AESTHETIC REALISM FOUNDATION 141 Greene Street  New York, NY 10012

August 2009           

Dear Friend,

     Today, in America and the world, hope and worry are together in a way different from anything that has been before. Aesthetic Realism, the education founded in 1941 by the great American philosopher and poet Eli Siegel, has the knowledge that can meet our economic crisis and the hopes of every person. Aesthetic Realism explains the reason for the failing of our economy, and how it can become both just and efficient. And it's the means for people to see the world, themselves, and other people fairly and beautifully. That makes it, I believe, the most important education in existence.

     I am requesting your financial contribution for the work of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation. This tax-deductible support is something of which you can be extremely proud.

Understanding That's New & Needed

     Aesthetic Realism is based on the following principles—and they each explain something crucial, not understood before: First, “The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.”

     And it describes what most holds up our lives and makes for all injustice: the desire to have contempt, to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” The desire for contempt is the cause of racism and prejudice, and—as an article accompanying this letter shows—these end as contempt is understood and criticized. That is one of the most urgent reasons for your contribution to this foundation: Aesthetic Realism's explanation of prejudice has the power to make our nation kind and proud at last in a field where it has had horrible injustice.

   Further, Aesthetic Realism shows, for the first time, the relation between art and everyone's life: “All beauty,” it explains, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Happening Now

I am an Aesthetic Realism consultant, an actress and singer, and a coordinator of the Terrain Gallery. I've seen that in every class, seminar, dramatic or musical presentation that takes place at this great educational foundation and in the outreach programs we offer, Aesthetic Realism represents, honors, makes vividly alive the very best in human thought. The accompanying Mission Statement tells about seminars and classes—on subjects from poetry to marriage, art to anthropology—about exhibitions, individual consultations, and more. I'll mention, briefly, a few of the important ways this foundation is changing for the better thousands of lives.

     In consultations, the matters people are troubled about are understood truly as aesthetic questions. Consultations, in which a person speaks with a trio of consultants, arose from the lessons Eli Siegel gave. Their basis is that we want to be like art: to put opposites together, as a painting does, or a play, or music. This way of seeing has a grandeur, dignity, and respect for the human self that's new in this world. As a consultant, I've seen the thrill and relief in a person as she feels comprehended. And I'm tremendously grateful to have experienced this myself as I studied with Eli Siegel, and now in classes taught by Class Chairman Ellen Reiss, one of the most respected and loved educators today.

An Instance of What I Learned

    For example, at the time I began to study Aesthetic Realism, though I wanted to be a kind person, I felt I had often been mean, and I didn't know how to change. In a class, Mr. Siegel asked me, “Do you think you're a different person when you're nice than when you're severe?” I answered, “Yes.” And he explained:

People are a mingling of ferocity and smiles. At any moment we want to like what is not ourselves, and also dislike it. The whole purpose of education and art is to relate these two—to make a one of the desire to be critical and to like.

The answer, he said, is “a critical love for the world—the criticism for the purpose of love.”

      I saw that I didn't have to go back and forth between harshness and praising, severity and honoring: I could put opposites together. And this, I learned, is what Cézanne did as he painted apples and oranges or Mont Ste-Victoire. Breaking them into multiple planes of color, he was at once harsh—making them rougher—and reverent—giving them new vibrancy. “All the arts,” Eli Siegel said, “are about all your worries, all the time.” To learn this is the birthright of every person alive.

Education, Outreach, & More

  In the field of education—used by teachers at all grade levels, the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method is what America's schools desperately need: it's the proven means of students successfully, eagerly learning; of fury and prejudice in classrooms ending; of students truly becoming kinder.

There is the biweekly international periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, edited by Ellen Reiss.  Her commentaries, and TRO itself, always address honestly the questions we face as a nation and as individuals—and provide, with style and clarity, the answers the world so greatly needs.

And there are our outreach programs. They include the history-making after-school classes for children, given in schools and community centers, taught by Barbara Allen and Robert Murphy. There are workshops for seniors, taught by Anne Fielding and Jeffrey Carduner, sometimes translated into Spanish by Dr. Jaime Torres. More than 200 of these loved workshops have taken place, at senior centers in New York and beyond.

Aesthetic Realism arose from Eli Siegel's passionate desire to know and respect the world and people. I myself witnessed and, as I said, profoundly benefited from his consummate good will in classes taught by him that I attended. Tremendous scholarship, unparalleled integrity, a profound and encyclopedic love for what is beautiful and just, met in Eli Siegel. This is simple fact, and I state it because the magnificent education taught here arose from a person worthy of it in every way.

     And so—in behalf of people everywhere—I proudly request your generous support for the work of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

	Sincerely,
	Carrie Wilson   Aesthetic Realism Consultant
Contributions are tax deductible