Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

This logical, thrilling issue of TRO is about something tremendously important in our lives. It’s titled “Fact, Value–& Our Own Emotions.”  Do we want to be fair to the facts—about people, about things?  Do we want to value things accurately?  Do we want to look at our feelings as facts? (They are facts.) What do fact and value have to do with love? And you’ll see—the opening section of Eli Siegel’s magnificent, so surprising lecture Is Hope Worth Money? is included in this new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

There is no bigger subject, historically and philosophically, than that of the lecture we begin serializing here—and no bigger subject in the daily lives and feelings of people. The subject is the relation of value and fact, of feelings and facts. The 1969 lecture, by Eli Siegel, has the title Is Hope Worth Money?

The two, value and fact, have been seen by people as ever so divided—as in different divisions of reality and different divisions of oneself. The Me who tries to be exact (and this Me is in some fashion in everyone) seems a different Me from the self who hopes, despairs, is enraged, or ashamed, or exuberant. And the rift—whether one is conscious of it or not—has weakened the life of every human being. This great lecture is about the fact that such a rift need not be—and, indeed, is false.

For Example

I look out my window and see shadows of leaves and branches against a glowing, white-painted wall. Those shadows could not exist without the particular position of the sun in relation to that of the tree branches and the angle of wall, all of which is measurable and calculable. What I just mentioned, and similar matters, have been called fact. But I also see that those shadows are beautiful: that there is a mystery in them even as they’re quietly and simply there, outside my window; that they have gentleness yet delicate tumult; that they seem distinct from the wall yet of it; that they feel very new to me yet remind me of other shadows I have seen. All that, the beauty, the mystery, the feeling of present meeting past, would be called value. Yet are those two aspects I described, which might be called “fact” and “value,” only apart? They are different, of course. But how much are they of each other? And are they both real?…Read more