Concept
Aesthetic Realism
Overview
Aesthetic Realism is a philosophy founded in 1941 by the American poet and critic Eli Siegel (1902–1978). He defined it as a three-part study: "[T]hese three divisions can be described as: One, Liking the world; Two, The opposites; Three, The meaning of contempt."
Aesthetic Realism differs from other approaches to mind in identifying a person's attitude to the whole world as the most crucial thing in their life, affecting how one sees everything, including love, work, and other people. For example, it identifies the cause of boredom as the desire to have contempt for the world.
The philosophy is principally taught at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, an educational institution based in SoHo, New York City.
In the 1980s the Foundation faced controversy for its assertion that men changed from homosexuality to heterosexuality through study of Aesthetic Realism. In 1990, it stopped presentations and consultations on this subject.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The object is then called beautiful; and the faculty of judging by means of such a pleasure (and, consequently, with universal validity) is called Taste. For since the ground of the pleasure is placed merely in the form of the object for reflection in general--and, consequently, in no sensation of the object, and also without reference to any concept which anywhere…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Aesthetic Realism is.
Happiness thus means perfection, and perfection a completely universalized individual. The motive toward the moral life is elsewhere stated to be love; and love is defined as interest in perfection, and hence culminates in love of God, the only absolute perfection. It also has its source in God, as the origin of perfection; so that Leibniz says, Whoso loves God, loves all.
John Dewey, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding
States what Aesthetic Realism is.
Poetry institutes the forms of the worship of Humanity; Science supplies the principles on which those forms are framed, by connecting them with the laws of the external world. Imagination, while ceasing to usurp the place of Reason, yet enhances rather than diminishes its original influence, which the new philosophy shows to be as beneficial as it is natural. And thus human life at last attains that state of…
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
States what Aesthetic Realism is.
Philosophers who discussed Aesthetic Realism
Related ideas
- Cult
- Greenwich Village
- Solar System
- The New York Times
- Time (magazine)
- The Nation
- Critical theory
- New York City
- Henry James
- Eli Siegel
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophical realism.