AESTHETIC REALISM FOUNDATION
141 Greene Street  New York, NY 10012 |
July, 2006
Dear Friend,
Now more than ever, people and nations need the knowledge and ethics that are in Aesthetic Realism, the education founded in 1941 by philosopher, poet, and critic Eli Siegel. That's why I'm proud to ask you for a financial contribution to the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. This foundation is the vanguard of culture and justice in America.
The enclosed mission statement presents the principles of Aesthetic Realism and the education taking place here at 141 Greene Street—and increasingly, through our Outreach Programs, at cultural centers, libraries, youth centers, and senior centers throughout the New York area and beyond. I'm glad to send you, too, reprints of some of the many articles that have appeared in newspapers throughout the United States and overseas during this past year about how Aesthetic Realism explains the biggest issues affecting people right now.
People today want to understand ourselves and also make sense of this tumultuous world we're in. Aesthetic Realism is the means to do both. I am Maureen Butler, Aesthetic Realism Associate. And I'd like to give you some examples of what I learned in Aesthetic Realism consultations and classes, because this knowledge, which changed my life and answers the questions of an individual self—myself and yourself—is the same knowledge that can have a nation be just and kind!
I learned that we're all in a moment-to-moment fight between two opposing desires. Our deepest desire is to honestly like and respect the world. But we also want to look down on everything—to have contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” All art, all justice, great scientific discoveries, every advance in civilization, and all lasting personal happiness arise from the desire to respect the world. Contempt, on the other hand, is the cause of the ordinary pain people feel in their lives—the boredom, nervousness, emptiness, trouble about love—and also the cruelty that goes on between individual people and in communities, including the cruelty of racism.
The study of contempt and respect is urgently needed by the world and taught nowhere but in Aesthetic Realism.
Trouble in Love & Trouble in the Economy
When I began to study Aesthetic Realism, one of the things I longed to make sense of—as millions of people do—was love. While I had lots of dates and had come to take for granted a certain approval from men, I agonized about why it was that every relationship ended in disappointment. I began to learn the answer in my first Aesthetic Realism consultation.
A consultation is a discussion with three consultants, in which you see how the principles of Aesthetic Realism explain your particular life and happenings in it, so that you're better able to meet your own hopes.
I told my consultants that a man I'll call Mike and I had given each other much pain for over a year, and once again it seemed love had failed. I was stunned when they asked me this about my purpose with Mike: had I hoped that he be clearer about the world itself and that he like the world? The answer was no:
Maureen Butler. I guess I hoped that he needed me more than anything else.
Consultants. Do you think you saw him as something to use to make more of yourself with—to be able to assert your power, your femininity, yourself?
MB. I see what you mean.
Consultants. Do you think that your purpose with him has been to make him stronger or weaker?
As I thought about these questions, many experiences with men came to my mind. I was learning the reason I saw myself as a failure in love: while of course there was much to criticize in the men I knew, my purpose with a man had been to conquer him, own him, have the thrill of making a strong man weak for me. Even where I was successful, I never felt satisfied, because I was annulling in my mind the fullness, the reality, of a human being to glorify myself, and calling it love. That's what many people call love—encouraged by self-help books, magazines, and talk show hosts. They don't know, as I didn't, that it's really contempt and ruins any chance of having real love.
I also learned in my consultations about another hope in me—a deep, good hope—which I hadn't seen and valued, and had unknowingly put aside to have contempt: to like the world, and use knowing a man to care for the world we both were in.
The Economy—Understood Too!
It's a beautiful thing that Aesthetic Realism's explanation of something as intimate as why a woman has pain in love is also the explanation of why people are enduring so much economic agony in our country now. The same purpose—contempt—that made love fail in my life is also what is making for the present economic suffering in our nation and world.
I had used men to aggrandize myself—and they had resented it. At jobsites throughout America, people resent being seen simply in terms of profit, as existing to aggrandize some company or employer. In my work as a technical writer for Information Technology (IT) departments in New York, I see the anger and pain that people have nowadays about jobs and money—even those who are fairly fortunate. People are shell-shocked and furious about having to work 10 or 12 hours a day and more, forced to take on the jobs of their downsized former colleagues. Eli Siegel showed in 1970, in a series of lectures, that economics based on a contemptuous way of seeing people was a failure. It had become, and is now, harder and harder for companies to make profits.
The state of mind my consultants asked me about—“[Did you see] him as something to use to make more of yourself with?”—has also been the cruel, ugly state of mind in economic history, and has brought about our situation in 2006: people forced to work longer hours for less money, if they have a job at all; stretched to the limit on their lines of credit or home equity loans; unable to afford medical treatment. And there is the shocking fact that in the United States of America many people, including children, have no home other than a cardboard box or, if they're lucky, a car.
Meanwhile, just as I couldn't like myself for wanting to weaken a man so I could feel big, no one can like oneself for hoping another person works for puny wages and long, mind-numbing hours—whether in Little Rock, Spokane, or Bangalore—so oneself can make profit.
The Answer, for Economics & Love
The people of America need to know that for our economy to flourish, it has to be based on the same thing which, I was learning in consultations, is necessary for love to go well: good will. Aesthetic Realism is utterly new in showing that good will is not a pallid, dull thing, but tough, practical, and tremendously subtle. Good will, Mr. Siegel said, is “the highest intelligence.” It is, he wrote, “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.”
Some years ago in a class discussion, I asked the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, Ellen Reiss, about what it would mean for me to have good will for Ernest DeFilippis—the man who, I'm so glad to say, is now my husband. Within her response were these beautiful questions: “Do you think there is such a thing as who he wants to be? And are you interested in that?” Those questions, about love, are related to the question Mr. Siegel said must be answered honestly for economics to be successful and kind: “What does a person deserve by being a person?”
My husband is an Aesthetic Realism consultant, and we've been married for 18 years. Wanting to know a man—how he sees the world—wanting him to like the world itself, and knowing that this is his purpose with me, has made for the thrilling and deep feeling of romance I longed for.
A Mother Seen More Truly—& the Combating of Prejudice
There is an enormous need everywhere for parents and children to see each other with more understanding. The Aesthetic Realism Foundation, in consultations, seminars, presentations, classes, and Outreach Programs, is meeting that need in ways that are making domestic life kinder and can literally have our homes and schools safer. For example, in October consultants Rosemary Plumstead and Jeffrey Carduner, as the invited speakers of the PTA Character Education Committee, addressed parents at Turner Creek Elementary School in Cary, North Carolina, on the subject What Do Young People Really Want?—and How Do They Want to Be Seen?
And there is an enormous, urgent need for people of different races and ethnic backgrounds to respect each other, to stop being cruel to each other. The principles I learned in Aesthetic Realism consultations and classes that enabled me to change the way I saw my mother are the same principles that can end racism in America and anywhere!
In my first consultation, I was asked, “Do you think that at your deepest you are more like other people or more different?” “More different,” I said. Growing up in suburban Cleveland, I saw myself as very different from my mother, June Butler—different and superior. For instance, she got excited when a farmer let her go right into the field on the side of an Ohio road and pick her own corn, while I acted bored. Where she was enthusiastic about things, I tried to act cooler. My consultants asked me:
Consultants. Do you feel that if nothing is going to faze you on the outside, you're going to be smarter than your mother?
MB. Yes.
I patronized June Butler. But despite the look of injury that often came to her face when we spoke, I didn't want to see how hurt she was by my scorn for her. I felt guilty about my mother but didn't know why. In my consultations I began to learn that I felt guilty about June Butler because I had contempt for her: I hoped to look down on her, so I could feel I was superior and important. And to look down on her, I had to see her as mainly different from me.
This motive, Aesthetic Realism explains, is what makes for all prejudice, including the racism still shamefully present in our country today. Racism doesn't begin with ethnicity. It begins with contempt.
In consultations I began to learn, as to my mother, what every person needs to see about our relation to all people. Each person is different, but we are related: at our deepest we are like each other.
For example: June Butler was very pretty and I thought she was very stylish. But I wanted to see her as superficial, just interested in beautiful clothes—while I, though liking the clothes too, longed to be seen as I really was. My consultants asked me, “Has the idea that you could have such an effect through how you appear made for a division in you: a division between what you feel people see and who you are, that is rather steep?” Oh, yes. My consultants were putting into words something so big in me, which I'd thought could never be understood.
Then they asked whether my mother could have that division too. I had never thought of it! Was she, too, yearning to be seen as she felt inside? My pain had been real to me, but hers had not. Now I saw how much feeling my mother might have had that I had missed.
This was the beginning of my learning to see my mother truly. Today June Butler and I have a genuine friendship that I cherish. I look forward to our lively conversations, and I'm proud to say that I respect and value her keen perceptions. The way I changed about my mother is the way people can change about prejudice.
For racism to end, we need to learn from Aesthetic Realism how to criticize contempt in ourselves. And we need to learn about the rich aesthetic relation of sameness-and-difference that exists between ourselves and every other person.
The Aesthetic Realism Outreach Programs
The principles I was learning in consultations are presented in workshops throughout the New York metropolitan area and in other states. I'll mention just a few that took place in the past year.
A series of talks was given at the Queens Borough Public Library on Architecture and You! We Can Learn about Ourselves from the Work of Three Great Architects.
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Filmmaker Ken Kimmelman and colleagues taught the acclaimed anti-racism workshop for young people, at libraries, cultural centers, and schools: “The Heart Knows Better”: Changing Prejudice to Kindness.
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Persons in their 70s, 80s, 90s, and a few over the age of 100, at senior centers and residences, learned about (for example) Memory Shows We Are Connected to the Whole World.
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Teachers attended workshops on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method at professional conferences and staff development sessions sponsored by their schools.
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Audiences at cultural centers and union conferences met the explanation of the economic turmoil going on today and the solution, presented musically, in Ethics Is a Force!: Songs about Labor, sung and commented on by performers from the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company.
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Young people attending after-school classes at urban youth centers were learning what it means to like the world honestly; how to see other people in a way that makes you proud; and how the opposites in you are also in a flower, in music, in a person who seems different.
The Need to See How Art Explains Life
Eli Siegel is the critic who explained what beauty is and why it is necessary for our lives. Every Aesthetic Realism class, seminar, and presentation illustrates this landmark principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
This principle has been the basis of the Terrain Gallery, which is part of the Foundation, since its beginning. During the past year the Terrain celebrated its 50th anniversary with an exhibition of works by 52 artists—including Will Barnet, Red Grooms, Chaim Koppelman, Mimi Gross, Alex Katz, William King, and more. They represent the hundreds of artists who exhibited at the Terrain since its founding in 1955 by artist and consultant Dorothy Koppelman.
Eli Siegel said that the beginnings of Aesthetic Realism are in his poem Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana , which received the Nation poetry prize in 1925. And now there is a film of Hot Afternoons by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Ken Kimmelman. Historian Howard Zinn wrote of it:
Ken Kimmelman's reproduction, on film, of Eli Siegel's magisterial poem, is an extraordinary achievement. It matches, in its visual beauty, the elegance of Siegel's words, and adds the dimension of stunning imagery to an already profound work of art.
The work of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation—the teaching of classes; dramatic and musical presentations; Outreach Programs; the thought that is given to the self and hopes of each individual person studying in consultations; the maintenance of computer systems and the building; every dollar spent—is in behalf of people's lives being better off. That is why I ask for your financial contribution. It's an investment in your own future and the future of every person alive and not yet born. Let's stand up for the justice, beauty, and truth people are desperate for!
Aesthetic Realism Foundation: Mission Statement & Description