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

‘This is the question of meaning not being: not the ontology of the understanding of that extraordinary verb, but the ethics of its justice. The question par excellence of the question of philosophy. Not “why being rather than nothing?”, but how being justifies itself.’

All quotes from Grace Jantzen — Becoming Divine.

It is important to stress though, as with the opening quote of this chapter, that we are already fully connected as embodied persons. The oneness of life makes this something we cannot avoid — even if we may want to sometimes! Also, when right and wrong are set up as absolutes, they are turned into something else. This ceases to be ethics in the sense of relationship and becomes instead a bureaucracy. A rules-based system of ethics falls into the same trap of defining ethics as ‘what the world is like’, or ‘what the world should be like’, rather than asking: How should we live?

The criticism of Western philosophy from Jantzen and others then is that truth is paramount! Value is only realisable through ideals, so morality is seen in terms of relating to something that is fixed and external. Even where morality is rejected, or considered to be ‘relative’ it is actually just a rebellion against this particular interpretation of what value really is. The underlying assumption is that of a fixed truth, and knowledge in terms of justified true belief is never questioned. This in turn means that value that arises from within the human economy, as an ongoing interaction between embodied persons, is disregarded.

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