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

we feel at home in the world — we feel connected to the cosmos, to nature and with our own bodies. With the Aristotelian soul there’s no saying souls are good or bad — they just exist in a matter-of-fact kind of way. We could say that the soul is amoral, like nature, or we could simply say that the soul is perfect as she is — because she could not be other than she is. It is only through our agency in the world that ethics begins and the designations of rightness and wrongness begin to be applied by human societies.

There is part of us that understands and is changed by the experience of beauty. I think that this apprehension of beauty is a bigger clue to what life is about than either goodness or truth. Beauty — which seems the least definable of values — also seems the most real. Beauty speaks to the soul, both as its inspiration and as its way of being in the world. Beauty is something given to us first of all, and this sets it apart from other values.

Another thought is that there is something more involved when that feeling of transcendence occurs by way of a relationship. For much of our time with other people we deal with them on a fairly superficial level — even amongst friends and family. Occasionally however, there are moments when we seem to see the real person. It is not that these are always happy events, but there is the sense of having reached a deeper reality. (The ‘I/Thou’ relationship made famous by Max Buber, although it may be credited to Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach.)

What was said above can equally be applied

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