“The Question—in Love & Economics”

The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known

Current issue—

Number 2011. August 7, 2019

Dear Unknown Friends:

There is no more important question for America and the world than How should people see other people? What should we want from a person—and from ourselves as to that person? This question, these questions, are immensely intimate: they’re about our domestic life, social life, amorous life. But they’re also crucial—for example—to how our nation’s economy will fare.

In this issue we publish part of an Aesthetic Realism lesson conducted by Eli Siegel. Having the lesson were a man and woman, a couple, who wanted to understand the trouble that was taking place between them: why they resented each other and felt wounded by each other.

Amazingly and logically, Aesthetic Realism shows that the fundamental fight within us as to a person we’re close to is the same as the fight that is central to economics. And in both instances, this fight is about the world itself—and is between contempt and respect: Do the world and other people exist for me to manage, conquer, use to glorify and aggrandize myself? (That is contempt.) Or should my purpose be to know—try to see honestly and lovingly what things are, understand ever more deeply and truly another person and other people? (That is respect.)

About our closeness to a person, Aesthetic Realism explains, magnificently, what nothing else does: “The purpose of love,” Mr. Siegel wrote, “is to feel closely one with things as a whole”....Read more

Recent issues—#2010 The Eternal, Lively Opposites—& the Selfie | #2009 The Opposites, Beauty, Contempt—& Our Lives | #2008 Reality’s Opposites—& the Self That’s Ours

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