By Edward Green

   
One of the greatest humanitarian and intellectual achievements of all time was the discovery by Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, that contempt causes insanity; in fact, that it causes all mental trouble. He defined contempt as the “disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.” Contempt, he said, was man’s greatest temptation, and his greatest failure. And in the course of many lectures on mental health, using the history and literature of the world, Mr. Siegel explained that no person has ever gone insane who hadn’t first over many years—in quiet, everyday ways—hurt his mind by accumulating unjust contempt for the world and other people. 

1. A Story from Senegal Tells of Insanity

I have been very much affected, reading modern African literature as well as folktales from around the continent, to see how often, and sometimes how courageously, African literature has looked at the subject of insanity. One of the most powerful instances of this is the story “Sarzan” by Birago Diop. Written in French, it was included in his 1947 collection Contes d’Amadou Koumba . The English translation I will be quoting from is by Ellen Conroy Kennedy, and is included in Charles Larson’s anthology Under African Skies (Noonday Press, New York 1997). “One definition of insanity,” wrote Eli Siegel in the “Preface” to Self and World (Definition Press, New York 1981), is the leaving by an individual of the outside world as a means of safeguarding and asserting his separate individuality.” That is what we see in Diop’s story. Thiemokho Keita, the son of a village chief, is returning to his people after serving fifteen years in the French army. He returns—but not with love in his heart, or a desire to respect the men and women he grew up among. Instead he sees himself now as separate from and vastly superior to them: they are savages; he alone is “civilized.” 

There is, of course, nothing wrong in seeing the wide world outside of one’s village—and of bringing new knowledge to people. In fact, both can be means of liking the world—which Aesthetic Realism says is a person’s deepest desire, and the cause of all true happiness and mental health. 

What is wrong, and ever-so-hurtful, however, is to do what Keita does—to use this new knowledge to have disdain for other people. Mr. Siegel writes of this as well in his “Preface”— 

The existence, in everyone, as a daily possibility, of the pleasure of contempt, is the great opponent to the pleasure of knowing the world and, perhaps, liking it because one knows it….It is this fight, as yet unsettled, which causes nervousness in man; and if it goes on exceptionally ill, insanity….Contempt is not interested in knowledge as knowledge, only in knowledge making ego the one thing.

And one doesn’t have to be a sergeant returning home from foreign lands to do this; a husband, having read something in the newspaper which his wife doesn’t yet know about, can tell her about it over dinner for the purpose of making her feel ignorant; pleasurably “confirming” in his mind his superiority to her. Surprisingly, Diop’s story begins not with his main character, but with an incident from the early history of Senegal. Centuries earlier a conqueror, El Hadj Omar, had swept across the land, imposing his will on the people. When they objected, he “decapitated those who would not submit.” What remained of this brutal conquest? Only ruins. Writes Diop: 

It was hard to distinguish the piles of ruins from the termite mounds, and only an ostrich shell, cracked and yellowed by the weather, still indicted at the tip of a tall column what once had been the mirab of the mosque El Hadj Omar’s warriors had built.

Since no further reference is made to Omar throughout the story, I think the author’s purpose is symbolic. He is saying: a person may fool himself into thinking he can have his way with the world and deal with people any way he wants, but reality is stronger than ego. A force, equivalent to life itself will win out. “The sacred woods,” writes Diop, “…burned by the fanatic Talibes have long since grown tall again.” 

These sacred trees—so proud and tall—stand, I believe, for the organic and inextinguishable desire to like the world: to see it as honestly friendly, good, and beautiful. Those trees cannot be kept from rising towards their friend, the sun. Omar wanted his mosque to tower over the world, and glorify him; but the Earth said, No! The trees have the victory. 

2. Contempt Declares War on the World

Whenever a person has contempt, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, he has—in a deep sense—declared war on the world. A contemptuous person doesn’t want to see the value of any person besides himself; nor does he think it is possible to give other people the justice they deserve and take care of himself at the same time. He turns life into a vicious battlefield in which only one side can prevail—and that side, he hopes, is his ego. 

We learn from the author that Keita left his village, Dougouba, to join the army of France. And this, too, is symbolic—for the French colonial army had as its purpose imposing its will on people world-wide: from Africa to Vietnam. Keita has allied himself to the wrong side—to something “foreign” to his true self. 

And one can ask: as this young African patrolled the land of Lebanon, earning his stripes as a sergeant or “sarzan,” and likely using force to intimidate the people there, what happened to his mind? Did it grow stronger in respect for humanity, or hardened in contempt? 

I believe it was contempt. Early in the story Keita is given a ride back to Dougouba by the narrator, who is a veterinarian. (The author, Birago Diop himself, interestingly was also a veterinarian.) The road ends at a distance from the village, and they have to walk the remainder. Keita tells the narrator: “When you come back this way again, you’ll go all the way to Dougouba by car. Tomorrow I’m going to get started on a road.” When the narrator returns a year later, there is a road. But when Keita approaches him, the veterinarian sees the sergeant has gone mad. How did it happen? It seems that Keita used his high position in the village—being son of the chief—to force his will on the people. On the very day he arrived, the author tells us: 

Sergeant Keita..wanted to keep his father from sacrificing a white chicken to thank the ancestors for having brought him home safe and sound….”Leave the dead be,” he had said. “They can no longer do anything for the living.”

And he proceeds to cut down and burn “the branches of Dassiri, the sacred tree, protector of the village”—the very thing, centuries before which the troops of Omar had done. 

Keita, surely, had a right to see religion differently from his father. But the way he both scorns his father’s desire to express gratitude to the ancestors and burns that sacred tree—with such obvious disdain for the emotion the whole village has about it—shows that his sergeant hates the very idea of gratitude. 

Honest and accurate gratitude, I’ve learned from Aesthetic Realism, is a sign of mental health. It means we are proud to see where the world has been our friend—proud to show that other people have made us stronger, more ourselves. And since the ancestors stand for a person’s relation to the world—a relation going back far into the past, farther than anyone knows—it is clear that Keita has declared war on reality itself in showing such contempt for his ancestors. 

And doing so, he has injured his mind.  

  3. Madness Can Take This Form

Contempt, Mr. Siegel has explained, is the “temptation of man…to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself.” It is interesting that Diop presents Keita as the son of a chief. It could be asked—and this I think is part of the subtlety of Diop’s story: did Sergeant Keita feel—simply by being born into “royalty”—that he was better than other people? And did he carry that feeling of superiority with him as he played with other village children, and later as he served in the French colonial army overseas? 

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that once a person feels he has a right to be superior—and gets pleasure from that feeling, he will, unconciously, want that pleasure to extend. And once we associate our own “glory” with being superior to other people, we are in danger of hurting not only ourselves, but the people we know—even the people we think we are closest to. 

That is what happens with Sergeant Keita. Telling himself he is “educating” his village, he takes actions which trample on their feelings. For example: without even speaking to his father, he takes the sculpture which embodies the Keita family’s spirit, the “Nyanaboli,” and throws it to the village dogs. 

It is a high-handed and brazen act. We feel Keita’s contempt has crossed a certain line; that his arrogance has taken on a new intensity. Later that evening, Sergeant Keita goes out of his mind. This is how Diop presents it: Keita is leaning against a tree, inveighing against everyone in his village—young and old—when suddenly:

he felt something like a prick on his left side. He turned his head. When he looked at his listeners again, his eyes were no longer the same. A white, foamy spittle appeared at the corners of his mouth.

The spirits, the author says, have taken his mind. Keita howls night and day; and when the narrator meets him, months later, he hears Keita crying out “in a hoarse voice” this chant:

Listen to things 
More often than beings 
Hear the voice of fire 
Hear the voice of water 
Listen in the wind to the sighs of the bush 
This is the ancestors breathing.

In Aesthetic Realism lectures Eli Siegel gave about the philosophy of mind, he explained: the self is always critical of itself. That ability—to be honestly self-critical—is the true glory and distinction of humanity; no other living being on Earth possesses it. A person is healthy-minded, and smart about his life, when he is proud of that fact. If we try to evade our self-criticism, we are giving up our humanity, and weakening our minds, perhaps disastrously. 

And one result of wanting to run away from ourselves—from our own ethical and critical opinion of who we are, and how justly we are meeting the world outside ourselves—is that we can give ourselves frightening obsessions, such as Keita has, as he, in his insane state, hears the ancestors breathing around him.

4. What Does the World Deserve From Us?

In Self and World , Mr. Siegel writes:

Obsessions are symbolical punishments that we give ourselves because we feel that what the obsessions symbolize has been neglected by us.

In Keita’s chant it is clear he is punishing himself with a fierce insistence for not wanting to listen respectfully to other people: for wanting, instead, to impose himself on them. Keita was not interested in giving the world and other people what they deserved. Instead, he was wanted to control them. But now, in his insanity, he is no longer able to control his own mind.

As I read this part of Diop’s story, it moved me very much, and made for large gratitude. Like Sergeant Keita, and like many people, I once did not listen to other people deeply—family or friends. And the reason, I learned in Aesthetic Realism consultations, was that I had come to the contemptuous conclusion that I had nothing important to learn from them—in fact, that they existed to learn things from me!

As a means of encouraging me to take better care of my life, my consultants suggested that I take part in three conversations that week, each at least a half-hour long, in which I was to say nothing and simply listen, with as much respect as I could, to what other people were saying. 

Just hearing this kind suggestion, my life began to change and become better and more integrated. Here I was, a young musician, hoping to become a good composer, but I hated listening! The contradiction was not healthy for me—either as man, or as a musician. And when I did what my consultants encouraged, I enjoyed myself deeply.

Instead of conversations being battlefields—which I too much had made them into all my life; battlefields in which I tried to have victories over other people by showing them I was smarter than they—I began to see vividly how much I had lessened myself by robbing myself of what I could learn from other people.

“Any time we have a chance to like something and don’t take it, we ourselves miss something,” Eli Siegel writes in the “Preface” to Self and World (Definition Press, New York l989). And he continues:

further, if we like something a bit, but can like it more, we miss something also. So, wherever there has been a possibility of our liking something, and we did not implement this possibility, a loss for us has taken place….The existence, in everyone, as a daily possibility, of the pleasure of contempt, is the great opponent to the pleasure of knowing the world and, perhaps, liking it because one knows it.

5. This is What Contempt Does to Mind

Contempt, Mr. Siegel showed, begins with a person feeling as he lessens other things, he makes himself more important. As Keita’s chant continues, we see he is punishing himself for this: for having made the people who lived before him—the ancestors—into nothing. There is a beauty in his ferocious self-criticism as he forces himself to acknowledge there is more life in the world than he earlier had wanted to see, and that the meaning in people which he wanted to put aside, cannot be put aside: 

Those who are dead are not ever gone 
They are in the darkness that grows lighter 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  
They are in the trembling of the trees 
In the moaning of the woods 
In the water that runs 
In the water that sleeps 
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd. 
The dead are not dead. 
Listen to things

As Birago Diop’s story ends, we hear one more song—one that accents terror. “All night,” the narrator says, “I had heard Sergeant Keita coming and going, howling, weeping, and singing:

Trumpeting elephants hoot 
In the darkening wood 
Above the cursed drums, 
Black night, black night! 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  
Fear lurks in the hut 
In the smoking torch 
In the orphaned river 
In the weary, soulless forest 
In the anxious, faded trees 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  
Black night, black night!

Keita has paid a terrible price for his contemptuous victories over people. Trapped now in his own crazed mind, the world has become for him a tormenting prison of darkness and fear.

“A large purpose of Aesthetic Realism,” Eli Siegel writes in the “Preface” to Self and World , “is to have a person make up his mind as to the value for him of contempt and respect.” And he continues: “Only through aesthetics as the oneness of opposites can he do this.” Mr. Diop’s story—while not as great as some things in world literature dealing with insanity—does have, in my careful opinion, true aesthetics. Like an tragedy from ancient Greece, it terrifies us, and uplifts us. 

“Contempt,” Eli Siegel so magnificently explained, “is the great failure of man.” And what is man’s great success? It is the state of mind from which art arises: the powerful hope to like the world, and see meaning and beauty in it. That state of mind—healthy, honest, free, life-giving—is what the study of Aesthetic Realism can make for. That study is the future happiness of mankind.