The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known

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Happiness—& What Interferes
June 24, 2009
Issue no.1747

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

Beauty versus Depression
June 10, 2009
Issue no. 1746

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

Ethics, Beauty, & Feeling Bad
May 27, 2009
Issue no.1745

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

The Largest Power Is Kindness
May 13, 2009
Issue no.1744

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

Children, Parents, & the World
April 29, 2009
Issue no.1743

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

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. And 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.