Steve Weiner, computer specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

This issue of TRO is about two things that people most often feel are worlds apart: the thought of the great philosophers and your life as you immediately live it every day! A big question philosophy has tried to understand is: do our lives have a central, inherent purpose that’s with us wherever we go, whatever we do? As you’ll see, this question is answered by Aesthetic Realism—logically and with enormous respect for humanity! For the happy and hopeful sake of your life and all lives, read “Our Largest Desire,” the deeply illuminating issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue of TRO, we conclude our serialization of the definitive, immediate, often humorous 1972 lecture A Poem Is in the World, by Eli Siegel. He has been speaking about those works called “the great books,” and about what such a book has to do with us, with our hopes and worries.

In the present section, Mr. Siegel continues commenting on passages from the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. And we come to one of the biggest matters in the history of philosophy: is there such a thing as the highest good, the summum bonum, that which the human self is most deeply after? Is there an end, or purpose, or utmost value we need to go for, through everything we desire or do? Over the millennia this has been written of, variously, by many philosophers after Aristotle—for instance, Cicero, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, Jeremy Bentham.

Aesthetic Realism says, Yes, there is a largest purpose, for and in the human self. And Aesthetic Realism meets the hopes of philosophy and every person in showing what that purpose is, and identifying also that in us which would like to evade it….Read more