21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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constitute legitimate purposes and values would re-align.

All of the above though still places us on shaky ground. If we refer back to the quotation from Simon Parke, (and indeed the opening quote of this chapter) then we get the sense that even this derivation of meaning from relationships could still involve a degree of striving. It sounds like grace analysed and then packaged for general application. Can we step back from this somehow? Two effects will be observed as we go into the next chapter on beauty. Beauty has the effect of helping us to see more beauty — to discover it in more ordinary things. Beauty also has the effect of letting us step aside from the world, to exist for a time in ‘lateralness’. These effects in turn lead into seeking ‘fairness’ in terms of an equity and balancing in human relations — an equality that undergirds both justice and freedom. The starting point for all of this is then simply to see! If beauty remains unseen or unnoticed, then none of the virtuous consequences will follow. Three authors at least have taken up the simple notion of seeing as the key to life’s meaning. Pierre Tielhard de Chardin says: ‘The whole of life lies in the verb “seeing”.’ And then (perhaps a rather unlikely source) we have John Gray (Straw Dogs):

‘Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot live without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?’

And John Ruskin:

‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what

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