Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Aesthetic Realism & Nature by Eli Siegel

Now that the warm weather is here, and like so many people, I find myself thinking about "the great outdoors" and nature, I'd like you to know about a delightful & deep lecture on this subject by Eli Siegel.

It is titled: Aesthetic Realism & Nature by Eli Siegel—This lecture is published in series in The Right Of — & available on the Aesthetic Realism Online Library. To give you an idea of this fresh way of seeing nature, I quote some here:
"Once more people are going to go out into the country, and be on the hillsides, and in the grass, and hear the birds, and look at the insects, and watch the sky; and they won't do it really, I'm afraid, with any love for what those things represent, and they won't do it with any deep wisdom for themselves. So far, nature has been used too much to hate people with, and to be against oneself….
Nature is defined by Aesthetic Realism as the way the world goes about being itself and changing. Aesthetic Realism sees man's mind as nature at its highest, but as a continuation of all that went before. And if you don't like the way your in-laws behave, you don't like nature, because in-laws are just as much nature as hummingbirds are. If you are going away from in-laws to hummingbirds, you're going from one aspect of nature to another, not from something called in-laws to something called nature."