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

How can a great, malevolent Shakespearean character assist us in knowing our feelings? And is it really possible to know our feelings? Why is it important for us to want to? These questions, which are about everyone’s life, are also urgent for America today. You’ll see why—and learn the answers to them—in “King Richard III & Everyone,” 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 great 1973 lecture The Scientific Method in Feeling, by Eli Siegel. It is about those two tremendous opposites in every person: knowing and feeling. Just about everyone has the sense “I’m a different person reasoning, knowing, from the person with emotions.” People have taken this rift in them for granted. Yet it has made them ashamed, and pained, also unkind. In the lecture we’re serializing and in Aesthetic Realism itself, Mr. Siegel shows that the division doesn’t have to be. In fact, feeling and knowing are always simultaneous. Feelings themselves can be known, seen accurately, and it’s necessary for us to want to know them.

In the lecture Mr. Siegel uses an anthology of English literature to show that true knowing is inseparable from feeling. And as I say this, I say too that Mr. Siegel himself embodied the oneness of those opposites, magnificently—in his teaching, writing, life. His desire was always to know. He wanted to know the world in all its fullness and immediacy. His scholarship was wide, deep, rich—truly unsurpassed—and it was always warm, vibrant with life, passionate.

In America Now

At this time, when there has been so much tumult and shock in America, it’s necessary more than ever that we want to know what goes on within ourselves and others. It’s necessary that we get to primal matters: that we ask, What kind of feeling do we want to have? What kind of feeling is best for America?…Read more.