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

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

‘Despite this interest in beauty, the world grows uglier all the time. I believe this is because beauty has become an adornment rather than a virtue, an ego symbol rather than a way of life. We are committed to power not pleasure, as a way of life, and as a result beauty has lost its true meaning as an image of pleasure.’

Alexander Lowen — Pleasure (My emphasis).

Beauty, like anything in life, can set up as a goal to be achieved. In this sense, beauty can be similar to a spiritual quest, or to idealism in morality or politics. Beauty then becomes something that we try to own. It is better instead for beauty to be something that we just become, such that we reflect the beauty that we find in the world. We then reflect our enchantment and engagement with life. Alfred North Whitehead gives a sense of this in his Adventures in Ideas. He says:

‘The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of beauty… The type of truth required for the final stretch of beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation…. Apart from beauty truth is neither good, nor bad… truth matters because of beauty.’ Friedrich Schelling puts it even more succinctly: ‘The theoretical intelligence merely contemplates the world, and the practical intelligence merely orders it; but the aesthetic intelligence creates the world.’

The beautiful gives us the sense that we are at home in the world. Remembering our Aristotelian soul, a key ingredient is our way of being in the world. If we find that way of being to be pleasant, then, arguably, this is beauty —

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