Perspectivism
Plato
Plato distinguished the world into two realms: the world of Ideas and that of sensible, material phenomena. He ascribed reality ("ousia" - "true being") to the former because of its changelessness and permanence. When he made the unchanging Ideas as the true being, he also presupposed that human cognition and understanding were supposed to strive for seeing these permanent Ideas. He tied his ontology of unchangeable Ideas with his epistemological ideal of viewing these Ideas.
Based upon these ideas, Plato criticized artists since they paint and describe changing phenomena in diverse ways from each perspective. For Plato, diverse phenomenal world is already a less valuable, ephemeral existence like a shadow of reality. The reality is, for Plato, objective reality free from any perspective.
Descartes and Kant
While Descartes rejected revelation, he succeeded reason as natural light from Medieval thinkers. He developed a theory of knowledge which relied on the power of reason. His rationalism, however, was tied with his conviction that the reality was objective, free from a variety of perspectives cognitive subjects may hold.
The conviction or belief of the existence of objective reality was still found in Kant. His concept of thing-in-itself indicates the existence of reality which is beyond perspectives of viewers.
Leibniz
It is Leibniz who developed the concept of perspective. Each individual (which he called "monad") reflects or perceives or mirrors the world from its own perspective. Thus, the world for Leibniz is a dynamic world of multiple perspectives.
Perspectivism is the philosophical view developed by Friedrich Nietzsche that all ideations take place from a particular perspective. This means that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives which determine any possible judgment of truth or value that we may make; this implies that no way of seeing the world can be taken as definitively "true," but does not necessarily propose that all perspectives are equally valid.
View
Perspectivism rejects objectivism as impossible, and claims that there are no objective evaluations which transcend cultural formations or subjective designations. This means that there are no objective facts, and that there can be no knowledge of a thing in itself. This separates truth from a particular (or single) vantage point, and means that there are no ethical or epistemological absolutes. [1] This leads to constant reassessment of rules (i.e., those of philosophy, the scientific method, etc.) according to the circumstances of individual perspectives.[2]. “Truth” is thus formalized as a whole that is created by integrating different vantage points together.
We always adopt perspectives by default, whether we are aware of it or not, and the individual concepts of existence are defined by the circumstances surrounding that individual. Truth is made by and for individuals and peoples.[3] This view differs from many types of relativism which consider the truth of a particular proposition as something that altogether cannot be evaluated with respect to an "absolute truth," without taking into consideration culture and context.
This view is outlined in an aphorism from Nietzsche's posthumously-assembled collection Will to Power.
In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—“Perspectivism.”
It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against.[emphasis added] Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.
Friedrich Nietzsche; trans. Walter Kaufmann , The Will to Power, §481 (1883-1888)
Interpretation
Richard Schacht, in his interpretation of Nietzsche's thought, argues that this can be expanded into a revised form of “objectivity” in relation to “subjectivity” as an aggregate of singular viewpoints that illuminate, for example, a particular idea in seemingly self-contradictory ways but upon closer inspection would reveal a difference of contextuality and of rule by which such an idea (e.g., that is fundamentally perspectival) can be validated. Therefore, it can be said each perspective is subsumed into and, taking account of its individuated context, adds to the overall objective measure of a proposition under examination. Nevertheless, perspectivism does not implicate any method of inquiry nor a structural theory of knowledge in general.[4]
Developments of this view
José Ortega y Gasset has conceived of a potential sum of all perspectives of all lives which could produce an "absolute truth."
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
See also
- Conceptual framework
- Contextualism
- Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
- Fallibilism
External links
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