Does Evil Begin?—the ninth in a series of lectures he gave in relation to Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw. From that series arose Mr. Siegel’s 1968 book James and the Children.
The Turn of the Screw has puzzled people very much. What was driving or affecting the two angelic-seeming children, Miles and Flora? Most critics have described them as ever so innocent, and the governess as bad. And for a long time there was the view that the mysterious evil taking place was of a sexual nature. Eli Siegel—in some of the most vivid, logical, subtle, thrilling of all literary criticism—made clear that the governess, who is also the narrator, is good, one of James’s very likable characters; that the story is definitely not about sex; and that Miles and Flora are impelled by that which Aesthetic Realism identifies as the impetus behind all injustice and evil: contempt. Contempt is “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Reviewing James and the Children in Poetry magazine, Hugh Kenner wrote that it is “a reading so careful…and so candid it reduces most previous discussion to wilful evasiveness.”
Our Central Fight—at Any Age
The hideous Freudian approach to children is, fortunately, not much around anymore: children are no longer presented as having “polymorphous perversity.” Yet children have always confused adults, and been confused by them, because people don’t understand people. And today there is as much mix-up about children as ever. On the one hand, the trend is for children to be presented by the various “professionals” as not having badness or injustice in their own right—that is, any badness doesn’t arise from the child himself or herself. The implication is that if children act badly or are mean, it’s either because they’ve been emotionally abused in some fashion or because there’s something amiss with their DNA. On the other hand, there is now in America an intense concern about overt, widespread bullying, the fact that children can be brutal; many therapists are chary about explaining that through DNA and emotional abuse, but they won’t say plainly that they don’t understand the cause.
To understand any person—from oneself to a US senator to a co-worker to a child of five—we need to study what Aesthetic Realism explains:
The greatest fight man is concerned with, is the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality that has taken place in all minds of the past and is taking place now…. [It is] the beginning and most important fight in every mind. [TRO 151]
People of any age are not aware of this drama between contempt and respect—whether to look down on, despise, and manipulate people and things, or to want to know, understand, see meaning in the world. But the drama is going on in us all the time, and the choices we make about it are who we are and what kind of ethics we have.
Take, for example, another Henry James child, whom Mr. Siegel spoke about as a prelude to discussing the children in The Turn of the Screw: Maisie in What Maisie Knew. She is surrounded by adults who are selfish and whom she cannot respect. Yet, explained Mr. Siegel, “She doesn’t use it to hope to have contempt for everything.” With rich, new comprehension of that novel, he discussed many passages from What Maisie Knew… Read more