Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

“Love, Money, Pandemic—& What People Deserve” has the honesty, knowledge, and kindness people hope for about the most crucial questions in everyone’s life: How should we see other people? How should we see the world? For instance: a contemporary man writes courageously and self-critically about how he was with women and what he went after in love—and what he learned that enabled him to really change! Read the urgent, stirring new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. 

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are in the midst of serializing the great 1974 lecture Long Ago for Liking the World, by Eli Siegel. In it, he is illustrating a principle central to Aesthetic Realism, which people need desperately to know now. The principle is: the deepest desire of a person is to like the world through knowing it. Further, this desire is in a fight with another huge desire we have, the most hurtful thing in us and humanity: contempt, the desire to glorify ourselves by making less of the world, people, and things. How much we can respect ourselves, how well our mind works, how truly civilized a person we are, depend entirely on how much we’re going after authentic like of the world rather than contempt.

In the lecture, Mr. Siegel uses instances from a book of 1891, A Literary Manual of Foreign Quotations, compiled by John Devoe Belton. As he discusses these—with clarity, grace, depth, kindness, sometimes humor—Mr. Siegel is showing that many statements humanity has cherished affirm that tremendous need in us to like the world.

Also in this issue is part of a paper from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar that took place early this year: “What Gets in a Man’s Way—the World or His Own Ego?” The paper is by Aesthetic Realism consultant Ernest DeFilippis. It’s principally about love. It’s courageous and exact and can get the thrilled respect of both men and women. The purpose of love, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to like the world itself through a particular representative of that world. I can’t state that principle without adding that my own gratitude for learning it, my gratitude to Eli Siegel for teaching it so magnificently, is unlimited and deeply equivalent to my very life.

Love & the Economy

Today, even during a pandemic and amid terrific distress about money and jobs, people’s confusion about love goes on. Inseparable from the purpose of liking the world is good will for a person and people. And Aesthetic Realism is the body of knowledge showing that the big matter in both love and economics is the same: should the basis of our amorous actions and thoughts, and also the basis of how a nation’s wealth and jobs are had, be good will or ill will? Should the economy of a nation, and should a kiss, be based on good will or the ill will of self-aggrandizement?

Fifty years ago, Mr. Siegel explained that the world had reached the point at which economics based on seeing people as instruments from whom to squeeze profits could no longer succeed. The profit system had failed, no matter how much various individuals might try to prop it up. He was right. People have increasingly objected to what profit economics has done to their lives. Now, through this terrible pandemic, amid so much suffering, people are becoming even clearer, swiftly and intensely…. Read more