No
discussion of perspectivism should neglect Blakes’ couplet:
“How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy
way,
Is an immense World of Delight, clos'd by your
senses five?”
Delight is a special word for Blake. Delight,
etymologically, comes from the Latin for charm or entice, delectare, and is related to
delicious. A false cousin is the French word délit, meaning fault or sin, and coming from delictum – a relationship
that Blake might have liked. In a famous couplet found in Auguries of
Innocence, Blake writes: “Some are born to Sweet Delight/Some are born to
Endless Night.” The verb “born” may make this seem a matter of temperament –
for which Blake had a healthy respect – but the larger meaning is birth into
society, where the determinants are class, sex (gender) and race. The birds,
for Blake, are always delighted – except when they are caged. Another verse
from Auguries of Innocence claims “the Robin Redbreast in a Cage/Puts all
Heaven in a rage”.
Blake
wants to give voice – or song - to that particular view of heaven. The voice in
which delight and rage are judged comes from the Devil in the “Marriage of Heaven
and Hell”, who has this to say:
“All
Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:--
1. That Man has two real existing principles, viz.
a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the
Body; and that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for
following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:--
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for
that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief
inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body;
and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.”
Reason, in Blake’s terms, has a positional essence
– it is a formal thing, rather as it is in Kant -- although Kant comes to that
formalism much more reluctantly. As the bound of energy, or eternal delight,
Reason both participates in and negates life. This, at least, in its proper
place. But in the Bibles or sacred codes, Reason is set up as something more
than a bound – it is set up as a separate essence, independent of energy. This
is the great fiction of oppression – that Reason is life. Since it is, in fact,
the bound set on energy, according to Blake, the Life of Reason is death in
life, and the God that torments those who follow their energies is the God that
lives off death.
Blake, of course, did not see this as the opposite
of Jesus’ teachings – but rather thought those teachings affirmed delight. The
great renewal, the life more abundant, the life without the law (that fulfilled
the law), was what Jesus was striving for. And of course, before Blake’s eyes
he saw the Kingdom of Heaven in full revolt -- he saw Jesus' successors in the
Jacobins, and the dance around the liberty tree.
I think Blake’s perspectivism, although without the Blake reference, comes out
as well in Nietzsche, with his quite opposite view of Jesus and the dance
around the tree of liberty.
Here’s a passage from the preface to Beyond Good
and Evil:
Let’s not be ungrateful to them [Platonism and the
Vedanta philosophy], even as it must also certainly be confessed, that the
worst, most boring and dangerous of all mistakes up to now has been a Dogmatic
mistake, namely, Plato’s invention of the pure mind [Geiste] and of the good in
itself. But now, where it has been overcome, where Europe breathes out from
this nightmare and at least enjoys a healthier … sleep – here we are, whose task
is the awaking itself, the inheritance of all the force which the struggle
against this error has bred [grossgezüchtet]. This meant standing Truth on its
head and denying the perspectival, the fundamental condition of all life, in
order to speak of minds and of the good as Plato has done; yes, one might ask,
as a doctor would, how did this disease attack the most gorgeous animal
[Gewächse] of antiquity, Plato? was he really corrupted by the evil Socrates?
Was Socrates, in fact, a corruptor of the youth? and did he deserve his
hemlock? But the struggle against Plato, or, in order to say it more
intelligibly, and vulgarly, the struggle against the force of the
Christian-churchly for millennia – because Christianity is Platonism for the
people – has created in Europe a splendid tension of the intellect [Spannung
des Geistes] as there has never before been on Earth; with such a taut bow, one
can now shoot the furthest goal.”
Gratitude and struggle are the things we pick out
of that quotation. The mistake often made by critics of perspectivism is to
presuppose that perspective is stable,
that it is pre-given, that it is perfectly defined. In fact, quantifying over
perspectives is tremendously difficult – it is the same kind of difficulty
encountered when quantifying over events. In our opinion, the mistake is shared
by those who claim to be perspectivists, when they come out with the moral rule
that one cannot judge another perspective or -- perspective's stand in -
culture. How can I judge is the cry in the classroom and on social media. This
is not a rule derived from perspectivism,
but from its enemy – Night. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of
what Blake's bird knows, which is the coupling of delight with a certain
cruelty.
It is of the essence of perspectivism that, among
all possible perspectives, there is no single one that can encompass all the
information found in every perspective. In other words, perspectivism claims
that there is no God’s eye perspective. The myth takes that to mean something
like: there are no universals. The two claims aren’t equivalent. It may well be
that there are invariants across perspectives. But this does not mean that you
can make, out of those invariants, a sort of uber-perspective. There are no
back doors to the God position.
Furthermore, these invariants aren’t necessarily
“truths”. I suspect that there are invariants that are fictions. Now, it is at
this moment that someone inevitably pops up, a smirk on his face, and says,
aha, how can you talk about truths and fictions if everything is just a
perspective? This objection comes down to saying that truth is an
extra-perspectival process. To which the reply, properly, is: so what? If it is
true (that the truth is extra-perspectival), it amounts to saying that there is
an invariant across perspectives. And if it is false (I believe it is false),
this means, merely, that truth claims are judged on their relation to
perspectivally specified frames of reference. In both cases, truth is not
grounded in reality, but in procedure. What is at stake here is not really the
truth, but something that is more like the reputation of the truth. The
reputation of the truth is that it is a good. The reputation of the truth takes
the truth to be more than it is – a selection procedure for statements. One of
the hallmarks of modernity is the divorce between truth and its reputation.
That divorce has been taken hard by foundationalists.
Another myth about perspectivism makes it
equivalent to that extension of the liberal ethics of tolerance in which it is
claimed that cultures are equal. This is, in some ways, a throwback to the
Leibnizian notion of monads – those windowless things. It is as if cultures
grew up in perfect autonomy and independence one from the other. Nietzschian
perspectivism is quite different, and in this does not share the Blake-ian thought
that the human animal can become like the bird – existing in the element of
delight. In N. perspectivism,
perspectives – and for the moment we will treat cultures as different
perspectives – are constituted by the assimilation and rejection of other
perspectives – a constant will to power. The liberal ethos of tolerance,
according to Nietzsche, could only arise after the liberal culture had
sufficiently disenfranchised rival cultures to the extent that it could
patronize them. This is a agitated point in Nietzsche’s writing – it is, on the
one hand, a point at which a culture has come to the summit of its power, and,
on the other hand, it is a point at which a culture manufactures the kind of
nihilism – the kind of misunderstanding of its own historical dynamic – which
undermines it. Nietzsche was inclined to describe this moment in medical terms.
Indeed, Nietzsche is famous for using the metaphors provided by medical
terminology – of sickness, health, strength, weakness – to diagnose (another
medical metaphor) Western culture. Nietzsche went to the extent of identifying
certain of his texts with convalescence itself – they were convalescent acts.
Metaphor, here, is supported by metaphor.
Such, then, is the sermon on perspectives.
One p.s. Perspectives, as I said, are very difficult to quantify over, which
means that they are difficult to individuate. Since the tribe of analytic
philosophers have a superstitious belief that knowledge begins with quantifying
over its object, they have a hard time with perspectives. Thus, they tend to
get impatient with Nietzsche. However, this is a superstition. You cannot, in
classic analytic fashion, quantify over electrodynamic fields, as Maxwell
described them. Physicists are rightly not worried about that.
The great point to keep in mind is: perspectivism
is neither incoherent, nor nihilistic, nor philosophically untenable. And it
makes a damn good alternative to foundationalism, which is not, in my opinion, entirely
compatible with a scientific image of the System of the World, to use Sellar’s
terms. I’ll trade the old stuffed Owl of Minerva for Blake’s songbird any day.
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