Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue is about a way of seeing that is the most needed thing in the world, the most artistic, most intelligent, most powerful, exciting, scientific, romantic, practical thing in the world: good will. Good will is a phrase heard much this time of year, but the real thing is not the soft or sacrificial item people mainly take it to be. It is the desire that other things and people be seen justly, dealt with justly, including by us. And it’s the feeling (which is correct) that our wanting others to fare well enables us to flourish, be ourselves, be expressed.

We publish “Good Will as a Circle,” by Eli Siegel: an explanation he gave in a 1969 class. With it is a paper by anthropologist and Aesthetic Realism consultant Arnold Perey, from a public seminar of 2019 on the subject “Today & Always—What Does a Woman Deserve from a Man?” Dr. Perey’s paper is about the need for good will in love. It’s also about contempt—the enormous competitor, in everyone, to good will. Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else,” and Aesthetic Realism shows that it is the most hurtful thing in the human mind. Contempt for people and the world is that which makes love fail.

And it makes an economy fail. In the 1970s, Eli Siegel showed that history had reached the point at which an economy can’t succeed unless it is based on good will. Contempt has largely been the impelling thing in economic life. It’s the basis of the profit motive: the seeing of other people in terms of how much profit can I make from you—how much money can I squeeze out of you while giving you as little as possible?

Even before the pandemic, an economy based on contempt was, for decades, making Americans poorer and poorer, undoing the middle class, putting millions of people in huge debt—all in order to keep big profits coming to a few people. Now, across this nation, people are lining up to enter food pantries, waiting hours on foot and in cars, because they and their families have “food insecurity”—which means they’re hungry, hungry, hungry. Millions of Americans are jobless or without sufficient income. An economy based on good will says: “No one should have to endure this! Every person deserves enough to eat, a good job and enough money to live with dignity, a good home, full education, and healthcare. A person who does not have these and wants them should be given them without stint!” That is good will. It is American. And now, nothing else will do.

We go, then, to Eli Siegel, speaking in 1969. He is the person who not only understood good will, but who showed, in his very life, its grandeur and magnificent intelligence.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Good Will as a Circle
By Eli Siegel

When we hope that other things are as good as possible, we have good will. But when we get some value for ourselves in hoping that they aren’t, that is ill will. Ill will consists of two things, contempt and anger. And much can be said about it.

Let’s take the idea that good will is like a circle. A circle is a form that is implicit in the world, and can be in a ring, in a column, can be in a hat, can be in the moon. It can be in a bit of string, can be in a button, can be in hundreds of things—can be in the way a bird curves about. The circle can be shown in millions of forms. You see the circle in the bird flying, or in the bit of string curved around, or the ring, or in the top of a circular table, or a column—and you feel that there is something abstract and permanent, and something fresh. Good will is like that.

But once you begin saying “I want to be through with good will,” you’re lost. If you can’t think that good will can surprise you for the rest of your life, you’re lost. It can take a new form, just as a circle can take a new form. If you think of a circle that is in orange or purple, it’s different. If you think of a circle found in the sky, it’s different. If you see a beaver wearing a circle around its neck, it’s different. A ribbon can be a circle. It can be found in ever so many ways—they’re all over the place.

So we see abstraction—something we’ve seen before—and then, we want never to lose any of its freshness. Good will is like that. Good will is a sight of the world as it truly is.

What Women Deserve from Men
By Arnold Perey, PhD

My study of men in diverse cultures worldwide, and what I’ve learned about my own mistakes, have convinced me that Aesthetic Realism is completely right in saying: what a woman deserves from a man, today and always, is good will. Good will isn’t the unsubstantial thing people may think it is. It’s the bedrock purpose of our lives. Eli Siegel defined it as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.”

Did I want women to be stronger and more fully beautiful? Have men in general wanted this? The answer on the whole is No. With few exceptions, men across the world have wanted a woman to be subordinate. This purpose has weakened men and made us despise ourselves.

What a woman deserves from a man is that he want to know her, and use the same mind that’s exact about a balance sheet, a work of art, or an IT innovation, to have good will for her. Central to good will is the desire to see and respect a woman’s strength of mind and her ethics, and to encourage them with all his heart. That desire is completely opposed to the conceited male ego. The joy this new purpose brings to a man is tremendous. Changing from overweening masculine conceit to a desire to know and be fair has brought me untold intellectual pleasure and real love—both of which would have been simply impossible otherwise.

The Ethical Battle in Self

How does a chubby child with a fondness for milk turn into a male chauvinist? Aesthetic Realism has made clear that every man is in a terrific battle between having contempt for the world, including women, and having good will. And that battle starts early.

I felt that I, a boy, was more important than girls. In my mind, an often-told family story was one justification for that. My grandfather, who had four daughters (one was my mother) didn’t have a male child in his family for 25 years. Then I was born! I heard over and over that he was so happy that the next morning he walked to work in the wrong direction. I thought, “This makes me more important than my aunts and mother, because I am the boy.” More evidence of my importance came when I learned to write my name and carved it with the point of a pencil on my grandmother’s new end table. Instead of punishing me, she told my mother, “Look how smart he is—he can write his name!” I also remember that when I saw the A&P sign on top of the big new supermarket near my home, I thought these were my initials, AP for Arnold Perey, displayed prominently for the whole neighborhood to see.

This kind of importance was opposed to another way I used my mind. I wanted very much to know the world and to like it. I spent hours reading my Wonderland of Knowledge encyclopedia and the stories in my big illustrated Old Testament for children. Through them I felt a respect, both for the facts of a large world and for ethics. Meanwhile, I used even the knowledge I liked so much to stoke my superiority, to think I knew more than anybody else. As a result, I was competitive with every person I met, including women. Not surprisingly, this made it impossible for me to care truly for any woman as I grew older.

For example, when I was an anthropology student in graduate school, I was seeing Margaret Kelly. The very thing that attracted me to her, her intellect and enthusiasm, I came to be angry at. I thought they made me small. Her enthusiasm for the great scientist Newton, for example, angered me, in fact drove me wild, because it wasn’t about me. I would say to myself, miserably, “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!”

Thanks to Aesthetic Realism, through its artistic, powerful, critical study of good will, I changed. I was freed to be more myself. In a magnificent, life-changing discussion, Eli Siegel said to me:

ES. Mr. Perey, you happen to be like many men. You want to know a woman who gives you a run for your money, that is, who can argue with you; then, you want a clinging woman, who has only a pair of lips and the ability to say yes. Are you torn between the two?

AP. I certainly am!

ES. Ms. Kelly is saying all you want is security and compliments—you don’t aim high enough. Do you think a person could ask something of you justly, which you really should give and don’t want to?

My answer was yes, and he continued:

ES. Do you believe the aspirations of Ms. Kelly are a pain in the neck? Is your favorite phrase “What do you want of me?” There are in literature and life many persons who felt that a woman wanted too much. What do you want, to live moderately or grandly?

AP. I don’t know.

ES. You want to be a nice, learned, intellectual bourgeois.

This was true. I’d been telling myself morbidly and miserably, “What does she want? I’m all right the way I am!” But I wasn’t.

ES. Are you interested in encouraging the best thing in a woman, or are you interested in letting sleeping possibilities lie?

AP. I’m more interested in not encouraging.

ES. Under cover of sadness, there’s a certain readiness in you to say everything is well with oneself. It’s like a bat, wandering in the midnight air and saying, “What a wonderful bat I am!” Ask, is it possible someone could miss something in you, be annoyed by you? Get to some luminosity and energy in this matter.

I did ask that question, and began seeing how much my inflated ego and complacency could annoy a person. Through careful study, my purpose with a woman changed. I came to be sure that what a woman wanted from me was what I wanted from myself: for us to use one another to care for the whole world more. And I was sure I wanted to respect and cherish a woman’s effect on my life.

I love Barbara Allen, my wife: Aesthetic Realism consultant, flutist, and my dear friend. She and I are grandly fortunate as we study together the great knowledge we also teach. I love her ethics. I learn from her every day. When we are in each other’s arms and passionately stirred, I want to strengthen her and know her as deeply as I can, encourage us both to be close to reality in its wholeness.

A Young Woman in Victorian England

A man who tried deeply to understand how a woman sees is the novelist Anthony Trollope. In his novel Kept in the Dark—a short work, his last, of 1882—he is fiercely critical of men.

The main character, Cecilia Holt, is a woman of thought. Trollope tells us she is well read in the “French and German poets” and has “two or three female friends, who were not quite her equals in literature but nearly so.” She lives with her mother in a small country home in Exeter, England. Though we learn of Cecilia’s “beauty, her grace, her dignity and her accomplishments,” Trollope writes:

Cecilia had no lovers till there came in an evil hour into Exeter one Sir Francis Geraldine,…a man who had property in the county.

Sir Francis is handsome and an aristocrat. We learn that he has one eye on Cecilia’s lovely appearance and the other on her fortune of twenty thousand British pounds. He is uninterested in knowing who this cultured young woman is, has no desire to encourage her to see meaning in the world, but works for her to worship him. Trollope describes Sir Francis conceitedly thinking “he was a man who knew everything.” Cecilia is impressed by the British noble, and when he seems to love her she welcomes it, and they become engaged.

But after six weeks, she discovers he has no interest in her opinions and cannot bear to hear any disagreement from her. He treats her with “ill-temper,” “scorn,” and “selfishness,” says Trollope. “The man himself, she found, was ignorant.” But Sir Francis is completely unaware that she has objections. Telling himself “his Cecilia was becoming tame in his hands,” he imagines he will have an uncritical, devoted wife.

That notion—that a woman should be adoring, and act and think in keeping with a man’s wishes—still clings to the male ego unbeknownst to ourselves. I thought I was an enlightened modern man and had gone beyond ancient anti-woman illusions. But I went crudely after a woman’s adoration and at times her body, without a thought to the awful effect I was having. Aesthetic Realism enables a man to ask: Do I want this woman to like, even love, the world itself fairly through knowing me? Or do I want to own her, see her as a private possession devoted to me?

In the following passage, Trollope describes Cecilia reasoning subtly, and rightly, about Sir Francis:

A certain way which Sir Francis had when talking to herself…struck her as ominous….That light tone of contempt if begun now would certainly not be dropped after their marriage. He had assumed an easy way of almost laughing at her, of quizzing [i.e., mocking] her pursuits, and, worse still, of only half listening to her….He had come to treat her with indifference, like a plaything.

And she thinks, “He does not in the least know me.”

When they meet next, she tells him, “You have wronged me…in your thoughts.” And she cancels the engagement.

Aesthetic Realism Consultations

When Jim Tully began studying Aesthetic Realism in consultations, he told his consultants he was worried that he didn’t have the feelings he hoped for, about things and people, including as to love. He was a graphic artist but said, “Painting and photography aren’t moving me anymore.” And he was concerned that he hadn’t been successful in his relations with women. He said he wanted a woman to need him, make him feel he was the most important thing in her life, yet each time he got close to a woman he began to lose interest.

We explained that a man’s contempt for the world causes him to be numb to things, and angry with them. “Are you also in a fight with people?” we asked. “Yes,” he said.

At work, he was in a contest with his boss, a woman, who, like him, was a graphic designer. And, as I’d misused knowledge, he misused art: to feel superior. When the two of them sat at a computer screen together, he was on the edge of his seat to see where he knew more and could correct her. But he also wanted her to like him: “I say to myself I’m going to be very charming, and I know I can be—and if I go about it in the right way I know I can succeed.” This strategy is not what a person deserves, in any aspect of life.

Love: A Subject of Education

Through his study of Aesthetic Realism, Jim Tully was learning that what he’d thought was love, wasn’t. We asked, for instance, whether he had wanted to have steady good will for a woman and hoped a woman would have a good effect on him. The answer was no: he’d wanted to dispense advice and act like a big authority. As he saw this, he saw it wasn’t love he was after, but conquest. And he said, with much feeling, that he wanted to have a different purpose.

JT. I want so much to see people better, and stop patronizing women.

Consultants. Do you want to see who a woman really is, as she sees herself?

JT. I don’t see that way now—but boy, do I want to.

As Jim Tully was learning and changing, he began to care for Jennifer Damon, a student of ocean biology. Love, Aesthetic Realism shows, is a subject of education; and we gave him assignments like these: 1) Write a soliloquy of Jennifer Damon—how is she affected by people?; how does she feel inside, to herself? And 2) Read and comment on the novel Middlemarch, by a woman of the 19th century who had a mind of great depth and learning—George Eliot, a true critic of how men look upon women and how women see men.

The deepest desire of Jim Tully is being met. He’s seeing that, rather than compete with a woman and flatter her, he respects himself through wanting to have good will: to encourage, honestly, lovingly, what is good and be against what isn’t good. In keeping with the scientific law of cause and effect, he is much happier. He told us how much he likes his conversations with Ms. Damon: about, for instance, art; their early lives; the purpose they’re learning to have—to be fair in their thought about people and things. He told us with tears in his eyes, “I am very, very grateful that a woman can say she respects the way I listen to her!”

And she, with a desire to see what’s true, has made him stronger. He said: “She encourages me to value the things in me that a person is right to care for.” He wrote to us:

The solid hopefulness I feel today was something I didn’t feel and couldn’t feel before studying Aesthetic Realism, and it makes me glad to be alive!