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

Here is the new issue of TRO—titled “Philosophy, the Opposites, & Our Lives.” How warm and immediate is philosophy? Most writers on philosophy would say: Since it’s about such things as the nature of being and perception, of course philosophy is about people. But philosophy hasn’t felt that way—hasn’t seemed to be about one’s own intimate and dear self. Aesthetic Realism, while greatly respecting the thought of the past, is the philosophy that answers the questions we have by being alive—and as it does, we feel it’s really about us, at our center. As its founder, Eli Siegel, speaks about philosophy, he brings the history of philosophy truly close to us: you’ll see this in the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here, in the current issue of TRO, are portions of a lecture titled Aesthetic Realism as Philosophy, which Eli Siegel gave in 1950. Thirty years later (in 1980), Martha Baird included three sections of that lecture in three issues of this periodical (TRO 363-5). And I am very glad to bring those sections together now, so that readers today can meet Mr. Siegel’s discussion of seventy-five years ago. This Aesthetic Realism principle is its basis: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” And Mr. Siegel speaks about the fact that, while the opposites are in our own hopes and worries, those same opposites are also in the subjects that philosophers have dealt with, puzzled over, disagreed about.

This Is Looked At

Philosophy can perhaps be described as the study of what is fundamental to reality itself. And Mr. Siegel has shown that wherever this study takes place sincerely, opposites are centrally present. Occasionally in the history of philosophy there has been an awareness that one is dealing with opposites. Most often, though, there is not such an awareness.

In the three portions of the lecture published here, Mr. Siegel speaks about the opposites being and change; then weight and form; then one and many. And in TRO 363, Martha Baird comments on his discussion of being and change and the two philosophers whose opposed views on the subject have gone through the millennia. She says:

The early Greek philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus have often been paired, and their contradiction has been noted. But Eli Siegel, for the first time, reconciles them gracefully and shows, in two paragraphs, that a basic question of philosophy is explained by music, and is in every person. No philosophy book ever told us this!…Read more