It is my careful opinion that Aesthetic Realism is the most needed education because it consciously asks the question of our seminar tonight: what do we encourage in ourselves and others, strength or weakness? And it shows that all the arts and sciences--including inventions and discoveries that have brought new strength to humanity--and all the courageous acts throughout history have arisen from the desire in a person to have good will, which philosopher Eli Siegel described in the journal The Right Of Aesthetic Realism to Be Know (TRO) as:
The desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful. (TRO 121)
Aesthetic
Realism explains, too, the opposition in every person to having a strengthening
effect; it is the desire for contempt.
“Contempt” wrote Eli Siegel, “is usually put forth as being strong. The question is, is it weak? … The ability to make somebody else weak, which is seen as strength, is one of the greatest corruptions of our civilization." (TRO 797)
Learning this has changed my life--as I'll tell now.
Two Different Notions of Strength & Weakness
As a young person, the times I felt strong were in school. I remember when, in my native Puerto Rico, we learned about the solar system. I was excited to see there were principles, a logic, in how all the planets follow different but predictable orbits around the sun. And when my friend Peter and I worked on a model together, we had a great time. I also liked to volunteer for classroom chores. But, as it was to happen often in my life, I turned what was a source of strength into conceit. When my teachers praised me for my work and how responsible I was for my age, I used it to feel “I’m wonderful”. At the same time, I felt they didn't know my thoughts, that I was fooling all these people making a lot of me, and I had scorn for them.
Eli Siegel describes what I was doing when he said: “As soon as you accept praise carelessly or for the wrong thing, weakness is beginning. Praise accepted for the wrong reason is the victory of contempt." (TRO 797)
Increasingly I went after this kind of praise. I also liked feeling needed when my friends came to me with their problems. I even imagined situations where people would be in trouble and I’d be a hero coming to their rescue--somebody's weakness became the source of my “strength”. Meanwhile, I also had a desire honestly to be useful to people, to have their health and their bodies stronger, and in my early twenties, I decided to study to become a podiatrist. But two things continued to fight in me: I wanted to be kind, but I also wanted importance, prestige, and wealth. Years later, in an Aesthetic Realism consultation I was asked:
Are you alive in order to like things and find your strength in that, or to have power for yourself by being made much of while you have contempt? As long as you feel your strength depends on being able to be superior, your life will be halted, even if you make lots of money and have everybody dancing, you will not like yourself and you'll feel like a fake.
I also began to understand something that occurred when I was in my teens. Every Friday night I would watch “Viaje a las estrellas”, a show you know as “Star Trek.” While all my friends wanted to be Captain Kirk, I admired Spock. Kirk was brash and energetic, but to me Spock was the strong one. He had the power of logic, remaining calm, even stoic, under tough circumstances, often saving Kirk from seemingly impossible situations. But what I saw as strength in Spock was accompanied by a deep kind of weakness. With all his ability, he couldn’t have emotions, he couldn't be moved, excited, or in love. Said Mr. Siegel in his lecture Poetry and Strength,
Accurate sensitivity is power. The ability to be affected by true power is power. That is the thing that people have to realize-–that to be unaffected by true power is weakness.
Had I not met Aesthetic Realism my ability to be affected by reality would have been stunted, and my life would have been essentially dull and lonely--a catalog of unfulfilled possibilities. On the outside, I tried to look affable and steady as a rock, but inside I felt like a two-faced fraud. Thanks to this kind knowledge and its understanding, the way I saw strength and weakness changed. I now have emotions that strengthen my heart and mind. I love a woman passionately--my wife, Donita Ellison. I have friends who make me stronger and whose lives I want to make stronger, and I feel truly useful to the persons I treat as a podiatrist. They are not only "patients," they are whole persons.
Strength, Weakness, and Medicine
Every
summer thousands of medical students in their graduation ceremony will recite,
as I did in 1983, the Hippocratic
Oath, which has as its motto: "Above All, Do No Harm." These are some of the sentences:
I swear I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery...I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being...Above all, I must not play at being God.
When I took this oath, I felt proud and hoped that when a patient left my office he or she would be better off. In these years, I’ve seen courage in doctors, true warmth and interest, but also selfishness and coldness; it’s in the feeling “I, in my wisdom, know what's best for you; I am superior to you. This illness you have is too complicated for you to understand. I do not have anything of importance to learn from you.” This attitude is utter contempt; it weakens doctors themselves and is dangerous to the people they swore to strengthen.
The two things that have most hurt medical care in this country are 1) that our system is based on contemptuously making profits from the illnesses of people, and 2) that Aesthetic Realism is not standard in the curriculum of every health professional and medical school. Future doctors, nurses, therapists, want to be useful, but they need to be educated about ethics, about the fight between respect and contempt in themselves, and how to see the people they will treat.
This is what I gratefully began to learn
two years after I received my degree when I met and began to study Aesthetic
Realism in consultations. I was working in one of the poorest areas in New York
City where I thought I could really be useful, but I also felt, I regret to
say, “I’m too good to be here.” I
dreamed of being on Park Avenue with more money and a more elegant
clientele. Meanwhile, I felt agitated
and distant. In an early consultation I was asked:
Consultants: Do you think you are more alike or different
from your patients?
Jaime Torres: Oh, different.
Consultants: That's very dangerous because as soon as you see yourself as different, the ego wants to feel superior; and from that many of the horrors of the world have occurred.
As I wrote assignments suggested to me -- for example, 10 ways I was the same and different from my patients--I began to see them from within, including seeing some of what they had endured, and I felt a new respect and care that was strengthening to both them and me.
An occupational hazard for doctors and nurses is to patronize, particularly chronically ill people, and to feel sorry for them in a superficial way. I saw this in myself and others, working in a long-term care hospital where many patients are bedridden or in wheelchairs. Once, after several conversations with a young man paralyzed from the neck down because of a swimming pool accident, I had a deep sense of sadness and pity, but I was puzzled because I also felt ashamed. I was fortunate to be able to ask about this in consultations and I began to learn that the customary notion of pity is different from good will. I was asked:
Consultants: Do you think pity may interfere with having a good effect?
Jaime Torres: I don’t know.
Consultants: Who becomes the center?
This
question surprised me, but I saw immediately that I was more involved with what
I felt having pity, than thinking of how to improve this man’s situation. They
continued:
Consultants: Is it an honest feeling if there isn’t a
desire to have a person stronger and the knowledge to do so? —both things are
absolutely necessary. Do you think any one of these patients is a relation of
strength and weakness?...Let's take this man you mentioned--do you think he has
thoughts that have strength in them? Is there anything he can see through his
experience that another person may not?
Jaime Torres: Yes.
I
began to see that in pity you see of weakness in the
person and not the possibility of strength.
Consultants: Do you think the large difference between sympathy and the usual notion of pity is the desire to see how the world is in a person; with the hope to respect the world and the person more, even if it is a difficult situation?
To see how the world is in a person, I learned, is by seeing how the structure of the world, the opposites, are in that person, including weakness and strength. I was seeing how contempt has a person see other people as not fully real, and a doctor must see people as real because their lives and bodies are entrusted to him or her.
As a podiatrist working in a New York City hospital for the past 25 years I have seen that the Aesthetic Realism study of the opposites and of contempt is absolutely necessary for physicians, and should be required. I have also seen that how medical practitioners, including nurses and technicians, see strength and weakness in their patients and themselves has been a field of much patronizing, coldness, and tragedy.
Can We Like Ourselves If We Don't Encourage Strength?
A book that comments on the question of our seminar is A Taste of My Own Medicine by Dr. Edward Rosenbaum, which was the basis of the 1991 film “The Doctor” starring William Hurt. The book is valuable in showing the fight in a man between wanting to be useful and wanting to have prestige, to be in a superior position.
For many years, Dr. Rosenbaum was a well-established
rheumatologist in Oregon. Meanwhile, it
seems he felt--as many physicians do--that having feeling for persons in his
care would interfere with his efficiency and strength as a doctor. Early in the book, he writes of his thoughts,
asking himself:
If I develop empathy, will my decisions be rational? Will I myself be overwhelmed by my more personal involvement? ...Seeing 20 or 30 patients a day [physicians] have learned not to get too involved.
Doctors have spoken this way for many years, but it's not honest. In fact, it’s really a justification of coldness and superiority. I don't think Dr. Rosenbaum was worried about his decisions being "rational" if he "developed empathy," but that if he thought more about what another person felt, he wouldn't be able to be on top, the strong one.
I was very much affected to see Eli Siegel give the refutation to this kind of thinking when he said in his lecture on strength:
A person wants to say, “Oh, I’m sensitive; therefore I’m not strong.” One might as well say that if an eye sees a lot it isn’t a strong eye, or if an ear hears a lot it isn’t a strong ear. The question is, what is the purpose of a human being? Is it to feel? And if sensitivity is allied to feeling--and certainly to feel is to be strong--then to be sensitive is to be strong.
I think these sentences are beautiful. Aesthetic Realism taught me that I needed to put together my scientific knowledge with accurate feeling--as much feeling as I could have--about the people I treat.
Meanwhile, the book is useful in showing a doctor's ordinary contempt for the men and women in his care, referring to one, for example, as “a senile old woman,” and of a man who is hospitalized, “the crock in room 411.” We need to ask: as we trivialize, are scornful of other human beings and what they endure, are we encouraging strength in ourselves, or weakness?
Dr. Rosenbaum tells how in 1985 he developed hoarseness in his voice. At first, he tries to ignore it, telling himself, "I'm a doctor, nothing can happen to me." As the condition persists, he visits a colleague who quickly tells him it's a cold. When it doesn't improve he seeks a second opinion and is told it is psychological, and that therapy would help. Had these doctors been more interested in what Rosenbaum felt, would he have been more efficient, and not misdiagnosed? Rosenbaum writes, “Too often doctors use a diagnosis to hide their failings… they give you medicines when they don’t know what else to do.” When a third doctor finds a growth under his vocal cords, Rosenbaum is hospitalized for a surgical biopsy. And he writes:
There was a vast difference between being a patient and being a doctor. To a patient his illness is a major crisis; to the doctor it's all a routine event...We forget that it's always a personal experience for the patient. I had been in similar rooms thousands of times, but in a different position. Then I was in command, neatly dressed, standing, looking down at a helpless patient in bed. Now I was that patient, literally stripped of my dignity. I was no longer in charge. I was being treated like a baby.
In a class Mr. Siegel spoke--and every doctor needs to know this--that as soon as one person is standing and another person is lying down, there's a great danger of having contempt.
From his hospital bed, Rosenbaum begins to see how patronizing and superior he had been with his patients, and the bad effect it had on them. He writes regretfully,
If I could go back [in time], I would do things very differently. All I can do [now] is tell what happened to me and hope that [others] can learn.
The biopsy is positive for cancer, and a specialist explains that the cause is from smoking and drinking. But when Dr. Rosenbaum tells him that he doesn’t smoke or drink, the specialist says nothing and arrogantly leaves the room. “A typical doctor” Rosenbaum thought, “it’s impossible for him to say, ‘I don’t know.’” I have learned that an important test of a person’s character, is being able to say and feel strong saying: "I don’t know."
As he receives daily radiation treatments, he is often reduced by the technicians to the man with the “thick neck” or “shoulders too wide.” But he also sees the results of a profit-driven health care where the hospital staff is overworked and shorthanded, rushing from one patient to the next, and he worries about possible medical mistakes. And now he thinks about what he felt when family members questioned his orders or the nursing care, and he writes self-critically,
There has been a part of me that has resented it. After all, we are professionals and do not want our image to be tarnished.
The treatment is successful and he is able to return to his practice, feeling he is kinder. He writes:
Today there is something different: my feeling. The calluses accumulated for 50 years are suddenly stripped away. A few months ago I would have [said that I was sympathetic to my patients]. Now I’m beginning to see that more may be required than I gave. Doctors talk about empathy. Some practitioners have it, some don’t; I don’t think it’s something that can be learned.
My life shows it can be learned! When every doctor, every person is able to
study Aesthetic Realism and see that having good will is our true strength, a
renaissance will be in medicine, and we all will feel proud and strong in
wanting to encourage the best in every person we meet.