Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

Today, all of us used our imagination in some way. But do we really know what imagination is? And, do we know how to use ours in the best and wisest way? You’ll be thrilled by the comprehension in the current issue of TRO as you learn what Aesthetic Realism alone makes clear: there are two kinds of imagination, one beautiful, one ugly. They’re told of in the issue’s title: “Imagination—For or Against the World.” And as you read, you’ll meet vivid (sometimes humorous) instances of these, from life and from art. It’s clear—knowledge humanity needs urgently is in the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the lecture Eli Siegel gave on May 5, 1971, on that tremendous, confusing, infinitely important subject imagination. It’s titled Poetry i: Imagination Is All This. And Mr. Siegel is the critic who showed what imagination, at its very basis, is—be it everyday imagination or the imagination behind great art; be it imagination that’s kindness or imagination that is cruel.

All imagination, he showed, is a joining of the chief opposites in everyone’s life: self and world. Whenever there is imagining, a person is looking at some item or aspect of the world, and is doing something to it, changing it, adding him- or herself to it. “Imagination,” Mr. Siegel said early in this talk, “can be described essentially as what we add to the world through our minds.”

And do we add to things, to the world, for good or for ill, justly or unjustly? There are, Aesthetic Realism explains, two kinds of imagination. And as I wrote in our last issue: Mr. Siegel’s showing the difference between good imagination and bad is one of the most important—and kindest—critical achievements in history. The two types of imagination, he showed, arise from the two big desires fighting in everyone: the desire to respect the world, see meaning in it; versus the desire to have contempt—to lessen what’s not us as a means of making ourselves superior….Read more