New issue—
“For All of Us: The Biggest Question”
Number 2139.—July 3, 2024
Dear Unknown Friends:
Here is the fifth and final installment of the lecture Hamlet and Questions, which Eli Siegel gave in 1976. In this work of magnificent literary criticism and human kindness, Mr. Siegel speaks about questions that are asked in various passages of poetry, including early lines of Hamlet. And in my commentaries I’ve written a little about the beauty of Aesthetic Realism itself in its asking of questions.
Now I’m going to quote and comment, some, on a question asked early in the history of Aesthetic Realism. It is the most important question for every individual person. Mr. Siegel asked it in The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict, a work that would become chapter 3 of his Self and World but which had first been published by itself in 1946. On its opening page, he describes in a question the “duality facing every human being…: How is he to be entirely himself, and yet be fair to that world which he does not see as himself?”
That question, in its beauty and dignity, is raging in people’s lives. Sometimes the raging is quiet, sometimes flaring. If asked, nearly everyone would say being fair to what’s not themselves is important. Some might even mean it a bit. But the world we don’t see as ourselves consists of people, facts, objects, history, knowledge, ideas, people again, people close to us and far away, people we see as different from ourselves. And even persons who have wanted to go after greater justice in various fields have rarely felt that being just was the same as one’s own glory, one’s own importance, one’s own being (as Mr. Siegel writes) entirely oneself. That is why a husband and wife, say, can quarrel in a way that makes them deeply confused and ashamed: because with all their affection, each doesn’t see being fair to the other as the same as being and protecting and expressing one’s own self…. more
Recent issues—#2138 There Are Questions—& Trouble—& Beauty | #2137 Hamlet, Questions, & Ourselves | #2136 The Kind Power of Questions
A selection of previous issues on— Art | Literature | Men & Women | Economics | Racism | Education | Nat’l Ethics | Mind
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