Being in the story but also retaining a perspective, which is the mode of functioning in a world, means that there are multiple points of view in play. This always the case, it is part of that excess of consciousness that assures us we are alive, and which we only reluctantly grant to those other points of view which are merely objects to us and which might we share (as common objects) with our closest interlocutors. These can be displaced on the pure axis of time, making them the viewpoints of ourselves in the past or in the future - polarities which seem to carry roughly equal weight - or else differing on a purely spatial axis which makes them the viewpoints of others, either of people in our immediate circle, where they might be our peers or others presumed to know more or know less than we do, or they are people we are forced to imagine who may be no less real, cultural figures or synthetic positions generated by the culture and posed as invariants in relation to contingent changes. It is insufficient to say that they all come together, simply constituting a living perspective, as if they are effortlessly synthesised like the visual fields of our two eyes, or the heterogeneous visual and auditory fields, no, these multiple points of view readily clash and putting them together is a positive task which may not succeed, rarely succeeds perfectly, and in fact the clashing itself, the disharmony of different streams in each of which we exist as some kind of elemental and partial persona conveys a sort of energy, a turbulence, which might be enough in itself since we only have to ride it. When the synthesis of perspectives does take place, opening an unexpected sense of space, or even breathing room, then it is what we call art and admire as truth, a second-degree perspective that lends order but introduces its own cardinal axes. To enter into this space is to come under the influence of ideas more powerful than our own merely contingent awareness, ideas which define the very contingency of our awareness, so that we are inclined to rate them at more than their true value. Experience shows us that they are as lacking in fundamental orientation as the constituents of the initial flux. What is needed, and we seem to see hints of this everywhere now is a third-degree perspective.