Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

The new TRO is titled “What Is Love About?” The human hope for love is inescapable—and rightly so: it is central to life. Yet do we know, really, what love is about? This issue prints the 2nd half of Eli Siegel’s great lecture The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage. The difficulties in marriage, and its true purpose, are described with unprecedented depth, kindness, and wonderful humor. As you read it, you will be finding out how love, the real thing, can succeed at last! That’s the literally priceless treasure in “What Is Love About?,” the current issue of The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the second part in our two-part publication of that kind masterpiece, that down-to-earth yet philosophically mighty lecture, that needed-right-now and classic work by Eli Siegel: The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage.

He gave this talk in 1964, and the word aesthetics, so eminent in the title, is central to Aesthetic Realism. Mr. Siegel is the philosopher who explained that the questions of everyone’s life are aesthetic questions, answered in the technique of art: “The resolution of conflict in self,” he wrote, “is like the making one of opposites in art.” In this talk he shows that the anger so much in marriage exists because the persons concerned don’t see (for instance) assertion and yielding, welcoming and objecting, care for self and care for what’s not self, as having the same purpose.

Another Principle, and a Poem

I’ll mention another principle at the basis of this talk: The purpose of love—indeed, the aim of our very life—is to like the world through knowing it. This purpose is interfered with in people because there’s a competing desire in us: to have contempt—to feel superior through looking down on, putting aside, sneering inwardly (sometimes outwardly) at what’s not us. And “love” has been used in behalf of that sneering at the world, with the couple agreeing in various ways that the two of them are of a finer caliber than others. (Meanwhile, with all their devotion, each feels superior to the other, too.) From this joint contempt for the world have come anger, shame, and much confusion….Read more