Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

Aesthetic Realism for decades has described what’s needed for a nation to be kind, true to itself. In “Beauty, the Opposites, & What America Needs” you’ll find a description, with clarity and conviction, of what people today are desperate to know. It outlines honestly, powerfully, the justice that people—of every race and ethnicity—deserve, in relation to jobs and money, education, healthcare. You’ll learn that art, being a oneness of sameness and difference, has what a nation must have. Read “Beauty, the Opposites, & What America Needs,” the new, grand issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. 

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue to serialize Things Are Likened to Each Other, by Eli Siegel. This 1971 lecture, which has Mr. Siegel’s scholarship, ease, depth, style, kindness, is about what art centrally is. What he explains is something we need tremendously to know now.

Mr. Siegel is showing that the very basis of art is the seeing that things different from each other are, at the same time, like each other, related to each other. That is in keeping with the central principle of Aesthetic Realism, “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Earlier in the lecture he spoke about passages of poetry by Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Voltaire—of the 17th and 18th centuries. Now he looks at a poem by Théophile Gautier (1811-72), and speaks about the fact that a thing and the possibilities of that thing are a relation of sameness and difference. He speaks too of Gautier’s having one feel a likeness between splendor and evil. Toward the end of this section Mr. Siegel reads his own magnificent translation of the Gautier poem.

Right Now in America

Sameness and difference are the very center of art; but they are also central to our nation—and to what will happen to it.

Right now in America two huge things are occurring. One is the terrible pandemic of Covid-19. The other is the protests, determined, beautiful, and overwhelmingly nonviolent, against racism. Both are making vivid the need for our nation to have a just way of seeing people, of behaving as to people. That just way will make a one of the individuality, the distinctness, of every human being and the fundamental likeness we all have—our magnificent and urgent relatedness.

The great documents of the United States are about sameness and difference. There is, for example, this from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” There are these words from the Preamble to our Constitution—having persons, in their diversity, be joined as one: “We the People of the United States.” The beauty of the phrases I have quoted is equaled only by the need to take them seriously at last. Those phrases do stand for the true purpose of our nation—even as they have been betrayed, flouted, undermined, falsified, made a mockery of by many people for hundreds of years.

The demonstrations of these months of 2020 have been saying: the betrayal must continue no longer.

The dishonesty about, violation of, attack against people’s real relation of sameness and difference, has largely taken two forms in America. One is racism. The other is economics based on profit: on using the labor, needs, lives of millions of people for the financial aggrandizement of a few….Read more