Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

Why does love so often turn into something else? And does it have to? Is there a purpose two people can have through which love will really succeed? Read “Love & the Philosophic Opposites,” the new, tremendously important issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by editor Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

In the 1964 lecture we are serializing, Eli Siegel reads and discusses his magnificent 1930 poem “A Marriage.” What that poem says about love—so musically, mightily, warmly, penetratingly—prefigures what people would learn in Aesthetic Realism lessons and classes beginning in the 1940s, and what men and women are learning in Aesthetic Realism consultations and public seminars today. We have reprinted the entire poem in TRO 1915. And in our current number, Mr. Siegel is speaking about sections 8 through 11.

The central matter about love has been articulated, for the first time, by Aesthetic Realism. It can be put this way: Is love about the world; is it an honoring of the world, a care for multitudinous reality? Or is love a refuge from people and happenings, a consolation against the world and a victory over it?

Aesthetic Realism shows that the purpose of love is to like the world itself through valuing another person. And the bitterness, resentments, recriminations, and dullness that come to be between two people exist because the “love” situation has been used to have contempt for the world. Two people come to despise each other because they’ve used each other to wage a cozy war against much of reality.

Marriage Is Philosophic

Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of that ever so human thing love is inseparable from its philosophic logic, its understanding of what reality is as such. For example, this Aesthetic Realism principle is fundamental to what love is—the love people long for and are confused about: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” In the part of “A Marriage” included here, and in his discussion of it, Mr. Siegel is showing that both marriage and love itself are a continuation of the world’s structure of opposites. Marriage has to do inextricably with the world in thousands of ways—it has to do with reality’s objects, history, happenings, people—but it is also a form of the world: it has reality’s composition, the oneness of opposites. >> Read more