Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

“The Two Kinds of Cleverness” describes the difference between true and false cleverness in social life, in economics, and in literature. You’ll see why this subject is important—is, in fact, urgent—in the thrilling, surprising new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. 

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We have come to section 4 of Eli Siegel’s wonderful 1949 lecture Poetry and Cleverness. Offhand, cleverness does not seem one of humanity’s biggest concerns. Yet how our very lives go depends on how we see cleverness, on how we’re affected by it, on how we try to be clever.

Cleverness is immensely diverse. And in this lecture Mr. Siegel describes what allcleverness has in common, from the kind that’s ridiculous, to the charming, to the kind much present in politics. Cleverness is always a dealing with the opposites of ease and difficulty.“Somebody who is clever,” he explains,

seems to be doing something that people would think hard, with ease….If anybody in a tight spot can tell such stories that he gets out of the tight spot, he’s clever….The word has come to be most often on the shady side….[But] whenever you can do that which most people would look on as difficult, or as hardly to be done at all, with some ease, you’re clever.

Since cleverness may be that of a cruel deceiver but also that of a brave firefighter who discerns a way to extricate someone from a blazing building, we need to know the difference between bad cleverness and good. Aesthetic Realism is the first body of knowledge to make the distinction clear. The nature of the cleverness depends on the two desires that, Eli Siegel has shown, are fighting in everyone: the desire to respect the world versus the desire to have contempt for it.

From the desire to respect comes all truly useful, beautiful, kind cleverness. From contempt comes the cleverness that’s hurtful, ugly, truly dumb, though it may temporarily seem oh so bright. In fact there’s a feeling in people that contempt as such—the getting an “addition to self through the lessening of something else”—is cleverness: that it’s the cleverness one needs to protect oneself and prosper in the world. Yet this “clever” thing, contempt, in its various forms, is the reason the person having it feels empty, anxious, dull, painfully unsure, hiddenly self-despising.

Humanity Has Invented

I’ll comment a little on a field through which we can see the fight in people between the two kinds of cleverness. It is the field of inventions. Every invention that has succeeded has done what Mr. Siegel described cleverness as doing: it has brought an ease to what was difficult or even seemed impossible. That is true of inventions from the wheel to electric illumination, to plumbing, the automobile, musical instruments, the vacuum cleaner, glass windows, the internet, life-saving drugs, machines for production. Every successful invention has been deeply clever. And it has come from a respect for reality, an honoring of reality, and from that form of respect which is good will: the desire to strengthen other people, have them be in a better relation to the world.

Then, so often through the years, the new invention has been met with that other cleverness, the cleverness of contempt, in the form of: “Hmm! People want this thing. They feel they need this thing, or what it can give them. I bet there’s a lot of money to be made from people because of this thing. If I can get in on the producing of it, or the selling of it, I’ll squeeze as much money as I can out of people.” This is the profit motive: the seeing of objects and human beings in terms of how much money one can wrest from them, how much one can aggrandize oneself through them. The profit motive has seemed tremendously clever to people….Read more