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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book to understand oneself with--at last,
By
This review is from: Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism (Paperback)
This is a book, as other reviewers have stated, that is unique and great. The author states on the first page of his Preface: "The large difference between Aesthetic Realism and other ways of seeing an individual is that Aesthetic Realism makes the attitude of an individual to the whole world the most critical thing in his life." And to learn how this is true is to understand oneself better--to an exponential degree.
As an anthropologist who has studied many cultures, the explanation given in this book of the many ways an individual can see the world falsely or accurately, egoistically or with respect, illuminates--as no other explanation has done--the inner lives of men and women from southern Africa to the Arctic, from New York City to Beijing, Sydney, Bagdhad. You see, in Self and World, for example, such sentences as: "The basic conflict in the human mind--present, I believe, in all particular conflicts--is that between a person warmly existing to his fingertips, and that person as related to indefinite outsideness....In every person there is a drive towards the caring for and pleasing of self; in every person there is a drive towards other things, a desire to meet and know these. Often this drive towards self as an exclusive thing collides painfully with the drive to widen the self" (p. 93). Here is the beginning point for the particular conflicts we all have, in every culture. It is the conflict present in the particular conflicts documented by Ruth Benedict in her always-important Patterns of Culture; by David Friend Aberle in his analysis of a Hopi life history (the life of Don Talayesva, titled Sun Chief); by Margaret Mead in her large anthology, Cooperation and Competition; and many more worldwide. Eli Siegel, in Self and World, explains the cause of these conflicts. He gets to a deep and universal, indeed multicultural, explanation. When he writes, "Look at Jamison. He is shy and he is arrogant; in fact, he is like most people," he is talking about people worldwide. And we don't necessarily know a person's race in Self and World: Is Joe Johnson white, or black, or brown? What color is Jamison? or Robinson? or Stella Winn? The people whose lives are described in Self and World--each in his or her own particular, rich way--are Everyman. They are you and me. And as we learn that Jamison "looks at himself and finds a person who is timid, wants to evade people..." and who "at other times...is raring to go, feels like an excited regiment, and like a dozen energetic lions" (p. 95), we see not only the duality or polarity that we have ourselves, but soon we will learn the reason why we bound back and forth between inferiority and superiority--and learn the solution in aesthetics. It is aesthetics seen in a way that adds to what was seen by earlier philosphers and critics--adding to Aristotle (in the Poetics) and Plotinus and Saintsbury and Matthew Arnold. For, writes Martha Baird Siegel in her Introductory Note, "He saw beauty in a new way and made it plain, able to be seen by others. He said: 'All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.'" For a more complete description, see this book. As a student of Aesthetic Realism who used the understanding of self set forth in Self and World as the basis of my doctoral thesis (Columbia University Department of Anthropology)--the thesis was sponsored by Margaret Mead--and as a person who came to understand myself much more deeply than by any other means, I have no doubt that the explanation of self that is in this book is the most valuable to be found anywhere. I do not say this to annoy anyone who may not be familiar with the full range of explanation that has been given (whether by Freud, Adler, Horney, Geza Roheim, or many others), but to be exact. To a person making a fair comparison, the author of Self and World, Eli Siegel, has understood, explained, elucidated with immense clarity, that unknown terrain which so many have struggled to map without success: the human self. And he has done so in prose that is great literature.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Book!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism (Paperback)
I have never read a book that was so clear and so kind about so many subjects--love, children, economics, and just plain life! I can't imagine a person reading this book and not having dust cleared out of their brain--Eli Siegel makes so much sense. When he describes how art has the answers for life, he describes it in a way that is so down-to-earth, and practical. After reading dozens of other books on psychology, this one stands out as plainly the best. It is profound, but never murky; and it is hopeful, but always solid--nothing "trendy" or "new age"--just good, surprising, plain insight. Now that I've written this review, I'm going to sit down and read the book again--I got so much pleasure the first time through!
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A major step in the understanding of mind--and a joy to read,
This review is from: Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism (Paperback)
When I began studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Brasenose College, Oxford, in the late 1970's, I was hoping to understand the world, other people, myself. There I studied the works of John Locke, David Hume, Rene Descartes, Bertrand Russell and many other great philosophers, and I was amazed by their ideas. But even when I graduated three years later I still didn't feel the philosophy I read and cared for had anything to do with my own personal thoughts and feelings. It was not until I read Eli Siegel's "Self and World" that I met a fully coherent, intellectually-satisfying explanation of reality and the purpose of our lives.
Eli Siegel explains the human self, what has interfered with -- ruined -- lives over the years; and he has enabled things that have tormented people--the hitherto intractable, incomprehensible things--to change, bringing sunlight where there was darkness. As he does, he brings together subjects that have been seen as essentially unrelated, such as individual psychology and economics, mental health and beauty, and shows how aesthetics relates and explains them all--that this is one coherent world, and that it is the other half of ourselves. As well as explaining in detail some of the biggest things such as insanity, happiness, what will make for truly successful economics, the meaning of beauty for our lives, guilt, how a child comes to have an attitude to the world and what interferes, love, dreams, and more--he also explains in a few paragraphs, sometimes less, such things as bed-wetting, the heredity-environment debate, trauma, and so much more, All this in words that are beautiful, with the most clear, accessible logic, kindness, passionate good will, and with tremendous humour. I'm giving a swift description of some of the matters addressed in this book, but what I write here comes from careful study and much thought. I suggest you read it for yourself, and see what you think. This book is a major step in the understanding of mind, and it also happens to be a joy to read.
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