Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

In America and everywhere, there is confusion about how to see one’s family, and people very much hope to make sense of that big matter. “A Daughter, a Mother, & the World” shows beautifully, with depth and logic, how a daughter began to see her mother newly, with comprehension, feeling, and kindness. You’ll be thrilled to read this latest issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are proud to publish here part of an Aesthetic Realism lesson conducted by Eli Siegel, to which we have given the title A Young Woman & Her Mother. Different from the lectures Mr. Siegel gave on subjects as diverse as the world itself—including history, the arts and sciences, the human self in all its aspects—in an Aesthetic Realism lesson he spoke to an individual person about the questions of that person’s own life. And I believe that never have human beings felt so deeply and truly and consistently comprehended as in those Aesthetic Realism lessons. I speak from enormously grateful personal experience, and with careful perspective.

Principles That Are True

Nothing is more important than the fact that each lesson was based on principles that are true, the principles of Aesthetic Realism. This philosophy, founded by Eli Siegel, explains what no other approach to the human self ever has. Every person, Aesthetic Realism shows, is an aesthetic situation. The questions of the life of each of us are answered in outline in all good art: “All beauty,” Mr. Siegel explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Further, Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that shows what the big fight is in everyone: the fight between the desire to respect the world and the desire to have contempt for it. From the first—the desire to respect—all kindness arises, and all true intelligence. From contempt comes every injustice and cruelty….Read more