"[2] 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.

[5] Eli Siegel described the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism as a study in three parts: "One, Man's greatest, deepest desire is to like the world honestly.

[8] Honest like of the world does not depend on how fortunate one is, but on seeing that reality is made well because it has an aesthetic structure, which art shows.

Siegel stated that all the sciences and arts provide evidence of reality's aesthetic structure and can be used to understand and like the world.

A good novel or musical composition, for example, composes opposites that are often in conflict in a person's mind or daily life: intensity and calm, freedom and order, unity and diversity.

A successful poem or photograph or work of art in any medium, is therefore, a guide to a good life, because it shows the aesthetic structure of reality and ourselves.

[16]A key study in Aesthetic Realism is how an attitude to the world as a whole governs how a person sees every aspect of life, including a friend, a spouse, a book, food, people of another skin tone.

[17] Accordingly, the philosophy argues that individuals have an ethical obligation to give full value to things and people, not devalue them in order to make oneself seem more important.

[18] Aesthetic Realism states that the conscious intention to be fair to the world and people is not only an ethical obligation, but the means of liking oneself.

[25] A second text, Definitions, and Comment: Being a Description of the World, completed in 1945, defines 134 terms, including Existence, Happiness, Power, Success, Reality, and Relation.

He stated that ideas central to the philosophy were present in his poem "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana", which won The Nation's annual poetry prize in 1925.

[27][28] It begins with a hot, quiet afternoon in Montana, and travels through time and space, showing that the diversity of reality is surprisingly connected, and things, people and places usually regarded as separate "have a great deal to do with each other.

There is an interactive workshop for teachers, "The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method", and classes in poetry, anthropology, art, music, and "Understanding Marriage.

Herself an Aesthetic Realism consultant since 1971, Reiss also taught in the English departments of Queens and Hunter Colleges, City University of New York.

Her commentaries on how the philosophy views life, literature, national ethics, economics, and the human self appear regularly in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

[34] The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company, composed of actors, singers and musicians, has appeared throughout the country in both musical performances and dramatic productions.

Truth"—Songs about Love, Justice & Everybody's Feelings, "Humanity's Opposites—Beginning with Ireland" (Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock and Irish Songs) and "The Civil War, Unions & Our Lives!

They also present dramatic readings of Siegel's lectures on Shakespeare, Molière, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Ibsen, Strindberg, Eugene O'Neill, George Kelly, Susan Glaspell, and others.

[38] The People of Clarendon County (Chicago: Third World Press, 2007), includes a play by Ossie Davis, re-discovered by Bernstein, together with photographs and historical documents concerning the Rev.

This was the first of five lawsuits that eventually led to the breakthrough 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which made segregation in public schools illegal and struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine established in 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson.

[50] Among the earliest students of Aesthetic Realism were Chaim Koppelman (1920–2009),[51] a painter, sculptor, printmaker,[52] and founder of the printmaking department of the School of Visual Arts, and his wife, painter Dorothy Koppelman (1920-2017), who opened the Terrain Gallery in 1955, introducing Aesthetic Realism to the cultural scene of New York City with art exhibitions and public discussions of the Siegel Theory of Opposites in relation to painting, sculpture, photography, poetry, and later, music, theatre, and architecture.

[53] Chaim Koppelman's interviews of Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Clayton Pond, in which these artists discussed the relevance of Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel's Theory of Opposites to their work, are now part of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

[76] With the exception of a brief 1971 review calling The H Persuasion "less a book than a collection of pietistic snippets by Believers,"[77] The New York Times never reported that men said they changed from homosexuality through Aesthetic Realism.

[78] Students of the philosophy who said they changed from homosexuality or in other large ways accused the press of unfairly withholding information valuable to the lives of people.

In the 1970s they mounted an aggressive campaign of telephone calls, letters, ads, and vigils in front of various media offices and at the homes of editors.

The Globe's ombudsman later wrote in his column that the article was biased against Aesthetic Realism and that it contained "strong, negative words without attribution" and "inaccuracies".