Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

The new TRO is a landmark in human thought. It’s about the question How are art and science related? You’ll learn that these two fields—though mainly seen as apart and opposed—are inextricably and beautifully akin. And you’ll learn why this fact is so hopeful for everyone’s life—how understanding it is a means of having our own thoughts and emotions fare well. Read “The Drama of Knowing & Feeling,” the magnificent new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part one of Eli Siegel’s powerful (also delightful) 1969 lecture Art Is within Science, a lecture in his definitive series on the relation between science and art. They, art and science, have largely been seen as apart from each other, as inevitably so, as two contrary divisions of human endeavor. The world of imagination, emotion, beauty has seemed a different world from the world of exactitude and logic.

The sense of the fundamental apartness of art and science corresponds to a division people make within themselves. Day after day people feel that the Me who tries to be logical and exact is separate from the Me who has emotion. Yet this rift makes us unsure and ashamed. We cannot like ourselves unless our emotions seem truly logical to us, and unless our desire to be accurate is not aloof but has true feeling inseparable from it.

In his art and science lectures, Mr. Siegel showed that the two, science and art, are not inevitably apart: indeed, they are of each other, deeply and livingly. As we see this, the corresponding opposites in ourselves are closer: we see that our emotion and our knowing can be increasingly one. These opposites were beautifully one in Eli Siegel himself, and we meet that oneness in the present lecture. His style and his explanations are at once warm—sometimes playful—and simultaneously scholarly, and richly exact….Read more