The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known

Aesthetic Realism and Mind [ Many issues contain sections of Eli Siegel's series on this subject ]

The Right Of is edited by Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, who is author of its commentaries.

True about the Self of Everyone / January 7, 2009

Very early in the history of Aesthetic Realism, from August 1946 through April 1947, Eli Siegel gave a series of 37 lectures in New York City's Steinway Hall on this new American philosophy. He had been teaching it since 1941.

     The Steinway Hall lectures were not recorded, but notes of them exist, some by Martha Baird, others by Blanche Hoffman. And so it is an honor to begin, as the year 2009 begins, to present at least some aspects of those lectures, which were on such subjects as “Love & Confusion,” “Children as Selves,” “Unhappiness in America,” “Reality Includes Sex,” “Aesthetic Realism & Economics,” “The Philosophy of Stuttering,” “The Philosophy of Depression,” “Why Aesthetic Realism Is New,” “Education & Feeling Good,” “Why People Hurt People,” “Snobbishness & Self-Conflict.”

     .... In this TRO we publish the first part of [the] opening talk. I think the lecture is great. It presents what is true about the human self—including the one we each go about with every day, which is so illimitably precious to us.   more

Care for Self—& an Unlimited World / 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....”

Following Mr. Siegel's discussion here, is part of a paper from a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “Expressing Herself & Being Just to Others—Can a Woman Do Both?” It's by New York City elementary school teacher Barbara McClung. And we see a woman of our time dealing with that question of Self and World: undergoing the distress and everyday ache that people endure because they haven't understood the question; then studying Aesthetic Realism and being able—grandly—to change.   more

Motives, Body, & the World / February 4, 2009

The second talk in the series Eli Siegel gave at Manhattan's Steinway Hall early in the history of Aesthetic Realism is titled “Reality Includes Sex.” We're proud to publish, from the available notes, the first half of it here. This lecture of August 1946 is on a subject that troubles people as much now as ever, despite today's seeming freedom, outspokenness, and glibness about it. I think Aesthetic Realism is magnificent on the subject. It contains the understanding of it, and of people's feelings about it, and of how people can truly like themselves about sex—not pretend to be at ease, but truly like themselves. And so this talk of 62 years ago is the most avant garde text on the subject (along with other works of Aesthetic Realism), and the most needed, and the kindest.

     In it, Mr. Siegel criticizes the then prevailing view of the human self: the Freudian view, which, for decades, impressed and intimidated people. In the second half of the talk, he takes up passages of Freud.

... Aesthetic Realism explains that the fight people have as to the world itself is central in how we see sex. This largest, constant fight in everyone is between the desire to respect the world other than oneself and the desire to have contempt for it. Let's look a little, by way of illustration, at a poem: “Duellum” (“The Duel”), poem 35 of one of the important books of world poetry, Charles Baudelaire's 1857 The Flowers of Evil.  more

What We're After; or, Art vs. Freud / February 18, 2009

Here is the second half of Reality Includes Sex, lecture 2 in the series that Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall early in his teaching of Aesthetic Realism. The talk took place on August 8, 1946. And in the second part, he speaks about Freud.

     This is an instance of Mr. Siegel's clear, courageous, logical criticism of Freudian theory—the theory that, at the time, pervaded every aspect of culture, intimidated people, and was the source they went to in the hope to understand themselves and feel better. As I wrote in the last issue, Freud's “explanations” are pretty much unused in psychiatry today, because they have not worked. Yet the practitioners and psychiatric spokespersons have not had the integrity to say plainly that Freud, the Authority for decades, was wrong. As Mr. Siegel speaks of Aesthetic Realism's disagreement with Freud, he is presenting, with vividness and grace, what is true about the human mind. more

Knowing Ourselves—& America / March 4, 2009

We are publishing, from notes taken at the time, the series of lectures Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall early in the history of Aesthetic Realism. And with this issue we have the third lecture, which he titled The Unconscious Is Next Door. He gave it on August 15, 1946. Here, and in Aesthetic Realism itself, is an explanation of the unconscious so different from what Freud and others described, and from what the unconscious is still largely taken to be—something fearsome, illogical, even lurid, in a world apart from the thoughts we know. Mr. Siegel shows that our unconscious is a philosophic matter, an aesthetic matter, also an everyday matter—that it's in keeping with 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.”

...In an essay written some months after the lecture we're publishing, Mr. Siegel explained, “The unconscious in a person is all that in him which, though it affects him, he hasn't seen” (TRO 913). Since a nation is composed of persons, there is such a thing as the unconscious of a nation. And we can see something about the existence of the unconscious of America through looking at the last seven years or so. more

Envy & Our Biggest Desire / March 18, 2009

We are publishing, from notes taken at the time, lectures that Eli Siegel gave early in the history of Aesthetic Realism, at New York's Steinway Hall. In this issue we print the first half of “Pleasure, Desire, & Frustration,” the talk of August 29, 1946.

     In presenting what is true about the human self, it was necessary for Mr. Siegel to show the falsity of the way that was then overwhelmingly prevalent: the Freudian way. Freud is not so current now. But it can be said soberly that the therapists of today don't understand the self any better than he did. And as Mr. Siegel criticizes the Freudian way, he shows what people today are thirsty to know: what's true about our own feelings, which confuse us so much.

... As a means of relating Aesthetic Realism to how mind is seen by psychologists in 2009, I'm going to comment on an article that appeared in the New York Times on February 17. It's about a tormenting emotion: envy. The writer, Natalie Angier, begins by saying that envy, unlike other “vices,” is not “tempting,” doesn't feel “good to indulge in”; “instead feels so painful” and “is a vice...nobody craves.” Why then do we feel driven to be envious, to have this pain, for which we also despise ourselves? more

How Do We Interfere with Ourselves? / April 1, 2009

Here is the second half of a lecture by Eli Siegel, “Pleasure, Desire, & Frustration,” of August 29, 1946. It is one of the talks he gave at Steinway Hall, presenting the basis of the new American philosophy Aesthetic Realism. We're now serializing, from notes taken at the time, those early lectures.

     The last word in the title, frustration, was much in use then, because it was a term central to Freudian psychology. Freud presented frustration as being essentially a sexual matter: he said you became neurotic because your sexual desires were frustrated. Mr. Siegel shows what neither Freud nor the therapists of now have understood: what the central question and desires of the self really are. He explains what pleasure really is; and that pleasure is of two kinds. The big question of everyone—the big fight in everyone's life—is: will I be myself through having the pleasure of respect for the world or the pleasure of contempt?

     I am going to relate what Aesthetic Realism, in this 1946 lecture, explains about people, to what it has explained about economics.... Let's begin with a person much in the news, about whom I wrote briefly this January: Bernard Madoff. As the New York Times describes it, on March 12 in a federal courtroom Madoff “admit[ted] that he had run a vast Ponzi scheme that robbed thousands of investors of their life savings.”   more

Children, Parents, & the World / April 29, 2009

Children as Selves is one of the lectures that Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall early in his teaching of Aesthetic Realism. We have been serializing them, using notes that were taken at the time, and the record we have of some talks is fuller than that of others. The notes for this lecture, of September 12, 1946, are quite fragmentary. Yet they convey something of the great, kind, true way of seeing children which is in Aesthetic Realism.

     That understanding of children is to be found in Mr. Siegel's Self and World, and in the 1946 talk he refers to one of the children written about in chapter 9, “The Child.” The boy Joe Johnson is imaginary, but he's based on real children. And he stands for real children today—who are thirsty to be understood and to like themselves for how they meet the world. In Self and World, Mr. Siegel has brought to the children he calls Joe Johnson and Luella Hargreaves and Michael Halleran and Daniel Dorman not only that longed-for comprehension but, in my opinion, some of the finest prose in English. more

The Largest Power Is Kindness / May 13, 2009

As we approach the 31st anniversary of the terrible operation that led to the death of Eli Siegel, we are honored to publish several of the many poems he wrote in the last year of his life.

      We print too part of a paper that Aesthetic Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner presented at a public seminar this March. The seminar was on the subject “What Kind of Power Does a Man Want Most?” and what's here is only a small section of Mr. Carduner's paper. But we see in it something that Aesthetic Realism explains and that every person and nation needs mightily, desperately, to know: There are two kinds of power, and we're in a fight between them all the time. They are the power of contempt, to lessen other things as a means of making ourselves big; and the power of respect, to see and add to the meaning of reality—of people and things. That human beings haven't known the difference has made for vast personal and international suffering.

   . . .Eli Siegel is the philosopher to explain what makes for beauty in every instance of authentic art. Music, and all art, is not an offset to life: it is a showing of what reality truly is—the oneness of opposites. And as we hear music, we're hearing what we want to do in our lives: “All beauty,” he explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” more

Ethics, Beauty, & Feeling Bad / May 27, 2009

We are publishing, from notes taken at the time, some of the earliest Aesthetic Realism lectures. These are the 1946 and '47 talks that Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall. And we print here the first half of the October 10, 1946 lecture: Ethics Isn't Soft, for Guilt Exists. In it Mr. Siegel explains what the psychologists today still don't understand: why people feel pervasively low, depressed, anxious, empty.

From the talk's opening sentence we meet the newness—new in the history of thought, new today—of Aesthetic Realism. Two fields usually seen as very much apart and even as conflicting, are, Mr. Siegel shows, deeply the same: ethics and aesthetics. And both are central to our own intimate choices, confusions, despair, and hope. Aesthetic Realism explains that what makes a work of art beautiful is justice in the fullest and truest sense. And that is so even if the art work is ever so wild.

... The mental practitioners of 2009 won't do what the Freudians did: tell a person that her nervousness or feeling of lowness comes from sexual repression. Yet the psychiatric approach today is really just as ignorant and insulting. Today's approach is to say depression and other mishaps of mind are caused by one's biochemistry, and to deal with these by drugging the person.

... It was less than a year after the lecture we're publishing that my parents, Irene and Daniel Reiss, began to study Aesthetic Realism. My mother had her first lesson with Mr. Siegel on August 29, 1947, and I'll quote from it now, because in it we see what Mr. Siegel explains in his lecture meeting the life of a particular person.  more

For a President & the People of America / 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?”...

     In order for our President-elect to be a good President, in order for him to succeed, he must want, passionately, to answer this question, articulated by Eli Siegel: “What does a person deserve by being a person?” And he must make sure the economy of America is based on a true answer to that question.

     That is not what the present economy is based on. And the coming President, and Congress, and the American people need to see that tinkering around with an unethically based economy will not work. We now have to have economics based, not on profit, but on ethics, justice, usefulness.    more

Why Don't People Feel at Ease? / September 3, 2008

This issue of TRO is about emotion, including that emotion which people hope will accompany other emotions but which so often doesn't: the feeling of ease.

     We are proud to publish a 1953 poem by Eli Siegel, “Congested Emotion in Beds.” With it is an article by Ann Richards, portions of a paper she presented this summer at the Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “Intensity & Ease in a Woman: How Can These Opposites Be One?” Ms. Richards is a New York City high school English teacher and an actor and singer with the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company. As this woman of our time speaks here about her own life, she is illustrating a 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

Love, Politics, & What Drives a Person / April 2, 2008

     The fact that men and women are confused about sex and can be foolish about it, is something everyone is aware of. But the trouble made front-page news recently, through the revelation that the now-former governor of New York was (in the words of the New York Times) “linked to a sex ring as a client.” I'm going to comment a little on the turmoil of Eliot Spitzer, as a means of commenting on the fact that Aesthetic Realism explains the human self, the self that is our own. more

The Human Self: Yours and Everyone's  /  January 9, 2002

"There is nothing people need more now than to see other people justly. Therefore, to illustrate Aesthetic Realism — and to show something of how Aesthetic Realism explains the self of every person — I am going to comment on instances of Arabic poetry written between the 6th and 13th centuries."...more

Mind and Sherlock Holmes / October 6, 2004

This issue of TRO continues the 1966 lecture Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things, in which Eli Siegel looks at terms put out by the American Psychiatric Association. This issue discusses compulsion, phobia, and more. Writes Ellen Reiss in the editor's commentary: "The psychiatry of today consists, to a large degree, of medication. Yet the crucial questions still are: What interferes with mind—what makes it fare ill? Also, what does it mean for mind, including one’s own, to fare well?"

We continue our serialization of the 1966 lecture Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things, by Eli Siegel. And in this instance, the “things” are psychiatric terms, defined by the American Psychiatric Association in a list published in the Reader's Digest Almanac. Mr. Siegel discusses them with casualness yet depth, exactitude and (as he says) “some jocosity.”   more

Mind and Charles Lamb October 20, 2004

Here is the conclusion of Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things, a 1966 lecture by Eli Siegel. Discussing terms from a glossary of the American Psychiatric Association, Mr. Siegel has been commenting on what he showed to be the crucial cause of mental difficulty: “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.”

At the close of the lecture, Mr. Siegel quotes from an essay of Charles Lamb (1775-1834), because in a literary way it brings up the question underlying so many of those psychiatric terms: Why should our own minds get to thoughts that cause ourselves pain? Do we, as Aesthetic Realism explains, punish ourselves in various ways for having contempt for the outside world, for being unjust to what is not ourselves?... As a prelude to Mr. Siegel's discussion, in her Commentary, Ellen Reiss looks at passages from Lamb's essays, including "Poor Relations" and "The Convalescent," passages in which he describes forms of contempt.more

	The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known online
	Current Issues: The most recent issues in which Aesthetic Realism explains the news, happenings in people's lives, events in history, and some of the most moving works in literature.	National Ethics: What honest criteria can we use to be good critics of ethics on the national and international levels? Aesthetic Realism looks at ethics as to loyalty, international affairs, & more.
	Literature / Poetry: Discussing many great works of poetry and prose. Criticism, wrote Eli Siegel compactly, is showing "a good thing as good, a bad thing as bad, and a middling thing as middling."	Love:  How Aesthetic Realism describes the purpose of love—"to like the world honestly through another person." Discussion of what interferes with having real love—today and in history.
	Racism—the Cause & Solution: The Aesthetic Realism understanding of contempt as the cause of racism, and the place of aesthetics in respecting, pleasurably, people different from oneself.	The Economy: Why our economic system has failed to meet the needs of the American people, and the Aesthetic Realism understanding of good will as the basis for successful and fair economics
	Education: The success of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method in having students learn to read and write—learn science, social studies, art, every subject—and be kinder, less angry, less prejudiced.	Eli Siegel Day in Baltimore: Talks given on August 16, 2002, Eli Siegel's Centenary, placing Mr. Siegel and Aesthetic Realism, his work, in terms of world culture and history.
	Art: "Aesthetic Realism sees the purpose of art as, from the beginning, the liking of the world more..."	Archives: The rich education provided by Aesthetic Realism in issues of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known which are online.
	Aesthetic Realism Foundation online Selected Resources online The most comprehensive source of information about Aesthetic Realism is the website of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation—and the sites connected to it, including this one. You can start, for instance, at the Foundation's home page. Then, go on to biographical information about Eli Siegel, who founded Aesthetic Realism in 1941. You will see how the education he began teaching in those years continues now in Aesthetic Realism consultations and in public dramatic presentations and seminars at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation—as well as in the Foundation's Outreach Programs for seniors, young people, libraries, teachers. Meanwhile in the schools of New York, the dramatically effective Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method has enabled students to learn, to love learning, and to pass standardized examinations for three decades. And artists since 1955 have exhibited at the Terrain Gallery for which many have written commentaries (including on their own works), based on the philosophic principles of Aesthetic Realism. You can read about Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism online, as well as about every person on the faculty of the Foundation. As editor of TRO her commentaries are in every issue (see, e.g., "Nature, Romanticism, & Harry Potter"; "Clothing and Emotion"; and "Jobs, Discontent, and Beauty"). In the Aesthetic Realism Online Library, you'll find the largest single repositary of reviews, articles in the press, lectures, poetry; and The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. In 2002, Eli Siegel' s centenary, the Governor of Maryland and the Mayor of Baltimore, the city where he grew up, wrote on the meaning to America of Aesthetic Realism and its founder. So did the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, in the U.S. Congressional Record. • Subscribe to TRO • Contact Us People in America's diverse professions—the humanities, the arts, education, the social sciences, medicine, labor—have written on the value of Aesthetic Realism. They describe the way Aesthetic Realism teaches people how to understand themselves more accurately; how the ability to be just to other people is enhanced; how one's professional attainments are augmented. Language arts teacher Leila Rosen, for example, writes on the Aesthetic Realism teaching method. Anthropologist Arnold Perey writes on the way Aesthetic Realism opposes prejudice and improves international understanding. And there are many others. Historically, new knowledge has often been met unjustly. This was true about the new, innovative thought of Louis Pasteur and John Keats, Beethoven and William Lloyd Garrison, Jonas Salk and Isaac Newton. And it has been true about Aesthetic Realism. Documenting and opposing this, the website "Friends of Aesthetic Realism — Countering the Lies," written by more than 60 individuals, refutes the falsehoods of the few persons who have attacked Aesthetic Realism and lets the facts speak for themselves. People who want to express their opinion of Aesthetic Realism, and have the knowledge to back it up, have created blogs and websites and have written numerous articles. See, for example, composer and educator Edward Green; essayist Lynette Abel; photographer Len Bernstein; teachers Ann Richards, Christopher Balchin, and Alan Shapiro. Others are listed in "What People Are Saying." The education of Aesthetic Realism enables a person to understand oneself more exactly than has been possible before, and to like the world honestly, authentically.