AESTHETIC REALISM FOUNDATION 141 Greene Street  New York, NY 10012

June 2010                               

Dear Friend,

     I am writing to ask for your financial support for the work of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. Aesthetic Realism, founded by the great American poet and philosopher Eli Siegel, is, in my careful opinion, the most valuable education there is. It makes possible new, solid, true fairness to people—including oneself.

     There are the Foundation's many outreach programs. Teachers, librarians, labor leaders, directors of community centers have spoken and written about them with enthusiastic respect and gratitude—because these programs have what America and the rest of the world urgently need.

      And accompanying this letter is our Mission Statement, which tells about the work of this Foundation. Every class—whether on poetry, anthropology, music, marriage, acting, or the visual arts—every public seminar, dramatic and musical presentation, every consultation, all our outreach events, are based on this groundbreaking principle, stated by Eli Siegel; it relates life to art as they have never been related before: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

The Big Fight in Everyone’s Life

     Aesthetic Realism explains the central fight in us. It is between the desire to like the world, see meaning in it, and the desire to have contempt, which Mr. Siegel described as “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” He explained what no other philosopher had: contempt is the cause of all injustice, including racism and war. The thing in us that interferes with our own minds—that causes (for instance) boredom, learning difficulties, anxiety, and our mistakes about love—is also contempt: our desire to look down on a world which we were born to know and value. What we see in the news every day cries out for this fight to be made conscious so people can choose respect for the world instead of contempt. That is what your contribution will help make possible. 

How Should People See Other People?

The city where I grew up, Cincinnati, Ohio, has been in the news because of racially motivated killings of young black people. I know such horrors can be prevented—through the study of Aesthetic Realism! That fact is told of in an article we enclose: “Majority Whip James Clyburn Opens Capitol Hill Event Featuring Play by Ossie Davis & the Answer to Racism.” As you’ll see, Aesthetic Realism and what it explains was central to this historic event at the Congressional Auditorium of the US Capitol Visitor Center.
 
     I was once coldly oblivious to the racial and economic injustice suffered by others. In fact, I participated in it by looking down on people different from me. I know personally that this cruelty can change.  For example, as someone who felt smugly superior to people whose families had less money than mine, I’m grateful that now, because I learned to criticize contempt in myself, I have a larger mind and heart. I feel passionately that every child and adult on this earth deserves a good home, food, education, a dignified income, and more—they deserve to have their best possibilities respected and encouraged.

      It’s shameful—and completely unnecessary—that in America thousands of families have been forced into homelessness because their mortgage costs exceeded their ability to pay. It’s un-American that across this land, millions of high school and college graduates can’t find jobs. Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that explains what is happening in the world economy. In lectures in the 1970s, Eli Siegel made clear that now the only economy which will work is one based on ethics, on the honest answering of this question: “What does a person deserve by being a person?”  I am an Aesthetic Realism consultant and a coordinator of the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. With commentaries by its editor, Ellen Reiss, Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, every issue has the comprehension people are thirsting for, whether about love, current happenings, why a person feels bad—or our economy.

The Education Young Persons Hope For

 The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method can end the fury and failure in our schools.  It has been tested for over 30 years in elementary and high schools, including inner-city schools. In classrooms where it’s used the results are unprecedented: young people come to have an enthusiasm about learning—and they learn successfully; they come to have respect for and kindness toward each other instead of anger and prejudice. That teaching method, as you’ll see, was also part of the Congressional Auditorium event.

The Understanding of Self!

The public seminars that take place each month at the Foundation answer truly and honestly, as nowhere else, the questions men and women are in the midst of and even tormented by. Taught by Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates, they have scholarship, vividness, and humor.  And beginning this year—you can listen to podcasts of great talks given at seminars. They’re accessible through the Foundation’s website: for instance, Bennett Cooperman on “Toughness & a Feeling Heart—Can a Man Have Both?” and Carol McCluer on “Busier Than Ever, but Why Do We Feel Something’s Missing?”  
                        
     I love Aesthetic Realism for explaining that art—because it arises from justice and puts together the opposites we need to make one in ourselves—is essential to every person’s life. From a painting like Jackson Pollock’s “Number One, 1948,” we can learn that it’s possible to be abandoned and accurate at the same time. You can read art talks on that work and others—talks that have been given at museums and libraries—at www.TerrainGallery.org, the website of the historic gallery based on Aesthetic Realism.

     Aesthetic Realism consultations arise from the lessons Mr. Siegel gave.  I’m proud that a transcript of my first consultation can be read on the Foundation’s website. Learning about contempt and seeing that my largest questions were aesthetic questions, having in them the opposites that are in art and in other people, ended the painful emptiness I’d felt. I became both less arrogant and more truly sure of myself. And I was able for the first time to become friends with a person I’d been tremendously angry at: my mother. I was learning how to have good will for people. Mr. Siegel described good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” In the classes taught by him I was honored to attend, I saw that he himself had good will for every person he spoke to or about.

     I’ve given some reasons why I think Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge people and nations need most—and supporting the work of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation is one of the very best things a person can ever do!

	Sincerely,
	Nancy Huntting   Aesthetic Realism Consultant
Contributions are tax deductible