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

A question crucial in the life of every person is: how much meaning and value should the world have for me? Reading the new issue of TRO, you’ll be surprised and thrilled by the magnificent, logical way that question is dealt with by Aesthetic Realism. And so importantly, this issue also explains how people can be proud as they’re close to another person, and why so often they aren’t proud. There is no more timely matter for our lives than “How Much Value?,” the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue serializing Eli Siegel’s great 1969 lecture Is Hope Worth Money? It is about the relation of two opposites that are central to philosophy, magnificent in art, and bewildering in people’s lives: fact and value. This landmark Aesthetic Realism principle is true of them: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

In the part of the lecture published here, Mr. Siegel speaks about opposites that are within value—including the opposites of absence and presence, and even nothing and something. And he speaks about the much debated question concerning value: is there such a thing as good that’s not just someone’s opinion; is there such a thing as real meaning?

Aesthetic Realism is at once philosophic, exact in its reasoning, and immediate, down-to-earth, human. Here, the way Mr. Siegel speaks about meaning and meaninglessness is utterly logical—also thrilling and often humorous. But since the nature of this discussion is so richly philosophic, I wanted to join to it another way Mr. Siegel spoke about the matter of meaning. So, following this segment of his lecture are passages from a 1965 Aesthetic Realism lesson in which Mr. Siegel spoke about meaning in relation to love—to love as both mind and body….Read more