Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

In this important issue, you’ll see that Aesthetic Realism explains something never explained before: what ethics really is! We need desperately to know what it is, because our nation and the world need ethics to be a living and loved thing in our lives and government. You’ll learn, too, why all real art is ethical! And you’ll meet the understanding of one of the most cared-for poems in English—the understanding of both its meaning and beauty. All this in “Art, Science, & What Ethics Really Is,” the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 3 of A Thing Has This, by Eli Siegel. It is a great 1969 lecture in his groundbreaking series about the relation of art and science. In this talk he is showing that the summing up of any thing—including any person, any happening—is utterly against what both art and science are. He shows that at the very basis of each is the fact that a thing is all its possibilities, all its relations, “everything it has, not just the part you want to see or do see.” Both true art and true science are in opposition to a hurtful, ugly, immensely popular way of seeing in people. That way of seeing is contempt, described by Mr. Siegel as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And here, in order to help place the importance, for our time and nation and lives, of the lecture being serialized, I quote, as I did in my two previous commentaries, this passionate, logical statement by Mr. Siegel in his Self and World:

The first victory of contempt is the feeling in people that they have the right to see other people and things pretty much as they please….

           That most people have felt…they had the right to see other people and other objects in a way that seemed to go with comfort—this fact is the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world. It is contempt in its first universal, hideous form. [P. 3]

There Is “Dover Beach”

At the point we’ve reached in A Thing Has This, Mr. Siegel is in the midst of discussing an essay he considered notable: “‘Dover Beach’ Revisited,” by Theodore Morrison. In it Morrison presents, with humor, the different ways in which several fictitious professors of English, with diverse points of view, appraise Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.” They’re doing so at the request of a Prof. Chartly, who is trying to ascertain via experimental method whether there is any universal basis on which to judge a literary work.

“Dover Beach,” then, in all its beauty and poignancy and power, is a thing. And the big danger of a critic is like the big danger of a person: to see a thing in keeping with what pleases oneself. Each of these critics, Mr. Siegel is showing, sees something of what “Dover Beach” is or is related to. Yet the essence of it—the rich, vibrantly sincere essence of it—is missed by all of them. Here I’ll say, with much gratitude: I have seen that this principle of Aesthetic Realism, stated by Eli Siegel, contains the means of getting to what makes any instance of art beautiful, no matter what aspect of that artwork one may be emphasizing for the while: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

While Mr. Siegel’s purpose in this lecture is not to say what “Dover Beach” is about, as the talk proceeds he does explain the poem’s meaning. It is a poem that still puzzles readers even as it is popular. I care for Matthew Arnold very much, and have seen that Eli Siegel is the critic who understood the feeling of Arnold and what Arnold was most deeply getting at in this and other poems and in his critical writing….Read more