Men & Women; Life & Love
What Opposes Love? / Number 150, February 11, 1976
Eli Siegel writes: "Aesthetic Realism believes that every true feeling of love can be a cause of respect for ourselves. It happens often with love that we come to think our emotion is too large for the person causing it. The words emotion and large have to be looked at. We have to see that there are two things in us causing us to love another. The first is our desire to despise the world. We can use the loved person to make less the rest of the world. The second thing, the true cause of love, uses the loved person to make the whole world more beautiful."...more
This issue includes:
- An instance of Eli Siegel's great literary criticism; he discusses Racine's Phèdre as exemplifying a false and hurtful way of seeing love.
What Makes Imagination Kind or Cruel? / Number 1960, August 23, 2017
...[In the paper of his published here,] Dr. [Edward] Green—composer, musicologist, professor at the Manhattan School of Music—is writing about the greatness of Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of imagination. In all the history of thought, it is Eli Siegel who showed there are two kinds of imagination, and these arise from the two big desires at war in everyone: the desire to respect the world, and the desire to have contempt—“get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” And Dr. Green writes courageously (also humorously) about something that has tormented artists, and that they have not understood: an artist as person may use his imagination in a way that’s fundamentally at odds with the respectful imagination from which art comes. Through contempt, people weaken their minds and lives every day. And through contempt, artists have also hindered, even stifled, the art in themselves....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss in which she shows how the US Constitution arose from kind imagination
- The next section of Eli Siegel's lecture Imagination: It Gathers; in it, he looks at John Masefield's “What Am I, Life?”, and shows how life itself is a gathering
- Part of Dr. Edward Green's paper from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar: “A Man’s Imagination: What Makes It Good or Bad?”
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, including a discussion of four maxims by Eli Siegel from his book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims, which not only show his beautiful, kind imagination but are also about ways people use their imagination on the world
- The next section of Mr. Siegel's 1971 lecture Imagination—It Gathers, in which he continues to look at passages from O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars
- "A Man's Imagination: What Makes It Good or Bad?" by Aesthetic Realism consultant Dale Laurin, from a recent public seminar
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, describing Aesthetic Realism's beautiful criterion for love, including at its most intimate—good will—which she illustrates using a poem by Robert Herrick: "Night Piece, to Julia"
- Part of the Aesthetic Realism lesson, titled here "Motives, Body, & Self-Respect," in which Eli Siegel speaks to a young woman and others about how to have a purpose as to love one can be proud of
- A moving commentary by Ellen Reiss in which she says: "My gratitude to Aesthetic Realism is limitless for its teaching me that the purpose of caring for books and the purpose of caring for a person are the same: to like the world." The commentary concludes with a stirring poem she wrote about her late husband, Timothy Lynch: "So Loved."
- The conclusion of Mr. Siegel's lecture Reading Itself Has to Do with Poetry, in which there is a list of "100 Significant Books
- Part of a paper by consultant Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman "The Hope to Like—or Be Displeased" from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar by the teaching trio There Are Wives
- Ellen Reiss's commentary in which she looks at the sonnet by Shakespeare Mr. Siegel discusses in his lecture, and writes of how Shakespeare "was one of the greatest haters of dishonesty—and lovers of sincerity—in human history."
- Mr. Siegel's discussion of complaint described poetically and with structure in two works: Arthur Hugh Clough's poem “My Wind Is Turned to Bitter North” and Shakespeare's Sonnet 66
- "Honesty versus Contempt" by Miriam Weiss, from a recent public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss uses a poem by John Milton on his blindness, which Eli Siegel discusses in this talk, to speak about the impulsion of Milton to be honest about what was happening in the England of his time—honesty about "who should own a nation"
- The next section of Mr. Siegel's 1966 lecture on complaint in poetry. He looks at Milton's sonnet "To Cyriack Skinner," which he says "has in it some of the hardiest feeling with complaint"
- An article by actor Carol McCluer from an Aesthetic Realism Public Seminar: "Honesty, Deception, & Love"
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, describing the importance of how Aesthetic Realism sees love
- "Proud Need: What Is It?" from a 1965 lesson in which Eli Siegel speaks to a woman about the Aesthetic Realism definition of love—proud need—and what in the self interferes with our having it
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss writes of people's confusion about how to see the known and unknown, inclluding in how these opposites are in another person
- The next section of Mr. Siegel's class on Music & “Questions for Everyone.” He looks at what music says about these questions: “Do I think I am two persons or one person?” and “Would I be afraid to know everything about myself?”
- "Sureness & Unsureness: A Drama" by Sally Ross, from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar
- Ellen Reiss's discussion of how Aesthetic Realism sees the important matter of criticism and kindness, including how it is present in a poem by Eli Siegel: "Behold, Love Is Criticism"
- The second part of Mr. Siegel's 1975 on Music & “Questions for Everyone,” in which he speaks about the relation of concord and discord in relation to the question: "Have I sometimes felt that I hated everything?"
- "Can We Be Both Critical & Kind?" by Len Bernstein, from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss writes of how Aesthetic Realism shows the meaning of art for people's lives, including through questions Mr. Siegel asked her about music when she was a child
- Part 1 of the 1975 class by Mr. Siegel, in which he discusses the first two of his questions: “Do I feel the same alone as I do with other people?” and “Have I thought that no one knew me or cared for me?”
- “Women, Confident & Unsure,” by Marion Fennell, from a recent public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
- Part of an Aesthetic Realism lesson conducted by Eli Siegel, which has been given the title: "Do You Deserve to Be Trusted?"
- A commentary introducing this lesson in which Ellen Reiss writes of her own gratitude for how Mr. Siegel wanted to know people, including herself, and tells about the trust Aesthetic Realism makes possible between husbands and wives, as it did in her own marriage to Timothy Lynch
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss writes about how Aesthetic Realism sees every person's need for the outside world. She gives a terrible instance of what happens when a person is unable to welcome the world: the fact that babies affected by the Zika virus are born with microcephaly.
- The final section of The Self Is, by Eli Siegel, in which he quotes from a biology text to show how the outside world, in the form of stimuli, affect a living being
- Consultant Carol Driscoll's paper from a recent public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation: "Managing, Yielding, & Mix-Up"
- Ellen Reiss's commentary describing how two central opposites in our lives—pride and humility—affect every aspect of our relation to the world and other people, including in love
- Part 3 of The Self Is, by Eli Siegel. In this section, Mr. Siegel discusses passages from Alexis de Tocqueville and a play by Ignazio Silone, in relation to the opposites of humility and pride
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss in which she describes the two ways of seeing our individuality—a way that is true, and shows our relation to the world, and a way that is narrow and hurts not only other people but also ourselves
- The next section of The Self Is, Eli Siegel's 1970 lecture in which he discusses an essay by David Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered
- "Men Want Comfort—& Also Self-Respect" by consultant Ernest DeFilippis, from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
- Ellen Reiss's discussion of the critical value of the two reviews by Eli Siegel published in this issue
- Mr. Siegel's 1937 review "Playing and Singing America" about a book on American play-party songs, and his 1926 review of Notorious Literary Attacks
- Part of a paper by Michael Palmer, from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “A Man’s Dissatisfaction—What Makes It Right or Wrong?”
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss with excerpts from an Aesthetic Realism she had with Eli Siegel on the subject of love, and why people are dissatisfied with themselves because of how they go after it
- The final section of Mr. Siegel's lecture about his great 1930 poem "A Marriage"
- An article by associate Steven Weiner: "Dissatisfaction—Right and Wrong" from a recent public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, in which she uses a poem by Matthew Prior (1664-1721)—"An Epitaph"—to show one of the central mistakes couples make in marriage
- The next section of Mr. Siegel's lecture, about sections 12 through 18 of "A Marriage"
- A description by Ellen Reiss of how mistakes about the philosophic opposites Eli Siegel speaks about in the next section of his poem "A Marriage"—continuity and change—cause pain in love and marriage
- Mr. Siegel's discussion of sections 8 through 11 of this poem
- Ellen Reiss's commentary describing in six clear points the beautiful, needed way Aesthetic Realism sees love
- The next section of Mr. Siegel's lecture on "A Marriage," in which he discusses Sections 6 and 7, and speaks about the meaning of and need for good will between people
- An article by consultant Devorah Tarrow from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar on the subject "The Mix-up in Women about Managing & Yielding—& the Beautiful Answer!”
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss describing how Aesthetic Realism sees the subject of love—the basis on which people can truly love one another—as she writes of the magnificent poem by Eli Siegel "A Marriage"
- The next section of Mr. Siegel's lecture on this poem of 1930, in which he discusses several sections of the poem: about vehicles as part of social history, color, tumult, fate, and more—all of these concerned with the relation of one person and another
- Ellen Reiss's commentary about the importance of how Aesthetic Realism sees love and marriage, including through the poem by Eli Siegel included here. She writes: "In it, in the statements and music, we feel...mind and body, closeness and intellect, touch and that hero of the poem, “a word.”
- Eli Siegel's beautiful 1930 poem "A Marriage"
- The first part of the lecture in which Mr. Siegel discusses this poem
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss describes both the value of the 1926 review by Eli Siegel and of the Aesthetic Realism understanding of self, which is in the paper published in this issue
- Mr. Siegel's review "Dr. Johnson’s Critical Comment as Alive Today as When First Written," originally published in the New York Evening Post Literary Review
- Consultant Derek Mali's paper from an Aesthetic Realism seminar: “What Does It Mean to Bring Out the Best in People—and Do We Want To?”
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss in which she discusses a recent article on "selective mutism" in children, and shows that it won't be understood until people see that it has to do with a central question Aesthetic Realism shows every person has: "How can we affirm our individuality, yet see ourselves as related to other people?"
- The final section of Mind and People of 1948. Mr. Siegel looks at two poems of the Civil War—showing how one stands for the manyness of people, and other for a single self
- Portions of the paper "Do We Bring Out the Best in People?" by Aesthetic Realism consultant Bruce Blaustein, from a recent public seminar
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss on how Aesthetic Realism sees the importance of relation—including in love and in education
- The first section of Eli Siegel's 1972 lecture Hail, Relation; or, A Study in Poetry, in which he discusses Shakespeare's sonnet 18: "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?"
- Part of a paper by Jaime Torres, from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar: “What Do Men Need Most to Know about Self-Confidence—& Conceit?”
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss describes the unintelligent and hurtful way of mind at the basis of the profit system. She cites as an example a recent New York Times article about a faulty tool for knee replacements whose use was expected to make money for doctors, though it was not proven safe—and, in fact, caused great pain to many people
- The next section of Eli Siegel's lecture Shame Goes with It All
- Part of a paper by associate Miriam Weiss, "What Makes Us Intelligent?," from a recent public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss discusses "Foreign Lands," a poem from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, to show the deepest hope of every child, every person: to love "the expansive and strange, and—simultaneously—...the definite, confined, near."
- Part of Philosophy Consists of Instincts, subtitled "The Everyday and the Grand." In it, he speaks of how these two qualities are in the thought and writings of American philosophers, including John Fiske, Chauncey Wright, and William T. Harris
- "Generous or Selfish?" by Nancy Huntting, from a recent public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
- Ellen Reiss's deep consideration of the famous poem by Robert Burns "Auld Lang Syne," which she says is "passionately, tearfully, firmly, joyfully against one of the biggest ways people have gone after comfort: the putting of things aside, the making them not matter”
- The next section of Philosophy Consists of Instincts, in which Eli Siegel shows how the desire to feel all's well and the desire for change are in the history of American philosophy—including in how the idea of evolution was met
- An article by associate and sportswriter Michael Palmer, "A Mix-up of Coldness & Warmth," part of a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss, describing the rift in people between logic and emotion, which Aesthetic Realism can end
- The conclusion of Intelligence Is You and More, by Eli Siegel, in which he discusses the life of Augustus 63 bc–14 ad), who he says "is clearly one of the most intelligent persons who ever lived."
- Aesthetic Realism associate Barbara Buehler's paper "Self-Expression—What Interferes?"
- An urgently-needed commentary by Ellen Reiss about the state of mind of the young girls described in the June 6 New York Times article: an intensified form of ordinary contempt--people's feeling "they belong to a world superior to the one they’re in"
- Part of Eli Siegel's 1964 lecture Intelligence Is You and More, in which he looks science textbooks and shows how the history of cloth and the functioning of the nervous system have to do with the meaning of intelligence
- Singer Kevin Fennell's paper "What Is True Self-Expression?" from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar
- Ellen Reiss's discussion of two poems for children by Robert Louis Stevenson—"Looking Forward" and "Singing"—which, she shows, illustrate two different notions of what intelligence is
- The next section of Eli Siegel's 1964 lecture Intelligence Is You and More, subtitled here "Intelligence, Love, & Motive," including his taking up of passages from Shakespeare's Othello and Antony and Cleopatra as instances of how people see intelligence
- Part of a paper by associate Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar on "The Freedom a Woman Wants Most"
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss looks at a recent New York Times article on the book The Joy of Pain: Schadenfreude and the Dark Side of Human Nature. She discusses the German word Schadenfreude, which has entered the English language, and "means joy at another’s troubles. And that happens to be a form of contempt."
- Two important and kind essays by Eli Siegel: "Is Your Unconscious Your Friend?" and "Medusa Is a Nice Girl"
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, about the beautiful understanding of women that is in Aesthetic Realism
- Eli Siegel's essay "The Everlasting Dilemma of a Girl"
- Three poems by Mr. Siegel about women
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss about the value of the two essays published here—for personal life, and as part of culture
- "Husbands and Poems," and “On Aesthetic Realism as New”—two essays by Eli SIegel
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, in which she discusses a recent New York Times article about cheating, and shows that the "satisfaction" of cheating is really "the victory of contempt," the feeling you've beaten out the world. She also discusses the ethics in a famous poem by Wordsworth: "Goody Blake and Harry Gill."
- The next section of Romanticism and Guilt, with Eli Siegel's discussion of Wordsworth's "To a Skylark," which he said illustrates "something present in Wordsworth's poetry...[:] his desire to be elsewhere and his desire to be right where he is."
- Aesthetic Realism associate and sportswriter Michael Palmer's paper "Care for Self & Justice to Others"
- A vitally important commentary in which Ellen Reiss writes about the importance of the recent strikes by fast-food workers in America
- Part 2 of Eli Siegel's Romanticism and Guilt of 1963, in which he says: "Art is an evoker. It takes the ego-stained wraps off. It takes the selfish grease off." And he discusses William Blake's poem Milton
- An article by educator Leila Rosen from a public seminar titled “Being Important: What Does It Mean, & What Mistakes Do We Make about It?”
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss writes about the fight in people between wanting to respect reality and wanting to manipulate it. She discusses a recent article from the Independent (UK) about the falsification of data by scientists, as an illustration of the human desire, described by Eli Siegel, to "see other people and other objects in a way that seemed to go with comfort."
- A continuation of Mr. Siegel's 1964 lecture, in which he discusses 7 more sciences, and shows that each puts together knowing and feeling
- An article by actor Carol McCluer from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar: "To Manage People or Understand Them: The Historic & Intimate Debate"
- Ellen Reiss's commentary about the kind way Aesthetic Realism enables people to look at how we are for and against the world, including through a fictional and representative man, and a discussion of a short poem by Robert Herrick: "Discontents in Devon"
- Part I of Mr. Siegel's lecture, in which he speaks of passages from a work by the early American theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards to show what feeling is
- An article by associate Steven Weiner—"A Man’s Cynicism: Weakness or Strength?"—from a recent public seminar
- A powerful commentary by Ellen Reiss showing how the factory collapse in Bangladesh "arose from a fidelity to the profit system all the way down the line"
- The final section of Mr. Siegel's lecture The Known & Unknown Are Kind in Poetry, in which he looks at some sentences from the Lang, Leaf, and Myers translation of Homer's Iliad
- "Cynicism: Does It Strengthen or Weaken Us?"—a paper by associate and union official Matthew D’Amico, from a recent public seminar
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, in which she writes of two major figures from English literature: the poet John Milton, who wanted England to be democratic, and Samuel Johnson, who objected to that view. Ms. Reiss also quotes from an Aesthetic Realism lesson she had, in which Mr. Siegel spoke to her of the meaning of criticism
- The next section of Eli Siegel's lecture The Known and Unknown Are Kind in Poetry, continuing his discussion of Paul Elmer More's essay of 1936 on "Lycidas"
- An article by Aesthetic Realism Associate Miriam Weiss from a recent public seminar: "To Manage People or Understand Them?"
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, with her discussion of the meaning of sincerity, and her showing what Aesthetic Realism teaches: that "a big reason we need to see what art is, is that art shows sincerity pays. True art is always sincere. "
- The 5th installment of Mr. Siegel's 1972 lecture, where he speaks of the importance of seeing our feelings truly, which art itself does
- A paper by consultant Margot Carpenter, from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar: "Power & Kindness"
- A thrilling commentary by Ellen Reiss about "an immense subject: What makes a certain expression or presentation of ugliness, horror,...the shocking, become art, and another expression of these be...hurtful?" And she looks at a section from Spenser's The Faerie Queene of 1590, which has the first of these.
- Part of Mr. Siegel's 1972 lecture The Known & Unknown Are Kind in Poetry
- An article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Devorah Tarrow from a public seminar: "Power Can Be Good or Bad"
- An editor’s commentary in which Ellen Reiss writes of an early poem by Tennyson, “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” about a young lady who went after bad power over men
- The next section of the 1972 lecture The Known & Unknown Are Kind in Poetry, by Eli Siegel
- An article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Carol Driscoll, from public seminar titled “Can a Woman Be Both Kind & Powerful?”
- A discussion of a passage from Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man" in Mr. Siegel's lecture Aesthetics Is the One Way
- Eli Siegel's explanation of points from his work "2-A Pleasure Described"
- Aesthetic Realism Consultant Devorah Tarrow on: "Logic & Passion—Do They Have to Fight in a Woman's Life?"
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss describing how Aesthetic Realism sees the aesthetic nature of self; and she discusses the recently revealed Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme as an instance of how people make a rift between caring for themselves and justice to the world
- Part 2 of Eli Siegel's 1947 lecture about Self and World
- "Self-Expression and Justice" by teacher Barbara McClung, from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss writes of the importance of the election of Barack Obama as standing for what Americans are hoping for, as to racial justice and kindness. She quotes passages from Vachel Lindsay's important poem "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan" about another president whose election stood for kindness.
- A section of Eli Siegel's lecture, subtitled "Corruption & the American Earth"
- Part of consultant Bennett Cooperman's paper, from an Aesthetic Realism seminar, "Liking Oneself in a Tough World"
- Ellen Reiss's writing about Wordsworth's "The Cumberland Beggar"
- Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, Aesthetic Realism Associate, on: "Intensity & Ease in a Woman: Can These Opposites Be One?"
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, explaining how three important English novelists describe the opposites in characters
- Associate and actress Carol McCluer on "Why Are People So 'Difficult'—& Could It Have Anything to Do with Me?"
- A description by Ellen Reiss of a woman's agitation because she does not want to know who a man is
- Eli Siegel's discussion of passages from Walter Pater's essay on the "Mona Lisa," by Leonardo da Vinci
- Aesthetic Realism Consultant Carol Driscoll on: "Mistakes Women Make in Love—What Are They, & Is There an Answer?," telling what takes place in Aesthetic Realism consultations
- Ellen Reiss's quoting from and commenting on part of an Aesthetic Realism lesson she had with Mr. Siegel about why men and women feel hurt by one another
- Eli Siegel's translation of a sonnet by the 16th century French poet Louise Labé
- Ellen Reiss's comment on the deep, kind way Eli Siegel spoke to a particular woman—her grandmother—in an Aesthetic Realism lesson
- Mr. Siegel's discussion of why women have been bitter
- His looking at the poem "Highland Mary," by Robert Burns, standing for sweetness in woman
- A discussion of the English novelist Fanny Burney
- Excerpts from several Aesthetic Realism lessons Ellen Reiss had with Eli Siegel
- Ellen Reiss's telling of what she learned about love from Eli Siegel in an Aesthetic Realism lesson, in which he related her to women of culture
- Eli Siegel's discussion of Elizabethan poet Thomas Campion's "Cherry Ripe" and "Rose-cheeked Laura," and a passage from Barchester Towers, a novel by Anthony Trollope
- "Men Want Praise, Kudos, Cheers—but How Can We Be Sensible about These?"—a paper by Consultant Bruce Blaustein from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
- A beautiful poem by Eli Siegel about the novelist Norman Mailer
- Part of a paper by Consultant Nancy Huntting on the subject: "Can a Woman Be Both Serious and Lighthearted?"
How Do We Want to Imagine? / Number 1959, August 9, 2017
...[The title of the paper by Dale Laurin printed here, “A Man’s Imagination: What Makes It Good or Bad?”] has in it something of the greatness of Aesthetic Realism. People haven’t known that imagination, with all its vast diversity, is of two kinds. Eli Siegel is the critic who showed it is, and made clear the distinction between these. There is the imagination which—even when it deals with the grotesque or ugly—is based on respect for the world. That is good imagination, good for the person having it and for humanity. The other imagination is based on contempt for the world; it is bad imagination, is always hurtful, and (as I wrote in the previous issue) is behind every human cruelty, from snobbishness to racism and fascism....more
This issue includes:
Yes—Love, Pleasure, & Self-Respect! / Number 1957, July 12, 2017
We are proud to publish a section of an Aesthetic Realism lesson conducted by Eli Siegel in 1970. The consultations that take place now at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, and by Skype and telephone, arise from the lessons Mr. Siegel gave. The basis was always this landmark principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” And always, Mr. Siegel saw the very particular person having the lesson as related to art, science, history, the world itself.
In those lessons, which Mr. Siegel gave between 1941 and 1978, something happened that was new in human history: people felt truly understood, to their depths and in all their subtlety, and were learning, on a logical basis, how to understand themselves....more
This issue includes:
About Books and Marriage / Number 1956, June 28, 2017
...[The lecture by Eli Siegel about reading we've been serializing] has his vast knowledge and scholarship at one with ease, humor, everydayness. And we see: reading as such is described—as poetry and all art are—by the Aesthetic Realism principle “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
Using passages from the book Good Reading, edited by J.S. Weber, Mr. Siegel has been speaking about such opposites as randomness and plan, wandering and point. Now, much present though unstated in the section printed here, is the question How is the way a writer has seen and portrayed a character different from how we see people? Also: What makes a literary work immortal? Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that answers those questions....more
This issue includes:
Complaint, Honesty, & Shakespeare / Number 1952, May 3, 2017
Here is the conclusion of the great 1966 lecture that Eli Siegel gave on complaint in poetry. In the talk he speaks about many poems, beginning with one of 4th-century-bc China. And we see that this matter, complaint, which people feel so personally, is of literature, culture: it is not just a misery—or triumph—of one’s own. Here I state again this historic fact: Aesthetic Realism has shown there is a criterion for distinguishing between good complaint and bad. Complaint is good, and can even be beautiful, when it arises from a person’s desire to respect the world, people, things. Complaint is bad, ugly, mean, when it comes from that most hurtful yet huge frequent desire in everyone: contempt, the desire to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.”...more
This issue includes:
Honesty, Nations, & Poems / Number 1951, April 19, 2017
...At the point we’ve reached [in Mr. Siegel's lecture on complaint in poetry, he] has discussed poems by Chu Yuan of 4th-century-bc China, Thomas Wyatt, Emily Brontë, and Byron. Now he speaks briefly, but beautifully, definitively, and very kindly, about a poem by John Milton....
In America today the matter of honesty-or-deception [—the topic of the article we publish here—]is more a subject of discussion (and outrage) than it ever was before. And, as I wrote recently, that fact in itself is very good. For there to be a hubbub about untruthfulness, a conscious intensity about it, can be a preliminary to something that has been so much lacking in people: a real love for truth....more
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About Love, Need, & Pride / Number 1941, November 30, 2016
It is an honor to publish part of a 1965 Aesthetic Realism lesson conducted by Eli Siegel—on the magnificent, confusing, thrilling, tormenting subject of love. The woman having the lesson, here called Colette Grayson, was in the situation of millions of people today. She and her husband, married for two years, were both disappointed. They were causing each other pain, and were for and against each other in a way they didn’t understand.
What Mr. Siegel says in the lesson is grandly clear, deep, logical, subtle, down-to-earth, kind. It is knowledge that’s simply far beyond what people are hearing from counselors and therapists: in all politeness, the difference is that between civilization and barbarity. Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of love is real understanding, and men and women are thirsty for it....more
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This issue includes:
Everyone's Confusion—& Music / Number 1938, October 19, 2016
...The section [of the 1975 class by Eli Siegel on Music & “Questions for Everyone”] included here is much about a pair of opposites that are together beautifully, mightily, in all good art: the known and the unknown. Yet these opposites trouble people immensely in life. And so, by means of introduction, I’ll comment on some of the tumult about them....
Millions of people right now feel insulted by the unknown; fear it; even hate it. They feel humiliated and angry that they don’t understand themselves, and deeply outraged that they can’t make sense of someone close to them, and life as such. For instance, husbands and wives have a tendency, foolish and also mean, to think they’re authorities on their spouse; then they’re annoyed, even furious, when something occurs making it clear that there are things in the person they’re close to that they don’t understand....more
This issue includes:
Music Is about Your Life / Number 1937, October 5, 2016
...[The subject of the paper published in this issue, criticism and kindness,] has tormented people—because they have seen criticism as unkind, and have seen kindness, really, as an evasion of their own intellect and personal need. That is, people have felt that to be kind to someone they had to put aside what they might question about him or her, and also put aside their own desire to take care of themselves. Aesthetic Realism grandly and mercifully shows that this view of things is incorrect.
It happens that this human matter of kindness and criticism is related to the technical art matter Mr. Siegel speaks of here: concord and discord. Both pairs of opposites are forms of the big primal opposites For and Against....more
This issue includes:
"Do You Want to Be Like Music?" / Number 1935, September 7, 2016
It is an honor to begin a serialization of Music & “Questions for Everyone,” a class of 1975, taught by Eli Siegel. “Questions for Everyone: To Be Thought about and Discussed” was published early in the history of Aesthetic Realism, in 1949. It contains 27 questions, and they are beautiful—kind and critical: they get to what most troubles people inwardly. In the class we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel comments on the first ten—in relation to music. All 27 are reprinted in issue 750 of this journal: http://www.aestheticrealism.net/tro/what-man-is.html.
...Eli Siegel is the critic who showed that art is essential to what every human being is, including people who think they’re not interested in art. That’s because, in order to make sense of who we are and to be as we truly hope to be, we need to see how art does what we’re trying to do: how it makes opposites one....more
This issue includes:
How Can People Trust Each Other? / Number 1934, August 24, 2016
We are honored to publish here a portion of an Aesthetic Realism lesson conducted by Eli Siegel. Aesthetic Realism is always philosophy. It is always thrillingly cultural. And it is always about you, in your rich particularity. In a lesson, the accent was on the life and questions of a particular person, the person having the lesson. And the knowledge of oneself that occurred through these lessons was unprecedented. People felt, as Mr. Siegel spoke to them and related their concerns to art, or science, or history: “I am being understood, as I never thought I could be—me, the person I am inside! And the basis is clear, testable logic.”...more
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Our Selves—False & True / Number 1929, June 15, 2016
[In the lecture we've been serializing, Eli Siegel] has been giving evidence for what no other philosopher saw: the human self, including your very own, is an aesthetic matter. It is two things, which are opposites demanding to be seen as one: your self is immensely particular, unique, personal; and it is infinitely related—to every person, thing, happening in the world....
Is the outside world, with all its strangeness, ordinariness, often confusion, something we were born to know and value as a means of becoming ourselves, who we truly are? Or is the world something we should manipulate, defeat, get away from? Truth says, The first! Contempt says, The second!...more
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Pride & Humility: The Drama in Everyone / Number 1926, May 4, 2016
...Yes, the self is—it is ours, and there is nothing more intimate about us than it is. Aesthetic Realism explains what has never been understood before: this thing, the self, so particular to each of us, is fundamentally an aesthetic matter. It is the oneness of opposites—first of all, the biggest opposites: our own individual being and the whole outside world, to which we’re unendingly, indissolubly related....more
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Care for Self: Relation vs. Contempt / Number 1925, April 20, 2016
[Eli Siegel] is the person in the history of thought who has described truly what the self is, that self which is everyone’s own. In the talk [we are serializing,] he uses a collection of essays by a writer he respects: David Riesman. Yet Riesman did not see what Aesthetic Realism explains: the self is an aesthetic situation, a oneness of the opposites individuality and relation. Each of us is a point, particular, specific—and at the same time we are related to the whole world, from words to food to history to people on our block and on other continents. The way we come to be increasingly individual, who we are, is through welcoming our relation to what seems different. That is what education is about. It’s what love is about....more
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Beauty & Dissatisfaction / Number 1922, March 9, 2016
We are proud to reprint here two reviews written by Eli Siegel. One is of 1937; the other, of 1926, when he was 24 years old....Both reviews contain some of his early work as a critic. He was, with ever-increasing clarity, coming to the answer to the centuries-old critical question: What is beauty—what is the criterion for art? In 1941 he would begin to teach Aesthetic Realism, which has the answer in its foundation principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
The criterion given in that landmark principle is at once terrifically discriminating and terrifically inclusive.
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Poetry, Love, & Dissatisfaction / Number 1920, February 10, 2016
…I have written that “A Marriage” is one of the finest poems in the literature of America. It is fervent, philosophic, tender, logical, vivid, wide, throbbing—immensely musical. It is composed of twenty sections, and we have reached Mr. Siegel’s discussion of the final two. Section 19, with its thirty lines, is the only part of the poem in rhyme. It can be seen as a poem in its own right, though it is certainly part of the whole. There are some lines in world poetry that have been, historically, memorable: lines readers have said stayed with them and came to their minds again and again. Two are here: “And don’t you, however, suppose / The eye is for the rose?”
What does this section, about the eye, the rose, and the world, have to do with the subject of the whole poem, love?... more
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Love—& the Mistake / Number 1919, January 27, 2016
The ideas in [Eli Siegel’s poem “A Marriage,” which he discusses in the lecture now being serialized,] he said, are a prelude to what would be taught in Aesthetic Realism lessons. And they are a prelude to what people are learning about love in Aesthetic Realism consultations now….
What is love? What is it for? And what is the big mistake people make about it? What is it that ruins love? People want the answers to those questions as achingly as they ever did. And they’re not getting them from the various mental practitioners, relationship counselors, articles, talk shows, and websites. The answers are in Aesthetic Realism….more
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Love & the Philosophic Opposites / Number 1918, January 13, 2016
...What [the poem "A Marriage," by Eli Siegel] says about love—so musically, mightily, warmly, penetratingly—prefigures what people would learn in Aesthetic Realism lessons and classes beginning in the 1940s, and what men and women are learning in Aesthetic Realism consultations and public seminars today.... In [the section of his lecture on the poem printed here], Mr. Siegel is speaking about sections 8 through 11.
The central matter about love has been articulated, for the first time, by Aesthetic Realism. It can be put this way: Is love about the world; is it an honoring of the world, a care for multitudinous reality? Or is love a refuge from people and happenings, a consolation against the world and a victory over it?...more
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Love: Two People & the World Itself / Number 1917, December 30, 2015
...“A Marriage” [the poem by Eli Siegel that he's discussing in the lecture being serialized] was written in 1930, and appears in its entirety in TRO 1915. It is one of the important poems of America—for what it says about love; and also for its musical might. In his discussion Mr. Siegel points out that the way of seeing in this poem—the way of seeing the world, people, and love—is a prelude to Aesthetic Realism itself, the philosophy he would begin to teach a decade later.
And as Ms. Tarrow makes clear, Aesthetic Realism is teaching men and women today what people have needed to know these many centuries—have needed hugely, achingly....more
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Love—& How We Talk to Each Other / Number 1916, December 16, 2015
We are serializing a beautiful, definitive lecture that Eli Siegel gave in 1964. In it, he discusses his 1930 poem “A Marriage” and how it preludes what Aesthetic Realism explains about love. With enormous pleasure and gratitude I say: Aesthetic Realism is that which makes clear what love really is, and also what the big interference is—the huge mistake people have made about love for centuries and are making right now.
The purpose of love, Aesthetic Realism shows, is “to feel closely one with things as a whole”—to like the world itself through one’s closeness to a person. And the mistake—the immensely popular mistake—is to use a person one says one cares for to get away from the world, lessen it, feel superior to it together.
“A Marriage” is a poem in 20 sections. It is musically sweeping and vivid, logical and throbbing. And our current issue has Mr. Siegel’s discussion of sections 2 through 5. He is showing that any two people, however alone together they may be, are always related to the whole world, and have the world in them. Even the troubles in marriage—for instance, the way two people can go from sweetness to rage—have their inexpungible likeness to outside reality....more
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What Marriage Is Really For / Number 1915, December 2, 2015
It is an honor to begin serializing the lecture Eli Siegel gave on April 3, 1964, on the tremendous and everyday subject of marriage. He explains, with ease and might, definitively and gracefully, what marriage means, what people hope for in relation to it, and what interferes with love. In the lecture, he discusses his 1930 poem “A Marriage.”
There are probably more poems on the subject of love than on any other, and I consider “A Marriage” one of the greatest of all. I’ll be commenting on why as our serialization continues; but the reason is in the relation of what is said, and the music, the sound, of how it is said. The poem is in 20 sections. Eli Siegel wrote it on the occasion of a particular marriage, but, as he describes in the lecture, it is not about that marriage and those people: it’s about what love truly is....more
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How Alive? / Number 1913, November 4, 2015
We are honored to reprint a review by Eli Siegel. It appeared in the New York Evening Post Literary Review of May 1, 1926, and in it we can see something of the beginning of Aesthetic Realism. He was 23 years old then; and this short article about the critic Samuel Johnson is itself literary criticism that is important, big. Mr. Siegel’s writing here, his prose style, is wonderful—with its aliveness and exactitude, untrammeled feeling and precision, earthiness and grand intellect. For all the brevity of this article, the reviewer places, as I have seen no one else do, just what it is that makes Johnson “one of the great and permanent critics of the world.”
The approach to reality and beauty in the 1926 review is also at the heart of the philosophy Eli Siegel would found fifteen years later. We can see this fact through the second work in the present issue: an article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Derek Mali....more
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Your Particular Self—& All People / Number 1909, September 9, 2015
...In [the lecture we've been serializing, Mind and People,] we see Mr. Siegel describing the biggest confusion, opportunity, turmoil, field for kindness or cruelty in the life of ever yone. It is this: We want, terrifically, to see ourselves as just us —unique, apart—and to take care of our own self. Yet we also, simply by existing, have to do with everything and everyone—and we have a deep, impelling desire to see ourselves as of them, related, close. These desires are opposites, and people have gotten and given much pain because they haven’t been able to put them together. In fact, all the cruelty in the world has come from people’s feeling that care for their own self was different from justice to all other things and people.
Aesthetic Realism explains that our constant and burning need is to see ourselves as at once unique
and related to everything. It is an aesthetic need...more
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How We See Relation / Number 1902, June 3, 2015
...I remember hearing Mr. Siegel say that there is no word more important than relation. Aesthetic Realism itself arose from his passionate and scholarly search for the relation among things—all the things of the world. In a 1944 article on him in the Baltimore Sun, Donald Kirkley writes that years earlier, even before the time Eli Siegel won the 1925 Nation poetry prize,
he wanted to investigate the whole reach of human knowledge, past and present....He thought “all knowledge was connected—that geology was connected with music, and poetry with chemistry, and history with sports.”... He wished to find something, or some principle, unifying all the various manifestations of reality....more
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Intelligence, Shame, & Profit / Number 1895, March 11, 2015
...The lecture we’re serializing is about the feeling of shame that, Mr. Siegel shows, has always been present in connection with the profit system. He begins with a discussion of one of the most noted essays in English, Charles Lamb’s “Poor Relations.” And he speaks about the shame that has been because some people have had much less money than others....
That poverty exists in this world, which has enough resources for all, will be seen as massive barbarism. I remember Mr. Siegel saying that only contempt could permit poverty to go on. He defined contempt as the getting an “addition to self through the lessening of something else,” and identified it as the source of all cruelty....
A matter of huge, immediate importance—which joins the two aspects of this issue of TRO—is: Is the profit system based on intelligence? Is the “engine” impelling it, the famous profit motive, intelligent? What’s intelligent depends on what the purpose of the human self is—because if we go against the very purpose of our life, of our mind, we’re unintelligent....more
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We—& Children—Are Philosophic / Number 1892, January 14, 2015
In [his lecture about instinct we are serializing] Mr. Siegel shows that the big battle going on in people’s lives every day is also the continuous conflict in a field that seems so different: the history of philosophy. This conflict is about fact and a notion of value, and it takes many forms in both philosophy and us. Centrally, it takes the form in us of the desire to see, to know, versus the desire to have things make us comfortable and important....
In the present section..., Mr. Siegel speaks about two opposites in thought: reality as definite, immediate, the objects right before one; and reality as indefinitely wide, expansive—as illimitable. In each of these opposites, the fight he has been describing is present: we can use each in behalf either of knowing or of making ourselves contemptuously comfortable....more
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Philosophy, a Famous Song, & You / Number 1891, December 31, 2014
…In his lecture [Philosophy Consists of Instincts], Mr. Siegel explains what no other philosopher has: the biggest conflict in every person, he says, the turmoil that goes on in people every day, corresponds to the largest matter in philosophy:
There is an instinct on the part of everyone to see or be honest; there is also an instinct to be comfortable....Perhaps the best way to see what this conflict is, is to see how it is present in the history of...American philosophy....more
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Intelligence, Feeling, & Our True Self / Number 1884, September 24, 2014
...Here is the final section of the great 1964 lecture [we've been serializing, andis part of a paper by Aesthetic Realism associate Barbara Buehler, from a recent public seminar titled “The Real Me; or, What Is True Self-Expression?” Our expression is an aspect of intelligence. And as Ms. Buehler writes about herself of once, she describes a grief had right now by ever so many other obviously intelligent people: the aching sense that, for all their keenness and perhaps abundant education, they’re not really expressing themselves; they’re not being their true selves, and don’t know what this true self is.
Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that identifies at last the huge opponent in us to both our intelligence and authentic self-expression. That opponent, that obstructer of one’s real self, is something which a person feels is oh-so smart and relies on, but which weakens oneself day after day.
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Always—Our Mind & the World / Number 1881, August 13, 2014
...I’ll comment here on a recent occurrence that involved self-expression of a horrible and shocking kind. I’m doing so because that event, in all its horror, is a means of understanding some quite ordinary notions people have of what it means to express themselves. A June 6th New York Times article about it reports that a 12-year old girl in an upper middle class Milwaukee suburb nearly died from “19 stab wounds...inflicted by two friends who had lured her into a park to kill her.” The Times calls this attack “unfathomable.” But it is not: it can be explained, through Aesthetic Realism....more
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Intelligence & Freedom, in Life & Art / Number 1880, July 30, 2014
In [the present lecture by Eli Siegel], he is describing what that great thing, mysterious thing—that thing people can be so mistaken about—really is. He speaks about various aspects of intelligence, so different from each other. As he noted in an earlier (1949) lecture on the subject:
Intelligence is that which enables you to repair a faucet, understand a child, get a bus sometimes, do well when you are cleaning your clothes, be more sensible in politics; and then, it is about the very biggest question of all: how to spend one’s life. [TRO 706]...more
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Our Two Desires / Number 1867, January 29, 2014
The two essays by Eli Siegel published here were likely written in the late 1950s. They have that comprehension of people which is Aesthetic Realism’s alone, and which is based on this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
In “Medusa Is a Nice Girl,” Mr. Siegel writes about opposites that confuse everyone: our fierceness and our tenderness. “Is Your Unconscious Your Friend?” is a definitive description of the fundamental situation within us all. The word unconscious is not so frequently used these days. Perhaps that’s because of the rather ridiculous way it was used by Freud: psychiatry’s foolish way of seeing the unconscious has somewhat tarnished the word itself. In this essay Mr. Siegel gives a beautiful and clear definition: our unconscious is “the cause of what we do, which we don’t know.”...more
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Woman, Body & Mind / Number 1866, January 15, 2014
It is an honor to publish here one of the great essays of the English-speaking world. It is “The Everlasting Dilemma of a Girl,” by Eli Siegel; and I surmise it was written in the late 1950s. While related to other notable essays—those, for instance, of Hazlitt and Lamb—in having prose that is powerful and graceful, charming and deep—“The Everlasting Dilemma of a Girl” has done something different and more. Through it, women have felt, “This explains me! Someone understands what I feel. Something I couldn’t give words to but have been so distressed by, is described—and in a way that gives me hope!”
Without “giving away” what is in this work, I can say it is about the philosophic opposites of appearance and reality—as experienced by women every day. It is about the huge opposites of body and mind. And it is certainly a kind, rich illustration, in terms of a woman’s hopes, of this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”... more
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The Opposites, Beauty, & Us / Number 1863, December 4, 2013
It is a pleasure to publish here two essays by Eli Siegel. The first, “Husbands and Poems,” originally appeared in 1960, in the magazine Today’s Japan. Its basis is this principle, central to Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” I love that statement—see it as great in the history of thought, for the reason “Husbands and Poems” illustrates: not only has Eli Siegel defined what makes for beauty anywhere, in Paradise Lost or a rosebud, Brahms or a friendly smile; he has defined what we want for and from ourselves—the absence of which makes us pained.
Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy which shows that the questions we have are nothing less than aesthetic questions. All our hopes, our woes, and our confusions are about that which makes for beauty itself: the oneness of such opposites as freedom and accuracy, individuality and relation, separation and junction, difference and sameness....more
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Guilt, Profit, & Poetry / Number 1861, November 6, 2013
[The subject of the article printed here from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar] has much to do with a poem of Wordsworth spoken of in the lecture [Romanticism and Guilt]. It is a famous poem, but its meaning is made clear for the first time by Mr. Siegel.
The opposites in the seminar title, care for self and justice to what’s not us, are the biggest opposites in our lives. And, Aesthetic Realism shows, all the cruelty in the world comes from dividing them—from feeling that the way to take care of ourselves is to lessen and look down on other people and things. That feeling is contempt. It’s immensely ordinary, and also the worst thing in humanity. Mr. Siegel explains—and I find these resounding, vivid, deep, clear sentences beautiful:
There is only one thing that is immoral in the world: liking oneself too much and the outside world too little....Once you feel what is owing to yourself is more and what is owing to other people is less, you can rob people’s purses, tell lies, keep back things that would do good to people, start wars....
Contempt is also the cause of guilt—or, as it’s often called today, low self-esteem. Guilt can take such forms as anxiety, nervousness, excess unsureness....more
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What & Who Are Important? / Number 1856, August 28, 2013
[In the lecture by Eli Siegel being serialized here,] he shows that every new movement in art arises from the sense that the world has not been seen with enough justice; things have not been valued; their meaning has not been brought forth! We’re ashamed, we have guilt, when we’re unjust. And an artist welcomes the guilt and feels, I must give to these misseen, undervalued things the form, the beauty, they deserve!
Never was such a feeling stronger than during the romantic movement, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Romanticism said: The ordinary things you take for granted have wonder! Things you consider distant from you, strange, even grotesque, can tell you about yourself! People who have been thought lowly have importance, dignity, even grandeur! ...more
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Feeling, Science, & the Battle in Everyone / Number 1853, July 17, 2013
One of [the] historic aspects [of Mr. Siegel's lecture Aesthetic Realism Looks at Feeling] is his showing that knowing and feeling always take place together. Indeed, he explains that every science has feeling in it. And he comments on feeling in relation to 14 sciences, providing a particular illustrative sentence for each. The sentences and comments are surprising, vivid, charming, sometimes humorous, often poetic, always exact....
People often complain—most notably in the field of domestic life—that somebody is trying to manage them. And sitcoms and films are filled with comic examples of spouses trying to out-manipulate each other. Aesthetic Realism, while valuing the comedy that can be found in the subject, is the philosophy that says plainly: the desire to manage someone—have your way with the person rather than try to know and be fair to the person—is the ugliest thing in the human self. It is contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And it always makes the manager ashamed, unsure, and intellectually weakened....
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What Our Feelings Are / Number 1850, June 5, 2013
It is an honor to begin to serialize Aesthetic Realism Looks at Feeling, a 1964 lecture by Eli Siegel. Nothing is closer to us than our feelings. Nothing confuses us more. Since every human act of kindness or beauty began with a person’s feeling something, and so did every vicious or ugly act, it is mightily important to know what feeling is. Aesthetic Realism is the means to that knowledge...
In this lecture, Mr. Siegel describes what is fundamental to all feeling, however complex. Feeling—whether a child’s on touching a cat, or Hamlet’s during an intricate soliloquy—is always a matter of pain or pleasure; it is always for or against. In any day, every person has feelings about hundreds of things. That means we are for and against in ever so many ways. And Aesthetic Realism explains this: in order to like ourselves, we have to be for and against in a way that makes us proud. A huge cause of shame and tragedy in the lives of people is, they’re not proud of their feelings. They’re not proud of why they’re for and against.... more
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Homer, Cynicism, & Goodbye Profit System / Number 1849, May 22, 2013
...It was 43 years ago today that Eli Siegel gave the first of his landmark Goodbye Profit System lectures. In them he described a huge, irreversible occurrence in economic history. He showed that an economy based on contempt—on seeing human beings in terms of how much profit you can make from them—could no longer continue successfully. He wrote:
There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries.
...I’m going to comment on a New York Times article about the recent factory building collapse in Bangladesh. That collapse is an instance of what Mr. Siegel once called a “horror story of free enterprise.” It killed more than 1,000 people....I’m commenting on this because, with all the horror (and, really, murderousness) of what occurred, the factories in that building are emblematic of the one way the profit system can now go on.... more
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Our Lives, Art, & How We Judge / Number 1847, April 24, 2013
This issue has to do with something great, beautiful, necessary-to-be-known—something Aesthetic Realism is the body of knowledge to show. It is this: What makes a critical judgment in the field of art right or wrong, has everything to do with what choices we make in our lives. What makes a critic judge a work of art wrongly and what makes us judge wrongly in our life are the same….
To place a little the paragraphs from the 1972 lecture [by Eli Siegel serialized here]: Paul Elmer More (1864-1937) was a literary critic with right wing views—views Mr. Siegel disagreed with adamantly. Yet Mr. Siegel praises More’s large care for Milton and sees it as important….more
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Sincerity & Power / Number 1845, March 27, 2013
[Eli Siegel's lecture The Known and Unknown Are Kind in Poetry] is definitive, has his scholarship, and his ease too, his everydayness, and humor. As a preliminary, I’ll comment a little on something he speaks of in it: sincerity. This is a matter that people are uncomfortable thinking about and can try to put aside. Nevertheless, we all judge ourselves, whether consciously or not, on how sincere we are.
In the lecture Mr. Siegel has been discussing a passage he sees as important: by philosopher R.G. Collingwood, about what Collingwood calls “corruption of consciousness.” That phrase means the lack of desire to see truly what we feel. And it has everything to do with sincerity, because to be sincere is not (as is often thought) to blurt out something unpleasant. In his Outline of Aesthetic Realism, under the heading “Sincerity Is Oneself as Real,” Mr. Siegel explains:
When one sees that it is best to be exact about oneself, for oneself is as real as anything in the world, sincerity is liked and followed. more
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Art, Horror, & Two Kinds of Power / Number 1844, March 13, 2013
...The lecture [we are serializing] is about something which Aesthetic Realism—and, really, Aesthetic Realism alone—shows to be of the utmost importance in every person’s life. It is this: Do we want to see our feelings exactly, critically; or do we go on the notion that our feelings must be right, because they’re ours? The latter is more frequent by far. It is a form of contempt for the world and makes for cruelty, both ordinary and massive....
[R.G. Collingwood, from whose work Mr. Siegel is quoting,] is writing mainly about art. Aesthetic Realism, however, is the philosophy which shows that the questions of self are aesthetic questions. It shows that art is not separate from what we, in our tumult and hopes and worries, are. Art has what we are looking for; it is how we want to be... more
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Power, Kindness, & Our Feelings / Number 1843, February 27, 2013
The lecture [we are serializing] is about something people do every day, usually don’t think about, and when they do think about it, generally consider it smart. But it is actually, Aesthetic Realism shows, a massive cause of self-weakening, pain, and cruelty. It is the right people give themselves to see their feelings any way they please; to assume that because they have a certain feeling the feeling must be right; to lie about their feelings, even to themselves…. more
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The Fight in Everyone & the Answer of Art / Number 1767, March 31, 2010
[In this issue, Aesthetic Realism Consultant Devorah Tarrow writes about opposites central in every person's life: logic & passion. Ellen Reiss explains:] Those opposites torment people, even as they may joke and pretend to be at ease on the subject. Both men and women take for granted that there's a separation between their reasoning minds and the feelings and desires of their bodies; and yet, however they may act, they're very much ashamed that what drives them does not go along with accurate thought...Ms. Tarrow shows how these opposites can at last be one.
[In the part of Eli Siegel's lecture published her he describes] the thing in all of us which interferes with our own lives[:] contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else." Aesthetic Realism shows that everyone, however unknowingly, treasures contempt, sees it as making us important and comfortable, and yet it's that which weakens us, impairs our judgment, makes us feel nervous and empty, makes us mean. Contempt...is a division between the largest opposites in our lives: care for self, and what the outside world is and deserves....more
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Care for Self—& an Unlimited World / Number 1736, January 21, 2009
In TRO 1735 we published the first part of the opening lecture in a series that Eli Siegel gave early in the history of Aesthetic Realism. These 37 lectures took place at New York’s Steinway Hall from August 1946 through April 1947, and unlike his later audio-recorded talks, they have come to us only through notes. Published here is the conclusion to that introductory talk, which began with Mr. Siegel explaining: “Aesthetic Realism says that every person—whether Hedy Lamarr or Harry Truman or a dishwasher or a philosopher—has one problem: the problem of Self and World.”
In the concluding portion, he quotes Freud, who was seen as the Grand Authority on mind, and Karen Horney, who made social factors more important than Freud had. And Mr. Siegel describes briefly and clearly a principal way that Aesthetic Realism’s explanation of self is vastly different from theirs. He is illustrating this central principle of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”...more
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For a President & the People of America / Number 1732, November 26, 2008
At this time, when America has had an election that is historic, we publish the 5th section of the lecture we've been serializing—a lecture that explains the economy of now and what Americans are looking for, as a nation and as individuals. It is Once More, the World, by Eli Siegel. We also print part of a paper by Aesthetic Realism consultant and actor Bennett Cooperman, from a public seminar of last month titled “How Can We Like Ourselves in a Tough World?”
Once More, the World, given at the end of 1970, is one of Mr. Siegel's great Goodbye Profit System lectures. In May of that year, he explained that the world had reached the point at which economics based on a selfish, ugly, unethical way of seeing one's fellow humans no longer worked....more
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Every Person Stands for the World / Number 1725, August 20, 2008
Here is the conclusion of the great...lecture we have been serializing: Poetry Is of Man, by Eli Siegel. [In it,] he speaks about what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the central fight within all human beings. It is the battle between ill will and good will, or contempt and respect. Contempt, the feeling we will increase ourselves by lessening something or someone else, is the source of every injustice, prejudice, human brutality....more
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People, Literature, & Evolution / Number 1723, July 23, 2008
In [Eli Siegel's] 1974 lecture [Poetry Is of Man], informally, sometimes playfully, yet always carefully, he shows that humanity and evolution itself have an aesthetic structure. He is illustrating this Aesthetic Realism principle: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."
[In a paper included here, an Aesthetic Realism associate tells what she learned about contempt,] which Aesthetic Realism identifies as "the greatest danger or temptation of every person:...the addition to self through the lessening of something else." In households across America, contempt is what has a sister find her brother boring; a son sum up his father; a child see his mother as existing to make him important; a girl feel she has the right to boss around her sister; a boy feel triumphant calling his little brother 'you jerk!'; and the whole family feel they're far superior to the family next door, whom they often mock at dinner together."...more
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The Need to Know a Person / Number 1714, March 19, 2008
In [his lecture Some Women Looked At,] discussing literary and historical passages about women, [Eli Siegel] shows that every woman stands for the world itself. Every person does, and not in some mystical, high-flown way--because the opposites that make up reality are in everyone. Women throughout the years and now have been mixed up, sometimes tormented, by such opposites in us as yielding and assertion, depth and surface, gentleness and strength. This great lecture is an illustration of the central principle of Aesthetic Realism: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."...
The hero of this issue of TRO is The Need to Know a Person. And one of the greatnesses of Aesthetic Realism is that it explains something said nowhere else: What's necessary for love between two people to fare well and what's necessary for economics (that seemingly impersonal, unromantic thing) to fare well, are the same. Further, the trouble in love and the cruelty and inefficiency in world economics have the same cause....more
This issue includes:
The Opposites, Love, & Florence Nightingale / Number 1713, March 5, 2008
[In his lecture Some Women Looked At,] as Mr. Siegel looks at various writings about women, he has us feel with vividness, with texture, what is in this explanation at the basis of Aesthetic Realism: the opposites, which make up reality, are in us, and in order to like ourselves, truly to be ourselves, we have to make them one.
In the present section, he speaks about the famous, the revered, the hugely valuable Florence Nightingale. He speaks of her with a necessary brevity, amidst many women in this lecture of about an hour's length...more
This issue includes:
The Comprehension Men & Women Desire / Number 1712, February 20, 2008
With clarity, depth, often humor, always kindness and style, [Eli Siegel] comments on various descriptions, literary and historical, of women [in his lecture Some Women Looked At]....We see opposites in women—in the same woman: such opposites as sweetness and fierceness, yielding and assertion, humility and pride. And we see both men's and women's confusion about the opposites.
In this issue there appears only a brief section of Some Women Looked At, because I want to join with that 1952 talk another instance—20 years later—of Eli Siegel's beautiful comprehension of women. In 1972 he lectured on the novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). At the time, I wrote a report of the lecture, and it is this report which is printed here."...more
This issue includes:
The Beautiful Understanding of Bitterness / Number 1711, February 6, 2008
[In the culturally important and enormously kind 1952 lecture we've been serializing,] using literary and historical texts, [Eli Siegel] presents various ways women have been seen. And we learn about men's confusion about women and the confusion within women themselves. Aesthetic Realism explains that the questions, the turmoil, the hopes of a person are aesthetic matters, as described in this principle: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." Most often, men have been inexact with the opposites in thinking about women—haven't made opposites one….A man feels, painfully, that his own forcefulness and gentleness don't go together. A woman feels hers don't. And she doesn't understand these opposites in a man she knows. She doesn't see that, without being clear about it, he hopes desperately to make them one somehow: to feel he can be strong and kind at once. And she doesn't see that she has the same unclear but unremitting hope....more
This issue includes:
Woman: Assertion & Yielding / Number 1710, January 23, 2008
We are serializing a lecture that Eli Siegel gave over half a century ago, and that is still new today and needed in its kind, culturally wide, critically powerful understanding of people [Some Women Looked At]. In the section printed here [part 2], he quotes Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59) on three women. Though Mr. Siegel does not name the opposites, we see a drama, in women, of assertion and yielding, and related opposites, like pride and humility, affecting and being affected....more
This issue includes:
The Understanding of Women & Men / Number 1709, January 9, 2008
This issue contains part 1 of Eli Siegel's 1952 lecture Some Women Looked At….Aesthetic Realism explains—beautifully, richly, and clearly—that the questions of men and the questions of women are essentially the same. Our largest hopes are the same, and so are our largest mistakes….
This great Aesthetic Realism principle is true of men and women alike: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." For example, a woman right now wants to feel she can be both strong and gentle. She doesn't know she's pained because when she's gentle she doesn't feel she's strong, and when she's strong she feels she's no longer considerate, delicate, tender. And she doesn't know that the man she's close to has these same opposites, that he too is troubled by them, and wants to make them one....more
This issue includes:
The Human Self: Confusion & Grandeur / Number 1707, December 12, 2007
Mr. Siegel wrote the poem [published here] about [writer Norman] Mailer in 1956, when that author was quite controversial. Meanwhile, years later, when he came to be treated as a literary elder statesman, Mailer was still, like every person, controversial to himself. We don't know how to see ourselves; how to be for and against ourselves; how, as this poem says, to make sense of our mind and body, modesty and boldness, our desire to be exact and our desire to be completely free....more
This issue includes:
The Beauty of Art & the Pain about Love / Number 1687, March 7, 2007
This TRO...is an illustration of the fact that Aesthetic Realism is strict logic, philosophic logic, and is also up to one's most personal confusions and the hopes and griefs of social life right now. In both respects, Aesthetic Realism is great.
[In The Opposites Theory, published here, Eli Siegel speaks about the opposites one and many, which affect everyone's life.] All over the world, millions of women are making the mistake which can be called unifying a man falsely. Every man is multitudinous. He has in him feelings; thoughts; the effect on him of all the people he ever met; an impression, say, of sunlight on snow when he was five; worry about a friend; his job, with all its aspects; his interests; his resentments; the books he's read; and more, and more….more
This issue includes:
- Eli Siegel's discussion of oneness and manyness in philosophy and in various arts
- Consultant Devorah Tarrow on "Mistakes Women Make in Love—What Are They, & Is There an Answer?"
Everyone's Question: How Can I Like Myself? / Number 1684, January 24, 2007
The biggest question people have today is the question men and women had fifty years ago, a hundred, a thousand years ago: How can I like myself—finally like myself?! The therapies that have come and gone, the exhortations to 'think positively,' the reassurances from friends, have not enabled people to look good to themselves deeply. Nor have they brought clarity to the accompanying question: Why don't I like myself?
The answers to those biggest of questions, those questions closest to the life of everyone, are in Aesthetic Realism....more
This issue includes:
- Several short, philosophic poems by Eli Siegel
- An article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Ernest DeFilippis: "Wowing Others Isn't Liking Oneself"
What Purpose Should We Have with People? / Number 1683, January 10, 2007
This issue is about the most important subject in the world: how should we think about people, and the world itself?...
An aspect of people's trouble about the matter is in an article that appeared last month in the New York Times. Reporter Bob Morris writes about holiday parties and the agony people have about mingling, speaking to strangers, figuring out what to say. He quotes a woman "who runs a successful public relations firm": "I'd rather stick needles in my eye," she says, "than have to work those rooms."
What neither she, nor the Times writer, nor others see is that the ill-at-easeness people can have at parties has to do with something much larger. It has to do with what Aesthetic Realism shows is the biggest fight in the life of everyone: between the desire to respect the world and people, and the desire to have contempt for them....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss describing why people feel so ill-at-ease in social life
- Two poems by Eli Siegel: "Being Good" and "Hopes That Are Large"
- Consultant Jeffrey Carduner's article from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar: "What's the Difference between Wowing People & Liking Oneself?"
Can Sex & Integrity Go Together? / Number 1682, December 27, 2006
Today—through television, film, magazine articles, psychological counselors—we have an atmosphere in which people feel that they shouldn't be ashamed as to sex no matter what takes place, and that if they are, it's because they're prudes or unduly pious. There is a tremendous pretense of ease on the subject. Meanwhile, though people may not express it—though they may speak as though they're completely comfortable about body—a big uneasiness, a gnawing self-disapproval, goes on. Men and women feel as to sex: "This happened, and we both seemed for it very much. But why don't I like myself?" Aesthetic Realism explains why, and what can have men and women respect themselves in relation to sex—and the answer is not narrow a bit. It's in the lesson printed here. And it's in the following distinction, stated by Mr. Siegel: 'Sex...is always either for contempt or respect.'...more
This issue includes:
Freedom That Is Justice Too / Number 1679, November 15, 2006
In the lecture we are serializing...Eli Siegel explains something huge, not understood before: he explains what freedom really is. Mme Roland’s words on the matter are famous: “O liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!” The reason that freedom, or liberty, has been so often a cover for cruelty and for just plain being wrong, this also the lecture explains.
Mr. Siegel is showing that authentic freedom is a oneness of opposites. It is not only expression, doing what one pleases; it is simultaneously accuracy, justice. Unless we feel our being just is the same as our being free, we’ll be ethically sloppy, unkind, even brutal. That is why there is so much unkindness in personal life, and so much cruelty within and among nations....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss abou true and false freedom, and the meaning of the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution
- Part of Eli Siegel's 1970 lecture There Are Two Freedoms. In this section, he discusses a poem from Mother Goose and an anecdote about Samuel Johnson to show aspects of what freedom is.
- Part of a paper by consultant Nancy Huntting, "What Takes Care of Me?," from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
Freedom—& Words, Nations, Love / Number 1675, September 20, 2006
[In his lecture There Are Two Freedoms, Eli Siegel] explains what that great thing, freedom, truly is. He shows that if freedom is not the same as accuracy, and not the same as justice, then it's not really freedom: it's messiness, and it's contempt….
We want to care for someone. We also want to be free. But because a person I'll call Tom does not think freedom is the same as seeing and feeling accurately what other things are—as he's affected by his wife, Dana, he feels he's losing his freedom. Dana makes the same mistake. One result is that each has a way of not listening to what the other is saying. This happens because a good deal of what a person sees as freedom is the ability to wipe out in one's mind what's other than oneself and to feel one is a world unto oneself, apart from and superior to everything else. That is the "freedom" Tom is going for as he thinks of something else while Dana talks to him....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss, on the meaning of freedom in personal life and economics
- Eli Siegel's discussion of a pictorial history of 1964
The Most Hopeful Thing in the World: Relation / Number 1673, August 23, 2006
...[In the article by him pubished here, Aesthetic Realism associate Kevin] Fennell writes about something so constant, so little talked about, so not understood; something that makes every person ashamed, with a kind of ongoing, taken-for-granted shame. It is what Eli Siegel calls, in his essay by that title, "the ordinary doom." And Aesthetic Realism understands it and enables it to end. "If we judge from history," Mr. Siegel writes,
we are doomed not to show our feelings; not to have them known. There have been many, many persons who have lived rather long lives, and who have been in many conversations; who yet did not show what was in their minds, what feelings they truly had. When people can't show their emotion, they are disappointed and resentful.
As people go through their days with a rift between what's inside them and what they show, there is, on the one hand, the deep disappointment even as they smile, joke, act casual and assured. On the other hand, those same individuals can get a triumph in having a life within and another for show....more
This issue includes
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss writes about how Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel see the meaning of relation, showing that the most hopeful thing in our lives is how we see our relation to the outside world through the opposites. As instances, she writes of our relation to the ocean and a lake.
- Two poems by Eli Siegel: "Recurrent March" and "Roar-Roar as Relation"
- An article by Kevin Fennell: "Public Self and Private Thoughts"
What Kind of Attention Do You Want? / Number 1646, August 10, 2005
... "The useful way of seeing mind," [Eli Siegel] writes in Self and World, is "to look upon it as a continual question of aesthetics." That is, in every aspect of our lives we are hoping to put opposites together—the same opposites that are one in every instance of art. In this final section, Mr. Siegel quotes the poet Keats to show how a person with one of the most important of minds was struggling to make sense of pride and humility, uncertainty and sureness, the being for the world and against it....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary about the kind of attention people truly want, using as an instance the writing of John Keats, whom Mr. Siegel discusses in the lecture being serialized here
- The final section of Psychiatric Terms and Shelley, Byron, Keats, by Eli Siegel
- Part of a paper by actress Carol McCluer from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar "The Drama in Everyone about Getting and Giving Attention"
The Ethical Unconscious of Everyone / Number 1634, February 23, 2005
In his [1966 lecture being serialized here] Mr. Siegel is discussing an alphabetical list of terms put out by the American Psychiatric Association. While “beginning with” them, as the lecture's title says, he is describing the self as such, as Aesthetic Realism explains it....
The central question is whether, in the various forms of mental ailment—from nervousness, to depression, to the “hypochondriasis” Mr. Siegel speaks about here—there is contempt for the world , and also a person's punishment of herself or himself for having this contempt. That is what Mr. Siegel, in many lectures and writings, made clear, and what no one saw before him. Further, the fight between our deepest desire, to like the world, and our desire to have contempt is the big, continuous fight within everybody....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss in which she discusses an important 20th century poem by James Stephens, "The Waste Places," to illustrate the fact that "we have that in us which looks at us, questions us"
- The 3rd section of Mr. Siegel's lecture Beginning with Psychiatric Terms: An Aesthetic Realism Consideration, about the term "hypochondriasis"
- "What's Real Intelligence?" by Michael Palmer, from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
The Two Desires / Number 1631, January 12, 2005
In this issue we conclude our serialization of the lecture Everyday Life and Aesthetics Look at Psychiatric Terms, which Eli Siegel gave in 1966. It is one of several lectures based on Mr. Siegel's looking at an American Psychiatric Association glossary. The lectures are wide-ranging, informal, critical, sometimes humorous, and in them is the great Aesthetic Realism understanding of the human self.
We print too part of a paper by New York City high school teacher Leila Rosen, from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar.......more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss in which she illustrates how Aesthetic Realism explains the two central desires in people through looking at poems by James Stephens
- The final part of Eli Siegel's lecture on aesthetics and psychiatric terms, with discussions of empathy and epilepsy
- The article by Leila Rosen from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “What's Real Intelligence about the World and Ourselves?”
Everyday Life, Aesthetics, & Psychiatric Terms / Number 1629, December 15, 2004
We continue to serialize Everyday Life and Aesthetics Look at Psychiatric Terms, by Eli Siegel. This lecture of 1966 is one of several in which he discusses a glossary of terms compiled by the American Psychiatric Association. The lecture is informal; often it has humor; and Mr. Siegel comments on some terms swiftly, others more lengthily. Yet throughout, he is presenting the Aesthetic Realism explanation of self: the explanation of that tremendous, intricate, so uncomprehended subject—our own mind and what in us hurts it.
“The greatest danger or temptation of man,” Mr. Siegel wrote, “is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself, which lessening is Contempt.” He showed that contempt is the decisive factor in every instance of mental mishap....more
This issue includes:
- A discussion, in Ellen Reiss's commentary, of a recent New York Times article about the term "passive-aggressive"—and what it stands for in the self
- The next section of Mr. Siegel's lecture on aesthetics and psychiatric terms, in which he looks at the terms "criminally insane," "delirium," "delusion," and "delusions of grandeur"
- Aesthetic Realism associate Barbara Buehler's paper, from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar, "To Run People or Understand Them?"
The Trouble about Communication / Number 1627, November 17, 2004
...Technology has made communication of a certain kind ever so easy. You can telephone a person as you walk down the street. You can sit in a chair in Ohio and exchange views over the Internet with someone in Asia whom you never heard of before. Meanwhile, people still feel, as persons did in previous centuries, that their emotions, thoughts, life within are deeply separate from other people; that even a person one is close to doesn’t know who one truly is. Eli Siegel describes the situation, and the everyday, taken-for-granted emptiness it makes for, in his eloquent essay “The Ordinary Doom.” For example, he writes:
We early come to feel we are not seen right, and it appears we never will be. So we accommodate ourselves to this. It is dull, basic tragedy. In the long run, it is unnecessary.*
That this non-communication is unnecessary, that Aesthetic Realism explains it and enables people to show themselves and be known, I consider one of the kindest, most important facts in human history....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary about the meaning of communication, and what interferes with it. She asks "Six Questions about Communication."
- Two poems by Eli Siegel: "Question" and "Stuffy Town"
- "Why Can’t People Communicate?" by Jaime Torres, from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
How Much Should We Feel? / Number 1620, August 11, 2004
...[In the lecture we're serializing] Mr. Siegel is discussing a list of psychiatric terms and definitions presented by the American Psychiatric Association and published in the Reader's Digest Almanac for 1966. His comments on each term are purposely brief and informal; there is humor—and there is also what he has described with tremendous fulness and variety elsewhere: his landmark explanation of the central purpose we have and of that in us which interferes. Our largest desire, he showed,
is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.... [And] the desire to have contempt for the outside world and for people and other objects as standing for the outside world, is a continuous, unseen desire making for mental insufficiency. [Self and World, p.1]....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss writes about why people go after lessening their feeling about the world, using sentences from a letter of John Keats to illustrate this
- A section of Mr. Siegel's lecture on psychiatric terms, in which he speaks about the meaning of "catalepsy"
- Part of a paper by Lynette Abel from a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation: "A Hope for Disappointment"
Art versus Ill Nature / Number 1617, June 30, 2004
Eli Siegel wrote the work printed here, “With Acting in Mind,” on January 27, 1961—the same month that he wrote “Remarks on Acting” and “Acting,” published in issues 1585 and 1531 of this journal. The ten points that comprise “With Acting in Mind” are about the very fabric of acting—they’re technical—yet they’re also about the feelings of everyone, actor or not. And the writing’s style is beautiful; it has charm and depth....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's discussion of what makes for ill nature in people, with lines from the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge describing ill nature
- "With Acting in Mind"— a work by Eli Siegel that describes technically what actors need to think of
- "Is Good Nature Intelligent?" by consultant Robert Murphy, from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
Are We Proud of How We're For & Against? / Number 1613, May 5, 2004
...Mr. Siegel gave [the lecture we're serializing] just after an off-year election, and he describes something large in the state of mind of Americans as they went to voting places. He says there was a pervasive sourness, grouchiness, ill nature—because people had a feeling of deep objection about their working lives, their economic lives, the cost of healthcare and goods, but were not clear about the objection, or its cause, or how to give form to it.
America now is different. Yet there is still that smoldering, sometimes exploding objection. It's more intense than ever. And it's still looking for comprehension, form, clarity. It is the objection Mr. Siegel articulated in his Goodbye Profit System lectures of the 1970s: people resent having their lives used to make money for somebody else—some employer or stockholders who don't do the work. They resent being seen in terms of how much profit can be gotten out of them....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, describing how the opposites for and against are in how people feel about the economy, and how they see other people—both accurately and inaccurately
- Part of Mr. Siegel's 1950 lecture Aesthetic Realism and the World, with a discussion of a New York Times article about mental health care in America at the time
- "The Drama in Men about Boredom" by Joseph Meglino, from a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
Poetry, Self, and Love / Number 1605, January 14, 2004
Eli Siegel explained that what makes for a true poem is the very thing that will make a person’s life happy, intelligent, proud. What takes place in the technique of a good poem is what we need, and we suffer because we do not have it: "All beauty," he showed, "is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." We publish his 1960 essay "What Aesthetic Realism Adds to Poetry; or, If One Wishes, Just Says about It."
The title is very modest—because what Aesthetic Realism adds to poetry is the biggest thing in the centuries-long history of poetic criticism. It is what such critics as Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Boileau, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold thirsted to see: the thing that makes one arrangement of words poetry and another not....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's discussion of a poem by Emily Dickinson, "I Got So I Could Take His Name"
- Mr. SIegel's essay, in which he shows, in vivid points, a new way of seeing the value of poetry
- Consultant Ernest De Filippis, writing on: "Vanity vs. Happiness"
What Representation Means / Number 1601, December 10, 2003
In this section [of the lecture we're serializing, Eli Siegel] comments on the "black power" movement which was gaining strength then, and on its importance in showing what representation means.
[The subject of the paper published here—the fight in self between coldness and warmth,] is related very much to the subject Mr. Siegel speaks on so deeply, widely, and kindly in the lecture we're serializing. If there is a coldness in us toward the world—and everyone has some—if we see the world as worthy not of our care but of our contempt, it will affect enormously the way we see representation....more
This isssue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's discussion of "voter apathy"
- Part 4 of Mr. Siegel's lecture of 1968 We Are Unrepresented
- "The Mix-up in Men about Coldness and Warmth"—a paper by Steve Weiner from a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
Art and Anger / Number 1585, August 20, 2003
We’re honored to print “Remarks on Acting,” by Eli Siegel. They were written in January 1961, in a notebook he kept, about the same time he wrote “Acting,” the 22 great, humorous instances for actors to perform which we published last year in TRO 1531. These shorter “Remarks” are beautiful—they present both the grandeur and the factual, workmanlike quality of acting at once....
Part of what makes the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism so important and needed is what [the article included here is]about: Aesthetic Realism shows that anger, and other large emotions—such as fear, hope, like, dislike—each has two forms, one good and one bad....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss about the way Aesthetic Realism sees two kinds of anger—one hurtful, and one on behalf of justice, including in art
- "Remarks on Acting" by Eli Siegel
- "Should Men Understand Anger?"—part of a paper by consultant Bennett Cooperman from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
Point, Width, & Being False to Oneself / Number 1567, April 16, 2003
...In the lecture [we're publishing], Mr. Siegel speaks about two opposites that are in us and in events, and are made one in every instance of art: width and point, or welter and resolution. As he does, we are looking at this central principle of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”
There is a spurious, very hurtful dealing with width and point that every person is prone to. One can feel that one’s life has much confusion in it, that there is so much one doesn’t comprehend about oneself. And there is a desire to take that uncomfortable welter, that width of confusion, and, without having to think, make it come to some swift point, to some rapid sureness, and so feel bewildered no longer. People can get to this fake sureness in many ways. Anger is a principal one....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, illustrating various ways people have welcomed contempt, in ordinary life and as nations
- The final section of Eli Siegel's lecture Has Poetry Point? in which he speaks of the famous trial and ultimate acquittal of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in the 1920s from the book The Lawless Decade
- Consultant Robert Murphy's paper, "A Man: Large and Small," from a recent seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
What Is Success—for a Person or a Nation? / Number 1566, April 9, 2003
...We print part of a paper that actress Carol McCluer presented last month at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar [about success]....As she shows, Aesthetic Realism answers that question—a fact of historic importance and also urgency, because the question stands for so much of the pain of people and nations. That is: both a person and a land can attain what they thought was success, yet be flops deeply, intensely, because what they saw as success was not that at all.
What does it mean for America to be a success? This is a pressing question now, as it has been at other times....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss about the meaning of success, including for a nation. She quotes a poem by Eli Siegel written during the Vietnam War which shows "there can be displays of might which nevertheless are true failure, make for true failure."
- The next section of Has Poetry Point? of 1969, in which Mr. Siegel discusses the important poem of the Civil War by James Sloane Gibbon "Three Hundred Thousand More"
- A paper by Carol McCluer: "What's Real Success?" from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
Point & Width—in Love & a Nation / Number 1564, March 26, 2003
This issue of TRO is about eternal aesthetics and urgent life. Here is part 2 in our serialization of Has Poetry Point?, the rich and surprising and great lecture that Eli Siegel gave on July 9, 1969. Mr. Siegel is speaking about opposites which, he has explained, are made one in all poetry, and he is showing how they meet in life itself. These opposites are width and point, or area and center. And in the present section, he looks at an instance of width become point in America of that time—in the midst of the Vietnam War. We are at the very basis of Aesthetic Realism, the principle “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”...more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, describing how a nation, like a person, is a oneness of point and width
- The next section of Has Poetry Point? by Eli Siegel, in which he discusses an ad in the New York Times by the American Institute of Architects. Its message, he says, is "Taxes for schools and things like that, yes!; money for war, no! "
- Part of a paper by Aesthetic Realism associate Michael Palmer: "Intelligent about Love?"
Cynicism or Like of the World / Number 1562, March 12, 2003
We begin to serialize the important and deep and kind and often funny lecture Has Poetry Point?, which Eli Siegel gave in 1969....In [it] Mr. Siegel is speaking about the very basis of Aesthetic Realism: the principle “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.” What kind of world is this? And how should we see it?
Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy which says that the deepest purpose of every person—though we may be massively untrue to it—is to like the world honestly. And the chief reason this world can be liked “is that the world has the opposites which, as one, we see as beauty itself.” That is what Mr. Siegel illustrates in this 1969 lecture, in terms of a particular pair of opposites: point and width....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary in which Ellen Reiss shows that cynicism is a form of, and comes from, dislike of the world
- The first section of the 1969 lecture by Eli Siegel. He speaks about point and width in relation to a passage about Prohibition in The Lawless Decade, a book by Paul Sann.
- An article by consultant Ernest DeFilippis, part of a paper he gave at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar “Is a Man’s Cynicism Weakness or Strength?”
Eli Siegel Day in Baltimore / Number 1534, August 28, 2002
In this issue we publish statements presented on August 16 at the Dedication of the Eli Siegel Memorial in Druid Hill Park, Baltimore, Maryland. Mr. Siegel grew up in Baltimore. And that day, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, was proclaimed 'Eli Siegel Day' in Baltimore by the city's mayor, Martin O'Malley, and 'Eli Siegel Day' in Maryland by the state's governor, Parris N. Glendening....Published in this issue too are Aesthetic Realism consultants Margot Carpenter and Robert Murphy, about love; and the statement by Chaim Koppelman, designer and sculptor of the memorial plaque....more
The Purpose a Woman Wants / Number 1527, July 10, 2002
The question which torments women now, even though a woman most often does not articulate it: How can I love a man and be loved, and yet be fully myself? This matter has not fared well because, for one thing, men haven't wanted it to. We know that men, and that thing called society, for ever so many centuries did not permit woman to be all she could be. But what has not been seen is that a woman herself has had purposes which make for a profound schism in her, a feeling that she is a different person in love from the person who wants to express herself in the wide world....more
This issue includes:
- A discussion by Ellen Reiss of passages from an Aesthetic Realism lesson with Eli Siegel about what a woman is hoping for from a man
- A section of El Siegel's 1949 lecture Poetry and Women, in which he speaks of the English poet Caroline Norton (1808-77)
Love, Economics, and Ordinary Contempt / Number 1521, May 29, 2002
We print the conclusion of Eli Siegel’s great 1970 lecture Selves Are in Economics. And with it is part of a paper presented last month at the Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “Do Women Have a Fight between Love and Scorn?” It is by New York City elementary school teacher Lauren Phillips.
The thing in us that hampers and kills love; the thing that has made economics a field for ill will, cruelty, and suffering; that which weakens our mind and makes for all unkindness—is, Eli Siegel showed, the desire for contempt. He defined contempt as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” I comment a little on a very elemental form of contempt, which people don’t know goes on in them day after day. It is the seeing of other things and people as less real than we are, and a concomitant desire not to be affected by them beyond a certain point....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary about how Aesthetic Realism explains that the cause of pain in both love and economics comes from the fact that people do not see other people as fully real; this contempt, Ellen Reiss explains, is the opposite of what art does
- The final section of Selves Are in Economics, in which Mr. Siegel speaks about an article of 1910 about women's suffrage and a recent (1970) article about good and evil in the field of finance
- The article by Lauren Phillps "A Fight between Love & Scorn"
Education, Attention, & Love / Number 1455, February 21, 2001
...At the basis of the lecture we are serializing is Mr. Siegel's historic, definitive explanation of the purpose of education: it is to like the world through knowing it. I comment a little on that explanation, in relation to a matter closely connected with education, around which there has been much agony: the subject of attention.
In the New York Times of February 8, there is an article about a new attempt to "improve [children's] ability to pay attention." For $899, parents can purchase a "computer game system" based on "teaching a user to modify brain waves." Playing it, the child wears a "helmet equipped with sensors that monitor brain wave activity." The article tells us that "at least 800,000 school-age children have attention disorders." And in the last two decades, drugs, particularly Ritalin, have been massively poured into thousands upon thousands of children to make their minds not so restless....more
This lecture includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss explaining how a child's desire to dislike the world interferes with his or her ability to learn, to pay attention—and how learning to see reality as a oneness of opposites has one feel the world can be honestly liked
- The 8th section of Mr. Siegel's lecture Educational Method Is Poetic
- An article by consultant Karen Van Outryve from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar: "Woman: Tender and Severe"
Sex, Poetry, & Self-Respect / Number 1446, December 20, 2000
Eli Siegel explains in the section of [the] 1948 lecture [published here], and in Aesthetic Realism as such, that the human self is made so the only pleasure that can truly satisfy us is pleasure which has in it respect for reality. Any other pleasure makes us ashamed...I comment briefly on that bewildering field of pleasure, sex. Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that makes sense of sex at last, and enables one to see it in such a way that one feels proud and kind.
The fact that in our time persons speak about sex glibly and seemingly boldly, and may have a lot of it, does not alter the fact they are as ill at ease about sex deeply as people ever were. In the media and in conversations there is a display of ease, to cover up the fact that one is tormented about body. Then, one person looks at another and feels, "I wish I were as comfortable about sex as he is"—and doesn't see that this "he" is putting on a show, trying to convince himself, as well as others, how very comfortable he is....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, in which she describes why people are confused about sex and what the true purpose of sex is
- A section of Eli Siegel's lecture Poetry and Pleasure with a discussion of a poem by Andrew Marvell: "A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure"
- Consultant Carrie Wilson on "Popular Mistakes in Love"
What We Meet, Are, & Wear / Number 1437, October 18, 2000
...In [the lecture serialized here], Mr. Siegel speaks about the approach to literature of Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828-93), an approach with which Aesthetic Realism disagrees. Taine said the defining thing in a literary work is "la race, le milieu, le moment"—the author's heredity, surroundings, and time.That is not so.The defining thing, and what makes a work art or not, is its structure, how it is made, whether the artist has been able to give his subject authentic form. But because Taine emphasized so much the material world that a writer meets, Mr. Siegel uses him to show something central to Aesthetic Realism: that reality with its happenings has a structure like the structure of a poetic line—the oneness of opposites.
And Aesthetic Realism explains that in order to understand ourselves, we need to see that we are trying to put opposites together. We need to see this to make sense of the most crucial matters in our lives, the biggest, the deepest: love, the way we get angry, how we look on persons different from ourselves, our ability or inability to learn. But for now I comment…on something which seems less urgent yet affects people constantly: what takes us in an article of clothing….more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's discussion of the opposites in clothing—in Chaucer's 14th century description of the Wife of Bath and in clothing ads in a 21st century newspaper
- Part of Eli Siegel's 1958 lecture Poetry As Happening, with comment on Taine's writing about Chaucer.
- "What's True Expression?"—a paper from a public seminar by English teacher and Aesthetic Realism Associate Leila Rosen
Energy, and an American Election / Number 1428, August 16, 2000
…Energy that is valuable, [Eli Siegel explains in the lecture published here], is inseparable from something very different: purpose, or shape. When energy—in ourselves or anywhere—does not have an accurate purpose, and does not have form, it is not really energy but something people experience often: painful hecticness; or agitation accompanied by a sense of hollowness; or ugly determination-on-the-move.
And so we come to the US presidential campaign—for it contains some of the most wasteful, fake energy ever. As I write of it, my purpose is not to comment on whom Americans in voting booths might or should or shouldn't choose, but to describe something of the state of mind of millions of people, whatever choice they make....more
This issue includes:
- "1960 Regret Poems" by Eli Siegel, and his note to them from Hail: American Development
- Part of his lecture Poetry and Energy, about the meaning of energy as it is in nature and in humanity
- A paper by actress and Aesthetic Realism Associate Carol McCluer: "Trying to Be Important"
Energy, Poetry, & Mistakes about Love / Number 1427, August 9, 2000
…Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy that explains that every person is in relation, all the time, to the whole world. I love this idea. I have seen that it is not only true, and is not only the beginning for understanding the previously not understood confusions and turmoil and hopes of people—it gives an authentic largeness to the life of every human being. Right now a baby is being born, not just to a particular mother and father but into all of reality. And Aesthetic Realism shows that the deepest desire of that baby is to like the reality into which she is born: to like the world. That is the desire which Mr. Siegel, in the present section of Poetry and Energy, calls "the Desire of Desires." And honestly to like the world itself is our deepest purpose every moment: as we hold a coffee cup, or look intently into a mirror, or look across a restaurant table at a person....more
This issue includes:
- What Aesthetic Realism shows about why love fails, as described by Ellen Reiss—and her showing that the answer people are looking for is in poetry
- A portion of Mr. Siegel's 1949 lecture Poetry and Energy, in which he discusses a poem by Thomas Traherne of the 17th century
- Lynette Abel on "Mistakes about Importance," from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
There Is an Ethical Unconscious / Number 1421, June 28, 2000
…A matter in the world of sports that has been affecting people very much is close to the subject of [the] article [by an Aesthetic Realism Consultant published here]. That matter is the repeated inability of award-winning Yankee second baseman Chuck Knoblauch to make simple throws successfully. The June 17 New York Times quotes a sports psychologist, Rick Wolff, who says such troubles occur when a player starts to think consciously about an action that should be spontaneous. But even if Wolff is correct (I'm not sure he is), he doesn't know why such a change in thought and feeling happens: "There's no rhyme or reason," he says. Well, there is a reason for the tumult of an eminent ballplayer, as there is for all people's. Aesthetic Realism is the means of knowing it, because Eli Siegel is the person of thought who understood the human self….more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's beautiful discussion of what in the self of Yankee Chuck Knoblauch might have interfered with his playing, and the thing in everyone that objects to our being unjust to reality
- Section 5 of Eli Siegel's lecture Aesthetic Realism and Nature, in which he looks at passages from Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast
- Consultant Carol Driscoll on "Woman: Sure and Unsure," from a seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
We Are Related to Everything! / Number 1419, June 14, 2000
As we continue to serialize Eli Siegel’s magnificent 1950 lecture Aesthetic Realism and Nature, I am tremendously happy to describe this principle on which it is based, because I see the principle as not only scientifically mighty, but thrillingly kind and beautiful: Aesthetic Realism explains that every person is related to the whole world. There is nothing—no object, happening, or person—with which we do not have to do. All reality is everyone’s heritage. Meanwhile, everyone has a constant desire to make the world less than it is, and this desire is the most hurtful thing in humanity....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary describing how Aesthetic Realism describes the inextricable relation between an individual self and the whole world
- A section of Aesthetic Realism and Nature by Eli Siegel, in which he looks at a passage from Richard Jefferies' writings about nature, and shows that nature includes much more than we usually see
- Part of a paper by consultant Derek Mali from an Aesthetic Realism seminar: "What Kind of Effect?"
Sex, Nature, & the Decisive Criterion / Number 1418, June 7, 2000
What is the thing in us that weakens us? What is the best thing in us? This issue includes a discussion of cybersex—and what it means for a person to decide what he or she most deeply and truly wants. In terms of history and culture: people do not understand what in the self has made for "the best that has been known and thought in the world," as Matthew Arnold put it; and what in the self has caused the brutality present throughout the centuries—has caused what Burns called "man's inhumanity to man." ...more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss describing the beautiful way Aesthetic Realism sees the subject of sex. She writes of how people's desire for contempt has them misuse sex.
- A portion of Eli Siegel's lecture Aesthetic Realism and Nature, about Richard Jefferies' The Story of My Heart
Conversations in Marriage—& Poetry / Number 1413, May 3, 2000
...Aesthetic Realism is that which understands, as nothing else can, the big, beautiful, yet so often painful subject of conversations. I have written on the matter in other TROs; but for now, I say this: What that seminar showed is that if men and women have trouble talking to each other, it isn’t for the reason given in current books—that the male approach to talking and the female are just different. The reason is, persons do not see reality and other persons justly. The man or woman you have to do with stands for reality and humanity; and as that person is in a close and crucial and prolonged relation to you, the amissness in how you both see the world will come forth in your seeing of each other, dealing with each other, speaking with each other....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's explanation how Aesthetic Realism sees what love is, and what interferes with it
- Part 6 of Poetry and Slowness, in which Eli Siegel discusses Tennyson's well-known poem "Crossing the Bar," showing that it has a "kinship between slowness and tremendous wonder"
- Part of a paper by consultant Ernest DeFilippis from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled "What's Missing When Husbands Talk with Wives?"
Poetry—& How People Affect People / Number 1411, April 19, 2000
...Aesthetic Realism explains that the one effect we can ever respect ourselves for going after is that through us another person like the world more: that we are a means of this person’s being more interested in, fairer to, more richly and accurately joined with reality’s things and people. And the reason people can feel uneasy and sometimes desolate about their effect on others, is that this is not what they have gone after. People live whole lives feeling they have not steadily affected another person in a way that makes them proud. They may have impressed persons stupendously; they may have lived with someone for 60 years and gotten and given devotion; yet there is an unarticulated emptiness and shame—because through them a person has not liked the world more, and may, in fact, like the world less.
This matter has to do with poetry; because all poetry that is the real thing, Aesthetic Realism magnificently explains, is like of the world....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary about what Aesthetic Realism teaches about how people hope to affect each other. She discusses how this matter was in the life and poetry of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
- A section of Poetry and Slowness, by Eli Siegel, in which he looks at Yeats's poem "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" to show technically how slowness is part of poetry
- "What Effect?"—part of a paper by Kevin Fennell from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
The Biggest Matter in Your Life / Number 1410, April 12, 2000
A principal way Aesthetic Realism differs from every other approach to mind is its showing that the biggest matter in your life is the fight between your desire to respect the world and your desire to have contempt. Every person wants to find value in things and people. But every person also wants to look down on other people and things as a means of feeling important and superior. Mr. Siegel defined contempt as "the addition to self through the lessening of something else." He showed that contempt is the source of all the unkindness in history, and contempt is also that in a person which causes mental ailment or distress....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss, explaining how Aesthetic Realism sees the distressing matter known as "obsessive-compulsive disorder" in children, and how as related to something in every person
- Part of Eli Siegel's 1949 lecture Poetry and Slowness, in which he discusses George Crabbe's "Peter Grimes"
- An article by science teacher and Aesthetic Realism associate Sally Ross: "Change, Steadiness, & Truth"
Words, Sex, and Kindness / Number 1399, January 26, 2000
…There is more interest now than there ever was in the way couples use words—in how men and women communicate with each other, and often don't communicate so well. Some of the most popular books of recent years have been on that subject. Meanwhile, people still feel that sex is very different from what a sentence is, what a word is, even from what a good conversation is. People still see sex as beyond words—as driving, inarticulate, and magical.
I love Aesthetic Realism for its understanding of both words and sex, and for showing the relation between them. This principle, stated by Eli Siegel, is the basis for understanding how words came to be, how people use them; and also how people are in sex, with all the victory, confusion, anger, and shame attending: "The greatest fight man is concerned with, is the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality" (TRO 151)….more
This issue includes:
- Part of Eli Siegel's 1949 lecture Poetry and Words, with a discussion of lines by Thomas Gray
- Five clear points in which Ellen Reiss shows how Aesthetic Realism sees the relation between words and sex
- "Sex and Kindness," from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar by Associate Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman
The Education of the Coming Century / Number 1395, December 29, 1999
In this final issue of the century, it is an honor to publish a poem by Eli Siegel. And we publish too something standing for the beautiful, thirsted-for, immortal education he founded in 1941: part of a paper by Pauline Meglino, from a recent public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation titled "Owning a Husband or Knowing Him—Which Will Make a Wife Happy?"
There Are Wives are the world authorities on marriage. They teach the monthly "Aesthetic Realism and Marriage Class." And in her paper, Mrs. Meglino quotes from an Aesthetic Realism consultation of a contemporary woman. It moves me tremendously to say in December 1999: Aesthetic Realism consultations are the education of the coming century....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's writing about the meaning of Aesthetic Realism consultations
- Eli Siegel's poem "The Waltz: Truth As Melody"
The Known & Unknown—in People & Poetry / Number 1383, October 6, 1999
We have in this TRO those tremendous opposites of known and unknown....A form in which the unknown comes to a child is the fact that grownups, including parents, bewilder him: they seem to change on him in a way he doesn't understand. Some of the finest prose in English is about this feeling. It is in "The Child," chapter 9 of Eli Siegel's Self and World; and here are a few of many sentences describing a boy's bewilderment: Joe couldn't understand why his mother, Helen, should be irritated with him ....
Sometimes Helen's irritations would occur without notice, just when she seemed to be pleased with the growing and exploring Joe. It just didn't make sense. Here was some being, an important being, smiling at him; and then, some moments later, maybe just because a doorbell rang, or because something in the kitchen went wrong, acting as if she didn't care for Joe at all. [P. 218]
The way people around one can go, without a sense of coherence, from sweetness to displeasure, from wanting to hug one to being aloof, has sometimes been so confusing, so woundingly mysterious, that a child can use it to be against the world itself....more
This issue includes:
- Part of Eli Siegel's lecture Poetry and Excitement
- A paper by Aesthetic Realism Associate Marion Fennell from a seminar titled: "Caring for People—Wisdom or Foolishness?"
The Drama of Excitement and Love / Number 1381, September 22, 1999
Mr. Siegel shows in [the lecture being serialized here] that excitement is always a feeling of opposites converging: hope and fear, for instance; much meaning and a single moment. And he has shown that love too is a oneness of opposites—most notably self and world. The purpose of love is to have more feeling about, be more just to, the people and things of this wide and various world through caring for a particular self whose lips we may kiss. When love "fails," it is because we have failed in making these opposites one.…
The two subjects of this TRO—what excitement is and what love is—meet, often tormentingly, in people's lives. Millions of people right now are in the following situation—which we can put in the words of Kira, married 5 years to Phil: "Here is this man who once made for such excitement in me. When we were dating, just the idea that I would be seeing him, that we would hold each other's hand and look in each other's eyes, made for such a stir inside me. Now we're together—and I'm sure not excited. He's become someone I get so quickly irritated with; talk sarcastically to; even scream at. I suppose we'll stay married for the rest of our lives; but there's a big dullness and emptiness instead of that excitement I once felt. I feel bitter, mixed up, and ashamed."…more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's "Questions about Love & Excitement"
- Part of the lecture Poetry and Excitement, by Eli Siegel, in which he speaks of a humorous poem "Little Billee," by Thackeray
- Aesthetic Realism Consultant and anthropologist Arnold Perey, writing on "Which Goes Wrong—Love or the Lover?"
Excitement, Byron, & the Trouble about Sex / Number 1380, September 15, 1999
This issue serializes a lecture of 1949 by Eli Siegel in which he speaks about Lord Byron....I can say as a person who knows the field: Eli Siegel is the critic who understood Byron, both the man and the poet, supremely—as Byron thirsted to be understood. It moves me very much to comment on some of that understanding as expressed in another lecture: Lord Byron May Yet Be Known, of September 14, 1969. Early in it, after reading a passage by William Hazlitt about Byron's intensity and his desire to escape ennui, Mr. Siegel said:
That hints at Byron's suffering. He wanted not to fall into himself in some dull and lessening way....Byron opposed dullness in himself in two ways: through writing and through women. His big complaint is: after the ecstasy of love he was more in himself than before.
Byron never knew—as no person has before Aesthetic Realism—what differentiates the excitement that makes us proud and more alive, from the excitement that leaves us ashamed, dull, empty....more
This issue includes:
- Passages from Byron's poetry, quoted by Ellen Reiss to illustrate the pain this great English poet had on the subject of sex
- Part of Eli Siegel's 1949 lecture Poetry and Excitement
True Excitement vs. Competition / Number 1379, September 8, 1999
In [his lecture Poetry and Excitement], with such scholarship, vividness, and ease, Mr. Siegel does a tremendous thing: he shows the structure of excitement—that which makes any thing or moment or happening exciting. The basis is this central principle of Aesthetic Realism: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." And as we see that excitement has a structure, a scientific and poetic organization, there are thrill, relief, grandeur—because people have felt excitement and order or dignity were opposites that had to fight; and they have been ashamed and distressed by the disjunction in their lives between an "exciting" time and an accurate or just time….more
This issue includes:
- A description by Ellen Reiss of two kinds of excitement: contempt, which has "the self competing with the world," and the true excitement of respect
- Part of Eli Siegel's 1949 lecture Poetry and Excitement, in which he speaks about two poems by Robert Browning: "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning"
- Aesthetic Realism Associate Miriam Weiss's paper "The Trouble with Competition"
Art versus Weariness / Number 1376, August 18, 1999
"To What Is the Artist Responsible?" is an introduction Eli Siegel wrote in 1973 for a public seminar presented by Aesthetic Realism consultants. This introduction is both leisurely and definitive, kind and historic. As Mr. Siegel answers the question in the title, he explains something huge, which no other critic of art saw….
Aesthetic Realism shows that there are two big purposes fighting within every person, and one of them is the source of all art. The deepest purpose we have is to like the world honestly, to see meaning in it, structure in it. From this purpose have come all intelligence, kindness, courage, and every instance of art in any century and nation. But there is another purpose working in each of us: contempt, which Mr. Siegel defined as "the addition to self through the lessening of something else." He showed—and there is no discovery more crucial or monumental—that all the injustice in history has come from this purpose; and that contempt is also the thing in every person which weakens our own minds and lives, even as we feel we are taking care of ourselves by having it.…more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, which includes a discussion of people's energy has been used unjustly so that some few people can profit, as illustrated in literary works by Zola, E.B. Browning, and Thomas Hood
- A paper by Aesthetic Realism Consultant and artist Marcia Rackow on "Woman: Energetic and Weary"
The Tumult about Strength / Number 1354, March 17, 1999
Everyone…wants to be strong, in both body and character. With the proliferation of exercise machines and fitness centers, the going after physical strength is more intense and elaborate now than at any time in history. The increased interest in having one's body strong is certainly a fine thing. And it is possible that an excess focus on it, the narrow, heated concentration a person also can have on the firmness of one's physique, comes from the feeling in him or her that there is something too flabby in how one sees, something limp, wobbly, wishy-washy in one's ethics and interest in knowledge....more
This issue includes:
- Two poems by Eli Siegel
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss about the trouble men and women have about how to be both strong and tender at once
- Part of a paper by Aesthetic Realism Consultant Bruce Blaustein titled: "What Makes a Man Strong?"
Fitness, Chaucer, and Ethics / Number 1347, January 27, 1999
[In this issue of TRO is a paper in which an Aesthetic Realism Associate writes about] something more worked at than ever before in history—physical fitness—and why, though a man's body may be in top-notch shape, he can still dislike himself, feel dull, nervous mean.
The basis of Aesthetic Realism is this principle, stated by Eli Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." The chief opposites in everyone's life, whether we are lifting weights or reading Paradise Lost, are Self and World. And Mr. Siegel explained what all the various therapists and counselors haven't seen: the way we judge ourselves, however unconsciously, is an ethical and also aesthetic way—it is not on whether we have praise from others, career success, or fine muscle tone; it is on whether we are trying, with our thought and feeling, to be fair to the world....more
This issue includes:
- A section from Eli Siegel's lecture Poetry and Unity, in which he speaks of Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women
- Ellen Reiss's commenting on what we can learn about "the relation of the physicality of a person and the quality of that person's thought" from the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
- "Mind, Body, and Kindness," a paper by Aesthetic Realism Associate Len Bernstein
Attention: An Aesthetic Matter / Number 1339, December 2, 1998
In recent years, difficulty with attention has been talked of mainly as a clinical matter. Many children are said to have "attention deficit disorder"; and they have been given, abundantly, the drug Ritalin as the supposed mighty pharmaceutical bringer of attentiveness. Ritalin is now being questioned more….
While "more than a million children" suffer and are drugged, the understanding of attention has been in Aesthetic Realism these many years. Before one can know how to "treat" problems about attention—and everybody has problems about attention—one has to see what Aesthetic Realism explains: attention is not essentially a clinical, chemical matter; it is an aesthetic matter….more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss about the difference between how clinicians see the matter of trouble about attention and how Aesthetic Realism explains this important subject
- Part of Eli Siegel's great lecture Mind and Attention, in which he discusses dialogue from Shakespeare's Hamlet. And Mr. Siegel says: "The only way to be attentive is to feel that through honest attention, we can be relaxed."
- "What Is Our Greatest Need?"—a paper by Aesthetic Realism Associate Michael Palmer
What Love—and Strength—Really Are / Number 1313, June 3, 1998
It is an honor to print an introduction that Eli Siegel wrote in 1973 for a public seminar presented by Aesthetic Realism consultants, “Why Does Love Change to Something Else?” Accompanying it is part of a paper by consultant Derek Mali from a seminar of this spring....And I am tremendously happy, as preliminary, to comment a little on this fact: Aesthetic Realism is that which explains at last, with grandeur and infinite practicality, the bewildering, thrilling, tormenting subject of love.
I begin by quoting William Butler Yeats, musical and pained on the subject Mr. Siegel writes about here....more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary relating how Aesthetic Realism sees the subjects of love and poetry. She discusses two 20th-century poets—Anna Akhmatova and William Butler Yeats—who suffered in love, but in their poetry had that beautiful justice to the world that love needs.
- "Why Does Love Change to Something Else?" by Eli Siegel
- A paper by consultant Derek Mali—“What Makes a Man Truly Strong?”—from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
The Thirst for Criticism / Number 1307, April 22, 1998
In [his lecture Poetry and Practicality], Mr. Siegel opposes the division people make between the "practical" and the "poetic," between the everyday and the cultural or wonderful. It is a rift that has people find most of life pretty tedious—peppered with moments of loveliness or excitement. Yet those moments can't have lasting meaning, because they are in a separate reality from the "real" reality of traffic jams, dust under the couch, and ill-natured bosses. This rift—which Aesthetic Realism magnificently shows to be false, unjust to what the world truly is—is related to another split people make, which I am grateful to comment on here.
People make a split as to themselves between the factual and the wonderful: That is, they want to be seen as wonderful, get tremendous approval, even be adored. And they feel that being seen truly, with critical exactitude, will interfere with the glowing sense of themselves they desire....more
This issue includes:
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss in which she writes of the new and needed way Aesthetic Realism sees the criticism of a self, as the means of people's being all we can be—and she describes the hurtful way criticism is seen today
- A discussion of two poems by Jonathan Swift in Eli Siegel's lecture Poetry and Practicality
- Aesthetic Realism Associate Sally Ross, writing on: "Love: Truth or Flattery?"
Practicality, Poetry—and Justice! / Number 1304, April 1, 1998
Aesthetic Realism shows that… justice and the practicality of poetry… are the same subject! The practicality Mr. Siegel mainly speaks of in the [lecture being serialized in this issue] is, he says, the customary notion of practicality as the utilitarian and unfanciful. But he is the critic who showed that every good poem, no matter how strange its subject, is practical in the most urgent sense.
The reason is in this principle stated by Mr. Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." All humanity's cruelty has come from people's seeing two opposites as apart: what's just to other things and what takes care of me. The way of mind which Mr. Siegel identified as the source of all the unkindness on this earth—Contempt—pits those crucial opposites against each other: contempt is the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world." But poetry shows those opposites are one: that to be just to the outside world is the same as expressing oneself. There is nothing people more desperately need to know: because unless we see justice as self-importance, we will want to exploit another— including economically—and be superior, including as to race….more
This issue includes:
- The first section of Eli Siegel's lecture Poetry and Practicality
- A commentary by Ellen Reiss, discussing lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alexander Pope, showing how "beauty and practicality are the same thing!"
- A paper by Aesthetic Realism Associate Len Bernstein on "The Fight: Ego vs. Justice"
The Best in Us—and the Worst / Number 1256, April 30, 1997
...Aesthetic Realism, greatly, shows that, with all the various purposes human beings have—to succeed in a career, find love, dress well, be entertained—there are two central, warring purposes that all the other purposes are about. One of these two purposes is the best thing in humanity; the other is the worst: and everybody has both. Until we understand these purposes and can love that best thing and criticize that worst thing in us, we will be mixed up about all our other purposes and never know or get clearly what we want. The best and deepest purpose of everyone, Mr. Siegel showed, is “to like the world on an honest basis.” This purpose, become intensely impelling, wide, rich, deep, is the drive to art. “Art,” Mr. Siegel writes, “goes for justice to all that is and all that lives. It welcomes subtly. It welcomes universally.”...more
This issue includes:
- Ellen Reiss's commentary, with an important instance of literary criticism, and the criticism of self, as she looks at how novelist and poet Emily Brontë exemplifies the human fight between respect and contempt—the former making her an artist, the latter causing her pain
- An introduction by Eli Siegel to a seminar about art: "Is the Drive to Art Different from the Personal Drive?"
- Consultant and filmmaker Ken Kimmelman's article: "Justice—or Conceit?" from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar
