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.

Note: The following issues of TRO include the lectures Eli Siegel gave in 1946 and 1947 in Steinway Hall, New York City. Beginning with Issue 1735, each of the issues, as they are published are added to this page.

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

Beauty versus Depression / June 10, 2009

In this issue we print the second half of one of the earliest Aesthetic Realism lectures. It is Ethics Isn't Soft, for Guilt Exists, and Eli Siegel gave it at Steinway Hall on October 10, 1946. He explains what psychiatry is still far away from understanding: the cause of depression and other mental ailment.

In this half Mr. Siegel does something that I find magnificent—thrilling in its logic and newness. He describes in detail the relation of victory and self-loathing, supremacy and self-disgust, which, he makes clear, is in all depression.

He would explain in his teaching of Aesthetic Realism that contempt is the cause of mental difficulty. It's the making of ourselves more by lessening what's not ourselves, and it's the primal injustice in every person....

As a prelude to part 2 of the 1946 lecture, I'm going to comment on two poems of Emily Dickinson. She is without doubt one of the authentic poets of America and the world, and yet at various times she suffered from depression. more

Happiness—& What Interferes / June 24, 2009

We publish here the first half of a lecture by Eli Siegel, given early in the history of Aesthetic Realism—in 1946, at Steinway Hall. Its title is Unhappiness in America. And working in it are two principles of the new philosophy he was teaching. The first: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” As he shows what that fervently desired thing happiness is, he speaks about the opposites of rest and motion, and the biggest opposites for everyone: our dear self and the wide outside world.

     The second principle describes the thing which people think will make them happy but which really makes them miserable. “The greatest danger or temptation of man,” he writes, “is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself; which lessening is Contempt.” Mr. Siegel explains that if we go after being happy by contemptuous means—by lessening the world, and trying to own and manage portions of it—we will suffer.

To illustrate, I'm going to quote from Edmund Spenser's mighty and lovable work The Faerie Queene, published in 1590. Cantos 9 and 10 of Book 3 are about Malbecco, an ill-natured old man who (like everyone) makes the choices he makes because he thinks they're the way to be happy....    more

The Logic of Happiness / July 8, 2009

We are honored to publish here the second half of an early Aesthetic Realism lecture, Unhappiness in America, which Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall in November 1946. In it we see some of the thorough, clear logic on which Aesthetic Realism is based. And we see Mr. Siegel explaining what people today want mightily to understand: what happiness really is; what interferes with it; and why, so often when persons get what they think will make them happy, they are unhappy still and perhaps more than ever.

     This lecture is about the cause within oneself of unhappiness. To be sure, there have been external causes—things outside a person which have made for misery. One of the biggest is the profit system, the barbaric way of economics that has had certain people be rich and condemned many others to lives of poverty. What Keats wrote, with musical intensity, about destitution's effect on love is perhaps even truer about its effect on happiness:

Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust.

In human history, millions of men, women, and children have been forced by profit economics to live under conditions that made happiness impossible .... more

Why People Can't Sleep / July 15, 2009

Here, based on notes taken by Martha Baird, is The Philosophy of Insomnia, the lecture Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall on December 19, 1946. Its subject, the inability to sleep, torments people today as it has for centuries. Around 1370, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote of himself:

I have gret wonder, be this lyghte,
How that I lyve, for day ne nyghte
I may nat slepe wel nygh noght.

That means: “I have great wonder, by this light, / How I live, for day or night / I cannot sleep nearly at all.” He says that, for lack of sleep, he is “a mased thing, / Alway in poynt to falle adoun” (“a dazed thing, / Always at the point of falling down”). *Chaucer made poetry of his trouble about sleep; he told of it musically; but he didn't understand it.

     Today, the psychologists don't understand the cause of sleeplessness any better than Chaucer did—and their expression on the matter is certainly much less beautiful. The website of the Mayo Clinic tells us that “stressful life events...may lead to insomnia”; also, “anxieties...may disrupt your sleep.” Well, such relations were noted long before Chaucer's time even—but why may they occur? And why may someone whose life is no more “stressful” than another's find herself agonizingly awake at 4 AM again and again?

     The answer is in the lecture published here. It's also in the discussion of the subject in Eli Siegel's Self and World. As a prelude, I'll quote a passage from Self and World....   more

Mind, Violence, & Movies / August 5, 2009

We publish here, from notes taken at the time, a lecture Eli Siegel gave on December 12, 1946, at Steinway Hall. He speaks about the popularity of films that present mind gone awry, and films that contain violence. And he explains, as no one else has, why people want to see such films.

The terror film of 1946 can seem tame compared to what we have today. But in this lecture, with its feeling of a particular time—America a year after the end of World War II — we also meet the understanding of ourselves right now, of what people are looking for, including from the films and television programs we watch.

Mr. Siegel shows that people were interested in the psychiatric film and the terror film because they wanted to understand themselves. He shows that people had an increased sense in 1946—it's even larger now—that there's something in everyone related to humanity at its worst and most troubled. We want to understand that thing. Meanwhile, the people of 1946 and all the years since haven't found, in psychology and the media, the comprehension of mind they've been looking for. That long sought after comprehension has been in Aesthetic Realism all these decades.... more

Stuttering & the Human Self / August 19, 2009

We’re honored to publish one of the early talks Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall: The Philosophy of Stuttering. In publishing those lectures, we’re using notes taken at the time, and those for the talk on stuttering, December 26, 1946, are quite incomplete. Nevertheless, we meet the explanation—clear, logical, kind, exact—of a matter that torments people now. And it would not do so, were Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of the subject widely known.

     The lecture can be seen as a companion to Mr. Siegel’s rich, stylistically beautiful discussion of stuttering in his Self and World. There he shows that this difficulty in expression is a phase of the fight all people have: the fight between respect for the world and contempt for it. “Stuttering is a collision,” he writes, of the desire “to be other, to be related,” and the desire “to be a snug, perfect point, capable of dismissing anything and everything” (pp. 324, 331).

     To accompany the 1946 lecture, we reprint parts of an important article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Miriam Mondlin. It appeared in this journal in 1994, with the title “How My Stuttering Ended.”

Perhaps the most eminent person in America connected with stuttering is our vice president, Joseph Biden.... more

Notes on Nervousness / September 2, 2009

“Who's Nervous?,” of January 16, 1947, is one of the lectures in a series that Eli Siegel gave early in the history of Aesthetic Realism, at Steinway Hall. We're honored to present it here, through notes taken at the time by Martha Baird.

     Three decades later, in the preface to his Self and World, Mr. Siegel wrote:

Is it true, as Aesthetic Realism said years ago, that man's deepest desire, his largest desire, is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis? And is it true...that 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?

Yes, it is true. And unless we want to learn about the fight in everyone between those two desires—to respect the world and to have contempt for it—we shall never understand mind, including our own....

     To precede Mr. Siegel's lecture, I'll comment on a situation of self told about recently in the New York Times. The matter is fairly unusual, but I'm discussing it because often the unusual can stand, in vivid fashion, for the everyday, and that is so here. On August 11, the Times published an article by Jane G. Andrews about her phantosmia, or “illusory sense of smell”: that is, “I smell a smell when no odorant is present.”  more

Art versus Cruelty / October 14, 2009

We publish here, from notes taken at the time, the lecture Eli Siegel gave on February 27, 1947, at Steinway Hall: Why People Hurt People. It is definitive on its subject, a subject that alarms and stymies people now.

     For example, discussions of bullying are taking place all over America. Teachers, parents, and school administrators don’t know what to do about it. The New York Times of September 22 described the bullying going on in a school honored last year as “the best high school in the state” by New Jersey Magazine...

In the 1947 lecture, Mr. Siegel explains what this principal and the psychologists and sociologists do not know: he explains what bullying comes from. The thing that makes a senior at a highly praised New Jersey high school get pleasure tormenting a freshman is described in this Aesthetic Realism principle: “The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt.”

     Mr. Siegel shows that we shall never understand the overt, fierce ways people hurt other people until we understand contempt—and how it is present in everyone....

In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance there is a very funny song on the subject of people hurting people. It is “The Policeman’s Lot,” and it is also a true poem. The idea in it, is that people who commit crimes don’t do so all the time—and when they’re not behaving criminally, they’re pretty much like other people.    more

Love—& What Interferes / October 28, 2009

In 1947 Eli Siegel gave a lecture, one in his Steinway Hall series, titled Love and Confusion. He has spoken and written, greatly, on the subject in the years since, and what we have of the 1947 talk is not a complete transcript but notes taken at the time by Martha Baird. Yet what is in that lecture, in those notes, is as immediate as the griefs, longings, worries, resentments, ecstasies, and strategies about love that men and women will have tomorrow. The lecture truly explains these— as the counselors and therapists over the years have been unable to.

We are publishing Love and Confusion in two parts. With it, also in two parts, we print a paper that Aesthetic Realism consultant Robert Murphy presented this month at a public seminar titled “How Can a Man Be Confident about Love?”   more

Love, a Person, & the World / November 11, 2009

In this issue we publish the second half of the lecture Love and Confusion, by Eli Siegel. He gave it in 1947 at New York’s Steinway Hall, and we are using notes taken at the time by Martha Baird. Here too is the conclusion of a paper by Aesthetic Realism consultant Robert Murphy—from a public seminar of last month titled “How Can a Man Be Confident about Love?”

So this issue is about the magnificent, often tormenting subject of love. And it’s about Aesthetic Realism’s explanation of love and what interferes. That explanation, I’m immensely happy to say, is true—and great. It’s what people have wanted longingly, achingly, turbulently to know.   more

Learning: Ourselves & a World to Love / November 25, 2009

This issue features the lecture Eli Siegel gave on March 6, 1947 at Steinway Hall: Education and Feeling Good. The record we have of it is notes taken at the time, and these are somewhat fragmentary. Yet the grandeur of this lecture comes through, its aliveness, its newness—and its importance.

I know firsthand, through my years of study with him, that Eli Siegel lived the way of seeing education that he presents here. He loved knowledge—that was clear to anyone who heard him speak. And he was interested in every field of thought. His scholarship was vast; it was comprehensive. Whether he spoke about Shakespeare, or economics, or the history of religion, or sociology, or French drama, or the movies, or a little-known American writer of fiction, or the Middle Ages, or the historians of Greece and Rome, a listener would feel, This must be his field of expertise. He wanted people to be at ease with knowledge, to see it as a friend. I am very moved as I write these words, because Mr. Siegel—representing the way of seeing that is in this lecture—made education warm to me, enabled me to love learning. And Aesthetic Realism can do that for all people.

Some decades after the 1947 lecture, its approach to knowledge took the form of the Aesthetic Realism teaching method, taught to educators by the consultants of All For Education. I won’t write at length here about the great, kind, documented, continuing success of this method in New York classrooms.  
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Aesthetics; or, How Not to Be Depressed / December 9, 2009

It is an honor to publish The Philosophy of Depression, by Eli Siegel. He gave this lecture on January 2, 1947, at New York’s Steinway Hall, and our text is notes of Martha Baird, taken at the time.

     Speaking nearly 63 years ago, Mr. Siegel is presenting what psychiatry both then and now has not understood. For lack of this knowledge, millions of people have endured misery. And they’ve been subjected to shock treatments (then), and numbing and agitating drugs (now). They were told then that their feeling low came from repressed sexual desire. And they’re told now, with equal wrongness, that their depression is biochemically caused.    

In the 1947 lecture Mr. Siegel explains, with clarity and vivid examples, what must be seen for depression to be understood: There is a desire in everyone to find what’s not oneself inferior, dull, cruel—because in doing so we feel that we are superior and special. This desire is contempt, and Aesthetic Realism shows it to be the most hurtful thing in the human self. It is the cause, for instance, of racism. And it simmers, thrusts, mingles with other desires in everyday life.   more

Jobs for Usefulness—Not Profit / December 23, 2009

Mental Conflict and Jobs, of February 1947, is one in a series of lectures that Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall, and, based on notes taken at the time, we publish it here. Various terms in this early Aesthetic Realism talk, like “mental conflict” and “the unconscious,” were much in use then, and the term “nervousness” took in more than it does now. But I think it is clear that the human mind of all time and our time is being understood at last, and greatly.

As to jobs: in 1947 the state of the US economy was very different from now. It seemed to be flourishing. Unions were increasingly powerful and therefore more and more people were making better and better wages. Today a huge 10 percent of our population is unemployed—over 15 million men and women. And that government figure does not include the millions of so-called “discouraged workers”—people who have stopped even looking for work. Yet what Mr. Siegel is explaining in 1947 is not only relevant and true today—it’s blazingly needed; it is, in its kindness and clarity, an emergency.    more

The Two Kinds of Pleasure—& Tiger Woods / January 6, 2010

To begin this new decade we publish the lecture Pleasure and Self-Conflict, by Eli Siegel. He gave it 63 years ago, and it explains what people now—in living rooms and at worksites, in schools and kitchens, at social gatherings and in halls of government and in bedrooms—most need to know. It is one of the lectures in his Steinway Hall series (1946-7). And what we print is based on notes that were taken at the time....

Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy that explains that there are two kinds of pleasure: the pleasure of contempt for the world, and the pleasure of respect. The first, contempt, is the feeling we’re more because we can see what’s not ourselves as less; and it is the most hurtful thing in the human self. This pleasure can be quietly ordinary. It can be a certain relish, a smug satisfaction, in telling ourselves someone “is an idiot.” But the pleasure of contempt is also the pleasure a white woman of Alabama had in 1860 ordering a black woman around—and feeling she was far superior to this slave and had the right to own her.

A fight between the two kinds of pleasure goes on within every one of us. It is the central matter in our lives.... The revelations about Tiger Woods—presented usually with ill will by the media—have puzzled, disappointed, and, unfortunately, titillated people. But what impelled this athlete, so revered and apparently upstanding, to have multitudinous extramarital affairs?   more

Snobbishness: What It Is & What’s Against It / January 20, 2010

Snobbishness and Self-Conflict is a great lecture that Eli Siegel gave in March 1947, at Steinway Hall. We’re proud to publish it here, based on notes taken at the time. Snobbishness is something people resent (“What an awful snob she is!”), yet also envy (“I wish I were in that set”—with the implication “and could look down on everyone the way they do”). Mr. Siegel explains that we’re all more snobbish than we know. He shows the ubiquity of snobbishness. And he has humor about it. But also, not long after the end of World War II, he is showing that snobbishness is related to Nazism: a way of seeing that “nice” people have every day is related to the fascism that enslaved and brutalized so much of Europe.

In this lecture Mr. Siegel calls snobbishness “the elegant phase of contempt.” He is the philosopher who has made clear that contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else,” is that in us which weakens our minds, though we can think we’re smart to have it. Aesthetic Realism explains this tremendous thing: snobbishness and mental depression always go together.    more

  Everyday Worry & an Earthquake / February 3, 2010

We publish here, from notes taken at the time, the first half of the 1947 lecture Aesthetics and Worry, by Eli Siegel. It is one in a series that he gave at Steinway Hall early in the history of Aesthetic Realism. And it explains definitively a tormenting yet everyday matter: the inaccurate worrying that people find themselves driven to engage in.

Meanwhile, this issue of TRO is being prepared days after the earthquake in Haiti—at a time when so much true worry is taking place, along with human anguish and agony on a gigantic scale. We are reprinting here, from Eli Siegel’s book Hail, American Development, his translation titled “Some Lines from Voltaire’s Poem on the Disaster at Lisbon.” The poem is about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
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  Worry, Art, & William Wordsworth / February 17, 2010

It In this issue we publish the second half of Aesthetics and Worry, a 1947 lecture by Eli Siegel. He is speaking about the inaccurate worries people have, which they feel driven to have, which they can’t shake. The psychiatry of neither then nor now has understood their cause.

What Mr. Siegel shows is that such worries come from the fact that there is a battle going on in every person between two large desires. The first desire is: I want to become all I can be through being just to the world outside me, trying to know it, seeing meaning in it. The second desire is: I want to make myself important and comfortable through lessening what’s not me, looking down on it. That second desire is contempt. And Aesthetic Realism shows it to be “the greatest danger or temptation” of everyone. It’s that in us which weakens our minds and lives, and it’s the source of every cruelty....

As a prelude, I’m going to comment on a poem by Wordsworth that has a famous instance of unreasonable worry. People, including Wordsworth, have not understood why he has that sudden, unwarranted dread told of in the poem’s last lines. But I believe the lecture we are publishing explains it.   more

Our Minds—& What Interferes with Them / March 3, 2010

We publish here The Philosophy of Schizophrenia, a lecture Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall in 1947. Part of Mr. Siegel’s greatness as philosopher is his discovery and understanding of that way of seeing in every person which interferes with our lives; which is the source of all unkindness; which always weakens our minds and, if present with sufficient fullness, can do so catastrophically. This way of seeing is contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

In the present journal, beginning in 1975, he gave rich documentation for his finding that “contempt causes insanity and...interferes with mind in a less disastrous way. Contempt is the great failure of man.” In issue after issue for many years he presented evidence, explanation, illustration. The scope of his material was vast....

To relate the 1947 lecture on schizophrenia to the present moment, I go to a popular website: WebMD.com. Sixty-three years after Mr. Siegel gave this talk, psychiatry still does not understand why people have mental distress, whether severe or less severe. That is because psychiatry does not understand the human self. more

Additional issues of TRO on the subject of Aesthetic Realism and Mind:

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

We're honored to publish here two poems by Eli Siegel. And with them is an article by Ernest DeFilippis: “What Does It Mean to Be a Good Husband?” .

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.