Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

Do all of us have an attitude to the world itself? And will this attitude affect how we see everything in our lives, including love?  Read “Always—Yourself & the World,” the much needed current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

 

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here are two essays by Eli Siegel, the first written in 1966, the second around 1960. They are at once philosophic and about the individual lives of people, about people’s feelings, vividly, subtly, precisely.

“The Changing Center” was originally published in the journal Definition. For over fifty years, women reading it have felt that something which confused them mightily was comprehended at last.

In the preface to his Self and World, Mr. Siegel writes: “The large difference between Aesthetic Realism and other ways of seeing an individual is that Aesthetic Realism makes the attitude of an individual to the whole world the most critical thing in his life.” The fact that we have to do, always, with the whole world, is what the two essays, in different ways, are about. The first uses a 17th-century expletive in its title, “Faugh, Reality!”

Through all the centuries and right now people have lived their lives without knowing what is central to themselves: There is, Aesthetic Realism explains, a fight going on in each of us all the time between the desire to like the world, see meaning in it—and the desire to have contempt for reality, get “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” This fight is fierce, and has ever so much nuance. But it is always about the world itself. We were born into the whole world. We were born to become ourselves by being just to what’s not ourselves—as richly and widely as possible. Further, Aesthetic Realism explains, the structure of the world is in us, and in every person and thing we meet: our very self, our individuality, is made up of reality’s opposites—such as freedom and order, power and gentleness, the known and the unknown, difference and sameness….Read more