Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

This new issue of TRO, “Imagination: What Makes It Good or Bad?,” brings thrilling logic and clarity to a subject that affects everyone mightily! What is imagination? Does some imagination strengthen and other imagination weaken people? What, really, is the difference between these? And how can we like ourselves for how we imagine? With powerful, kind comprehension, this issue presents what Aesthetic Realism has explained: there are two kinds of imagination. And Aesthetic Realism makes clear the fundamental distinction between them! This is shown through vivid and stirring examples. You’ll be moved and importantly educated as you read “Imagination: What Makes It Good or Bad?” the latest issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Now, in January 2025, we begin to serialize a lecture Eli Siegel gave over fifty years ago: a lecture that’s brand new, for it’s about our present moment and has the knowledge, the exactitude and freshness and kindness, that humanity is thirsting for. The lecture is on imagination. It’s titled Poetry I: Imagination Is All This. And Aesthetic Realism is great about that tremendous subject—for Eli Siegel understood it, as no other critic or student of mind could.

He showed what imagination fundamentally is. And he showed there are two kinds of imagination, which can be called good and bad; kind and cruel; beautiful and ugly; true and false. Imagination is the source of the utmost loveliness and also the utmost cruelty. And Eli Siegel showed what the fundamental difference is between these. We need—how urgently we need—to know that difference.

And so, I’ll describe immediately the difference in impulsion between the two imaginations—between imagination that’s good (even magnificently good) and imagination that’s hurtful (even brutally hurtful). Aesthetic Realism shows that there is a fundamental fight going on in every human being. It is between respect and contempt for the world. Respect is the desire to see meaning, value, in reality; contempt is the feeling we’re more if we can look down on what’s-not-us. And the central distinction between the two imaginations is: does this imagining arise from a desire to respect the world—or from the desire to have contempt for it?…Read more