Steve Weiner, computer specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

This new issue of TRO does something magnificent: it shows what we most want for our lives. And it does this through a landmark discussion, by Eli Siegel, of one of the world’s great literary critics, William Hazlitt! You’ll learn what in ourselves interferes with our largest desire, to value things truly. —You’ll have a new knowledge of and respect for the human mind, and see new meaning in literature, as you read “Criticism–of Life and Literature,” the latest issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

The lecture Hazlitt Tells of Criticism was given by Eli Siegel in August 1970, and we have been serializing this moving, remarkable, definitive work.

It is about literary criticism, certainly: after all, it’s about William Hazlitt (1778-1830), the English critic and essayist whose importance Mr. Siegel is showing. But as I’ve said in these prefatory comments, the lecture is also about everyone. That’s because we’re all critics, of a sort, all the time: whether we’re conscious of doing so or not, we’re always evaluating things, people, ourselves. The purpose of our very lives, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to value rightly: to like the world on an honest basis, through knowing it.

Further, there’s no more hurtful mistake than the one people so often make about criticism, about valuing. The mistake is: that one’s judgment of something or someone arises not from the desire to know and keep knowing—but arises instead from whether this thing or person or idea seems to flatter and aggrandize oneself in some way, makes oneself feel comfortable and superior. There is the unspoken, ugly, so frequent criterion: what makes me important is good; what questions my superiority is bad….Read more