Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

“The Aesthetics of Restlessness” is about something that plagues people everywhere. What does restlessness come from? Can it be comprehended at last—so people can stop having it, and honestly like themselves?  Yes! That longed-for understanding is in the great new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. 

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

It is an honor to publish the first part of Mind and Restlessness, by Eli Siegel. This lecture, which he gave seventy years ago, explains definitively, kindly, clearly, richly, beautifully, a matter not understood by others attempting to deal with the human self.

We do not have a full transcript of Mind and Restlessness, but I have put together notes taken by two of the students present in that 1948 class: Martha Baird and my mother, Irene Reiss. Though these notes are incomplete, they bring us an authentic picture, not only of the ideas in the lecture, but of Eli Siegel’s depth, ease, great exactitude, humor, scholarship, down-to-earthness, respect for the self of everyone.

People have been tormented by their restlessness. And, as Mr. Siegel shows, along with the kind that is overt, there can be a restlessness that people don’t even know they have, but which makes them feel unsure, unplaced, rather empty.

Restlessness Is about Opposites

At the time of this lecture, the philosophy Aesthetic Realism was in its first decade: Mr. Siegel had begun to teach it seven years earlier. It is the philosophy showing that the human self is an aesthetic situation; that our fundamental need, in every aspect of our lives, is to do what art does: put opposites together. “All beauty,”Mr. Siegel explained in a landmark principle—“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” So in this lecture he looks at restlessness as no one else ever did: as a question of aesthetics.

Take a woman who cannot concentrate on something important that she’s reading but must too often get up and look out the window, check her email, look for something on Ebay, wipe a countertop, text a friend, take a selfie with her dog, get something from the refrigerator. In her restlessness, she is dealing painfully, inaccurately, with opposites that are one in every instance of good music, motion and rest. The oneness of these opposites makes for beauty anywhere. For example, there’s the beauty of a tree as it stands with trunk firm and still, while its leaves move rustlingly, in delicate tumult.

And there are the biggest opposites in everyone’s life: self and world. Restlessness, Mr. Siegel shows, always has to do with a false relation of these. In the 1948 lecture he speaks about various forms of restlessness. The particular causes may be somewhat different. But in all, the decisive cause is a person’s unjust seeing of the world: a feeling that one takes care of oneself by looking down on it, getting away from it. That feeling is contempt, which Mr. Siegel showed to be the most hurtful thing in the human self: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world….” Read more