Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
What kind of country—and economy—do the American people really want? And what can we learn about this from one of the most notable people in our history? Read “Walt Whitman—& Who Should Own America,” 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 print here an important American essay, originally written and published in 1938: “Walt Whitman, Agitator,” by Eli Siegel. While there is in it a sense of that year, it is also immensely immediate, of our own very moment. It explains what Americans are looking for, tumultuous for, clamoring for right now.
The essay is important literarily. As literary criticism it is great. And the writing in it is beautiful: the prose has the scholarship, grace, vividness, and throbbing comprehension that are Eli Siegel’s. This essay is great too in its understanding of history, and economics.
Mr. Siegel wrote “Walt Whitman, Agitator” before Aesthetic Realism formally existed. But the philosophy he would begin to teach three years later was developing in his thought. The central principle of Aesthetic Realism can be felt in the 1938 essay: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” That is the basis of what he says here about America, and how America and the world should be owned.
America Now, & Whitman
Eli Siegel saw what no other economist or historian, left or right, saw: that an economy needs to be aesthetic, the oneness of opposites. It needs to be the oneness of one and many—justice to each individual person and to all people at once; it needs to bring out the particular expression of every single person—with that expression friendly to what all people deserve. And economics, he explained, needs to be the oneness of the biggest opposites in human life—self and world, or selves and earth: the earth of America, with its wealth, has to belong to every person, every American self. This oneness of opposites, he shows in the 1938 essay, is what Walt Whitman stands for. And seven decades later, it is what America must be, if our economy is to work efficiently and bring pride rather than agony to millions of people. >> Read more