Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

What are people—what are we—most longing to understand about ourselves? Is there something we’re fundamentally going after, just by being alive—and do we need to be true to that something? Do we have purposes we should know about: one that will have us like ourselves; and one that will inevitably make us unhappy and have us dislike ourselves? This new issue of TRO has the authentic answers, presented thrillingly, including through an instance of art—the art of singing—and through a moving example about love. You’ll be reading a comprehension of self that’s the real thing and without parallel as you read “Everyone’s Deepest Desire,“ the latest number of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are publishing, in two parts, portions of a definitive lecture—at once definitive and warm—that Eli Siegel gave in 1974. The title is What Are We Going After?, and here, in this issue, is the second and final part.

At the point we’ve reached, Mr. Siegel has been commenting on an article, “The Demoralized Mind,” by Jerome Frank, published in the journal Psychology Today. It provides, Mr. Siegel says, an opportunity to show what differentiates Aesthetic Realism from other ways of seeing the human self.

A central, enormous difference is in the lecture’s title, What Are We Going After? Aesthetic Realism shows that there is a fundamental purpose had by every human being, just as every human being has arteries. That purpose, in us from birth, is to like the world through knowing it.

Unlike the various approaches referred to by Frank, Aesthetic Realism is philosophy and certainly is not in the psychiatric field. So let us take a famous statement by a great and lovable philosopher, Aristotle. He wrote, at the start of his Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.” Aesthetic Realism would agree with that—but, I believe, would say too that the more knowing is authentic and untainted, the more it goes for like of the world as such, through seeing what many instances of the world truly are. In fact, if we want to know certain things yet also feel the world they’re in is an enemy, or unimportant, our desire to know will have big limitations. There will be so much we won’t see as worthy of our knowing….Read more