Note from the editor, Nancy Huntting: I’m glad to continue this important blog for my dear friend and colleague Meryl Simon, (1934-2019). On the original blog, she wrote:
I publish this blog to have people know the new, urgently needed understanding of humanity—primitive and civilized—which is in the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, founded in 1941 by the great American educator and poet, Eli Siegel. I have an MA in Anthropology, am an Aesthetic Realism consultant, and live in New York City. A basic principle of this philosophy is:
“The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”
When I learned of Aesthetic Realism in 1971 and heard lectures of Eli Siegel in which he related diverse, specific studies to the human self at its deepest—economics, religion, geology, geography, family, agriculture, even war and peace—I knew I had found the very thing that anthropology was looking for, and that I was looking for. —Meryl Simon