“Men, Women, & the Art of Justice”

The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known

Current issue—

Number 2006. May 29, 2019

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of the lecture by Eli Siegel we have been serializing: the great We Approach Poetry Variously, of 1972. Here too is an article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner, from a paper he presented at a public seminar titled “What Is Most Powerful for a Man—Understanding a Woman or Owning Her?” Mr. Carduner writes courageously and definitively on male injustice to women, and as he does he explains that form of it which has been the subject of intense publicity at this time. As you’ll see, Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that makes clear the source of this unkindness and what its relation is to any cruelty, and what a man truly thinks of himself for it.

The Explanation

It has been necessary for a long time, vitally necessary, for people to learn from Aesthetic Realism. It is ragingly necessary now. One reason is: Aesthetic Realism explains what makes for injustice, and what can end it. That is so whether the injustice is of a man feeling entitled to deal with a woman however he pleases; or young people in a schoolyard bullying another child; or a boss paying an employee very little; or the brutality of looking down on a person of a different skin tone; or lying; or the assumption that a person close to one should be managed by oneself; or the taking for granted it’s all right for some people in a nation to be very rich and others very poor. Aesthetic Realism shows—and humanity needs achingly, screamingly, to learn—that the cause of every injustice is contempt: the desire to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Mr. Siegel explained:

As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.

And Aesthetic Realism shows there is another desire in us, opposed to contempt: to like the world, see it truly. Because that is our deepest desire, because it’s the purpose we were born for, our being untrue to it makes us ashamed, agitated, empty. But what is it that can make this deepest desire—which is the same as justice—do at last what it so rarely does: truly, glowingly, solidly WIN?...Read more

Recent issues—#2005 How Much Surprise—in Art & Life? | #2004 Quiet, Noise, Beauty, & Our Lives | #2003 Excitement and Calm—in Poetry and Us

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The Right Of is edited by Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education, who is author of its commentaries.