Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

How can we feel the world has true, large meaning for us? And what in ourselves interferes with our feeling that? For the tremendously hopeful answers to these questions—and to learn about a great English critic too—read “How Alive?” the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are honored to reprint a review by Eli Siegel. It appeared in the New York Evening Post Literary Review of May 1, 1926, and in it we can see something of the beginning of Aesthetic Realism. He was 23 years old then; and this short article about the critic Samuel Johnson is itself literary criticism that is important, big. Mr. Siegel’s writing here, his prose style, is wonderful—with its aliveness and exactitude, untrammeled feeling and precision, earthiness and grand intellect. For all the brevity of this article, the reviewer places, as I have seen no one else do, just what it is that makes Johnson “one of the great and permanent critics of the world.”

The approach to reality and beauty in the 1926 review is also at the heart of the philosophy Eli Siegel would found fifteen years later. We can see this fact through the second work in the present issue: an article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Derek Mali. It’s part of a paper he gave this July at the public seminar titled “What Does It Mean to Bring Out the Best in People—and Do We Want To?”

The Interference in a Critic & Everyone

For example, Mr. Mali speaks about something Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy to show: the interference, in each of us, to our own happiness and intelligence is our desire to have CONTEMPT—“the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Contempt is the stifler of our kindness and of our full aliveness. And further, contempt is also the fundamental interference with a person’s ability to be a good critic of art. Our contempt prevents us from seeing truly the value of a literary work—or anything. I learned about this in a magnificent Aesthetic Realism lesson many years ago. Mr. Siegel was speaking about contempt as he described a “me” in everyone “that is the ugliest thing in the world”:

There is a me that says the best thing to do is be inaccurate about the rest of the world. It says, “That is good in this world which pleases me.” This has occurred in criticism and has made for some false judgments, many of them. It also goes on in life. The self is the one bad judge in the world—nothing else can go wrong—the narrow self that is not interested in the object.

Tepid or Alive?

One of the most frequent forms of contempt is something Derek Mali writes about: the desire to be not much affected by things and people; to keep oneself inwardly aloof, unhad; to meet reality with a certain tepidity—with part of oneself, not all of oneself. No one was more opposed to that way of being than Eli Siegel. He saw it as awful, as completely against what art, humanity, and the world deserve. In the 1926 review, we see him pointing to, and describing richly, the aliveness of Samuel Johnson—Johnson’s tremendous non-tepidity, his putting the fullness of himself into his judgments and statements…. >>Read more