Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

Relation—is there anything more essential for a person to know about in order to have a happy life? Read the answer in “Relation: The Most Important Subject”—the new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by editor Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part two of the great 1972 lecture by Eli Siegel titled Hail, Relation; or, A Study in Poetry. It is about what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the most important subject in the world. Relation is, on the one hand, a philosophic matter, and in this talk we see some of the philosophic logical might of Aesthetic Realism. But on the other hand, relation, and how we see it, has to do with our biggest worries.

For example, loneliness is about relation. So is cruelty. Loneliness is the feeling that one does not have deeply to do with other things: it is a denial of relation. And cruelty always begins with the denying another human being feelings, hopes, a life, related to and as real as one’s own. Meanwhile, central to both kindness and intelligence is the sense that other things and people are related, vibrantly related, to ourselves.

Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy which makes clear that—and how—every individual is fundamentally related to every other person and thing: “The world, art, and self explain each other,” Mr. Siegel wrote: “each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” This vital relation we have to everything not ourselves is the reason why our having contempt weakens our minds and interferes with every aspect of our lives. Contempt is the desire (which we feel is so clever) to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

There Is Shakespeare

In the first and second parts of this lecture, Mr. Siegel discusses two sonnets of Shakespeare. He had given,  in the 1950s, a series of talks on all the 154 sonnets, and he is the critic who showed what they are about and who the much disputed “friend” Shakespeare writes of really is. In that series—one of the greatest of all instances of Shakespearean and literary criticism—Mr. Siegel shows that the friend is not any person Shakespeare knew. This friend is reality itself seen truly—in all its fullness and with all its tumult—as beautiful, as having form. And the friend is, too, Shakespeare’s own seeing of reality that way, which seeing made for Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, and more. The friend is the aesthetic seeing of the world, which was loved by Shakespeare, and which he worried that he was untrue to.   >> Read more