Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, writes:

William Wordsworth and Abraham Lincoln are a means of our learning about a fight that’s in all of us—in “Originality, Convention, & What’s True,” the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue to serialize a 1963 lecture that is historic—great in what it says about both life and art. It is Romanticism and Guilt, by Eli Siegel.

Part of its greatness is Aesthetic Realism’s explanation of guilt. Whether guilt is searing or murky, whether it shows itself as agitation or emptiness or “low self-esteem,” it is the sense that we have been unjust to the world. Guilt does not come from society or religion or our upbringing. It comes from what the human self is. If we are unjust, whether we’re clear about that or not, we have to dislike ourselves—because our purpose from birth is to be ourselves through seeing truly what’s not ourselves. This purpose is in keeping with the aesthetic nature of the human self: each of us is, all the time, a situation of opposites needing to be one, and the chief opposites are self and world. Writes Eli Siegel in two clear, resounding, and beautiful sentences:

The basis of the Aesthetic Realism method is that every human being is a self whose fundamental and constant purpose is to be at one with reality. It is impossible for that self to evade this purpose, although he can curtail it, obscure it, limit it.

That is how “The Guilt Chapter” of his Self and World begins… more