Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

This TRO makes thrillingly clear something that has eluded people for centuries: what mind is, what its purpose is; also, what makes that aspect of mind, imagination, good and what makes it go wrong. Through the knowledge told of here, people—we—can finally respect ourselves on a steady basis for how our minds work! This TRO can have one begin to understand one’s own imagination and see how it can really work well—not just “cleverly” but deeply, proudly, excitingly, and justly! Read “Mind and the Two Kinds of Imagination,” this landmark issue of The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We have the honor to publish in two parts, in our July and August issues, a discussion by Eli Siegel about that tremendous universal matter—and also that matter most intimate for each of us—mind. Our own mind is so dear to us; it is nearly equivalent to what we ourselves are. Yet our mind, too, is so bewildering to us. And sometimes a person’s own mind can even torment him or her. Mr. Siegel gave this 1975 talk the title Preface to Sensation, Understanding, Imagination, Emotion: A Lecture of William Cullen Bryant, 1825. (You’ll read his explanation of that title soon.)

I have seen that Eli Siegel is the philosopher who understood mind: he understood it in all its everydayness, and mystery, and history, and confusion, and grandeur. It is he who explained what the purpose of mind is: to like the world through knowing it. He showed that mind is an aesthetic matter, in keeping with this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Mind is trying to put together such opposites as for and against, change and continuity, motion and rest, affecting and being affected, one’s individual self and an unlimited world.

And Mr. Siegel also explained the greatest danger of any mind, the ugly and hurtful thing in it. This hurtful thing is contempt, the feeling “we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” Everything unjust, cruel, sleazy in a person comes from the welcoming of, and having, contempt.

I’m very happy to say too that Eli Siegel, in enabling humanity to see what mind is, has given us knowledge that’s not only terrifically needed but beautiful and delightful….Read more