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

pleasure.

Love sees beauty and responds to beauty with love. Plato said: ‘Love’s function is giving birth in beauty, both in body and in mind.’ To some extent this can be conflicted. Our relationship to wild nature and indeed to our own bodies is always somewhat unrequited. But we owe something back to beauty, to nature, to wildness! We must respond in kind by creating beauty in the world, both in terms of the physical things we make and also the relationships we form with other people, and with animals and plants and the environment. Keats may have said ‘beauty is truth and truth beauty — that is all to know on earth and all ye need to know’, (Ode on a Grecian Urn); but Aristotle saw instead a relationship between the beautiful and virtue, arguing that: ‘Virtue aims at the beautiful.’ The big link then is less between beauty and truth, more between beauty and goodness.

Beauty brings about a radical ‘de-centre-ing’ — takes us out of ourselves. This is a necessary process for bringing about good in the world. Another passage from Elaine Scarry takes up this thought and leads us into the further discussions of this work:

‘…beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a life-saving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of ”a symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another”. ‘It is clear that an ethical fairness which requires a “symmetry of everyone’s relation” will be greatly assisted by an aesthetic fairness that creates in all participants a state of delight

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